The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [65]
Chris keeps talking about going to see Mount Aetna. “I’m gonna go see that fucking volcano,” he says. He doesn’t. He flakes on sumptuous dinners, saying he’s got a stomach bug. He’s a teetering cadaver by the time he lands back in Newark, where he hurriedly buys his girlfriend gifts in the duty-free shop; the older gangsters make fun of him for not going to the famous luxury stores of Naples.
Message: Chris has chosen a piteous, destructive stasis over what could be a fascinating life. But I watched him with tremendous envy.
The unsingable girl pitied me obsequiously, wailing that I couldn’t stop.
We’re both junkies, I said.
She gasped. “We’re not junkies!”
She had a list of ex-boyfriends who quickly became more pronounced dope fiends than she was, and she would rail against the terrible things they were doing with their lives.
My lungs weakened. I had so little breath that I would routinely have a panicked, choking fight for air just by standing up from a chair too quickly. I like to leap up and pace whenever I get a good idea. So creativity was hazardous.
I couldn’t stand all the way upright; I shuffled, half bent. It took me ten minutes to cross my tiny apartment, piss, and return to bed. It took half an hour to go down the stairs of my building—I walked backwards, gripping the rail, as if I were descending an Alp.
I never connected this with the $300 worth of dope I was sniffing daily. I was twenty-nine, and I thought, Well, twenty-nine, you know, getting older, the body starts shutting down.
Seriously, I thought this.
There was a Jennifer Lopez video that was on all the time—synopsis: Jennifer Lopez, a carefree girl from the Bronx, goes and picks up her paycheck at the beauty parlor, then gets on the train and heads out on the town with her friends, laughing. The video bewildered me. I knew, just from passive pop-culture consumption, that she was one year older than me. How’s she able to do this? To function?
It was about four blocks to the bank machine. Every day I beeped Greg, and then headed for the stairs. Thirty minutes down. Then one block down Ludlow Street, which was transitioning from a discount market—Hasidic Jewish guys in their black hats and quasi-nineteenth-century garb selling knockoff leather goods—to a groovy-people playground. I felt invisible on the street. Maybe life was moving around me so much faster than I was that I was invisible.
Most likely, though, people were just averting their gaze from this guy who was clearly dying. I didn’t look like a dope fiend, more like a cancer patient.
It took me three lights to cross Delancey, a wide street leading to the Williamsburg Bridge, looming grey in the distance. One Walk and I started across the westbound lanes. When I was half - way across, Don’t Walk started flashing. Drivers would wait, rolling their eyes—gruff white commuters, thuggy dudes in decked-out Mazdas, delivery vans, Jersey-plated cars filled with girls in sequined outfits, en route to parties—as I finally got to the traffic island. Some time spent wheezing on the traffic island, my heart racing. Then I started crossing the eastbound lanes. It took me ninety minutes, sometimes two hours, to the ATM and back.
Puking became so normal that I stopped kneeling. The only thing in my fridge would be a dozen corn-syrup-loaded green or pink simulated-fruit drinks. I’d get ridiculously thirsty, so devoid of nutrients, and down one in a gulp. Five minutes later, I’d walk into the bathroom, stand by the toilet, aim, and puke the entire drink, still the same color it was in the bottle.
The radiators in my apartment broke down, but I didn’t want to get the landlord in there—my garbage can was piled past the brim with empty heroin bags, I’d sometimes take a handful, ball them up, put them in my mouth, suck on them—so, utterly sick, I lay in bed with layer upon layer of clothes on, under the blankets, my breath steaming in the air of my own