The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [66]
Greg was primarily a coke dealer: he offered heroin as a comedown option. I think being a coke dealer entitled him to feel a little superiority. This was undermined, perhaps, by watching me die.
I had a month’s abstinence from heroin. A friend—secretly a junkie for years whom I always did coke with, but never did dope with—maybe a drug variation of that O. Henry Christmas story about the watch chain and the comb—called me up, looking for dope for a friend. I beeped Greg.
“Hey man, where’ve you been?”
I, uh, I said, making up a lie, I’ve been in California.
I loaded a lot into that compact lie, and he got it. “That’s good, man, that’s good,” he said. But when I asked him to come into Manhattan, he said, “Uh, there’s nothing really going on with that right now.”
No?
“No.”
Are you sure?
“Yeah.”
It’s bad news when your dealer cuts you off because he doesn’t like watching you die. I didn’t really get it.
In New York, heroin traditionally comes in a tiny glassine envelope with a brand name stamped on top, to identify differences in quality between dealers. I can barely remember the brand names I had: there was one called Ruff Ryders, after the rap label. There was an empty—naturally—bag I found on the C train with the silhouettes of Civil War soldiers firing their rifles and the brand Glory. There was a legendary bag in the early ’90s called Tango and Cash—after a Stallone movie—that was laced with fentanyl and killed a bunch of dope fiends. The dope bag made the cover of the New York Post. Once, after I was clean, I bought a basket at IKEA, looked down into it and thought, hmmm, that tag’s about the size of a bag of dope, thinking nothing of it until months later, when I reached in it and came out with a bag called Timberland. (I flushed the bag—actually, more truthfully, I ripped it open and lovingly sprinkled the powder into the water, then flushed the bag itself—then called clean friends for reassurance. They all told me I had done the right thing; my friend the rock legend said, in a merry tone, “Ah, what a waste.”)
There was a single brand—other than the sample Krack-House! bags—that Greg brought, and I can’t remember what it was. There wasn’t a logo, it was just the brand, in a simple font, stamped on the bag. My house was filled with hundreds of these discarded bags, ripped open, the contents sucked out. Strewn on the floor, all over the table where I sniffed the dope, stuffed in those bags of leftover takeout Chinese. The name’s just out of reach in my mind. Baffling. Before the heroin binge began, I had gotten a new doctor, the fiancée of a photographer friend from the Knitting Factory days. She liked drugs. Freud’s The Cocaine Papers was on her bookshelf; she had appeared on TV, advocating the decriminalization of Ecstasy for clinical purposes. The first thing she did was switch me to another antidepressant, and I could have orgasms again.
Now, much later, to help me detox, she prescribed a sizable quantity of oxycodone and wrote out cessation plans neatly on legal paper. First day, five pills every two hours; second day, two every three hours; and so on for a week until you were gently delivered from your cravings. What I did was spend three days detoxing, and then gulp them all down on Tuesday. Then I would despair that somehow her detox program hadn’t worked.
I was indignant that the antidepressants had stopped working, too. I went to her and whined, and she prescribed me more. Still no dice. As I sniffed bag after bag, then licked the sniffing plate, then put the bags in my mouth and sucked on them for residue.
It was New Year’s 1999. We all thought, merrily, that when the clock turned to 2000, money would disintegrate in the banks, airplanes would fall out of the sky, the power would go off forever. I had detoxed a week earlier. The Cocaine Papers doc had prescribed Naltrexone to me, which is what they call an “opioid receptor antagonist”; you can use all the dope you want, and you won’t get high.
The unsingable girl came with the only champagne she could find in a convenience