I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (30 page)

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For the next seven months I became an intravenous drug user. I was bad at administering the meth myself and my left arm where I shot it had one long red track mark snaking down it that never disappeared. I bought a makeup stick and would draw a line along it to try to camouflage it. I began to wear only long-sleeve shirts. I thought I could never go any lower than sticking a needle in my arm. But I did. I became that stranger who stuck the needle in someone else’s.

I never again, however, showed up for an interview after a night of debauchery. That was an odd detail about getting deeper into my drug use. As long as I didn’t admit to myself I was an addict, I could be a bit messy and push the boundaries of acceptable behavior—both personal and professional. But once I realized I was in that deep I gave myself parameters professionally in order to keep up the ruse of reliability. I blocked out time in my calendar for use when I didn’t have an interview scheduled. I was still only using once or twice a month. The difference was in degree now. All was rationalization. But the race never stopped. I could never get off the track, that circular street where even now I could never catch up.

After seven months the use was no longer unpredictably thrilling. It had become just part of the routine of my life, which also included boarding Archie and Teddy at a local kennel when I knew I was going to shoot up. Teddy had begun to attack the drug dealer when he arrived and Archie would run frantically around the apartment the minute the tiny glassine bag of meth was produced. When I prepared a needle, an incomprehensible soul-rending siren-like cry he’d never made before would issue from somewhere deep within him. And if he was there when the sex began he would attempt to herd me away from the bed and make it all stop. Cutting me out of the herd had taken on a different meaning. More tragic. Truer. I hated Archie and Teddy seeing me like that—and, more important, interrupting my addiction—so I just factored in the cost of the kennel with the drugs as the price of my use.

Another part of the routine was the recovery period of plying myself with healthy food and juices and ounces and ounces of wheatgrass. That part of my early use remained the same and just got ramped up once needles became a part of the equation. The climbing back to normalcy was how I confirmed I was not only alive but also capable of living. I was still engaging in destructive behavior to prove I was indestructible. I was yet to see it as suicidal. There is a fine line. I was continuing to walk it.

On February 17, 2011, I had stayed up all night “slammin ’n’ slummin,’” as I came to think of my sex life that entailed attaining the meth and then finding men online who were not disgusted by the sight of needles or my now-destroyed arm that no amount of makeup could disguise. The next day I was coming down and forcing food and juice and water in me when I went on the Internet to try to focus my jumbled, exhausted mind. I clicked on the
New York Post
’s Page Six gossip site. I don’t know why. I had stopped reading Page Six unless it was linked from some other site. I had, for enlightened political reasons I convinced myself, broken myself of my daily
Post
habit. That was one addiction I had at least licked. But for some reason that morning my fingers were guided there.

I saw a picture of my old friend Perry pop up on my computer screen. I immediately felt guilty. What would he say if he knew what I had become? I also felt like such a failure, for I assumed the item was about his newest show business success or venture. He and his partner, Hunter, who worked at
Paper
magazine, were always making the gossip columns and party pages. They had even branched out into making films of their own, in addition to Perry’s novel writing and producing the Narnia movies for Walden Media. I took a swig of water and prepared to be jealous.

My bleary eyes focused on the headline above his photo: “‘Narnia’ Producer Dies of OD.”

I shook my head.

I read “‘Narnia’” again. I read “Producer” again. I read “Dies” again. I read “of OD” again.

This could not be true. No: not true.

I felt the moment rewinding itself.

I read the headline a third time.

“‘Narnia’”

“Producer”

“Dies”

“of”

“OD”

No amount of meth in no amount of needles had ever stopped my heart, but that headline had. I could not breathe. I then suddenly began to hyperventilate. My heart seemed to jump-start itself. It wanted to escape my chest.

Tears sprung from my eyes. Leapt to their own deaths from them. When I think of the moment now I see it as animation. I become a drawing of myself. It’s the only way I can convey the unreality of it all.

My tears, in the picture my memory conjures, are cartoonish.

They are giant drops drawn in the air, springing forth, falling.

Falling, falling.

Falling.

I did not exactly read these words through them but found them lined up there before me through the blur of shock and panic of such cartoonish sorrow:

A Hollywood film producer and novelist was found dead of an apparent drug overdose yesterday in his Greenwich Village apartment, police sources said.

Perry Moore, 39, was discovered at around 2 p.m. in his Houston Street pad, a doorman high-rise just off Sixth Avenue, the sources added.

Moore was an executive producer of the blockbuster “Chronicles of Narnia” trilogy and had penned a well-received fiction work in 2007 about a gay teenage superhero.

I sat staring at Perry’s face through my tears as I watched them being drawn in the air before me.

I sat there a long time. Or maybe it was only a second.

I stood.

I walked in circles around my apartment, trying to catch my breath.

I began to walk faster.

I fell to my knees.

I made a sound I had never made before, Archie’s soul-rending siren-like cry suddenly issuing from somewhere deep within me. I could finally comprehend it. It was a howl of grief.

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I don’t remember much about Perry’s funeral at Grace Church. I do recall the pews were packed. I do remember sobbing throughout the service. I do recall praying and in my prayer promising Perry I would get sober. I swore to him I would. Did I swear to God? I can’t remember.

Neither Perry nor I had known about the other’s drug use. Subsequent news stories reported that he had overdosed on Oxycontin. Could it have been prescribed for his chronic back pain? Of all the people in my life, Perry would have been the last person I would have suspected of being addicted to any drug. Would I have been the last person he would have suspected? I was having a hard time believing it had really been a drug overdose that killed him. Why could he not have confided in me? Why could I not have confided in him? If nothing else proved I was a drug addict—the needles, the depleting of my bank account, the continuing destructive behavior—that secrecy was the final proof. That shame. That unsharable shame.

I was able to keep my promise to Perry for a while but by the summer, when I was back for my four months in Provincetown, I gave in to temptation and again was buying needles at the local pharmacy and filling them with meth. This latest iteration of my addiction, however, was not about combining it with sex. Instead a new phase began: hallucinations. Or were they manifestations? I am not sure of the correct terminology, but I am sure of this: I loved them. Oh, how I loved them. So many people while on meth suffer from psychosis and paranoia. Not I. I reveled in the revelations that were being presented to me. It was all a kind of heightened narrative as far as I was concerned, as it will now become a heightened part of this one, so heightened that it might cause harrumphs of derision and even scorn from some. So be it. What I am about to relate is as much a part of my addiction—a bigger part really—as sticking needles in my arm, for I was convinced that the injected meth was opening a spiritual portal of some kind and I was being visited by the Angel of Light that I found written about in other reading I was doing that summer in the King James Bible. There—in Second Corinthians, eleventh chapter, fourteenth verse—it states: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” And yet I did marvel that Lucifer was letting me know of his presence and that it was becoming a spiritual experience as rich as any on the Camino. His minions of light were sweeping into my line of vision and would often transform themselves into different human aspects from all historical periods—old women, young boys, dashing men, female beauties—trying to figure out what appealed to me the most. They would astrally project themselves toward me and jerk about just outside my windows wondering, as I was wondering, who had conjured whom right before dawn approached—Lucifer’s favored time, when darkness was at its glorious depth. A kind of seduction was taking place as they hovered into being in that haunting hour. The visions were more afraid to be entering my realm than I was of seeing them. That was what was so fascinating to me. Once I accepted them, it was I who tried to calm them once I realized they were the frightened ones. I felt such tenderness toward them and their fear. They seemed to be so perplexed by my lack of it. Were they truly demonic? Was their fright a ruse? I only know by my welcoming them they wavered. “You are revealing yourself to me for a reason,” I told them once. “I am here to let you know that you are true. But don’t expect me to obey you.” And then I heard it, Lucifer’s dulcet voice, the sound of light itself: “The key to joy is disobedience.”

I had a real affection for my hallucinations. I even considered them holy in their way, for they were the flip side of the same experiences I had had on the Camino. They gave the mysticism back there a two-sided quality, rounded it out, even made more sense of it. Just as that bludgeoned Christ on the cross in that monastery had seemed to come to life and that bearded angel had milled about Roncesvalles like Jim Morrison, these newest visions may not have been real, but they, as I had told them, were true. They almost made me turn away from John Keats and toward William Blake, but I remained steadfast. Loyal. Keats remained my “glorious luminary,” as William Rossetti wrote of Blake. “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination,” Keats himself wrote, offering up his wise kindness once more to me when I was doubting what I had been seeing.

Had it really been one of them—these Angels of Light—in Roncesvalles whom I noticed that numinous night? Was it they who crept into the sacristy and emboldened the crucifix? Had God been taunting me with the Devil or was the Devil taunting me with God? If one believes in God and the transubstantiation of the Eucharist and the power of prayer and all the heightened spiritual light that the Camino can offer then one has to believe in the opposite side of that same exact light. God created the Devil so God could be God. One cannot exist without the other. Lucifer was God’s greatest thought. And what are hallucinations if not God’s thoughts placed before us? That is the conundrum that Lucifer can never overcome. Lucifer, once thought into being by God, is finally not thought at all. Only God could think a thought that is not thought. Lucifer is all sensation. But Lucifer is not evil. Lucifer is less. Ever so slightly, but forever: less. Which doesn’t mean he is not magnificent. Think of the love that God must have had for him to bestow upon Lucifer the power of light. When that Christ on that cross that day in that monastery’s sacristy opened those bludgeoned eyes and light shone forth from them and I fell to my knees bathed in it, it was not God’s presence I was feeling. It was the magnificent love of Lucifer who had been allowed to latch on to it.

A monk’s contemplation is the quiet, still center found in the midst of such a God/Lucifer continuum, which itself is found at the blood-shed heart of Christianity. Addiction is the blood that continues to be shed when that continuum is confronted with sensations alone and no contemplation is called upon. When I emerged from that experience in the sacristy that day on the Camino and Mary enfolded me in her burly arms, it was not a monk I was finally feeling like. She was wrong about that. I had emerged instead an addict.

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When I returned to New York that autumn my addiction worsened. There were binges of sex again thrown into the mix. Humanity is, after all, the fleshy membrane that separates the light of God from Lucifer’s illumined angels. But my hallucinations soon took on another even more dazzling aura. Another realm unexpectedly reared its godhead. Once the portal had been opened, other images of magnificent light began to manifest themselves. One night there was the image glisteningly carved into the darkness of a creature that was half man and half elephant. Its trunk came curling toward me as if beckoning me to its side. It was gargantuan—I counted four arms forming—and yet not monstrous at all. The arms reminded me of Daniel’s dreadlocks back on the Camino that he had formed out of his wild blond hair. The glistening creature—I thought of Daniel’s shaven girlfriend clenching a dreadlock in her teeth and pulling him toward her with it—was beatific as it continued to beckon and carve itself into the night. I knew enough to know it was some sort of Hindu or Buddhist god, but I didn’t know the name for it. I then remembered my dream back at that hostel on the Camino when I returned to the church basement and it had been suddenly transformed into a Buddhist notions shop with tiny carved gods unknown to me lined along its myriad shelves. There had been one—only one—that glistened in that dream. It too had a trunk. It too had beckoned me with the trunk. What I was now seeing was a gigantic version of the god. The moment I remembered it from my earlier dream, it smiled, nodded—even seemed to giggle in delight—and retreated. Then row upon row of what appeared to be priests in turban-like headdresses of blindingly brilliant light projected themselves forward and hovered before me as if an assessment were taking place. I did not flinch from the visions. I felt fortified by them. I felt seen—as if I were their vision of light and they were trying to make sense of me. I smiled. I nodded. I too giggled in delight. I know all this sounds even more woo-woo than anything Shirley MacLaine has ever claimed, but like MacLaine, once one has experienced such visions all shame about acknowledging them vanishes. What I saw that night was the actualization of an eternal verity. Faith is not belief. Faith is the deification of doubt. Faith is surrendering to what you have never believed in before—what you never thought possible to believe in—so that impossibility can then believe in you. Faith makes you possible.