Long Past Stopping (13 page)

“Who? Boyd? Yeah, he was there. He was telling me some shit about owls and Indians.”

“Damn. I wanted to meet that guy. What'd he look like?” I asked him.

“He was the guy wearing all black.”

“The guy? Almost everyone there was wearing all black. I must have thought he was there for Goth night.”

That made Grux laugh, which was unusual. “Ha. I wish he could have heard you say that.”

That one beer hadn't done much as far as supplementing my dwindling supply of heroin, but I did my best not to overdo it. I was almost out.

 

F
OUR DAYS ON THE ROAD
and the sickness hit me like a Mack truck as we pulled into Lawrence, Kansas. I had been letting myself get pretty sick for about a month now, so I thought I would be prepared, but I found out quickly that I had never even been close to experiencing full-blown withdrawal. It was beyond horrific. Everything hurt. Bones, stomach, skin—and it was no easy task holding in the diarrhea that was threatening to explode at any minute. We made it to the club just in time for me to avoid shitting my pants. I was in so much pain and so fucking scared, yet I had to pretend that everything was fine. When Thomas commented on my pale complexion, I told him my stomach was hurting.

“Must have been something I ate,” I said with as cool a demeanor as possible, but I was sweating bullets, and it was pretty cold out.

“Jesus. Tell me you didn't eat that spaghetti last night. Did you?”

Grux had cooked about fifteen pounds of spaghetti and tomato sauce. It was the first thing he made that appeared to be somewhat edible before he decided to mix a five-pound can of peanut butter in with it. None of us ate that night besides Grux, who couldn't stop telling us how good it was. But as long as Thomas was asking, I might as well lie and blame it on Grux.

“I had to. There was nothing else to eat.” It was a good excuse, and maybe we would get some better food out of the deal. I didn't lift a finger for load-in or setup that night. I just sat at the bar and drank shots of whiskey. I finally had my chance to get wasted, but it didn't seem to be doing a damn thing for the dope sickness. It only added fuel to my self-pity. All I wanted to do was curl up and die, but I had to play the drums instead.

The show went surprisingly well—it was maybe even the best one yet—and I actually felt some relief as soon as I put on my mask. Once in costume, I didn't have to put on an act. I could be as sick, sweaty, and miserable as I wanted, which made a huge difference.

Playing also gave me something to focus on other than wanting to die. When I took off my mask, though, the thoughts of death returned with a vengeance. The thing was, I didn't really want to die forever. I just wanted to be dead for the next week or so. At least until the worst of it was over. I ordered another drink, but people were trying to talk to me, and I was in no shape to talk about anything other than myself, and that was not a good subject. I had to get out of there and talk to someone I knew.

Grux had a device from RadioShack that when you pressed the button made the sound of a quarter dropping into a pay phone. I convinced him to lend it to me, and I went out to explore Lawrence.

It took me a while to find a pay phone that worked, because the phone companies had been getting wise to the gadget I was using. The newer phones would connect you straight to the operator who would read off your location and tell you the cops were on their way, but eventually I found one that accepted the sound of fake quarters. I called Heather, and the moment I heard her voice I started sobbing.

“It's fucking bad. Way worse than I thought. How could I have been such an idiot? Fuck…fuck…fuck…and these people I'm with are fucking insane!”

“Ha! And you're not?”

“Not what?” I asked, either not understanding or not paying attention.

“Insane? I mean, this whole thing is insane,” she said, trying to make a point I was unable to grasp.

“Well, I might be a little insane due to the circumstances I'm in, but these people are really crazy. They put peanut butter in their spaghetti and wear homemade sunglasses!” But even that didn't sound crazier than what I was doing. I couldn't articulate what I wanted to say, but I didn't call her to get laughed at. She could hear me getting defensive and changed the subject.

“Hey, O, you're going to get through it. You're not the first person to go through this. Just think about all the other people who've been through the same thing.”

I thought about it, but it didn't help. “Yeah, but I'm not those people. I don't think I can do it. I thought I brought enough stuff to last two weeks, and it's already gone. It's so fucking bad. So fucking bad.” Repeating myself was the only thing I could think of to convey how horrible I felt.

“I'm sorry, O. I wish I could help, but what can I do? It doesn't even matter whether or not you think you can do it. At this point you don't have a choice.”

“Yeah, you're right. I don't have a fucking choice. Why did I do this? I'm such a fucking idiot,” I said.

“Think about it this way: you still have seven days before you get to New York, so by the time you see me you'll be all better.”

“Okay, where am I meeting you again?” Talking to her wasn't helping. I suddenly wanted very much to get off the phone.

“It's on the corner of Houston and Lafayette, a huge brick building. Just go in and find the Scott Nichols Gallery.”

“Okay.” I wrote it down. “I'll see you in a week.”

“Good luck, O.”

 

T
HAT NIGHT I TOSSED
and turned on a hardwood floor, my skin alternating between freezing and scalding, and my head filled with thoughts of…I thought about all sorts of shit. My mind was racing all over the place. Mostly I just tried to repeat my mantra, “It's bad…this is so fucking bad,” until some crappy childhood memory would come out of nowhere only to be replaced by, “I wonder what happened to so and
so from high school?”…and on and on till I reined it in and got back to my mantra. Occasionally I would hear a truck speed by on the highway, and I thought about how nice it would be to take a casual stroll right into one of those big motherfuckers, and just like that…nothing.

 

W
E BROKE DOWN
in Kansas City the next day, and I decided to try taking NyQuil. I was so tired, it seemed like I just needed a little something to knock me out. It made me more tired but it didn't put me to sleep, so I figured another bottle would do it. That had the same effect, and it wasn't till I drank the fourth bottle that I realized the shit wasn't going to put me to sleep. It was just immobilizing me to a point where the slightest movement demanded an ungodly amount of effort.

It didn't slow down my brain, though. It just made my thoughts more ugly. They were no longer appearing in the form of childhood memories, or anything I could attach much meaning to. Weird blurry figures appeared, and what seemed to be animated piles of grayish meat. It was as if I were living inside a Francis Bacon painting or Peter Greenaway movie. Or a fucking Caroliner show. I tried to take off my mask, but it wasn't a mask. I was a deformed bull-person in an 1800s band. We were trying to make our way west for some reason, but the farther west we went, the more deformed we got and the brighter the colors became. We were forgetting how to talk like people, but we could understand the cows, and they kept telling us to keep going. It was a slow journey because I could see only out of my mouth, and Groat Pulp, our leader, kept putting dirt in the spaghetti and tripping over his gigantic foot. Gris Welled, the banjo player, was trying to tell me something in the old language, and I vaguely recalled that I hadn't always been a bull-person named Both Oars. I was a human person lying in the third row of an old airplane limo heading east, not west.

“Huh…what?” I said, opening my eyes.

“Hey, Oran, sorry about waking you up, man, but we're in St. Louis. You can stay in the van if you want, but I thought I should tell you where we're going in case you woke up later.” Thomas was whispering, as if he could convey the message subconsciously without really having to wake me up.

But I was wide awake and had been for almost three days now. I was just too physically tired from the NyQuil to move. “Okay,” I said.

“We're going to a club down the block with a big neon sign. Just tell them you're with us and they'll let you in.”

“Okay. Thanks, Thomas.”

“No problem. Hope you feel better.”

We had the night off, which was a relief, as I could not imagine playing a show in my condition. Eventually I did get up and walked around looking for food. I ordered lasagna at a diner, stared at it for about twenty minutes, and headed over to the club, leaving the food untouched.

The club looked like an MTV set, or a Mafia club in a Hong Kong action movie, and there were hundreds of good-looking kids standing still, intently focused on one of the most boring bands I had ever heard. When I was in the van, at least I knew the shit in my head was just that—shit in my head. What I saw in that club was real, and in that moment, still sick, and feeling the toxic aftereffects of the NyQuil, reality was way too much for me to handle.

I went back to the Suburban, hoping to escape back to the land of Day-Glo cow-people, but it never came. It was just my saliva on the cold vinyl of the bench seat and silence for the next three days. I had ceased talking, except to update the others on the state of my “insomnia.” They were all pretty nice about it, despite the fact that I had stopped taking part in any of the loading or setting up. The only relief I got was when I put on my mask and played for the increasingly larger crowds. I started looking forward to our shows with an almost religious fervor, because the other twenty-three hours of the day were unbearable.

 

W
E WERE IN DETROIT
when Jeremy came and found me in my usual spot, lying horizontal in the third row while everyone else was setting up.

“Hey, man, I found this guy who says he has some methadone. You want some?”

Even at this point I was still trying to hide what I was going through, so I tried to control my excitement and said with a hint of disapproval, “Why would I want methadone?” Did he know what was going on? Did all of them know?

“Don't tell Grux, but I just kicked dope a week before we left because I didn't want to go through it on the road, and…well, I just thought that you were…uh, never mind,” he said, getting ready to shut the door.

“Hey, Jeremy, wait. You're right, it would probably help with this fucking insomnia. Where is this guy?” I was still unable to admit it.

“He's across the street, but I can go get it.”

“Nah, I'll come with you.” I wanted to see who he was so I could
maybe get a few more pills later on without Jeremy seeing me. We crossed the street, and this regular-looking guy pulled a prescription bottle from his pocket and handed us each a pill.

“Thanks, man. How much do you want for these?” Jeremy was already taking his, but I knew that if I took mine now I would be catatonic by the time we played.

“Don't worry about it,” he said.

“Cool. You sticking around for the show, man?”

“Fuck yeah, I drove up from Chicago to see you. You guys sounded amazing last night, but I couldn't see shit. Too many people.”

“Yeah, it was insane.”

It had seemed as though there were five hundred people packed into this little Greek bar in Chicago, which was a startling turn of events for us. It was too bad I missed most of it, but I had spent the majority of the night down the street lying on a pile of secondhand clothes in a thrift store owned by a guy in one of the bands we were playing with called the Beast People.

“What is this place?” I asked the methadone guy, looking up at what must have been a fifteen-bedroom brownstone mansion. “You been here before?”

“Yeah. It's some kind of anarchist collective. They got a 1 percent interest loan from the Catholic nuns and bought the place,” he explained.

“Wow. There's so much wrong with that I don't know where to begin. First of all, isn't an anarchist collective a contradiction of terms? And second of all, since when do Catholics buy mansions for anarchists?”

“Detroit is fucking weird, man. That place there,” he said, pointing to the mansion next door, “is owned by the communists. Same thing. Nuns bought it for them.”

“Really? You think they'd buy me a mansion if I told them it was for satanists?” Just knowing I was finally going to get some sleep tonight had put me in a better mood.

“I'm pretty sure they already bought one for the satanists. I think it's one of those across the street.” We were both looking up and down the block for any sign of satanism, but there was nothing obvious.

“Shit. What about a house for atheists?”

“Maybe, but then you'd have to live in Detroit. And believe me, you don't want to live here without believing in something.”

We went inside to see the Beast People rolling around naked on the floor, covered in black and brown greasepaint and wearing unidentifiable
animal masks. I think they were an a cappella act, but the sounds they were producing were totally inhuman. I was glad I hadn't seen them before I drank the NyQuil.

Next up was a more straight-ahead band, but not too far into their performance, someone in a blue whale suit ran in screaming and started attacking the audience before chasing the band offstage. I almost lost the guy with the methadone in the confusion, but I found him right before we went on and convinced him to give me a couple more pills. He still refused to take any money for them. Once again, I found myself having to sleep on a hardwood floor, but after being awake for five days I could have slept on a pile of nails.