Long Past Stopping (37 page)

“You know, we both have a similar sense of humor, and we're interested in the same stuff,” I told her awkwardly after class one day. “And, well, I've been into you ever since I first met you, and just the fact that I'm still into you…well, it feels like it's meant to be,” I continued before realizing that what I was saying was a thousand times creepier than simply asking her to go to the movies. “Uh, what I mean is that…after ten years, it's amazing that we both ended up doing the same kinds of things, you know?”

Remarkably, after all that, she agreed to give it a try. I was ecstatic. She was the one thing missing in my life, and now everything would be perfect. That was my thinking anyway. I didn't realize that, without some kind of hopeless desperation over a girl, I had no idea who I was. And when I started dating Jibz, a central part of my identity just disappeared.

By now, I had moved out of my apartment with Sam, and into a much nicer place down the street with a guy I knew from school, and his friend Suzy. Whenever Jibz came over to hang out, I found that I was just as nervous around her as I ever had been before, and I couldn't come up with anything to talk about. Jibz seemed nervous, too, which was rare, and her visits were always extremely awkward until I pressed the play button on my VCR, giving us an hour and a half of relief.

That didn't stop me from being devastated when I didn't hear from her for three days. God forbid I call her and possibly give the impression that I was obsessed. When I saw her walking down the street at two thirty in the morning while on my way home from a bar, I was instantly struck sober. I noticed an almost imperceptible pause when she saw me, like she'd been caught. I knew in that moment that it was over, that it probably had been for three days.

I didn't want to talk to her, and she didn't seem too excited to see me, but one of us would have had to cross the street to avoid the situation.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi.”

“How have you been?”

“Fine,” she answered. I was hoping she would voluntarily tell me what she was doing walking in the opposite direction of her house so late at night, but she just stood there.

“What are you up to?” I asked before I could stop myself. I already knew the answer was going to be bad, because she certainly wasn't headed to my place.

“Oh. I'm just going to a friend's house.” She was nervous; I was nervous; neither of us knew what to say.

“Okay, I'll see you later then,” I responded to get out of the situation. But the situation came with me. I went from being angry for a few days into a full-blown depression for months. We shared almost all of the same friends, so it was impossible to avoid her, and seeing her amplified my feelings a thousand percent.

 

I
F THERE WERE
anyone whom I would never talk to about anything important, it would be my grandma. We spoke to each other once a month, but I always limited it to talking about the weather or the latest show at the museum. I never brought up my personal life, figuring she wouldn't understand what I was going through. I was so consumed with thinking about Jibz, though, that I couldn't even make small talk.

“Why do you think I keep myself so busy?” she asked me after I told her I was heartbroken. I knew she wouldn't understand.

“I said, why do you think I run around all the time, going to book clubs, throwing cocktail parties, painting…. Why do you think I do more now that I'm retired than I ever did?”

Grandma did do an incredible amount of stuff for an old woman. She had recently sent me pictures of herself hanging off a cliff in Italy, cutting her own piece of marble out of the mountain.

“I don't know,” I said, annoyed. “I figured it was because you liked all that stuff. I thought that's what people did when they got old.”

“It's because if I don't keep myself busy, my head starts saying terrible things to me.”

“Really? Mine, too.” I had thought she was just a ditsy old social butterfly, immune to bad feelings.

“I started sculpting marble because I needed the sound of the drill to overpower the nonsense in my head. You'll get through this, but you have to keep yourself busy.”

It wasn't much, but it felt like the first real connection I'd ever made with her. She had fooled us all into thinking she was just a vapid, shallow old woman. A week later Mom called me to tell me she had been found dead on her kitchen floor.

“What?” I'd heard what my mom had said, but the shocking part to
me was not that she died. That's what old people did. The shocking part was that I didn't feel anything. I had never experienced anyone dying, but I had seen others go through it and I had always thought there was a way you were supposed to feel.

“Kyle and I are flying to Florida. Do you want to come?”

“Uh. Should I come?” I had never been to a funeral.

“Grandma expressly said in her will that she didn't want a funeral. That she wanted to be remembered as full of life, but her friends are having one anyway. I want to respect her wishes, but it won't look too good if I don't show up. I'll just tell them you couldn't get out of school, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

I wasn't aware how much time passed when I was startled by my roommate Suzy's voice. Even then, it took a moment to realize she was talking to me.

“Hey, are you okay?” Suzy asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine,” I said, getting my bearings.

“Because you've just been standing there, holding the phone for like ten minutes.”

“I have? No, I'm fine. I was just thinking,” I said, hanging up the phone. I wasn't thinking though, I was waiting. Waiting to feel the thing you're supposed to feel when your grandma dies.

“Are you sure? 'Cause you don't look fine,” she said.

“Seriously. Everything's all right,” I said, deciding in that moment to take a walk before going to class.

Unaware of how I got there, I found myself seven miles from home, standing on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and what used to be the Sutro Bath House. I sat there for a while before walking through the Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge. I could have used a drink, but by the time I got back to the Mission it was late and all the bars had closed. I had been gone some twelve hours, aimlessly walking around, thinking about my grandma. I still hadn't figured out why I wasn't feeling anything.

 

J
UST BECAUSE
I wasn't feeling sad about my grandma's death didn't mean I wasn't going to use her as an excuse. School had become even more of a drag since I was always afraid that I was going to run into Jibz, and I was having trouble making art anyway. I also found out that Grandma had left a will and that Kyle and I had inherited two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars each. Even though I was still collecting food stamps, and we wouldn't see the money until we were forty, I was now the thing I despised more than anything in the whole world: a trust-fund kid.

I didn't plan on dropping out of college but somehow, whenever I left the house to go to school, I would end up at my practice space instead. Eventually I gave up any pretense of going to class and spent my days playing the drums.

Though Kyle and I didn't have access to the trust, ten thousand dollars in interest showed up in the mail, and I decided then that I needed to take a semester off. I spent sixteen hundred dollars on a beautiful drum set and hid away in my rehearsal studio. Like my grandmother, I needed something louder than oil paints to stop the fucking racket in my head.

W
AITING FOR MY
connecting flight in Puerto Rico, I went outside to smoke a cigarette and realized that they might search me on my way back in to the terminal and find my remaining supply of methadone. I couldn't bring myself to throw the pills out, or see them get confiscated, so I decided to take all six pills at once.

When the flight attendants finally managed to wake me up in St. Kitts, the plane was empty and they were already halfway through cleaning it. I was so out of it that two of them had to help me walk to the customs booth.

The people in Miami had given me specific instructions to tell the customs officials about exactly where I was going and why I was there, but the piece of paper I had written the information on had doubled as a page marker for the eleven-hundred-page book I brought with me and subsequently left on the plane when the attendants dragged me out. It was bittersweet losing that book. On the one hand, it wasn't looking like I could get past these guys without it. On the other hand, I had been carrying around that five-pound monstrosity for the last six months and I was only around page eight hundred, and at least a hundred of those pages had been footnotes. Even the footnotes had footnotes. It was one of those things you don't realize is such a pain in the ass until it's gone. I should have lost that thing a long time ago.

I really didn't want to walk back to the plane to get it since I wasn't sure I could make it that far without lying down and taking a nap on the marble floor, but the customs guy was serious.

“Please esplain to me again how it is dat ya come all da way here, and know not where ya going?” the officer asked, speaking a little slower this time. I thought this was an English-speaking island, but I could barely understand him.

“Because I've never been here before,” I answered. “How would I know where I'm going if I've never been there?” This explanation sounded logical to me, but he just shook his head and called a few more guards over to help figure it out.

It was all too confusing. I just wanted to lie down, when a guy showed up and asked me if I was Oran and said something to the customs guards that got them to let me through. I think he tried to talk to me as we drove to the place I would be staying the next ten days, but I couldn't understand him either, and once I sat down in the car I started nodding out again. Luckily I was the last to arrive, so I didn't have to meet or talk to anyone. The driver showed me to my room and I passed out with my clothes on, only to be woken up a few minutes later by a woman holding a vial of blue liquid.

“Hello. I'm Dr. Mash, and you must be Oran.” I couldn't remember ever being this high in my life without having some cocaine to keep me awake, but I managed to sit up and say hello to her.

“Now we don't want you getting sick before your treatment, so we need you to drink this. Judging by what you told us, this should be enough liquid morphine to tide you through the night,” she said, handing me the vial.

“I actually think I'm all right for the moment. Can we wait and see how I feel tomorrow?” I asked, without explaining that I was on six days' worth of methadone.

“Actually, no. I don't want you waking up in a few hours going through withdrawal. So drink this now, and we can talk about it tomorrow after you've gotten some rest.”

I drank it just to get her to leave.

It was late in the afternoon when I woke up and wandered out of the little cabin I was in. I was still way too high to be engaging with other people, and I instinctively resorted to my teenage stay-the-fuck-away-from-me tactic of walking around hunched over while looking at the ground with a pained facial expression. It wasn't all feigned; I really did
feel terrible, and it wasn't just the drowsy, nauseated feeling of having way too many opiates in my system.

As far as I could tell, this was my last chance. If this shit didn't fix me, I didn't think anything could. My Internet research on ibogaine beforehand looked positive, but so did much of the research on AA, NA, rapid opiate detox, rational recovery, harm reduction, and every other fucking thing I had tried. I had looked into all that shit, and all of it claimed to be the thing that worked.

The first four days we were there were for…I don't know what exactly. It all seemed kind of thrown together, but they gave us a bunch of literature to look through about the history of ibogaine. We learned that it was first discovered by the Pygmies of West Africa. The Pygmies then gave it to a few local tribes who went on to start an offshoot of Christianity based on their experiences with the drug. Since their experiences were always different, the Bible had become an amorphous, ever-changing, and constantly amended text to reflect new experiences and insights from village to village. One anthropologist who studied this phenomenon described his experience, which involved lying on a dirt floor while a priest alternately fed him the drug and punctured holes in his skin with a meat hook. The priest knew he had given the anthropologist enough ibogaine when he stopped flinching. He brought his story and the drug back to Europe with him, and by the early 1980s, a junkie in New Jersey got ahold of some and took it for no other reason than to experience a new high. When he came down from it, he realized that he wasn't experiencing any withdrawal symptoms from heroin. The heroin withdrawal never came, and he never used dope again. He then gave it to seven more junkies, five of whom also quit doing heroin after taking the ibogaine.
But what about the other two?
I wondered.

So far there was documentation of only a few hundred people taking this stuff to combat addiction. My official identity as a participant in this round of treatment was Ibogaine Human Test Subject #121. It sounded like science fiction, but Dr. Mash used this numbering to differentiate us from her Simian Test Subjects back in her lab at the University of Miami.

We were also told to get rid of any expectations we might have about our “journey,” as we were told to call it. A number of people had been unsuccessfully lobbying the FDA for approval to use this drug in the United States, but the government was afraid it might instigate another 1960s-type movement like acid had done, so Dr. Mash and her crew of
counselors were very adamant about distancing ibogaine from the word
trip
or anything else that might suggest a relationship to LSD.

In my free time, I sat outside chain-smoking and drinking this unbelievable grapefruit soda called Ting. Someone needed to start importing this shit to America. There were eleven of us, plus a few staff members, and I just wasn't in the mood to talk to any of them. Other than one of the counselors, no one seemed too interested in talking to me either. I had been under the impression that this stuff was used to treat heroin addicts, but there was only one other opiate addict there. They were mostly alcoholics, two of whom were back for a second try, and there was even one woman there who was hoping this would treat her codependency issues. I made a minor attempt to reach out in solidarity to the other opiate addict, but he was a Republican doctor from Texas who had become addicted to pain pills and saw no connection whatsoever between his addiction to morphine and mine to heroin.

One thing was for sure; we were all antsy as hell to get this fucking “journey” going. None of us had come up with twelve thousand dollars to fly over here and talk. We came to get cured, and the sooner the better. Dr. Mash had been lowering my dose of liquid morphine, and although I wasn't in full-blown withdrawal, I was a long way from being comfortable. Unfortunately, only four of us could go on our journeys at a time.

For whatever reason, I was in the last group to go in, so for two days I watched with nervous anticipation as the other clients came prancing out of their “journeys.” They weren't supposed to talk about it, but they were so jazzed up about having hung out with their dead grandfathers or finding out that the person who molested them was actually a human being with feelings just like the rest of us that the staff couldn't shut them up.

On day two, though, I watched as the doctor from Texas came out shaking and white as a ghost. He went straight to his room, and we didn't see him for a couple of days. The other three in his group were acting as if they had all won a game show.

I wasn't allowed to eat that night, which wasn't much of an issue since I was hardly able to eat anyway. I couldn't sleep either. I just tossed and turned till the sun came up and sat on the porch and smoked cigarettes. Around 7:00 a.m., the door to the clinic opened, and someone tentatively walked out and bent down to touch the grass. He was followed by a woman, who walked over to a flowerbed and stared at it for a while before puking up a small amount of white paste and returning to the clinic. Two
others came out and just wandered around kind of checking things out. Then I watched and smoked as one of the staff members started to bring the next batch in one at a time. He came to get me last.

 

I
WAS NERVOUS
walking into the clinic. It was a cabin just like the others, but black plastic covered all the windows, and the lighting had been reduced to near total darkness. I was led to a room with three side-by-side hospital beds. Next to each bed was an EKG and an IV rack. Two other clients were already attached to their machines and were lying on their backs wearing sleeping masks and listening to headphones. Another thing we had learned while waiting to get our cure was that no one was very excited about being hooked up to machines while they went through their “journey.”

“Thank you for calling it a ‘journey,' but you're still thinking about ibogaine as if it were LSD. It's not. I promise you. Not one person has ever had an issue with it,” Dr. Mash said. As much as they told us it wasn't going to be like LSD, it still seemed like a sterile fucking environment to be going through something like this.

In total silence, so as not to disturb the others, I was directed to lie down while the nurse hooked me up to everything. I stared into the darkness above, waiting for Dr. Mash to administer this drug, which I was suddenly having second thoughts about. All I could think about was that Republican doctor, who was still, a day later, in his room crying. The guy couldn't have been more different from me, and the general consensus was that his “hard journey” had more to do with him being an asshole than anything else, but I began wondering if it couldn't have something to do with him being an opiate addict like me. Then Dr. Mash came out holding a tray with six enormous capsules.

I had to take them one at a time, following each with a big gulp of water. The nurse then put a mask on me, placed a pair of headphones over my ears, and pressed play on the CD player. While I waited for the “journey” to come on, I was expecting Kenny G or Muzak or something. Instead, they played a song I vaguely remembered from high school, when the Goth kids decided to listen to something other than The Cure or The Smiths. It featured a bagpipe, what sounded like a Native American drum, an African shaker-type instrument, a Middle Eastern dumbek, and thank God, no lyrics. The next song had a similar world-music vibe.

The “journey” didn't exactly “come on.” No matter how much the
doctors insisted we let go of our preconceived notions of psychedelics, my high school acid trips were all I had to go on. I was expecting some kind of gradual transition from reality into whatever was in store, but when the third song started, the shit hit me like a baseball bat to the head, in perfect unison with the first note. Again the drums sounded Native American, but the music didn't seem to have a source, as though it were omnipresent. I imagined it could be heard at the same thunderous volume throughout the universe, and each note hit me like a ten-foot wave. I remembered bodysurfing on a particularly rough day at the beach; massive waves slammed me to the ground continuously. Getting sucked under for the fiftieth time, I made a split-second decision not to fight it and let my body go completely limp. I was tossed head over heels every which way, but I didn't get slammed onto the floor as I had before. This was a similar feeling, but I felt more like a pinball getting knocked around in space at unbelievable speeds every time the universe played another note on its bagpipe, pan flute, French horn, or koto.

I tried to cast aside my cynicism about this ethnic hodgepodge of world music made by “enlightened” white folks and attempted to relax and enjoy the interaction between the harpsichord and didgeridoo. As soon as I did that, I found I was able to navigate a little better or at least trick myself into thinking that I had some control over this bizarre free fall through space and time.

That song ended, and I was still floating in space, but there was an almost deafening hum that rose and fell at a slow but steady rate. When the next song started, I could no longer hear individual instruments or see the specific shapes, patterns, and colors they formed. Instead the colors and sounds coalesced into a visual scene.

I found myself standing in a desert wilderness. Possibly the Southwest, maybe Australia or Africa? It didn't matter. Something told me that this was long before there was an America, or Australia, or any concept of progress, or borders, or time. I stood there forever, waiting for someone or something to come along and tell me the secret or give me the message I was supposed to get. The sun came and went, but time didn't move forward. It just went around in a circle.

I had to take a piss.

I'm not sure why I didn't whip it out right there and piss on the ground. Maybe out of consideration? In any case, I began walking toward a nearby bush. Halfway there, I noticed that the desert landscape was beginning to fade, until it looked as if it were going to disappear altogether. I didn't give it too much thought. I needed to get to that bush
quickly so I wouldn't piss in the loincloth I was wearing. As I got closer, the bush transformed into a hospital bed floating in the middle of space. I climbed in it and reached up to take off my sleeping mask.