Ninety Days (6 page)

Standing here, two months later, I picture my thin, wrecked, desperate self, scrambling to collect a windstorm of bills. I remember sweat pouring down my face, and the blasts of cold air coming in from the street. I remember a guy with a bike helmet on and two young women helping me collect the money. I remember putting the wad of bills back into the same pocket and its falling out again, but this time the guy with the bike helmet pounces and prevents the bills from flying.
You OK?
he asks doubtfully, and as I double-check the zippers I see my hands—stained black from scraping charred wire screens, blistered with lighter burns, and scabbed all over from nicks and cuts from dozens of shattered glass stems. I shove the money in my jacket pocket again, hide my hands in my jeans, and, not knowing how to respond, hurry to the street.

I try to remember where in the vestibule I was that day and how long it took to collect the bills. People—now in late spring clothes, not bundled for winter as they were then—pass in and out of the bank in front of me, and I try to picture one of them dropping three thousand dollars’ worth of cash. Twice. I try to imagine what I would do and how I’d react. How on earth did I not get arrested? It seems so cartoonish and unlikely, so far away.

Further away is the memory of me and Kate meeting in this same space before sitting down with a bank officer to open the accounts we needed to start the agency. How many years ago was this? Four? Five? Three? I can’t remember, and I can’t see us then. It’s too painful or too long ago, but in either case I can catch only the edges of that day, the conspiratorial air, the excitement and trust that passed between us. The hope.

I leave the little time machine bank vestibule and step out into the warm afternoon. It’s almost three and I have three hours to kill before the six o’clock meeting at the Meeting House. I’m hungry and exhausted and think, fuck it, the Meeting House can survive with one less junkie tonight. I think this even though I’d agreed to meet Polly there.
I’m not a babysitter,
I say out loud, feeling the giddy rush of deciding to skip the meeting pushing away the heavy memories of just a few moments ago.
I’m no one’s keeper!
I go on, declaring to the air like a lunatic.

As I walk home, I wonder how long it will take the check to clear, how long before the six thousand dollars will add to the two thousand in the account already and make eight. Eight thousand seems like an enormous amount of money. More than three months’ rent. The apartment would be covered into the fall, and with bags of food from Jean, I’ll be OK past October. The bank is at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. My apartment is at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. Somewhere south of 20th and north of 16th I remember again that day two months ago, leaving the bank with three thousand dollars stuffed in my jacket, calling Rico from the street and telling him to meet me at my room at the Gansevoort Hotel. I remember him saying he was only a block away and how my heart raced as I hailed a cab to get there before he did, how his van was pulling up to the hotel just as my cab was, and how I hopped from one vehicle right into the other. From call to cab to van and back to my room took less than five minutes, some kind of record, and in the middle of the day, no less. Remembering the return to the hotel room, the wealth of drugs, the remaining cash in hand, and the night ahead starts my heart racing. I think again of the two thousand in my account. The two that will be eight. Following the thousand-dollar-a-day logic of those nights at the Gansevoort, three months’ rent becomes eight nights high. Eights nights less the thousand I owe Rico and the thousand I owe Happy. Six nights high. If I call one of them now and pay back what I owe I’ll still have a grand in cash to buy drugs. And I won’t have to go to Mark’s like last time and suffer through his jittery lectures and treacherous friends.

I arrive at my building, enter the lobby, and hit the elevator button. Somewhere between the lobby and the seventeenth floor, three months’ rent becomes seven digits. Seven forgotten digits that bubble up from memory like a dark miracle that I dial on my new phone which, until now, has not stored or dialed any dealer’s phone numbers. After a few rings, Happy picks up with a question,
Who is this?
I tell him.

Happy takes his time getting to the apartment. On the phone I let him know right away I have the money I owe him and that I need to buy a thousand dollars’ worth of drugs. I give him the new address and he hangs up the phone. It’s three in the afternoon and he shows up after eleven. I call him a few times through the afternoon and evening, but he doesn’t pick up. I pace the studio and avoid phone calls from Polly and Jack while I wait with the two thousand dollars I ran back to the bank to get. Though eight hours pass from the initial phone call to hearing him knock on the apartment door, there is no turning back from getting high. It’s like a switch has been flipped and I’m on autopilot. No phone call, second thought, or imagined consequence can keep me from doing what I’m about to do. Only Happy not showing up can keep me from using, and if he doesn’t show up by midnight, I’ve already decided that I’ll go to Mark’s.

At eleven there’s a knock at the door. There he is, looking exactly as he always has: white sweatpants, black hooded sweatshirt, Yankees cap, and large headphones around his neck. Without saying a word, he walks past me into the apartment and looks around.
Smaller place,
he says, in a voice that is both empty of and bursting with opinion.
Wondered where you went,
he adds with a hard emphasis on
went,
as I hand him the cash he doesn’t count. He pulls out ten bags and two stems from the front pocket of his sweatpants and as he hands them to me says,
It’s good,
and starts for the door. Usually two hundred bucks gets you two bags plus a third bag free, so I say, cautiously,
Aren’t there five missing? Interest,
he answers, simply and without turning around, before he palms the door and steps into the hall. I watch him go and wait to hear the elevator open and shut before I go to the door and double-lock it.

From the first hit, which I load with as much as I once would have used in a whole night, there is something wrong. Something off. The drug tastes like medicine, and while, yes, there is a wallop of something blasting through my lungs and heart and brain, it’s not the high I’ve waited for since three o’clock. After exhaling a huge plume of smoke, I light up and inhale another deep lungful. And then another. I pull so hard and inhale so deeply that on the fifth hit the stem pops apart from the excessive heat. I’m high but exactly where I started, still here and not there. And
there
is the only place I want to be, a place where no amount of this smoke can take me. Is it the drug or is it me? I can’t tell what’s wrong but something is. I call Happy and tell him that there’s something not right with what he sold me and ask him if he’ll switch the bags. I lie and tell him I’m about to start a period when I’ll be ordering a lot more and this is not a great place to start. By one in the morning Happy shows up again. He’s smiling, as if I’ve passed some test, and not angry as I thought he’d be. I’ve smoked down one bag and give him the remaining nine. He hands me back ten new ones that I can tell are colored and textured differently. He doesn’t say one word from the moment he enters the apartment to the moment he leaves. I say
Thank you
as he goes and then lock the door, take a clean stem, and pack it to the brim. I can instantly tell the difference when I inhale the new smoke and the freight train I’ve been waiting for all day finally hits me. At last, the world cracks open and I fall through, leaving behind for a blessed second everything and everyone. I settle into the couch and, with eyes closed, hold on to what I know will be over soon. It will wriggle away as suddenly as it arrives, just as it always does, and I will, I know, sit on this couch for hours, burning my fingers and filling my lungs to court its return. But it never does. What comes instead is restlessness followed by an urgent need to get out of the apartment. What comes after that are two Asian guys—young, hip, bored, cute—standing in front of a white tile apartment building down the block from mine, who seem to be waiting for me. I ask them to come over and they do. I ask them if they get high and they say yes. I show them a stem and they ask what it is. I suggest they try, and they do. They both get naked and I join them and the hours pass as the three of us thrash around on the bed and stop and start dozens of times to get high and down vodka. At around ten in the morning I am convinced they are undercover cops or DEA agents who have tricked me into letting them into my apartment, and I demand that they leave. They are confused, ask for a stem and a bag of drugs, which I refuse, and at last they go. I sneak to the liquor store on Seventh Avenue and buy two half gallons of vodka and a bag of ice. I drink the first bottle quickly and close my eyes and fall asleep for a couple of hours. I have five bags left and I stuff a quarter of the contents of one into a pipe and begin to hope, like so many times before, that my heart explodes, that my brain erupts, and that the death dance can resolve, for once and finally, in death. I look across my small studio to the door that leads to the terrace and remember the first thought I had when I saw it, weeks ago, when the real estate agent showed me the apartment: if all else fails, there’s that.

Wednesday becomes Thursday. Five bags become three. The lighter, bent down at an angle too far and for too long, pops, and its metal workings explode apart in my hand. It is the last lighter and it’s now evening again. I scan a few drawers and pockets and find no more and realize I have to go out. I pour a vodka and look around at the apartment filled with glasses jammed with cigarette butts the Asian guys must have smoked. There are used condoms on the floor, a sheet nailed to the wall above the terrace door to block anyone seeing in, and empty beer cans and vodka bottles everywhere. The gloom of the wrecked room and the grim image of three strangers drugging and drinking and slamming into each other to create closeness or apartness or whatever each of us is running to or toward is too much to bear. And there is nothing new about it. It’s like every other time getting high. And here I am again. I look at the terrace door. I look at the bags of drugs on the coffee table and think: Is there enough to get me on the other side? Is there enough to finish what I started two months ago? There’s only one way to find out, I decide, as I put on my shoes to go get lighters.

Like every other time I’ve left a room with drugs, I worry it will be raided, and more than the fear of being arrested, I panic at the idea that the drugs will be seized, taken away, not used. So I tuck the bags in the front pocket of my shorts, put on a clean T-shirt, wash my hands to clear off the soot, and leave. The elevator man, the older of the two Serbian brothers who work the elevator in the building, mumbles something inaudible. I pray he can’t smell the smoke I’ve been breathing for nearly forty-eight hours. I leave the building and immediately wish I hadn’t. The sidewalks along Seventh Avenue are teeming with people. Cars streak by, sirens sound, voices come from all directions. I don’t want to be here, but I need lighters and have no choice. I get to the bodega and ask for ten lighters, more than I need but I’m fearful I’ll run out again. Once I have them in my pockets I walk back to Seventh Avenue, head south, and before I’ve turned onto 15th Street, I see him. Asa.

How he persuades me to come to his apartment I have no idea. I’m standing in his small studio living room listening to him talk to his sponsor, Lucy. I hear him say the word
Benadryl
and I can’t imagine why. I go to the bathroom and run the water and flush the toilet while I draw as big a hit as I can. Immediately he comes knocking on the door. I pack another hit, light it, and exhale as I scramble unsuccessfully to find a window to open. The little room is dense with smoke, and when I open the door the drug clouds pour into the apartment like steam. Asa is calm and not confrontational but he asks me, gently, if I will give him the drugs. I say I should probably leave, but as I do I think I hear heavy footfalls outside his door. One part of me is aware that I am becoming paranoid, as I always do on drugs, and the other remembers the Asian guys who seemed to be communicating with each other last night in an intricate code of winks and hand signals. And then the shadows on the terrace that looked like men with bulletproof vests.

Asa has a box of Benadryl in his hand and says that Lucy suggests I take a few to kill the edge, soften the high, and help bring me down a little so I can decide what to do. This sounds good, so I ask for three and I swallow them down. I ask if he has alcohol in the house, and as I do I remember how we know each other—from the rooms—and I apologize. But I know that I need alcohol and I need it soon.
I need to go to the bathroom,
I say, and he seems genuinely stumped, so he turns his back and starts talking again to Lucy. I disappear into the bathroom and load up the stem a few more times. I feel a notch calmer as the hits push away some of the worry, but in its place comes something else. That old restless sexual energy that this drug unleashes. So I go back out to where Asa is and say I’m getting warm. I ask him if it’s OK if I take my T-shirt off and he just sort of blinks and says,
I guess so.
I’m feeling a bit bolder now than before, so after my shirt is off I pull out a stem and pack it in front of him and draw a hit. I exhale into the neat, attractive little studio. I pull a chair directly in front of where he’s sitting on the couch and lean back and put my hands in my pockets. I push my shorts down my hips a little and flex my arms and think that something is about to happen. In the deluding inner sheen of the high, I think there’s no way he won’t be game to fool around. I’ve had a sense he may have a crush on me and by God if he does, here I am. It seems completely logical, and Asa the friend, the saving angel, the sober comrade disappears and in his place is just a beautiful nearby body that looks like the next place to go in my crack-mapped journey. He hands me another Benadryl and asks me again if he can take the drugs from me. Again, he’s calm, not angry or pushy. But I can barely hear him for all my desire. He stays on the phone with Lucy and says to me,
You can stop now. You can stop and you can crash here and everything will be OK. This doesn’t have to get any worse than it already is.