The Big Fix (4 page)

The throbbing in my hands is nearly unbearable. Why did I decide to binge like that? I got tired of spending my whole paycheck on mixed drinks every Friday night. Or on a bag of weed I would smoke up in one sitting. I needed something more. My friend at the bar told me he could get
me some heroin. I hadn't had any for a while. I was getting scores from medicine cabinets here and there, but rarely could I get heroin. I was excited. I would need to wait until he got back from Dayton the next day, he had told me. He promised he would make it worth the wait. He leaned into me to let me know what he had in mind. I know he was just using me for my money. He had been a junkie in San Francisco before coming to this podunk town. He knew how to get what he wanted. So did I. I am sure the gin factored into my poor decision making when I told him yes.

The following day we were sitting on the floor of my apartment, where I trusted him to inject me in my hands with an old battered syringe. This was the only tool we had at our disposal. In fact, new syringes were so scarce, one couple I knew had spent an entire weekend hooked up to saline IVs so they had an open port to inject into. I had never even used a new syringe. I prepared the dull instrument. I had sharpened the needle on a matchbook in hopes that it would slide into my skin like butter. This was magical thinking. The fishhook needle bore into my skin with a vengeance. We nodded off, puked, ate cookies, and nodded some more. He wandered back to the bar at some point. He came back the next day smelling like cheap vodka and sweat to do it all over again. Now, a few days later, I am broke.

Ah, of course—the number in my wallet. It starts to come back to me. This guy wants me to call him as soon as I get paid again. I owe him $20 for a shitty bag of coke that I split with my friends, plus I think I might have let him feel my tits at the bar to get him to buy me a few drinks. My life is a constant series of new highs and mostly lows. I take
inventory: several bags of heroin, cocaine, a few Vicodin, and cheap booze.
I had a productive weekend,
I think, as I sit here feeling my loneliness.

I haven't had my phone turned on at this apartment, or else my mother would surely be calling by now. The last time I saw her, she knew something was going on with me. It's been a few months since then. I had gotten a DUI trying to navigate my way back to West Chester under the influence of a few too many cocktails. For me to be able to continue in school, I had to move out of my parents' house in the suburbs and back closer to downtown Cincinnati. At least when I lived with my parents there were some constraints on my behavior. Now there were none. I imagined the next time I would see her. She would have to get my brother or someone to drive her to come get me to take me back to the house. We would do these check-ins once a month or so since the first D had come home on my report card. My mother was none too happy with what she saw as another rebellious phase. Between the black clothes and my new tattoo, my mother was wondering if I had suddenly become possessed by some kind of devil.

“Why haven't you called me?” she will inevitably ask.

During my last visit, my time was spent dodging eye contact. The sunglasses concealed the dark circles under my eyes. A long-sleeved shirt hid the bruise the syringe had made on my forearm. I had lost a few pounds, but nothing drastic enough to draw much attention. She wasn't focused on my appearance; for my mother, it is more about my mood. She's always interested in how I answer questions. As I sat in the living room sipping my diet soda that day, my mind formulated a million excuses.

My mom gets this look on her face when she is worried. She wears a shade of makeup that is slightly too dark and slightly too thick in a ring around her face. When she gets upset, the makeup crinkles by the corners of her eyes. I have seen this look many times. That day was the first time it was ever directed at me. Twenty years old is pretty late in life to start fucking up. I am making up for lost time. She never saw this coming. My progression from bookworm to party girl has thrown her off guard.

I had always been the “good girl.” I was the child who had never given my parents any problems. For me, that meant I was invisible to them. My mother focused on my father, my father focused on drinking, and I focused my attention on anything that would get my mind off my misery. Books were my first fix, even before food. I could read a book a day. I could spend hours and hours sitting in my room, absorbed in the stories of other people. I liked to imagine myself as part of the story. I could forget myself as I turned those pages. It was hard for me to live in my own skin. My parents saw me as well-behaved and studious. The reality was I was extremely depressed. I didn't know a name for it, but I knew this feeling of darkness that would overwhelm me. I would lie around watching television for days at a time trying to escape my surroundings. Inside, I felt as if I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs. Or break things if I could muster the energy. I remember the feeling of wanting to disappear, which as a teen became a feeling of wanting to die. It was only in hindsight that my mother realized I'd been having trouble finding ways to cope. I kept things bottled up for so many years that I was
bound to implode or explode. I chose the former. Everything feels like it is crashing around me.

During that last visit, I had stuffed my face with the food she brought to me. I hadn't had a solid meal in days.

“Tracey . . . I am asking you a question,” she said.

I tried to put her off by telling her, “I have just been busy, Mom. I have school and work.”

This was half true and half lie. I did go to work. I needed that money. School was a different story. I had been to five classes since the semester started.

She tried to get me to look at her. I didn't want anyone to see me, least of all her.

“You know how I worry,” she told me.
Yes. I know,
I thought to myself.

In fact, I have started to worry about myself. I occasionally hear a faint voice in the back of my mind asking me what the hell I am doing. I suppose it is what is left of my conscience. I drown that voice at happy hour.
Let me live my life,
I tell it. I spent so many years as a depressed fat girl, this is my time to enjoy life. I almost believe my own lies. Almost. There are moments of sobriety interlaced with the intoxication that creates humiliation. I need more and more substances to cover up the mess I have made of my life.

My mother loves to talk on the phone on Sundays. My visits have become fewer and farther between, so she depends on those phone calls. Sunday is our day for connection. For a few moments, we can be a normal mother and daughter again. For as long as I can remember, Sunday always has been a special day to us. No matter how much my father drank during the week, he usually made an attempt to be sober on
Sunday. He would get stuff done around the house, almost as if we were a normal family. He would go out on the lawn mower or do the grocery shopping. My mom would look out the window, setting her hair for the week, while he raked up the leaves. She wore a modified beehive long after it went out of style. She could only sleep on her back for fear any other position would destroy her look. She coated her hair in White Rain hairspray, sipping on her Maxwell House coffee in her frosted green mug. My father worked as an engineer, sixty- to eighty-hour workweeks with lots of travel. He was rarely home. When he was, it frequently would spiral into chaos. Mostly I was raised by my mother. She went back to work temporarily when I was six and never left. She worked as an executive secretary during a time when secretaries were known as “girls.” My parents work hard. If they ever find out what I am doing, I will be one big fucking disappointment.

My mind is going a million miles a minute. That is one of the drawbacks of cocaine. It makes me think too much. I put my hands across my eyes. Both are throbbing in unison. I am going to go back to sleep and pray for better luck.

Six months later, I decide it is time for me to get away from Cincinnati. “Decide” might not be the right word. My terrible choice in company has made the decision for me. My mom used to tell me, “Show me who your friends are and that will tell me who you are.” Well, my friends are slowly becoming people I would have called cutthroats and junkies. I guess I am becoming one as well. I thought I was so different from all the other users. I was a person who cared. I would take people in for a few days here and there, people off the street who were traveling through the city
following the Grateful Dead or some punk rock band. They would tell me their stories of dope sickness or some other drug-related malady that I thought was surely in their head.
How could some little pill or powder have such a huge hold on you?
I thought to myself as I dismissed their complaints as fiction. I was somehow above them because I was too strong to get hooked on anything. I had gone all these years without any issues. It was easy to delude myself into believing I must be fine. The evidence was stacking up against me, yet I turned the cloudiest of blind eyes.

My judgment has gotten as low as my standards. One blurry night recently changed the course of my life. I was hanging out at a bar—the way I would spend most of my evenings after work—with a friend of a friend, since my usual happy hour companion had passed out early at my place. We'd been downing some cheap fortified wine called Cisco. It's known on the street as “liquid crack” and tastes like grape lighter fluid. This man used to go out with one of my friends. We spent our time exchanging stories about her. She was a beautiful woman with long blonde hair. She wore liquid eyeliner and always had a Newport hanging out of one corner of her mouth. I loved her and he had loved her. We had this thing in common. Everything else was so very different. He had recently been released from prison. That should have scared me, but the liquor gave me artificial courage.

He was entertaining me with stories about the predicament he was in that was like something out of a gangster movie. He owed some money to a loan shark.
Do those really exist?
I thought as I sipped my gin and tonic. I tried to
focus on pacing myself so I wouldn't throw up later. In the morning, he was planning to present the loan shark with the money: $2,240, to be exact. He had the cash with him, but he said he was a little short on his debt. I had seen the movies. “Are they going to break your legs?” I asked. He laughed at my ignorance. Not at what they would do to him, but at how I stupidly did not understand that these things really existed.

When we finally staggered back to my apartment, our noisy laughter woke my sleeping houseguest, who got up and left quickly. No time to swap stories with two drunk fools on a Thursday night. Unfortunately, the houseguest took something else with him. Without my knowledge, he clipped my drinking partner. My friend didn't notice that his money was gone until he woke up later, and our earlier laughter turned into terror.

“These people are going to kill me, Tracey,” he told me frantically.

He flipped over my mattress in vain.

I offered naïvely, “Let me help you look for it.”

He pushed me back down.

“No!” he told me. “You have done quite enough.”

If I wasn't still so drunk, I would be more afraid.

“Seriously,” I said. “Let me help.”

Then I saw it. That look in his face. He picked up a pair of broken scissors and put them up against my face. A theft had turned into a hostage situation. I wasn't going anywhere, I wasn't doing anything, until he let me go. I instantly felt sober. He was angry and he was desperate. This made a person dangerous.

I would see that look again. I would see it in the face of a rapist, hopeless addicts, and abusive boyfriends. It was a look that I had never seen growing up in suburban Ohio. This look was one of terror. It was my face reflected in his eyes—I say “reflected” because when he looked at me, I saw nothing but a frenzied stare. No emotion but anger, all of it directed at me.

“If I don't find this money, I am going to kill you, bitch,” he told me.

He pushed the scissors toward my face again.

“In fact, I am not going to kill you,” he continued. He was so angry spit was starting to come out of his mouth.

“I am going to put your eyes out so you have to live the rest of your life this way.” I believed him. In my gut I knew these were facts he was giving me, not idle threats.

As he tore apart every inch of my apartment, I sat frozen. He explained to me that these were the type of people who would not forgive him for not having the money. He dragged me around the city in the dark, fruitlessly trying to find my houseguest. It wasn't the fact that it was my houseguest who had stolen this man's money. What mattered to me was that he didn't believe me. When he finally decided to abandon me, I formulated an idea about how to get enough money to escape the city. It would take a few days. I would have my college tuition check refunded to me. It was break time between quarters. It would take a while before my parents would realize what had happened. I had to find some way to fix the situation. More importantly, I had to find a way to get out of his reach—NOW. There was once a time when I was innocent, when I believed the world was a good place full of good people. That time was over.

Within a few days, I was on a Greyhound with $900 and no idea what I was going to do with myself. I just knew that I had to get away from immediate danger.

In my mind, there were two junkie choices: New York and San Francisco. If I was going to take a “vacation,” I certainly wanted it to involve drugs. The incident in my apartment had me looking over my shoulder in fear for my life. I needed an escape. I needed it now. I certainly intended to return when things calmed down. How long would it take this person to realize I didn't take his money? If I was going to hide out for a few weeks, I figured I might as well enjoy my time. Hell, I thought, I might even be able to bring back a few bags and double my money. People I knew did this all the time. I could get back the $900 and go back to school. The plan was slowly taking shape. I knew people in both SF and NYC, places I was
sure
I could get heroin. New York didn't seem that appealing. I had been there in 1988 with a few friends. We had slept in our car at Tompkins Square Park. We drank blackberry-flavored brandy to stay warm in the cold city air. That was the first time I saw a dead person on the street. His body was blocking my path. I asked my friend, “What do I do?” He said, “This is New York, step over him.” We had gotten loaded on something or other, but I never got the hang of navigating the dope spots. I decided I would try my hand at San Francisco. The warm California sun would do wonders for my mood while I worked to straighten out my life back in Cincinnati.