The Book of Drugs

Table of Contents

 

 

 

—The Long Winters, “Be Kind to the New Girl”

So, this is important:

This is what I remember, and how I remember it—although I've changed some names, and amalgamated some people, and some places.

I'm certain that some people in this book remember things differently, or remember things I don't remember. Some people probably have no recall of events that are vivid, and crucial, to me.

I'm scared not just of subjectivity, but of losing people I love.

In life, I'm meticulously honest, but my default is to feel like a fraud. I walk through customs thinking I'll get busted for drugs I'm not carrying. I walk out of stores afraid to be caught with things I haven't stolen. So, of course, I'm terrified of a common scenario: a memoirist is dogged, exposed, and denounced.

I'm telling my memories with scrupulous precision, while scared that the mind is unreliable. Maybe every person on the planet is equally susceptible to errors and contortions of remembrance—whether or not they consider their minds to be suspect. Does that make memory itself an act of imagination?

I wrote my ideas on Post-It notes and stuck them on the wall by the desk. Lyrics, ideas for poems, ideas for newspaper pieces, preposterous diagrams for joysticks and wired-up boxing gloves that would work as sound-effects triggers. These are two notes I left for myself in November 1999:

I'm mostly writing drug stories. I have them. People read them.

I know a famous actor who was a regular on
Page Six,
going in and out of nightclubs, in the heyday of the Hilton sisters and the Olsen twins. He struggled with cocaine and painkillers but was embarrassed to talk about it. “Addiction stories are clichéd,” he said.

You're a storyteller, I told him. You know how few essential stories there are. This one is
new,
how often does that happen? It's up there with Boy Meets Girl Boy Loses Girl, Man Challenges the Gods and Is Punished, Rags to Riches. Joking cynically with friends, I've called this book a JADN: just another drug narrative. We, the addicts, keep writing them, but nearly everything we have to say has already been expressed just in the title of Caroline Knapp's
Drinking: A Love Story.

I can't renounce drugs. I love drugs. I'd never trade the part of my life when the drugs
worked,
though the bulk of the time I spent getting high, they weren't doing shit for me. I wouldn't be
here
if I didn't do the drugs first. This part of my life—even minus the bursts of euphoria—is better, sexier, happier, more poetic, more romantic, grander.

And if heroin still made me feel like I did the first time, and kept making me that way forever—kept
working—
I might've quite happily accepted a desolate, marginal life and death.

I've heard from so many people who got clean, then went out and got wasted again, that, bewilderingly, they were
exactly
at the same place they were when they left off,
immediately.
It's just the bizarreness of addiction, which waits patiently, no matter how long you go without drugs. Who knows, maybe I
am,
in fact, unlike the aforementioned relapsers, but I have no desire to try the drugs again, and see if things go differently. I don't want to test this life's durability.

None of this guarantees I won't go out and get fucked up. It happens, often to people who've made enthusiastic public declarations of recovery. I watch
Celebrity Rehab
and think:
My people!

Caroline Knapp, it bears mentioning, was also addicted to nicotine, and died of lung cancer.

I loathe myself in a lot of these stories. I feel compelled to tell you now that eventually I turn into a kind, loving person who struggles to live the first line in Saint Francis's prayer: “Make me a channel of your peace.” Not to demand peace, but to transmit it.

Maybe that's not what you're interested in—maybe you want salacious tales of the debased guy: the cleaned-up guy is intolerably corny. Maybe you just want to read
drugs heroin heroin drugs
over and over again. When I was getting high, that's what I read these books for.

 

My dad's dad was the town drunk in Tullos, Louisiana. In the mid-1950s, when everybody else's family had gotten a car, my dad's family still had a horse. Because the horse knew how to get home. My grandfather would get wasted at the bar, slump on the horse when his money was gone, and the horse would take him home.

He lost their house in a card game—I mean, he literally
lost their house in a card game
. He came home and said, get up, everybody, we have to leave.

My dad got into West Point. When he came back on vacations, his dad made him go to the bar with him in uniform so he could show him off, which my dad hated. He went to Vietnam, where he served as an adviser to a South Vietnamese tank unit, not with an American unit, possibly because the officers doing the assigning disliked him: he was too uptight, too intense.

I spoke to my dad about Vietnam just once when I was a kid.

Dad, what's that citation from the South Vietnamese government that's hanging on the wall of your study?

“Well, we were at———, and we were surrounded by———of them, and there were only———of us.”

So, it was a battle?

“It was a battle.”

Did you win?

“No,” said my dad. “But we killed a lot of them.”

He was interviewed by the
New York Times
in 2000, about how the war's legacy is taught at West Point—a salient point, being that the Vietnamese were so fanatical, or so patriotic, that they leaped heedlessly, or courageously, into death.

“Lord, I saw them die by the hundreds,” my dad told the
Times
reporter.

I think what he saw in Vietnam amplified, demonically, what he learned as a child: terrible things could happen, unexpectedly, at any time. His became a life of hypervigilance. He tightened like a fist.

 

He drank beer at night and on weekends. I don't remember him drunk—not in the way he told me my grandfather was drunk—but on the weekend, if you had done something wrong—(failed Algebra, neglected to mow the lawn)—you had to tell him early. At 11 AM, he would be disappointed. At 2 PM, he would be angry. At 4 PM he would leap out of his chair, red-faced, in a rage, and whip his belt out, threatening to finally beat me the way his dad beat him.

My dad never hit me. I waited, and waited, but he never did. He reminded me often how lucky I was; that he grew up in a
house with an openly, constantly drunk father who actually beat him. I did feel lucky.

 

My younger brother, a matchless student who eased virtuously through school, began to have strange episodes when he went off to college. He stopped going to class, and, for reasons he found to be perfectly sensible, started sleeping only every other night. He's brilliant, and odd; when he turned thirty, I congratulated him. He shrugged: “It's only significant because we have a base-10 number system.”

My mom had unpredictable manias when she'd yell at you for something someone else did. “Your brother doesn't have a plan he doesn't have a plan
he needs a plan a person needs a plan!
” she screamed. OK, Mom, I'm not him, so . . .
“How can you live without a plan he's an adult he needs a plan!”

He moved home and spent his days hanging out in the garage playing chess on the internet. I gave him my old laptop when his died; he would drive his car to a riverbank and spend the day writing code on it, in antiquated computer languages like COBOL and FORTRAN. He got a job, at night, sitting in the basement of a bank counting things. She still yelled at him. “When are you going to get a job?”

“Mom, I have a job.”

Eventually my brother was living in his car. It's harder, post-9 /11, to live in your car—they won't let you just park and sleep just anywhere, anymore. So he'd come home for interludes.

He developed delusions. He thought somebody had broken into his car and moved things around. He stayed up all night gripping a kitchen knife, believing people were coming for him.
He was institutionalized and medicated, then got out, didn't take his meds, went back home, went out and lived in his car again, went back home, etc. He seemed better off when he was homeless.

I see my brother as the guy I should've been. I have the same disorder: I down four pills every morning to stay rational. But he's the guy whose illness was exacerbated to the point where he became homeless and delusional. He was once the family star and I was the fuckup.

I had something he didn't have: an obsession.

 

When I was eleven or twelve, I'd pull up a folding chair to the jukebox at the teen center and listen to the same songs repeatedly: “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell, “For Those About to Rock, We Salute You,” by AC/DC, “The Stroke,” by Billy Squier. Mostly older kids came there, to play pinball and that formalist masterwork of vector-graphic arcade games,
Tempest
. They taunted me, I think because my intensity scared them. An adult staffer saw me pulled up so close to the jukebox that my head rested on the grille, and said, encouragingly, “There's a piano in the other room, do you want to go play it?” What? What made her think, so mistakenly, that I actually had within me the capacity, the potential, to
make
music?

I lived with this desperate feeling: no access to anywhere that bands played, no friends who played guitar. When I should've been doing homework, I would be lip-synching to Thin Lizzy and Dio records.
“You don't think we hear you jumping around up there?!”
my mom yelled.
“You think you're gonna be a rock star? Well, rots of ruck!”
She liked the racist faux-Chinese put-down.

I tried to stop wanting it, but I couldn't. As life went on, I pursued my dreams, for sure, but not in joy: I was harangued by them. I pursued them in dread.

 

My mom told me she'd buy me a guitar if I got on the honor roll. So I did—by a tenth of a point, and I had to go and argue with a gym teacher for it. I got a guitar—an Aria Pro II, and a Marshall practice amp, from a guitar store in Paramus, where the Jersey-metal sales guy yelled at me for touching the instruments hanging on the wall—and returned to fuck-up-hood.