The Chronology of Water (6 page)

Two.

Three.

One.

The first time I went down into Monty’s basement I was with Amy. When he opened up, we went in - we were the only women that night. We were fishing for a little danger. Briefly I felt weird. Then weirdly, I didn’t. There were maybe four guys in there besides us. One of those four was also a swimmer. When I looked at him, I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, but he smiled and nodded and waved.

The room was dark- and not just because the walls were painted black with all kinds of glow in the dark and neon shit all over them. The carpet was dark red shag. One shit brown old sofa, three lava lamps, three posters: Che and Jimi and Malcolm. A fish tank with a bunch of tetras and a giant angel fish glowed blue green in the corner. A small refrigerator, assorted glass
bongs, and a big ass coffee table upon which were a variety of items not so good to name. One Love in our ears.

Monty came over with pills in his hand and said, “Choose one, and I’ll tell you what it does.” I picked a capsule with a red cap on one side and a yellow cap on the other.

Amy passed, shaking her head, saying “ Nuh uh, captain fantastic,” reaching for a bong.

Monty looked at me and laughed a classic stoner laugh - huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhow about you take two?”

“What’s it do?”

“Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“I just want to know what it does,” I said, feigning bad-assery.

By that time in my collegiate athletic career I could give a shit about good citizenship. When I competed, I didn’t even make the board. No one in the pool turned their head at the finish to see me. I was lucky I hadn’t drowned. I’d become the kind of woman whose mouth was stuck in a permanent “yes” shape. All I wanted was experience - especially if it would numb the fuck out of my brain. My I don’t know who the fuck I am-ism. My I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My couldn’t someone, please, anyone, love me? I would have put anything in my mouths.

“ Well, this particular little beauty will sedate your ass and make you dreamy.”

I opened my mouth and ate it instantly.

He was right, I became sleepy, but not quite dreamy, so I asked for another. Two more women showed up. They didn’t look like swimmers. Too skinny. Long stringy hair. Glitter nail polish. They wore tube tops and Levis and flip-flops and giggled. They ate acid tabs and danced.

Amy tried to get me to go back home that night but Monty
talked me out of it. “I’ll walk her back, I’ll walk her,” He kept saying.

The walk back was one of the funnier nights of my life. Oddly, I remember it. 3:00, maybe 4:00 a.m. Black night. Warm. We made a pit stop in the reflecting pool on campus where I laid down with all my clothes on, laughing, laughing. I said, “Look at me! I’m Ophelia!”

Monty said, “Am I Hamlet?”

“Fuck yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!” I screamed, and rolled around in 10-inch deep water illuminated by underwater lights. Campus police showed up and wrote things on small pieces of I’m not really a cop paper and handed them to us and told us to go home. After they left we ate them. Then we bumble fucked on the ground under a tree - my own pants were baffling me and I was too gone to really get it on but Monty didn’t seem to mind. Then we played a game where we would run as fast as we could and dive into shrubbery. The next day at swim practice I was covered in shrub scrapes and scratches and my head felt like cotton.

Again.

I wanted to do it again.

I wanted to eat all the colors and see what I felt. No. I wanted to eat all the colors to get to the not feel. But even that was not enough for a burning girl.

One night there were white lines on mirrors ready for me when I entered. “ Look,” I said laughing, “I’m Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz! Poppies!” Breathing in the white, breathing out comprehension and emotion.

What I learned about Lubbock from the people in that basement was a different brand of education. Someone’s father had been kidnapped and murdered. Police found him in the stockyards under the hooves and shit of cows. Someone’s
brother had O.D.’d and killed his girlfriend on the way under with a shard of glass from a mirror. Someone’s mother had murdered his brother and sister - ages seven and 12 - because jesus told her to. They were wicked, jesus had said into her ear. One woman’s uncle was a pedophile, but no one in the family was willing to send him to the slammer, so they gave him an attic apartment. Another woman’s brother hustled coke over the border. One guy’s Mexican best friend had been found with his hands and his dick cut off next to the train tracks - the severed items in a Glad bag. Monty’s half-brother was in the state hospital for repeatedly raping a retarded girl neighbor.

I don’t know how else to tell this but straight no chaser. These dramas … these over the top horror stories seething with blood and immorality … they made me feel better. Like television does. Less like a damaged daughter. A failed student. A slut. An athlete gone to seed. And what was in the basement helped feelings leave my body altogether, so I didn’t need to know who I was, or why, or anything at all.

Two.

Three.

One.

When I walked into the basement the second year, I was nearly always by myself. I didn’t care who else was there. I didn’t care what the room looked like. What posters were on the walls. What the shit brown couch had all over it. What did interest me was the set-up on the table. There sat a spoon and a tray with cotton, a lighter and a syringe. I picked the spoon up and put it in my mouth. Monty said “huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu huh where do you want it?”

I said “Here,” and slapped my arm hard enough to raise a vein.

FOR PART OF MY LUBBOCK LIFE I BECAME A ZOMBIE. Not a flesh eating one. Gross. I’m no cannibal. No, I was of the high functional type, like so many of the people around you right. This. Second. We’re everywhere.

In zombieland I met an M.D. one night at a club who snorted enough to drop an elephant. His license plate read “DR IS IN.” I met a cop with chronic back pain from a gunshot wound who smoked it rolled up in little brown cigarettes. I met a Mexican sculptor who cooked it up with peyote. I met a woman who took care of toddlers during the day and left reality every night and came back to tend to children in the morning with droopy eyelids. My creative writing teacher, two swimmers, a football star, the owner of a popular restaurant, musicians, artists, and oh yeah. Junkie zombies.

I liked the fang of the needle. I liked chasing the dragon. I still like watching the action of a syringe in an arm. It actually makes my mouth water. Even in movies.

30 seconds from being to nothingness.

And I liked how my life, and what it was and wasn’t, simply left.

When you enter zombieland, everything looks a little like it is underwater. Slow motion and thick. Other people look a bit cartoonish - their movements too quick, their mouths and eyes sometimes taking on weird shapes, their arms and legs occasionally morphing into snakes or animal heads. Sometimes you
find yourself giggling at inappropriate times. Also, things are sleepy. Like in a lucid dream.

Actually, it’s exactly like lucid dreaming. According to neurobiology, in a lucid dream, the first thing that happens is that the dreamer recognizes they are dreaming. When the area of the brain that is usually off during sleep is activated the recognition of dreaming occurs, the dreamer must be careful to let the dream delusions continue but be conscious enough to recognize them. It’s a process some people theorize as the space between reason and emotion.

The zombie is also in this kind of space between reason and emotion - and more. Ask any high functional zombie - or a recovered zombie - and they will tell you right away that life was like awaking dream. Boy howdy. Though for some it is a nightmare beyond language.

In a general sense, for me it was cool in zombieland. For example, I could sit in one spot all day and look at light changes on the wall with absolute fascination until night fell. Another time I dipped my hand in blue paint again and again and covered a white wall of my apartment with hands. Though I admit at one point the hands became menacing and threatened to consume me, later they were again benign, even able to sing me to sleep through little mouths on their palms.

I guess now that I’m thinking about it, zombie state is also a good deal like hypnosis or meditation. In hypnosis or meditation, you shift awareness from the physical world and enter the deeper world of the subconscious. Sometimes this makes your regular body go numb. Neither zombies nor hypnosis/meditation folks are freaked out by this. In zombieland, when you are so relaxed your mouth feels lax as water and your muscles drop down into the warm flush, you are going somewhere important of the mind. Down and deep. Into the world of dreams.

But another tricky thing about zombieland is that in the dimension of dreams you might experience body distortions, vibrations, or weird shaking. The key was not to panic. It didn’t
mean you were turning into a Quaker. It was normal. It meant your body was ready to “go” where your mind was taking it. It meant you were going on the nod.

And there is no such thing as time. No past, no present, no future. Or else they are all there at once. So the slowing and slurring of language, the heaviness in your legs, the oddity of your hands turning to giant leaden balls that swing slowly from your arms, the big wad of pillowcase in your mouth, these are all body modifications needed to go where you are going. Though I distinctly remember things going better when I did not leave the apartment. I had, for lack of a better phrase, night blindness and dumb girl head out in the world. Plus there was the problem of legs and arms.

Or maybe I saw the world for what it was, no place for a girl like me. Why not … leave?

There were other, not cool times. Like the time I woke up under an overpass with my face against asphalt in a pool of my own vomit with my pants down around my ankles. Or the time I woke up in some blond and blue-eyed Karate guy’s bed with leather twine around my neck. Or the time I fell from a second floor balcony and cracked my head, the woman with the latex gloves touching my forehead in the ambulance saying, “Lidia, can you still see me? Stay awake for me, Lidia. Good girl.” She looked like an underwater white octopus lady. Pretty though.

I’m a strong bodied person. And the thing of it was, the things I thought would kill me in my life, maybe even the things I wished had, didn’t. What, I distinctly remember thinking, did I have left to lose? Crossing the blood-brain barrier. The mind body barrier. The reality dream barrier. All that euphoria filling up the hole of me. No pain. No thought. Just images to follow.

I was a zombie for a spell in Lubbock. In Austin. In Eugene.

It wasn’t epic compared to the other wounds in my life.

Rehab and relapse and remember all start with the letter R.

THIS IS NOT ANOTHER STORY ABOUT ADDICTION.