White Out

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1:
Memory Disease

Chapter 2:
The Castle

Chapter 3:
The Future Lasts Forever

Chapter 4:
Hello, Stripe

Chapter 5:
Everything Is Green

Chapter 6:
White Out

Chapter 7:
Funboys

Chapter 8:
Sorrow

Chapter 9:
Pleasure

Chapter 10:
Bloodless

Chapter 11:
The People

Chapter 12:
Love

Chapter 13:
26th and California

Chapter 14:
Forgetfulness

Chapter 15:
Outside

Chapter 16:
Endless

Epilogue

About the Author

I’d like to thank Jon Sternfeld, Rebecca Traynor,
Aaron Kunin, Colleen, Barbara, and Michael T. Clune,
Sid Farrar, Stan Apps, and Jimmy Kinnon.

CHAPTER 1

M
y past is infected. I have a memory disease. It grips me through what I remember. For example, seven years ago in Baltimore, Cat wakes me up to kiss me on her way to work. I’m about to fall back asleep when I remember about Dominic. I remember how fun he can be. I sit up in bed and think about it.

It is mid-June which in Baltimore is not a fresh thing. Mid-June is already midsummer. Veins filled with heavy blue. Humid, ninety degrees. I sit in bed thinking and the things I should do like renew my driver’s license or protest my parking tickets are like chewing on broken glass. Then I remember I can go to Dominic’s. I just think casually about going over there and maybe hanging out. I don’t wait to have a shower.

I pull up at Dominic’s, get out of the car, and someone is already yelling at me.

“Dom don’t need you coming around here.” It’s Dominic’s brother. He stares at me.

“Is Dominic here today?” The time for polite questions seems already to have passed, but I say it anyway. I say it in the ingratiating high-pitched voice I use these days when I’m forced to speak to people. Dom’s brother spits, barely turning his head.

“Dominic’s gone, he don’t live here anymore, get the fuck up out of here.”

The brother looks like a deflated version of Dominic, white all around the pupils, wearing a tool belt and work boots. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. Doing drugs makes your pupils swell in your iris. Not doing drugs shrinks the whole package, and you can see crazy white all the way around. When I was six I read in a book that Tarzan could recognize crazy people by the white that goes all the way around the iris.

“Have you happened to see Henry around today?”

“Man listen to me, Dominic don’t need you around, fuck Henry I don’t know where that one-armed freak is, if I see your monkey ass here again I’ma call the cops.”

As soon as he says “monkey” the door opens and Dominic himself shuffles out.

“Hey Mike come on in. Me and Henry was just trynna think about that other thing for you.” Dom is an enormous bear of a man, thick shaggy black hair, mumbly lips, big eyebrows. His whole face is camouflage for his coded speech. His eyes always on the ground, one expression. He is beyond shame.

Dom’s brother walks through the door and angrily starts hammering a light-fixture bracket into a wall. Dom and I follow. There is absolutely no furniture or wallpaper or pipes or carpet or tile anywhere to be seen in the room. Light’s coming through a single window with a sheet stapled over it. There must be forty staples in it. The brother’s work. I see Dominic has a syringe sticking out of his neck. I just like to be around him. Things happen around him. He’s like an open door things walk into and out of. Some of the things stay for a while.

Syringes, for instance. He has a bearlike bulk but he never eats. He’s a gathering of things. When that magnet inside him finally stopped spinning and all the things dropped to the pavement for the cops to pick up there was maybe ninety human pounds of him left for the ambulance, according to Henry, who was there, according to Henry.

In that bare front room at Dominic’s there is a trembling joy in the air. The thick sun of June gets trapped, pools, and grows cloudy. Proto-organisms form in the cloud of wood-color, heat, and sheet-light. I’m full of angels who fasten their lips and wings and hands to Dominic’s body, until he looks like a beach a thick flock of seagulls has landed on. By the time we get to the kitchen he doesn’t even look human.

The human form is not one I’m too committed to anyway. As Henry said once, I have a vein that starts in Baltimore and ends in Philadelphia. And here’s Henry. One arm. The missing arm is like an anchor dropped in the ocean of what he should look like and doesn’t. It keeps him anchored. He has a high-pitched granny’s voice.

“Hey Mike we was just trynna think about that other thing for you.” Dom sits heavily down in a chair, his neck goes out like a Slinky and his head is just way way back.

“It’s good to see you Henry. Man is it hot out today!”

This is the part I think I need to remember. Or I need to forget. It’s kind of hard to put together. Addiction is a memory disease. I was there at Dominic’s. I remembered one hour ago, sitting up in bed and thinking about renewing my driver’s license. I remembered six months ago, writing notes to myself in scary big letters and taping them all over the apartment so when I woke up I would see them. “No dope today!”

I also remembered talking to one of the teenage prostitutes who sometimes slept on mattresses on Dom’s floor. She said that Henry once told her he lost his arm by getting high and falling asleep on it in an awkward position. He slept for three days, and when he woke up it was dead. They had to cut it off. The story deeply affected both of us. Everyone knows how your arm can fall asleep in an awkward position. Everyone knows sleep is the cousin of death.

So it came right down to it.

“Mike, we was trynna think about that other thing for you,” Henry said solemnly. I’d been asking them to see if they could get me some OxyContins. I wasn’t ready to ask them for the white thing. I waited.

“And, between us, you know Dom is gonna keep trying, you know he don’t wanna let you down.” We both looked affectionately at Dom passed out in the chair. He was going to keep trying. He would
always
keep trying. He was probably trying now, in his way.

“But between us there’s no way you’re going to get it. It’ll never happen. First, because there’s this lawyer who comes through and buys all we can get the first of every month. How much? Dollar a milligram.” That figure brooked no argument. I lit a cigarette and bowed slightly to the phantom lawyer.

“Second, the pharmacy’s numbers computer…” I tuned out. The genius of Dom and Henry’s paranoia was in the details, but I didn’t have the energy that day.

“So Mike, we can’t get you into any of those Oxys.” I tuned back in. “But you might want to think. You might want to see about the white tops. ’Cause we can get those. We can get plenty of them. They’re cheap. And they’re good. Matter of fact.” He closed his eyes. I saw a half-empty white-topped vial on the corner of the table. “They’re pretty good.”

Henry said it twice. In this kind of situation language is superfluous. Pure waste, a luxury. We both knew I couldn’t give a damn about those Oxys. White tops. Wishes begin in white. Jesus is white. Madonna is white. The queen is white. The moon is white. The white tops are white. A picture starts out as a white space. A white space is a picture of the future. The future poses, the camera snaps, the picture is pure white. Dominic’s white teeth in his gaping red snoring mouth, like a kind of teasing promise: inside it’s all white. Cut Dominic in two and you’ll find white inside. I bet when they cut off Henry’s arm it was pure white in the middle.

In Baltimore that summer the best heroin was sold in little glass vials with white stoppers. White tops. The color of the stopper was like a brand. If it was good, its reputation would spread. (“Where’s Dom?” “Dom’s dead.” “What was he doing?” “White tops.” “Who’s got ’em?” “Fathead.” “Where’s Fathead?”) Eventually dealers with inferior product would start using the good color, and then the people with the hot dope would have to change to red or blue stoppers. It was a cycle. I’d been off the stuff for almost six months, but as soon as I saw that empty white top, I got a funny, destiny feeling.

You might think the whiteness of the white tops isn’t that important. After all, over the past few years I’d bought red tops, blue tops, black tops, and even yellow tops. Of course, the drug itself is often white, but it can also be brown, and the white is really just an effect of the cut. But the first stuff I ever did was in a vial with a white top, and its whiteness showed me dope’s magic secret.

The secret is that the power of dope comes from the first time you do it. It’s a deep memory disease. People know the first time is important, but mostly they’re confused about why. Some think addiction is nostalgia for the first mind-blowing time. They think the addict’s problem is wanting something that happened a long time ago to come back. That’s not it at all. The addict’s problem is that something that happened a long time ago never goes away. To me, the white tops are still as new and as fresh as the first time. It still is the first time in the white of the white tops. There’s a deep rip in my memory.

Dope never gets old for addicts. It never looks old. It never looks like something I’ve seen before. It always looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. I kind of stare. I’m kind of shocked.

“White tops, Henry? Really?” It’s always the first time I’ve heard of it, the first time I’ve seen it, every day, forever. Take a look at your shoe. Your television. Your car. Your girlfriend. Now compare that sight with the first sight.