You're Married to Her? (11 page)

I was turned on for the first time at a dinner party and remember stealing into the bathroom to take notes on a roll of toilet paper. For months I'd been grinding away on a second novel that was supposed to be funny, and here I had discovered the perfect tool to complete it. At 4 A.M. every day I drank a huge mug of coffee and chopped my first lines of coke. Within seconds I was overtaken by voice. It wrung my nerves and flowed through my fingers. It was the voice of my loud and sarcastic Brooklyn uncles, of comedians in Catskill mountain hotels, the New York Jewish voice that excited and nurtured me as a child but began to fade when I went to college then moved to New England, as I tried ever harder to fit in and tone it down. I finished the first draft of the novel in a matter of months only to begin the long frustrating process of submitting it for publication. And that's when the problem started.

I was finished with the novel but not the coke. I was like a runaway subway train speeding underground with
no passengers. I had the energy, I had the concentration, I had the time, but there was more milk in a green coconut than ideas in my head. I was a hyper-graphic perpetual motion machine overwhelmed with the urge to write. Regardless of the quality or the content, I wrote pages and pages and with no inclination to revise. I had a stack of yellow legal pads a foot thick, every page covered front to back in illegible longhand scrawl. And because I was on cocaine and totally empowered, completely without fear, I thought every word profound.

As I was now living with Marge, over a hundred miles from Boston, I procured my drugs on Cape Cod, from a middle-aged iron woman who surfed, swam long distances outdoors seven months a year and ran a furniture restoration business on her own. She lived in an old farm house near Pleasant Bay with an enormous yellow barn, did her deliveries in a two-ton pickup truck, boasted a string of lovers that included the most famous abstract expressionists in the New York school, and cared for an ever increasing pride of cats fathered by a huge calico tom named Caesar. Although her skin was as tough as a lizard's, wrinkled by age and weather, she cut a handsome figure, with a tight athletic body, high cheek bones, a Maori tattoo on her bicep, silver white hair which she grew to her waist, and heavy native jewelry made of ivory and turquoise. Raised in New Zealand, she'd been an Olympic swimmer before locating to Manhattan where she operated an antique gallery on Lexington Avenue. In the late seventies she moved to Cape Cod with her much
older husband, an architect who succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver. Since his death she'd had a series of affairs with much younger and very buff seasonal workers from Jamaica who became her source of drugs.

Although she hosted dinner parties for gallery owners and antique dealers and their wives—smoky, vodka-swelled affairs in which the drinking began at eight and it wasn't until ten-thirty that she absently strolled into the kitchen to start the roast—she was a woman who mostly liked men, who identified with men, with the image of the archetypal tough guys and outlaws of her generation. Because I was a man who had come of age in an era of less extreme sexual identities and found her attitudes as naïve as they were outdated, we treated each other with caution.

She was fun company in a group but tête-à-tête conversation was difficult with a woman who referred to her last one-night-stand as a henpecked wuss for returning to his wife, or a temperamental woman friend as deserving a good hard bitch slap. However, she was the only person I knew who always had quality cocaine. No hundred-mile trips to Boston, and worse, the long slow paranoid drives home, eyes scouring the rear-view for a state trooper; no loud sports bars enduring a TV hockey game while waiting for a white suburban college dropout dealer who fancied himself a gangsta. I could shop safely, on-Cape, except for one glitch. My dealer was perfectly happy to receive a kilo of coke flown up from Kingston inside a gift box of mangoes, cut it into tightly
wrapped origami-like one-gram packages and sell them at an enormous profit, but she saw herself as a craftsperson, an athlete, a doyenne of the furniture restoration business, and did not like to think of herself as selling drugs.

Therefore every desperate attempt on my part to score and likewise every opportunity on hers to move product occasioned the semblance of a formal social visit.

Although I never called her unless I wanted drugs, and as my habit grew had to do so on a regular basis, she received each phone call with an eruption of surprise, as if I had unexpectedly turned up after a three-year backpacking adventure in the Hindu Kush. “Oh, look who's here. Your old lady let you out of the house without your leash?”

“Just in the neighborhood.”

“Oh, yeah?” As she lived about forty miles away this was a lie too ridiculous to acknowledge. “What's new?”

Under the best of circumstances this question has the potential to immobilize me in a state of profound introspection. Nothing is ever really new with me. The alarm rings at seven. I make café au lait. I work out on a rowing machine while watching ESPN SportsCenter. I spend the better part of every day with my face in a MacBook Pro, writing something that at best no one will see for years. On St. Patrick's Day I plant the peas; on Thanksgiving morning I spread manure. Even something out of the ordinary, a vacation, a gall bladder operation, a large check in the mail, has been anticipated for some time
so it does not meet the criteria of new. Add to this state of bewilderment the fact that I have been watching my stash diminish, putting off calling her until I am totally desperate for drugs, sitting in my car within sight of her front door at eight-thirty in the morning. “Uh, not much new with me. You?”

Unfortunately everything. “Hey, Caesar got another little bitch pregnant, did I tell you that?” Last month. “That stud has the biggest balls I've ever seen on a cat. You ever see his balls?” She had pointed them out on numerous occasions. “You know what he left me?”

“A dead squirrel on your door mat.”

“I told you that? More than my limp-dick ex-boyfriend ever did for me. You know the new antenna he put on the pickup? It fell off. He was a worse mechanic than he was a fuck. . . .” There was more. Her bidet was leaking. A seagull had dropped a quahog that dented her windshield. Her favorite female cat had fleas. It is frankly unfathomable to me that someone would consider the minor irritations of daily life to be of even remote conversational interest but it was as if I had turned a spigot that came off in my hand. She didn't have enough avocados to make guacamole. She craved Chimichangas but they gave her gas.

As usual I awaited any chance to seize an opening. “So, you'll be home? I could pick up some avocados in town.”

Once inside her house there were the cats to admire, as well as any new pieces of furniture she had restored,
music she was currently listening to. Tea was served. There were stories about people I had never met, an armoire the size of a refrigerator freezer to be lifted from her truck, at which point I'd ask, as absently as I could, “You have any coke?”

She never answered the question directly but shrugged resignedly and ascended the stairs to her bedroom, leaving me no choice but to follow. “You and Marge still fuckin'?” she'd ask, rummaging through her night table drawer. “A lot of guys stop fucking their wives.” But as I stood at the foot of her king bed, a cat on my shoulder, a mug of cold chai in my hand, trying not to look at the erotic painting over her bed or the enormous silicone dildo or the oozing tube of KY jelly and above all her breasts, falling out of her open bathrobe, a headache coming on, my morning shot to shit, all I wanted was to overpay for a few grams of cocaine and get out of there.

“My husband used to fuck me every day of the week. I ever tell you that?” Indeed she had. “That man had a cock like an Indian elephant.”

And so it went every time, usually for an hour or more, until she, too, grew bored, or decided I was some kind of neutered asexual half-man for not making a pass, or an interior alarm went off signaling the requisite amount of time had gone by to designate this a visit and not a drug deal. Then, “Hey!” she would say, as if just remembering, as if she had eight starving people over for dinner and had yet to put the roast in the oven. “I got some
really good shit,” she would say, and sell me my drugs so I could go home.

 

My wife is a writer of prodigious literary output but some day it will be discovered by an astute grad student connecting the dots in her archive that her production increased significantly on the day that I rented an office outside the house. Working with someone like me under the same roof is a challenge even for those with unshakable concentration, impossible if you are at all sensitive to the sounds of a creature in pain. When one is told that he snores, it is difficult to believe. It is tempting to say, Prove it, tape me. But no one ever does. Once, at the end of a short call, I accidentally left my phone off the hook with the answering machine running and discovered that listening to myself writing is like being in bed next to someone with obstructive sleep apnea. Even people in my office building will occasionally ask after me, having heard me through the walls groaning or talking to myself or come upon me wandering the parking lot in a cold sweat. In the years that I was doing cocaine, however, I was working at home. I was quietly engaged in my study for hours, as my wife was in hers. She had no idea what was going on. I had always been prone to peaks of euphoria that alternated with troughs of intense envy and pessimism. I had always had a frantic drive for sex. Moreover, I tended not to show the effects of coke wearing off until the cocktail hour. For someone who had no idea that her husband had developed a secret drug habit
I must have seemed an awful lot like a frustrated writer who drank. Except for the money. The money kept disappearing.

In the beginning I was spending about a hundred dollars a week on coke, not much more than a weekly restaurant tab or chain-smoking habit; an amount I could reasonably extract from my checking account. But coke made writing feel so good, so effortless, that I began to snort a bit for other unpleasant activities, like cleaning the bathroom, like figuring the taxes, like doing anything that was a pain in the ass to do. One hundred a week was suddenly three hundred a week and my personal savings were suddenly gone.

I found a freelance job writing software content for a toy company that had made its mark selling leather hobby kits and plastic backyard pools, and some decades later a doll so wildly popular that at Christmas there were shortages causing parents to fight it out in the toy store aisles to get one. The heirs of the company then went hi-tech and developed what might have been the world's slowest personal computer. I was called upon to write amusing content for educational word games and was paid to come up with funny word searches, quizzes and acrostics. I wasn't writing literature but who cared? I was on coke! I was harnessed to a project, making good money. I was part of the silicon revolution, a tech writer with a well-known company and best of all allowed to work at home. Most days I wrote from early morning till late afternoon happily surrounded by a dictionary,
a thesaurus, encyclopedias, children's books, and legal pads, stacks of legal pads densely filled with puzzles and puns, until about four, when my eyes began to burn and my heart raced, when my hands shook and my temples ached, when the euphoria turned into anxiety and I had a secret to face. The money I was making simply did not exist. After eight months I had spent every dime I'd made on coke.

I was as low as I had ever been in my life and pondering any number of desperate measures. Once, years before, at the encouragement of a friend who convinced me that a third glass of wine at dinner was a warning sign for the early onset of alcoholism, I attended a 12 step program and discovered a bizarre universe in which the people with the most messed up lives had the most status. While I sat in the back row, unacknowledged and alone, the guy who backed over his dog with a station wagon got a round of applause. The mother-of-three who became a prostitute had so many offers from men volunteering to be her sponsor that she took names and numbers on a napkin. It felt like a talent show for addicts. I thought I might return now that I had become as desperate as the other contestants but I convinced myself that I had my wife's reputation to protect. She was a famous writer. I had already deceived her and drained my savings. What would be the consequences if I went public with my need for help, if people discovered she was married to a coke addict? We lived in a small town where your secrets are only as safe as where you're parked:
anywhere you go, anything you do, people are aware of it because they see your car. Proving the perfect logic of the syllogism once again, I took another long snort of cocaine and reasoned that I could not seek help because I needed to protect the person I was hurting most and therein stumbled upon the greatest rationalization known to man: blame the victim.

This was a finding of far-reaching personal import, rivaling such formative developmental breakthroughs as discovering that playing with your genitals makes you feel really good, or that mixing mayonnaise and ketchup makes Russian dressing. Armed with this discovery, I could blame my wife for getting hooked on cocaine in the first place. Didn't I want to write a great novel that would earn us lots of money? Didn't I want her to stop working so hard and traveling so much to support us? Blaming the victim had real possibilities. Everything could be her fault. I suddenly had a worldview. It all made sense. I wasn't personally responsible for anything. Nothing was my fault. For instance, there was a reason I wasn't successful. Study after study showed that tall men had more reproductive success, made more in the marketplace, got promoted faster. But I am only five-feet-eight inches tall. And whose fault was that? My mother's, of course! Why didn't she marry a taller guy? The bitch! I had always been delusional but coke took it to another level.