Acrobaddict (37 page)

My anxiety exploded once I passed through the revolving doors, and I wanted to stay within the circle and head right back into the street to shoot up, but somehow I kept moving forward to the elevator. Hired as a clerk in the Style department, which covered design, fashion, house and home, and dining, I had no idea what my job would entail. Diego, an energetic man and everyone’s best friend, provided the introductions to my coworkers.

My job was to arrive every morning fifteen minutes before the editors and reporters to deliver the latest edition of the paper to their desks. Later editions had fewer stars printed on the front top corner, and even though Diego repeatedly explained the star system, I always misread the constellations. The rest of the day was spent filling mailboxes, answering phones, running errands, and doing general clerical work.

Miller was my supervisor, and his annoying, know-it-all attitude garnered my immediate contempt. Years of shuttling sheaves of black-and-white newsprint between departments and sorting endless stacks of mail slowly drove clerks insane. I diagnosed Miller with “
Times
clerical anemia.” His character had faded into a hazy smudge, his hands forever newsprint-stained, and he incessantly besieged me with facts from yesterday’s news. As the new guy, I had to respect, listen, and try to not contract his disease; but an hour with him sparked every personal mental issue I had and whetted my heroin appetite.

Eventually I fell into a work groove, making my daily rounds to the writers and editors of that Holy Grail, passionately enslaved to the dull glow of their computer screens. The syncopated clicking of keyboards, the drone of background chatter, and the flickering of the fluorescent lights became a mundane annoyance that made me want to use again.

However, I did love seeing people work hard, as a team, and create something. I wanted to be more than a junkie. I was going to fight for change by not using, paying attention, and respecting the honor of my new job. At night, I looked at my plastic
New York Times
ID card and smiled. In Manhattan, jobs define who we are, and this job finally turned me into someone with a noteworthy identification. I now had the badge by which to look down on others, as they had on me; to be the annoying guy in the bar, name-dropping, wearing expensive clothes, and talking about my perfect life. I was a
New York Times
employee, with access to the news before everyone else in the general public.

After a few weeks my sweet work romance wore off. Really, what did I expect? All that I had held sacred and with such high regard came tumbling down. I never wanted to see another newspaper. The tireless writers and editors, whom at first I extolled as purveyors of important articles, now exhausted me. They were so busy and focused that many of them never even took the time to introduce themselves to me. Miller hounded me throughout the building, filling my days with meaningless tasks, wielding his unique capacity to dismantle a perfect day with a single word. It seemed like Miller and his phone
had the ability to startle me out of every free moment I had to sit in my cubicle and drink a coffee. His very presence made me want to use faster than being with my parents; there was no way I could stay abstinent. I shot up after receiving my first paycheck.

Matt was crushed. He had witnessed my many attempts to change my life only to be swallowed by the disease that corroded everything and everyone around me. I tried to refrain from getting high at work, but I always failed. I would take my backpack into the fourth-floor bathroom near the Style department, sit in the stall, and then remove my kit with its used spoon, cotton swab, rubbing alcohol, and syringe. I would return to work in a vigorous state—heroin convinced me that I loved working for such a well-respected corporation.

My work high cultivated an attachment to the illusions and grandeur of the department—labels, vanity, money, objects, and clothes, along with an obsession for binge cleaning and chain-smoking. I would clean and organize my workspace to obsessive neatness and then go outside and smoke cigarette after cigarette, denying myself even a second of fresh air. The heroin blocked any lung or asthma pain, and I loved watching the smoke pour out of my mouth as though from a car’s exhaust pipe. As the high faded and lung pain resurfaced, I would chain-pump my inhaler to recapture my breath. A large part of my workday was spent outdoors among the smoking journalists as I scheduled my next high, leaving me little time to sit still and actually perform my job.

Every other Thursday, our checks were ready upstairs on the eighth floor at 2:00 p.m. The secret society of addicts were always first in line, usually late for work, but early to secure their spot, nervously waiting to receive, run, cash, and use. The anticipation and anxiety of our group while waiting those fifteen minutes before the floodgates opened were palpable.

I scheduled my lunch break on payday to coincide with paycheck time, trying to crunch two hours into one. With check in hand, I ran to Thirty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, cashed it at my bank, sprinted all the way up to Kimi’s apartment on Forty-ninth and Eleventh, cooked my heroin, shot it, and returned to work on Forty-third and
Eighth a new man. In my delusion, I always won that emergency death race, arriving back to work in time, but the reality of Miller’s beady eyes and clogged-sinus breaths met my triumph with a menial assignment. Despite his attempts to bring me down, I now had the power—I had my high.

Matt tried to keep me through gifts, clothes, and nice meals—anything to distract me from using. I wanted to stay clean for his sake, but I couldn’t do it. I refused to surrender, and he got sucked into the vortex of my addiction. Matt came to hate that I spent more time with Kimi than with him, as well as the unusual bond and secret codes she and I had created for contacting each other. A single ring and prompt hang-up on his apartment phone meant either her guys were dropping off the heroin soon or it was ready for pickup. Either way, I knew Christmas was around the corner. Matt quickly caught on to our system and tried to confront her, but never got a word in until I owed her money. Then she called the apartment continuously and got in a huge phone fight with Matt, who in turn lent me the money to pay her back to get her off his line.

Years of running to Kimi’s home to heal my pain through shooting up, crashing on her couch, and chain smoking cigarettes forged a deep bond between us. Listening to my laments like a bartender at closing time, she comforted me with “Oh, Chico, it’s gonna be all right. You and I are the same and nobody understands us. We need this stuff to live.”

Kimi was my lifeline when I needed to talk about life, when I needed my sustenance, and when I needed nurturing—when I needed mothering. We talked for hours and fought like mother and son over money, relationships, and the strength of my heroin—all the normal things families talk about. Drugs wove our lives together—blood is thicker than water, but heroin is thicker than blood. Kimi wanted my money and I wanted her high; we would never cut the cord that connected us. During heavy binges, she would reprimand me for using too much heroin and insist that I slow down, mirroring the humiliation and shame I experienced during my childhood. When her dysfunctional love became too much for me to handle, I escaped
to the place I initially ran away from by making small detox trips to Boston. The old neighborhood, which had always triggered my disease, became a place of refuge where I could be when I was too ill to be anywhere else. I would sleep for two days straight at my mother’s house, taking bitter sips of methadone sandwiched between even more bitter dreams.

For years, I told my parents that I was in recovery and attending twelve-step meetings, but those desperate trips home made the truth clear. My mother never asked what was wrong with me, consciously or subconsciously knowing, and too afraid of losing me again—aware I might never come back if pushed too far. I ran from the mother who gave me life to a mother who offered me death. My birth mother was afraid of me, and I was afraid of my death mother. I created the same tarnished relations inside my family and outside it, among strangers I called friends and drug friends I called family.

When my mother’s house failed to detox me I would switch to my father’s home, and I would walk the beach, searching for the gymnast’s strength and superhuman power I once knew. I believed the ocean could pacify the most depressed person, and that this place would heal me through the casting of prayers into the deep blue.

I climbed the rocky cliff overlooking Boston harbor where a memorial to someone who had jumped to his death was written in once-wet cement, now hardened with time.
Did he fall to the hand of my demon, and would I be next on the list?
The ocean’s black mirror below flashed visions of my youthful entry into this world of darkness. That vibrant, naive raver with every desired chemical in hand, that drug boy in baggy pants following LSD trails into the moonlight, that freedom child jumping from transcendent trip to trip now belonged to the Devil. He was now one more link in strengthening the demonic chain, one more unheeded warning passed down from user to user, one more soulless junkie. All the discipline, dedication, and talent that had once characterized me drained into the sea, and no amount of once-held talent in the world could change that.

After fourteen days of not using I would leave my mother’s house, strong and confident, but as the bus entered Port Authority, the
Chrysler Building greeted me like a giant syringe piercing the night sky. The city lights of Manhattan would deflate all my gained recovery. My skin would change as I walked through Times Square and, with temptation swelling up inside, I always found myself running back to Kimi, having left mother for mother, imparting the travails of recovery. Only Kimi understood my ailment, only she had the cure, only she could agree with me and identify with the rawness of our beings. I sold the unconditional love of my own mother for the synthetic love of a fictitious one.

Months passed and my recovery ebbed and flowed, occasionally gripping an edge of grass from within my grave, but never making it out. I led my relationship with Matt down my now seemingly destined path of destruction. We both tried to make it work, but living with me was like having an avalanche in the apartment. Matt took me on a vacation with his friends to a beach in Florida, and I ended up stealing his friend’s pills. The guy had fibromyalgia and had hundreds of OxyContin, Valium, and Percocet in his suitcase. I decided he wouldn’t miss a few. Matt saw this behavior as sinking to a new low. But to my way of thinking, the only difference was that his friend could easily have his prescription refilled, but I had to fill prescriptions myself. I justified my thievery as normal addict behavior—we cling to the sick, stealing painkillers from dying loved ones. There was no end to my betrayal, and it became painfully clear that Matt and I had to break up. He deserved better. My love affair with heroin was destroying us, and I had shoved a kind and generous man into the shredder. After two years together, during which I had brought only death, disease, deceit, rage, and sadness to our relationship, we broke up.