Cracked (2 page)

Despite the fact that we had been joined at the hip for a couple of years, Gene and I were just friends. With the odd benefit. True, we did sleep in the same bed a lot of the time – when we slept, that is. We cuddled and were affectionate with each other, especially in bed. We went to sleep in each other’s arms and woke the same way. But we never kissed, and we only had friendly, perfunctory sex about once every few months or so. I couldn’t see myself getting over Jack, and Gene was one of those addicts whose sex drive had long since gone down the drain. But affection is good. Friendship is good. And as far as we were concerned, we had all that in each other. We didn’t need anybody else. “How long?” Gene asked me.

I shrugged, keeping the smoke in my lungs. It wasn’t the best hit, but it would do. Oh boy, it would do, do, do. The longer you hold the smoke in, the better the rush.

“Dunno,” I exhaled, dropping my head onto his shoulder. The movie was over, and Gene was flipping stations. “Look.
The Feud
is on.” Gene fixed his hit, and for once I refrained from watching how much of the precious leftover resin he put on his.

We sat in silence, watching
Family Feud
. Often we yelled out answers, but just as often we sat in silence. I was more of a talker than Gene while high. Well, I was more of a talker than Gene, period.

We sat like that for an hour, slowly using the last of our stash with Gene cleaning the pipe assiduously, waiting for the phone call. It rang once and we both jumped out of our skins and grabbed for it, but the caller I.D. showed that it was my bank. Fuck you, Bank.

The phone rang again. It was long distance, a 949 area code. My sister Ginger. I glanced at the clock on the DVD player – noon, so nine a.m. in California. She would have just gotten back from taking the rugrats to school and Fred off to work. She was checking up on me.

“Ginger?” Gene asked.

“I’m not answering it,” I said, nodding. Ginger knew about me. She hadn’t given up on me either, and I did talk to her once every month or so. I loved her. I envied her. I didn’t want to think about her. I let her call go to voicemail, and five minutes later, D-Man called to say that She – Bruno – was outside.

Gene sprang to life, grabbing his jacket and his keys to get back into the building. His boots were already on so as not to waste precious crack time when we got the call.

“Do you have twenty bucks for Bruno?” I asked. That was the price of delivery – even if we didn’t have money to pay for the product, we always had to fork over twenty for delivery.

“Shit,” Gene answered. He checked his wallet. “I have ten.”

I jumped up and checked the pile of coins I kept for laundry money. I had nine dollars in loonies and four quarters. I handed them to Gene. It meant that we only had a half pack of cigarettes between us and no money for more, but who cared.

He smiled. “This is embarrassing,” he said.

“Deal with it, dear,” I replied. “Go get me my drugs, and make it snappy.” Our moods always improved when another eightball was waiting for us outside.

Anticipation. Just like the song says.

“You’ll just have to wait for it, bee-yatch,” Gene said, all happy tough guy.

“Fuck off and get me my drugs,” I replied, happy right back.

Gene left and I got up and went to the bathroom, peed and brushed my teeth, splashed water on my face. It’s important to keep up hygiene whilst consuming large quantities of drugs. You sweat so much while smoking crack that you might as well have just finished a triathlon. I actually kept crack clothes, old worn-out workout clothes, in which I only smoked crack. It was a good thing I’d never been all that vain. Gene was taking a few minutes, which didn’t worry me, because usually D-Man called too early, and one of us would be waiting in the cul-de-sac outside the back door of my art deco-era apartment building for ten minutes or more, strung out but coolly pretending to be waiting for our ride somewhere. Just behind me was, literally, the most expensive restaurant in Toronto, a place so upscale that you had to know where it was, located on a back residential street. Limos drove in every few minutes between seven and ten p.m., and Gene and I always thought the valets had made us. However? So far, so good, was our motto.

Inside the apartment, I paced and picked up a couple of glasses, stuck them in a sink full of soapy water, made more ice, got the Murphy’s Oil Soap out and had a swipe at the ugly-ass coffee table that my ex had made from scratch. In a previous life, I had been married to a man who had decided to take up woodworking to help quash the demons in his head.

I didn’t like to think of my previous life.

But it made me think of Ginger. I picked up the cordless and decided to stay on top of things, the manic hyperactivity of the addict waiting for a fix. I would check my messages!

Five minutes later, Gene came through the door.

“What an idiot,” he said, kicking off his boots. “This is twice what we ordered.”

I looked at him, my whole body shaking.

“Ginger is dead,” I said. “She’s dead.” I stopped.

My sister. My beautiful sister.

My twin.

There were no twins on either side of either my mother’s or my father’s family, so imagine their surprise, they used to like to tell us, when they were told that Ginger and I were growing together in my mother’s womb.

“I thought your father was going to faint, right there in the doctor’s office,” my mother told us. It was one of our favorite stories, Ginger’s and mine. We loved to hear how we began, and to imagine growing nestled together, all safe and warm and protected. There were no stork fantasies in our house; both Mom and Dad were very no-nonsense about the facts of life. “But in those days it was rare enough that the man even came into the doctor’s office for these things, so I was proud of him anyway,” Mom told us. Dad said that he even drove down to Boston to hear some famous psychologist give a lecture on raising twins.

My parents had five kids including Ginger and me, and they weren’t even Catholic. Go figure. My mother, a beauty queen back in the day, didn’t know what the hell to do with all of us, and who could blame her. My father owned a couple of dry cleaners in Maine, where I grew up. I guess you could call him successful, but for us, back then, success meant that we had a shit-box summer cabin on a tiny lake and we usually got meat for supper. The steamy chemical smell of a real dry cleaner – as opposed to the storefronts at which we drop our shirts off in the city – always makes me feel eight again. In a good way.

Ginger and I had three brothers. Skipper was almost eighteen years older than Darren, the youngest, and he and his wife Marie lived back in Maine. Laurence, the second oldest, worked in television in New York City. And our little brother Darren, the pet, was a musician, and now lived in Toronto, like me. I had struck out for Canada after high school. Ginger, who had always had her head in a book, had gone off to Bennington, and I had met a Canadian boy who had spent the summer with his grandparents in Downs Mills. When he left for university in Toronto in the fall, I followed him, full of love and craving adventure like I now craved crack. I hadn’t been anywhere, and even though I was from Maine, Canada seemed as foreign as Paris.

Of course, the boyfriend didn’t last, but Toronto did. And two years later when he finished high school, Darren followed. He was my baby, my pet, and Ginger was engaged to Fred and planning her own life.

Mom had had us, the twins, at forty, and Darren a couple of years later. She called us her change-of-life babies, but until I knew what that meant I couldn’t figure how a few more kids could change your life that much. As close as Ginger and I were, Darren was sort of like our honorary third twin. We babied him and dressed him up and for the most part took him with us everywhere we went. The three of us would read together, perched in a tree in the backyard. We shared a stereo, Ginger and I letting Darren take it for two or three days at a time into his room once he passed his twelfth birthday. And when Karen Milton, the love of his sixteen-year-old life, stood him up for junior prom, Ginger and I went to her house, rang the doorbell, and I punched her straight in the face when she answered. Ginger was scared to death, but stood her ground. She might not have been as impulsive as I was, but she never left me to flounder alone. She was always there.

Karen Milton’s folks had me arrested. They didn’t understand familial loyalty one little bit. I couldn’t totally blame them – I did break Karen’s nose, and she had supposedly had a burgeoning career as a catalogue model. I found it difficult to believe – I thought she was shaped like a tuber – but I knew better than to say so. My dad was so proud of us for sticking up for our little brother that he bought Ginger and me our first car, an old Buick station wagon with actual wood panel sides. We had the summer of our lives, riding around in that thing, stopping at Dairy Queen and singing out the window at the fireflies, and arguing whose turn it was to drive. We never talked about it, but Ginger could always tell what was bothering me, and I her. If she was in math class and I was in English, sometimes the answer to a quadratic equation would pop into my head, and Ginger would find herself reciting bits of
Macbeth
in her head.

I loved my older brothers well enough, but in some ways they were like foreign creatures to me – blond and athletic and perfect. In fact, I looked like that too, but I always felt darker, as though I should have inky black hair and pale skin. But we all had the quirky, snide sense of humor that made me love my family, when I could bear to talk to them in my angst-ridden teenage years. In my family, the highest form of humor is self-deprecation. Not the “I’m so ugly” kind of thing, but got a long anecdote about having your skirt blow up in front of a class of tenth-graders when you were a student teacher? That story will get told and retold in various guises in my family, with continued appreciation. Bump somebody’s car in the parking lot and accidentally leave your dentist’s business card instead of your own on the other card’s windshield? Hil-arious. In my family, one-upmanship is about how stupid you could be in any given context, not about the money you made or the house you just bought.

Sometimes I thought my being a crackhead was the ultimate manifestation of stupid one-upmanship.

* * *

I, Danny, am the black sheep of the family. Literally, now. When my life started taking its sharp sudden downtown after my leaving Jack, when I went from a few glasses of Shiraz once or twice a week to being a full-time crack addict within a year, I dyed my naturally wheat-blonde hair black. Since I had always felt like a goth Sylvia Plath inside the body of a brainless cheerleader, I figured it was time to let the outside match how I felt inside. I’m the only person I know who has blonde roots showing. Dark hair feels much better on me. I don’t care how it looks. I don’t spend much time in front of the mirror anymore anyway.

When I left Jack – when I felt like I had to leave, to separate myself from the madness that was overtaking him – I wanted to jump into a dark pool and never resurface. And that’s what I did. I made almost a career of it, in the beginning. From a young age, I could drink like the Irish girl I was, generations back, and I became a regular at a neighborhood pub, where I learned how to drink like a professional. I found myself enjoying the company of people who lived on the margins; the unemployed actors, wait staff on their days off who couldn’t stay away from the place, tweedy retired professors with English accents and broken capillaries, and guys who didn’t get work at the union hall that day. I could watch baseball, discuss politics or read a trashy novel with a glass of Shiraz in front of me, and I didn’t have to think about a thing. No one judged me. No one asked difficult questions. I was everyone’s little sister. The bartender dealt coke, and soon I became one of the people running to the bathroom every forty minutes, becoming more animated every time I came back. Then I met Gene and he introduced me to cocaine’s evil cousin.

Crack.

All I can say is, if it didn’t feel like a choir of angels all of a sudden bursting into the room and whispering into your ears, I wouldn’t do it. Taking a hit off the pipe is like having every good thing in the world rush into your head in one moment, and stay there for a bit, and all the bad things are gone, gone, gone. It’s better than a twenty-minute orgasm. Not that I would know.

Crack had me at hello. But it also took my money – I spent over a hundred grand in one year on my habit, without blinking. I had always been a saver; never cared a whit about material things. But crack became my full-time job. I used a lot of creative financing, believe me, and I think most of the collection agencies had me on speed dial. I change my unlisted phone number more than some people I know change their underwear.

Not only did it take away my money, but it also took away most of my straight friends – what we in the drug world call the normal people, with nine-to-five jobs and mortgages and kids, regardless of sexuality – and most of my family. Not that they didn’t try, my family, but my shame meant that I knew they were better off not worrying about what I was getting up to.

But Ginger knew. She knew what I was doing to myself.

Of course she did. She was my twin. I couldn’t get away with lying to her about anything important. I couldn’t figure out how I hadn’t felt her death. I told myself it must have been the crack; it messed with everything in my head, and I couldn’t read any signs clearly when I was high – no hunger, anger, love or hate. That’s why I did it; that was the beauty of it. Torturing myself that I left Jack when he needed me? Crack, please. Haven’t eaten for three days and feeling a bit weak? A couple of stale crackers and another hit will fix me right up without having to go to the grocery store or call for pizza.

And my twin sister had died, without me knowing anything about it. I hadn’t felt her death, but I felt her absence.

I used to be a twin. I was Ginger Cleary’s twin.

* * *

The airport in Toronto was particularly crowded. Word had gotten out that the Rolling Stones were flying in with their walkers to do one of their impromptu concerts at The Horseshoe or some other old-school bar band kind of place. Other than “Sympathy For The Devil,” I’m not much of a Stones fan, so I couldn’t have cared less if they were standing next to me at the Starbucks getting shots of espresso to shoot into their veins. Now, if Tom Waits was next to me in line, I might have made a sycophantic ass of myself. Or Elvis Costello. Or Kris Kristofferson. God, I’d had it bad for KK when I was a kid. He still did it for me. The whole Rhodes Scholar-troubadour thing. And his version of “Me and Bobby McGee” is probably my favorite recording of all time. But all around me were your basic no-names. Like me.