White Out (26 page)

“But when I come back in here to the group y’all told me
Meeting Makers Make It
and
One Day at a Time
and
Keep Coming Back.
And I did. And now it’s been six years, and that bell don’t ring no more, and I’m clean and it’s all due to this group right here. Keep coming back.”

He sat down to an appreciative rustle. There was a silence thick with the firm breathing of the group. Not like the weak thin breathing of strangers at a bus stop. Or the watery panting of a masturbation team. Or the hopeless breathing of a funeral or a jail cell or a bank lobby. The man in the painter’s suit raised his hand.

“I don’t have much to share today. I just wanted to say that I’m grateful to be clean and I’m glad to be here with you people tonight.”

“We’re glad you’re here too,” the group said.

“I’m Helen, and I’m an addict,” a thin, blonde girl said into the group, and the end of her sentence already sounded richer and faster and stronger and better than the beginning. “I, uh, I guess I never liked being around other people that much. People they…they act like…like, people.” She giggled like it was a private joke, but there are no private jokes in the group and everyone was laughing.

“I didn’t feel comfortable in every situation. And I kept taking these little pills. At school the teacher’s mouth would move and I would laugh. And they would get angry. Or sometimes they’d laugh. But really, you know, I didn’t understand. Anything they were saying, you know. My relationships were like that. And now, it’s been, God. I don’t know, like ten months. And I can say these things to you and you. You just act like…

“I don’t know what I mean.”

She meant that her whole fucked-up body and mind was making the group and everyone in it stronger and more relaxed, including her. But not her more than anyone else. Not more than me for instance. She smiled and was quiet.

After a moment an obese woman with an “I Love My Home Group” button began to speak.

“My name is Ebony, and I’m an addict.”

“Hi, Ebony.”

“Lord! I am grateful to be here at my home group tonight. I get excited when it’s my home group. I wake up and I say, ‘It’s Wednesday today; I’m going to my home group tonight.’” She shuffled around in her folding chair and fanned herself with one of the readings.

“I been through it this past week, y’all. And some of you in this home group know that. Y’all helped me get through it. Your love and support. I won’t never forget that. It was my sister’s service this week. It was the first time I been together with my whole family since I been clean. Now, I have never in my life gotten together with my family and not been high. And I did not get high this week. I did not have the desire to get high this week. I did not have the thought to get high. And I am grateful for that.

“But you know, my whole family came down. People coming from Georgia and Tallahassee. Aunts and uncles and you name it. And you know some shit had to happen.” She shook her head and we laughed.

“I love my family but you know I hate they guts and only here in this group can I say that. ’Cause there’s no hate in here. And it makes it easy and makes me not ashamed the way I feel about my family. Because in here it’s all good. Like you was my family. No you better than family. The group, the NA group. People in here you ain’t got to convince of nothing. Group people. I’m just saying this just to be saying. Like I was to talk about how I could cut my uncle’s ears off with a butter knife. It don’t matter. I ain’t have to use no drugs, and when I called some of the people here on the phone when I felt crazy with my family every minute under my damn feet, y’all answered.

“If you sitting here new in recovery, what you need to know is that there is a lot of love here. And I love every single one of you. It don’t matter who you are. I love you. The love here is strong. I felt it the first time I came to this meeting. This room, these chairs. That table Sandra sitting at. I still feel it. The love in this room is strong. Helen. My heart is full here tonight. And this home group has a special feeling here tonight. And it does have a special feeling every time I come here. And I will keep coming back.”

I noticed that all the tension had drained from my body.

The basket had been sent around, and a voice out of the group told us that the group had collected nine dollars and fifty cents to help with expenses. It told us if we didn’t have any money don’t worry about it and keep coming back to the group. Like Soviet communism, NA has many slogans, each with a strange potency. “Don’t Pick It Up and It Won’t Get in You” is a charm against mind devils. “One Day at a Time” is a charm against the devils of time. But “Keep Coming Back” is the master slogan. So is “Meeting Makers Make It.”

We got up and stood in a circle with our arms around each other while someone recited the Serenity Prayer. Ebony was to my right. A guy with a tattoo of a knife on his neck was to my left. His eyes were closed. He was wearing a button that said “I Love My Home Group.”

I closed my eyes. The love here is strong. I stood in the circle with the waves of it vibrating in my skull and my legs and my tongue. Twice a week at least I stand up and get exposed to the love rays of the group. It disperses the hard lines of my body. The thought lines shift, waver, and melt.

That love isn’t the kind of love where you need to know a whole lot about the people you are in love with either. What they look like, even. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with the people. When it’s really strong, the people blur in it. Like Ebony said, it seems to come more from a place, a room, a day of the week, than from the people who come in the room alone from the endless eviscerated capitalist century outside, and who go out alone later.

In that room the hard strange surfaces of Florida opened. Gold spray paint and Jesus and Mariah Carey and linoleum lined the opening. The group stood in the circle together and when I looked across into Helen’s open eyes it wasn’t like looking at someone. It wasn’t hard like that.

I drove back up the highway with the windows down and the love slowly fading. Past tenements and shopping malls. Orange clouds hung in the hot black sky. I’m past thirty now. As I drove I remembered another night. In Baltimore right after I’d moved there. Eva and I were high, driving fast, Guns N’ Roses on the stereo. Laughing. I smiled, remembering. Wondering also why still. And for how long. Eva’s eyes, the streetlights through the windows. Surfaces less solid than smoke. How long can they last? How long will they keep coming back? It already seems like centuries.

I drove fast, remembering the Baltimore billboards, the humid trees, Eva’s floating hair. Remembering how the lights came on in the heavy Baltimore night. I was watching what I was doing as I drove but I wasn’t. I wasn’t really seeing the Florida highway as it curved up over the buildings and into the orange and black sky. The Chevys with chrome rims and green tints passing me, the neon palm tree signs over the bars below. I wasn’t really seeing them.

Memory reached through my not-seeing and stole them all. While I was thinking about the past, the surface of the present disappeared into memory. The hot black sky, the Chevys, the road curving up over the buildings.

One day the surfaces taken by memory will be all I have to recognize myself by. The face I will have when I am gone.

CHAPTER 13

I
’ll know me by the color. Drifting snow covered the short West Side blocks. It came halfway up the windows of the parked cars. They looked like the squinting eyes of white people. Clear irises. Day and night coming through them. Thirty days and nights coming down with the snow. I’m on my hands and knees in it, looking for a white bag of dope in front of two cops. In the white dust of the world, like a myth. The people yelling:

I don’t believe it! Hey, smart guy, get your ass back over here.

On my hands and knees right in front of the people. Looking through the snow for the dope I dropped when the “here come the people” cries rang out.

Can you believe this damn junkie, Carl?
I’m sifting through the white dust. Chicago, December 2001. Drifting white dust piled up to the windows. And everything I wanted. Everything I could have wanted turned to dust. Because the dope had stopped working. The dope had begun to malfunction. I don’t know when. Maybe a month before. Maybe a year. My mind wasn’t right.

Consider what dope is. Information. Processed by the brain. Dope molecules carry information to brain receptors. Heroin isn’t some simple poison like cyanide. It doesn’t turn off your kidneys. It isn’t some raw sense pleasure like sugar. It doesn’t make your mouth happy. What makes you happy? Sun? Sunlight on a day when you feel like good things will happen? The beach? Like a honeycomb full of the honey of beach memories. The street you used to live on? Shadowed by a memory so early it doesn’t have any shapes. It sheds dark drops of light on you, on the present-tense sidewalk.

What makes you happy? Dope goes to the brain. The polymorphous brain. The brain is the multiform possibility of happiness. It has roots that reach through time and drink from everywhere. The poet Hafiz wrote in the fifteenth century that wine doesn’t make us drunk. We make the wine drunk in us. The happiness is mine, the memories are real. Dope is a connection. From past to present. From over there to over here. The connection lights up as past happiness pours through it and bubbles up now. Heroin is an interface with the brain’s infinite happiness. Heroin is a white screen. All of memory’s wonderful shapes projected onto it.

Heroin molecules are delicate. Complex. Hundreds of thousands in a twenty-dollar vial. As they pass through the envelope of my blood and hit the white heat of the chemical brain fire, they crystallize into the basic forms of pleasure. The alphabet of happiness. The code of memory. Time, sensation, places, and faces processed through the dope code. “There” passes through dope to reach “here.” “Then” passes through dope to reach “now.” After a year or so my brain can’t imagine how it ever got by without it. Its natural roots die and the dope system takes over. Chip’s roof, Eva’s eyes, Baltimore sunlight gets mixed with fields in Burma, planes landing in the desert, dealers’ phone numbers, prices of vials. I’m woven in. Thought feeling and memory come through on the dope signal.

So when dope stops working it is catastrophe. An invisible comet explodes in the atmosphere. A flash, and all the world’s processors turn into ash. All the world’s alphabets pulverized. The world covered with a thin layer of fine bone-white dust. With tiny mutilated bits and pieces of alphabets. Meaningless. For months after the catastrophe, the pulverized information snows down.

When dope stops working it isn’t just a problem with the dope. The junkie brain doesn’t think,
We’ll just have to find other ways
of being happy.
Dope isn’t a kind of happiness for a junkie, one kind among many. It is the code that makes happiness possible. Impossible. Dope malfunction. Information decay. I walk out into the sunlight and the raw matter stretches forever. Meaningless.

I don’t believe it! Hey, smart guy, get your ass right back over here.

The senseless world of terminal addiction. No taste left in food. No color left in color, no sound left in sound. No dope left in dope. This was not a feeling I had; it was my world. The real world. There were telephones and sidewalks in it. People. Family members. Long and short distances. Moving my fingers over the familiar shapes like a person newly blind.

“You could smile a little when you see us, Michael. It’s been months.”

“I’m sorry, Dad, I just feel a little…tired. I need to borrow your car for a minute.”

I still knew enough to get more dope. It’s not a feeling exactly. More like an instinct. A primitive sense about where feeling might be found. The way blind tadpoles burrow into moist sand. I burrowed like that into the white dust on the West Side of Chicago. They call dope bags “blows” there. They call cops people. I was sifting through the dust in the bags. Through the pulverized alphabet of feeling. Patiently trying to puzzle the broken letters into one real word. Sleep for instance. Ah. There. No. Not yet. Finally doing enough to reach the simple physical properties of dope. The toxicity level. The off switch. Little overdoses every night. Like using a cell phone as a hammer.

But sometimes, from a distance, that first white bliss still flamed in the white grains of a new bag. I rushed back to my car with the dope clenched in the sweat of my hand. I opened it to find that the first time had left its angel shape in the white dust. Like a snow angel. In my dreams a white phone was ringing.