White Out (8 page)

You could always steal the vitamins and then try to return them. But that was a real hassle. Those Baltimore Rite Aid managers weren’t stupid. It was much better to buy the vitamins with a bad check and then return them with the receipt for cash. No questions asked. I always felt good walking into a Rite Aid with a couple bottles of L-Carnitine and nice fat receipt.

“Do you have a receipt, sir?” The clerk looked skeptically from the vitamins to me.

A look of fake panic crossed my face. I pretended to look frantically through my empty wallet. The clerk smiled coldly. Then I smiled back, and slowly took the receipt out of my shirt pocket.

“I think you’ll find everything is in order,” I said smugly.

A receipt was my passport to pleasure. Or to freedom, in this case. The Center for Addiction Medicine was a devil for that $150. They didn’t take any shorts.

“The program lasts for ten days,” the nurse said. “We will give you buprenorphine for three days. That’s the maximum allowed by law. It won’t take away all of your withdrawals, but it will help. We will administer it here, so you need to come here every day to get it.”

She droned on. I nodded like a maniac, listening too closely to the scripted words. I was serious. I went home and spent a long night in the castle. Lieutenant Abelove introduced me to all sixty members of the castle guard. Personally. By name. I memorized their names. In the morning I struggled into my clothes and drove slowly and erratically over to the Center. I got the buprenorphine and drove back home. I was making it. And after my experience with the ReVia, I realized that the bup (as they called it) really did take the worst edge off.

This isn’t so bad
, I thought. The breeze wrinkled in my sad curtains.
Just like the flu
, I thought. The sun crept across the floor. The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Mike. Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”

It was Funboy. A junkie friend I hadn’t seen in maybe two weeks. I had a vague feeling I was supposed to be mad at him. But I couldn’t remember why.

“Oh. Hey. Look, Funboy. I can’t do anything. I’m kicking.”

“That’s awesome, Mike. Yeah! Right on.”

“I gotta get going.”

“Sure, sure.”

There was a few seconds of silence. I didn’t hang up.

“So I kinda gotta get going,” I said again.

“Sure, sure. You know…” Funboy trailed off.

“Know what?” I asked quickly.

“Sometimes…No, never mind. That’s awesome, Mike!”

“What were you going to say?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes you gotta step it down.”

“Step it down?”

“I’m just saying.”

“What?”

There were ten seconds of silence. I couldn’t wait to hear what Funboy was going to say next. He took his time.

“They got twenty-fives down at Druid Hill,” he said finally.

My jaw dropped.

“Twenty-fives?”

“That’s right. Big quarter-gram vials for twenty-five dollars. Man, that’s all I been spending! Twenty-five dollars a day. Just one of them things. Per day. You know how I used to have a forty-dollar-a-day habit? Well, one of them shits does it. Man. Just one of them damn shits. I even wake up and I even got a little bit left.”

“Damn, they got twenty-fives?”

That changed everything. They usually sold dope in twenty- or forty-dollar vials. Ten-dollar scramble on the Eastside. But twenty-fives? What did that even look like?

“What do they even look like, Funboy?”

“Oh man. Fat white tops that big full to the top with little rocks of raw. Them rocks are packed in white powder. That powder has little brown streaks of pure raw in it,” he said dreamily.

“How big are the vials, Funboy?” I asked.

“That big,” Funboy said again into the phone.

I sighed. He was an idiot. I realized I would have to take a look at one for myself.

Looking in the phone book, I found another detox clinic, on the far north side of town. I took I-83 and got off at Northern Parkway. The clinic had a long driveway. And trees. They were serious.

“We offer buprenorphine detox only once in each patient’s lifetime,” the nurse said sternly. “You can only have this treatment once at this clinic, so it is necessary that you are completely committed to freeing yourself from your addiction.”

I gave her a check for $150. She gave it back to me. I gave her the cash, in tens and fives and singles. At this clinic, they injected the buprenorphine. I liked it better that way.

That night I tried to drive myself into sleep by telling myself stories about my bright dopeless future. But by 4:00 a.m. I was talking to Henry Abelove. The next morning I accidentally got on 83 going the wrong way. I got off and then remembered that I couldn’t get on 83 going north at this exit. So I had to drive five blocks up and one over to catch the next northbound ramp. Or was it six blocks up? Or three over? Then I unexpectedly ran into a charming little dope spot down in Patterson Park.

Convinced I couldn’t get clean in Baltimore, I headed across country to the Chicago suburbs and kicked in my father’s basement. I told everyone I had the flu. It worked. The key was that I didn’t know where to score in the suburbs and I didn’t try to. Plus I got arrested for driving with a suspended license and when they let me out of jail my car had been towed and I didn’t have any money to get it out. So I couldn’t even try to score.

Well, I did try to score. Lamely. Half-dead from kicking, I crept around Waukegan in my stepmother’s car, leaning out the window and asking people at bus stops where to cop. But all I ever got was crack. I wanted to believe it was dope really bad, but it was crack.

“Hey what you got, man?”

“Crack rock, tens and twenties.”

“How about some heroin?”

“We ain’t got it man.”

“Come on, I really need it.”

The dealer looked at me. He saw I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“OK, here you go.”

I gratefully gave him the money and he gave me the crack. Smoking crack while kicking is a really terrible idea. But in the Chicago suburbs I was unable to score any heroin that wasn’t also crack. But, given that it was the North Shore of Chicago, I deserved some credit for even getting the crack. After about five days the withdrawals started to subside. My father gave me money to get my car back. My appetite came back. I started to smile again.

I spent the next six weeks in Chicago, recovering. My life, which had been so chaotic, settled into a comfortable pattern. At noon I would get out of bed. I would walk from the house to my car, which was parked on the side of the street. I would drink whiskey in my parked car and read Taco Bell wrappers while eating Taco Bell and drinking whiskey. A couple hours later, I’d drive the fifteen miles over to my friend Cash’s apartment to smoke pot, take ephedrine, and play a video game called Star Wars Racer. I’d spend about five hours there. Then I’d drive back, taking the long, slow roads because my vision would start cutting out by then.

But let me tell you a little bit about Star Wars Racer. In the game, you control a futuristic racing machine. It looks kind of like a car. It works exactly like a car. You race around a futuristic video-racing course. The goal of the game is to out-race your opponent. My opponent was Cash.

“There you go, Mike! There you go,” Cash said encouragingly. “Your hand-eye coordination is starting to come back. Your will to succeed is coming back. You’re hungry again. It’s the old Mike again!”

He beat me every single time. It was a kind of lesson. At the end of August I drove back to Baltimore. I got the sheaf of bills out of my mailbox in the lobby of my apartment building, and went up the elevator. It was early September and grad school was about to start back up. I was done with coursework, but would be teaching a composition class to earn the stipend that was supporting me while I was supposedly working on my dissertation.

“I’m going to really get going on my dissertation now,” I said. “I’ve conquered dope, I’m strong and healthy, my future is bright.”

I put the bills on my table and started responsibly to shuffle through them. Then I saw a little white powder out of the corner of my eye on the tabletop. In two seconds I’d rolled up a five-dollar bill and snorted it up. It tasted like dirt or dust. I sneezed. I had tears in my eyes. I ran out the door to cop some real dope.

A year later I was with Cat in Boston. We were visiting a friend of hers. I’d been off dope for two months. Cat didn’t even remember that I’d ever used hard drugs. Or at least she didn’t mention it.

I was tired after our long drive from Baltimore to Boston. I threw our bags on the bed of the guest room and went to the bathroom. I opened the medicine cabinet. Inside was a half-full bottle of Percocet. I took five instantly. I started to sweat with panic and desire.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Cat said.

Her lovely long blonde hair set off her perfect tan skirt and long tan legs and high tan leather heels. It made my nose itch. It made my arms horny for needles.

“Nothing. I’m just a little tired. You guys go on out without me.”

I took a cab to the local Greyhound station. I ended up copping from some skinheads.

Johns Hopkins at Bayview on the east side of town offered a detox program for heroin addicts. They shot me up with bup and gave me Tylenol in a baggie, just like the other places. But they had a more hands-on approach, a more psychological and scientific orientation.

“So what made you decide to get clean?” the nurse asked me. I was kind of surprised. This wasn’t in the script.

“I just realized that heroin addiction was interfering with my future plans,” I said cautiously. She nodded. I went on enthusiastically.

“You have to have something to believe in to quit,” I told her. “You can’t just quit for nothing.” She nodded encouragingly.

“And I believe I have a bright future. It’s like now my future will be my high.”

I had just recently come up with this, after failing at the Center for Addiction Medicine again. Now, hearing myself tell it to someone else, I began to feel confident.

“Has any recent event caused you to want to quit?”

“Event? No.” I paused. “I’m quitting because I’ve decided it is the rational thing to do.” I smiled.