Sunday, November 7, 2004

I've been re-reading some of my old postings, perhaps trying to find some thread to grab on to, some way to get back into this thing, whatever it is, that I feel compelled to continue. It struck me that I never talked about shooting up and how sexual it was. I can't tell you how many times I've heard former junkies talk about how heroin recalls that post-orgasmic feeling; the melting of all your muscles, the gradual numbing of all your senses. It accurate, although extremely irritating. It's that last bit of romance that all ex-junkies hold onto. Even though they carry around plenty of shame and regret over what junk does to your life and the lives of everyone that cares about you (assuming there is such a person), every junkie loves to wax and wane about what a great feeling the heroin high is, how it's better than sex, etc. When I first got addicted I was snorting dope. That particular method is slower in effect, less dangerous, and therefore, less thrilling. Devon started shooting up before I did, but it wasn't long before I asked her to show me how it's done. She shot me up the first time. The act was extremely sexual, extremely intimate. Shit, you have to have some degree of trust to let someone stick a needle in your arm. Looking back, shooting eachother up (because after all, I got pretty damn proficient at it before too long) replaced sex. When we first met, back when we both were just snorting, we fucked constantly. We were both employed only part-time and would sometimes spend 48 to 72 hours straight in bed. It was simple. Hours just kissing, holding, and fucking eachother every which way; briefly interrupted by cigarettes and bottles of Coca-Cola. Our friends would often chastise us for what, in retrospect, I must admit were extreme displays of public affection that were more often than not, in pretty poor taste. But shit, we we're in our twenties, self-proclaimed artists living in NYC, and didn't really give a shit if we caught a little heat for sticking my hand up her skirt in a bar. That very physical exchange was displaced as soon as we we're both regulary shooting up. Although the act of shooting up certainly was physicial, and very intimate, we never really returned to that place together. Instead, it was the needle. We would both carefully clean and prepare each other's needles. I would settle back into the couch as Devon would swab my arm with cotton swabs soaked in alcohol. I never needed to tie off to make my veins protrude. I had a unusually robust circulatory system, my veins always looked as they were about to burst from my arm. As Devon described it, I was a natural-born junkie (there were other reasons for this description). I would actually start to salivate as I watched her dissolve the dope in water, gently heating it to speed the process, but not so much as to evaporate or waste the heroin. She would roll a tiny wad of cotton between her fingertips, then drop it into the spoon (or sometimes bottle cap). I forgot how much of this was about process and preparation. I've never met a junkie that wasn't diligent at least about some part of the preparation. After she sucked all of the dope into the hypo and gently tapped it to remove all of the air bubbles, she would start to run her fingers up and down my outstretched arm. Her fingers were like a divining rod of sorts; Devon could always find an open and working vein. She never missed, she never jabbed a nerve or muscle by mistake. Only I did those things. It's hard to describe the anticipation of waiting for that needle to go into the vein. You never sweat the pain. It's just a pin-prick for christ's sake. It's just that moment, when the needle point finds blood and it all shoots back into the chamber. That's when you know it's coming, that's when you know that woman you love is going to fill you up with the good stuff. In a moment, you'll feel better than you felt yesterday, better than you felt a minute before, and maybe better than you've ever felt in your life. You're helpless at that moment, waiting and trusting that she'll bring you through. After allowing me to enjoy that sensation, I would return the favor before I was too far gone. That's the way it worked. It went that way for several weeks. For a while, we even still had sex afterwards. Then eventually, we stopped having sex. The cleaning and preparation was much better foreplay. The needle finding vein--penetration. The plunge... well, you already see where I'm going. In away it was so much more thrilling than just fucking. We were displacing our bodies with needles, with cotton, with spoons and cigarettes. Eventually, of course, we stopped shooting each other up. Like any other relationship, that sex got tired. We were too eager too get high, too desparate to stop being dope-sick. What was sex, became too people jerking off in a room together. It wasn't so intimate anymore. It was more like a buddy-booth. In the end, it was just about getting through the day. It didn't matter if anyone else was there. Looking back on this entry, I realize not only that it's poorly written and cliche-ridden, but I'm guilty of the same romanticism I was so critical of when I first started writing. What the fuck. I'm entering a new age of honestly (as I frequently tell my wife). I don't need to go back and re-write anymore to paint myself in a more positive light. Of course, if I were a little less drunk right now, I'm sure I could have crafted some better sentences. 12:12:47 AM    comments []

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Hey. I'm back. I know it has been quite some time since I've posted. Things sort of fell apart for me for a while. Since my last entry, I: quit my job, then found a new one; quit my wife, then got back together again; sold my house and moved back to Manhattan. In short, I quit my life, blew everything out and started over again. I want to thank those of you who left kind words of support in my absence. I'm in the midst of rethinking this blog and will likely take it in a new direction. At any rate, I'll be posting regularly again. 2:07:00 PM    comments []

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Sorry I haven't been posting and thanks to all for your kind words of support. I will be returning shortly. My life is in a bit of a shambles right now. My wife and I are divorcing and I'm in the process of blowing out my life so I can start all over again. Updates coming soon. 8:31:09 PM    comments []

Friday, April 2, 2004

After a few months in Dallas, I finally managed to stop using dope and coke. As much anger as I had (and maybe still have) for Devon for ultimately choosing dope over me, I'll always be indebted to her for driving me to quit. Trying to care for Devon and myself in Texas, trying to hold it all together, trying to cover her crimes and lies and bad checks and scabs and track marks, and endless nights of fighting and crying and picking her up off the toilet seat when she had nodded out while peeing and carrying her to bed with a pair of tired panties around her ankle--these things eventually broke me. Trying to keep the straight life, going to work hungry with no more than 75 cents in my pocket--not enough for the bus but still enough to buy some candy so I could get through the day--all while she was sitting home getting high every day made me tired. So eventually, I began to hate her. Not really hate her because I loved her and still love her but rather I hated that this darkness was inside her. I began to resent the drugs and the whole lifestyle. And it was exactly this anger and resentment that drove me away, that made me feel nauseous at the very idea of getting high. That' s why I'll always feel indebted to her. So the tides began to take us in different directions. I was finding my way back to shore, while Devon was getting pulled ever deeper into some seriously cold and dark fucking water. That's about when I got involved with Alana. More on this tomorrow. 5:56:43 AM    comments []

Monday, March 8, 2004

Just returned from a two-week "vacation" in Florida. Whether it was a vacation was questionable, as I brought my wife and daughter down to spend time with my mother and grandmother. My mother is one of those people who speaks only in discourse--there is no communication, only an endless stream of explanation and unsolicited and unuseful factual information. My grandmother chain-smokes Salems and favorite activity is telling me what a "slut" my 65+ year old mother is. My relationship with them is complicated. I feel drawn to my mother because she has ignored me most of her life and to this day doesn't actually listen to me when we speak. Thus, I find myself endlessly restating even the most basic facts and circumstances of my existence (e.g., how old I am, where I work, what I do, etc.). My grandmother has a intense hatred for all things foreign to her, including men. Nevertheless, I was raised by her and will always feel indebted to her. Typically, they hate eachother and yet are oddly reliant on one another. Thus, I spend most of my time in Florida running interference between the two of them, listening to my mother recite her plans for institutionalizing my grandmother and the seedy details of her consultations with lawyers and social workers over her secret tape-recordings of her conversations with my grandmother. Similarly, my grandmother relates her suspicions regarding my mother's sexual relations with the elderly men in her retirement community, my mother's plans to "do her in," and her intense loneliness. I also spend a great deal of time driving them back and forth to their respective homes and eating inordinately large amounts of heavy Italian food--my favorite sort of cuisine when the weather is intensely hot and humid. Generally, by the end of the visit, either my mother and/or grandmother are angry with me; usually for some perceived act of betrayal. This time, it was my grandmother for my alleged disbelief in everything. Devoutly Catholic and somewhat of a simple thinker, my grandmother attends church several times a week--although more often for Bingo than for mass. She has never forgiven me for announcing my atheism at Thanksgiving dinner when I was 16 years old. Nearly 20 years later, when I announced my engagement to a Jewish woman and told my family that the ceremony would be presided over by a Rabbi, my grandmother looked at me with tears in her eyes and proclaimed, "Thank God you believe in something!" (Incidentally, my mother also looked at me with tears in her eyes, but only because I was marrying a Jewish girl.) At any rate, for this visit, my grandmother decided to disown me for my disagreement with her very thoughtful and reasoned analysis that "the world is trying to screw her." She screamed at me across the dinner table while I held my infant daughter in my lap, "There's no sense talking to you because you've never believed in anything." Apparently, she was advocating that I abandon my atheistic beliefs in favor of her intensely cynical and often bigoted paranoia. I'll hold on to my godlessness for a little while longer. Next time I visit Florida, I'll visit Disneyworld instead of my family. I prefer pagans to roman catholics. 3:44:16 PM    comments []

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

When we we're living in Dallas, Devon took up with a self-proclaimed jazz musician named David ("self-proclaimed" being the worst kind of jazz musician). Actually, I shouldn't say that Devon "took up" with David because it implies some sort of sexual relationship. Rather, David was Devon's daytime scam buddy. Together, they spent their days scouring up money to score dope, while their better halves were working. Perhaps you detect a hint of bitterness in my voice. At the time, I had gotten clean. No more dope, no more coke. I had gotten a job, which paid a salary of $17,000 per year. Roughly, that translated into money for an efficiency apartment, cigarettes, .99 cent dinners at Taco Bell, and Friday nights at the Granville Dinner and Movie Theater (beer and popcorn--also for .99 cents). It wasn't much of a life, but it beat jail, dope sickness, and scabs that didn't heal. Devon never quite signed on to my vision of suburban bliss. The plan had always been that she would get a job too. She tried at first, first landing a job at a photo studio, then a second one, waitressing at a hip restaurant in Deep Ellum. She only lasted a couple of days at each place. She quickly realized she could make a lot more money stealing from her employers rather than working for them. Once Devon "took up" with David, she stopped trying to find work altogether. David was a forty-something sax player. He had dark hair that was peppered grey, and in style and appearance he resembled the well-known jazz musician, David Sanborn. Unfortunately, he had none of his talent. Every musician I have ever known simply has to play their instruments. They dedicate long hours to practicing and receive great joy out of playing. Then there was David, who carried his saxaphone with him everywhere, but I never saw him so much as take it out of his case. He did, however, stash his works (hypodermic needles) and dope in his saxophone case. If David ever did play his instrument, if he ever had any talent at all; his dope habit had long since robbed him of his desire to play. David lived with a thirty-something, red-haired woman named Kristen. She lived in the straight world, made lots of money, and had a ten-year old son. I don't know what she saw in David or what it was exactly that had brought, and kept, them together. I only met her once. She showed up at my doorstep one day, looking for David. I told her he was out with Devon and I had no idea where they were. She looked at me, angry and confused, and asked me whether I thought they were spending "too much" time together, and whether I knew if David was "using." I looked at her sadly and told her that getting high was all that Devon and David did together. I agreed that they were spending too much time together, that eventually they were going to get into trouble. Kristen started to cry, and I felt like crying right along with her. We looked at each other sympathetically, each seeing the pathetic resignation in the other--each acknowledging that we were powerless to control these mad people we had fallen in love with. Kristen left. I never saw her again. The next day, Devon got pissed at me for "ratting" David out to his girlfriend. She told me David was really mad at me too. I never knew exactly how they spent their days together. Generally, I know that it involved shoplifting, purse-stealing, and/or visits to pawn shops and dope spots. For a while, it involved writing lots of bad checks against my checking account, as well as the accounts of Devon's mother. Their official story is that they were "job-hunting" together. David would pull up to the house, every day at around 5:30 p.m. in his beat-up Honda Civic and leave Devon at the curb. She was usually high, her eyes little pinpoints as she walked in the door, a rolled up newspaper in her hand that was conveniently opened to the classifieds, but unconveniently speckled with blood. (Devon had a chronic problem finding veins at this point, which often resulted in her needles clogging with blood). Once Devon got home, we would fight for two hours or so. Eventually, we would make up. She would promise me that she would spend less time with David, that she would get a job and stop getting high. I believed her because I desperately needed to believe her. No person with any sense would have believed her otherwise. Not after all we had been through together. By 10 p.m., Devon would feel dope sick and beg me for money so she could get high again. More often than not, I gave in. Frankly, I just wasn't strong enough to be strong for both of us. It was taking everything I had just to stay clean and go to work every day. I would give her enough for a capsules of dope (in Texas, heroin came in capsules rather than bags, and was sticky an brown, instead of a white powder) and wait for her by the door until she returned. Sitting at our kitchen table, I would watch her struggle to find a vein, sometimes for as much as an hour. Then, as Devon began to nod out, I would clean her up, throw away her clogged needles, and put her to bed. The next morning I would wake up, go to work, and the whole painful process would begin again. Devon never did find a job or stop using, but she did stop seeing David. One day, while I was at work, I received a frantic phone call from Devon's father. Apparently, she was in the hospital, having just been attacked by David. I believe he really attacked her, because Devon insisted on involving the police--whom she hated--and filing a complaint. I later learned (from Devon) what had really happened. David had given Devon money to score some dope. It was a spot that wouldn't sell to David, either because they thought he was a cop or just plain didn't like him. Devon returned empty-handed, complaining that she had been beat. David didn't believe her and accused her of pocketing the dope for herself instead. Devon wouldn't admit it to me, but I'm reasonably sure that David's suspicions had been correct. Nevertheless, his response was to smash Devon's face against the dashboard several times. Then he drove her around in his Honda, looking for the so-called "beat artist" that had taken his money. She finally was able to jump out of the car when he had stopped at a traffic light. I left work and met Devon at the hospital. She seemed genuinely scared. She also had lost one of her front teeth and not coincidentally, her desire to spend time with David. Later, Devon's dad and I went to David's house to confront him. If he was home he wasn't answering his door. I left a threatening message on his answering machine, which I regretted because it probably terrified Kristen and her young son. Still, I was angry. Angry at David, angry at Devon, and angry at myself for not being strong enough to help Devon. Angry that she couldn't quit using for me or for herself. Angry that I couldn't protect her. Angry that what was once a beautiful girl with a beautiful smile had been transformed into some sort of junkie-redneck that was missing a front-tooth. I don't know what ever happened to David. I expect that Kristen probably left him after the police came to his door. I know that he subsequently phoned my employer and told them that I was a junkie and to ask me why I wore long sleeves in the Texas heat. Although I was no longer using, my arms were still pretty scarred up, and that was all my boss needed to know. I lost my job. Sometimes I wonder if Devon is still missing that tooth. 5:35:37 AM    comments []

Friday, February 13, 2004

I'm back. Sorry to have been away so long. I was focused on another writing project and a job hunt. The job hunt was successful. I start a new job in March. I will no longer be defending corporate polluters and embezzlers. Instead, I will have the privilege of suing their sorry asses. I had to take a bit of a pay cut, but in my mind, it was worth it. The writing project is also going well. I well into a new novel and am thinking of uploading chapters onto this blog. At any rate, thanks to all who wrote to say they missed me. I'll be making regular entries in this journal again, beginning this weekend. 5:16:52 PM    comments []