Authors: Joe Putignano
Acrobaddict (38 page)
S
IGMUND
F
REUD’S ID, EGO, AND SUPEREGO CONSTITUTE THE THREE-PART STRUCTURAL MODEL OF THE PSYCHE WITH WHICH HE DESCRIBED AND DEFINED THE ACTIVITIES AND INTERACTIONS OF A PERSON’S MENTAL LIFE
. T
HE ID CONSISTS OF UNCOORDINATED INSTINCTUAL TRENDS, THE EGO COMPRISES THE ORGANIZED, REALISTIC ASPECTS OF A PERSON, AND THE SUPEREGO PLAYS THE CRITICAL MORALIZING ROLE
. E
VEN THOUGH THE MODEL IS “STRUCTURAL,” THIS PSYCHIATRIC TRIPTYCH IS A FUNCTION OF THE MIND RATHER THAN THE BRAIN, WITH NO ACTUAL DIRECT, SOMATIC, STRUCTURAL RELATION INVOLVING NEUROSCIENCE
.
It was midsummer in Manhattan and the heat bounced off the concrete and the trash, suffocating all who walked the streets. The name
Hell’s Kitchen
was appropriate for my part of the city—it felt like we were living inside a microwave oven. After Matt and I broke up, I had moved back in with Keith and Kip.
I missed Matt and wished I could have quit using to save our relationship, but I was happy to have escaped one of my biggest fears while we were living together: Matt coming home to find my cold and lifeless corpse on his bathroom floor, with my syringe as the murder weapon. Now single, I could use as much as I wanted without thinking about inflicting images of my overdose upon my relationship hostages.
Living in New York meant being trapped in a nonstop fashion show of sex, pride, prestige, and power. Gorgeous people, too busy to appreciate each other’s beauty, dominated the avenues, desperately trying to see their own reflections in the storefronts, cabs, and each other’s dark glasses: the black holes of vanity. Everybody had something someone else wanted, and it pervaded the perfect-bodied dancers, actors, and singers living in my Theater District neighborhood. New York provides a tough competition for beauty and youth, magnified exponentially in the gay world where human qualities are overlooked for flesh, muscles, and flawless skin. If we don’t end up hating ourselves because our families told us we were wrong, we hate ourselves by creating a social grouping in which aging is considered worse than death. It’s so much better to die young than to wake up to a wrinkle. Fellow gays can be crueler than the society we protest against. Internally we react and defend ourselves through a modern mummification of antiaging lotions, sex, drugs, and dance music that makes our fountain of youth bubble up in the club scene.
If I was to survive in New York, I needed to get on the same playing field. Even though I was a junkie, I worked hard in the gym and could reshape my body from the skinny waif I had become to my gymnast form. The problem was that it’s difficult to lift weights after shooting up. I would go to the New York Sports Club and nod off with dumbbell in hand, then wake up with my eyes half open, sedated and high, watching the weight drop to the floor in slow motion. While others shot steroids in the locker room, I shot heroin and laughed at the absurdity as I continued to weight-train while high. I was now a professional addict, more or less functioning in life, and wanting to better myself while living in my self-constructed hell.
I checked my email on Kip and Keith’s computer every day. They had recently introduced me to a social networking site that felt like a jealousy breeding ground. I clicked through the site, looking at perfect profile pictures and picking the ones I wanted to be. The TV droned in the background, and a story caught my ear about a fashion designer in Manhattan with a triumphant life full of enthusiasm and creativity. I wanted to meet him. Being high brought on an arrogance
I would have never had sober. I searched his name on the Web and he came up. I sent him an email and he quickly answered back. In my confident, delusional drug state I asked him on a date. He said yes, and we made plans to go to the movies. I couldn’t believe I had made a date with someone I had just seen on TV, and someone who wasn’t a drug dealer, junkie, or crackhead. While I was awful in social situations, I did develop the finely honed skill of exposing my good attributes and selling what I wanted seen, showing off the saturated colors and highlights of my life while concealing my dark truth.
His dark, slicked-back hair; small, sharp eyes; bigger-than-life personality; and a smile that welcomed everyone made Alejandro much nicer than I imagined a famous person could be. He dressed in an old, eighties punk style that I had abandoned in order to find work in the city, and I could barely convince him I was once pierced from head to toe. As we talked in the coffee shop before the movie, strangers interrupted us to tell him how much they loved his clothes. Rather than being a bitchy queen, he was extremely carefree and kind, speaking to them as if he’d known them all his life. While I didn’t want a relationship, I liked being around him.
The Devil and the drugs had taken all I had and all I once was, and I saw an opportunity here to be someone by proxy. My ego took over and I thought,
Since he is somebody and I know him, I could be somebody too
. I had been determined to fill the emptiness inside me with external labels and to define myself through things, and now sitting in front of me was a man with a label and things! I was not going to let this guy go.
After the movie we continued our date at a club downtown. Alejandro walked up to the front of the line stretching down the block and the doorman unlatched the velvet rope for us. I felt bad for the people waiting, but it felt good to be treated like someone special. Free drinks arrived from the bartenders all night long, which was good since I had no money to buy him a drink even if I’d wanted to—paychecks went to Kimi and then into my veins. Inside the club’s dark lighting everyone seemed to know Alejandro. He was intriguing, artistic, and a big drinker. I kept up with the drinks, even though I would have
preferred the sedating effects of my true love; but, not one to turn away a mistress, the first drink turned into a drowning.
The night faded into blackout, and I woke up hung over in his apartment. I was still drunk and had to get home and get to work. I stumbled out, terrified that I had done something stupid and would never hear from him again, but before I reached my apartment he sent a text inviting me to meet him for coffee before my shift. With a short shot of hot, brown liquid dope in my veins, I cured my hangover and met him with the expectation of
the
question: “Do you remember what you did last night?” But he never asked. He just smiled, sitting close to me, with one arm slightly touching my wrist. I wanted to be one of those guys good at cuddling, holding hands, or sharing emotions in public, but I was never good at intimacy, fearing the monster inside me would infect another human being with my darkness. I did my best to let him in.
He invited me to a movie premiere the following night—a world away from the usual evening spent in my drug dealer’s dirty bathroom. I was excited and nervous. I had to conceal my habit and hoped my odd high behavior might fit in well among the eccentric company he kept. I had to keep the fresh track marks covered, and did my best to conceal the bruises over my veins using women’s cover-up: Thank you, CoverGirl, for helping junkies all over the world fit in like normal people, because “if you don’t look good, we don’t look good.”
Guards released the rope sectioning off civilians from the special, and I entered the after-party with my charming date, who introduced me to Macaulay Culkin, Paris Hilton, and other celebrities. Starstruck, with a smile frozen on my face, I couldn’t move. I had lived in New York for years and had never met anyone famous, and now, on my second date, I was in a social circle of celebrities. Everyone was drinking, and a few drugs were being passed around like hors d’oeuvres, but I was terrified of embarrassing Alejandro, so I refrained. Besides, the heroin in my blood, mixed with this new feeling of being part of the people being watched, gave New York a rich patina.
We went back to his place after the party, and, while he was showing me pieces for the upcoming fashion week, Pamela Anderson called
wanting a dress for an upcoming event. Just a short week ago my life had centered around Kimi’s hellhole in Hell’s Kitchen, and now I was sleeping with fame. I would never leave him.
I took Matt to Alejandro’s fashion show. It was a dramatic mix of freaky people drenched in expensive and bizarre costume versions of their own personalities, wanting to be seen, admired, and written about. I felt nauseous from everyone’s clothes screaming, “Here I am! I’m interesting, deep, and trendy! Love me!” but I had done the same thing with piercing. I hated them because I hated me.
The watchful eyes of massive security guards maintained the boundaries of plastic chairs separating New York’s famous socialites from the club-kid mundane. Surprisingly, the usher sat us among the privileged in the second row, an arm’s length away from the catwalk. The room’s attention shifted as a glittery, aged butterfly of a woman swept in and landed in her seat directly in front of us: Liza Minnelli. Madonna was more my speed as a gay icon. As she left her seat to flit about the room, we checked to see if her gift bag outdid ours, but it just had the same fancy face cream samples and CDs. The evening was gorgeously presented and a big joke: fashion overshadowed by a party catering to the pseudocreative and the ego-driven, set to a soundtrack of jealousy and envy.
The top of the show immediately brought my self-esteem down as flawless-bodied models stampeded down the runway. They were perfect, unobtainable specimens. But Alejandro’s hard work and talent blew me away, his stories flowing past before my eyes, woven into each piece. My lasting contribution to the world would be flawless vein explorations. Perhaps we could join forces and create a ghastly haute couture collection in bloodletting: emaciated models armed with beautiful crimson holes, tracks marking their limbs, accessorized with syringes and blood. But my dream line would never happen—Alejandro despised drugs after he had lost several close friends to overdoses. Would I be next on his list? His disapproval didn’t stop him from being a hard drinker, which always confused me, since it’s just a liquid form of the same disease.
Alejandro and I continued dating through fancy fashion events and pretentious social scenes, but my addiction was starting to show its envy. Sloppy drunkenness led me to forget syringes in places, say the wrong things to the wrong people, and embarrass everyone around me. One night at a club while Alejandro was talking to people and doing his “public relations,” I pulled my own PR as a guy asked in my ear if I wanted coke. This was like asking a landlocked fish if he was thirsty. Bored of hearing the extolling of Alejandro, we went into the bathroom, did a few lines, and bought some for later. I stashed the coke next to my spoon, syringe, and heroin in the Dolce & Gabbana bag Alejandro let me use. Drug use and the illusory qualities of clothes, money, and prestige go hand in hand and create wonderful false sensations of identity.
Alcohol balanced out the coke high and provided a cloak of normalcy, so I drank deeply into the night, ending up at Alejandro’s apartment with a few of his friends and his assistant, whom I started hitting on. After hours of my sneaking into the bathroom to do more lines, his friends left and Alejandro confronted me: “Are you on drugs?”
The innocence in his eyes was killing me. “No, man, I’m just drunk.”
“Okay, you seem a little more than drunk, but I believe you.”
Then, in my drunkenness, I got honest and started telling the truth, feeling him out to see how much I could reveal. His face turned angry when I mentioned drugs, so I swerved into lies, baiting him with sympathy on a hook, but that fish wasn’t biting, so I had to change my approach and paint myself as the victim. I had to mold his anger into pity, as if addiction had been forced upon me. I grew up in a terrible ghetto of drugs, paving an inescapable destiny, fueled by a fabricated father who taught me how to shoot heroin when I was fifteen. My manipulative and drunken acting, complete with tears, landed him right on my hook.
