Crazy Enough (21 page)

I was a terrible addict. When I say “terrible,” I don't mean I was a super hard-core, shooting up in my eyeballs, trick-turning, gold-tooth-selling junkie, I mean to say I was a loser among real addicts. I could still sort of eat, I kept my apartment, and, though I called in “sick” a lot, I never lost my job.

I never shot up. I'd cook the tar (called “chiva”) in a spoon with water as if I was, but instead I would just snort the hot, dirty liquid with a straw or a broken pen. The shit was nasty, too. Chiva tasted like a combination of Easter-egg dye, coppery blood, and fresh throw up. I would gag and heave and throw up every single time I used, but I never officially ODed. My heart never stopped and I never went to the ER to get the adrenaline shot. Suffice to say, I was not a real junkie.
Real
junkies are always almost dying, constantly. I was light-years from being a hardcore addict. I only got addicted as a sad side effect of trying to get my real junkie boyfriend to love me.

Loser.

Any addict worth their chips would call me a
chipper, poseur,
or a
tourist
. Looking back I call it
junkie lite
.

I don't know if Billy ever said he loved me, or if he was even remotely kind. We had sex sometimes, but I would really just be waiting for him to care about me, or act like he did. Of course when we had plenty of dope, we had good times. He was ecstatic when I
gave him some China White. He kissed me and called me his sweet girl.

One time, we were at the pay phone on the dying lady dealer's corner. We were about to call her, head down into her basement studio, and get our handful of balloons, when a badly disguised undercover cop got in my face, hissing obscenities and trying to come across as a crazy homeless guy. Had I not been so startled, I would've laughed at him.

Billy fixed his bugged icy eyes on the man and stared him down, silently. I stood at the phone booth waiting for this idiot to scram so we could call the dealer. Billy stepped intently between me and the cop, still staring, creepy and hard. My heart did a tiny bump in my chest . . . was he protecting me? Finally the undercover stalked away muttering his pretend nonsensicals but we had to drop it and leave since we had clearly been made.

Later, Billy pushed a man who innocently walked into me and shouted, “Don't touch my girlfriend, motherfucker!” The man staggered backwards with his palms towards us in the universal “Hey, hey, I'm cool, I'm cool” pose, stammering surprised apologies. Billy finally unlocked his eyes from the poor guy and we continued on our way to his place. When it's feeding time, junkies get pretty cranky, and Billy could be downright scary mean at times, but he called me his
girlfriend
.

We had two main dealers. One was a dying woman in a filthy basement apartment on Market Street; the other was a married couple who would deliver. I really liked the married couple; the guy looked like Carlos Santana and the woman looked like a sunken-eyed
seventies actress whom you've seen in everything, but whose name you can't recall. They fancied themselves musicians, so they would always bring some home-recorded demo on a hissing cassette tape. The music was terrible, but if we sat through the agonizing twang and inane drivel of junkie lyrics, and made a sufficiently big deal over them, they would, sometimes, bump us a bonus, usually in pill form: “Honey, take this twenty minutes before you boot up and you'll feel like you went through a wall.”

“Wow, actually that sounds terrible.”

“You won't know what hit you. You'll fucking love it.”

And I always did.

When I was high I felt like a rock star. Like I had already accomplished my dreams and everyone adored me. I felt famous, but, most important, I felt loved. That was the drug's greatest trick.

One night Billy recorded me on his four track while we were wasted. It was a Billie Holiday song, “Lady Sings the Blues.” She was a
real
junkie and she was amazing. I sang a breathy lilt into the microphone, high as a kite, thinking I, too, must sound amazing. Later Billy took nude pictures of me wrapped in a black lace scarf. I felt beautiful and doomed.

Later when I heard the recording, sober, I could hardly believe what I was thinking. Flat, mush-mouthed, and out of tune, I sounded terrible, like a warped kid's record. And the nude photos? Woof. They looked like pictures of a moon-colored narwhal, hauled out of a sea of sweaty cheese using grandma's funeral veil.

Whoa.

I have no shame in admitting I am incredibly vain. My vanity has saved my ass, many times over, especially with regard to drugs and alcohol. Remember heroin chic? Those numb, bony girls, languishing across fashion spreads with their priceless milky flesh sucked in,
drum tight, across long, chiseled bones? Doing heroin was going to make me look like them, right? I was going to look like an expensive, bisexual vampire cat from outer space! Yeah!

Yeah . . . no. I was ugly. My visage was more heroin shit than chic. I mean, you'd think vomiting and lying around all day would make you more attractive, but you'd be wrong.

My flesh was Elmer's Glue-colored pizza dough peeking over sweatpants. My skin was puffy and spotted and my hair was a matted red mess. It's safe to say that, had I been even remotely as hot as one of those smacked-out models, I'd have stayed on drugs and died in gorgeous, skinny squalor.

I figured it was definitely time to stop when I started seeing demons and thinking about killing myself. My spirit was looking down at me, literally and energetically. Pissed, mortified, wondering when I was going to get out of this half-life.

Then there were the demons. Pointy shadowy things, I could only see them out of the corners of my eyes. They would point at me, rocking and shaking in my periphery. I couldn't hear them, at first, but I knew they were laughing at me.

Towards the end of my half-life, I smuggled some China White heroin back to San Francisco with me from a trip to NYC. I put the packets in a condom and tucked them inside me for the plane ride. Billy always got the first taste because he always made the score. But this was mine, so I did a bunch of it by myself, alone in my apartment. He'd get some later.

I sniffed up a healthy line out of the first bindle, and hit play on my stereo. When I was high I loved to get lost in music, become the
star, the object of desire, and all my ugly would melt. This particular day, I was David Bowie, living as Ziggy Stardust: beautiful, bones, glamorous, misunderstood, and . . . and . . . lost . . .

I began darting, in and out, through a thick cloud of prickling panic when I found myself slumped in front of the stereo. I had been jet-black gone for half the album. I focused my eyes through my loose, gooey muscles; the CD counter was at track five.

“It ain't easy, it ain't easy, it ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down. . . .” I did too much. I can't . . . stay . . . hot coffee vomit spurted out and splashed onto a newspaper on the floor. My mouth was stinging.

I came to a few times. The music was loud. I would peek at the little track counter on my CD player.

If I make it to track 11, I'll be okay.

“Time takes a cigarette . . .”

Open your eyes. Stay.

“. . . and puts it in your mouth . . .”

Awake. Get a smoke. Open your eyes, Storm.

“. . . it lingers . . .”

Open your eyes.

“. . . then you forget. You're a rock 'n' roll suicide.”

Track 11, “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide,” a funny song to live to.

One of the smartest things I did at that time was speedballs. Doing speed mixed with heroin you could stay up and feel the high. The best part was not being able to sleep at all, having panic attacks and hallucinating. It was
smart
because it was such a hideous way to exist that I finally decided it was time to leave Billy and get clean.

Billy and I had started this little game whereby we would buy some dope together, get high, and then he'd start some ugly fight where I would usually end up leaving in tears, leaving him with the rest of the drugs to himself. Great game. He'd always win, though. He was a genius, after all.

There's nothing quite like a rape to put things into perspective.

The rape was technically my fault, thus making it more heinous.

One night, Billy was in a rage. We hadn't slept in days and he was obsessing over a complicated guitar track he was laying down. I was wasted, smoking and listening to the cacophony of his screaming guitar, trying to look supportive. In between takes he would cuss, kick something, rewind the tape, and then go again. Some of his ranting started to creep my way: “You stupid fucking waste of skin. Get the fuck out of my life.” He was trying to get me to leave. I pretended not to hear him.

I wanted to tell him he was brilliant. Amazing. What a totally unrealized genius he was, but I was fading. It wouldn't have worked, anyway, my flattery, he would have seen right through it. Much better to go completely blank in general so that his verbal and musical assault would just fade into dream or nightmare background music. Billy might then get bored or tired, and leave me alone.

I spaced out staring at his half-open bedroom door, waiting to disappear, when she walked in.

There were weeping red black chunks torn out of her huge, lumpy gut. Her flesh was a flat gray, like a dry shark, but wobbled with every step and hitch of her gurgling laugh. This corpse of a dead, bloated whore staggered towards me, her arm swung in a loose, accusing point at me. She had red, matted hair like mine and dull bulging eyes, filmed over like those of an old fish. Her livery smear of mouth opened off center . . . opened and closed but the sound
that I heard from her was the sound of Billy's repetitive guitar riff, screaming, accusing.

My lungs swelled with ice water, and my skin prickled to a bristling itch as I was hauled upwards by my own shouting, “What the fuck do you want? WHO ARE YOU?”

The whore demon was gone; All that was left was Billy screaming at me how I ruined his take, his life, you cunt. My heart popped woodily against my sternum. I panted and coughed and was suddenly aware of being very cold and damp. Billy's screaming faded in my world even though it went on. I lay back down and tried to get comfortable.