Needle (23 page)

Thankfully, that false sense of well being soon kicked in. I left the bathroom and proceeded to nod off and then fall asleep on the futon. When the alarm sounded, I immediately became aware of the soreness and without even looking in the mirror I began to concoct a lie to justify my new face:

Ummm…I was uhhh…cleaning the stove and uhhh…it’s one of those new glass-top ovens and uh, I kind of just lost my balance and sort of slammed my face into it
.

As soon as I arrived at Serendipity that morning my deformity was immediately addressed by Andy, and after offering up my lame excuse I scurried into the kitchen as Mr. Bruce was fast approaching.

“What is that awful thing on his nose?!?” Mr. Bruce asked, with a degree of disgust that he simply couldn’t disguise.

“He burnt it on the stove,” said Andy.

“Oh. Was he trying to stick his head in the oven again?”

45

As the summer wore on it seemed my life and aspirations were caught in a downward spiral, and even though Perry said he had a plan, I increasingly turned to drugs in order to distract myself from the realities around me.

“Everything’s going great,” I tried to tell myself as the crack pipe sizzled and I strained to hold in the fumes. “Couldn’t be better.” Then,
at the last possible moment I would exhale the vaporized rock only to cap off the evening with a dope-loaded syringe.

But things definitely
could have
been better. I hadn’t seen Justin, Chris, or Leslie since April and though we hardly cared, no one had heard a word from Matt in several months as he’d remained completely unreachable ever since the big dustup with Danny. Perry tried to call his Bronx residence on several occasions, but Matt never seemed to be home and would never return the call.

As it turned out, his parents had hatched a plan designed to sequester Matt from the world in a desperate attempt to save him from a life of hopeless drug addiction. He was forced to remain imprisoned in their home, except on Monday through Friday between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m., when he was permitted to drive himself to work and somehow maintain his teaching job. Of course, had he been instructing a group of students expecting anything even remotely close to an education he wouldn’t have been so lucky. Appropriately enough, however, he led a class consisting exclusively of drug abusers and delinquents bound for nowhere. As such, they were perfectly willing to allow him to nod off in class, fucked from the dope that he’d purchased on his way in to work. Most of his students would be dropping out by the end of the semester anyway, so there’d be no one running home to tell mommy or daddy that the teacher wasn’t teaching. As far as his class was concerned, Matt was a refreshing departure from more annoying teachers with less intrusive problems.

Essentially, Matt’s quarantine was tantamount to being grounded. As far as The Good Detective and the Missus were concerned—he woke up, went to school, returned home, and then reported directly to his room. No playing outside after school, no friends, no phone calls and no heroin.

I think the Ansons really believed their semi-isolation therapy was working, especially when Matt chose to remain “productive” by finding a summer job, rather than laying back and collecting Department of Education checks. In reality, though, Matt
needed
a second job to help pay for what had now become a gargantuan heroin habit, and the reason he’d finally resurfaced in the first place.

In mid-July he called Perry at Dabney’s, who had actually been promoted to a waiter/manager capacity. This wasn’t as amazing as it might sound because regardless of its size, Perry always had the remarkable ability to completely camouflage his habit.

“Hey!” he greeted Matt and the overdo phone call. “We thought
you’d died. We actually picked up a substitute guitarist just in case you OD’d.”

“No man, I’m fine,” Matt said, without even asking about the status of the band. “Hey dude, do you think you can get me a job at your restaurant for the summer?”

“I don’t know. We’ve already got a dope fiend on board.”

Perry did manage to secure Matt a temporary job in the kitchen, as one of the regular prep cooks had just left for vacation. As a matter of fact, it was a great job. For fifteen bucks an hour Matt hid in the basement—high as a kite—chopping celery stalks and carrot sticks.

With both incomes Matt was earning enough to maintain his enormous drug habit and still have money left over, especially since he was living with his parents. Pardon the pun, but Matt was definitely living the high life and apparently letting it go to his head. On a daily basis he would brag about how much more money he was making than Perry—while he worked fewer hours and did even more drugs.

“Hey, Perry: How many hours do you think I worked last week?” he asked, even though he knew exactly how many.

“I don’t know, Matt,” said Perry who just happened to be cutting payroll checks at a desk behind the prep area.

“I’ll tell you how many,” Matt slurred with eyes barely open as he continued chopping celery. “Thirty four point five hours, exactly!”

“That’s great, Matt.”

“You know what that means, Perry?”

“What does that mean, Matt?”

No answer.

“What does that mean, Matt?” Perry tried again but to no avail, as the new prep cook was suddenly stuck in a nod.

“MATT!!!” he bellowed, finally losing patience.

“WHAT!!!” Matt shouted back as the cleaver fell out of his hand.

“You just asked me a fucking question!”

“What question?”

“You just asked me what it meant that you worked 34.5 hours last week,” Perry reminded him.

“I worked 34.5 hours last week?”

“Well that’s what you just fucking told me!!!”

“Oh yeah!” Matt said as he returned to a more thorough state of awareness and resumed chopping. “I worked 34.5 hours last week, which comes to…”

He thought about it for a few moments.

“That comes to $517! Do you know what that means?” he asked once more.

“No Matt, I don’t fucking know what that means. Can you hang in there long enough to tell me?”

“Sure. That means that with my teaching check I’ve made almost $1100 for the week,” he pointed out, as visions of loaded syringes danced in his head.

“That’s great, Matt.”

“And it also means that for same week, you’ve made about half of what I’ve made. You hear that, buddy?
HALF!!!”
Matt said as he aggressively slammed the cleaver down on the celery stalk to accentuate his point. However, upon a closer analysis it became clear that although Matt would be enjoying a 90% gain in gross earnings, it would come at a 10% loss in net fingers as the cleaver came crashing down on his hand along with the unsuspecting stalk of celery.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time nor would it be the last that Matt found himself in need of emergency medical attention, as once again he chose to do the wrong drug at the wrong time. As a result, he was immediately transported to St. Vincent’s Hospital to undergo surgery and have the severed part of his left index finger re-attached.

Fortunately,
his pinky
remained unscathed.

46

Though the summer finally neared an end, my spell as not only a junky—but also a crackhead—was just beginning. Of course, I never actually considered myself
addicted
to crack. After all, I was already a heroin addict and as far as I was concerned, a significant dope dependency clearly marked the end of the drug-addiction line.

By now, my chemically altered brain considered even the regular use of any drug other than heroin to be insignificant. It sounds crazy—but my daily, summertime, crack-dabble seemed nothing more than a symptom of living in an area that was inundated with crack
dealers
. I’m fairly certain that had they not been stationed in such close proximity to my building, the thought of smoking crack
everyday would’ve never occurred to me. However, they were and it did.

One particular afternoon, just before returning home from Serendipity, I purchased two rocks outside a schoolyard on the corner of 47
^th
Street. Shortly thereafter, as I attempted to cross Tenth Avenue in order to score my daily dose of dope, a car pulled up and blocked my path to the other side of the street. Meanwhile, the dope dealer, who only a moment ago was patiently awaiting my arrival, suddenly sprinted in the opposite direction as if he’d seen a cop or something.

“Get your fucking hands against the car, asshole!!!”
came a greeting from one of New York’s Finest, as he exploded out of the unmarked vehicle in front of me.

Without thinking I complied with the command, and it wasn’t until he patted me down and found the crack in my pocket that I realized what was going on.

“Fuck!” I muttered to myself as I didn’t want the little children looking on to be traumatized by my language. However, expletive aside, I realized I was a bit lucky for had the cops waited just a few moments longer they could’ve busted me twice.

“Turn around and smile for the camera you fuckin’ crackhead,” said a cop and of course it
really
pissed me off.

“Where?” I asked.

“On the roof of the building across the street,” another cop said to me and pointed. “Do you see the guy with the camera waving to you?”

Indeed I did and would’ve waved back—but my hands were cuffed. Besides, I was a little miffed that the cocksucker was collecting evidence against me from the roof of the very building I lived in. I must say, even now I was a little cavalier about it all, but that was only because it was my first arrest and I had yet to learn of the plague of miseries awaiting me.

I was loaded into a white cargo van and then chained to a collection of crackheads, heroin addicts, and a few drug dealers that included my own. There, bound together on the floor of the van, we were to be transported to the local precinct responsible for hosting the event.

I realized that rush-hour traffic, distasteful under normal conditions, was utterly revolting when chained to a group of dirty drug addicts on the floor of a hot and stinking police van. While sitting in the vehicle with temperatures approaching a hundred degrees, conversations soon began to revolve around the fate of its
passengers. Essentially, predictions involved one of two scenarios: You would either be “going home,” or cast off to Riker’s Island for an indeterminate period. Fortunately, based on the fact that this was my first arrest, I would be part of the former group.

Eventually, we reached our destination. The chain gang was then led off the van, fingerprinted, and moved to a cell where we sat and awaited our destiny.

“When the fuck are we gonna get out of here?” I said to my dealer.

“Get out of here? You’re not going nowhere for a while, papi,” he said.

“
You said I was going home
!!!”

“You’re in the system now,” he informed me. “You go home when it’s through with you.”

“When the fuck is that gonna be?!?!”

“Twelve hours…maybe 24, maybe
more
. It depends on how business is.”

The “business” he was referring to was operated by the Department of Corrections and from the looks of things, business was fucking booming.

Eventually, we were re-chained to each other and led back to the van for a journey downtown to Central Booking. My crack dealer and I were now chained together and I began to sense him playing the role of my own, personal, jail-house escort—as if the service was included with the price of the drugs.

As we exited the van and entered the monstrously large facility, it was all really beginning to sink in.

“The
system
?!” I said with disgust, as I looked around and was faced with the scourge of society decaying right before my very eyes.

“
Corrections
system,” my chaperon elaborated.

“Fucking
digestive
system, maybe.”

We were unchained and then herded into an area to undergo additional processing procedures. First, I had to drop my pants and underwear and then squat and cough before a corrections officer, whose job was to ensure that I had no objectionable materials stowed away in my ass. After passing inspection, my belt and shoelaces were removed and my belongings were confiscated.

Finally, we each waited in line to undergo health assessments performed by a member of the facility’s medical staff. When it was my turn I stumbled over to her desk with my hands cuffed, my shoes falling off my feet, and my pants sliding below my waist. Out of
respect for the lady, a disgusted C.O. was forced to return my pants to their regular position as the detailed evaluation began.

“Name?” she asked.

“Craig Goodman.”

“Date of birth?”

“May 27
^th,
1968.”

“Married or single?”

“Single.”

“Any children or dependents?”

“No.”

“Any food allergies?”

“No.”

“Taking any prescribed drugs?”

“Prescribed? No.”

“Any pain or discomfort?”

“Not yet.”

“Diabetes, epilepsy, or heart condition?”

“No.”

“Any known physical illness?”

“No.”

“Any known mental illness?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. You’re done.”

I stood up and with my hands still cuffed before me, tried to hold up my pants. I was then escorted to another area where I was to consult with my court appointed, public defender. As he discussed the charge, I was given the impression that my sentence would involve community service. He also mentioned that as long as I didn’t get arrested again within a year, the conviction would remain sealed.

After the consultation, I was led to an enormous jail cell that held at least a hundred prisoners. For the first time since the ordeal began, my handcuffs were removed and I was ushered in. I made my way toward a desolate corner of the cell and passed a young Latino who wasn’t as lucky, as he was not only cuffed—but hanging from an extension of thick pipe that ran from floor to ceiling. With cuffed hands held above his head and draped over the outcropping of pipe, he struggled to remain on the tips of his toes and only partially suspended in order to reduce the pressure on his wrists. Even in such a painful and vulnerable position, he glared and taunted the C.O.’s as they passed.