Problems (14 page)

Brian kissed me. It felt awkward while the other girl was there. She wasn't that pretty.

I cuddled with him in bed. He felt my hair. He unbuttoned his shirt. He told me to suck his nipples. It felt oddly feminine to be sucking on a nipple.

The third girl was a trip. She was Puerto Rican. She walked in talking on the phone, loud as hell. “Yeah, this white dude, I'm here now, Julio, lemme get down to business.” She plugged in her phone and turned up the clock radio. Brian muttered something about his hearing and the horrible music. She didn't care. She introduced herself as Liberty. I giggled. I was getting wasted on the wine Brian had brought.

Liberty came out of the bathroom in a crazy getup. She had a belly she was not ashamed of. Suspenders went over her tits and then clipped onto garters. A crazy booty and a tongue ring. She targeted me. Reeked of vanilla, which made me hungry and nauseous. She started sucking my tits and made a big show out of biting my nipples. Brian stood there with the Columbia girl going down on him.

I was on all fours with this girl licking my ass and finger-banging the shit out of me. I was screaming.

I played with her pussy, but it was so obvious I didn't know what I was doing. She removed my hand and said, “Let me.”

Brian wanted to see Liberty go down on the Columbia girl. I went to the bathroom and did another line. When I got back to the room, Brian was lying down, and the Columbia girl was going down on him. I felt oddly competitive when he said she gave the best head ever. He asked me and Liberty to suck on his nipples.

“This is fucking awesome,” he said over the blare of the clock radio playing some actively annoying song with a techno beat.

Then I went down on him, but he wasn't making the same sounds as he had with the Columbia girl. I wanted to be awesome at giving head. I was going to have to work on that. He looked directly at me and asked Liberty to go down on him.

Liberty got between his legs.

“Hey, no teeth!”

“Sorry, I like it rough,” she said.

“I said no teeth!”

“That's the way I do!” she said.

“That's better,” he said. “Okay, now stop.”

But she didn't stop, and he grunted.

All that money and five condoms and this dude got off from a
BJ
after five minutes of getting head.

He said it was late anyway, and he had to get home. “Nothing like young women to make you feel alive.” I felt bad for his wife, as though I was part of a mean private joke he played on her. I hoped she killed him one day and got away with it.

I got three hundred bucks for forty minutes of accumulated action.

“Do you do this a lot?” I asked Liberty.

“Well, since I got out.”

“Got out?”

“Yeah, I was locked up for smoking crack,” Liberty said.

“Someone named Liberty wasn't free,” I said, cracking myself up.

I gave Douglass the money and told him to call the dude. Douglass said the guy was going to stop by in the morning. But he didn't stop by the next day, or the day after. Three days we waited for him. The cash was on the bookshelf underneath a heavy statue of a girl with her eyes closed. We had the money, and there was
nothing on Earth we could do to make the dope get there any faster. It was the same feeling I had when I was in a cab, late, stuck in traffic. No matter how much money you have in your wallet, the cab doesn't move.

We grumbled and watched terrible movies. Douglass was king of the remote. I was too weak to put up a fight. I didn't want to be alone, but being around Douglass wasn't much better. I tried to cuddle with him, but he said, “I can't do this cuddling thing right now, babe.” Sweat was making my body rot. I rubbed between my tits where there was a little puddle of sweat. I smelled it. There was something sickly comforting in the smell of hotdogs and sweat. I wiped underneath my left tit and rubbed off a thin layer of skin.

Douglass decided to try to score out on the street. This was an act of desperation. If you got busted, it almost always happened when you scored on the street. That's why I only dealt with delivery guys. I didn't want him to go, but the dealer wasn't even answering our texts. I gave him all my money. Douglass's phone was broken, so there wasn't going to be any way of getting ahold of him. Our plan was not a very good plan.

I tried to embrace getting clean so I would never be in this position again, dope sick, lying on my unwashed sheets, and thinking,
Finally, it's over. Finally, I will be clean, and this whole stupid ordeal will be over
. I sobbed.

You have to be tough to be a drug addict. You have to sit there a lot of the time and be sick. So many times I thought,
I am not too much of a wuss to be a drug user
.

The true mark of any addict is the ability to deal with being dope sick. Some people chain-smoked and paced around and made frequent trips to the bathroom to shit or puke. Other people were
silent and looked for ways to busy themselves. I methodically went through the ashtray, putting aside butts with some tobacco left. Later, Douglass would roll cigarettes using these stale bits of tobacco. Douglass stared at the television. We were the weird people in a waiting room. In every waiting room, there is a loony, and I was that loony.

Douglass, being a seasoned junkie, was the calm one. “You just have the flu. Imagine you have the flu. It's only a matter of time. Do you think we will never score again?”

I didn't tell him I had Suboxone, which I had been taking over the last two days.

You can't be junkies and be friends. To be a junkie means constantly choosing yourself over anyone else. And it's hard not to grow resentful when you are paying for someone else's habit.

At our worst, Douglass was a parasite feeding off my sickness. At our best, we were a team, a tag team of vultures. We lied to one another all the time. “I lost my fucking bag. It was right there. Can I have one of yours?” Douglass stole from me. I heard him open my dope drawer while I was pretending to sleep, and when I sat up, he shut it quick. We would talk about our broken hearts, our lives, our plans. But there was always a line. I would let him be sick if it meant I could be high.

Douglass shocked me when he came back within half an hour with no drugs but almost all the money. It was twenty short. “I had to buy a drink,” he said as he sank into the sofa. There was still a hundred, so we had enough for a bundle.

The rash underneath my tit had gotten worse. Flaps of skin kept flaking off. My head grew sweaty, and when I rubbed it,
dirt gathered under my nails. My stomach felt caught in-between vomiting and shitting. The eggs Douglass had made the morning before smelled pungent but not entirely unappealing. How could he sit there and eat an apple? Had he spent twenty bucks on two bags for himself? Had he shot up in the bar bathroom? Had he thought what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me? Had he thought since he was the one who could have gotten busted, he deserved a couple bags? It didn't matter. I wasn't going to accuse him. Twenty bucks for a drink in a shitty bar? I stared at Douglass's phone. I kept rereading the texts. I tried to come up with some kind of timeline. One hour ago the guy said he'd be here in twenty minutes, so maybe twenty minutes meant two hours. Even if he had left when he had texted “twenty minutes,” he had to be here in two hours. I kept imagining him driving around the corner, parking, walking down the steps and through the courtyard, expecting him to buzz right then.

Right then.

Right then.

The buzzer kept not buzzing.

I kept going to the bathroom. I shit like ten times in a day.

I sat there hating myself. Hating the room. Hating the smells. Hating the discarded Snapple wrapper. Hating seeing that same crumpled brown bag on the floor. Hating that I never picked it up.

I mostly hated this fucking movie Douglass put on about this sad, quirky boy in some small town who fell in love with a quirky girl who was a carnie, and she made him less of a wuss. I fucking hated watching two people fall in love, and I hated thinking of Peter, Peter, Peter. How many fucking memories were there, and did I have to individually grieve each one? Why couldn't I just put them all in one big box and throw them away like he did?

Peter driving at night while I played
DJ
. Peter drumming on the steering wheel. Peter crying in my arms telling me he was a loser and was always going to be a loser. Peter on Christmas morning wearing a Santa Claus hat and waking me up with a plate stacked with chocolate chip pancakes. Peter trapping mice and taking them to the park because he didn't believe in killing them. Peter screwing me before he went to work. Peter flicking his special Zippo I had bought him. Peter rubbing his dick and then smelling his hand, not knowing I was watching. The way he ate peanut butter out of the jar, taking a bite, smoothing it over, scraping the edges so he didn't waste any. Peter handing me the iPod he had put all my music on. Peter lying on the bed wearing briefs that were way too small for him. “They fit me good, right?” he had asked. Peter, always smelling like soap, his clean, scrubbed skin. His perfectly clean asshole. If I had to eat off someone's asshole, his would be my first choice. Peter playing an obscure Bob Dylan song to me on our anniversary in a terrible Mexican wedding shirt. How many fucking memories were there?

“Can we please watch something else?”

Douglass said, “C'mon. Let me finish this. We always watch what you want.”

This was the most untrue statement anyone had ever made in the universe. Douglass always had the remote. Any time I put something on, he complained till I gave it back. Douglass left the apple core sitting on the coffee table, because the apple-core fairy was going to come by and flutter away with it. It would sit there for days, just like that fucking brown bag. In order not to have a complete mental breakdown, I didn't let my brain ponder what gross rotten thing was in that brown crumpled bag. Douglass was selfish. He just thought, “I don't fucking live here. So I'll throw shit everywhere.”

Addiction is so boring. Look at that dumb person doing the same
dumb thing over and over all the time and not doing much of anything else. That's addiction. Repeating the same thing, the same cycle, the exact same thoughts.

Sit there. Look at your fucking phone. You can stop it right now. You are officially boring the fuck out of yourself. Your problems are becoming old problems.

“These are old blues,” Joanna Newsom sang.

Eventually the guy showed up. After he had put us through hell for three days, we didn't even mention it. Douglass handed him the money and went to the kitchen with the bundle. Knowing I was about to get high made my body feel high already. Someone told me about this girl who got wet as soon as she felt the dope in her hand. I heard the familiar rattling sounds of Douglass going through my spoons, even after I had asked him to reuse the same one. I smiled at the guy. He had a cute grin. Wore bright sneakers. He was always a dick on the phone and always polite in person. I rambled a little about how things were good, just to show him there were no harsh feelings. I felt weirdly embarrassed about all the texts and phone calls. He wished us a good day and slammed the door. And just like that, I knew it was going to be a good day.

Douglass came in and put the bundle on the coffee table, already ripped open. I didn't count the bags. I didn't care how many Douglass had taken from my portion. I would later, when I was down to my last two, but right then it was a bounty.

“Stay away from needles,” Douglass said as he wrapped a belt around his arm. He used his mouth to hold the sleeve of his shirt up. He put the needle in his arm. His mouth let go of the sleeve. His eyes closed. He went, “Damn!”

Even after the sickness subsided and the sweats stopped and that warm feeling came and another movie started, I was still not okay. When you go through day after day of numbness, you forget what feelings are like.

Douglass said, “When you're so strung out, it takes more than what you're used to to feel okay.”

“We should get clean,” I said.

Douglass nodded.

He said, “You are still young, but I'm running out of time.”

He said, “You can do something, or you can be a junkie. You are fooling yourself if you think you can do both.”

One of the only good things about getting high with Douglass was that he didn't nod out like most long-term users.

The real junkie nod is frustrating to watch. They slowly droop forward until they are completely bent over. They keep dropping their cigarette. You watch them light it, lean over, drop it, and then wake up and pick it up and then instantly drop it again. You watch their head fall forward until it hits the coffee table. Every time, they say they are just tired. Every time, they say, “No, I'm awake,” and they light a cigarette and they slump over and they drop it. And you want to scream, “Put out the cigarette and just lie down.” How fucking hard is that?

“Why can't he just lie down?” I asked Elizabeth the time we watched Noah do it.

“I don't know why,” she said.

Douglass told me, “I have Tourette's. I don't know I'm doing it, so if I do it, just tell me and I'll stop.”

He would hop and holler and make loud nonsense jokes and repeat himself over and over.

Sometimes I would say, “Can you please stop?”

“Stop what?”

My ass felt itchy, so I got in the shower, turned on the water, turned around, and spread my cheeks so all the water went inside my ass. I was freezing cold. There's probably some guy out there who would be turned on by licking shit off your asshole. Whatever weird thing you can think of, there has to be some freak whose favorite thing in the world is that exact thing. When you think of everyone who has ever been born and everyone alive right now and every human that will be alive until an asteroid hits us or global warming sets off a series of natural disasters or we just ping-pong from planet to planet and leave colonies behind, out of all those people, there has to be someone who is into whatever your mind can come up with. Like some guy who jerks off by rubbing his dick on different kinds of cheese, or some guy who eats bugs as he jacks himself. Then there are the weird things everyone knows about, like men who are into amputees. I bet there's some guy who jerks off by rubbing his cock on books. Like his dick gets paper cuts, and he cringes in pain, but he kind of loves it more than anything in the world.