This is a Memoir: Week 4

High

Drug scenes in movies frighten me. The fluorescent, blurred movement of the camera panning from needles in arms, noses pressing across glass, Ryan Gosling hunches next to a toilet in a middle school bathroom, slow dances with a prostitute in a motel, his fingers grasp her back, he buries his face in her neck, in the straw web of her hair. Snapshots of those who can go no lower, be no lonelier. These scenes unsettle me physically, I cover my eyes, I squirm in my seat. Because I am low. I am lonely.

After church on Sunday I met a recovering cocaine addict. Some friends of mine had invited some friends of theirs (including myself) over for lunch. These friends, a married couple, have six-week-old twin boys, an excellent situation for a baby lover as at their house I never have to be without one. He, the man in question, is tall, bearded, and charming, and he asks so many questions. I find myself telling him things about my family, about my father and his immigration, about skeletons only recently emerged from the closet, the timing of my parents’ marriage so soon after my father’s divorce, the heaviness of his fatherhood, my feelings of distance from my mother now that her job consumes her, the difficulties of watching my brother fall maybe-in-love, forever leaving the camp in which we have for so long co-existed. Did I tell him all these things? I might not have. I held one of the babies, standing in front of the couch, pressing the little one to my chest, bouncing my body up and down, turning from side to side, as he slowly fell asleep. Everyone else was sitting, and I felt like I was onstage performing a one woman show, an emotional tower full to the brim with secrets waiting to be told.

I drank a lot in college, and when I would drink I would fall. Not quickly, but in slow motion, bending at the waist, my backside weaving, my body closing itself into a tighter angle until I hit the ground. I would wake up the next day hungover, yes, but also with my body aching. I also smoked pot for the first time in college, with my brother at his house in Las Vegas a few miles from where my parents lived. We actually invited my parents to smoke with us, but they declined. My brother had recently gotten high for the first time in a Seattle planetarium showing a Radiohead laser show. Apparently the experience was incredible, his sight heightened, his sense of his soul palpable even physical. I drank a gallon of vanilla soy milk, declaring it to taste more delicious than any milkshake and became fascinated by arm in the socket of shoulder. After two hours, I became paranoid and had my brother's roommate take me back to my parents’ house. When I woke up the next morning I thought, “No need to do that again.”

But I would.

Coming home from a grad school party at 3am drunk and high I attempted to open the front door of my apartment building and promptly fell over, breaking off the key in the lock. For about a minute I sat in the vestibule of the brown stone bereft before calling my roommate to come open the door for me. She was, justifiably, unhappy and unsympathetic, but she did open the door.

My best experience with marijuana involved smoking from a one-hitter in an alley way in Boston proper. My mind became a perfect and beautiful blank. It was the only time in my life I can ever remember not thinking about anything. I sat in the restaurant adjacent to the alley, drinking a beer, blissfully empty. I still look back on that moment with almost uncomfortable yearning, and if I could've guaranteed every experience with reefer would be that glorious I probably would’ve become addicted myself.

Except the next time wasn't blissful. I took 3 hits (or was it 5) from a vaporizer with my best friend and her current boyfriend and, at first, didn’t feel anything except extreme thirst. I drank a glass of water and when I was done said, "My epiglottis feels too big. Or too small.” And then I am lost. I fold into a corner, weeping, yelling that I am not crazy. My best friend turns to her boyfriend, "WHAT DID YOU GIVE HER?" Am I dreaming? This is never going to end. This is forever. I cannot sit still. I need to go on a walk to sweat the pot out of my system. As we wind around the maze of sidewalk behind my house I jump up and down until I can't breathe. It doesn’t work. I call a dear friend who is eating dinner with his parents at the Legal Sea Food in the airport, hours away from flying home to Madrid. He leaves the restaurant to talk to me and instructs me to get into bed. I crawl in wearing my shoes and down coat. He tells me to breathe. I am in my bed and I am 14. It is 5:45am, and it is time to get up for school. My dad turns on the light in the hallway outside my bedroom and then goes downstairs to make coffee. It is too early. Do not make me get up, Dad. It is 6am. He comes to the door, “Deb, it’s time.” I do not want to leave my bed. “Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the toxins.” My feet twitch as I expel the high through my toes. My mom comes and gently kisses my forehead. I am sick, so sick. “Do you need some water?” Wrapped in a blanket, feverish, am I dying? How long will this last? “15 more minutes,” he says. I stare at the clock for 15 minutes, and then I get up, for school, or work, or maybe because it's New Year's Eve, and my friend and her boyfriend would rather be having sex than waiting on me. I graze the wall with my fingertips. This is real. I am real. I am high for the next 3 days. Some sort of wall between my conscious and unconscious mind crumbles. I will dream about that night and wake up sweating for years.

So I am afraid of drugs. But I am drawn to this man who must have them. Who must have them but can’t, won’t. “Sometimes I wish I could be less human,” he says to me. We are discussing church, his church and mine, and Jesus, which is a story for another time. I wish that every day, I think but do not say. Was he broken by the drug too? So broken he had to go back to it again and again? He thinks he can glue himself back together with his own force of will; he cannot. No one can, I think, but do not say. He knows it too. That’s why here, that’s why Jesus, that’s why he listens to secrets, unafraid of skeletons. In himself he sees more monstrous things than the bad fruit of my family tree. The baby's pacifier falls out of his mouth and he cries out. I put it back, holding it there gently, my fingers on his cheek, my thumb gently stroking his tiny neck.

When it's time to go I hand the baby back to his mother. I gather my things. I go home. My arms ache. There was some transfer between us; I can feel the need again, to be not-here, to rescue myself from decay, from my own rotting heart. I fall asleep, and in my dreams the angle of my body is closing, leading towards the ground. Except there is no ground. There is nothing but the slow descent.