Authors: Joe Putignano
But Nick would somehow pull it together where it seemed to matter, like at school and work. I was so envious and bitter that I could not do this. I could pull it together for the high alone, but failed in all other areas of my life. Nick was an exceptional worker and student. He never missed classes, got excellent grades, and would never call in sick for a shift. I was the complete opposite. I was doing poorly in school and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why.
I was trying to concentrate on the assignments in class, but I was rotting inside and could only concentrate on heroin. I would have to leave class to get high and then return completely out of my mind, trying to focus on the subject at hand. In my biology class I had a lab partner, and the poor girl could not figure out why she had to constantly explain what we had done the day before. She seemed confused as to why I couldn’t remember where the microscope was kept, or the safety goggles, or everything else that she had explained to me over and over again. She didn’t realize I was doing my own biology experiment, which was failing. I wanted to be a good student so badly. I thought if I did well, Nick would see that I could do other things and not just be a perfect drug addict. I wanted him to see the good qualities in me and to be proud of me.
In the end I got kicked out of college—once again—because of my drug use. In a way, I was happy I didn’t have to go to class anymore; it was just getting in the way of the highs I wanted and needed. I didn’t like my teachers, and I wasn’t learning what I wanted to. The best part was that I no longer had to go down to Canal Street during that horrible, cold morning commute.
The time had come to move on to the next stage of my odyssey. I had climbed the great stairs of drug abuse and was ready to walk through the iron door—the door that had been scratched with warnings and prayers, had been stained with blood, fingernail markings, and the broken lives and dreams it had stolen. If you pressed your ear close enough to the iron handle, you could hear the screams of the souls it had already taken. I was bored with skin popping, and I wanted a higher high. I wanted more, and that deep smell of burnt cinnamon and ash pulled me to it. I wanted it in my veins. I wanted my body to become the map of stars over our heads, with my new needle holes and track marks forming the very constellations that astronomers search for—my future mapped out on my skin. I knew the place I wanted to mark first: the keyhole through the iron door. I had a deep vein below my biceps, a throbbing river over my muscle and bone. That vein was only there to be marked, to be opened for this very purpose. It was thick, intrusive, and all mine.
I cooked up the heroin as I had been shown, the thick, brown potion that boiled in my spoon. The spoon I used to eat with now fed my arms and thirsty veins. I drew the hot liquid into the needle, its tip so fine and sharp. I rubbed the spot on my arm with alcohol, a clean, medicinal smell somehow altering the macabre moment into a sterile environment that allowed my mind to justify what I was about to do. I was simply going to take my medicine as prescribed. I held the needle over the vein at an angle and plunged it into the river of blood. It was painless, sensational, and I pulled back the plunger as a dazzling display of blood danced into the heroin.
It ignited in the syringe like a liquid firecracker, thrashing through the brown, watery sky in its maroon magnificence. I was prepared to throw that firecracker into my bloodstream to re-explode in my
brain, and I pushed the enigmatic fluid into my arm. I pushed and heard the deep hinges of the iron door opening, and wild wind swept through my hair. The vein bled as soon as I removed the needle. I wiped the blood away with the alcohol swab, and within seconds felt a tsunami of fire burning through my body. It was so hot, so good, wrapping me and holding me, clenching my spine, swirling to the tips of my tongue with such a pure, exquisite euphoria. This was the ultimate—the alpha and the omega.
There was no waiting, and the high was so much more intense than skin popping. This was it, the key to life, and I would never live without it again. In a crashing sound of cosmic bliss through the iron door, God returned. The room swirled around as God held me and cradled my body in his endless arms and gently covered my skin in tender kisses. Sweet and sublime, the sounds of each song in his voice told me everything was going to be all right. He rocked me like he had done in the womb and I was bathed in white light, never to return to the world without that tender armor.
I believed the feeling in that moment contained more peace than some people experience in an entire lifetime. I could smell and taste life all around me. God danced through me, making love to my cells, flesh, and bones, and our souls united again and again. In that moment I was the most powerful human being who ever existed. That odd smell returned to me, burnt cinnamon and ash, but I ceased to worry about its origin. My eyes shut and I went back to the place I had come from, back to the beginning of the music. If it hadn’t been for my loyal heart pumping my blood, I would gladly have died in that moment. I would be okay with leaving Earth and my body because I was finally satisfied and felt finished. Like warm winds in a summer dusk, the feelings slowly escaped my bloodstream and mind.
I had found a new hobby, but I had to keep it a secret. I knew the spot on my body I would hit again like a dog marking its territory. That fat vein below my biceps, where my arm bent, was the target. The more heroin I used, the more I needed to work, because I was burning through money. I had to pick up an extra shift at Gabriel’s to be able to afford my new hobby. I never had any reservations about
using at work. I believed nobody really noticed if I was high because I had such amazing control over my physical functions. I imagine a few people at work knew something was not quite right with me, but it was New York City and everyone was eccentric and unique, with their own set of bizarre baggage. I felt a sick sort of pride taking orders from the overprivileged, rich Upper East Siders while ruined on heroin. My dirty secret contaminated their perfect, crystal-clear, wine-glassy lives, poking their enchanting dinner conversation with a needle.
One day we had a particularly full Saturday brunch. The weekend brunches were busy from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Table after table would fill up with a thunderous wave of demanding New Yorkers yapping about their hangovers and eggs. I had been so swamped with customers that I hadn’t left my station in hours. I was wearing a dirty but pressed white Ralph Lauren button-up polo shirt and a solid green apron that tied tightly around my body. In our apron pockets we fit our mandatory sterling-silver wine keys, pens, and pads of paper to take orders. However, my apron had other things in it. I had a used spoon, stained from cooking, and a syringe.
A few times during a mad rush I had almost pulled out the syringe to write an order with, and it had almost spilled out on the table while I was searching for my wine key. I usually tried holding off on using until after my shift was over, but on that day my feet ached and I was consumed with terrible anxiety. Earlier I had messed up a table’s order and forgot to enter a customer’s item, and he had to wait forty-five minutes for an omelet. I couldn’t handle it anymore and asked a coworker to cover my tables, telling her I had to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was pristine, with a huge mirror and wallpaper that had an exaggerated flower pattern on it. I used the sink counter as my table and prepared my own omelet.
I had to do this quickly, because being away from my section for a few minutes could alter the course of the day, and it would take hours to fix a mistake. I cooked the liquid in my spoon, smelling the sweet bouquet of heroin rise over the aroma of pumpkin waffles and coffee. I rolled up my white sleeves to reveal that beautiful vein, the
median cephalic vein that swells up through the skin on our arms. My veins were like a dazzling gold mine ready for digging, I held the syringe and saw myself stick it into my arm in the huge wall mirror. I felt regret for a minute, with my whole body contained in the reflection, seeing myself first as a boy, hopelessly trying to be a champion in the number-one spot in gymnastics, then flashing to the present time: a sad man in a busy Upper East Side restaurant, with all the world outside the door, eating, laughing, and enjoying life.
I wasn’t paying attention to my craftsmanship, and I pushed the needle too far into my arm and felt a large pain. I went too deep that time, and tried again. I slanted the needle, concentrating on my precision, gently entering the needle, painlessly, like a professional, and there we went—we had liftoff. I pulled the wild, colored blood back into the swampy brown heroin. This heroin was gonna be good because it was darker than normal, almost blackish. I pushed the liquid into my vein, sending a surge of energy throughout my limbs, and that memory of me as a boy vanished. I didn’t need to be an Olympian or a college graduate, because now I was Hercules, strong and powerful, beautiful and eternal.
There was a huge bang on the door, and I remembered my tables. I had to get back out there, now. I didn’t wipe the blood from my arm, but simply rolled down my sleeves, broke the tip of the needle so nobody could prick themselves, wrapped it in toilet paper, and threw it in the trash. I flushed the wax paper and heroin remains down the toilet: a sad good-bye as they swirled and spun to their death. I ran back out in an opiate haze.
Two new table groups sat down with smiles, happy that their hour-long wait for brunch was over. I couldn’t believe people would wait that long for food. I pulled out my pen and started to take their order when I saw that, through my dirty, pressed, white tuxedo shirt, my blood was starting to seep through. The blood was brilliant, like a Rorschach test a psychologist would show to his patients. “What does this blot tell you, doctor?” It bled through the white shirtsleeve, perfectly over the top of my vein, forming a nice maroon pool.
I was distracted by the smiling girl’s order for “seven-grain toast . . . and I would like jam, not that strawberry jam, I want something different, like peach, raspberry, or blueberry, or something nice.”
Of course you do, sweetie
, I thought to myself.
Would you like a bloodstain on your toast as well, ma’am?
How I wanted to drip blood on the table to ruin their perfect breakfast. But I held it together and kept my arm bent to hold back the blood.
The girl’s annoying order for non-strawberry jam gave me an idea. I would just smear some jam on my shirt, over the bloodstain. It wouldn’t look perfect, but it could act as somewhat of an explanation. I took some dark blueberry jam and worked it into the crease where my arm bent, squishing it into the blood. It worked; no more bloodstain, and the blood had finally clotted on its own.
Things at my apartment had been rocky between my roommate and me due to the side effect of my new diet of mainlining heroin following a Xanax, which led me to unconsciousness. My roommate asked me to leave. I stayed with a friend who lived a few streets away, until she too asked me to leave, for the very same reasons. I had become a rare, toxic poison that was quickly absorbed through the pores of those around me. At first people didn’t see it, but when they lived with me, I quickly contaminated their systems.
Once again I had no place to live; but, luckily, one of my coworkers, Kip, told me he had a room available on Forty-seventh Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. I couldn’t believe how perfect that location was, because my drug dealer lived at Forty-ninth and Eleventh. I wouldn’t have to take a cab anymore all the way down from the Upper East Side, and the money I saved on cab fare I could spend on dope. The rent was affordable, and I liked Kip a lot. He was a tall, slender man with a giant smile. Kip and his boyfriend, Keith, were aspiring Broadway actors and wanted to sing on the Big White Way some day. I knew nothing about musicals, and the very thought of them made me cringe.
I moved in with them. They had been together for a long time and had an enthusiastic, fun lifestyle that was nothing like my own. They
gave me my own space, and I would sometimes hang out with them. They had no idea what I was up to, although I would shoot up in their bathroom with only a small, wooden door between us. I could hear them talking and laughing just a few feet away while I was sticking a needle in my arm, then would come out of the bathroom in euphoric oblivion.
Both Kip and Keith knew I had had a problem with drugs, but thought that I had straightened it out long ago. I felt bad about lying to them—they had been so kind, letting me into their living space. But I was too sick and scared to risk losing another place to sleep by telling them the truth. I also liked living in their apartment the most out of all the places I had lived in New York City thus far. It was in the Hell’s Kitchen area and felt more like living in the city than the dreary Upper East Side. The neighborhood felt gritty and cool, mesmerizing to even the most jaded of junkies like myself. I could get high, smoke a cigarette, sit on my stoop, and watch the city unfold for hours.
The energy of Kip and Keith was infectious, and it helped me reevaluate my own life. They were happy together and had been with each other for such a long time. I knew my relationship with Nick would never come around to that stage. I would always be a secret in his life, and I couldn’t live like that anymore. The more he was away, the more I ran to my other boyfriend: heroin. I didn’t know what to do without Nick; he was the perfect guy for me. He put up with my unusual personality and let me entertain my own madness wherever I was. He laughed when I was in a store and squished and broke candy in its package. He knew that if I ever became a millionaire, I would buy a piano just to push it off a cliff to hear the sound it would make as it crashed. Who else would be entertained by such bizarre fantasies?