Crazy Enough (22 page)

Perched on a lamp over my head was a shadow demon. I looked right at it. It looked right at me. It was sooty and pointy and dust-bunny dry, and in the sweetest voice inside my head cooed, “You know, if you were dead, you would not feel this way.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“No. Fuck. You,” It giggled.

I shot up and swung my tingling feet to the floor. Billy smoked at me, his huge, bug-lamp blue eyes hateful. He was holding his guitar still but the room was still loud, the guitar amp crackled and buzzed, threatening serious feedback that would rip the air to pieces.

“I . . . uh . . . I gotta . . .” I couldn't say
go
. I didn't want finality. As lame and mean as everything really was in that place, I wanted someone, anyone, to be there. Even if they hated me. And if I made some permanent-sounding declaration, and he listened, took it to heart, and never wanted to see me again, it would be my fault. My heart hung from itchy threads begging pathetically for Billy to say, “Don't,” or “I'm sorry,” or
anything
. He just stared at me like I was
a permanent disappointment. I pulled on some clothes, slowly, in case he might want to stop me from going off into the dark and cold. When he didn't, I skulked out.

On the street, in that biting, spitting cold that is a specialty of San Francisco Februaries, I would find a place to crash. I had done it before. It was around one in the morning and folks would be closing up the bars on Haight Street soon, people would be headed home and one of them would let me tag along.

I ran into an acquaintance on the street. She was cute, older than me in years and miles, but she had an easy laugh and pot at her house and of course I could crash with her.

Thank god.

At her apartment, she couldn't find the pot but she had some crappy wine I started to guzzle. Maybe she had painkillers? No. I was going to go from clammy to a trembling pile of fucked in a few hours, so I just drank. When the sun came up, I would get back to Billy's, back into his stinking graces; maybe there'd be some chiva left.

The little apartment was very warm. She went into the kitchen to get some more wine and came back wearing a filmy slip.

“You know, I really like my body,” she said, jutting out one pale hip, handing me the bottle.

Uh oh
. “You're totally pretty, yeah,” I said. My teeth were starting to hurt. She pat her hands down her sides.

“Yeah, even if I gain weight, I still have this,” stroking her hands around her small waist and outwards from the ample curve of her ass, “see?”

Her words stretched out. She had a strange, dry lisp that was creeping into her mouth, as if she were talking through a stiff, permanent, wide-open grin. She was on something. Coke? “Here,”
she purred, taking my hands to stroke down her sides, “I've always wanted to kiss you.”

Just a safe place to crash.

I let her kiss me and I tried to reciprocate.

“I want to taste you,” she said. Ugh. I must have been so filthy and smelly. When was the last time I even bathed? And was it before or after Billy and I fucked last? And when the fuck was the last time we fucked?

Even in this unwelcome sexual encounter I concerned myself with whether or not I was going to be yummy? I would have felt sexier had I been flung over a bar toilet in the middle of a plosive intestinal event, reacting to some shit Chinese food.
How the fuck did I get here?

Whatever drug she was on made everything I did (precious little, if I'm remembering correctly) just fine with her. She scratched and bit and made a big scene about how she was gonna fuckin' come, yeah!!!!

Ugh.

Naked and stinging, I crawled into her bed and faced the wall with my back to her. She slid under the blankets and fiddled around with me from behind while I stayed dead still.

I'm asleep. Get bored and leave me alone.

My skin crawled all over, but I wasn't shaking yet and there was a purple hint of morning in the apartment. In no time she will be unconscious and I will get the fuck out of there . . .

Keys in the door?

I'm staring into the wall, my ears growing hot from aching towards the sound of someone coming into the apartment. Tossing keys onto a table. Jacket coming off, the flumping sound as it gets tossed onto the floor. She is in bed with me but isn't moving. Footsteps
into the bedroom then, “
Hmmm
.” It's a man's voice making a what-do-we-have-here? hum, a happy surprise. Then, a shirt being pulled off, the slip and leather squeaks of a belt being pulled open, big boots thumping off of big feet, then a zip of a fly and jeans. I could smell the salt and deodorant and cigarette funk of skin in close proximity as he crawled over us pulling the blanket down to reveal a she, whom I am guessing was his girlfriend, and a naked stretch of unsuspecting me, a new girl.

This
must
be his apartment because I am now paying rent to his cock. This is what I had to do. I was sitting somewhere in my skull, arms crossed, with a mix of pity and pissed-offness at my sad-sack existence. Twenty-two years old and I'm blowing another random dude, not for a semblance of affection, not for drugs, not even because he was cute. I never even saw his face. I drew my aching mouth around this stranger so I could stay somewhere warm.

The girl is suddenly awake and screaming: “What the? Don't assume you can . . . you can,” she was screeching at him, slapping at his naked torso. He let go of my hair. I flopped back onto the bed and froze.

“Get out!” She slapped him out of the bed.

“Agh! You crazy bitch! A'right, a'right! Fuck! Ow!” He was trying to get his clothes off the floor as she smacked him on top of the head. She threw herself out of the bed to continue verbally assailing the guy into the living room. I braced myself for what might happen after the guy left. She was now awake and in a complete state of meltdown.

I'm asleep.

The door slammed open then shut, the shouting stopped, but her dramatic sobbing rasped in the next room.

I'm asleep.

She screamed something and glass smashed. A bottle? She padded her way back into the bedroom, moaning and crying.

I'm asleep. I'm asleep. I'm asleep.

She sobbed and keened in bed next to me, tried to hold me, but I was a dead heap. I am asleep. After awhile she finally wound down and blacked out. I was crawling and starting to shake a bit, hard to say if I was sick, or just in shock at the utter catastrophe my life had become.

When the sun came up, I got dressed quickly and quietly. Scraped a pile of quarters off her dresser and took the bus down Haight to my apartment.

I had my own room in a flat, catty-corner to Billy's. I never had my keys with me because I was always at Billy's place, but I lived with a nice couple. She was a gorgeous mom-to-be, who worked for an organic juice company, and he was a handyman who sold speed on the side. I knew they'd be home and awake by now, so they could buzz me in.

As I stood on my stoop, waiting for the buzzer to open the gate, I looked up the hill to Billy's door. He was probably high and asleep. No idea where I was and not the slightest inkling of a shit did he give about it. Neither had I, obviously.

Later, alone in my drafty bedroom, the sick came over me, and I remember thinking,
Whoa, this is bad. Not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, though.
Like that desperate, quaking skin wave before a bad case of food poisoning, just a little while longer here and it will all be behind me.

My stomach felt suspended in a sick, cold gel and the thunkathunk of my heartbeat sent waves of sick through it and
down to my sweating bowels. Just a little while longer though. Home stretch. Atta girl, almost there.

Then it got worse.

Each itchy hair scraped out of every oily follicle, stiff and splintered across every aching stretch and fold of skin. My face was stuck in a dry heave “ugh” around my dried, fat tongue that sat in my mouth like a pantyhose toe stuffed with bark dust. I shook on the bathroom floor, clammy, spooning the toilet. Out of the corner of my tearing eye, I saw the demon staring from lip of the tub. Long, dark fingers folded around its knobby knees, beetle-black eyes flat, emotionless, superior.

Gotcha.

At some point, I no longer had to choose between cleaning up my own balsamic diarrhea, or foamy puke. Both my ends were endlessly leaking and spurting, but were now shooting blanks. I somehow smeared my damp body down the hallway into my bedroom. It all gets foggy from there, save for the pain and the humiliation.

Trying to get into my bed was a nightmare. Anything that touched me sent a crazy acid-splash sensation that shocked my nerves. Satin, worn raw silk, even a baby's breath would have felt like electrified razor wire. My skin felt like it had been burnt crisp and I was smeared with rancid peanut butter and piss. I stank, and everything hurt.

Adding to that agony was the bone-aching ocean cold that my walls and windows did nothing to keep out. Blankets weren't enough of a barrier between me and the cold, so I pulled whatever was around from the floor to cover myself: towels, jackets, and dirty laundry. I must've looked like a sick, milky slug, some hollow-eyed larvae of
a huge, meat-eating moth, all slime and twitching under my dank cocoon of rags.

All I wanted was to go to sleep and wake up better.

Junkies pray a lot, I think. They pray for an easy score, they pray for money, and not to get busted. I just wanted to be knocked out. So I prayed. Hard. To God, even.

God, please let me sleep. Knock me out, or kill me, please, God.

I was sure I wouldn't know the difference between sleeping and dying at that point, I just wanted out of my body and brain. Even my tears stank, leaking out of me like cheap salad dressing.

Then someone got into bed with me.

The bed shifted under their weight and a warm, bodily presence pressed into my back. I turned quick and blinked through the dark behind me, gone, like a blown-out birthday candle. There was a soft hum in my ear, like a fan in another room. “Please come back,” I said into the dark.

Please come back
. . .

The warmth flowed back into my bed, surrounding me. My shaking calmed down and my breathing evened out. I was warm, softening; the edges were blurring and fading.

I soon fell into a sweet, purple sleep. When I woke up again, a few days later, I wasn't better, but I was on my way.

It wasn't long after that the phone rang.

“Stormy?”

“Mom? Hi . . . hello?” I don't know how my mother even had my number, or what she was thinking when she called. But she called at around the exact moment I could form a coherent sentence.

I didn't tell anyone, for a long time, about my run-in with heroin.
It was too embarrassing. I know some people knew what was going on, but once I was clear of Billy and the Demons, nobody brought it up. I especially didn't tell anyone in my family, I hadn't even been in touch with them for months, my mom for even longer.

“I just need to know you're all right,” she said after an awkward silence.

“I'm fine, Mom. I'm fine.”

A
lot of performers, famous, infamous, and anonymous, get into drugs as part of their job. Truthfully, there are plenty of drunks and drug-addled perverts in every vocation, but for some, it's a prerequisite to be high in order to be creative. Like the drugs will make them a subversive, freewheeling genius, or something. It doesn't help that a lot of people think that all
good
art comes from an altered consciousness. It's a tough argument, because so many artists were and are totally fucked up, yet produce some outstanding stuff. However, you might be able to take the drugs away from the artist and the art would still be cool. To put it another way, you could take a talentless hack, give them the best drugs known to man, and they'd still suck.

Bone straight, or chemically twisted, it's a crazy fucking job.