Authors: Dirk Wittenborn
“Growing up with Casper.”
My father stepped back from me like I had just stabbed him. “What in God’s name did you tell them?”
My mother could tell something had gone wrong from the expression on my father’s face. When he told her what I’d done, she looked at me like she wished I’d gone to Vietnam and gasped, “What have you done?”
NOVEMBER 1992
W
hat have you done?
Twenty-one years later, Z was still trying to figure that out. At the moment, he lay sleeping on his stomach, face stuck to the mattress tag of his unsheeted bed. Z’s snore was loud and strangely melodious. The hole his addiction had burned in his septum had turned his head into a pipe organ.
The room he was confined in was small and barren and smelled of chlorine. Just a bed and a footlocker. Sheets and a towel were brought in once a week; he used the towel but did not bother to make his bed. He had done that a long time ago. He accepted his punishment, and at the moment was attempting to sleep through it.
A TV, supported by chains from the ceiling in the corner, had been on all night. Sometimes, when he left it glowing, his dreams would be interrupted by voices from his past. He’d open his eyes and see old friends on chat shows promoting their latest movie, book, or noble cause. Before his lockup, the sight of them used to make him feel envious and lonely, and prompted him to call their unlisted numbers in the middle of the night “to catch up.”
The awkward and prolonged silences that passed for conversation were far more embarrassing than the quick snub. Even if Z’s confinement for these last months had included a phone, he knew there was no catching up. Two nights ago he heard his old friend and fellow drug fiend Belushi yelling at him. When he opened his eyes, he saw it was just
The Blues Brothers
on Channel 4. He did not think of his friends as dead so much as “missing in action.”
This morning he had heard a novelist he’d been engaged to in another life tell
Good Morning America,
“Z and I were never that close. But I do hope he’s getting help with his demons.”
Z was awake now. He tried to begin each day with a positive thought. He said it out loud, “If you like superficial people, you can’t blame them when they’re superficial to you.” He sounded like Homer. Lying on his back, belly-up in his boxer shorts, his skin was the color of a frog who had slept in formaldehyde. Even though he’d lost most of the weight he’d gained from the sugar in the one (usually two) bottles of white wine he used to consume each night to come down from the cocaine, Z was still as bloated as two-day-old roadkill.
Sitting up, examining himself in the mirror, he thought,
What
has happened to you?
The easy answer was cocaine. The hard one he’d yet to figure out. As he ate breakfast—Kit Kat bar, Diet Coke, and a Marlboro Light—he remembered the day his father had told him, “I just don’t want you to look in the mirror one day when you’re forty and say, ‘You bastard, you. Look what you’ve done to me’.” At age thirty-eight, Z was two years ahead of his father’s schedule.
Once, not so many years ago, Zach Friedrich had been, in the parlance of the eighties, “happening.” He owned a loft in Tribeca—paid for with the screenplay he had written of his first novel, which he never got over not being produced, and did studio rewrites that allowed him a room at the Chateau Marmont and a leased BMW. Now all his possessions fit into the footlocker at the end of the mattress. It was empty except for some old clothes and a laptop crowded with megabytes of the cliché he had become: pitches and scripts no one wanted to read, and first paragraphs of novels he’d been too high to write.
As Z finished the last of his Kit Kat, he reached for a pen and crossed off yesterday on his calendar. Not being overly optimistic with regard to his cure, Z waited till the day was over before he credited himself with making it through another twenty-four hours without fucking up. There were fifty-seven Xs preceding the one he had just made: 1,392 hours without cocaine. The first few hundred were Spanish Inquisition hard. He had felt like he had poison ivy on the surface of his brain, a fiery rash of anxiety he could not balm and thereby control with a numbing, cooling snort of powdered distraction.
It was the feeling of control, the mastery of feeling, an on-off switch you could trust to turn on the lights inside you that he was addicted to. He knew now why the lab monkeys he’d watched with his dad bit into their own flesh when the alkaloid anaesthetic had ceased to flow—the sharpness of your own teeth, the pain you inflicted on yourself, was preferable to the helplessness of life in a cage.
At the beginning of his withdrawal, Z railed at the world and its hypocrisy, damned his friends who had traded lines with him at parties he was no longer invited to, and cursed lovers who made small talk about his being “such a waste of potential” while they continued to get wasted.
A few weeks earlier, day twenty-nine of his incarceration to be exact, he had had his second epiphany in the long-drawn-out end of his romance with cocaine. After 697 hours without his lover, Z was able to see that the intimate strangers of his life had not turned on him because he was a drug fiend. They understood addictions. He now saw it was pure narcissism that had inspired him to imagine that he had been spurned because of his contempt for the money and success. What his world wouldn’t accept was that he ceased to be able to laugh at it
with
them. Worse, he had felt superior for burning the bridge while he was still standing on it. No question, a drug addict who wants the world at moral attention is a boring thing.
Now, on the morning of day fifty-eight, Z’s brain no longer itched. It had been over a week since the urge to distract himself from his longing with a blast of dopamine had made him bite his knuckle and imagine eating one of his hands, i.e., he no longer wanted to trade his cage for that of the lab monkey with unlimited access to cocaine.
Which is not to say Z was entirely comfortable feeling human.
It took all his energy to pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt. He was wondering if a second Diet Coke would give him enough of a caffeine boost to get moving when his mind treated him to a third epiphany—the hardest part of giving up drugs, of escaping the alternate/synthetic universe of addiction, is not the cold turkey, the physical withdrawal from the drugs and the people he shared them with. The hardest and scariest part was figuring out how he was going to reenter and navigate life without the certainty that comes when you are misguided enough to believe that all you have to do to feel your lover’s embrace is to reach into your pocket for a gram. How do you replace longing once that, too, has deserted you?
Z felt old. Back when his brain was still itching, he had had panic attacks, shortness of breath that made him hyperventilate till the numbness moved up his arms, and his brain told him he was having a heart attack. He reminded himself of his father, checking his pulse two and three times a day to see if he was still alive.
He was checking it now. His heartbeat seemed irregular, or was that just his imagination? He knew he had damaged himself. The only question was how much was permanent. Except for getting tested for AIDS—negative—Z had not been to a doctor in seven years. Z smiled at the thought that at thirty-eight, he was old enough to remember that once upon a time sex was safe and cocaine wasn’t addictive. He wondered how he would go forth alone into the brave new world of the 1990s.
The prison Z had chosen to detox himself in was a thatched-roof pool house on an estate that had once belonged to the Ortleys. The bars on the windows had been installed to break the townies of the habit of breaking in and stealing the TV when the twins and their family went south for Christmas break. Lucy owned the place now. She’d moved in a few months after the car accident that had killed Nigel and their baby.
The “good news,” as he heard his father once say, was that Lucy was alive and Nigel had turned out to be a surf bum with a very large trust fund. Lucy was seriously rich, and she used her money to help her escape the sadness of her stillborn life by adopting children no one wanted.
She had five. Eleven-year-old Leila, an Afghani with blue eyes and the nose of Alexander the Great was four when she lost her leg, six when Lucy adopted her. Annabel, twelve, was born in Colombia with a harelip. Lulu, fifteen, was the child of a Cambodian sex worker. Alistair was a blond nine-year-old whose parents were Swiss heroin addicts. William, sixteen, named after Friedrich, was tall, black, handsome, and almost totally deaf. His parents were killed in the Soweto riots by the South African police. Lucy had always had a fondness for damaged creatures, starting with Z.
Z heard the key turning in his lock—exercise time. He looked up through the bars of his windows as he tied his left sneaker and cursed. The sun was shining and the sky was as cloudless and unweathered and blue as a computer screen. It was easier to muster his lethargy into a run if it were cold, or rainy, or better yet, both. Z liked the feeling that he was being punished, even if he had to do it himself.
The door swung open with a creak. Usually, Lucy unlocked the door for her brother, but today his jailer was Leila. “Mom says I’m supposed to take you for your run this morning.”
She stood in the doorway, backlit by the morning sun. Tall, slim, and sharp as a spear, she’d never worn a skirt because a land mine had blessed her with a plastic leg. Leila eyed her uncle with curiosity and mistrust. After a moment, the girl added with a backward glance, “I brought my bike so I could keep up with you.” It was a girl’s mountain bike that she’d just gotten for her birthday.
“I think the question is, can I keep up with you?”
“I’ll go slow.” Of all Lucy’s children, Leila was Z’s favorite, perhaps because she didn’t trust him, perhaps because she was the most obviously damaged. Whatever, the sight of her made him feel ashamed for feeling sorry for himself. It was Z’s idea to be locked in. When he had first shown up on his sister’s palatial doorstep fifty-seven days earlier, he had been rightfully fearful that his craving for powdered companionship would torch his resolve, drive him to borrow, aka steal, a car. Or, if the keys were hidden, hitch a ride into the city in search of a line of relief.
His parents had no idea Z was less than three miles down the road. They hadn’t talked on the phone in almost a year, and it had been longer than that since they’d stood in the same room. Their last conversation dealt with a check for a thousand dollars Friedrich had cashed for their son. It was still bouncing.
Z had arrived on Lucy’s doorstep in September. The pool had just been drained. Hidden behind the stables, shielded from the main house by a stand of pines and a tennis court, Lucy and her children were the only ones who knew Z had come home to put himself under house arrest.
Z’s sneakers were laced now, his stocking cap pulled low over his ears and unwashed hair. Leila stood in the doorway and watched him as he stretched out his hamstrings by perching his toes on the back of a dictionary.
“Mom thinks now that you’re better, you should have this.” The girl limped toward him and offered the key on the flat of her hand, fingers pressed tight together, the way you would offer a carrot to an animal that bites. If his sister had handed him the key, he would have said he wasn’t ready. Embarrassed to be so fearful in front of a child who had been told she was lucky to have a stump below the knee, Z took the key.
He tried to distract himself from shame with polite conversation. “How’s Alistair doing?” Alistair was born addicted to heroin. He was now getting over the measles.
“He thinks you’re a werewolf.”
Z growled and made a scary face. Leila didn’t laugh. “What do you think?”
“Mom says you have a substance abuse problem.”
“Your mother’s being polite. I was, I am, I always will be a drug addict.” Z remembered hearing at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting he had attended a few years back that admitting you were powerless over what you longed for was the first step to recovery. The reality that need was a life sentence was so depressing he had left the meeting halfway through to cop an eighth. He still had money then.
Z was remembering that the drug dealer he’d gone to lived on Mulberry Street, and he used to feed live mice to his pet snake. Z had stopped stretching to recall the dealer’s name when Leila asked, “Why did you take drugs in the first place?”
“Cocaine made me think I was smart and brave and . . . funny.” Curiously, he had never taken any of the drugs his father’d worked on. No pharmaceuticals, likewise no heroin, no methamphetamine, just cocaine (snorted, never booted or freebased). He used to joke that he used cocaine homeopathically. It didn’t seem so funny now.
“Why did you stop?”
“It stopped making me feel good.” Z didn’t feel like having this conversation with an eleven-year-old. He wanted to start his run.
But Leila had sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled up her pant leg to readjust her prosthetic shin and foot. The scars on her stump looked red and angry. “How’d it make you feel?” She took a small bottle of baby powder out of her pocket and dusted her stump.
“Sick.”
“If it made you feel sick, why didn’t you stop sooner?”
It was the obvious question, the one neither Lucy nor the psychiatrist she took him to see once a week at the outpatient drug clinic in Summit had thought to ask. As long as his blood test showed no sign of the demon, they thought he was making progress. Even if they had asked him, he would have lied. Leila’s stump merited the truth. “The truth is, I didn’t realize how sick I was until I got a postcard from an old friend.”