Here’s What I Don’t Say
I’M IN Jeff’s bedroom. There’s porn on the TV and Jeff’s wife, Arlene, is talking about a threesome after we get high. It’s a tempting offer but I’ve just loaded enough coke and heroin into a syringe to kill a rhino. I know it’s too much. Know, too, that I will be leaving my mother to care for my kids, their mother long gone, already on her own death march. I sit on the edge of Jeff’s saggy bed, looking at that clear liquid in the thin plastic cylinder with its thick black numbers, rolling the syringe between two fingers, hoping that I will feel the weight of my decision, the lifetime of suffering I will cause. But I don’t feel anything and I stick the needle in my arm and press the plunger and watch as the world gets very bright and then washes out and even though I am still breathing there are no thoughts in my head, only a siren that keeps getting louder and louder, and I see the things around me but cannot name them and I have no idea where or who I am.
TWO YEARS later, I pick up Ed at Logan Airport. We drive through the city’s maze of narrow streets. He takes in the weathered cars and crowded rows of triple-deckers, mostly brown or green or gray, their little square lawns host to neglected shrubs and the occasional scrawny tree. Well, Ed says, it’s not home. But at least you can smell the ocean. I smile. We’re life-long friends, using buddies turned recovering addicts. Him first. Then me. We don’t talk about it. But he saved my life. Dragged my sorry ass to detox when I wanted to die.
We show up at one of the recovery meetings I attend, where I’ve been asked to speak to celebrate my second anniversary clean. I talk about moving from Philadelphia to Boston, pitching the idea of a little adventure to the kids. On most days, I feel grateful to be alive. Lucky, I say, looking at Ed, who sits next to me in this dank church basement, its cheap paneled walls draped with bright banners that praise Jesus. I hopeful, I say, but I’m also struggling with my past. Can’t seem to let it go. It eats at me. I hate myself for the things I’ve done and wonder if I will ever feel better. The night that Kathy K. overdosed on Valium and Tuinal in my mother’s bathroom is often on my mind. Instead of calling an ambulance, my friends and I, just teenagers at the time, dropped her on her father’s doorstep. She survived. But leaving her to die has left me feeling like I don’t deserve the life that I’m living. Kathy K. almost didn’t get a second chance. Why should I? There are the countless times when I used nail files to sharpen dull needles or fired up cotton shots, always thick with cut, pure poison running through my veins, the kids fast asleep in the bedroom next to mine. I was willing to do anything to get high and the desperation disgusts me. One night, the kids’ mother and I, wasted on Quaaludes and whiskey and driving down a four-lane highway, fought about spending the rent money on meth. To settle the argument, I swung the car into the oncoming lanes, somehow missing the approaching traffic but sailing off an embankment into the woods below. I totaled the car and destroyed a tree. We both walked away unscathed. That time, the kids weren’t with us. But how often did I drive with them when I was blind drunk? They must have known that Daddy wasn’t well, yet what choice did they have but to get in? I had no business having kids, I say. I’ve fucked them up.
