I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (34 page)

My friend’s husband obviously knew I was high. I couldn’t hide it. But he didn’t say anything before he left. I lay on the bed trying to calm my heart. I had to have sex. But how? The sun on the bay was no longer sacred but seemed to curdle it, boiling it now in my vision. Would more of the hallucinations I knew were on the way be enough to satisfy me?

Archie crawled up under a chair and cried some more.

Teddy, confused, took it all in.

I told them both I was going to be okay.

But I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay.

I was drowning in the bath of light.

The sun shone brighter inside my body than outside on the bay.

Lucifer had come for me once again.

He had come.

This time he wasn’t going to leave unless he took me with him.

*   *   *

The narrative of what took place inside my body over the next three days would take up as many pages as this whole book. I shot up once with that same needle after I tore up the apartment trying to find another one when I needed to feel even higher. I stayed up for almost four days. The hallucinations of Lucifer and all his minions of light became more and more pronounced, more and more magnificent.

But this time it became much deeper than that, for I had never visited him in his realm. He and his minions had only visited me in mine. This time he had come to take me to his home and, in so doing, force my earthly death to occur. He had through my addiction been seductively biding his time until he sensed I was ready to be taken. Addiction was the vehicle he used to arrive; it would now be the one he would use to take me away with him.

Call it an overdose.

Call it a near-death experience.

I only know it was the most blissful, most peaceful, most astonishing experience I’ve ever had in this life because it wasn’t of this life.

The top of the apartment disappeared. The moon and stars became more beautiful and brighter because the sky became darker, inkier, more vast. The wharf unanchored from the beach. And slowly, ever so slowly, it, and I along with it, drifted out into the bay and then into … yes … another realm. I was aware of going through a scrim-like membrane of some kind. All was mist. The air changed. My breathing did also—or, more precisely, the lack of it. The sound of lapping water overcame me. We circled slowly in a vortex. Other vessels of light accompanied us. I was standing completely still. Lucifer’s loving light-filled presence was behind me—hovering—guiding it all. Round and round we went. Round. And round. The lapping continued. I then felt my body hollow out—no lungs, no shit, no shame, was needed anymore. Then: no body. All that was left was feeling. And yet no nerve endings. Just ending, ending, endlessness. A sense of freedom. An utter lack of terror. “It’s dying twice a day. I’d never thought of it that way. It is a practice of dying—what it’s like to get rid of the ideas, the desires, the body even.” And, yet, though circling, we were also moving forward. It’s how completely still I had felt on the Camino as I walked on and on and on. There was an exquisite incongruity that kept gathering about me and I was there at its dead center as I had been that night I stood so close to Love. Severn’s letter about Keats’s death I had read only days before floated into being. I felt each word. I became each word. “He is gone—he died with the most perfect ease—he seemed to go to sleep. On the 23rd, about 4, the approaches of death came on. ‘Severn—I—lift me up—I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—be firm, and thank God it has come!’” At “God” the vessels of light closed in as if to attack. The sound of the lapping became louder with their approach. Lucifer’s more powerful light waved them off. I felt him smile; his presence behind me wafted with it. I felt his own feelings meld with mine. Go on, we felt together. Had this been the way he’d come for Keats? Once more I wondrously became each word. “I lifted him up in my arms. The phlegm seemed boiling in his throat, and increased until 11, when he gradually sunk into death—so quiet—that I still thought he slept. I cannot say now—I am broken down from four nights’ watching, and no sleep since, and my poor Keats gone. Three days since, the body was opened; the lungs were completely gone.”

*   *   *

I felt that if we got to where we were going I would never make it back. And yet I did not panic. I conveyed to the Luciferian light that I knew it was an angel above all else. It was to its goodness I surrendered. And that was when a kind of confusion occurred, a disruption in the forward motion, that moment Lucifer and I became soul mates because I acknowledged he had one, felt it with all my being, which was all I was at that point. His light wasn’t angry with me but greeted this knowledge I had of it with gratitude. And that is when we reversed course in the vortex, for it wasn’t rejection the light was feeling. It was rejoicing in being understood. Had this been its mission all along? For me to see my addiction as evil but not myself as such, just as the role given by God to this Angel of Light was to be conceived by us on earth as evil even though it was not itself? We crossed back through the scrim. The mist gave way to the beach again where I lived. The wharf was reattached to its mooring. The ceiling alighted above me. I heard it latch into place as the sky itself did, its stars less bright, less numerous, less. My lungs, gasping, lunged with air.

And yet a veil of sadness—such sadness—instantly descended upon me. The light itself was saddened to be back in my realm, especially when he noticed the Bible there on my desk my mother had given to me the last Christmas she was alive. He silently commanded I remove it from his presence, but I refused. He actually cowered at my refusal at first. Was shocked by it. Then a great exalted anger girded him. I grinned at it. At him. I said aloud, “My goodness is a part of me. Deeply a part. I will not deny it. Especially in your presence. It is why you came for me. But your goodness is part of you. Deeply a part. You cannot deny it. It is why you brought me back.” His anger dissipated. Disappeared. He hovered more closely to me. The smell of my flesh seemed to soothe him as his own slightly sulfuric scent did me. Indeed, the meth itself once inside one’s body has a slightly pungent, sulfuric odor. Was that what he was smelling? Himself? Was that what I was smelling? Me?

We both knew that this final visit had taken a surprising turn for us both. We felt we were being melded for eternity when instead we were letting each other go. Before he left me he had one final gift to bestow upon me. A magnificent narrative began to play out in the immense storm clouds that erupted over Provincetown in which he allowed me to visualize the whole future I had given up with him and his minions in his realm that turned out to be not hell at all but a kind of alternate heaven. He entrusted me with these visions and I will never reveal them, but they were filled with ecstatic carnality and camaraderie. There was rapture to them. Regality as well as ribaldry. Lewdness. A soil-less soulful earthiness. There was a Greco-Roman manner to the dominion over which he ruled. There were chariots. Much was chiseled. Everyone felt chosen.

I went out on the wharf to take in the vast panoply of it all and allowed my friend next door in his cottage and my neighbors on the wharf and anybody who walked by on the beach below to witness the grief I began to feel at the loss of all this, even though I knew they could not see what I was seeing there displayed above me. I began to sob uncontrollably at my sense of loss.

That was what was so astounding about this last time I have, so far, used drugs—the shamelessness I had about it. The public display of it all. I had learned how to hide when I shot up meth. I knew how to lock a door and have sex with strangers I’d most likely never see again. But this was completely different. I have called it an exorcism when trying to explain it to incredulous friends as I’ve attempted to describe that abject grief I was feeling on the wharf that day when I stood at the end of it saying good-bye not only to the Angel of Light and his many minions but also to the addict I had become. Yet an exorcism implies evil was being disgorged and this was far from evil. This was generous. Transcendent. The addict in me had died the night before when I was being taken. That was Lucifer’s truest lasting gift to me. He had absorbed back into himself that part of me that he had used to reveal himself to me and was letting me, reborn, live a little longer in my own realm. His mission was complete. I was saying good-bye that day not only to him but also to myself. Just as I had to grieve for my parents and for my HIV-negative life, I was grieving that day for the addict, no longer active, who was joining them. So alone out there on the wharf, I had found a way to preserve my own life. But, like my little brother so long ago taking aim, I had to kill something to do it.

This is what I’ve learned from my battle with addiction and its welcoming of the Angel of Light. Lucifer—as we so nominally label him—is not bad. There is, for certain, a playful vulgarity about him with which he likes to goad God. Lucifer can find enjoyment in being a bit mean as he toys with you. Takes pleasure in his power even as he’s frustrated at not being the ultimate source of it. But there is also a grand streak of benevolence in him. I came to understand that he has no choice but to play the role God created for him to play. His existence is God’s will. In that, Lucifer is God’s servant. That is his faithfulness and not his fallenness.

I know now it wasn’t the angel this whole time I’d been looking to fuck but the devil I’d been learning to love. For one can’t completely love God until one loves the Devil too. Their divinity lies not in their division but in their duality, their abiding bond. I will be forever grateful that Lucifer too showed me such love at the end and enlightened me with it. He told me early on that the key to joy is disobedience. Through his patience with me—through his presence, through his teaching, through God’s love manifested through him toward me—I came to disobey the dictates of my addiction.

I miss him.

*   *   *

I should have known there would be consequences from such a binge and such a display on the wharf. My friend who was allowing me to stay in his apartment there was more than concerned; he was deeply angry. He felt rightfully betrayed by me, his kindness taken for granted. His witnessing, which I allowed, much of my hallucinatory state must have scared him immeasurably. No. There was a measurement of it—he told me he was throwing me out and explained to me that he couldn’t chance my dying in his apartment. I then tried to explain to him, in turn, I had nowhere to go. But he was adamant. He wanted me out. He told me to leave immediately and find a couch of some other friend to crash on. He insisted that I could not spend one more night in his place. “Just get out. I want you out tonight,” he calmly stated. Any empathy he had had for me had been replaced with disappointment, even disdain. I had learned enough in my almost six months of sobriety not to step into his anger and reflect it back at him. I absorbed it instead. I was now a poverty-stricken, desperate meth addict. I was now homeless.

I begged him to let me stay that night. He relented. The next day mutual friends of ours lobbied him to give me at least a week to figure out where I could go. I will always be grateful that he showed a bit of pity on me once he calmed down and allowed me that. But he wanted all my stuff out of his apartment on the wharf and back in the one he had initially rented for me next door. So yet again I had to make a move. He also was railing at me to check into rehab as soon as possible, as other friends were suggesting. But I had no money for that. I was down to a few hundred dollars in my bank account, even though, like the addict I was, I’d spent a hundred of it to buy the meth a few days before. I was even skipping meals to save money. No one seemed to understand what dire financial straits I was in as well as emotional ones. I even considered suicide for the first time in that following week. It scared me, since I’d never had such thoughts before. They weren’t dramatic ones. Or even desperate ones. That was what was so scary about them. They were rational ones. It seemed a solution to my predicament. I was so tired of being such a burden to myself and others. But I was a survivor, I finally decided. I would figure out what I had to do next. I wasn’t dead. That was the whole point of the last few days. I had been brought back from the brink of death. Was I now going to kill myself? Was that Lucifer’s endgame all along? No, I concluded. Death was the destination we all reached. It had not been mine yet. For that I was grateful. I was, yes, alive. I would stay that way.

As I was packing up my stuff for the move next door during the sunrise the next morning—I had been unable to sleep—I found a tiny Ganesha that the woman who had been wearing a pendant of one had given me for my birthday back in March. I held it in my palm and wondered why he had forsaken me for those four days. The rising sun bathed him in a crimson glow as I sat rubbing his tiny trunk and coming to the realization that he had not. He had simply stood back and allowed that last battle for my soul to occur so we could start together with a clean slate. That God–Lucifer continuum that my Western life had contained for fifty-six years was an obstacle that had to be removed before a new beginning could commence. That circle had to be completed, and once it had been, Ganesha and I could move beyond it to the even larger concentric one that contained it. “Thank you,” I whispered, and heard, in that moment, the most innocent of giggles. Ganesha’s? I looked at the sunrise over the bay and saw a father a few feet away beneath my window there on the beach with his tiny giggling son. The child was joyfully chasing a seagull whose wings lifted its escape against the reddening sky as if my own father had drawn them there. I knew for the first time as I sat there watching the two of them continue to play with each other right beneath my window that the great search in my life was over. I had been searching for the wrong thing all along. The father I had to discover was not my dead one or his replacement in some sexual sense. He was not a deity. The father I had to discover was the one within myself. And I did not have to give up being the son to find him. That was the final blessing of my addiction. It had delivered me to this destination of being both the father and the son. My sobriety was now my child. It was still in its infancy. I had to protect its innocence with all the loving ferocity that a father feels for his baby boy. I gently folded Ganesha in my palm. I sat and watched the father and son on the beach. I listened now not to the child’s lone giggle but to their shared laughter rising, rising along with the rising wings of the seagull flapping like one magnificent flattened
M
against the rising sun.