Long Past Stopping (24 page)

I went to the square and sat down on the curb and watched the town come alive as hundreds of people started to show up. Some of the passersby would nod at me, say hello, or raise their own bottle, and I would raise mine back and say, “
Salud
.” It was still so hot and I was so zoned out from working all day that I drank the beer a little too quickly again.

While I was on my second one a kid a little older than myself
decided he wanted to practice his English on me. I was feeling the effects of the beer, and I welcomed the company. After the preliminary “Where are you from?” “How do you like Mexico?” and “Can I stay at your house when I visit?” questions, I asked him why everyone was so dressed up. He was looking pretty sharp himself, so he seemed like the right guy to ask.

“It is the richest girl in town's
quinceañera
.”

“Quince-what?” I asked him.

“You no have
quinceañera
? It is very big deal in Mexico. How do you say?” He was thinking hard. “Fifteen birsday,” it came to him. “You want to go?”

“Why not?” I answered, “but,
primero yo necesito un mas cerveza
.” It was amazing how much easier it was to speak Spanish when I was drunk.

“They have all the free cerveza and tequila you could drink over there. I already tell you; this girl is rich.”

Things got hazy very quickly. There was a live band that seemed to know only three songs: “Low Rider,” “La Bamba,” and “Tequila.” Somehow I ended up dancing with the birthday girl, who was as cute as she was rich. She was wearing what looked like a full-on wedding dress and a tiara.

“
¿Que significa ‘La Bamba'?
” I asked her. “What's it about?”

“Nada. No tiene sentido.”

“No comprendo.”
Alcohol may have helped me speak Spanish, but it did nothing in the way of helping me understand it. These people, all of them, spoke so fucking fast.

“No es Espanish,” she attempted.

Holy shit, she was cute, and I was drunk. I had never kissed a girl in my life, and for the first time, the urgency to do so outweighed every other excuse I usually used. Since it was my last night in Mexico, none of my excuses worked anyway—all of them had to do with the possibility of getting rejected and having to see the girl the next day, or worse yet, not getting rejected and having to see her the next day.

Without thinking, I leaned in for a kiss. She turned her head, and I pecked her on the cheek. She was giggling, though.

“
Mi padre está acá,
” she said, nodding in the direction of a group of guys decked out in alligator-skin boots and huge cowboy hats. I tried to connect to the part of myself that should have been very afraid of these people…the voice that would have normally told me to get the fuck out of there, but I couldn't.

“
Vámonos,
” she said, leading me through the crowded dance floor and out to the square. “What is wrong with your hair?”

“My hair?
Yo tengo un problemo con mi pelo.”
I decided telling her I had a disease was counterproductive to what I was trying to accomplish.

“
Me gusta,
” she said, leaning into me.

 

T
HE BAND HAD JUST
finished playing “Tequila” for the
n
th time when, Maria, I think her name was, pushed me away and said, “
Mierda. Me voy
.” She turned around and ran away as fast as her high heels and wedding dress would allow her.

I waited a few minutes before going back in and found her dancing in the middle of the room with her father. The crowd had circled around them and was clapping in time to the music and cheering them on. I made my way to the bar for another free margarita and just kind of lurked around, waiting for another opportunity to hang out with her. She kept glancing at me, but she now had to dance with what seemed like every single guy in the whole town. It was uncomfortable to watch the first girl I had ever kissed dancing with all these young cowboys, which led me to drink more. Starting to feel nauseated, I made my way onto the dance floor and interrupted her long enough to say good-bye.

I was surprised that she actually gave me a hug, and whispered again, “
Me gusta
.”

“
Yo tambien,
” I replied, before turning around to leave.

I walked home, still nauseated from the alcohol and trying to figure out why I felt so sad. Maybe it was because I liked it here, and I was leaving the next day, and I wanted to hang out with Oscar and finish building that house, and eat more of those hot dogs, and make out with Maria, and get her out of that crazy dress. Maybe we could get married, and I could buy some cement, and build my own house. I stumbled over to the curb and started puking.

“
Ay chinga
. Where have you been?”

I wiped my mouth off with my shirtsleeve, and looked up at Oscar, who must have been on his way home. “I had to carry all of my friends by myself. I need to find another gringo, unless
mañana
you say Carmen you no want to leave. Yes?” He helped me up and we started walking home. “You can live in the small casa, and I move into big house with me esposa, except for when Carmen visits. Then I get small house, and you have my wife. ¿
Bien?
”

“
Si
.” I knew he was joking, but I was definitely sad about leaving. “
Es la verdad.
I like it here,” I said.

“
Ay hijo,
you talk crazy; nobody like it here. This place has nothing, and
las mujeres son muy feas
…ugly and
estupid
. You are
borracho y loco.
”

I may have been drunk and crazy, and Maria may have been stupid (it's hard to tell when you can't speak to each other), but goddamn she was beautiful.

I
N SANTA CRUZ
I made it through the twenty-eight-day program, only because the rehab was so big that it was easy to slip through the cracks. They wanted your money, and then they wanted you out, to make room for the endless stream of drug addicts who went through the revolving door of that place.

I was too scared to move back to San Francisco, partly because I was nervous as hell that I wouldn't last a day without relapsing, and also because some detective from the SFPD kept trying to get in touch with me about the breaking-and-entering charges Jake had pressed. The rehab suggested I go into a sober-living environment (SLE), as they called it. I agreed and convinced my grandma's trust to give me seven hundred dollars to buy a '61 Buick Special I had seen for sale on the side of the road, telling them I needed it to get to meetings. The transmission didn't go into reverse, but the owner convinced me it would only take ten minutes to fix. I believed him for no other reason than it was the coolest car I had ever seen.

The SLE was a little house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where I shared a room with five other guys. There was nothing to do at the house, so I spent my days reading books at a café, and at night I went to AA meetings as a requirement for staying at the house. The boredom was excruciating, and I missed my friends terribly. It felt as though I were
just biding my time until they accepted me back. The only friend I had made in Santa Cruz was an eighteen-year-old girl named Annie who had also been at the rehab and now lived across the hall from me in a room she shared with seven other girls.

Once in a while, Aaron, Eli, or Jake (who eventually dropped the breaking-and-entering charges) would drive out to check up on me, and after a few months of telling them that I was doing well, the Roofies invited me to come back to San Francisco to play a few tracks on the new album they were recording. The truth, however, was that I had started drinking occasionally, and I was now driving back to the Mission a couple of times a week to buy dope and was on the verge of getting hooked again.

I managed to keep my drinking and drug use a secret until I got back to Santa Cruz from the recording session and the owner of the SLE asked me if I had used any substances while I was away.

“If you just come out and tell us, it will save us the forty dollars for a urine test,” he said. Since I didn't want anyone to find out I was back on heroin, I told him I drank a few beers.

“Thanks for being honest,” he said, “but we still have to kick you out of the house.”

The first offense usually resulted in having to leave the house for seventy-two hours, long enough to get the substance out of your system and pass a drug test, but I didn't know how I was going to manage to stay clean that long.

“Fuck. What should I do?” I asked him. “Do you know of anywhere I can go for the next three days?”

“I don't know. You could maybe check yourself into a detox, or a hotel, but we also heard that you got together with Annie.”

I never thought that Annie and I would hook up, but a few weeks earlier we had been sitting in the living room watching TV when she just came over and started making out with me. She must have been bored too. She made Santa Cruz bearable for a few weeks, until she relapsed and went back to the rehab for her fifth time.

“Well, normally we would just kick you out for seventy-two hours,” Roger said, “but because of Annie I'm afraid we can't let you come back.”

It was late at night, and I had nowhere to go. I had nothing to lose, so I asked him if I could take the forty bucks I had just saved him on the piss test and use it for a hotel. He must have felt sorry for me because he reached into his pocket and gave me a twenty.

The extra money didn't solve my problem. I sure as hell wasn't going to spend it on a hotel, but where the fuck was I going to go? I had burned every bridge I could think of, and after ripping off my bandmates, breaking into Jake's house, selling my roommates' stuff, stealing money from Aaron, and almost getting Kyle arrested, I was out of people to ask for help. I couldn't blame them. No matter how much I wanted to do the right thing, the urge to get high eventually outweighed anything else. Mom was on some sort of tough-love trip, and I could even see her calling the cops on me again if I showed up, so going to her house was definitely out.

The only thing I could think of was to head back to San Francisco and get more drugs. While driving back to the city, I thought about what my next move was going to be and came up with the idea of going to my dad's house.
If that motherfucker is capable of feeling even the slightest bit of guilt
, which I wasn't 100 percent certain of,
he has to take me in
.

To make sure I actually made it to my dad's house in Santa Barbara, I decided I had to spend all my money—the worry being that, if I still had any cash on me, I would change my mind before I got there and drive back to San Francisco for more dope. It was the kind of logic that only a drug addict could come up with, because I simply didn't trust myself unless I was broke.

With the extra twenty I had scammed off the owner of the house in Santa Cruz and the money left over from the trust, I had close to three hundred dollars on me. When I got back to the Mission, it took me less than ten minutes to spend two hundred and sixty of it on a bunch of balloons, a fair amount of crack, three syringes, a pipe, and a bottle of water. Hoping forty dollars for gas would get me to Santa Barbara, I filled up the tank and headed south on the 101.

I started smoking crack the moment I hit the freeway and was immediately overcome with a terrible case of paranoia. Before going to the rehab, I thought I was the only one who imagined SWAT teams and helicopters were after me, but it turned out to be so common that everyone just laughed about it. It annoyed me that my paranoia was so clichéd, but when I was high, I would swear to God that those fuckers were following me and it was just a matter of time before they landed on the roof of my car. I guess it was preferable to the story I heard in rehab about little monkeys that lived in your car's air-conditioning vents and spent their time conspiring to kill you so they could steal your closely guarded cocaine. I liked monkeys as much as the next guy, but invisible homicidal crack-smoking monkeys scared me even more than the cops.
Regardless of the paranoia, my choices were to keep smoking crack or fall asleep at the wheel. I kept overdoing it, though, and had to pull over every fifty miles to come down with more heroin, which would require me to smoke more crack to stay awake.

By the time I got to Santa Barbara, the coke wasn't working for more than five minutes at a time, my tank was on empty, and it was four in the morning. But the real problem was that I had no idea where I was going. I knew my dad lived in an extremely wealthy neighborhood called Hope Ranch, but even if I found it, I didn't know his address. I didn't even have his home phone number, since I only ever talked to his secretaries. His work number was easy, though. 1-800-4-ESTEEM is a hard number to forget, but it was a three-day weekend and I knew that nobody would be at the office anyway.

My plan was to drive around Hope Ranch until I recognized my dad's street. Crescent Something? Something Heights? Via Del Someshit? It didn't matter, because the plan went to hell a few miles into the city limits when my car ran out of gas. I had forgotten all about it. I pulled over. I had no money, no phone number, and no address. Coming up with a new plan was more than I could manage, so I leaned my head against the window and went to sleep.

Startled awake by the tapping sound of metal on glass, I opened my eyes to a cop shining his Maglite at my face. I was so high I could hardly hold my head up, and the car was full of drugs, broken crack pipes, bent spoons, and syringes, all hidden in various rips in the thirty-eight-year-old upholstery. This really looked like the end of the road for me. I rolled down the window and tried to compose myself.

“What's going on?” he said, scanning the inside of the car. “I pulled over 'cause I figured this was an abandoned vehicle. I didn't expect to find anyone in here.” He was probably a few years younger than me, twenty-two or twenty-three.

“Yeah, sorry, sir. I ran out of gas and decided to wait till it got light to find a station.”

“Man,” he said, shaking his head. “If you had rolled to a stop twenty feet farther, you would have seen the Shell sign just beyond that over-pass.”

I tried to look surprised, but it wouldn't have made much of a difference unless they happened to be giving gas away for free.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

Wondering if he had already seen any paraphernalia with his flashlight, I answered him as best I could. “I'm trying to get to my dad's
house. He lives here in Santa Barbara. Hope Ranch, I think it's called.”

“Well, you sure got close. That's the exit right there.” He pointed to the next exit, which couldn't have been more than a hundred feet away. I couldn't believe how close I had come, and here I was about to get arrested as soon as he searched the car.

“Come on, let's get you some gas, I'll give you a ride over there.”

I have never understood my luck with cops. Obviously, being white helps, but I had plenty of white friends who went to jail for minor offenses like jaywalking, putting up posters, or riding their bikes on the sidewalk. My interactions with the police always involved actual crimes, such as drinking and driving, narcotic possession, being under the influence, and breaking and entering, and I had never once been to jail. I was lucky. As much as I hated the police, they seemed to like me fine. Assuming that I was off the hook again, I started to relax until I saw him bend down to take a look at my license plate. I had owned the car for only a month, and hadn't made it to the DMV to get it registered.

“Something's weird about those tags. I'm going to have to call your plates in,” he told me.

“What do you mean? What's weird about them?” I asked.

“I don't know. They're just not right. Sorry, but I have to call it in.”

He walked back to his car and left me standing there.

The funny thing about my paranoia was that whenever a cop did pull me over, I instantly snapped out of it. I had been lying about my drug use to people for so long that I had become pretty good at acting sober, even when it was all I could do to not lie down on the ground and go back to sleep. A few minutes later, he came back to give me the bad news.

“I thought something was weird about those tags. Those stickers were stolen. This thing hasn't been registered in over two years,” he explained. “I know it's a bummer, man, but I've got to call the tow truck.”

Again I wondered why the cops were always so friendly to me. Apologizing and calling me “man.” While we waited for the tow truck, he asked me, “What year is that Buick, anyway?”

“It's a '61 Special,” I answered.

“No shit. The one with an aluminum engine?”

“Yeah. How'd you know that? I didn't even know they made aluminum engines until I got this thing.”

“They only made them for one year, and only for that car. Hardly any of them left. Goddamn, I bet that thing hauls ass.”

“Yeah, it's fast as hell, but the reverse is shot. I've called a few places, and they said there was no way I could a find a new transmission for this thing,” I explained.

“Oh, man, there's this place up in the hills where we used to go to take acid and mushrooms. It's a huge junkyard up in Carpenteria. This old hippie owns it, so he never minded us running around up there, but I'm sure you could find a transmission for that thing at his place.”

“Yeah? How much do you think one would cost?” I asked.

“It'd probably be expensive but worth it. That's a beautiful car. You should go check out his place anyway. You'd like it up there.”

Then he started to go into more elaborate detail about his acid experiences. “Man, it's so incredible when the sun's coming up over the hills and everything's purple and pink and lavender. You wouldn't believe it, man.”

“Sounds nice,” I said, not knowing what to make of this whole situation.

“Yeah. Too bad I can't do that anymore.”

“Yeah, too bad,” I agreed. I didn't know what else to say. Like most people, I get extremely nervous talking to the police, and this guy was just one decision away from searching my car and introducing me to jail life. As much as I loved telling people I had my first acid trip with Jerry Garcia's daughter, I just wasn't comfortable trading acid stories with an officer of the law.

The tow truck showed up and ended that conversation. As the driver was hitching up my car, I asked the officer what I should do about my things. Even with him standing right next to me, I was hoping to retrieve at least some of my heroin. I knew I would be getting sick soon.

“Just leave your stuff in there. Your things will be safe at the pound. That way you'll come down to get your car back.” It was sad watching my new car drive down the freeway without me, especially with all my drugs still in it. I didn't even give any thought to what I was going to do next.

“Hey,” the officer called to me, “get in the car, and I'll give you a ride to your dad's house.”

I got in the car even though I had no idea where his house was.

“So, where's he live?”

“Actually,” I said, “I'm not really sure. I'm pretty sure it's in Hope Ranch, but I've only been there a couple of times so I can't remember where exactly. I think his street had something to do with apples.” Apple Crescent? Avenida del Manzanas?

“Okay, we'll just drive around and see if anything looks familiar.”

Again I wondered why this guy was being so nice.
What if I had been a Mexican with a broken taillight? Maybe he was just a nice guy.

“Does any of this look familiar yet?” he asked.