Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (18 page)

My wineglass was empty, but it was being refilled by someone. I tried to remember more about the dinner parties from when I was young. I must have been five or six. The kids would eat in the living room, while loud bursts of laughter would come from the dining room. There was a large open passthrough separating the dining room from the living room. The adults could easily check in on us but it was usually us spying on the adults. We could see them reflected in the glass picture window that stretched along the back of Bobby’s house. We almost always stayed overnight after these parties, but it would take a while to fall asleep because of the swearing and roaring coming from downstairs. My younger sister and I would share the sinister room with the slanted ceiling.

Erica called her kids in to set the dinner table, and my father quickly told his kids to help out. I stood up and took my glass of wine with me to make room for them. The children swarmed around the table, dropping plates and napkins haphazardly, eager to get back to their game. I stumbled a little while leaning against the wall. I knew I needed to eat something soon.

We finally all sat down. Plates were heaped and wine was poured. The kids were done almost as soon as they started and rushed off again, this time to play on the patio on my sister’s roof. Politics were
being discussed at the table, so I got up with my wine and went into the living room to check my messages. I don’t discuss politics at the table. I think it’s gauche.

“Come on, we’re going to the roof,” my sister called out, so I followed them upstairs. The view from her roof is stunning; you can see the whole downtown Manhattan skyline. The night was clear, so we could see every window in every building. They’d brought more wine upstairs and we all sat around the patio table while the kids played tag on the roof.

“We’re going to take the kids to Coney Island tomorrow,” Dad told me. “Want to come?”

“Sure,” I said. There was a light from the stairs shining directly behind him so all I could see was an outline of his head. I squinted my eyes, trying to take in more of his features. Everyone said I looked like him. I didn’t think so, but I tried to view him impartially to see what I might look like when I got older. All I could make out was his soft, quiet voice, talking about the plans for tomorrow.

I was drunk. The roof swirled for a minute, and I clutched the table to steady myself. Erica and her boyfriend went downstairs, dragging the kids kicking and yelling behind them to put them to bed. They said they were going to clean the kitchen and retire too, and my dad told him he would be down in a few minutes to help.

We sat there quietly for a minute or two, neither of us saying anything.

“I think,” I said, “that there is something wrong with me.”

“Well, yes,” he said.

I looked at the city and it looked back at me. “There are a lot of things I don’t remember,” I said. “About Oak Ridge.”

“You’ve always had that ability, ever since you were a little kid, to just block out whatever you didn’t want to know,” he said.

I could feel a weird feeling coming on, naked and ashamed, even through my drunken pill fog. “Like with what?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, anything,” he said, shrugging. “It’s just something I’ve noticed about you through the years.”

“Sometimes I think something might have happened at Playland,
that old day-care center,” I said. I paused, debating whether or not to say what I had to say next. “Or at Bobby’s house,” I finally said. “I feel strange there, especially in the old room I always stay in.”

He shook his head vigorously. “Playland was a foul place, but no one at our house
ever
would have done anything inappropriate,” he said.

He was quiet for a minute, but I could see his eyes concentrating hard on the table in front of him as he struggled with what to say next.

“There was always so much drinking going on,” he finally said. “So many different people around. It’s possible someone came up to your room while they were drunk, since the bathroom is right next to that room. Maybe someone sat on the bed with you. Maybe even tried to hug you because everyone loved you guys so much. Maybe their hands accidentally went somewhere they weren’t supposed to, by mistake, and you misinterpreted it.”

That’s the last thing I remember him saying. I blacked out.

I opened my eyes
and I was on my bed at home, on top of the covers, naked except for my underwear. There was spare change covering my body—nickels, dimes, and quarters stuck on my skin.

I looked around me, panicked. I had no idea how I’d gotten there. The last thing I remembered was being on the roof with my father, and then it was one thirty in the afternoon the next day.

I searched around the room for my phone, finally finding it underneath a pile of clothes wadded up in front of my bathroom door. There were seven missed calls, all from my father’s and sister’s cell phones, and a few texts from Emily and Stephanie. I could see that there were voice mail messages, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen to them. I turned on my air conditioner because the room was swelteringly hot. I stood in front of it for a minute, cool air blowing over me, and tried to massage the red coin tattoos out of my skin. When the room cooled down I crawled under the covers and played back everything I could remember about the night before. No matter what, I still stopped blank after the last thing my father had said to me.

It had sounded rehearsed, like an excuse he had been telling himself for years in order to forgive someone else.

I fell back asleep, clutching Ollie close to me, feeling him purr against my chest.

I woke up later to my phone vibrating on my nightstand. It was my sister.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “We’ve been trying to reach you all day. We’re getting ready to leave Coney Island.”

“Sorry, I’m hungover,” I mumbled. “I must have drank too much last night.”

“Aww,” she said. “Do you feel okay enough to meet us for dinner? We’re going to Noodle Pudding,” she said, naming an Italian place in Brooklyn Heights.

Noodle Pudding,
I repeated in my head. That’s what I felt like.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I had the shakes. But I would go because of the children. I had to put on some sort of front for them, especially after ditching out on going to Coney Island with them. “What time?”

“We have a six o’clock reservation,” she said. “I know it’s early but, you know, the kids.”

I rolled out of bed, fished Clover out of my jeans pocket, swallowed two Oxys, and got in the shower.

I arrived at the
restaurant before any of them. I thought about smoking a cigarette, but I didn’t want the kids to suddenly turn a corner and bust me. I refuse to smoke in front of children, and I’d told my niece the year before that I’d already quit after Erica had told her that “Uncle Josh smokes sometimes.” I had been mortified. I think it had been a ploy on my sister’s part to guilt-trip me into quitting, since she knew my niece would bring it up in front of me. She’s out-spoken that way. It’s one of the things I love about her.

I could see them coming from a few blocks away, a mob of children swarming around three adults. My niece was riding on my sister’s boyfriend’s shoulders. They looked like such a family. My heart ached.

I tried to maneuver it so I would sit far away from my father, but the kids had specific people they wanted to sit next to so after four different rounds of chair switching I found him next to me. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“You feeling okay?” he asked. “We missed you today.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I drank too much.”

“Me too,” he said.

“Do you know what time I left?” I asked him. “I don’t remember getting home.”

He looked surprised. “You don’t? You left around 1:00
A.M.
Remember? I tried to get you to take a cab, but you refused.”

“I took the train?” I asked. I was mortified. I must have looked like a nut job to other passengers. I hoped I hadn’t puked. “I don’t really remember anything from shortly after Erica took the kids down,” I said.

He looked really disturbed. “You don’t remember anything I told you?” he asked.

“Some stuff,” I mumbled.

“You don’t remember us hugging and lying down on the roof bank?” he asked.

Erica and her boyfriend were giving us a funny look and laughing.

“Jesus, no!” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“I thought it was weird at the time, but you were really drunk,” he said. “You wanted a hug. It was really nice, you’ve never been that affectionate.”

Closing my eyes does not make me invisible.

“You really don’t remember anything I told you?” he asked, quietly, just to me, after everyone’s attention turned to something else.

“Just the stuff about how I might have misinterpreted some stuff,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, that was mainly the gist of it,” he said.

I hadn’t touched any of the wine that had been ordered for the table because of my hangover. The pills were doing nothing to stop it, so I filled up my glass.

I avoided them the rest of the holiday weekend as much as possible. I could feel myself going dark, shutting down. I knew I wasn’t running on logic anymore. Something had snapped inside my head, and whatever good feelings I had for the world had been replaced by a simple engine that ran on one thought only—to get through the day until tomorrow. It was as if my brain had blinders on and I was living in tunnel vision.

Since there was no work that Monday I went swimming. I zoned out, meditating with the rhythm of lap after lap after lap. When I got to the locker room I showered quickly and changed. As I was zipping up my fly, a large, broad-shouldered man walked past me. There was no one else around. He maneuvered between my locker and me, suddenly grabbed my face with one hand, and pushed me up against the other wall of lockers.

“I want to pull those pants off you,” he whispered.

He let go of my face, caressed my cheek, winked, and walked off.

I stood there, stunned. I was used to guys watching in the locker room, sometimes even pulling out their dick and waving it around. It goes with the territory in most male locker rooms in New York. But no one had ever grabbed me before. There was something so off about what he had said. It wasn’t like any other sort of come-on I’d heard. It was foul and it sounded
young,
like what a pedophilic teacher would say to a first-grader.

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes as I finished getting dressed but I sucked them in and created a white wall in my head. I walked out fast, briefly considering reporting him to the staff but not willing to go back even ten minutes into my past to relive that moment. I went down into the subway, blinders on again, full force.

The platform was empty except for a young woman in a skirt standing about ten feet away from me. I glanced at her as I leaned against a column.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of movement and I turned. The same woman was now lying on the cement floor, twitching violently, her skirt riding up around her thighs. I rushed over and knelt next to her, and she was suddenly still, her eyes focusing on me. She sat up.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Should I call someone?”

She stood up and I handed her bag to her. “I’m fine,” she said brusquely.

“Should I call an ambulance? Or one of your friends?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she snapped.

“Okay,” I said, backing away. “But I’m going to just stand over here. I’ll be on the same subway car. If you need anything let me know.”

She nodded but wouldn’t make eye contact with me. The train came and I kept my eye on her the whole time. She looked at the floor.

My stop came before hers. I briefly considered staying on the train and following her home, but figured that would just creep her out. There were other people around now to help her if she needed.

When I got home I sat on the edge of my bed. Ollie climbed into my lap and I stroked him absentmindedly. I stared at the wall for a while, and every time I could feel the shakes coming on I forced them back. I needed to get out of there. I called Joey. I knew he was always up for a drink. Or a vial of coke. He had always been a master of escapism, and I needed to crawl down in there with him. He was at dinner but told me to meet him at his house later.

I took three pills out of Clover and swallowed them with a glass of water that had been on my nightstand for at least a week. It had been almost a year since I’d moved back to New York City, so psyched to start my life over and get my career back on track. I’d taken care of the career, but I’d already given up on the life part. The only life that felt real or safe was the one on pills, the one where everywhere I moved, a warm bubble surrounded and followed me, protecting me. Outside of that bubble the world was cold and harsh, like a February wind whipping over my face. After about twenty minutes I felt the invisible force field start to rise up again around me. I sank into it and let its soothing heat thaw out my skin.

I ordered my own
coke that night so I wouldn’t have to rely on Joey’s. I asked the delivery guy for the twentieth time if he had any
good pills to sell, but as usual he only had Xanax. I didn’t care about benzos, I had buckets of them left over from online deals. I rarely took them anymore. I found that it was always good to carry some around with me in Clover, though. I could use them as currency at parties or bars and trade for favors, drinks, or, if I got lucky, opiates. Plus I liked the way it made me feel to be able to flash Clover anytime someone I had just met complained about being stressed. I doled them out like Tic Tacs, and it made me feel needed.

As I got ready to meet Joey I did a few lines while listening to Glass Candy.
Fantastic Planet
played on my TV with the sound off.

I met Joey at a bar around 11:00
P.M.
He was with a group of friends and the night was on, immediately. The entire group rotated from the bar to the wall to the bathroom. It was like a ballroom dance where we all switched partners. Everyone had their own blow, and we’d rotate who we brought to the bathroom with us. Stall door shut, keys out if someone had a bag, or thumb and forefinger curled together facing up to create a flat surface if someone had a vial (like me). I’d picked up Joey’s lingo, “Give me your paw,” when I needed to pour a pile of coke onto someone’s hand. I refused to pour lines on the backs of toilet tanks, like some people. There was something so disgusting about it. Forget the fact that there would be four of us crammed in a stall with piss covering the floor and scads of toilet paper stuck to the walls. I had my limits.