The Quiet Room (15 page)

To make matters worse, the Voices in my head kept up a steady roar of commentary about everything I did. Between their shrieking, the pace of the work, the thundering din of the crowd talking all at once about the Mets, their Saturday night date, that jerk Rodgers in marketing, the last movie they saw and the next movie they were going to see, the last guy they dated and the next guy they wanted to ask them out, sometimes I would want to scream.

After a while, I switched to working downstairs in the cocktail lounge on Friday and Saturday nights. The pace was just as fast, but the job was a lot easier. There were fewer things to remember. With ice. Straight up. Frozen margarita, with salt, without salt. Nothing to it.

Still, there were a lot of creeps down there, and sometimes it was hard to keep my temper. Sometimes I came close to losing it. Once I actually did when a particularly rowdy group began to tease me and laugh at me and make fun of me. There were both men and women in the group, and they were all getting off on the wisecracks of one particularly obnoxious guy who was the ringleader.

As I tried to ignore the taunts, the Voices were taking over. They were yelling orders at me. They were telling me all kinds of vile and violent things to do to that jerk. I served the customers as quickly as possible, and tried to keep away. I was afraid of what I might do. But the restaurant was crowded, the tables nearby kept ordering, and those people themselves kept calling me over. There was no way I could escape their ridicule.

I took it as long as I could, long enough to get their orders, go away and fill them. But when I came back to pass out the orders, and this guy started in on me again, I decided it was time to strike back. I gave all his friends their drinks, saving his for last.

“Did you say that you wanted that on the rocks, sir?” I asked him demurely. Then I poured the whole thing into his lap.

I couldn't blame that one on the Voices. That was all me, and I loved doing it.

Still, despite the hassles, I stayed on. They apparently needed me. I needed the money. I liked the company. Before too long, there was another big attraction: It was here that I got turned on to coke.

I had dabbled in drugs in high school, smoking pot with some friends, sorting out the seeds from the leaves on the fold of an opened-out record album cover. In college, I had tried cocaine with friends at parties. And when I found myself really strung out I tried Quaaludes. I couldn't drink. Something about alcohol just didn't agree with me. Even when I just tried some beer at a fraternity keg party I'd always throw up. Those little pills or a quick snort on the other hand could make me feel incredibly relaxed when the Voices were making me tense. But drugs had never been a big part of my life until I got out of the hospital.

By the time I left the hospital, though, cocaine seemed to be everywhere. In fact, I rarely had to seek it out. It came looking for me. I found that plenty of people coming to the restaurant were into cocaine. In fact, every so often I found that some regular customers would offer to tip me, not in cash, but in cocaine. At the end of the meal, the happy customers would simply ask me to share some lines with them.

At first I was cautious. It was a pretty public place, after all, just down the road from my parents’ home. But gradually, as time went by and no one tried to stop us, I became more and more relaxed. Just as I had begun to recognize the good cash tippers, so too I began to know who did coke and who didn't. There seemed to be so many who did! First it was an occasional line just for fun. Then it became a daily event. Then gradually cocaine became a regular part of my life.

Soon I began to get friendly with the people I knew who did the drug. Often I would see a big-time drug dealer, a man I knew had been in and out of jail for dealing drugs, sitting at the bar. Often he'd call me over from across the bar and invite me to do some lines in the bathroom. I liked it when people shared. It was cheaper and easier than getting cash. When a customer tipped in cash, I just mentally calculated it for my cocaine fund. When one passed me a quarter gram, however, it was much more valuable. I got to do more of the stuff, and I got to do it right away.

All I was trying to do was to feel better. Those medications they gave me in the hospital were useless. I took them because people told me they would make me better. But lots of times I didn't know why I bothered. The only thing those fistfuls of stupid pills did was make me feel fuzzy and disoriented, as if I were at the bottom of a swimming pool. And the Voices still raged away at me, mocking the drugs, the doctors and me.

Cocaine, on the other hand, helped me ignore the Voices. For as long as it lasted, cocaine made me feel alive. It made my senses feel sharp and clear again. When I did a line, I felt good, I felt real, I felt vital in a way I hadn't since long before the Voices entered my life. Cocaine directed my attention outside of myself. As long as I was high, I had enough strength to ignore those Voices calling me back into their world.

So for a while I found the relief I wanted. When the crash came as it always did, I went back for more. When the crashes came closer together, the search for relief began to consume more of my time and my life. Before too long, the search for cocaine— and of ways of getting it—began to be the single-minded focus of my existence.

Eventually, it was cocaine that brought me to Raymond. Then Raymond brought me cocaine. Then Raymond and cocaine became so intertwined with each other that I could barely tell them apart, and I couldn't do without either one of them.

I met Raymond through one of my fellow waitresses who lived in his building. Nicole and I had become friendly, and liked to hang out with each other. Raymond was her friend. At first I would go over to see Nicole. We would talk, listen to music, and I would watch her put on her globs of makeup. And then we would both go down to see Raymond. Raymond always had cocaine. If he didn't, he knew where to get it.

For a long time, we had a friendly threesome. Nicole and Raymond and I would all get high together. But as time went by, I slowly found myself bypassing Nicole and going straight to visit Raymond.

Like drugs and music, Raymond took me away, for a little while, from all the pain. For before too long, he fell in love with me. And I guess I fell in love with him. He wasn't exactly the kind of guy my parents would have picked out for me. But I liked him. He was cute, a black man with light brown skin the color of chocolate milk. He was over six feet tall and had a smile that would melt a brick. He had a great in-shape body, not rippled and bulging like a bodybuilder, but just nice and toned all over. Even without the cocaine, he turned me on.

He was an emergency medical service technician. He had a girlfriend he lived with. Or maybe she was a wife. He wasn't clear. But that kind of made it more exciting and romantic.

For a while, Raymond gave me something fun to look forward to. He was a bright spot in my life that was otherwise nothing other than miserable. My head was full of pain. I was confused and lonely. There was something wrong with me, and I didn't know what. I worked so hard at dating, but the guys who were interested in me were geeks and creeps. The ones I liked never called back. Most of them thought I was too porky. Raymond thought I was perfect, cuddly and beautiful. He told me so all the time. How could I resist?

Mom and Dad were trying hard to help me. But being around them wasn't fun either. Dad wanted so much for me to be well. He was always lecturing me, questioning me, pushing me, encouraging me. I wanted so much to be well for his sake that being with him was a constant effort. I had to hold myself in, watch myself, control my actions and impulses. It was hard work.

And I was so consumed with self-hatred that it was hard for me to do anything with my mom. How could I go shopping with her when looking in the mirror made me sick? How could I go to the country club with her when I knew I was so fat and ugly. I couldn't stand to be around my beautiful, trim, outgoing mother. Raymond never wanted to hear about my illness. Whenever I started trying to talk about my symptoms, he would cut me off or change the subject. To Raymond, I was as normal as the next person, and that was that. So we talked about him. I liked that. To me, he was someone outside the system, and especially outside my system. We talked about his work, about his mother, his house, his little son, Ray Jr., his girlfriend.

But mostly we did cocaine, or talked about it. Where were we going to score? Whose car were we going to take? Who was going to drive? Do you have any? No, do you? Was there any stashed? Who's got money?

Together, we got high on coke every single day and night. When I got off from work, we would go off together in search of a place to get high. We couldn't go to his place; we certainly couldn't go to my parents’ house. So our relationship was filled with cocaine and endless hours in cheap motel rooms. We took the four-hour special and spent the time watching the Playboy channel and sniffing coke. I was so desperate for the drug that I let him do anything he wanted with me, just short of having sex. But when the coke was gone, so was I. No coke, no Ray and Lori.

As I became more and more consumed with the drug, just getting enough for the day became a major focus of my life. Raymond was doing some buying and selling, and often shared some of his with me. But that wasn't enough. I was working long hours at the restaurant, and still getting some tips in lines. Nearly all my wages were going to purchase cocaine, too. Some days, when I didn't have enough money for that day's hit, I would even steal small amounts from the restaurant.

Staying high became my entire goal. I did coke everywhere. In an elevator. In Grand Central Station. Walking down the street. I even did coke in Dr. Rockland's waiting room. I was continually high, continually fighting the Voices, continually feeling rotten. I hid cocaine in my pockets, in my socks, in my sneakers, in my room and in my car, for emergencies. The one thing I was afraid of was of being without coke when I needed it.

Cocaine was definitely a form of self-medication. My mind began to obsess over getting as much as I could, more than my body actually craved. I was literally consumed with everything and anything having to do with the drug.

I even began to hear my own cocaine-filled life reflected in the music I listened to. Eric Clapton sang about cocaine. Neil Young sang about Raymond and me:

I love you baby,

can I have some more?

I always needed more. For when the fall came, it was horrendous. It was a tremendous crash. Coming down from an artificial high was like riding down a roller coaster dramatically spiking down, and then derailing off the track. I couldn't sleep because I was so coked up. And without any more to bring me back up, I just got into bed and lay there with my mind racing, trying to fight off the bad thoughts entering my brain, the bad thoughts telling me to kill myself and end all this misery.

Once when I crashed and I was out of cocaine—including everything I had hidden away in all my secret stashes—I panicked. I had to have something. So I decided to snort a lithium capsule. I broke it open and sniffed the white powder inside as if it were coke. It was horrible. My entire face burned. I felt like my nasal passages were on fire. I tried shoving water up my nose, but nothing worked, and it was hours before the pain subsided. I thought the walls of my nose were going to cave in.

Need for the drug began taking me deeper and deeper into a world that I never knew existed before. To get coke, I went with Raymond to places I would have been afraid to go otherwise.

One of our favorite cocaine stops was in the South Bronx, at a store about as big as a table. Upstairs was one of the most disgustingly filthy bathrooms I have ever seen. There was also a little room with a TV and a bed—and lots and lots of coke. It was piled up on a mirror. We would go there. I would wait. Raymond would do his deal. We would do a line, and then leave with enough to keep us satisfied for a while.

It was a frightening, dangerous, awful place. Once when Raymond took me there, there was a rifle in the upstairs room. When he left me there, and went off with the dealer, I became wild. I was so wired that I didn't even go for the pile of the stuff sitting right there in the open on the mirror. Instead, I went for the rifle. I would end this fucking horrible existence right then, I thought. I would blow my brains out, splatter them on the wall. I tried to put the gun to my head. But I couldn't manage it. I couldn't maneuver the rifle to my head with one hand, and reach the trigger with the other hand. Besides, I was shaking so hard I could barely keep the rifle still. I could hear Raymond and the dealer coming back up the stairs. I put the rifle down, and waited for them, trembling all over with fright.

The more drugs I did, the more suspicious people around me got. Dr. Rockland was beginning to question me more. Early in my therapy sessions I had told Dr. Rockland I was doing coke but I made light of it. I never told him how much I was really doing, or how important it had become to me. I told him it was just an occasional thing, a line now and then with friends simply for recreation. I could tell he was beginning to realize that wasn't true. By now, I was sometimes consuming nearly $1,000 a week worth of cocaine.

Gail Kobre—now Gail Kobre Lazarus—was growing concerned. Even with her new husband and her new house, she still tried to keep in touch with me. It wasn't the same as before, but still she would occasionally drop by. I had told her I was doing drugs. I even tried to get her to share a line with me. She indignantly refused. One afternoon she and I were together in the backyard of my parents’ house. I was lying on the hammock, and Gail was sitting on the rocks by the roses.

“I'll always be your friend, Lori,” she told me. “But I can't stand by and watch you ruining your life like this.”

As for my parents, I had tried hard to conceal it from them, but they weren't stupid. They were hoping they weren't seeing what they were seeing, but they were beginning to catch on. Raymond and I called each other as many times a day as we could. I called him at his work. He called me at home at midnight, and teed my parents off. I'd have to lie to my folks, that it was a wrong number, or else that it was my friend Nicole calling. I knew the lies weren't working.