I’m Gonna Kick Tomorrow…

December 21, 2013

The snow came down in a maddening haste and I was scared I wouldn’t be able to drive afterwards, for I've done opiates before, but never the brown stuff. I sat behind the wheel of the parked car, imagining it skidding out, the roads curling up into themselves, and my life following suit. It was already dark and the roads were certain to worsen. It’s the same, but more intense, she said in my passenger seat. I had an idea what to expect from past experiences with similar stuff, but I couldn’t be sure. ‘A stronger, more vivid version of what I already knew,’ she said. I was no less scared. The void is never quite the same twice. She was clutching a CD case—Settle by Disclosure, the one with those young faces staring blankly back out at you in judgement on the cover. She laid it down flat and laid down lines, careful as a surgeon, wiping the beige dust into imperfect rows with a J. Crew gift card on the glossy faces of those innocent boys. It was freezing, but I was insulated by the wad of cash in my back pocket and the Toyota’s musky heat blasting on high. It was my dad’s car and he let me borrow it. We still had love in our lives, in our hearts. She turned the heat off to make sure the beige powder didn’t blow off the hard plastic. We consumed it all, turned the heat back on for a second before holding hands and walking into the strip mall like little kids in lockstep, our bodies loose and warm, our minds in bloom. She kissed me. We shopped, whimsically, amongst the holiday cheer, for our beloved friends and family. Christmas lights dangled above us, blinking red and green, and the air smelled like pine and cinnamon and melted sugar with a hint of chemical still trailing. I got my mother a white infinity scarf. I wrapped it a day later. Three days after that, it was wrapped around her neck. A symbol of the burden—her hopeless child’s addiction. She loved it. It was warm. We were warm. Life was a gift.

            And full of everything I didn’t deserve.

September 15, 2019

The 1:00 train came in right on time, the first miracle of the day, and I let myself hope there’d be more. Sunday. The Giants were two games in and hadn’t shown their true colors yet, still a team you could imagine winning something. My dad had a pie coming from Luigi’s, and we’d all sit around the TV at 4, pizza grease on our fingers, green peppers caught in our teeth, and the Giants down two scores at half time was becoming something of a ritual in recent years. But we are a Giant family. I’d scored a little extra cash from a shady favor for an ex-coworker—enough to save a fix for this morning and buy my way out of guilt and anxiety for the upcoming week. I paid the train fare. For once, I paid the fare. I didn’t have to dodge the conductor. The sun poured through the window, and I let it pin me to my seat, half-asleep, the train a smooth hand carrying me past stations I usually counted stop by stop, fighting the crawlers under my skin. Hot and cold at the same time. For once, I just sat. For once, the silence was golden.

Market Street was almost serene when I stepped out onto the platform, my Cheslea boot heels clicking down the empty stairwell. Weekdays, the stairwell swarms—airtight faces drooping, piss and litter everywhere—but not today. Today, the city exhaled. The air was cleaner and brighter than usual, carrying the warm breeze like a prayer. I checked the schedule and smiled; I had time. Time to walk to Heaven instead of riding the smelly bus.

Near the Prudential Center, I passed a man standing in his underwear, holding a sign scrawled in crayon. A jumble of words that didn’t say anything. I took it from his calloused hands. I flipped it over, pulled a Sharpie from my pocket like a magic trick, and wrote, “If you only give once a week, please, think of me next time. Peace and Love.” When I handed it back, he nodded like I’d told him a secret. A block later, I looked back. People were lining up, digging into their wallets, their purses, their hearts. Feeding his pipe, sure, but for a moment, feeding something else too. He smiled. So did I. The difference between us was time. An enabling mother. A few teeth.

I walked on, my feet barely touching the pavement. It felt like being carried on a hoverboard made of trash-can lids, absurd but consecrated. At the top of William Street, I was crossed by a beautiful guard, a woman with a smile that could outshine the sunny reflection off her flak jacket. I thought about my sunglasses, how I’d left them on the train yesterday after getting high. Boys were shooting hoops in a driveway up ahead, their voices and the hum of the game breaking through the Sunday quiet. I whistled, hands out like I was calling for a pass, and for a second, they froze. A white kid on this street with one goal. Momma says hell no. But I waited, steadily, and finally, they passed me the ball. Two dribbles with my right hand, cross over to my left, and let it fly. All net. The boys stared at me in awe, perplexed. "It's like riding a bike," I quipped with a smirk, recalling memories of my days as a successful youth athlete, memories that usually fill me up with embarrassment when measured against my current situation.

At the top of the hill, the real world rushed back. Druggy thoughts on MLK and Mercer. I turned the final turn. The congregation spilled out of the church up ahead, a gathering of worshippers in four-buttoned suits and sundresses, basking in the golden hue, the reflection off the statue of the Cross as they wobbled their way to their respected town cars. I crossed the street and kept going, the Cross from the church throwing its long shadow over me. The Court Street open market was here and it was open for business. Heaven. I entered the gate.

The shots rang out before I got to the walkway and off the grass, before I was in the deep recesses of the complex. Pop-pop-pop. Instinct yanked me behind a Nissan Altima missing its hubcaps. I peeked over the trunk, saw Jawbone—his gorgeous caramel skin unmistakable—running like his life depended on it because it did. Pop-pop. He staggered, violence splitting through him from behind, his body falling, knees first, then torso, onto the cracked pavement. Two men in balaclavas stepped up and finished the job with mechanical precision. I heard the clips empty but I wasn’t there to bear witness. I didn’t stick around. Didn’t look back. Didn’t feel a thing. I just ran as fast as I could. But I could feel the bloodshed as I fled, the physicality of the bullets. Silence finally resumed as I turned the corner of MLK, depleted.

Other customers were passing with trepidation, the strong urge for their fix pulsing through them so ferociously they couldn’t, wouldn’t believe gunshots were firing in Heaven. All but one of them continued on, face scratching Frankenstein’s marching, indifferent to it all, hoping to pick up before the place was rat-infested with police. Apathetic to catching a stray. White people with one goal. A few others too. One man, a guy named Bucky, a Newark junkie who hadn’t lost all self-regard, decided to walk with me, in the opposite direction.

We circled the block. Yellow tape quarantined the crime scene. Ambulances and police cars everywhere. Colors galore. Addicts were already gathering at the far edge of the complex, first ten then twenty. From the distance, through the red and blue, it appeared as if they were in synchronicity, fidgeting concurrently, scratching in unison, like those well-disciplined Olympic swimming teams I used to watch at my grandma’s house before she died of Emphysema.

Bucky, impatient as I was, pointed me in an unfamiliar direction—a path—a path to a housing project that I had never trodden. I didn’t ask a question. In less than a mile, we found ourselves in another Court St, a different Heaven, this one a single brick building that required a claustrophobic trip up a flight of stairs, but nevertheless it had the goods. I exchanged numbers with the man and thanked Bucky for the plug. I frequently had nightmares about aimlessly walking about in Newark unable to score, exposing myself to theft or worse, a scarier prospect than overdosing in peace. More phone numbers, in case of emergency.

By the time I hit Penn Station, the sun was still high, the Giants were an hour from kick off, and I was pleased—unapologetically pleased I didn’t feel bad about Jawbone. Delighted to witness a man, who once aided me with money, who once spotted me when I was on my knees begging, lying dead before my eyes, without the slightest feeling of compassion flickering in my heart. I wasn’t sorry I wasn’t a bit sorry. It was the cost of doing business. He played the game. He lost. It wasn’t my problem. I boarded a homeward bound train. The glycine bags were stamped Serendipity. I went to the bathroom. It hit like a blessing. My stomach growled, thinking of Luigi’s pizza. I smiled. Normalcy.

Who doesn’t love pizza and football on a Sunday afternoon?

April 21st, 2014

In the Newark airport, minutes prior to taking off to visit my best friends in Rome, I sniffed a hit of some of the finest smack the city could offer. The rush that brings rapture without turning the lights out, the hit that walks that tightrope, the difference between the dreamy balance beam and a cop asking, ‘do you know where you are?’ with a flashlight in your pupils.

Despite being stuck in a middle seat, I was so thoroughly inebriated and so caught up visualizing a European vacation that the cramped quarters hardly bothered me. I leaned back, high as hell, dreaming of Rome like it was some ancient treasure waiting to be excavated by me, a half-witted, drug-abusing archaeologist given the chance to play make believe thanks to the grace of his father. Twelve hours later, I woke up folded in half, looking as if I were attempting to self-fellatiate. My neck screamed, the weight of the snoring man spilling onto me from the left, while the cute college girl on my right remained oblivious, headphones on. I cracked my neck and scratched my nose and tried to smile. I just landed in Rome.

I had cash, a full wad of it. My parents had my PayPal info, and Daddy would answer if I case of an emergency. I was still in college. My grades were slipping, but they still liked me, loved me even, still clung to the idea of the kid that had been but was no longer—the kid with attentive ambition and unblemished skin. The surface was still sturdy, barely. They didn’t see what was underneath. Not yet.

The first two days were a hymn to indulgence. Wine, cobblestones, my friends and I laughing into the night, shouting bad Italian slogans into the star-spangled sky. The city, with its gladiatorial ghosts and its golden light and its beer on every corner carried us wherever it wanted. Drifting plebians at the mercy of almighty Rome.

It was the third day when he rose again, and on that day, the third morning, reality came crashing down. Legs shaking, gut twisting. My body betraying me. A Roman Senate of insides provoking extremities, swirling violence to the surface; Brutus in my bones, Longinus in my limbs, feeling every bit like Caesar. I was soaked—sweat pooling in my pits and spilling into the sofa; I stunk of a pungent, sour truth. My heart pounded, and I knew. The sickness. I was certain it wouldn’t happen to me, it couldn’t, never me, and if it did, I was certain I could handle it at once! I was an idiot kid really. But it was always a problem I could resolve so quickly, needing a fix, so instantly, even—I was unaware and ignorant of how acute the distress, how grating it was psychologically when your drug dealer is 4,400 miles away and you’ve pressed your luck this hard, spending too many hours numb over the past ten months to dare ask the universe for a break. All the luck I’d been riding came to an end on a couch in Trastevere. I tried to hype myself up for a venture out, a trip on the trolley down to the Spanish Steps, the sun was shining, yet I couldn’t do it. I was in prison, on vacation.

The internet wasn’t helpful. Google gave me nothing concrete about scoring in Rome—just a few high-crime areas with moderate potential, but nothing actionable. I was angry but more than that I was scared. I was always scared of new feelings, drug related or otherwise. My only blessing was that my friends went to class, thank the Pope in the Vatican down the block for that! I had time to try. Time to fail.

I finally stepped out, caught the trolley, and hit the Farmacia’s one by one all along the track thinking it my best shot. I had practiced my pitch in the mirror prior to leaving, my best Leo in Basketball Diaries impression. Pity and money were my best shot. At the third stop, a Farmacist with a black eye, a woman over 6-feet tall, called the cops on me. The farmacista’s eyes lit up sharp and red and she cursed at me in Italian. I bolted and boarded the trolley again before she could finish dialing. There was one more Farmacia on the track and I had no choice but to turn back defeated.

It was the Farmacia Igea San Gallicano. I found him—this old farmacista with the face of a saint gradually driven cynical; he looked like F. Murray Abraham in a bad mood. He laughed when I told him what drugs I wanted to purchase. “Non c'è modo,” he said. But the laugh cracked him open, and he saw me for what I was: a stupid, innocuous kid, out of place and shaking in his skin. He saw it in my eyes. For as much as I was acting, I really wasn’t. So, he made me an offer. A strip of Suboxone, under the table, for 120 Euro. I learned about the Subs through fellow addicts, as I do so many things, conversations about rehab on rides to re-up, how to avoid cotton fever, how to take Subs, but with no personal experience, I didn’t know what to expect. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Addiction giving you no choice. I didn’t even flinch. I paid the prezzo folle upcharge. I tore the wrapper, broke the strip in thirds, and let a piece dissolve under my tongue, the tangy, sour bitterness blooming into something close to hope.

When I got back, my friends had a handle of gin. We blacked out. The next day, we went to the Vatican, and the day after that, the Coliseum. I ate pasta like I’d never tasted food before, washed it down with cheap wine, and forgot, for a moment, what I had gone through and what waited for me when the meds ran out.

I didn’t feel the sickness again until I spent the flight home sleepless and irritable, my body buzzing with the anticipation of relief. I landed, my parents drove me home, I unpacked nothing and called a guy. The drive back to Newark felt ridiculous, so I met a local dealer on the corner of Brown Street, a man I hate for fucking me over in a past transaction, and bought his whole supply, paying yet another upcharge with the money I consciously left over from the trip. It was as if I was reunited with a lover.

At dinner that night, my mom made prime rib and yams. We sat together laughing, dad too, musing about the wine, the art, the Vatican, my two friends and the classes they’re taking. After dinner, I did the dishes like a good son, and my mom put on The Grand Budapest Hotel. We drank herbal tea and she laughed the way she used to with a glow I forgot possible. She thought she had her child back. That Europe and friends and culture had fixed dependency. A year into heroin addiction. She knew so much yet so little. But for a moment, I was happy to pretend it was all perfect, maybe it really was all perfect: the warmth of our love, the glow of the TV, the palpability of her optimism, my façade never mightier. It was a night for setting your heart on something.

Or maybe it was just a dream I had while the plane fell out of the sky.

Around St. Patrick’s Day 2012

That spring semester, the Devil and God were raging inside me, their battle spilling into the streets, the classroom, into my veins and psyche, into every anxious minute I spent pretending to belong. I was living among the clean-cut kids at St. Joe’s University, most on scholarship, buoyed by their parents’ money and mapped out futures, but I wasn’t one of them. I was a shadow, a fraud—a community college ghost. Every day was a tug-of-war between my need for friends and the compromises it took to keep them.

Adderall was the currency of our belonging. My peers used it to sharpen themselves into productivity machines, lean and unstoppable robots, while I just collapsed inward. I never handled amphetamines well. The pills only made me panic, my heart sent skittering like a moth stuck in a gutter. But I took them anyway, because that was the social thing to do, I wanted to belong. And always I ended up in the library bathroom with my head between my knees, a paper bag inflating and deflating, wondering if I was about to die. Hoping sometimes I would.

One day I really overdid it—Adderall, coffee, cigarettes, no breakfast and a string of bad news, cramming for some midterm. I can’t even remember the class. By the time the exam ended, I was sheet white, a walking corpse. I hit the world, it was night, and Philly blurred into a neon haze. The city signs. The streets folding in on themselves. The stars in the sky shooting too fast to wish upon. I wandered for fifteen minutes or fifteen years. Deep Breath. When I found my car, finally, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The keys looked alien in my palm, the road ahead a slippery slope.

I got out for air. Then, I stumbled into a bar across the street, its name gone from my memory, as if it were never real to begin with. I only recall the fluorescent Neon Pink sign. I ordered a shot of whiskey and a beer. The first shot disappeared fast, burned my throat, but steadied my hands. I ordered another. The second slid down smoother, and halfway through the pint, my stomach let out this low growl of approval. I ordered a Reuben and devoured it like I hadn’t eaten in days—because I hadn’t.

And then, something happened. The panic dissolved. My pulse found its rhythm again. My vision settled. Things again had edges. By the time I left the bar, I was steady on my feet, a faint hum in my head where the madhouse had been. I slid behind the wheel and drove home, feeling touched by grace. That night, for the first time in months, I fell asleep without effort, even a faint smile showed in the corners of my lips. I had a thought—a simple, perfect thought: Maybe this is my medicine.