Author: Bill Clegg
Category: Fiction
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BILL CLEGG
LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON LONDON
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For everyone still out there
Think of light and how far it falls, to us. To fall, we say, naming a fundamental way of going to the world—falling.
—WILLIAM KITTREDGE, A Hole in the Sky
Scrapers
I can’t leave and there isn’t enough.
Mark is at full tilt, barking hear-it-here-first wisdom from the edge of his black vinyl sofa. He looks like a translator for the deaf moving at triple speed—hands flapping, arms and shoulders jerking. His legs move, too, but only to fold and refold at regular intervals beneath his tall, skeletal frame. The leg crossing is the only thing about Mark with any order. The rest is a riot of sudden movements and spasms—he’s a marionette at the mercy of a brutal puppeteer. His eyes, like mine, are dull black marbles.
Mark is squawking about a crack dealer he used to buy from who’s been busted—how he saw it coming, how he always does—but I’m not paying attention. All that matters to me is that we’ve reached the end of our bag. The thumb-size clear plastic mini zip-lock that once bulged with chunks of crack is now empty. It’s daybreak and the dealers have turned off their phones.
My two dealers are named Rico and Happy. According to Mark, all crack dealers are named Rico and Happy. Rico hasn’t shown up the last few times I’ve called. Mark, who makes it his business to know the day-to-day movements and shifting status of a handful of dealers, says Rico’s Xanax habit has resurfaced and is beginning to slow him down. Last year he didn’t leave his apartment in Washington Heights for three months. So for now I call Happy, who shows up after midnight when the $1,000 limit on my cash card zeroes out and I can start withdrawing again. Happy is the more reliable of the two, but Rico will often deliver at odd hours when the other dealers won’t. He’ll come in the middle of the day, hours late but when the rest are asleep and closed for business. He’ll complain and give you a skimpy bag, but he’ll come. With Mark’s phone, I dial Rico’s number but his voice mail is full and not accepting messages. I dial Happy’s and it goes straight to voice mail.
Happy and Rico sell crack. They don’t sell cocaine to be inhaled, pot, Ecstasy, or anything else. I buy only bags of precooked crack. Some people will insist on cooking their own—a tricky operation that involves cocaine, baking soda, water, and a stove top—but the few times I tried this, I wasted the coke, burned my hands, and ended up with a wet glob that was barely smokable.
Give me the scraper, Mark barks. His stem—the small glass tube packed on one end with Brillo pad wire—is caked with residue, so after he scrapes it out and packs the end again, we can count on at least a few more hits. He folds his legs in a spidery arrangement and for a moment appears as if he will tip over. He looks like he’s in his sixties—gray-faced, wrinkled, jutting bones—but claims he’s in his early forties. I’ve been coming to his apartment for over three years, with increasing frequency, to get high.
I pass him the craggy metal strip that had until last night been the support behind the nylon web of an umbrella. Scrapers come from all sorts of things—wire coat hangers mostly, the ones without paint; but umbrellas have long thin metal strips, sometimes hollow half cylinders, that are particularly effective at cleaning out stems and generating a miracle hit or two when the bag is empty and before the need comes to check the couch and floor for what I call crumbs, what Mark calls bits, but what all crack addicts know is their last resort until they can get another bag.
I reach toward Mark to pass him the scraper and he flinches. The stem slips from his hands, falls in slow motion between us, and shatters on the scuffed parquet floor.
Mark gasps more than speaks. Oh. Oh no. Oh Jesus, no. In a flash he’s down on all fours picking through the debris. He rescues several of the larger pieces of glass, brings them back to the coffee table, lays them out, one by one, and begins picking and scratching at them with the scraper. Let’s see. Let’s see. He mumbles to himself as he maneuvers frantically over each shard. Again, his joints and hands and limbs seem animated not by life but by strings pulling and tugging him—furiously, meticulously—through a marionette’s pantomime of a fevered prospector scrabbling through his pan for flecks of gold.
Mark finds no gold. He puts down the scraper, the bits of glass, and his movements come to a halt. He collapses back into the couch, where I can practically see the strings that held him aloft now glide down around him. The bag is empty and it’s six a.m. We’ve been at it for six days and five nights and all the other stems are destroyed.
Morning glows behind the drawn blinds. Minutes pass and nothing but the low whine of the garbage trucks outside cuts the quiet. My neck throbs and the muscles in my shoulder feel thick and tight. The throbbing keeps time with my heart, which slams in my chest like an angry fist. I can’t stop my body from rocking. I watch Mark get up to begin sweeping the glass and notice how his body rocks with mine, how our sway is synchronized—like two underwater weeds bending to the same current—and am both horrified and comforted to recognize how alike we are in the desolate crash that follows when the drugs run out.
The creeping horror of these past few weeks—relapsing; leaving Noah, my boyfriend, at the Sundance Film Festival nearly a week early; e-mailing my business partner, Kate, and letting her know that she can do what she wants with our business, that I’m not coming back; checking in and out of a rehab in New Canaan, Connecticut; spending a string of nights at the 60 Thompson hotel and then diving into the gritty crackscape of Mark’s apartment with the drifters there who latch onto the free drugs that come with someone on a bender. The awful footage of my near-history flashes behind my eyes, just as the clear future of not having a bag and knowing another won’t be had for hours rises up, sharp as the new day.
I don’t know yet that I will push through these grim, jittery hours until evening, when Happy will turn his cell phone back on and deliver more. I don’t yet know that I will keep this going—here and in other places like it—for over a month. That I will lose almost forty pounds, so that, at thirty-four, I will weigh less than I did in the eighth grade.
It’s also too soon to see the new locks on my office door. Kate will change them after she discovers I have come in at night. This will be weeks from now. She’ll worry that I might steal things to pay for drugs, but I’ll go there only to sit at my desk a few more times. To say good-bye to the part of me that, on the surface anyway, had worked the best. Through the large open window behind my desk, I’ll look out at the Empire State Building, with its weary authority and shoulders of colored light. The city will seem different then, less mine, farther away. And Broadway, ten stories below, will be empty, a dark canyon of gray and black stretching north from 26th Street to Times Square.
On one of those nights, before the locks are changed, I’ll climb up into the window and dangle my feet, scooch close to the edge and hover there in the cold February air for what seems like hours. I’ll crawl down, sit at the desk again and get high. I’ll remember how excited everyone was when we opened nearly five years before. Kate, the staff, our families. My clients—novelists, poets, essayists, short story writers—came with me from the old literary agency, the place where I’d started as an assistant when I first came to New York. They came with me, and there was so much faith in what lay ahead, so much faith in me. I’ll stare at all the contracts and memos and galleys piled on my desk and marvel that I once had something to do with these things, those people. That I had been counted on.
Mark is shouting from the kitchen, but I don’t hear what he’s saying.
My cell phone rings, but it is buried under a pile of blankets and sheets in the next room, and I don’t hear that either. I’ll find it later, the voice mail full of terrified calls from friends and family and Noah. I’ll listen to the beginning of one and erase it along with the rest.
I won’t hear the tumble of the new locks on the door of the apartment where Noah and I have lived for eight years—how the sound has changed from a bright pop to a low click as the bolt flies free while his hand turns the new key for the first time. I can’t hear any of this. Cannot feel any of these things that have happened or are about to as the construction that was my life dismantles—lock by lock, client by client, dollar by dollar, trust by trust.
The only thing I hear as Mark angrily sweeps the glass from the floor, and the only thing I feel as the city rustles to life outside, are the barking demands at the end of the marionette strings. Through the endless morning and the crawling afternoon hours, and after, they grow louder, more insistent; tug harder, yank rougher, shake the cash card from my wallet, dollars from my pockets, loose change from my coat, color from my eyes, life out of me.
Cheers
It’s January 2001 and Noah’s cousin Letty is giving a small dinner at her brownstone in Brooklyn Heights to celebrate the launch of the small literary agency my friend Kate and I are about to open. Letty is a well-bred daughter of Memphis. Wellesley educated, widowed, and much younger-looking and acting than her sixty-something years, she has the bright, smiling, good-hearted eagerness of an underdog. Unlike her supersleek, wife-of-a-former-ambassador sister, Letty has always seemed slightly at odds with her privileged upbringing. She hasn’t needed to work a day in her life, but she talks often about her jobs in the design departments of several book publishers and her many years working for foundations. She has two daughters, Ruth and Hannah, and scads of girlhood friends with names like Sissy and Babs whom she often flies back to Memphis to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries with. Letty is one of the kindest people I have ever known.
It is the end of January, one week before the agency officially opens. We don’t have phones, stationery, or bank accounts. I’m anxious that we still have to hire an assistant and a bookkeeper, but I’m more anxious that we will not have money to pay either. Noah and I arrive at Letty’s ten minutes late, and Kate and her husband are already there. Letty has arranged for someone to take coats, serve drinks, pass hors d’oeuvres, and attend to the dinner table. He’s in his mid-to late thirties, Asian, attractive, clearly gay, and a bit too friendly. His name is Stephen and his flamboyance makes me self-conscious in the presence of Kate and her husband, whom we haven’t socialized with as a couple much and who seem now, together, very straight.
Stephen asks Noah and me what we’d like to drink and scampers off to the kitchen. He brings us two glasses of white wine, even though I asked for a vodka and Noah a Scotch. He flusters and apologizes and goes back to the kitchen but does not return. Five or so minutes pass and Letty gets up to look for him. A few minutes later he comes out with the drinks. Letty is clearly embarrassed.
The evening is decadent. Caviar, shrimp, and cheeses before dinner, then roast lamb. I have too much of everything and am full long before dessert is served. Noah and Letty both give toasts—both have tears in their eyes as they do. I shift uncomfortably in the beams of their praise and cringe, not for the first time, at how close I am to a cousin of Noah’s and barely know any of my own. At how Noah and I will go to weddings and birthdays of cousins and siblings and nieces of his and I see my family once a year—at Christmas usually—and then for only a day and a night.
On the way to the bathroom, I ask Stephen to bring me another vodka. He forgets and I drink more wine. As I finally catch a gentle buzz, I look around the table and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Nights like these are for other people, people like Kate and Noah who—with their Ivy League degrees and supportive families—seem born for toasts and congratulations. At dessert, instead of drinking the port Letty has Stephen open, I get up and fix another vodka. Stephen sees this, realizes that he never brought me the earlier one, and from then on is very quick to refill my glass.
Noah and I hold hands in the cab ride home. I’ve had seven or eight vodkas, at least as many glasses of wine, and still feel a few drinks shy of where I’d like to be. I think of all that is left to do in the coming weeks to open the agency, and of the two other parties being thrown to celebrate. One is a cocktail party at the new apartment of a friend of Kate’s; the other is a seated dinner for fifty or so clients and publishing colleagues hosted by my friend David, who is also one of the first writers I worked with. I worry that I’ll need to address the crowds at both of these parties—say something at least by way of thanking the hosts—and I begin to think about how to make sure I won’t have to. I close my eyes and try not to focus on how much I want to call Rico and do a few hits. After four or five drinks, this option usually rises up and floats in front of me until I either call him, call another dealer, or fall asleep.
It’s just before midnight, and my mind starts racing with ways that I can break away from Noah and score. A manuscript left at the office? Cash I need to get from the ATM? Nothing seems plausible. As we cross the Brooklyn Bridge back into Manhattan, Noah takes both my hands and tells me how proud he is—of me, of the agency. As he speaks, the lights from the bridge flicker across his scruffy beard, kind eyes, longish sideburns and close-cropped, receding hair. I lean into him and away from the other thoughts. He smells the way he always smells—like Speed Stick deodorant and fresh laundry. I relax a little, think for a moment that there’s not so much to worry about, that everything will work out.
Getting into bed that night, I remember Stephen, the guy at Letty’s, and how he forgot to bring out several dishes warming in the oven, spilled a glass of wine, and made flirty eyes at me through dinner. I wonder how Letty found him and remember his lingering too long at the table, asking too many questions, and seeming oblivious of his mistakes. I remember that he let us know he went to Princeton and that, when it came up that Noah was a filmmaker, he listed all the famous people he knew—playwrights, activists, actors. I also remember his writing his number down on the back of a napkin and pressing it into my hand when I went into the kitchen for a glass of water; how he held my hand a beat too long when he told me that he’d bartended lots of book parties, that I should call him sometime. And though he’d been a disaster all evening, I know, as I fall asleep that night, that I will.
Over a year later, when Stephen is setting up a small table in our TV room with glasses and ice—something he has now done for us at least half a dozen times—I notice a long burn mark down the side of his thumb. I ask him what happened and he stops what he’s doing, looks at me as if he’s been waiting for me to ask this question for a long time, and says, You don’t want to know. But I do know. Addicts have antennae that can sometimes detect the kindred frequency of other addicts, and in this instant I pick up Stephen’s. In fact, I’ve probably been responding to it since the second we met. But it’s not until now—when I know exactly how he burned himself—that I fully understand the reason I hired him, why he is now in our apartment working another party, even though he has twice stood us up on the day of an event with some complicated excuse of illness or family trouble. And so I say, Maybe you need to be more careful what you smoke, and when he smiles and asks, Are you? I know that this will lead to something. That the ball is in play. I’ll b
e amazed later when I remember what I say next. Not as careful as either of us should be. And then next: We should set that up sometime.
I throw a party at the apartment when Noah is out of town. It’s a Thursday night and I’ve already cleared the decks so I don’t need to go into work the next day. All evening I pretend to be tired—yawning and stretching, rubbing my eyes—hoping to encourage people to leave early. I imagine the first hit and the bloom of exquisite calm it will bring and I quietly, invisibly, detest everyone in the apartment for being there. I move through the apartment with my seltzer—what I always drink when I organize anything larger than a dinner party—and as I’m talking and smiling and hugging congratulations and thank-you-for-comings, I’m running down the list of things left to do. Check in with Noah to give him the sense that the night has wound down and I am heading to bed. Run out to the cash machine to get Stephen $300—maybe $400—to go wherever he needs to go to score. I’ll also need at least $300 to pay him for bartending, since he accepts cash only. I decide to tell him not to bother cleaning up, that I’ll do it so he can get going.
Stephen leaves around eleven fifteen and returns after one. I’ve just finished breaking down the bar, washing the glasses, and putting away the sodas and napkins. (He’ll include those two hours on his bill.) This night is important. Not because it’s the first time I sleep with him. Not because I spend another $700 I barely have. But because at some point, around four in the morning, when we have smoked nearly through the bag, Stephen calls his friend Mark, who, in a few swift minutes, is at the door with more.
Mark is a restaurant publicist. Tall, neat, angular. I notice right away how he vibrates. As if some electrical charge shocks through his body at a low but steady thrum. I also notice how he speaks to Stephen. Like Fagin to the Artful Dodger, he has some authority over him, and even though it’s clear he’s on his best behavior, I can see how their dynamic involves some commingling of brutality and care. As Mark holds up our stems and complains how oily and burnt they are, Stephen flutters around him like a nervous nurse attending a surgeon. Mark gives him a you-should-know-better look and shakes his head. Stephen doesn’t tell him that they’re burnt because of me. That I have, as I always do, scorched each stem with hits that pull too long and flames that are too high. Everyone I ever smoke with will complain about this. And though I will try, each time, to inhale as gently as I can, it always seems like I’m not pulling hard enough, as if the flame is too low, as if I’m not getting enough.