Author: Bill Clegg
Category: Fiction
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I wander past the bright, contrived windows along Wooster and try to remember what time of year it is. It looks like Christmas but I’m sure it’s not. It takes longer than a few beats to remember that it’s March. I make my way into a wide, light, serene store, with low tables and discreet racks hanging with what look to be carefully curated garments. I ask a dark-haired saleswoman with eyes like opals—blue with flashing gold and red—if they have any men’s turtleneck sweaters. I tell her I’m visiting and have run the one I’m wearing into the ground. She looks down my torso at what I am wearing, and her frown and wrinkled brow seem to agree. She directs me down a flight of steps to the lower level. Near the bottom of the stairs is a small basket of folded cashmere turtlenecks, and I pick the smallest one they have, in burgundy, with a cable knit pattern, and find a changing room. The moment the door clicks shut, I pack a thick hit, cough loudly to mask the sound of the lighter, and hungrily draw from the stem. I blow the smoke wide and close my eyes for a few minutes. I have no idea where I will go next and I lean against the back of the changing room wall and let the warm glow of the drug shield me from caring. This little changing room, nothing more than a cube of light and mirror and white paint, is safe, and for a moment I am calm.
I slump further down the wall and let every tense, clenched muscle loosen. It feels as if each limb, every digit, could fall off. The contraption of my body feels barely assembled, on the verge of collapse. Out of nowhere comes a memory of Noah weeping at Japonica. Shaking his head and sobbing. Telling me not to explain, not to say another word, that he knew I was high, could see it on every inch of me.
I pack a hit as big and as fast as I possibly can. It takes a few deep draws for the vision of Noah to dim, and after a few more hits the exorcism is complete. The tiny changing room is thick with smoke, and I know I need to leave. After another big hit, I suddenly remember the SoHo Grand Hotel, which can’t be far and where, thankfully, I have no history.
I sit up and shimmer with the promise of a clean, new hotel room as more smoke curls around the ceiling of the changing cubicle. Energized now with a plan, finally a place I can go, I cool off the lighter and stem and head back into the store. As I walk, I notice that my jeans won’t stay up anymore. My old blue cashmere sweater is tucked in all around my waist, but the soiled, worn-thin Levis are still slipping off me. I need to get a new hole punched in my belt before going to the hotel.
The downstairs of the store is brighter now than I remembered, and smaller. I worry they’ve been listening to me get high and that they can smell the smoke pouring from the now open door of the changing room. Without trying on the sweater, I race upstairs to the opal-eyed woman and tell her I’d like to buy it. She runs my debit card through and as she pulls out the bag that has the words Christopher Fischer scrawled across its meridian, I look around the store. Where once it had a sleek impenetrable chic, it now has a slapped-together, flimsy quality. The bag looks odd, too thick, too bright, too big, as if it were a prop bag for some off-Broadway play that involved shopping. The opal-eyed woman folds the sweater in a confection of tissue, places it in the phony bag, and hands me my receipt as she tells me to have a nice evening. I can feel my grip on reality loosen as I take the bag. Is this some setup? But how would they know I’d come here? I rush out of the store and onto Wooster Street.
A few beats later I hear my name being called in a high-pitched, nervous, southern accent. Bill, oh, hello, Bill. I freeze. ROSIE?! Old art-project, crack-smoking, 23rd Street Rosie? What’s she doing here? Jesus, is she in on this? I look around and can’t see anyone I know. My heart pounds and my neck chokes with a sudden rush of blood to my head. And there she is: Barbara. A lovely middle-aged, impeccably dressed woman who acts as an adviser to foreign publishing houses, what people in publishing call a scout. I’ve known her, not well, for years. She eyes me with worry, but kindly, and quickly I say hello and move on before a conversation can take root. Seeing her jolts me into thinking about book publishing, the agency, Kate, our employees, my writers—Jesus, all those writers. And with them the names and faces and voices of all the publishers, editors, agents, scouts, publicists, and assistants roar to life, one by one, like a great, animated mural—scolding and disgusted. And then, again, memories of rehab and Noah flood back in. With my fake shopping bag in one hand and debit card in the other, I start hustling west toward the SoHo Grand.
I see—oh, dear God, thank you—a leather shop and immediately go in, take off my belt, and ask to have a few new holes punched. This is the third time I have done this in the last five weeks. At one point, in some hotel room, I have taken a knife and stabbed out a new, albeit rougher, hole. The old guy behind the stack of bags and wallets eyes the weathered belt and me cautiously and says, You’re going to need more than just a few. He makes three and when I put the belt on it links, easily, to the last one. I consider having him make another, but judging by how quickly he makes the holes and rings up the price, it seems he wants me gone. I walk for a few blocks toward the hotel, but before I get there I know I need to change out of my mangy blue sweater. I’ve been wearing it for over a month. It’s stretched out of shape and the unidentifiable residue that crusts and streaks along the neck and chest is, I’m worried but not exactly sure, beginning to smell.
A few blocks away, I see a small Chinese restaurant. It’s the kind with only three or four tables that is mostly for takeout. There are no other customers in the store when I enter. I step up to the counter and ask if I can use the bathroom, and the boy there, no more than sixteen, says that it’s for customer use only. A woman I assume is his mother joins him and repeats that it’s not for public use.
I am desperate to change and also getting antsy for a hit, so I order three dishes and some egg rolls for takeout and ask, a little impatiently, if I can use the bathroom now. The woman says, yes, if I pay first. So I do. I walk past the counter to the back of the kitchen, where there is a tiny bathroom. Luckily it has a window and a mirror. I run the water and flush the toilet to mask the sounds of the clicking lighter and the popping sound the drug makes when it’s lit. I pack the stem and light up. I load it again, since I’m feeling far from relieved after the first hit. The rock pops at the end of the stem when I pull, and the glass at the very end cracks apart. This sometimes happens when you put a big cold chunk of crack in a still-hot stem and light up too quickly. I scramble as quietly as I can to clean up the small bits of glass, find the thank-God-still-intact rock of crack, and reload the broken stem. My agitation is high, so I pack in even more. The hit is big and I blow the smoke out the window and, thankfully, begin to feel a wash of relief as I exhale. I wriggle out of my sweater and see my torso in the little mirror. Ribs and bones jut everywhere, and the color of my skin is light gray. Little scrapes and burn marks and scabs speckle my arms, chest, and stomach. I feel, for the first time, beyond the desire for sex, as if I have passed into another state of being high, where sex no longer matters. I am relieved, because the body in the mirror is not one I would want anyone to see. I look more closely at the worst burn marks and cuts, the ones on my hands and forearms, and I shudder. I look in the mirror again and see how little skin I have, how my frame seems covered by the thinnest sheet, pulled tight. I look like I crawled out of a fire, starving. I have never seen my pelvic bones winging from my abdomen in the way they do now and I’m relieved, as I pull the sweater over my head, that this glorious, thick miracle of costly fabric covers all of it. I wash my face and hands, wipe away various stains on my jeans, and pick lint and hair and detritus from the rim of my trusty cap. I find Visine in my jacket and drown my eyes in it. I wash my mouth out with soap and rub it under my armpits to cover up whatever odor may be coming from there. I fire up another blast, blow on the stem, wrap it up, put the old sweater in the bag, and open the door that leads to the kitchen and the front of the shop. There are two men—heavy-jacketed, dull-panted, gray-shoed Penneys—and they are looking directly at me as I step toward the counter. The food is in bags, ready, a
nd I grab them, thank the woman and the boy, and leave. As I walk west, I turn back and see the two Penneys exit the restaurant and begin walking my way. I change directions several times, and after twenty or so minutes I think I’ve lost them. I throw the Chinese food and the shopping bag with my old sweater into a garbage can. My heart is racing and I’m worried that I’ll be too panicky to make it through the check-in process at the front desk of the SoHo Grand. I’m too jumpy to stop at a bar and get a drink, so I decide to just go for it. Just get to the room. Once there, I will be okay. Once there, I can order room service, call Happy, drink bottles of vodka to take the sharp edges off. I am focused on the short-term relief of the hotel room, but under everything is a creeping knowledge that with not much money left, not much more weight to lose, and not many more places to hide, this is it. An end of some kind is near.
I stop by a deli around the corner from the hotel and get ten lighters, six boxes of sleeping pills, and a six-pack of beer so that I have something to drink the second I get to the room. I wish I could take a hit before going into the hotel, but I know it’s now or never. I head into the new brick-and-glass building, and as I march, as slowly and calmly as I can, up the steps, I think of the clean sheets, the gushing shower, the room service, the immaculate surfaces, the safety. The place is crawling with guys who look like production assistants on movies—all hats and jeans and scruff. Thank God. Thank God I don’t stick out. Instantly I imagine I am in town from L.A. on a shoot and that anyone noticing my weight, the rings under my bloodshot eyes, the greasy hair poking out from my cap, will just chalk it up to a tight production schedule and late nights in the editing room going over the dailies. So with this fantasy flickering behind my movements, I go to the front desk and ask for a room. How many nights? the woman asks, and I make a quick calculation of the $500 room rate and the amount of crack I plan on buying from Happy. I tell her four nights and that I need to check in under an alias as well as needing a smoking room. She doesn’t skip a beat. She says, Fine, runs my debit card, looks at my passport, hands me a plastic room card, and off I go. I practically giggle from excitement and relief in the elevator as I’m heading up to what is the third floor from the top of the building. I clock that it’s high enough for a jump to matter. If all else fails, there is that.
The room is small, on the southwest corner, and dimly lit. The lights of SoHo, Tribeca, and Wall Street dance and blink on the other side of the large windows, and it feels, when I first step into the room, like being on the inside of a snow globe suspended in midair, high above the city. I stand at the window and call Happy for the last time.
He arrives around one. I’d smoked down what I had left from the bag at Rosie’s an hour ago, and my stem is now less than two inches long, caked with burnt, unsmokable residue. When I called hours earlier I asked for $2,000 worth. More than I’ve ever ordered. I can only give him $1,500 in cash—what was left of my limit when I went to the ATM before midnight and a new grand after. I ask him, this one time, to sport me the difference. He pauses, briefly, and starts counting out the bags and new stems. Nice hotel, he says, commenting for the first time ever on where I’m staying. Nice room. And he leaves. Looking at the forty bags of crack on my bedspread, the most I have ever seen in one place, makes me feel safer than I have felt all day. The bags look fuller, more jam-packed than usual, and the abundance, the dancing light outside the window, and the awareness that I will never leave this room sends a high through my system before I even light up. I lie down on the bed and drop the bags on my chest and face, one by one, and then all at once. It feels like an arrival. The end of a journey. Not just the panicked one of days and nights and weeks after relapsing, but the long one, the whole useless struggle. The lines from that novel rise up again, but this time with new meaning. It would be now.
I pull the curtains shut and pack a hit with one of the new stems and, more than ever before, let the crumbs scatter about. It won’t matter. I won’t see the end of this pile. There is no way I can survive this. I pack another hit. Another. And another. Happy has given me eight stems, and I load two more so I don’t have to wait for one to cool before I start the next. I inhale smoke nonstop for nearly an hour, naked and breathing more smoke than air. I am filled with smoke—warm, electric, big. I feel weightless in this dim room. I am almost nothing. I am, finally, about to be nothing.
I order bottles and bottles of vodka from room service, no food. I smoke and drink all night, and by morning I have gone through a third of what I bought from Happy and panic that I won’t have enough. By midnight, I decide to get $1,000 from the ATM and call Rico and ask him to float me a grand’s worth until the next day. I’ve never asked Rico for an advance but he doesn’t hesitate. When he comes around two in the morning—heavyset, cranky, and in a bulky red sweatshirt—he throws in a couple hundred extra, in addition to the thousand on credit. On the house. Eat something, man, he says, and for a moment he looks worried. But only for a moment and then he’s gone. I gather all the little bags together. A bigger pile than the night before and now, with only $4,000 in my account and a hotel bill ticking up, I worry, again, if I will have enough. Death and an empty bank account are racing neck and neck, and it’s the former I am pinning everything on.
I take all the sleeping pills out of their boxes and pop each one free from the thick sheets of safety packaging. I put the pills in a clear water glass from the bathroom and empty all the crack into another. My hands shake as I move the pills and the crack, and my whole body rocks in time with my heartbeat. I am drinking vodka like water and nervous each time I have to order another couple bottles that the room-service boys will report to the desk that there is something funny going on in my room.
The second morning comes on and the room seems smaller. I open the curtains and the day outside is gray, still. I am looking out the window at neighborhoods I’ve eaten and shopped and walked in for years, and yet I feel as if I’m seeing a city I’ve never been to. Nothing appears familiar and it seems less like a place I could go down the elevator and visit, and more like a photograph or a mural I can only regard.
I continue to smoke and am grateful for a ventilation system that draws the billowing clouds away as soon as I exhale. I have kept a window cracked to allow fresh air in, and for once I don’t worry about the smell seeping down the hall to alert other guests or hotel employees.
I stand at the window, towel around my waist, and notice across the lot behind the hotel a string of black SUVs and several dark sedans lined up in a row. There must be nine of them, and I think but am not sure I see two people sitting in the front seat of each. I stop breathing. One of them seems to be holding a pair of binoculars. My heart begins to slam in my chest. It looks as if they all have binoculars. Eighteen pairs of them, trained directly on this window, this room, me. My towel slips off and I drop to my knees and kneel up to the window. One of them is waving. It’s hard to tell but I’m sure he’s waving from behind the glass. There’s a reflection, but yes, yes, his arm is waving. Fuck, they’re all waving. Waving with one hand and holding binoculars in the other. I feel like I’ve been electrocuted. My arms and neck ache, and I think I’m having a heart attack. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! I shout to myself as I pace the room and pour a full glass of vodka, downing it in one gulp. FUCK. I immediately grab a new stem and jam it full. SHIT! I scream as I stop myself from lighting up. I can’t smoke it with the curtains open. Not with them all watching. But I can’t close them, they’ll storm the room. Oh, my God, they are going to storm the room. I run to the bathroom and turn on the shower to hide the sound of the lighter and the loud popping sound of the flame scorching the too-large chunk of crack at the end of the stem. It takes three long pulls to smoke the stem down, and I grab a towel and lay it across the base of the door to the room. Suddenly I notice that the ventilation system in the bathroom isn’t very good. The smoke hangs heavy and slow in the air at the top of the ceiling. I open the door and return to the room. Without looking out the window, I close the
curtains, sit down on the bed, load up the stem, and smoke. And again. And again. I am low on vodka and without it I will shake out of control. After a few moments pass, I do it again. I’m terrified now of calling downstairs for more, but I do. I grab shampoo and streak the walls around the bathroom door and the vents of the air system, hoping to create a fresh smell. I drink the last of the vodka, load up more hits, and look at my watch and see that it’s after one o’clock. I have one more night left in the hotel and I know there is not enough money in my account for another. The vodka comes, and the boy who delivers it is not a boy but a man and too smooth, I think, too in control, and too, well, manly to be a room-service waiter. Fuck, I think. Undercover. I thank him, sign the bill, and when he asks if there’s anything else, I think, GET THE FUCK OUT! but gently say, No thanks, and keep my shaking hands behind my back. He leaves and I think I hear something above me. Is there another room above me or the roof? I can’t remember. I pace the room, light a hit, and decide whether to open the curtains and look up. It takes forty-five minutes and nearly half a bottle of vodka for me to pull back the curtains, lean out, look up, and notice that there is an open roof above this room and not another room. The building steps back at the top, and my floor is the last before it narrows. I look out across the lot to the line of black SUVs and sedans and think I see the flash of a lighter go off in one. And another. Are they trying to drive me insane? Why are they watching me? Why don’t they just arrest me? WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY? I suddenly feel light, flimsy. Defenseless. I try to stand but stay bent with dread, like a half-closed jackknife. I close the curtains and crouch on tiptoes back to the bed. The noises above—footfalls? Something dragging? Are they planning on scaling down from the roof and coming in through the windows? I realize how small this room is and wonder if they’ve rigged it this way solely for me—is it usually part of a larger suite, but when they saw me coming, they created a wired, camera equipped, roof-accessible space to corner me into a bust? A radio sounds from somewhere—in the hall? The roof? I jump off the bed toward the dresser. My towel comes off again, and I see in the mirror a rickety skeleton—elbows and knees and knuckles bulging like bolted wooden joints strung with thread. I am the marionette I have seen hundreds of times before but never thought was me. I am only sticks and strings and spasms. Money gone. Love gone. Career gone. Reputation gone. Friends gone. Hope gone. Compassion gone. Usefulness gone. Second chances gone. And if there had been any hesitation about dying, that’s gone now, too. I take a huge hit. There must be almost $2,000 worth of crack left in the glass cup. I have almost two full bottles of vodka, a water glass full of sleeping pills, two clean and three rough-but-usable stems left. I need to get it all down as fast as possible, to wallop my system hard enough before anyone breaks into the room. I’ve slept only a handful of hours over the last six weeks. I cannot remember eating. I’m sure my racked body won’t survive if I overwhelm it with what I have. The team of binocular-holding, lighter-flashing, hand-waving SUV drivers outside, who now seem to be on the roof, are, at any second, it seems, about to explode through the door and windows.