Memoirs Aren't Fairytales: A Story of Addiction Read online

  “My family,” she said when I asked who the names were.

  I didn't know what design I wanted. My family was in my heart, but it seemed a little strange to put them on my skin too. I didn't like Chinese symbols or tribal bands. Casey suggested a butterfly or flower, but those were too girly for me. I decided to get the skyline of Boston inked on my foot. A symbol of how far I'd come since moving here.

  “Who wants to go first?” Austin, the tattoo guy, asked.

  “You go,” Casey said.

  I got on the dentist-like chair, and Austin drew on my foot with a marker. After I approved the placement and design, he took the tattoo gun out of its plastic bag. He inserted a new needle into the tip and dipped the head into a cup of black ink.

  Casey held my hand, but she didn't have to. It wasn't painful, more like an annoying scratch that wouldn't go away.

  “I want to put in a few details, is that okay?” Austin asked.

  “Do whatever you want,” I said, taking in all the pictures on the ceiling.

  Eric had a tattoo, and so did a lot of my friends in college. But their tattoos weren't like these. These were pieces of art.

  “All done,” Austin said after a while.

  Around the skyline, he had put yellow, blue, and pink swirls. They were like the bursts of beautiful I saw on the beach in Cape Cod. A needle had inked this special memory. A story. And now I'd never forget it.

  Casey got into the chair, and I watched the needle. The names popped in a rich red, the circle black and shadowed with yellow. She winced and complained and said how she couldn't believe how brave I'd been.

  I wasn't brave. The needle just didn't hurt.

  Austin covered her tat with a bandage, like he'd done for me, and Casey drove me back to my apartment. She parked in front and turned off the engine.

  “Can I come up?” she asked.

  I only had an hour before work and I still needed to shower and get ready.

  “I have to leave soon.”

  “That's fine,” she said. “I'll just give Eric a quick hug and take off.”

  When we got inside, Eric was in the kitchen separating the coke into two bags. On the other side of the counter were a rolled-up bill and two lines he'd chopped up. I left Casey at the door and snorted both lines. When I looked up, she was pale.

  “Is the tattoo hurting you?” I asked. “Sit down and I'll get you some water.”

  “I don't need water, I'm fine,” she said. “Was that coke you just snorted?”

  “Yeah—”

  “Why do you have so much of it?” She pointed at the two bags in front of Eric.

  Eric told her one bag was for me and the other was for him.

  “This is too much for me,” she said. She turned around and opened the door.

  I caught her before she got through the doorway.

  “It's not a big deal,” I said.

  “It is.”

  “Casey—”

  “I thought you were like me, Nicole, but you're not.”

  She ripped my hands off her arms and ran down the hall.

  I looked at Eric, and he smiled and cut a line for each of us to snort.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My daisy dukes and tight tanks were getting me bigger tips, and I was picking up all double shifts, but we still never had enough cash. We never had enough of anything, really. There wasn't enough food in the fridge or money to pay the rent and electric bill, and there was never enough blow to snort.

  Our landlord would bang on our door at the first of each month, threatening to evict us if we didn't get caught up. He came early in the morning, and Eric and I would hide in the bathroom. We'd play a game of how many lines we could get up our noses before he stopped knocking and left us alone. Usually it took about six. But in the third month, I only had enough time to do two before I heard what sounded like a bulldozer clawing through the kitchen wall. I checked, and the walls were intact, but the front door was being rammed with something hard. Both the deadbolt and chain were locked, so the wood splintered in the middle, and our landlord came plowing through the gap. He had a crowbar in his hand and aimed it like a gun, flashing it in our faces. Spit was flying from his mouth as he yelled about the rent we owed. All I could do was laugh. I mean, the guy looked like Homer Simpson, with his bald head and rippling pot belly.

  I put my hands in the air and backed away from the crowbar to find my purse. I emptied my wallet, handing Homer all the money I had. It was a fist full of change. “Will this buy us one more night?”

  He pocketed my change. “I want you punks out of my building. Get your shit and get the fuck out right now.”

  I stuffed my two backpacks full, but there was still so much to pack. We didn't have any boxes. We were out of trash bags except for the one in the kitchen filled with garbage. I turned the trash bag upside down, dumping all the rubbish onto the floor. Homer yelled at me for making such a mess, but he wasn't giving me much of a choice. The trash bag smelled like stale milk and moldy Chinese food. I didn't have time to soak up the liquid or wipe off the chunks of food that were stuck to the bottom of the bag. I threw in everything I could.

  I did a final sweep of the room. We were leaving behind the lamp and coffeemaker, towels, plates, silverware and the air mattress. I asked Homer if we could have more time to move. His response came out in a paragraph, and it wasn't in English. I guess the answer was no, and whatever else he said was just some bullshit. Besides the rent, we were good tenants.

  Eric hoisted the TV into his arms, I carried the backpacks and trash bag, and we left the building with Homer and his fucking crowbar tailing us. The rabbit had been impounded for unpaid parking tickets, and Eric was out of cash too. We had to hoof it to Renee's.

  The top of the trash bag ripped, and Eric's CD player smashed into pieces. We weren't even halfway to her place yet. Clothes fell all over the sidewalk, and a pair of underwear soaked with something nasty flopped onto my shoe.

  Eric set the TV down on a bench and put his hands on his hips. “You've gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  I flung the underwear over to him, and it landed on his shoulder.

  “Real nice,” he said, throwing my panties on the ground.

  I started to scoop all our stuff into a pile but stopped and looked over at him. He was just standing there, rubbing his temples. “Can you help me out?” I asked.

  We clumped everything together in a big mound and stared at it like somehow, miraculously, it would walk itself to Renee's.

  “We need another bag,” I said.

  “No shit, genius. Fuck, wait here.”

  He went into a few stores and came back empty handed. “Call Renee and tell her to pick us up in a taxi,” he said.

  When she pulled up to the street corner where we were sitting, she couldn't stop laughing. I glanced over at Eric, squatting on top of the TV with his pants and shirts in a ball under his feet, and lost it. He did too. We didn't care that the people passing us were gawking. This shit was funny. The only person who didn't find it funny was the cab driver. He charged us extra because our clothes stunk up his backseat.

  Things were easier with all of us living together. We spent less money on trains since Renee lived close to our jobs and we didn't have to divvy up the coke. And now that the rent and utilities were divided three ways, we had no problem affording them. But like with everything else, things changed by the second month. The more money we made, the more coke we bought. The more we snorted, the more we wanted. We decided to cut what was less important. We stopped buying weed and only ate at the bar because the food there was free.

  We were paying our bills, but always late. We got letters in the mail from our utility companies telling us they were going to disconnect service. Eric pawned his TV and CD collection to pay the electric bill. The cable company started calling Renee's cell a few times a day, leaving long and threatening messages. She got so fed up with screening her calls, she pretended to be her mother and told the collector Renee was dead
. That was the last time she heard from them. To pay our rent, Renee sold the stuff in her apartment. She even hocked Baby, but we were still behind. Once we paid our overdue balances, the next month's bills came in.

  Soon her apartment was bare except for the bed, couch and a few dishes. Our electric was shut off, and our rent was three weeks late. It was time to come up with a plan. We couldn't deal coke because we didn't know enough people. We couldn't get second jobs since we were already working double shifts, so we decided to hit up our parents.

  Renee didn't have any luck with hers. I guess she'd been sucking them dry for a while. Eric's parents sent him two hundred and told him to make it last because they couldn't afford to send any more for at least a month. He cashed the check and we went straight to Que's. But two hundred dollars worth of coke only lasted a little over a day.

  When I called home, Dad answered the phone. I told him we'd been kicked out of our apartment because the building was getting renovated and we had to move in with a friend. He didn't think that was a bad break. I told him we'd lost a month's rent when we moved, and he suggested to pick up some overtime.

  I needed a different approach. What would make him open his wallet for me?

  “But Daddy, I don't have enough money for food and I'm starving.”

  “Michael told us you'd lost a lot of weight,” he said. “Oh sweetheart, why didn't you ask me sooner?”

  I was still going to Michael's place, but instead of every week, I went every other.

  I'd been using coke for about four months, and at first, the weight had come off slowly. It wasn't until we gave up weed and binging on munchies, and we stopped buying food that the weight had really started to shed. I'd already lost at least thirty-five pounds.

  My dad agreed to deposit fifty dollars into my account every Friday. Fifty dollars a week was a joke. I needed around eighty dollars a day. Between the three of us, we had a two hundred and fifty dollar a day habit.

  It was time to talk to Que.

  Renee got called into work, so Eric and I went to his house without her. All we had was the twenty bucks Michael had given me the night before. It wasn't even enough to buy three Percs.

  “Que, I'm jonesing,” Eric said. We were sitting on the bed, and Que was slouched in the chair by his desk. Since our first visit, we'd been promoted from standing against the door to lounging on his bed.

  “What can you do for a twenty-spot?” Eric asked.

  Que's hand hovered around the middle of the cabinet and then landed on the third shelf. Coke and weed weren't the only drugs we had bought from him. We'd dropped hits of ecstasy and snorted Percs when he was out of coke. But up until today, we'd never graduated to the third shelf. Renee told me that shelf was reserved for junkies. By the way she said the word junkie, it sounded like that was someone honorable.

  He grabbed one of the packets and held it out to us. It looked all professional with its perfect, wax-paper wrapping and stamped emblem.

  “What is it?” Eric asked.

  “Heroin,” Que said.

  I wondered why he kept it on the bottom shelf of his cabinet. Wasn't heroin like the king of drugs?

  “How much does it cost?” I asked.

  “Each bag is a nick or a bundle of ten bags for fifty.”

  Damn this shit was cheap. And the packet was fat too.

  “We snort it?” Eric asked.

  “Snort it, freebase it, slam it. Same as coke,” Que said.

  Eric's face turned red. He must have felt embarrassed for asking. I would have asked too if he hadn't. Eric knew as much about drugs as I did, which was nothing compared to what Renee knew. She taught us about coke and opioids, how to cut them into a fine powder and how to snort them in a hurry without a straw or a dollar bill.

  We had planned to suggest doing runs for Que, like a delivery service where he could pay us in coke. We hadn't talked about subbing heroin instead.

  “It's good?” Eric asked.

  I already knew it was good. The image of that homeless guy nodding out on the train was stuck in my brain.

  “You want a taste?” Que asked.

  “Hell yeah,” I said and looked at Eric. He nodded and smiled. “We both do.”

  Que grabbed a water bottle and a lighter. His hands were moving so fast I couldn't keep up with what he was doing. He handed Eric a glass pipe that looked like one of those test tubes we used in chemistry class, but both ends were open. In front of Eric, Que held a piece of tin foil that he'd smeared with the cooked-up mix.

  “When you see smoke, suck it through the pipe,” Que said.

  The smoke burned off the foil in thin, squiggly lines. Eric sucked, and when his lungs were full, he held it in until he coughed. When he exhaled, his eyes closed. His back leaned towards the bed. I asked him how he felt. He didn't say a word. His only movement was his fingers releasing the pipe so it dropped onto the bed.

  Que held the foil for me, and I followed the smoke with the end of the pipe. The taste was an odd mix, sweet like kid vitamins and bitter like vinegar, and it burned my lungs. I felt it, slowly, at the tip of each limb and then a rush up to my head. The rush wasn't anything like coke. This, well, this was euphoric—tingles and sparks and melting—like I was being swallowed by a cloud of cotton and the sun was wrapping its rays around me like a blanket. I could feel my chin falling towards my chest, my back hunching forward. My body was acting on its own, and my mind was empty, like all my memories had been erased. There was scenery behind my lids. Aqua colored water and powdery sand that extended for miles. The beach looked familiar. Maybe it was Ogunquit Beach, where my parents had brought us as kids, or Nantasket Beach, where my grandparents lived in the summers when they were still alive.

  I didn't know how long I was like that—asleep or awake or totally fucking out of it—but when I came back, Eric and Que were staring at me.

  “What do you think?” Eric asked.

  “Give us four bags.”

  I was never going back to coke. I wanted more heroin. And I wanted it now.

  We needed tin foil, so on the way home we stopped in an alleyway a few blocks from the mini market to count the change in my wallet. It added up to less than a dollar.

  “We're at least two dollars short,” I said.

  “Buy a pack of gum,” he said. “And I'll meet you down there.” He was pointing to the corner of the street.

  There were three people ahead of me in the checkout line. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eric walk in and go down one of the aisles. There was only one camera, aimed at the register, but there were mirrors near the ceiling in all four corners of the store.

  The line moved fast. I unzipped my jacket, undid the top three buttons of my shirt and arched my back. The customer in front of me finished paying, and I reached for a pack of Juicy Fruit, setting it on the counter.

  “Forty-nine cents,” the cashier said, but his eyes weren't on me, they were scanning the aisles.

  “Can you tell me how to get to Quincy Market?” I asked, handing him two quarters.

  He looked at the change, and then his eyes slid a few inches up to my chest. “You, uh…”

  While he watched, I adjusted the underwire, and my boobs popped out even more. “I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you said.”

  “Err, t-take the Orange Line to State Street and it's, uh, a b-block from there.”

  I heard Eric cough, and then the bells on the front door chimed. We were in the clear.

  I told the cashier to keep the penny and thanked him for the directions. He didn't say you're welcome, but I still gave him a little shoulder shake for being so helpful.

  I caught up to Eric at the end of the block. “Did you get it?” I asked.

  He leaned forward and the box of foil poked out from the collar of his jacket.

  “That was too easy,” I said.

  “You made that dude almost swallow his tongue.”

  “I did good?”

  Eric laughed and put his arm around my shoulder. “They di
d good,” he said, nodding towards my chest.

  We rushed back to the apartment. Eric's hands were shaking so bad he dropped the keys before he got the door open. We took the stairs two at a time and already had our jackets off before getting inside. We sat on the floor by the bed, and Eric followed Que's instructions. The heroin was cooked up, and he spread it over the foil.

  When I was in fifth grade, a cop came into our classroom. We were all wearing our black t-shirts with D.A.R.E across the front. We stared at the cop while he paced in front of the chalkboard, showing us poster-sized pictures of different kinds of drugs. When he got to heroin, he said it was like a terrorist. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it was something bad. During my sophomore year at UMaine, I watched on TV the attack on the twin towers. How could that cop compare tragedy and murder to this harmless white powder? Something that made me feel this incredible shouldn't be categorized as a terrorist.

  Heroin deserved the top shelf in Que's drug cabinet. It deserved the highest rank.

  Coke gave me energy. Ecstasy made me dance and want to be touched. Shrooms made me hallucinate. But heroin. Shit. Heroin was kind. It didn't trip me out like acid or bring me into a dark hole like PCP. It showed me the quietness of the waves.

  When the smoke came out of my mouth, I felt every muscle relax. The replay of my parents' nagging was muted. The looks of pity that flashed in my head from when I moved out of my dorm room were blurred. And the dirtiness I felt inside my crotch was wiped clean.

  I heard Renee walk through the door. She dropped her purse on the floor. I felt her sit down next to me and I opened my eyes just slightly to greet her.

  “Chasing the dragon, huh?” she asked.

  I was chasing something. And damn it felt so fucking good.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When the three of us got back to the apartment at two in the morning, all our stuff was dumped in the hallway. The bed frame was in pieces, and the mattress leaned against the wall. All our clothes were thrown in boxes piled on top of the couch cushions. We were only two months behind on rent. Shit, I thought our landlord would be more forgiving than that. He had changed the locks while we were at work and put a No Trespassing sign on our door. We tried to break in, but the door was like steel, and Eric couldn't knock it down. We needed a pick-up truck to move it all and a place to crash. With seventeen dollars, we weren't going to get very far. We filled our backpacks with as much as they'd hold and headed for the park.