New Mind

              I keep thinking about memories and memory. I have memories of some moments of huge impact in which worlds of detail have been etched into me. Things happened that were “important” and I can snap back to them, forever connected by thin strands of rubber band. (Thank you NC) These are memories made from things which made everything immediately not make sense. You might call them trauma. Everything that makes up a life in an ordered world gets jumbled all about in an instance. We can spend the rest of our lives trying to put our worlds back together. I had some of these moments. You probably did too. Someone did something to me when I was eight or nine and I’ve been alternately dismissing it and trying to sort my world out ever since. In this memory I can see every detail of the space, every feeling I had, every movement of this person and my every reaction to it.

              There seems to be a wholly different type of memory, a much more ephemeral kind. The details flutter in and of focus. The timelines are fluid and disagree with each other. They span long periods and contain vast stretches of void. And they lead to intensely strong emotions when conjured in the presence. It’s the feeling that’s etched-not so much the details. My memories of Dean are of this second type. Dean appeared at some point in those days on Franklin and while his presence was titanic I can’t see his entrance. I can only reasonably imagine it.

              When Leslie broke free from the craft service table, she moved to the Art Department. Anyone with any sort of weird, creative bent wound up there. Lovingly, or not, called “Art Fags” by the shorts-wearing Grips, Art Department did most of the heavy lifting on all of these early music videos. Surely this would be argued by some but face it, they came in first, worked their ass off to provide a space, an environment, a world worth shooting and then dismantled and cleaned it all up after everyone else went home. A video without Art Dept. would be a fucking well-lit, white box. Leslie was one of these guys and she started working for Jose.

              Jose Montana was a cool, little gay guy who art directed most of these videos we all worked on. He’s certainly THE art director in the collective bundle of memories that make up this chapter of my life. Everyone liked Jose. They liked him because he was a good guy. I’m sure my take is benefited by not working directly for him very much as that’s a whole different side of a person on display, but overall people dug Jose I think. And so, by way of Leslie’s career advancement he came into our orbit. Not inner orbit but peripheral.

              Again, things get jumbled and timelines become very fluid and interchangeable but I don’t think I was strung out yet. Let me explain my reasoning. We lived in two different apartments in the Via Carlotta. Initially we lived in the first-floor studio apartment that opened onto the courtyard that the entire building wrapped around. Across from us was a guy named Tom. Nice guy. Queer as a football bat. Looking out of our French doors led straight across and into his. He was a painter. Well, he painted. It brought him immense pleasure and satisfaction I presume. But I don’t remember him being very good. At one point he gave Leslie and I one of his paintings. A beautiful and kind gesture to be sure. I just remember Leslie and I feeling trapped. It was garish or something. I can’t see it now, but I can see Leslie’s face when he left. A tangle of nervous laughter and the slow onset of obligation. We didn’t like it. At all. And yet we had to hang it up as our entire apartment was on view to him. And it was big! And so, we did. We hung it up and proceeded to explain it to stumped visitors for months. You do this for someone kind. You just do.

In any case I have separated recreational/rookie dope use with this first floor apartment and the strung out months to the second floor apartment we graduated to at some point. I think Jose came into things in the first-floor days. And so, with Jose came Dean although I have no memory of his entrance. No vision of first meeting him. I have no idea how we became so close. It’s like a child being born eight years old.

Dean was Jose’s boyfriend. Certainly that’s how Jose would describe him. I’m not so sure about Dean. He was a young guy, well hell, we were all young. I think he came from Portland or someplace like that. Maybe Austin. Maybe Providence. He was quiet with a quick snicker and jagged sense of humor. Not much into letting anyone really know what he was feeling but not entirely cut off from it. He was likely Bi but he always seemed entirely asexual to me. Gentle, subdued, and wispy. You just knew this guy had been really hurt at some point and all effort was put into laughing or denying it away. He lived in an apartment somewhere in the wilds of the lands west of La Brea. Maybe around Fountain and Orange. One of those streets between La Brea and Fairfax on the Fairfax end of Fountain. I think he quickly moved in with Jose, at least I know I’d go to Jose’s to hang with him and plan stuff. Planned to cop.

Dean was way ahead of me. He’d been getting loaded for a while. He seemed to be able to drift in and out of habits by pure force of will although he’d probably never admit to being sick anyway. Again, I have no idea how it came to be that we both shared this penchant for dope but once known we surely joined forces. Almost the entirety of my struggle with heroin addiction has been in a state of relapse. That is, I’d get sober, last awhile, sometimes quite a while and then give in and things would again spin out of control. Using after having been sober is wildly different from the first go around. There’s the guilt, the shame, the absence of any reasonable excuse. You just got selfish, made a really selfish choice and traded in everything to feel that feeling again. I know it’s a complex deal but it’s also pretty much that simple. That period on Franklin with Dean was the only period of using on the other side. I wasn’t stupid but I was still completely naïve about what I was getting myself into. This period was really one of the very few times that I ever got high with anyone. I’ve been living secret lives my whole life.

              We started hanging out more, often when Leslie and Jose were slugging it out on some set. We’d get some money out of the ATM and head to 6th and Union, or the house on Hoover or 8th and Broadway and cop. I have no actual memory of us actually doing dope save for the New York trip, but I know that’s all we did. We’d get high, listen to music and talk. See? This is what I mean about memory. My memories of Dean are all but devoid of detail but the feeling is intense. I think at the end of the day I just felt an overwhelming empathy for him. We never spoke a word about the things that happen to kids at eight or nine but we knew they’d been done to us. He just seemed to have been clobbered by them. He was a friend and we shared a solution to all of the kid stuff.

              I think Leslie and Jose were concerned. I think anyone could sense that we were probably egging each other on to some new destruction but again, who wants to say anything? It was still halfway out in the open. I’d still offer a balloon or two of powdered dope for every five Dean and I’d do. I probably wasn’t fooling anyone and over time everyone stopped saying ok. I know that at one point long after I was fully strung out and just destroying whatever life Leslie and I had created she asked/accused me of fucking Dean. Anyone would think that I suppose. We spent all of our time together in secret. I remember that moment in full detail. I see myself sitting on the bed in the upstairs apartment, the bedspread some pattern mainly of red and just looking at the floor as Leslie raged. We create so many questions in the ones who love us that it turns to madness. How can we possibly be doing this to ourselves? Something must explain it.  They need something to make sense. We kill them with confusion, I think. I acutely remember feeling that if I had put such an absurd answer into her than I must be some monster.  I’m sure I simply shouted “What?! No!” and I’m sure I tried to make her feel bad for even asking such a thing and I’m sure I tried to make her the villain in this thing. That’s what we do. But I couldn’t fool myself. I could see everything and how every choice I had made connected to everyone’s perception of me and all of these connected to all the poisoned emotions I’d manufactured in people and how I really was a selfish monster and so I’m sure I huffed and puffed and slunk off like a coward and stormed out to get more dope. I’m sure I used someone else’s pain for my own benefit. I did a lot of that.

              But none of that had happened yet. Dean and I were still just chipping. One night we had rehearsal. I remember it raining lightly as we pulled up the alley to Hully Gully. I didn’t feel so good. I had the beginnings of a cold or something. Dean was hanging out with us, and I was just looking forward to practice ending and maybe going and getting some dope. I really didn’t feel well and so when something happened that made us cancel practice, I was fine with it. In the pre-cellphone era, I’m not sure what could have happened that we’d know in the moment to cancel but suffice it to say I find myself standing in the rain behind someone’s little blue pick up truck and saying that I’m happy it’s cancelled, I feel shitty. I see Dean kind of snicker and ask, “you have the flu?” I answered “I don’t know maybe. Feels that way.” “You’re dopesick,” he says with a downward turned smile. The camera pulls out 100 yards and I stand there with this thought balloon of “Fuck!” over my head. That’s how I see it now. Fuck, he’s right, I’m dopesick for the first time. “Really?” Dean says, “Let’s find out.”

              I don’t remember copping or getting high but I remember the feeling of every symptom of what a normal person would feel with the flu washing away within seconds of getting the dope in me. I guess we found out. I’d graduated.

              Having done enough dope consistently over a period of time long enough to produce physical withdrawal symptoms happens only once. The next few decades and the relapses they hold are almost immediate snaps to dopesick. I swear the longer you fuck with this stuff the quicker you get strung out. If I got high today, I’d absolutely feel the first squiggly worms of dopesickness slithering through my head and limbs tomorrow morning. Just an echo but unmistakable. This first getting sick might go unnoticed or it might be seminal like it was for me. Dean helped usher me into it. I’m sure it sounds fully repellant and perverse to you as you read this but for me it was an odd form of achievement. It was certainly breaking the ideal I had imagined but it was a real part of this thing I said I wanted. I imagine that’s what Steve Irwin felt when everything he loved and protected turned on him and took his life. These things we think we love. And I don’t want to sully Irwin’s legacy by linking it in any way to my own but the instant turnaround, the instant realization that “Fuck!, I made a mistake” was maybe similar. In any case I was strung out with a Diet Coke habit.

              Time moves on. More rehearsals are completed. More jobs are wrapped. LA holidays come and go and still, life is fairly good. We humans have an incredible capacity of agreeing that the flowers are beautiful as we all know that the house is starting to smoke. At some point I got a rig. I got a syringe. Who knows where? The typical junkie rig of a BD ultra-Fine Insulin Syringe. Orange top. They’re spread bent and unusable all over the pavement of this world in all the bad places. Some dealers would have them hidden behind tires on the street. Some seventy-year-old homeless junkies would sell them out of their grocery cart, this their single hustle. They weren’t hard to get. Eventually I’d just go to drugstores and say I was a diabetic and demand them. I’d endure the look of scorn as I’d buy a ten-pack. They always knew.

              I sit in my bathroom. I’m in the upstairs apartment. I’m alone. And yet still hidden in the bathroom. Pants up but sitting on the toilet. The sun beams in ferociously from my right. Leslie is out. Likely working. Likely less than happy with who she’s attached her cart to, me this broken and diseased horse. I remember, I see the little glob of tar get surrounded by the water I squirt into the spoon it rests in. Little tendrils of dissolving heroin sprout from the ball. Almost imperceptible. I carefully balance it in my left hand and reach for the Bic lighter on the edge of the sink. I roll and flick and fire appears. The flame pushes and flutters around the underside bulb of the spoon. When I see bubbles, I retract. I move the flame in and out. Like I’m cooking. Like I’m making a roux. I want this to be right. Slowly and then all at once the two objects become one. Tar and water become heroin. I take the ripped off piece of a Qtip cotton I’d prepared and drop it in the liquid. I have to roll my fingers because the cotton fibers are so light and they attach to the nervous sweat on my fingertips. I gracefully lay the spoon onto the gleaming white porcelain of the sink. Leslie always kept everything so clean. So pretty. I reach over and take the rig from its resting place on the toilet paper roll tiled fixture. The point goes into the cotton and I pull up the plunger with my right hand thumb as I so very carefully balance the rig into this cotton. The brown liquid just appears in the barrel of the syringe as I slowly push up the plunger with my thumb. There’s no sense of liquid flowing; its purely space being filled. I pull it all up. Every drop. I hold the rig point up and look for air bubbles. Somehow, we always believe we have to get all the air bubbles out. We really don’t but we do it out of tradition. We let the liquid settle and the air float to the top and we gently push on the plunger until the slightest bit of liquid comes out. Stop! Don’t waste any. I transfer the rig to my left hand while pushing up my right shirtsleeve. I’ve already considered where I’d hit. This is it. This is the moment I’d imagined since being a naïve little kid in Bel Air MD keeping everything secret. Everything that people do to eight or nine-year-olds. Keeping it all secret and wanting to be anyone else. Here in this Los Angeles afternoon on 1987 or 1988 in a bathroom on Franklin Avenue I push the point of this BD ultra fine insulin syringe into my arm. I get lucky, So fucking lucky. I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books to know to look for blood. A little rose of blood appears in the barrel. My body is joining in and doing its part. The flower of blood tells me I’m in. I slowly pull back the plunger sucking more blood into the barrel. I’m registering. Decades later nothing feels as good as registering. It’s like God telling you That “I’ll take you in for one more night.” I pause and push. I push the blood swirled brown liquid into my arm. All of it. I pull the point out and wait. I don’t wait long. Something washes over me that I couldn’t even imagine. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I’m home in a house on flame. But I was home.

              Dean and I carried on.