Something Borrowed

I met Melinda in 1990 at Impact House in Pasadena. Impact was and still is at the top of the mountain where the slippery road ends, all leading to the one most hardcore of treatment centers. After coming back to LA and stealing Ricky Lee Jone’s Percodans and floundering for a few months at Paul’s house in Frogtown, something had to be done. By this point, my parents knew I’d relapsed, and that was such a weight. I remember my mom getting on the phone and just yelling, “What the fuck are you doing?! What the hell is wrong with you?” What could I say? I didn’t try to defend myself. I never did. I was always the villain in the story. It was just easier. And it’s not like I wasn’t. It was me who fucked up. Being a hero requires others to sign on to that. Being a villain involves nothing but your own black heart. It’s hardly noble; it’s just easy. It makes sense. It’s why kids always blame themselves for abuse. Something needs to make sense, and being the bad guy is the quickest path to it.

              Next store to Paul’s house was an older couple. I forget her name, but he was Lyle. They had to have been in their late 70s. I really loved them. It was something else pure I did to knock back some of the horrors of being a junky that just destroys everything. One night I took Lyle to a Dodger game. Of course, I was high, but he didn’t know, and it was a really beautiful night. It was like what hanging out with my grandfathers might have felt like. I’ll always have that night. I always imagine them living there whenever I drive down Fletcher to and from the 2. But that can’t be. They must have long ago crossed over. I’ll see them again. I believe it.

              My days were all spent in service of getting dope. A balloon was 7 dollars. What a weird price to arrive at. It made asking to borrow 7 dollars for some contrived need tricky. If I forgot to round up to 10, the gig was up. Who asks to borrow exactly 7 dollars? Sometimes I worked. I even got it together enough to get some Art Direction gigs from other PAs who had moved up the ladder. I couldn’t hack it. I was so intimidated by anyone higher up the food chain than me. I had zero sense of self-worth. I was so far out from shore. The relief I’d feel if I got enough money to cop was so incredibly overwhelming. Even before I shot the dope, I knew that for the next few hours, I wouldn’t be me. Fuck. I hated me. And so, you can imagine what you’ll do for that. I stole books from used and vintage bookstores and sold them to other vintage bookstores. I broke into friends’ houses and stole CDs to sell. And even then. Even at that lowest ebb, I could tell myself I was doing them a favor. I’d only take CDs that they shouldn’t like to begin with. I’d take The Beatles, and The Who and The Clash and maybe some others I can’t remember. But at the very instance where thought becomes a choice, I always thought I was doing the right thing. I think we all do that. No matter how obviously fucked up our actions and choices are to the entire world, we always think we’re doing the right thing. It only needs to appear for a fraction of a second. The point is we can not see ourselves as the broken people we can become in the nanosecond where decisions exist. We think we’re doing something good. And that leads to a whole universe of bad.

               I went to a couple NA meetings and tried to connect. I’d been very connected to NA in Baltimore for the year I spent there clean after The Christmas Where Everything Collapsed. NA in LA is ok, I suppose, but it’s nothing like what I was exposed to in Baltimore. Baltimore is a dope city. And so NA was strong and for real. I never felt that in LA NA. Look, I’m sure my perception is based almost entirely on wanting to stay high, but I just never really connected. But I did meet a guy named Peter who sponsored a bunch of people. He was a graphic designer. I’m not going to give his last name, but he was well-liked in the clean scene. Hell, he was one of the leaders. People loved this guy. I did, too, but the timing was just all off. At some point, he suggested I go to Impact. It was free, and it worked. Impact House was a residential rehab where you’d go for months. It was for convicts and anyone who just had nowhere else to turn. People didn’t go there expecting to be cured in 30 days like so many of my clients today demand. It was basically behavior modification with a massive focus on NA. At full census, there were probably about 50 people? Maybe 100? God, I’m so bad with gauging numbers and amounts but suffice it to say there were a lot of people there. Lots of cholo Mexicans with pristine white shoes and creased Dickies. Waxed Mustached White Power convicts coming or going from long sentences, Black Muslim crackheads and an assortment of the rest of us. Young kids with nowhere else to go and just wanting to get loaded, somehow we made the call and wound up here. They’d sign us up for General Relief, and that’s what we paid. Look, the place is truly a God-send for so many people. I don’t have a single negative word to say about it. There were things  I hated doing, but they cared. They really did. And it was tough. They’d kick you out on a dime.

              And even though we did everything together, the men couldn’t speak to the women. Sounds crazy, but otherwise, it always leads to the same deal. Rehab romances always, and I mean 100% of the time, end in catastrophe. If both of them actually stay alive to get back to treatment, it’s a miracle. People “fall in love” and decide to leave and build a life together. This life is cobbling together a couple hundred bucks and getting loaded in a cheap motel. One of them usually dies. Gone. People die every 8 minutes in this life.

              But, if you were just a little more clever, you could find ways to communicate with HER. Little fragments of song lyrics as she passed by while you were serving lunch. Sitting near her and talking to your buddy but loud enough that she knew you were talking to her. And, of course, I fell in love. And it wasn’t Melinda. First, it was  Laura. Laura was this beautiful blond junkie with a tattoo of an eye a few inches above her pussy on her stomach. I saw it when they took us to the beach one time. God, I loved that tattoo and what it was so close to. Like the Holy Grail. Just a couple inches down. Be still my beating heart. She was in there after getting arrested for a series of bank robberies. Lots of bank robbers in there. You’d be surprised how many people try and rob banks. They just always get caught, and they get so little for it. Don’t rob banks. It’s a sucker’s game.

              I’d try to get as close as possible to Laura throughout the day. Usually, it was just looking at her from across the yard where we all smoked, and I thought of that tattoo and what it would be like to have my nose pressed against it and my mouth just a few inches lower. Such are the thoughts when you’re 22 or so, and you’ve wound up in a Southern California treatment center for convicts and other junkies, like you, who’ve just blown every chance at a reasonable life. You fall in love and imagine making them cum, and then maybe some new beautiful life will spring forth, and all this will fall, far away behind you.

              The last time I saw Laura, it was years and years later. We’d wound up in AA together on the East Side of LA. She came to my house to ask if I could help with a stray pit bull she’d found. Buster. He was named Buster. I couldn’t take him in as I had three dogs then, but I gave her some money for dog food, and we talked. I never told her about all those images, hopes, and dreams I’d created around my idea of who she might be. I hope she’s still doing ok. I don’t count on it anymore. If I don’t see people, I assume they have died. I’m usually right. Most addicts will die from using. Like almost all of them. Maybe 2, 5, maybe 10% make it. It’s a low fucking number. We get this poison in us, and it sparks up our spines and worms into our brains for years, and ultimately it’s just easier to die. And we die by mistake. We get stronger dope. We get clean for a while, our tolerance goes down, and we get some “fire” dope with Fentanyl in it. And poof. We just become dead weight for some paramedics to have to lift and transport.

              My thing with Laura lasted most of those first couple of months. And then this new girl appeared. New women appeared all the time, but most were all torn up, as torn up as most of the men, and I’ll happily assume I was part of that group. But, being 22 gave me a little something of a leg up. The point is that this gorgeous, tall, black-haired Hungarian chick rolled in, and I just shattered into a million little sparks and wafted around all the trees and planter boxes and skimmed along the cement pathways and twirled around all the bored convicts’ heads and coalesced in my stomach, and I zeroed in. Melinda showed up.

              The story of Melinda and I is too long, at least in my mind, to jam into one story. It floats along the lines of soulmates and despair and more drugs and obsession and self-pity and sex and crying in the rain from across the street watching her kiss someone else. The story contains everything that makes me a sucker and some sort of an adult. I fell in love with her. I know I say that a lot, but as God is my witness, everyone I’ve ever truly fallen in love with happened immediately upon first sight. I don’t even understand how it can happen in any other way. We’re not negotiating a relationship here. We’re not offering and retracting and counter-offering. I either get hit in the heart by the club of love, or I might, at best, say, “hmm, sure, I’d like to fuck her.” But that’s it. When I fall in love, it happens in the space of fractions of millionths of a second. And that God for it.

              Melinda and I spent the next few months there at Impact. We got out. We hung out. My love was unrequited. And then it was for a month, and then for years, it was just off and on, and I built an entire career around documenting my heartbreak, and eventually, I just got tired and moved on. But those were some of the most intense and embarrassing years of my life. I should have stuck with just wanting to lick Laura. I’d probably have saved everyone a lot of trouble. But, the heart wants what the heart wants.

              And really, I don’t regret a second of it. I still love Melinda, and she’ll likely never read this. I still love everyone.