Dive For Your Memory

I just walked around my neighborhood. I walked to Vons, the neighborhood grocery store that I go to at least once a day. I prided myself on marching in there every single day for the first year of the whole pandemic debacle. I showed unity. I know all these people working there like family. One of the security guys calls me “The Gambler,” given my Kenny Rogers beard. He positively beams when he sees me. I love this little old guy. I buy food for each meal. I love to cook. And I want to walk to stay in suit-wearing shape. I waited my whole life. I’ve tried to lose enough weight all my life to wear suits like Nick Cave or Warren Ellis or any other guy not afraid of being the fat little kid at age 50. And it happened. I did this thing called Noom with my best friend Dan last year. I lost 100 pounds. Jesus! It’s just crazy how much that is. I got legitimately skinny. It’s all I ever really wanted. It changed everything! Like a fucking ton of Semtex going off under your bed on the first day of spring! Wham! Transported to an entirely new dimension. I was raised in a house where the unspoken Golden Rule was that only thin people were good people. Heroin kept me so filled up I never ate. I’d extend habits just to lose a few more pounds before I’d slink into rehab and gain it all back. But, something’s different now. It’s been about eight months since I got to 160 pounds. I have no memory of weighing that ever before. Clearly, I must have because I surpassed it, but I don’t know when. Maybe high school? And so I walk.

              But today, I was walking around and looking for anyone connected to the scene I created the other night. As much as I know I was motivated by my poor terrified dogs, something else was also at play. It wasn’t just about Winnie and Buckley. I was into the rage. I was into flowing along a river of hate, looking for rocks and skulls and sleeping bears on the shore hoping for a salmon to jump into their mouths. And so I was kinda hoping I’d see someone so I could talk and apologize. I came on like an enraged lunatic. I’m convinced it was what saved me from any repercussions from a party of young, drunk toughs. I think they sensed how unhinged I was. But, there were kids around. I only see them now in the memory movie, but then they were blurry and out of focus. Little kids don’t need to see me losing my mind. Anyway, I didn’t see anyone, and I wasn’t going to just hover around their house. Someday we’ll meet, and I’ll say my piece. In the meantime, I’ll keep walking, skating, dropping things on my tongue, and writing all of you these love letters.

              These things really are love letters to whoever cares enough to read them. Every aspect of my life is so wholly formed by the different variants of love. Showing love. Feeling love. Fearing the lack of love. Seeing this same lack in others and just holding the door open for strangers. I do that religiously. And it’s not because I’m so magnanimous but because I believe it’ll get me closer to love. And I want that.

              Before the whole fireworks ordeal of the other night, I was writing about first meeting Leslie, and how captivated I was by her. It bears repeating that she was a gorgeous, shy, quirky artist chick a few years older than me. She was like seeing some mythological beast appear on your back patio asleep one morning. How? Why here? Why me? She was that.

              And the shirts she made. Her’s was, I’m pretty sure, an Echo and the Bunnymen song squared up and tangled, tingling and wrapping around each other, every letter. She made them with Sharpies, I presumed. When she finished mine with the “A Box for Black Paul” lyrics on it, I was bowled over. I’m not even sure if we had even kissed yet. I wish I still had that shirt. It would be really big on me now! I’d wear it with my purple velvet suit and just take over Vons! I’m the Pope of Eagle Rock Vons! I’d wear that shirt to the wedding of Jesus and Jennifer Lawrence. I imagine them together.

              And now we’re back in the Franklin year. Those months moved on playing music, working on so many corny hair-band metal videos. The video “vixens” seemed so interchangebale. Weirdly enough, and I don’t think it was just the dope, they never really turned me on. They were beautiful, sure, but they were so afraid. Afraid of losing status or maybe this troglodyte bass player’s affections. And always too much hairspray. You just knew that if you ever got the chance to fuck them, you’d only smell perfume and nothing of them. That’s so sad. I always wanted to taste and feel and smell them like they’d just run a thousand miles to meet in some overheated room with dope and days to spend just crawling into each other. And no fucking showers. Just primal. And really, fuck the dope. The taste and scent were enough. Like that eye tattoo just inches above…The smell. The taste.

              And again, real-life interjects. A friend, a Facebook friend, reached out to me a couple days ago. I will go to great lengths not to give even a hint as to who this is. I think we’re pretty safe. I don’t even think I know what this person looks like or if we’ve actually met in person. Maybe we have, and I am now shattering their idea of me being someone who could help, me who can’t even remember them. But we’re friends on Facebook, and we’ve had a few interchanges over the years. All fairly nice. But I’ve always felt that this person would hate me if they really knew me. I feel like that a lot. Like I have some unforgivable opinion lurking under my skin that will push me out of polite society. This isn’t an indictment on this person, it’s never happened, but I feel that way nonetheless. I feel wildly out of place in the echo chamber I find myself in. But, I like this person. Genuinely.

              This person messaged me because of the stuff I’ve been writing. They confided that after many, many years of being clean, they got loaded at the beginning of the mask phase. And it’s just kept going. And could I suggest any help? And so we talked, and I offered up some ideas, but I knew they’d be hard to swallow. Nothing feels like the right thing to do in these moments short of being put to sleep for a week or so. But it’s very important to me that this person, who I don’t even really know….feels how much I’m in their corner. The loneliness of needing to kick combined with no one even knowing you’re strung out is like a little small bomb slowly exploding and pulverizing your quite lovely slow, beautiful beating heart. It’s fear and shame made flesh. At least, it was always that way for me.

              We just talked a little more on Messenger. The detox I suggested was a no-go. Too many bad Yelp reviews. What can I say? I just want this person to get on the other side. Maybe they can find a GP to help them with a take-home detox. I offered my bedroom as a place to kick. I fully realize how potentially creepy and preposterous this sounds, but I’m serious. I rarely sleep in my bed. They could just sweat it out in there with a TV and a dog or two if they wanted them. The thing is, I’ve kicked on so many stranger’s couches over the years. We just do it for each other. Anyway, they know I’m here. I’m here on another end of another thread of where this love with heroin takes us. And maybe I’m projecting that onto them. I don’t think so. So I wrote them a poem:

               These things that we have to do

These things which we’ve carved out of fear and black concrete

Getting past all the sensors, all the guards

And here we stand with a lake of “fuck, what have I done?” lapping at our feet

We can see the other side, but we know

We know almost no one ever gets there.

But I can! Maybe I can  throw off these old t-shirts and scared texts

I can maybe do what I am so fucking afraid to do

I can maybe almost die to get over there.

These are the things we have to do.

A couch and a shitty TV

Hourly white pills and electric blue Gatorade

(they say that’s good)

And one million perfectly sensible reasons to make the call

Make the call and feel better.

And six months later

A year later

These things that we have to do

Are still there.

It’s just a quick little poem I wrote to express how I feel about this, all but unknown person, but also how much I love them because I know the pain that invades them. The subtleties of addiction are many and varied. But we, the sorry tribe, understand.

And so, after the poem,  I started writing more about Leslie and those middle months where things weren’t catastrophic, but things were sad. Leslie would still make potato salad every now and again, but it lacked the excitement from the downstairs days. Once we moved up to the exposed brick wall, second-story apartment life started trickling out of a slow drip IV onto the pavement. Dripping just where everyone would stand and yell up, “Hey! Through down your keys!” That’s how we visited each other then. We’d throw down keyrings so our friends could get past the shitty security system and just walk up. Here’s what Mick has to say about it:

Can’t you hear me knockin’, ahh, are you safe asleep?

Can’t you hear me knockin’, yeah, down the gas light street, now

Can’t you hear me knockin’, yeah, throw me down the keys

Alright now

Throwing down your key ring. Such a part of living in LA in those years. It was intimate. It was trusting; it felt like you were throwing down part of your little soul. And really, it was just a key to get in, come on up, hang out, eat potato salad and drink.

When I started writing this piece after the first attempt, after I assaulted the gangbangers’ late fourth of July party, I had some theme in mind. It seemed important. It seemed important to explain and describe the moment when everything you’ve been so sure of, everything that drove you, turned out to be, in a fucking FLASH, wholly and regrettably wrong. You were just wrong about everything.

I felt that as soon as I started screaming at that cholo motherfucker. I didn’t need to do that. But maybe that’s all they’d understand with a guy like me rounding the corner. The point is, in an instant, I knew I was wrong.

I felt that later that summer/fall with Leslie and my friends in the band. I was only getting worse. I can’t even remember if Dean was still around. I’m not sure where he’d be, but my memories are only of copping and getting high alone, almost always in my car listening to Dodgers games. I just remember whole stretches of periods where nothing happened. The months that I know must have occurred but were filled with drug monotony that they escape memory.

At some point, we, the band, Sleep, rented a rehearsal space above the Hollywood Billiards Club on the corner of Hollywood and Western. The billiards place was fairly historic, I think. Who knows? I think it was. Several floors above were sectioned into individual shitty carpet-covered rooms with enough outlets for a band to practice in. Noise be damned. We just all hammered it out together. It felt good having our own place. But as is always the case, you play way less once you have a 24-hour lockout. It’s always available. What’s the hurry? It all just grinds to a halt.

We got the place a day or two before Leslie had had it with me and kicked me out. I don’t even know what that meant. She deserved so much better. She deserved to tell me to fuck off, pay your rent. And come back when you had at least 60 days clean. I don’t think that happened. I left for a while and carried on like a piece of shit. We practiced for a while and maybe played some shows. The weather was getting colder. I remember walking around downtown to cop after dark and feeling like it was harder than usual; it was getting cold. That felt sad. Everything was sad. Nothing was working out the way I thought it would. Not at all the way I’d imagined. I know it was near Halloween because of the big Halloween parade in Hollywood. Was it a Gay Pride thing? Was it just Halloween? Did I imagine the whole thing? I went down to Bonnie Brae and 6th to cop.

Sorta slim pickings, but I found a guy and bought a ballon for all I had to my name. 7 bucks. At least I had that. I drove back up the 101, got off on Western, drove up to Hollywood, and found parking. I think I expected to practice that night. I remember planning on sneaking to the bathroom to get high and play. I went in and up the rickety elevator to our floor. We all had a key, so I opened the door and stood there flummoxed. Just scraps of papers, empty beer bottles, and my guitar and whatever amp I was using. I can’t remember what it was. How can I not remember that? The room was empty. They’d all left.

And still, it didn’t hit me. I closed the door and set out to shoot up. I pulled the balloon knot apart with my teeth and extracted the little wax paper folder piece of heroin. It seemed weird. There was way too much of it. You never got extra. I smelled it. It didn’t have that vinegar scent. But still, it was brown, and IT JUST HAD TO BE DOPE.

That’s always the thought. It just can not be dope. And so I put it in my spoon and squirted some water on it and started cooking it. It just got thick. It didn’t behave. I knew in my gut what was happening, but I couldn’t accept it. Sniffed again. Smelled like chocolate.

I’d bought seven or eight or whatever dollars worth of a tootsie roll. Just a common-looking thing that looked like dope. And it took several actions to get to the center, just like a real tootsie pop. I’d been burned. I was alone. My band had taken all their gear, and Leslie had kicked me out.

These are the moments when the worst things you can feel for me are sympathy or empathy. I’d orchestrated every single second of the play, which ended with me here, sitting on a rotten carpeted Hollywood rehearsal lockout with everyone gone but the junky singer who’s trying to tell himself that maybes there’s dope in this glob of thick brown liquid he’s about to inject into his right arm.

What can you do? You shoot it. You push it in and wait and pray to God that maybe they put at least the smallest amount of dope into the chocolate. There’s nothing else available to you.

So you sit and wait and feel. You feel really hard. I there anything? Anything at all?

And no. You’ve just injected pure Tootsie Roll into your right arm, and your friends have left you, and there are queers in costumes parading up and down the street, and everyone has a life except for you. And you gave yours away. You have no one but yourself to blame. This is where you end up.

And this is that moment you’ll feel later racing into the cholo fireworks party and challenging them to shoot you, the moment when everything you counted on crumbles. Everything you thought was without question falls apart in an instance. Turns out that being a junky didn’t make you a better singer. Didn’t make your band better. Didn’t attract people to you. You aren’t Lou Reed or Nick Cave. You’re Mike Coulter, and the world couldn’t care less.

It’s funny how much we believe in fantasies until the very moment they fall apart. Heroin made it easier to believe. But, c’mon, who really wants to love a junky? I guess I’ve just been driven by hope and fantasy throughout all of this.