Out On The Tiles

We woke up and drank coffee. We were fairly miserable, but we weren't talking about it. I was supposed to be getting clean? I think. But it was evidently just something that was going to somehow magically happen in spite of our constant frantic efforts to keep us and really her in pills. I was shooting dope by then, and we didn't talk about that either. She knew, of course, but she was adamant about not crossing that line again herself. So I kept buying her Roxies whenever she'd ask, and I'd sneak off to shoot dope. It was an unspoken deal we'd made. She wouldn't crucify me for using dope, and I'd valiantly go cop her oxycodone 30mg pills from some invariably Persian or Armenian guy from Craigslist..

These connections would usually last anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months, and then they'd replace each other. Sometimes it was on the Westside and sometimes the Valley. All different faces but the ritual was the same. I'd get hundreds of dollars and drive, heroically to some Vons or Walgreens parking lot and wait for them to show up. There was really nothing to it. It was and likely still is, incredibly easy and organized. Every day was the last day. That's always how it is during a run. "I'm gonna kick tomorrow" sings out from the song and it's a universal truth. Always tomorrow. Sometimes it would get confusing when I'd come home with a cigarette pack cellophane wrapper full of light blue pills and inexplicably not want any. It made no sense. Of course, I was already high on dope, and we had to readjust our script to maintain. Why not just take some oxy on top of the dope? Wouldn't that solve the problem? But I always wanted her to have what she needed. It really did feel heroic and when she was sick, and I could give her something that made her immediately better I felt love. I loved her intensely. I still do. I still love all of them. Sometimes I wonder if I wanted to be loved so badly that I mistook the love I reflected off of her as her loving me. In, any case, we woke up, and we felt bad.

I wasn't sure if she'd actually wonder aloud if we should get some drugs. It was always so off again-on again, although it's never really off until it ends. That was another part of the deal. She had to suggest it. There is a word derived from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego. The word is Mamihlapinatapai. It refers to the unspoken understanding between two people who both desire something but which neither wish to initiate. If she brought it up, I was allowed to agree, and even though I was already getting high behind her back, we might keep the subterfuge going and be able to get high together and have the kind of day that we used to have before all this. We'd go to places like Bed Bath and Beyond and look at KitchenAid mixers and towels.

There was an ice cream maker period as well. We'd buy things for the house and talk about when we'd live together and have a kid. There was nothing debaucherous about our using except the drugs themselves. After shopping, we'd get loaded and order pizza and watch Game of Thrones. We fucked perfunctorily. Opiates and sex are just not a workable combination. Dope deadens the sex drive. It's part of its appeal. To be completely devoid of libido can be quite liberating. So many things go with it. So many aspects of self-esteem just vanish when you don't care who might want to fuck you. But we'd pull it together every now and again when the blood levels were right or when there were other things like Molly and Quaaludes. But mostly, we just got high and pretended we were normal.

We sat there on the couch, and she was on her phone looking at Instagram, and I was watching Baseball Tonight. I was waiting. Eventually, it started. "Ugh. I don't feel very good today, Baby." "Oh man, baby, I'm sorry." Thirty milligrams of Oxycodone, she was fit as a fiddle in twenty minutes. And so our scene moved forward, and eventually, the stage was set with her pain, and my final line was uttered, "Do you want me to get you some stuff?" That's it. It was over. We'd signed on for another day, and this day was not tomorrow.

I went into action. I texted whomever it was at the moment. There were a couple to choose from and for whatever reason, I chose the Burbank guy. He told me where to meet him, and I started putting on my boots. At this stage, there's just no stopping me. Nothing. This is going to happen, and I am going to be her hero. "Can I go with you?" She had never said that before. I always went alone while she stayed home or waited for me to bring them to her at work. It was just something a man does. I asked her, "really?" and she said yes. She threw on some clothes, and out we went. This was a new thing. God, I remember it so well. It was hot, and the sun blared down on us. We got in my car and headed to the bank, where I pulled out yet another three-hundred dollars. The seemingly endless pile of money was from a home equity loan we'd taken out to work on the house for her eventual moving in and it was just getting consumed by daily runs to parking lots all over Los Angeles and Orange County. The sickness and self-loathing I felt then and even now thinking about this was just one more thing to disassociate from in that mad world of tunnel vision.

We pulled over at the spot somewhere along the Glendale part of San Fernando. We waited. We didn't wait long, and around the corner, my guy came. He looked a little worse for wear, but it was early for this world, and I really didn't care. He got in the back and said hi. A little more nervous than usual. He told us he had it in his apartment and that he'd leave his cell phone in the car. I told him he didn't need to because I trusted him. I'm always trusting everyone. I don't see red flags; I see special features. She said nothing beyond hi, and I remember feeling proud that he knew she was part of my life. She was, is, gorgeous and now this Persian or Armenian Craigslist drug dealer knew that someone gorgeous likes me or loves me or would at least want to spend some amount of time with me even if it might only be in an effort for me to buy her drugs. Whatever, she's gorgeous, and he saw that. And then he left. And we waited.

There's a lot of waiting in the drug world. Tons of it. You never really get used to it, but you grow to expect it. I've waited for hours in parking lots staring into my rearview mirror for the sight of him turning a corner. The relief you feel at that moment is like nothing else. And generally, he always comes back. God knows what takes them so long other than there are often multiple hims involved, and each one adds a bit of delay. And so we waited. We eventually looked at his cell phone, and it didn't turn on. It seemed like a shitty phone. And we waited. I walked around as if that might lure him out of cover. Nothing. Finally, she said, "He's not coming back." "Fuck," I said. What else can you say? And we still waited. And then the moment that I've carried with me for years happened and yet nothing actually happened. He never did come back. But oh, while we waited.

The feeling of defeat and desperation that accompanies the realization of getting ripped off is immediate and has a diamond-honed edge that just slices through your soul. Perhaps that's a bit hyperbolic, but truly nothing feels that way. There's a somatic quality to it that feels like your stomach is cut. A paper cut. Like your actual stomach has been exposed and a sheet of paper dragged across it. That's how I felt in that moment. And for the first time, someone else was feeling it with me. And I looked at her.

She was wearing black yoga pants and a t-shirt with some cartoon print on it. She was wearing big dark sunglasses and a hat. A white wide-brimmed hat covered the top of her ridiculously long and thick black hair, and she was staring straight ahead. She looked like something that was perfectly formed for some specific task. She was a machine designed to make me feel the depths of sadness and the heights of love and attraction all at once. It's such an odd feeling to feel everything at once. I wanted to cry and fuck her at the same time. Whenever I think of how beautiful and wanton and sexy a woman can be I think of her at that moment. I distinctly remember thinking about Bonnie and Clyde and those two that killed all sorts of people in that movie Badlands. I was part of a crime-fueled love affair, and it felt good. I could do this forever. We could just keep going, and well, I didn't think about what we'd actually do crime-wise, but we'd fuck a lot in the car and on the hood and in cheap motels, and we'd get high, and it would be us against the world. I wanted her smell on the skin of my face as I tasted her and felt her sweat drip into and tangle her hair and we'd just self-immolate as we came and we'd take the whole world with us. I wanted to spray an M27 Automatic rifle towards whatever onlookers were gawking at this scene. I wanted to smell and taste every part of her body. Her sweat, her pussy, her spit, her hair. I wanted us to laugh together, saying, “Jesus! We have so much hair to deal with!” Whatever we did, we'd do it together. I wouldn't have to do any of this alone anymore, and God, she was so beautiful in those yoga pants and sunglasses and hair. All that beautiful hair.

That moment and all of its fantasy lasted a split second as those things do. "Is there anyone else?" she said. "Yeah, there's the guy in Pasadena. Let me check." And the moment was gone. The Pasadena guy was home, and so we got more money and got more pills. I don't remember what we did that day, but I'm sure it was some sort of bleak attempt at normalcy. The Bonnie and Clyde moment had passed.

That's as close to going berserk as I've ever come. I've certainly done more selfish and manipulative, and I-don't-give-a-fuck things for drugs, but nothing ever had that feeling of abandon and of knowing nothing can stop me. The way she looked that day and what our lives had become meant I was a God if I was the one she wanted to be with.

I think an awful lot about love. I've come to a definition for it after years of wondering what exactly it is that I'm feeling that I call love and it is this: Love is the feeling you get when you embrace anything that has the potential to break your heart. Love seems to be the reward for ultimate vulnerability. The willingness to crawl along a razor's edge must have some sort of payoff. I think that's what love is. And so, there's this aspect of going berserk in love. At least in my idea of love. There's this state of being relieved of the fear of consequence and having everything of value focussed on a single point and the absolute certainty that every molecule of that point is meant for me and that it might disappear and destroy me in a second. That's the feeling I had sitting there with her on that hot, sun-baked late Friday morning on the side of San Fernando Road. I've felt variants of that before and since but none quite so desperate and sad and proud and turned-on as that. I hope I can feel it again someday. I feel incredibly lucky to have felt it at least once. Maybe I went berserk.