I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (31 page)

But, conversely, the drugs that were engendering such faith, such visions, were destroying me.

Addiction, I came to understand, is the proxy battle for the soul. I was in the midst of a pitched one, its violence veiled in beauty.

*   *   *

By the end of 2011 I had decided I had to have a plan of action to fulfill my promise to Perry that I would get sober. I was ruining my health and going broke. Hallucinations were neither feeding me nor paying my bills. In November, during a particularly messy binge, someone from whom I’d bought drugs and whom I convinced to stay behind and have sex with me even suggested I seek help. When a fat, tweaked-out naked meth dealer expresses concern for you, then you know you’re in trouble. I looked at my calendar when he left that night and circled the date December 22. That was the day I decided I would walk into a fellowship at the LGBT Center in New York and begin my journey to sobriety.

There was no other choice left me. I had gone through my savings since I had begun using and knew that I was going to be unable to pay my rent much longer. I contacted my landlord and got out of my lease. I then e-mailed my brother and sister and told them the truth about my meth addiction and that I was using it intravenously. Two close friends talked to my brother, who told them, they said, he would pay for me to go into rehab for three months down in Mississippi, since I didn’t have the money to pay for it. I agreed to go. I did my intake interview over the phone. A bed was reserved for me, and my sister arrived to help me pack up my belongings, which I planned to store down in Mississippi while I was in the rehab facility. A plan of action was set in motion. I was scared to death. But I was ready.

And then everything went awry.

*   *   *

It was January 2012.

My sister had arrived to help me pack up all my belongings—my furniture, my extensive collection of art, my too-many clothes—for the move down south. I don’t have a driver’s license, so she was going to drive the U-Haul truck I had rented to Mississippi with Archie and Teddy and me riding shotgun. Where was I going to go after my stint in rehab down there? I had no idea. I could not get past one day at a time at that point. I still can’t. I know now I never will.

When one is confronted with an intravenous drug user in one’s family I am certain it dredges up lots of issues. Lots of fear. Lots of anger that has festered there for years and years. I could set out here in my narrative my own version of events that led to my brother deciding to decline to pay for my rehab. But I’m sure he’d have his own version that differs from mine. I will honor our relationship. What is important is the result of those events and the private e-mails that went back and forth between us. Two days before my sister and I had scheduled to pack up the U-Haul and depart, I suddenly did not have the money to go to rehab. I did not know where, in fact, I was going to go. Mississippi was now out of the question. After much prayer to every entity I had come to believe in I took a long walk in the freezing cold to collect my thoughts. I had only been sober for ten days after two years of heavy meth use. Did I even have thoughts to collect? I was attempting to release the resentment I instantly felt toward my brother for backing out at the last minute of his commitment to pay for my rehab and focus instead on it being a blessing in that it would make me own my journey to sobriety even more. Maybe he was seeing the bigger picture himself already and was doing what was best for me.

As I was trying to think all of that through, I heard a voice. God’s? Lucifer’s? That elephantine Hindu deity’s? A Cape Cod drag queen’s? Whoever it was, it made instant sense to me. I had often heard back during my Provincetown summers when I asked what it was like to live there in the wintertime that “either you stay high all the time or you spend the time getting sober.”

I came back to my apartment on 21st Street and told my sister we were turning the truck north and heading to Provincetown. I got online and found an eight-by-ten-foot room in a boardinghouse that would accept dogs that was available for a month. I would, however, have to share the bath down the hallway. My sister got on her computer and found a storage unit in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where we’d unload my stuff.

With two days to go, we now had a plan.

*   *   *

The next day I was even able to find an apartment beginning the second week of February until May 1. After unloading most of my stuff in New Bedford, my sister and I brought a few things along to Provincetown and stored them upstairs from my new place in an empty room in the landlord’s apartment.

We then checked into the boardinghouse. She was going to spend the night with me and catch a flight early the next morning back to Mississippi. I was starving and knew that Archie and Teddy needed to be walked. The only place I could find open with food was a combination 7-Eleven-like store and gas station. I tied the dogs up outside and went in to find some potato chips and a ginger ale. When I was paying the cashier, a man came in with Archie on his leash. “Your dog got loose outside. I assume this is yours,” he said, since I was the only one in the store. The cashier stared at me, waiting for me to take my change. She held it out with one hand and kept her place in the story she was reading in
Star
magazine with the index finger of the other.

“My dog?” I asked, panicked. “I have two dogs.”

“There was only one out there, man. Sorry,” he said.

I picked up Archie. The cashier shrugged at the man, who wanted a pack of Marlboro Lights. I rushed outside and stood in the freezing cold in the middle of the dimly lit gas station area screaming Teddy’s name as if I were Shirley Booth bellowing for little Sheba. I had kept it together for the last several days under so much stress. But in that moment I fell to my knees with Archie in my arms and began to sob. Where was Teddy? Had I lost him on top of everything else? Had he been taken? Had he been run over and killed? “Teddy!” I called, and cried. “Teddy!”

The man who had found Archie got in his car and watched me from his window. He lit up a Marlboro. I watched the smoke fill his car as he cranked it. He pulled out of the parking lot while watching me the whole time and taking another long drag on his cigarette. He’d have a story to tell whomever greeted him when he got home, a home that was not an eight-by-ten-foot room in a boardinghouse where his tired sister waited.

I sat on the icy parking lot in front of the store and huddled with Archie. This is what my life had come to. This is what drugs had done to me. This is who I now was. I was tearfully tearing open a bag of potato chips and choking them down chip by chip while sitting on the freezing oil-stained concrete in a carless parking lot at a carless gas station at the end of the world at 12:17
A.M.
in January. Where were my hallucinations now? Where was my hope? And still, if I had had a needle full of meth I would have stuck it in my arm right then and there. The certainty of that thought terrified me yet comforted me too because it was a form of clarity. I didn’t like what I was seeing, but I was coming into focus. No Angels of Light hovered about in that moment. The night was not numinous but dimly lit by neon. My knees were aching on the concrete.

“Teddy!” I called when I spotted him suddenly running from around a hedge in the distance toward me. “Teddy!” For a moment that’s all I needed to be thankful—Teddy running into my arms to join Archie. I fed them each a potato chip. My teeth chattered. The cashier came to the window and stared at us. She shook her head dismissively and went back to reading her
Star
magazine. I looked at the neon light above a gas pump. It flickered once. Then twice. A car passed by. I longed for angels of any sort. I longed for my old life back. I finished the bag of potato chips.

*   *   *

For the next four weeks Archie and Teddy and I lived together in a boardinghouse room just big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers. I waited my turn for the bathroom while the frowning female schizophrenic down the hall took her time in there not washing her hair. A David Bowie look-alike took even more time touching up his blond highlights. The twenty-something girl next door to me waxed her legs in there—and other regions no doubt—while her odd music selection included Shania Twain and the Thompson Twins, the latter’s “Hold Me Now” and “Doctor Doctor” blaring into my room. It was like being in rehab after all.

I stayed to myself and stayed sober, luckily finding a fellowship of like-minded people in town. I was up each morning at 5:30 to have my Grape-Nuts and strawberries and blueberries with my 1 percent milk before catching a ride with the boardinghouse’s manager who was also in the same fellowship that met each day at 7:00
A.M.
at the local Methodist church. From that first day attending a Methodist church with my mother to attending that one in Provincetown had been quite a journey.

I soon had one month without meth.

The days continued to pile up one at a time after I moved out of the boardinghouse into my off-season apartment. It was lonely, but I had Archie and Teddy and tentatively made friends in the fellowship. I went out one night with a woman who had moved to town from New York as well. She had over twenty years sober and I was curious as to how she had managed it. We sat talking at one of the only three restaurants still open in Provincetown that time of year. I trusted her enough to let her know about all my hallucinations.

“The next day after that amazing night of seeing that glistening light-infused elephantine god I got on my elevator in my building and there was a family of Indians looking at me suspiciously. They even seemed a bit in awe,” I told her. “I wondered if they had somehow seen what I had seen. I was on my way to the theater that night—without much sleep, I might add—down on Christopher Street at the Lucille Lortel. On the way there I was trying to figure out what exactly the godhead I’d seen was. I knew enough to know that it was one based on an Eastern religion, but I am a born-and-bred Protestant. All my religious belief is based on the conflict between God and the Devil,” I told her. “On my walk down Seventh Avenue I turned to check out my reflection in a shop window to make sure I didn’t look as worn-out as I was feeling and there in the window sat a golden statue of the exact half-elephant/half-man god I had seen the night before. At first I thought I was having another hallucination, but I realized, no, it was sitting there before me behind my reflected face. It even looked as if we were combined into one vision.” The woman smiled. I thought she was going to say something. But she waited for me to continue. “I went into the shop and there was another even bigger, more golden elephant god posed next to the shopkeeper. I grabbed the statue’s trunk and held on for dear life. ‘What is this?’ I asked the man. ‘Is this bad or good if you are suddenly seeing this everywhere?’ The man looked a little shocked by my desperate tone, but told me that such a thing was very good.” The woman laughed. “‘What’s he called?’ I asked the man. ‘You’ve been put in my path to tell me what he is called. Who is he? Come on, tell me. Please.’ The man placed his hand atop mine there on the golden elephant’s trunk. ‘Be calm,’ he told me. ‘It is good. It is a good thing. This is Ganesha,’ he said. ‘He has revealed himself to you in some way?’ I told him that he had without telling him the details. I didn’t want to freak him out any more than I already had. ‘He—Lord Ganesha—is the Remover of Obstacles,’ he told me. ‘He is the God of New Beginnings. This is very good. Ganesha is good. Very, very good.’”

My new friend smiled again. She had finished her meal and placed her fork next to her empty plate. Behind her on the bar’s TV screen the Boston Bruins were playing a hockey game. A fight broke out between two players behind her head, the arms flailing around her like the four arms of Ganesha himself.

“I then went to the theater and sat down in my seat,” I continued. “While reading the program and waiting for the play to begin—it was
The Pride
with Ben Whishaw and Hugh Dancy, two of my favorite actors—I glanced over at the person sitting next to me who rolled up his sleeve and on his forearm there was a tattoo of Ganesha.”

I shook my head, still feeling the wonder of that evening. I took a big bite of my pulled-pork sandwich. My new friend unwrapped her scarf from around her neck. She lifted her necklace and held it toward me in the table’s candlelight. Its pendant was a golden Ganesha.

I gasped. Then—as Ganesha was beginning to teach me—I giggled with delight. My friend giggled with me. The hockey game commenced behind her head. The fight was over.

*   *   *

When I was ninety days sober I wanted to celebrate and get my first tattoo. I really didn’t think I’d be able to stay completely sober for three whole months in the dead of winter in Provincetown without finding someone to use with and alleviate the abject loneliness that had begun to take hold of me. But I had. Did I want a Ganesha tattoo like I’d seen at the theater that night next to me? I went to bed on my eighty-ninth night of sobriety not knowing that something deeper than any tattoo would mark me, claim me, stir the deepest recesses of my soul where no drug could reach that had been kept safe there for just such a night.

I dreamed of the blond-haired angel from Starbucks so long ago who had walked the Camino and about whom I had confided to Hugh Jackman. The angel and I were in a mountainous region, but it was very different from Mount Kilimanjaro or the Pyrenees. I had no idea, in fact, where we were. There was a lake and the angel wanted me to swim in it with him. I don’t like to swim. I almost drowned once on Cape Cod when I was touring in that summer stock production of
Equus
long ago and have never felt comfortable in the water since. But the blond-haired angel was insistent. He jumped in. I jumped in after him. We swam side by side, synchronizing our movements. As our heads emerged from the water and we stared at each other I managed to ask him where we were going. “There,” is all he said, and swam onward.

“I”m going to that fallen tree over at the shore,” I said, growing weary of the water.