Long Past Stopping (11 page)

The waiting room was dead silent and there wasn't anyone at the desk. I was about to leave when a woman appeared, and simply said, “The sign?” pointing at the door. I nodded and she led me back to another room with six tables and motioned for me to lie down on one. I had no idea what to expect, but for five bucks it seemed like it was worth a shot. I lay down on the table and the woman tapped three needles into
each of my ears and left. It felt like a lot more than an hour went by before she came back and took the needles out. As I walked back out to the waiting room, she was leading someone in, and without a word I handed her five bucks and left. It was about ten thirty, and I realized she had just left me there till her first real client showed up.

I went home, starting to feel pretty shitty. I looked through the phone book under “addiction” and called a few advice hotlines. One place was right around the corner, and I made an appointment to go talk to them.

“So how long did you say it's been?” this older black guy asked me from across his desk. I had made the appointment for three o'clock, and I managed to hold out on buying dope till about two thirty. I always ended up getting too high when I held out so long.

I zoned out for a second and had to ask, “I'm sorry, what was that?”

“How long you been using dope, man?”

“Four or five months…something like that.”

“Uh-huh, and you think you could kick by getting acupuncture, and coming here for counseling?” he asked me with a hint of
boy you must be crazy
in his voice.

“I don't know. I mean, I'm only smoking it. It shouldn't be that bad. Right?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. Our clients usually detox at the Salvation Army or somewhere and do the counseling to stay clean, not get clean.”

“But it could work? Maybe?” I really wanted him to agree with me.

“Maybe it could. We start at eleven in the morning. Come by if you feel like it.”

I never went back. I tried the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic next, and they gave me a bag of Extra Strength Tylenol and some shit for stomach cramps. The stuff was worse than a placebo; it actually made me feel shittier. Heather didn't bring it up too much, but about once a week she would ask me what was going on and I'd give her a doctored-up progress report. I was managing to cut down a little, but shit came up all the time that seemed like a valid excuse to use. I couldn't do a full day in the studio if I was sick. I couldn't play those Sleigher songs if I was sick. I couldn't go out if I was sick, and I definitely couldn't tell people how great I was doing if I was going through heroin withdrawal. About all I could do was lie down on a table with needles sticking out of my ears. Since that first morning I walked into the acupuncture place I hadn't exchanged words with the woman who worked there. I would go in and she'd stick the needles in my ears until the first customer arrived. I was the only person who showed up for the 7–9 a.m. junkie special. I felt
guilty toward the acupuncturist too. She must have been waking up at six in the morning for five extra bucks, and I really wasn't showing much progress.

 

A
FTER ABOUT A MONTH
of this really trying routine, I got a phone call from a bass player, Jeremy, who asked me if I could go on tour in three days with his band, Caroliner. Their drummer, Mike, had just quit over some girlfriend drama.

“I've never heard them. What kind of music is it?”

“You've never heard of Caroliner? How is that possible? They've been around for sixteen years. I thought everyone knew about them.”

“I've heard
of
them, but I thought it was just some generic noise band. I didn't know you and Mike were in it.” Mike was an amazing drummer.

“Yeah, we've been in it for a few years now. I can't believe you've never seen us. It's perfect for you.”

“I don't know. I can't keep up with Mike, that's for sure.”

“You don't have to. Just do whatever you want. It'll be perfect. I promise.”

“Shit. Three days? Let me call you back in a minute.”

I hung up and called Heather at the photo gallery she worked at to tell her about the phone call from Jeremy, and without any hesitation she said, “Call him back and say yes. Don't think about it. Just tell him you're going.”

“Yeah, but I mean I've never even heard them before. What if it's the worst thing ever?”

“That's not what it's about. You have to go,” she said. “Listen, I got to get back to work. Call that guy back and tell him you'll do it!”

“Okay,” I said, getting ready to hang up.

“And find out when you'll be in New York. I'm going there for work in two weeks.”

Typically, I would have liked at least to hear the music, and maybe meet the folks in the band, but Heather was right. It had nothing to do with whether I liked the music or the people, for that matter. I had to get the fuck out of San Francisco. I spent the next few days with Jeremy, a banjo player named Thomas, and Cheryl, the violin player, going over the songs. It was the best band I had heard in San Francisco, and I was surprised I had never seen them before.

The singer was apparently too busy dealing with last-minute tour
stuff to come to rehearsal. When I told Sean I was leaving, he asked me what I thought of Grux.

“What?” I couldn't understand him. It sounded like he was eating a piece of celery and talking at the same time.

“You mean you don't know Grux? Oh, man…”

“Wait. Say it one more time. I might have met him.” It was a weird name. I couldn't be hearing him right. Grux?

“
Grux!
The main guy! The singer!”

“No. I haven't met him yet, he's been busy trying to reschedule a bunch of shows since we're leaving three days late.”

“Well, seriously, man. You should try to meet him before you get in a van with him for a month.”

“Why? Is he weird?”

Sean laughed at that one. “Is he weird? Dude, his name is Grux, and he's been doing obscure noise music for sixteen years. He is the textbook example of weird.”

“Well, I'm pretty used to weirdos by now, and I already said yes.”

“Yeah, but…Oh well. I guess you'll find out.”

He wasn't the only one to ask about Grux. It seemed that everyone I called to say good-bye to, or reschedule recording sessions with, said the same thing.

“What do you think of Grux?”

“I haven't met him yet.”

“What! And you're…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah…I heard he's weird.”

“Weird? That's a bit of an understate—”

“Listen, I have to make some other calls,” I said, cutting them off.

How bad could this guy be? I was only going to kick dope anyway.
I didn't see how this guy could make matters worse than they already were.

I devised a system to taper off by filling a nasal spray bottle with heroin and water, and the idea was to sniff just enough of the stuff to get well when I was really hurting. Then every night I would top off the bottle with water, slowly weakening the solution. I would supplement as little dope as possible with large quantities of alcohol to take the edge off. I could only hope that the two hundred bucks I had spent on heroin was going to be enough.

The plan may have made sense logically, but I had a feeling it wasn't going to be so easy.

I
ARRIVED AT THE SANTA FE
Community School only to leave the next morning for their annual field trip to the International Free School Convention. The previous year we had spent a fun month driving to Boston and back, and this year the convention was in Miami. There were about fifteen of us in an old International school bus, and as nice as it was to see Ed, Denis, and the rest of the group—especially after being around the born-again Christians—it just wasn't the same without Kyle.

When we got to Houston, we were closer to the ocean than many of the kids had ever been, so we took a detour down to Galveston. It was the ugliest beach I had ever seen, covered in spots of crude oil and surrounded by offshore wells and tankers. Ed told us that anyone who wasn't back in forty-five minutes wouldn't get to go to Disneyworld.

Never having seen waves before, most of the others were scared to get in. It wasn't even the ocean, it was a gulf for Christ's sake. Ignoring the severe undertow signs, I put on my shorts and went for a swim. When I turned around a few minutes later, I could barely see the bus parked on the side of the road. I started swimming back, but I wasn't making any progress. So I tried harder, even though it didn't seem to make a difference. Panicking, I put even more effort into it, but I could only keep it up for so long. The moment I started treading water to catch my breath, I could feel myself getting sucked back out. I panicked again
and put everything I had into it, but I was starting to have trouble staying up. Then I really started freaking out. I began to scream for help, but that wasn't helping me catch my breath either, and I could barely keep my head up. I never stopped struggling, but at some point, my efforts just weren't helping anymore and I started going under.

I don't know how he found me, but out of nowhere an arm reached down into the water, got me in a headlock, and pulled me up. It was Denis, the physics teacher. The timing was eerie. Another few seconds and it might have been over.

When we got to Orlando, Ed made good on his threat of not letting me go to Disney World and made me wait in the parking lot. I tried every combination of crying, swearing, yelling, and blaming, all to no avail. For five hours I sat in the bus, seething. I thought it went against Ed's whole philosophy of learning from our mistakes, but he said that when our mistakes affect other people, those who are affected get to decide the consequences. I had held up the group for over an hour while I was out there drowning.

The trip was terrible, but during the month I was away, Mom had moved out of the houseboat and into a huge mansion rented in San Rafael. When I got back, I was happy to finally be reunited with Mom and Kyle. Even Laurel, our old housekeeper, had come out to join us. Mom wasted no time in finding me a new juggling teacher, and Kyle and I started taking gymnastics and breakdancing classes as well.

On Sundays Laurel took Kyle and me to her church, which couldn't have been more different from the one I had gone to with Fred. Laurel's crowd sang, danced, started shaking, and fell down. Even though the preacher read from the same book, it came out sounding totally different. I still wasn't buying into it, but at least they were having fun. Even I couldn't help dancing once the gospel band got going.

It was just like old times with all of us back together again, and Kyle and I even got to experience public school for a few months, until Mom asked me what I thought about the idea of joining a circus.

 

T
HE AUDITION WAS
at a big compound called The Farm in San Francisco's Mission District. I juggled in front of a few people, who then asked me why I wanted to join the circus. I told them, “I just want to make people happy,” which was the stock line I had been using whenever I was asked why I juggled. This explanation always made me feel like a liar and a fraud, but no one ever questioned it. After seeing my
mom hand a check to the woman who appeared to be in charge, I was informed that I had been accepted. The exchange of money was never mentioned to me, but it was hard not to wonder how much passing the audition had to do with that check. It worked the other way around with the rest of the performers. At the end of the week, Leticia, the director, would walk around and hand
them
checks. It bothered me that I had been accepted because of a payoff rather than my skill as a juggler. Granted, I had just turned nine years old, but I was by far the best juggler there. I tried to put it out of my mind, thinking this was just a trial period. Once they realized how talented I was, they would start paying me instead of the other way around.

Shortly after my audition, Mom worked out a deal with my school where I was able to get credit for “life experience” in the circus, so I stopped going to class and started taking the bus to San Francisco every day for intense rehearsals.

The circus was small. There were only five performers, which meant that just being a juggler (me), or a tightrope walker (Francesca), or trapeze artist (Pierre), or an acrobat (Robert) wasn't enough. Even though each of us had our specialty, we all had to do a bit of everything. Leticia, who didn't really have any circus skills, was the director and main clown. For ten hours a day I practiced acrobatics, tightrope walking, stilts, trapeze, and slapstick. When I wasn't working on that stuff, I was teaching the others how to juggle. It was hard work, I was always sore, and my armpits were in constant pain from jumping off a three-high twenty times a day.

The three-high was the most dangerous part of the show, so we had to practice it incessantly, as there was no room for error. It was a difficult trick. Francesca would jump up on Robert's shoulders using his calf as a kind of springboard to launch off of. I would do the same thing to get up on Pierre's shoulders so he could transfer me to Robert and Francesca. The complicated part was getting from Pierre's shoulders to Francesca's. We had tried various ways of getting me up there, but almost all of them ended up with me swinging through the air in the harness I was attached to. Francesca wasn't tied in, and if I didn't send her off balance while trying to get on her shoulders, I would usually knock her down when I came swinging back in her direction. Robert, who was trying to hold all of us up, didn't seem to be enjoying it much either, but Leticia was adamant that this was going to be the grand finale with me juggling three clubs up on top. Eventually I figured out how to get up there, but the next problem was how to get down. The idea was for all three of us to jump at the
same time, cued by a count-off from the band. The band hadn't started rehearsing with us yet, so Leticia would count off for us. Francesca would jump backward to get out of my way while I fell straight down to be caught by Robert. When he did manage to catch me, he would grab my underarms so tightly that after five attempts what started as a yelp of pain became a scream. By the twentieth jump I was forcing back tears. This went on every day, with Leticia reminding us there wouldn't be a harness in the show, which caused Robert to grip my armpits even harder. It didn't take me long to start hating that guy.

 

T
HE FARM WAS
part circus rehearsal space, part punk-rock club, part apartment complex, part animal farm, part community garden, part preschool, and part anything else that could bring in a few extra bucks. When the circus finally started the new season, I began staying at The Farm since there was no way I could make it from Marin County to wherever we were performing by 6:00 a.m. The guy who ran The Farm, a lawyer named Andy, assured my mom that I would be fine there, and I started sharing an apartment that was built into one of the two airplane hangars attached to the back of the main building, with a night nurse from San Francisco General Hospital. The other hangar was home to a group called Survival Research Laboratories, which built huge, evil-looking robots whose only purpose was to destroy each other. Although I hated waking up at 5:00 a.m. and not getting home till 10:00 p.m., I enjoyed living in that madhouse. The residents were mostly self-obsessed creative types who held menial jobs in order to support their art.

My roommate, whom I rarely saw because our schedules were so different, seemed to be the exception. The only thing I could find out about her that might be considered unique was that she chewed tobacco. At least she had left a can of Skoal lying around in the apartment, and having nothing better to do, I decided to try it one night. I immediately started sweating and puked all over the floor before I could make it to the communal bathroom down the hall. I couldn't understand why anyone would chew that stuff. I remembered getting sick when I drank that bottle of wine, but mostly I remembered being funny and entertaining. This stuff only made me sick. I still felt nauseated the next day while performing in Tracy, a town between San Francisco and Fresno. I couldn't be certain whether I was still feeling ill from the chewing tobacco or from the ninety-degree heat and Tracy's overwhelming smell of manure. In
either case, it was all I could do not to vomit standing on top of the three-high for our grand finale.

 

O
UR SHOW WAS
split into three parts. The first part we referred to as the Adult Show. The story line was a political commentary on the Reagan administration, as told through juggling, trapeze, tightrope walking, and a misguided elephant that would repeatedly appear onstage to ruin our acts. I was too small for the elephant costume, which required two people to operate. Everyone but me took shifts in it since it came out to ruin everyone's act at least once. The audience would go nuts every time it came out to knock me over, right as I was about to be the first person ever in the world to juggle fifteen balls. The Adult Show got that name not because of the political theme, but because before I had joined, only adults performed in it.

The big selling points of our circus, at least when it came to applying for grants, were the second two parts: the Workshop and the Kids' Show. Our audiences consisted of kids, ages five to twelve, and their parents. After we in the Adult Show did our thing, four of us would hold workshops with the kids for another hour or so, teaching them to walk on the tightrope, juggle, do somersaults, and so on. Pierre got to sit the second half out, since it would have been a terrible idea to let inexperienced kids swing from the forty-foot trapeze. It didn't even seem like a very good idea to let
him
do it. Instead of a net, we put a six-inch-thick piece of foam directly under the trapeze, and Robert would stand there, pretending to be ready to catch him should he lose his grip. The four-foot strip of foam was all for show. Once Pierre got swinging, it was far more likely that he would have landed out in the audience, or hopefully on top of the truck parked backstage, than into the armpit-destroying hands of Robert.

My workshops ranged in size from ten to twenty-five kids, depending on the turnout, and I had only an hour to get them ready for the Kids' Show. I wasn't a very good teacher, but there were always two or three kids who could actually keep three balls in the air after only an hour. I became pretty good at spotting the ones with no talent and would hand them some scarves to throw around. There was always at least one crier, but most of the kids were pretty excited to be in the circus for a few hours, showing off their new skills, juggling scarves or doing somersaults in the ring. I didn't like being around kids that much and didn't really
know how to talk to them. They all seemed so immature and directionless to me. The workshops were one of my least favorite parts of being in the circus.

I had a lot of least favorite parts.

Waking up at 5:00 a.m. every morning sucked. I hated Robert more than anyone, but he lived closer to The Farm than anyone else, so he was there every morning to pick me up. Getting rides from Robert sucked.

Upon arrival at the site, I had the unfortunate job of picking up dog shit. I wouldn't have been so opposed to it had the job not come with the official title Pooper Scooper. It may have been intended to make the job cute-sounding, but for some reason that title had the opposite effect on me. It was actually a high-pressure job, considering we couldn't really begin setting up until the area was shit-free, but instead of lending a hand, everyone else would stand around impatiently, watching me pick up feces. If we were really running late, the other members would walk around looking for dog shit, and yell, “Pooper scooper!” at the top of their lungs. I would then run over and pick the shit up with one of my clear plastic bags. Picking up dog shit sucked.

After setting up, which took about four hours, it was time to get into costume in preparation for the arrival of the kids, who would start showing up around 10:00 a.m. I had to put on a pair of blue tights, a red leotard, and a pair of shorts that had been painted to look like Jackson Pollock made them. Then I would walk around the audience in full clown makeup and hand out brochures. Being a clown was one thing, but
feeling
like a clown sucked.

Setting up, performing, and then teaching, often in ninety-degree heat, was a tough job. It was usually three o'clock by the time we took off our outfits, at which point it was time to tear down. Tearing down after what had already been a grueling ten-hour day really fucking sucked.

I did my best to smile and keep my feelings to myself. I even told people that being in the circus was fun. Every kid's dream. That kind of shit. A local news station shot a segment on me and when they asked why I wanted to be in the circus, I gave them my stock answer. What else was I going to say? I had no idea why anyone would want to be in the circus, but when I saw myself on TV, it did look pretty convincing. No one seemed to question my enthusiasm, which is why I was stunned when Leticia told me I wasn't going to be performing in the next season.

“You're kicking me out? What did I do?” I asked her. I was devastated, not because I would no longer be in the circus, but because I was
being rejected. It was my first clear sign of failure. What had I done wrong? I worked my ass off for these people. I didn't know what to say. I was paralyzed, which was the only thing that kept me from crying.