Long Past Stopping (15 page)

D
RIVING INTO
San Francisco was always an amazing experience, even if I was only gone for a few hours. This time I had been away for a month, and I was coming home to an awesome girlfriend, my new recording studio, and a bunch of bands, and we still had our Saturday night improv noise thing going. It was the life I had always envisioned for myself, ever since my days at The Farm. Using some kind of bizarre logic, I decided that if I felt this good clean, just imagine how good I would feel if I got high. I didn't see any danger in it because it was fairly obvious that the only reason I got addicted in the first place was because I had been so sad and depressed at the time. Feeling good was a totally different scenario, and anyway, after that fucking tour, I deserved to do it one more time.

An hour later I was hiding the straw and the foil wondering,
What the fuck is wrong with you? You stupid piece of shit. I can't fucking believe you would do this shit again. And after everything you just fucking went through?
My internal dialogue was interrupted by the phone ringing. It was Heather calling me back from work.

“Hey, O. I'm leaving now. I can't wait to see you. Where did you want to meet?”

“Well, actually it turns out I'm super wiped out from the drive. I didn't get any sleep last night, and I think I just need to take it easy.”

“Uh…I'm pretty tired, too. But I thought since you just got back…that…you know we could just be tired together.”

“Yeah…I don't know…I mean, I won't be any fun to hang out with, you know? It was a pretty rough month, and I've been around people twenty-four hours a day. I think I just need to be alone right now.”

“When have you ever been fun?” she asked.

I tried to force a laugh, but there was too much truth in that joke. “Listen. How about tomorrow? I'm just too out of it right now.” It was the wrong thing to say. The whole situation was wrong and I knew it. Heather had rehearsal the next night, and an opening at the gallery the night after that, and still I made up excuses not to see her on the only night she was available. I couldn't face her after I had just spent a month trying to get clean, only to relapse the moment I got home. My theory about feeling too good had turned out to be wrong.
At least I only fucked up once
, I thought.
I just won't do it again.

The problem was that I didn't feel quite so good about myself the next day, and the urge to get high was overwhelming. Since Heather was busy anyway, why not just one more time?

There was always an excuse that, no matter how unbelievably ridiculous it may have sounded after I got high, made more sense than anything in the whole world beforehand. I tended to make the worst decisions stone-cold sober and could only see how stupid they were after it was too late. This went on until I was right back to where I was before. Lying to Heather, faking orgasms, waking up sick. The same exact bullshit all over again. I don't know how she didn't see it.

It stopped being the same when I started running out of money. The tour had wiped me out. What little money I had left from my dad's loan, I had spent on the road, and the three hundred dollars that Grux had given us when we got home didn't last too long. I figured if I switched over to using needles just until I got some money, I might be able to make it through until I got some work, without getting sick. Seeing all that smoke when I exhaled seemed like a waste. A needle seemed a lot more efficient.

I also came up with a new idea to quit. It was something I had read about on the Internet called “rapid opiate detox,” where they put you under general anesthesia and give you an opiate blocker called Naltrexone, which would kick all the heroin out of your system in a matter of hours instead of days. When you woke up the next day, you would be clean. The big issue with it was that it was only being done in Canada
and cost ten thousand dollars. If I had ten thousand dollars, I wouldn't have had to quit. A little more research taught me that Naltrexone was also used to deter heroin addicts from relapsing and could be found at the local pharmacy for five bucks. I could just do it myself for a savings of $9,995. What a rip-off.

Meanwhile, lying to Heather was stressing me out so much that I broke up with her. My rationale was that I cared too much about her to see her wasting her time with a pathetic piece of shit like me. Racked with guilt and self-loathing, I admitted to her that I had started using heroin the moment I got back from tour.

“I just need some time by myself to sort all this shit out,” I told her, bracing myself for at least a little drama.

“Okay. Good luck with that,” she said sincerely. Even though I broke up with her, I couldn't help but be disappointed at how easy it had been.

To complicate matters, Jibz had finally decided that I was the right one for her after all. I couldn't have agreed with her more, but heroin, while fucking me up in so many ways, did allow me to see through the distorted lens of emotions that I usually based all my decisions on.

With my
feelings
no longer in the way, it was obvious to me that it just wasn't going to work out between us. Not now, anyway.

She didn't give up so easily. In a complete role reversal, she tried to convince me that we were always meant to be together, she just never saw it before. It was the same line I had been using on her for years, which made the situation harder to get out of. The only excuse I could come up with was that I was a junkie, thinking that would surely scare her away. But it only made her more determined. She wanted to save me.

Jibz was the only other person besides Heather who knew I was doing drugs. I told her about this rapid opiate detox thing, and that I was going to do it at a motel my roommate worked at in the Marina. She offered to come with me and be there when things got rough, but I decided I'd better do it on my own. I didn't want anyone to see me squirming around in a pool of sweat while vomiting and shitting for six straight hours.

From the accounts I had read it was definitely going to be bad, but I had been through some rough shit before and figured I could take anything for six hours. A common theme was that the Naltrexone detox wouldn't kill you, but it would sure as hell make you wish that it had. Trying not think about it, I checked into the motel, poured myself a cup of water, and swallowed the harmless-looking pill.

It got so bad so fast that within an hour I wished I were dead. My skin
was going from freezing to burning so quickly that I couldn't tell which was which. It was also the first time I had experienced what literally felt like crawling skin—not goose bumps, or a chill, or that weird shiver I would sometimes get after taking a piss. It was as if my skin had decided it wasn't in the right place and was trying to figure out where it was supposed to go.

At the same time, I was trying to navigate my way back and forth from the bathroom through a whole new space-time continuum I didn't understand. My trips from the bed to the bathroom every few minutes felt like a mile each way. I tried just hanging out on the toilet because, no matter how many times I puked, or shit, there was always more. When there was finally nothing left to puke up, I dry-heaved until I was so parched that I needed water. But I couldn't keep the water down for more than a few seconds. On the few occasions that I did, it would come out in the form of diarrhea a few minutes later.

Eventually my skin, having given up on trying to find out where it should go, just crawled off my body, leaving raw flesh and exposed nerves. Everything hurt. The sheets, the pillow, my T-shirt, my underwear, and my body hair felt like steel wool against my body. Just as I had been warned, the idea of killing myself was going around in my head like a tape loop, but I couldn't think of a single painless way to go about it.

The most fucked-up part—the thing that I had not seen mentioned once by anyone who had gone through it, was how this stuff affected one's sense of time. I stared at the red numbers on the digital clock and it would take at least an hour for a minute to go by. I could deal with the pain, the puking, and the diarrhea, but this time warp I had gone through was fucked up, especially since there was a horrific psychedelic element to the whole thing. Time had slowed down so much, I felt as if I were rolling around in a blur of raw flesh at ten times the speed the rest of the world was operating on.

Looking for any form of escape, I tried turning on the TV. Just the light from it gave me sharp pains in the back of my eyeballs, and the people on the infomercial were far scarier than what I was dealing with. Even on mute, the TV put out a high-pitch hum that I found unbearable. I turned it off and went back to watching the minutes slowly tick away on the clock.

It felt as if I had been alone in that room for at least a week when sunlight started appearing around the edge of the curtains. With the sun came a small bit of relief, as the pain and hallucinations started to recede.
I watched it get brighter, thinking this must be what spring is like in Iceland because it felt like two more days went by before I heard a knock at the door.

I had agreed to let Jibz come and check on me in the morning, but now I wished I hadn't. I still felt gross, like a shell of human being, and my body had been put through the wringer. I put on some clothes before letting her in, and they felt like sandpaper against my skin. Everything was uncomfortable. I opened the door and tried to say something, but I got choked up and started crying. Then she was crying. When I calmed down, all I could tell her was that it had been rough, which must have been obvious enough just by looking at me. I thanked Jibz for the soup and crackers she brought and asked her to leave, which made me feel like a real asshole.

All I managed to get down was a saltine. It felt as if I were eating metal filings. Seeing Jibz had made me so antsy that all I could think about was being anywhere other than where I was, which is always a difficult predicament to be in. I got in my car and drove home, puking up the cracker out of the window at a stoplight.

Once again I couldn't see the harm in doing a little dope just once. Not even close to fully recovered from the horrors of last night, I needed desperately to feel better. The Naltrexone was supposed to block opiates for twenty-four hours, and the dope caused another violent fit of coughing and vomiting before I felt better. Five minutes later, I was cleaning up the puddle of vomit on the floor, feeling as if last night had never even happened.

I called Jibz to thank her for coming by, and to let her know that I was finally clean. This time for good. Our old band, the Roofies, had reformed when she got back, and we had rehearsal the next night.

When Jibz showed up for band practice, she couldn't get over how much better I looked, considering what she saw the day before.

“Yeah. That stuff was terrible, but it really worked.”

Of course I had to use up what was left of the dope that morning, which led me to buy more.

“You want to come over to my place?” she asked when we were done rehearsing.

I wanted to go to my room and be by myself, but I couldn't think of a way out of it. It was just so depressing. I felt like a bad actor in a fucked-up soap opera as I went through the motions of making out with her. I did want to give it another chance, I was just too stressed out with all the
shit that had been going on, and the last thing I wanted to do was start lying and faking orgasms with someone else. I couldn't even get that far with Jibz.

“I'm sorry. I'm just too stressed out,” I said.

“Too stressed out for what?” she asked.

“Never mind. Nothing,” I answered, realizing I was actually being a bit presumptuous in the first place. It gave me a new resolve to clean up my act, though. This time for Jibz. Even so, I avoided her as much as possible over the next few weeks while making preparations to do the rapid opiate detox again. But there was no fucking way in hell I was going to be conscious for it.

A couple of weeks later I rode my bike down to Pill Park in the Tenderloin and bought what I was told were Klonopin off a Vietnam vet. Not telling anyone about what I was doing, I climbed the ladder up to my loft and settled into my bed before taking the Naltrexone and Klonopin. They both kicked in just when I realized I needed to take a piss. As I approached the edge of the loft to climb down to the bathroom, there appeared to be two ladders. I must have picked the wrong one because the next thing I saw was the floor coming up fast.

I
F THERE WASN'T A PROTEST
going on, Kyle and I would usually head up to UC Berkeley anyway and try to make a couple of bucks juggling. I had a routine that was mostly bits and pieces stolen from other people's acts, but I never got the same response from these jokes that my older colleagues did.

“And now, ladies and gentleman, five balls,” I would say, starting to jump up and down while only juggling three balls. I rarely got more than a chuckle from that joke, but I still thought it was funny.

Kyle, whose job it was to hand me things while I performed and collect the money after I was done, somehow got a lot more laughs than I ever did. It started one day after my five-ball joke. One at a time, he was supposed to throw in two extra balls, and I would catch them while I continued juggling, transitioning from the joke to actually juggling five balls. By accident, he threw both at the same time, and I ended up dropping everything. The crowd got a laugh out of it, but I was mortified that he had fucked up the trick.

Another time he threw me a lit torch while I was up on my six-foot unicycle, but his aim was off. Not only did I catch the side of the torch that was on fire, but I also lost my balance and fell. I had to let go of the other two torches I was holding in order to not fall on my head, and one of them knocked over the open container of kerosene. Before I knew it,
I was lying on the ground a few inches away from the three-foot flame of ignited gas. The audience went nuts for that one. We collected almost sixty dollars from that crowd, but I was humiliated.

After that Kyle changed his job description from assistant to saboteur, always trying to find clever ways to make me fuck up and look like an idiot. The fact that we were making more money was little consolation. Those assholes didn't care about skill anyway; they just wanted to see me fall down and light myself on fire. If I didn't hurt myself, we were lucky to make thirty bucks in a whole day. We'd spend half of it on candy, split the other half, and then tell Mom that we only made five bucks.

“Five bucks? What happened to the rest of it?” she'd ask.

“The rest of what?”

“The money?”

“I swear. That's all we got,” I lied.

Eventually Mom figured out we were spending our measly earnings on candy and video games. She came by our usual spot to surprise us, and we weren't there. I don't know how she tracked us down, but I was just about to get a replay on Bride of Pinbot when she found us at the arcade with our pockets full of candy. Luckily she didn't have any of my school photos with her or I'm sure she would have tried to ban me from the arcade the same way she did at McDonald's.

Mom's obsession for always knowing exactly where we were and what we were doing was taking a toll on her. I would have been more than happy to disappear and give her some space, but she had come up with a plan to get us out of the house and know what we were doing at the same time. Saying good-bye to the political protests and street performing up at UC Berkeley, Kyle and I started taking the train out to San Jose on weekends to stay with a family who was extremely active in the juggling community.

Barry was a computer programmer who ran the International Juggling Association with his wife in his spare time. Ironically, Barry was a terrible juggler, and his wife, Sue, couldn't juggle at all. I never understood why they were so involved in the grunt work of running the IJA, but it was unbelievable how much paperwork it generated. Their house was filled with file cabinets stuffed with documentation on who could juggle how many balls or clubs or rings, and for how long; breakdowns and descriptions of the artistic versus technical skills of each of these jugglers; what juggling organizations they belonged to; whom they studied under; their relatives; and so on. He was the J. Edgar Hoover of the
juggling world. Although I never asked, I assumed they had a file on me as well.

Spending time with them actually made my mom look slightly less obsessive. They had two kids, Marc and Scott, who, like me, had to juggle at least an hour a day. It didn't seem to help them that much. On Saturday nights we all went to a local church where they belonged to a juggling organization called Safety in Numbers.

At this point, I was up to seven balls, but I usually couldn't keep them in the air for more than thirty seconds. My record was around a minute, but it wasn't long enough or solid enough to include in a routine. I could keep five clubs in the air for slightly longer. I had been working on seven balls and on five clubs for almost six months and wasn't getting any better. I felt as though I had finally hit a wall, but I kept at it anyway.

While I was in the gym practicing, Kyle spent his time trying to catch a rabbit we had seen hopping around on the church grounds. When he finally did catch the thing, we smuggled it back to Berkeley in a paper bag. Mom didn't know what to do about the rabbit. We already had two peacocks living in the backyard. The peacocks didn't belong to anyone, and no one in the neighborhood seemed to have any idea when or how they had gotten there. She let us keep the rabbit in the house that night, but the next morning there was shit and piss everywhere. Monday was show-and-tell at school, so we got the cheapest chicken wire cage we could find, put a bunch of shredded-up newspaper in it, and brought the rabbit to school.

Of course, I had to go directly from school to tap dancing class, so I convinced my teacher, Carol, to let me leave it over night. After repeated requests to take the poor rabbit home, he was still hopping around in his cage in the back of the classroom a month later. I brought food for him, but I hated cleaning out the cage and only did it when the smell got really bad. It pissed me off, because in my mind it was Kyle's rabbit, yet I was the one who ended up being responsible for it.

Mondays were the worst. Aside from being a terrible day in general, after two days with the windows closed and nobody to clean up after the rabbit, the classroom always smelled awful. I didn't want to deal with Carol's threats of what she was going to do if I didn't take the rabbit home, but I was even less excited when a substitute teacher walked in holding a scarf to his nose. Carol could be vicious, but everyone liked her. Her brand of nastiness was always entertaining, as long as I wasn't the focus of it. I could tell that this substitute teacher was an asshole the moment he walked in the room, and I was not mistaken.

“What's that smell?” he asked, scanning the room. “What is that rabbit doing in here? Whose rabbit is that?”

Since I had decided it was Kyle's rabbit, I didn't say anything. Neither did anyone else, until he threatened to take away our recess if we didn't tell him. Everyone pointed at me.

“You get to stay here during recess to clean that cage,” he told me. “Okay. My name is Mr. Lutkenhouse,” he said, causing a chorus of moans throughout the class. “Yes, I was told you call your teachers by their first names here, but when I was a kid, ‘mister' was a title of respect. So I don't care what you call your other teachers, you will call me Mr. Lutkenhouse.”

I had never acted particularly rebellious before, but this guy's presence had triggered eleven years' worth of the antiauthoritarian conditioning I had grown up with. He started calling roll, and when it got to me, I once again decided to say nothing.

“Oran?” he said for the third time, looking around the room. I was nervous as hell, but I couldn't answer him.

“Does anyone know where Oran Canfield is?”

“That's Mr. Canfield,” I answered.

“What did you say?”

“You can call me Mr. Canfield,” I repeated.

“Okay, Mr. Canfield. You can go to the principal's office.” He looked as though he was shaking, and I could swear his skin had turned a redder shade.

“Thank you,” I said, getting up to leave.

“After you clean the rabbit cage during recess,” he said, causing me to reluctantly sit back down.

“Yousef? Is Yousef here,” he went on.

“Do you mean Mr. Daryiush?” Yousef asked him.

“Mr. Whateveryousaid, you can go to the principal now.”

Ten more kids went to the principal's office, and it was looking as if class was just going to be Quincy Blue, Akbar Bey, and me. I couldn't imagine what class was going to be like with only three students, but eventually, the principal, Wendy, brought the other kids back to class and told them to take their seats.

“Oran,” she said. “I will see you in my office at recess.”

I was still afraid of this guy, but I was feeling pretty cocky about the fact that I had started and seemed to be winning this little sixth-grade revolution. Knowing he couldn't send anyone else to the principal, Mr. Lutkenhouse resigned himself to using our last names.

“Where do you think you're going, Mr. Canfield?” he yelled at me as I headed for the door at recess.

“I believe you heard the principal tell me to see her in her office,” I said, gloating.

“Fine. I guess you and I will be having lunch together then,” he said. It was only ten thirty, and I couldn't see the day getting any better.

I was hoping Wendy would send me home, or just keep me in her office.

“What happened? This is very unlike you,” she said.

“I don't know. I really couldn't help it. That guy's an asshole. I don't like him.”

“I can tell. Listen, though. Carol is going to be out for two days, so you're going to have to deal with him. I don't like him either, but that's who they sent. Please, try to do what he says until Carol gets back.”

There were still a few minutes left of recess, so I went back to class and cleaned up after the rabbit so I wouldn't have to do it during lunch. The rest of the day went without incident, but every moment was a struggle.

The next morning, I pretended I was sick.

“Too sick to make it to that audition after school?” Mom asked.

I was supposed to try out for a Coca-Cola commercial. I had done a few local commercials for JCPenney and was hoping to get a national one. I had heard that the Mikey kid from the Life Cereal commercials had made ten thousand dollars just for the shoot and was still getting royalties every month on top of that. I was going to walk in that afternoon, and the casting people would know I was the one for the job the moment they saw me. I wouldn't have to audition or anything. That was my fantasy anyway, since I hated auditions. I took rejections very personally, and so far that's all I had ever gotten. JCPenney had cast me in two fleece-wear commercials because they wanted someone to ride around on a unicycle in a sweat suit. No audition necessary.

“That teacher is an asshole. I'm telling you, something bad is going to happen if I go to school today,” I told her.

“Come on. Aren't you being a little dramatic?”

“You haven't seen this guy. Believe me, if you saw him, you would know what I was talking about.”

“Sorry, Ory. I've got clients coming in all day. You have to go.” She was surprisingly empathetic.

If for no other reason than to promote this softer, gentler way of getting me out of bed, I got up and put on my clothes. The look on my mom's face scared me, though. I could tell she was actually worried.

 

M
R. LUTKENHOUSE MADE
it obvious that he hated me. I could see it in his eyes when he called out “Mr. Canfield” during roll call. I was determined not to say a word the whole day, lest I say the wrong thing and get detention. I wanted that ten thousand dollars from the Coke commercial, even though I had never seen the seven hundred bucks I had supposedly made from the other ones. I succeeded in not saying anything, until I found myself having to stay after school anyway and write three hundred sentences as a punishment for reading my book.

Mr. Lutkenhouse handed me a piece of paper after I failed to put my book down within thirty seconds of our reading period being over. It was a Xerox of Carol's favorite punishment, having to write
Making noise in the learning environment is disturbing and therefore prohibited
. The “X 25” was in Mr. Lutkenhouse's handwriting at the bottom. It was obvious that he had been waiting all day for me to make the tiniest slipup.

“No,” I said, looking up from the note. I felt like he had just taken ten thousand dollars from me.

“What did you say?” he asked. I could see his face instantly getting darker.

“I said no. I wasn't making any noise.”

“No, what? You weren't making noise? Or you're not going to write the sentences?”

“Both. I was not making noise, and I'm not writing those…” Before I could finish answering, he lunged at me, and without even knowing what happened, I found myself on the other side of the table with Mr. Lutkenhouse facing me from where I had just been. His face was not only red, but at this point the veins were popping out of his neck and he was shaking with anger. He tried to grab me again, but I just kept running around the table. He stopped and stared at me for what seemed like an eternity and then jumped on top of the table and dove at me as I was trying to run away. I was lying on the ground in shock when he grabbed me by my collar and lifted me off the ground. The class was in an uproar, everyone was yelling, but no one was louder than me. When we got to the door, he threw me against it, and I fell to the ground. Again I tried to run, but before I could get away, he grabbed me and threw me against the door a second time. The third time he got me by the neck and didn't let go. He dragged me out the door and carried me out to the hall where he lost his grip. There was so much screaming and yelling going on that by the time Mr. Lutkenhouse made it to the hall, Kyle's fourth-grade class next door was already there, waiting to see what the hell was going on.

Mr. Lutkenhouse was bent over, trying to get a better handle on me, when Kyle saw that I was the one getting beat up. In an instant, Kyle was on Mr. Lutkenhouse's shoulders trying to get him to let go of me, while I was flailing around as if I were in one of those
Laurel and Hardy
skits where the little guy's arms are too short to punch the big guy. Somehow he managed to shake Kyle off him while holding me in the air by my collar. He then carried me down a flight of stairs to the principal's office, where he threw me over the counter, and I landed on top of the rather surprised secretary, Yvette. Looking back at the door, I saw Mr. Lutkenhouse leaning against the doorjamb, trying to catch his breath. His face was covered in blood.