Long Past Stopping (21 page)

After that night, there was no such thing as essential recording gear. The only thing that mattered was that I fall down, clutch at my heart, and vomit. I kept pretending to myself and everyone else that I was fine, but the charade was wearing thin. I was losing weight rapidly—punching out new holes in my belt every couple of weeks—as well as my sanity, from a combination of too many drugs, too much lying, and an inability to remember what lies I told which people. My roommates, who were dismayed that I had left rehab again, must have known what was going on, but there wasn't much they could do.

The thing about cocaine is that in the beginning of a run, five or ten bucks' worth would make me fall to my knees and puke, but six days later I could be spending up to five hundred dollars a day, shooting up every five minutes just to stay awake. I had to stay awake to peek out of the keyhole in my door and record the conversations of my roommates plotting to catch me using. I could hear them talking about it all the time, but my tape recorder wasn't able to pick it up for some reason.

I became so paranoid that I only left the house when absolutely necessary. To sell more shit, to buy more drugs, and occasionally to work some random job to get money to buy more drugs. When I did run into people, I tried my best to convince them that I was just stressed out from dealing with the flood, the lawsuit, my breakup with Heather—anything but the truth.

 

A
FEW PEOPLE WHO
weren't fully aware of what was going on took pity on me and gave me random jobs here and there. I restored pianos for a guy in Oakland, and bar-backed at a couple of neighborhood establishments. I even took a job at a leather-goods factory, making cock
rings and dildo harnesses, which turned out to be dangerous work for a junkie. My job was to feed leather strips into an industrial sewing machine, cut the strips into eight-inch sections, attach some buttons, and voilà…a cock ring.

Making a hundred of these a day was monotonous work, and it was easy to nod off, especially when I was sewing. Usually I woke up right before my hand reached the needle, but when I woke up and saw three Mexican women looking at me in horror, I knew I was in trouble. I couldn't feel a thing, but when I looked at the machine, I saw that my thumb had gone right through the double-stitcher and had been sewn onto a strip of leather that was only two steps away from becoming a cock ring. I was bleeding profusely, and even though I didn't feel it, I knew it was supposed to hurt. I put on a show of tremendous pain while one of the women ran to go get help. My boss was able to stop the bleeding with some bandages, but if I had nodded off while stamping out patterns for the dildo harnesses, that machine might have taken my hand.

None of these jobs were able to support my habit, so in the hopes of stretching my money a little further, I got on methadone and started buying crack instead of powder cocaine.

Someone on the street had told me you could inject crack by breaking it down in lemon juice. He was right, but it was a ten-minute process, and ten minutes was sometimes too long—long enough to fall asleep and wake up eighteen hours later with the pattern from my computer keyboard pressed into my face. So I started smoking a little of it while I waited for the rest to dissolve. Then I started smoking it all the time and spent even more money. I hardly ever had problems with buying heroin, but the crack dealers were not to be trusted. They were always selling me bits of soap, drywall, even cat litter. Those guys had no fucking morals.

 

M
OST OF MY FRIENDS
had stopped talking to me at this point. It started with Jibz after I agreed to record our band, the Roofies, and got her to pay me in advance. I planned to use the money to get my tape machine out of the pawnshop, but it never happened. I spent it on drugs, and when it came time to record, there was nothing to record with. The studio had dwindled down to almost nothing. I tried to tell her, Eli, and the rest of the band I was sorry and I would pay them back, but that wasn't enough for them. Jibz decided that unless I agreed to pay them back and get random drug tests, they were going to kick me out of the
band. It surprised me, as I never really cared too much about that band anyway. I told them to fuck off, and stormed out, strangely relieved that I had one less obligation to think about.

A week later, before Optimist International practice, Eli surprised me as I was coming out of the bathroom after shooting a particularly good speedball. My tolerance was so high that really getting a good shot was rare, and this was a rare one. My heart was still beating like crazy as Eli asked me, “Were you shooting up in there?”

“No. I was taking a shit,” I answered with as straight a face as possible. Taking shits had become very rare as well, which was an unfortunate side effect of heroin.

“I just don't know what to believe anymore. I could have sworn you were using again, but then whenever I talk to you, you do a good job of convincing me that I'm wrong,” he said. I was kind of proud of myself for being that convincing moments after puking into the toilet, but Eli continued. “So I've decided that since you're such a good liar, I just can't talk to you at all anymore.”

His words stung, but I was still trying to combat the rush from the cocaine and couldn't come up with an argument against his line of reasoning. I had to concede that it made a certain amount of sense.

“Okay. Do you mind telling Sean?” I asked him as if it were no big deal. I wanted to get out of there before I started crying. This band
was
important to me, and Eli and Sean were important to me. Normally I would have argued or apologized, and tried to convince him I was fine, but I didn't have it in me. I left him in the kitchen and walked to my room without any obligations left.

 

E
LI MUST HAVE
told my last two close friends, Jake and Betsy, that he thought I was using again, because that night they staged a last-ditch intervention. They suggested that I accept that I was a junkie but, instead of quitting, I just try to cut down to a reasonable amount, get my life back on track, and try not to beat myself up so much about the whole thing. It sounded like a good idea to me, and I agreed that I would give it a shot, which made it all the more confusing at five that morning, when I found myself on Jake's roof, clearly planning on breaking into his house. I tried to tell myself to stop. I had twenty bucks in my pocket, the pawnshops opened in three hours, and I still had that Fender Champ I could sell. But it was as if I were watching one of those shitty teen horror movies where you're yelling at the screen, telling the girl not to go down
to the basement, but there's nothing you can do. Just like that poor girl, I couldn't yell at myself loudly enough to turn around as I watched myself bend the security bars and squeeze my hundred-and-twenty-pound body through the window.

I looked around and noticed a bunch of sleeping bags scattered around the floor and saw Jake's sister looking up at me from one of them. Without answering her, I walked straight to the front door and let myself back out. What the hell had I been thinking?

Once again I woke up with people in my fucking room. Jake and Mick were standing in my doorway. Jake started by asking me if I had broken into his house the night before.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Okay, buddy,” he said. “I hate the fact that I'm doing this, but I already filed a police report, and if you don't leave town in one week, I'm pressing charges.”

I could see Mick fuming. As soon as Jake was done, he exploded. “One week? Fuck that! Where's my camcorder, motherfucker? You're getting the fuck out of here right now, you lying, stealing piece of shit. Get up, motherfucker! I'll teach you to fucking steal from me, you piece of shit.”

I had come across Mick's camcorder a few weeks earlier while I was in his room looking for records to sell. I figured I could pawn it and get it back to him before he ever noticed it was missing. In a terrible twist of fate, he looked for the fucking thing that same night. So far, I had spent at least two hours helping Mick look for his camcorder while telling him, “It's got to be here someplace. Are you sure it's not in your room?” At least I'd managed to get it back from the pawnshop a couple days earlier. My hope was that he would find the camcorder behind his records, and think he misplaced it, but unfortunately it hadn't worked out that way.

“Get up, motherfucker!” he kept yelling at me. “You're out of here!”

Jake tried to diffuse the situation by convincing Mick to leave me alone for a minute and let him talk to me. I was in shock. Everything had come to a head, and I couldn't see any way out of it, especially with Mick out in the hall still yelling at me.

I got up, told Jake I was sorry, and then led the way to Mick's room. I showed him where the camcorder was, but it didn't stop him from yelling at me. All I could do was hang my head in shame, as I walked out the door to spend my last twenty bucks in the hopes of getting at least another few hours of not giving a shit before I started thinking about what the fuck I was going to do.

Mick followed me all the way to the street, screaming “You're out of here, motherfucker!”

I came back to the house ten minutes later, and my key didn't work. There was no way they could have changed the lock that quickly. I pounded on the windows to no avail, and realized they must have done it while I had been asleep.
Someone has to come out eventually, I'll just jam my foot in the door and force my fucking way in
, I thought as I paced back and forth, starting to feel sick. It was a bad situation, but I couldn't blame them for changing the locks on me. I deserved it. All the same, I was standing on the street shivering and I needed to get into the fucking house. I decided to call the cops, tell them the truth, and see if there were any legal rights I could take advantage of.

“Your name's on the lease?” the emergency operator asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay. Just sit tight and I'll have a car there in two minutes,” she said, hanging up.

It didn't even take two minutes. The police car was pulling up pretty much at the same time I hung up the phone. I couldn't count how many times I had called the cops to report a fight or someone passed out in front of our door, even a drive-by, where the bullet had literally ended up in a brick wall six inches from my head. Most of the time, it would take them up to forty-five minutes to show up, if at all.

“You the guy who called?” the cop asked me as I approached the car.

I nodded to him.

“What's going on?”

“Well…” I hesitated. “Let me be honest. I've been having a problem with heroin, my roommates have noticed some of their stuff has gone missing, and I just came back to the house to find the lock has been changed.”

“You've been stealing your roommates' stuff?” he asked me. I nodded again. “Okay, we'll take it from here,” he said as he and his partner walked over to the door.

“This is the police! Open up!” they said while pounding their Maglites on the piece of plywood we had used to replace one of the windowpanes. There was no movement in the house. I peeked through the crack and could see them standing back by the kitchen.

The cop had a look through the door, too, and yelled, “Hey. You with the blond hair. I can see you. Open up now.”

That got Mick to come to the door.

“Listen,” the cop said after hearing Mick's side of the story. “Nobody wants to live with a junkie, but the law is the law. His name's on the lease, and yours isn't. If you don't like it, the only thing you can do is move out. Now give me a copy of the key.” The cop went to the door, tried the key, and handed it to me.

“You should really stop using that stuff,” he told me on his way out.

 

B
EFORE GOING
back to my room to get high, I apologized to Mick and told him I would be gone soon. He just ignored me. I didn't know where I was going to go. The only solution I could come up with was to call my friend Aaron and see if I could kick on his couch. Our friendship had gone through many ups and downs since we had been roommates at boarding school, but I could always count on him if I was in trouble. Going to Aaron's house didn't fulfill Jake's requirement of getting out of town, but it was all I could come up with.

As always, I was determined to really clean up my act. Then I found a few thousand dollars lying on Aaron's dresser the next day. It was money he had been saving for a trip to Thailand, but I figured he wouldn't miss two hundred bucks.

“Why does it look like someone's been rifling through my shit?” he asked me when he got home from work.

“I don't know.” I was laid out on his couch pretending to be sick.

“How much money did you take?” he asked, ignoring my answer. I gave up the act of being sick and told him I took two hundred bucks.

“It seems like it was more than that,” he said.

“Man. I swear I just took two hundred. Count it.”

“I would, but I don't know exactly how much was there. Come on, let's go.”

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“I don't know. I'll take you anywhere you want to go, but you better figure it out soon.”

First he gave me a ride home. I packed a bag and gave him my Fender amp—which I never got the chance to sell—as collateral for the money I stole. From there, he drove me all the way to Santa Cruz to a rehab our friend Sam had just successfully completed. By now I had absolutely no faith that it would work for me, but what the fuck else was I going to do?

O
NE OF THE MAIN
selling points of my new boarding school in Arizona was its field trips program. The program offered trips to the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations, to Baja, California, or to work with charity organizations in Tucson, but freshmen were required to go on the Mexico trip. We drove to a small town in northern Mexico, and I was dropped off in front of an adobe hut that I was told I would be staying at for the next three weeks. I said my good-byes to the remaining kids in the van and watched them drive away on the dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust. My heart sank at the sight of it. I didn't really know any Spanish and my host, a middle-aged man named Oscar, didn't speak much English. I picked up my bags and made a gesture to imply that I wanted to bring them inside, but he made a motion that I interpreted as “wait.”

“
¿Donde está el baño?
” I asked him. He motioned for me to leave my bags where they were and led me behind the hut to an outhouse. A woman out back was carrying water buckets from a well, up a ladder, and finally to a large metal tank on the roof of the hut.

“
Mi esposa,
” he said. “The water is for
la ducha
.”

I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I had no idea what he was talking about. He ran his hands through his hair and pantomimed rubbing soap over his body.

“Ah. A shower,” I said.

“
Sí
. Showard,” he repeated to himself.

I held my breath before going into the outhouse. When I came out, the woman was lighting up a pile of wood under the tank to heat up the water.

“Showard!” Oscar yelled to his wife as we walked back to the front door.

Again I picked up my bags to bring them inside, and again he motioned for me to leave them. When we entered the house, I understood why. Oscar introduced me to his two kids, his parents, and his wife's parents, all of whom were living in the one-room hut. How the fuck did this place get approved by the school if there was no place for me to stay? The four old folks were making eye movements toward a free chair, so I sat down. We just sat there and stared at one another while Oscar's wife, who had come back in, hung a sheet in front of a raised platform covered with a piece of sheet metal.

“Showard,” Oscar said again before disappearing behind the sheet. His wife left the house again. I just sat there absorbed in my discomfort, wishing I had followed the school's advice to cut off my dreadlocks, while these four ancient Mexicans studied me in silence. I was jarred out of it by Oscar yelling “
Ahora!
” at the top of his lungs. That was followed by the sound of water hitting sheet metal. When he yelled, “
Bien!
” the water stopped. A few minutes later the same routine was repeated.

When he was dressed, I followed him outside and up to the roof, where he opened and closed the water tank for his wife and then the kids. I was dreading the prospect of having to go through this production myself, and I was still totally confused as to why my bags were still out on the front porch. After about five attempts, I succeeded in asking him where I would be staying.

“My nephew, he take care of you. But don't tell him the money.”

“What money?” I asked.

“From
la escuela
. I says to him I brought you here so I could speak the
inglés. ¿Sí?
You speak the Espanish, and I speak the
inglés,
yes?”

“
Sí,
” I said.

“
Más importante.
Don't tell
la escuela
you stay with my nephew, okay, or they will not give me the rest of the money, yes? He is good kid, but only nineteen years old.”

“
Sí,
” I repeated, but I wasn't so sure. The whole setup bummed me out. The school had told me I was staying with the head of the city council, which I had assumed meant somewhat modern living conditions. I
had never seen anything like that shower situation, and while I was aware that there were people in the world living eight to a room, I had never experienced it, nor did I want to.

As I took in the view from the roof, it appeared that this was the biggest house on the block, and the only one with anything resembling the contraption Oscar was operating.

“My nephew's house mucho better.”

 

W
E WERE STILL
on the roof when a police car skidded to a stop with the sirens blaring right in front of the house.

“
Vámonos,
” Oscar said, darting for the ladder.

As I climbed down after him I felt a surge of adrenaline, an involuntary reaction I had to sirens and cop cars. Even as a kid, I felt guilty of wrongdoing every time I saw a police officer, or any authority figure for that matter. We were required to watch
Midnight Express
before going to Mexico, so my fear of authority had become absolute terror.
I should have cut my hair,
I was thinking when I was close enough to the ground to jump off the ladder.

Instead of running away, though, Oscar ran straight for the car. A huge policeman got out wearing aviator glasses, and Oscar introduced me to his nephew, Raul. Raul nearly broke my fingers when he excitedly shook my hand. He seemed too smiley for someone who had to share his room for three weeks with an American kid he'd never met, but it gave me a good view of his one silver and one gold front teeth. It was hard to understand why Oscar had made such a mad dash from the roof when Raul had showed up, until his wife came outside yelling at an incomprehensible speed, holding up their naked daughter, who was covered in soap and crying because she got shampoo in her eyes while waiting for the rinse cycle.

“
Ay, chinga,
” he said under his breath. He ran back to work the shower, yelling
hasta mañana
to us.

I carried my bags to the car, and got in, before getting another surge of adrenaline when Raul turned on the siren and peeled out, sending up a huge cloud of dirt. A few seconds later, he slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the next block.
Was he responding to a call? Did he forget to do something at Oscar's house? What the fuck was going on?

“
Mi casa,
” he said, turning off the siren. I looked out the back window through the dust cloud that was still hovering in front of Oscar's
house, less than two hundred feet back. I could even see Oscar waving at us from the roof as I unloaded my bags. These people were crazy, but there was no way out. Nowhere to go and no one to call. There wasn't even a phone to call anyone with. The best I could hope for was to get through the next ten days until my Spanish teacher, Carmen, came to check in on me, at which point I would start crying and tell her that I was living with a crazy nineteen-year-old cop, and that the city council guy—if in fact this town even had a council—was only in it for the money. She would scold them, apologize to me, and place me with a nicer family. Raul spoke zero English, and I had absolutely nothing to say to him. At least he did have a TV and a bathroom with a shower you could control all by yourself. We watched Mexican soap operas and ate quesadillas until he went to work. Raul worked nights, so I hoped that, like my night nurse roommate at The Farm, I wouldn't ever see him. He freaked me out with his gold teeth, aviator glasses, and creepy grin.

 

O
SCAR HAD NOT
mentioned that
hasta mañana
meant he would be shaking me awake before the sun was even up.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled, totally disoriented and blinded by the single twenty-five-watt bulb in the room. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself looking up at Oscar. I could hear a few roosters calling out in the distance, but no humans should have been awake at this hour.

“
¿Café?
” he said, holding out a thermos to me. I took the thermos as he continued, “Goot mordning, señor.
Arriba
. We have mucho work to do.” I took a few sips of coffee, which was surprisingly good, and got dressed while he waited for me on the porch.

No one had told me about any work, but then again, nobody really told me anything.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked Oscar while we walked through the silent town to wherever it was we were walking to. “Carmen told me you were on the city council.”

“Ah…Carmen,” he said in a faraway voice. “I want to sex her.”

“What?” I couldn't help but start laughing. She was around fifty years old and married to the headmaster.

“She's too old for me,” I said.

“No too old. Esperienced,” he said with a sigh. “Professor Carmen. She know many things.”

I was still laughing, but I really didn't want to think about it.

“¿Carmen es de España, no?”

“
Sí, pero,
she told me you were on the city council.”

“Yes. That is what I say to her so I can sex her. I always want to sex with an Espanish señora.”

“So, you made that up so you could
have
sex with her?” I said, stressing the word he had previously left out. Something about “sexing” her made the idea of sleeping with Carmen way worse than if he had simply said he wanted to fuck her. I thought about correcting him, but I figured there would be plenty of time for that.

“No, no, no…” He got slightly defensive. “
Es la verdad
. I am on the council, but look around you. Where is the city? We only meet a few hours in the month. We have nothing to talk of.”

I looked around at the dirt roads, the little huts, and the chickens and goats running around the yards. Oscar had a point. What could they possibly talk about, other than maybe telling Raul he didn't always have to speed around with the siren on? It was probably very similar to our monthly student council meetings, which rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes.

Unlike Oscar, though, I wasn't under the illusion that being on the council was going to get me laid. Pretending I was a “good kid” might have made an impression on the administration, but it seemed to inspire a fair amount of mistrust and awkwardness in the other students, none of whom seemed to hold “good kids” in very high regard. That probably had something to do with my decision to grow dreadlocks and listen to Bob Marley, who along with Jimi Hendrix, were the only two black musicians I could listen to without those assholes coming in to my room and taking my records.

“Oh,
mi esposa,
she ask me what is wrong with you hair.”

“I have a disease with my hair.” I came up with this excuse before the trip. The school had made a big deal about telling all the vegetarians to use this technique when declining meat, and I decided to use it for my hair as well. There had been more than a few incidents of families kicking students out of their houses for being vegetarians, but not since they had come up with the disease explanation.

“Ah. I am very sorry.” He led me into an empty dirt lot. “
Aquí
. This is where we build
casa
for my mother.” The dawn sky provided just enough light to see a wheelbarrow and a pallet stacked with fifty-pound bags of cement.

“We?” I asked.

“
Sí
. You and me.” The prospect of Oscar, a short roundish middle-
aged guy, and me, a scrawny hundred-and-fifteen-pound thirteen-year-old, building a house was comical, but he seemed serious.

“Don't worry.
No es problema. Vámonos, hijo
. Let's start. Three weeks, we make big house.”

We got to work with only a wheelbarrow and a shovel. We emptied three bags of cement into a five-foot pit we had dug into the lot, and, using the wheelbarrow and two five-gallon buckets, got water from a spigot down the street. My job was to mix cement, while Oscar ran around with a tape measure, marking off spots with the endless amounts of litter that had been strewn about the lot. Every once in a while he would step back and gaze at this mess, remeasure something, and move a candy wrapper or a beer can a few inches here or there.

“
Ven aquí,
” he called to me while intently studying the trash he had rearranged.

“
Mira
. See the Negro Modelo, that is the southwest corner, that plastic bag is the northwest one…”

“The green one or the white one?” I asked.

“The white one. The green is for
la puerta y,
that Tecate
es por la otra
corner, and this Tecate is the front door. See it? What do you think?”

“
Bien,
” I said, lacking the language skills to ask him what the hell he was thinking. This outline of beer cans and candy wrappers was at least six times the size of his other house.

“So you've built a house before?” I asked, because it really didn't seem as if he knew what he was doing.

“
Es muy facil,
” he said. “Like your game Legos. After this you can go build a house in America
no problema
.” I initially attributed his inability to answer questions as a language barrier, but I was becoming less sure about that.

“But you have built one before. Yes?”

“You will see. Very easy.”

I took his answer as a no.

“
Vámonos
. The cement is ready.”

We filled the wheelbarrow with cement and rolled it over to what I had thought was a ladder lying on top of a tarp. On closer inspection it looked more like a twelve-foot-tall bookshelf made out of two-by-six-foot pieces of wood. He started shoveling cement on top of it till the wheelbarrow was empty, and I went back to get more. By now it was afternoon and the sun was beating down hard on us. We filled the bookcase with cement and Oscar said, “We go now for
siesta
.” The best thing I had heard all day.