Chapter 7
Now
The streets are about as warm and inviting as I remember them from those months before Alfred, which is to say not at all. I know it's all a matter of perception, but how else am I supposed to feel, clutching Alfred's jacket to my chest against a chilly wind by the gloomy light of dusk, crossing the streets I once slept out on, wandering through alleys where I used to mug rich tourists?
God damn it. Even if there's not a god around to do that.
And it's not like I ever even asked for this, you know? For his help, for anyone's help. I mean I did, before, back when there was something they could have done. When there was anything left of me to salvage. Four years ago. But now it's almost pointless. I'm too far gone, I'm irredeemable—why would they even want to try? To save me? What a fucking joke. There's nothing left to save. I can't love anyone properly, my "capacity for trust" is all fucked up, I can't even have a glass of wine without hankering for some heroin, I can't even talk, because why the hell should I open my mouth if nobody's going to listen? If everybody hears the wrong words?
Dark falls fast and cold. A drizzle starts up, of the chilly autumn variety. It's the slow and seeping kind of wetness, makes you damp so slowly that you hardly notice, so that it's mostly the chill and misery you get instead of the fresh feeling of new rain.
And isn't it funny that I should see one of the old dealers I used to know, standing on the corner and looking conspicuously inconspicuous.
Bad idea bad idea bad idea, why the hell not? I want it, and the reason not to do it is a mile away, with his head in a fridge saying sorry.
"Whatever you got, however much a twenty will get me," I tell the corner-boy, pulling the bill out of Alfred's jacket pocket. My voice sounds like a stranger's, like when you hear a recording of yourself and think, "That can't be me." Squeaky, stark, too loud.
Five months of silence broken to buy drugs. Isn't that funny. "Whatever you got, however much a twenty will get me." What an anticlimax. Guess I fumbled that one. It should have been "No, but I mustn't!" I should've at least offered a more dramatic parting for my sobriety, like, "I have lived both worlds, and I choose this!"
Guess I've been reading too much Victorian drama. Anyway.
First time anybody's listened to me in what feels like years, because he gives me a baby-baggie, no questions asked. He just comes through for me like that. I'm oddly touched that somebody around here keeps his fucking word.
This is the part where I freak out, like, no, this is stupid, this will ruin everything you've worked for, don't do this to yourself, don't do this to Gilbert, don't do this to Alfred, don't. And then the other side of my head going, don't stop.
And I know that this could kill me, especially after being clean for so long—don't do this, don't ruin everything, you stupid fucking—there's a hornet's nest in my head, and in comparison, death seems peaceful. Quiet. I don't worry much about hell, because if it exists then it can't be much different from here.
So I find a convenience store with a bathroom to get high in. I'll have to snort it, because I don't have a jar or a lighter or a gun (a needle, that is). Injection is faster and stronger, but I guess it won't matter now. It'll be strong no matter what I do. Besides, I doubt that I have the mental fortitude to go ask for one.
All holed up in the convenience store bathroom now, a room with a single urinal and a sink, noplace to snort my ill-gotten gains but the floor.
So do it. Pour the baggy on the floor. Take off glasses, set them on the counter. Pull out a brown paper towel to use as a shitty straight-edge, separate the powder into little lines, pinkie fingernail as a scoop and straw.
Then the pause: should I really do this? I really shouldn't do this.
Really, really shouldn't do this.
Do it anyway.
Then sit back and wait for everything to go quiet.
Somebody's banging on the door, and I can't stay in here because it's a single person bathroom. Staggering out into the light, I'm worried about coming off as sober, so obviously the high hasn't hit yet. Good. Very good.
My hands start to shake halfway down the street…gotta find a bench soon or risk plopping down on the pavement, getting tossed in jail for the night.
Shit. I left my glasses in the bathroom.
Oh well. I find a park, find a bench, collapse. It's cold but I don't feel it. My life is circling the drain and I'm just watching it. It's my fault and I don't care.
Time goes so slow, then really fast. The way a week feels like a year and a year feels like a week. It's like I'm on the cusp of sleep, when a minute can hold a lifetime, and three hours a perfect blank.
Rain falls, breath fogs, limbs heavy and numb but not from cold.
And I hear somebody calling my name from a mile away.
I don't care, I don't care.
Then
In my defense, I was exhausted.
I mean, looking back on it, I have a defense for everything. I was hungry and desperate and lonely and hurt, and what else is there for a college dropout addict but whoring and thieving to survive?
Desperation and hunger were my big excuses for the prostitution. But the suicide…
Sometimes people will get very suspicious about my motives for that one. I can say with one hundred percent honesty that I just wanted to stop living, The End, but some people think drug addicts have the capacity for manipulation. I mean, when it comes to getting drug money, we're pros at manipulation and lies, but as for getting off the streets and into rehab? No. We don't waste our valuable remaining brain cells on things like that.
I wanted to die, full stop. The fact that this led to my institutionalization did work out to my favor, or at least in the eyes of the rest of society, but it wasn't my intention at all.
I never had any hope for getting out of the addiction, and I guess that's where the exhaustion comes from. It gets so that all you have to look forward to is your next fix, and when the drugs stop working well enough to justify all the shit that goes along with them…why keep going? What makes it worse is that the only time you ever feel in control of the addiction is when you want it—when you don't want to stop, and so it feels like you can—but then when you want to stop, you can't. It's worse than horrifying. It's exhausting and monotonous and cyclical and the only way to break out of it is dying.
At least, that's what it feels like to somebody with no money and no home and no friends.
If you don't have the money for rehab, they just dump you out on the street to keep doing your thing. People tend to adopt very self-righteous attitudes about it, like, "Well, maybe if you weren't such a bum,you'd be able to afford a program. And why can't you just get better on your own? Are you really that weak? Don't you have any willpower?"
Obviously not. I willed myself to give up drugs, and when that didn't work, I willed myself to die.
I was successful in neither.
San Francisco, what should have been my senior year at Yale. I found a few homeless shelters where they let men sleep, but they were not as heavily guarded as I would have liked. I never felt safe sleeping in a room full of guys, especially not guys who looked as ratty and disrespectable as me.
They gave me clothes, which was nice of them, and meals too, but if you stayed too long they started doing drug tests. A failed drug test would send you to a free clinic for an STD panel and pamphlets on addiction, and you weren't allowed back in without proof that you were trying to quit. Usually I just stopped going to those ones.
One night I was out on Polk Street, hawking my usual wares, when a pretty girl with blond hair and green eyes walked up to me. I thought she was about to proposition me, which would have been a welcome change, but then she said, "You too, yeah?" And I realized firstly that she was a hooker too and secondly that she had not been born a she.
"Yeah. Smoke?" I held out a cigarette, but she shook her head.
"No, those things'll, like, kill you. I'm Felicia, by the way. Go by Trixie if you're buying."
"No thanks, I've got my own to sell. Matthew." I held out my hand, but she ignored it.
"Hey, listen, you self-employed?"
"Sorry?"
"Self-employed. Do you have, you know, like, a pimp?"
I said no, and Felicia smiled. "Want one? Raymond's really chill, he doesn't ask for a set amount every night, just a percentage. Always twenty percent of your night's earnings. He lets you do the math yourself, thank god. He lost a couple recruits last week, was hoping for a few more. Interested?"
"What's so great about having a…a pimp?"
Felicia cracked her bubblegum and rolled her eyes. "Only protection, like physical protection, and also sexual protection, like free condoms, and also he'll get you checked for bugs and itches, you know. And if you tell your johns that you got a pimp, they'll, like, stay in line if they know what's good for them. Oh, and lodging. I can tell you're one of the homeless ones. You'll get to sleep in the rooms during the day and fuck your clients in them at night. And he'll get you some nice clothes, better than those ratty ones you're wearing that make you look like you just stumbled out of the orphanage."
Felicia seemed kind and well-looked after, especially for a trans-woman in her position. Raymond's terms seemed fair enough. So I agreed, mostly on basis of the lodgings.
And then they told me: "If you're using, you have to quit." Apparently it was Raymond's policy to have clean whores, to prevent the spread of STDs and to make the ring less likely to get busted by cops. It was a very good policy, and one that doubtless kept a lot of unfortunate men and women from falling all the way to rock bottom.
They tried with me, they really did. Gave me a thousand more chances than I deserved.
Withdrawal was hell, but Felicia took me through it. "I'm really going out on a limb for you, man. Like, Raymond wouldn't have even bothered if I didn't put in a good word. And I guess if you weren't so pretty. But you better get it together and stay clean, yeah?"
And I did, for a good long while.
The job wasn't as rough with Raymond watching my back. There were nervous young men and callous old geezers, skinny college kids and beer-gutted, hairy, mustached plumbers, married men, power bottoms, control-freak tops, dominatrices, and everything in-between. I started to get into the rhythm of the work—nasty analogy not intended—understanding what different clients wanted, how to spot a bruiser, which repeat-johns showed up and when, which ones were likely to tip well, which ones were likely to skip payment. I had enough money to buy my own clothes and food. And one day I realized that I wasn't just rolling with the punches anymore: I was getting a few moments to myself, time to recover and stand up and look around at everything.
For the first time in a long time, I could look up from my feet.
And that's when I saw Miguel.
I had been working the streets for about three months clean when Felicia told me that she'd found a day job as a grocery cashier. Apparently she and her boyfriend (also one of Raymond's boys, and I don't even want to consider how fucked-up close those two must be) were saving up to buy an apartment, hopefully to leave this lifestyle for good.
When Felicia offered to get me an interview there, I almost refused.
"Oh my god, don't be stupid. Mattie, I don't know if you've noticed this, but being a rent boy isn't lucrative or anything. Right? Don't you want to get out of this mess? Don't you want something better for yourself?"
"I tried 'something better.' I fucked it up. It isn't worth trying again."
Felicia scoffed. "Of course you are."
Miguel Lopez was sweet on me, and that alone should give plenty of warning for his Jude-like predilection for patronage of lost causes.
"Those pants are way too big for you, Matthew. I'll bring you some new ones next week."
"Oh no, I really can't accept—"
"Of course you can. I insist. And anyway, I'm sure our customers would thank me for making things a little more visible." He winked, and it wasn't until the next day that I realized he was making an ass-joke. I wondered if that could be considered sexual harassment in the workplace, but quite honestly I was endeared to such a subtle expression. It had been a long time since anybody had actually flirted with me, instead of just throwing money in my face and saying "I'm going to fuck you now."
He invited me to his apartment for ice cream and movies occasionally, when I could take off from selling my virtue. He had bad taste in movies, but I never told him.
"We gotta get some meat on those bones," he'd say.
I fell asleep on his couch a lot. He let me put my head in his lap. I guess he was kind of the sweetest person I'd ever known.
So of course I broke his heart. Of course I fucked it up.
The middle-aged man, flanked by two young children, had swaggered into my check-out line wearing aggressive overconfidence like a wrestler with a law degree. Currently he held out a wine bottle for inspection. "It's just that this wine wasn't of the quality I expected, you know?"
Well, what did he fucking expect from the beverage aisle at Wal-Mart? "Sir, if you don't have your receipt then I can't—"
"I understand that, but it was really just so disgusting. I shouldn't have had to pay for this. The quality is—can you just open your register and give me the money? The price-tag is still here, see, ten ninety-nine. I bought it from a blond girl, wearing big feather earrings. If she's working today, she'll vouch for me."
"I'm afraid I'm not authorized to give you a refund if you don't have a receipt." Motherfucker.
"Then go get somebody who can do something, will you?"
I thought about taking his children aside and breaking it to them that their father was an utter douchebag, and that just because shouting very loudly at people sometimes gets them to obey you does not make it an acceptable social habit. Instead I paged Miguel.
He winked at me when he arrived, then turned to Irrationally Irate Customer #392349571. "What's the problem, sir?"
Irate Customer #392349571 explained his beef with the product, admitted that he'd lost the receipt, and insulted me for refusing to open my register and pay him for disliking cheap wine. Miguel apologized and led him away to exchange his bottle for another of equal value, and I heard IC #392349571 say something about, "Can't be easy, having to manage the disabled cashiers your employer hires."
Fuck you, I mouthed to his back, with accompanied hand gesture.
His spawn saw. To this day I cringe over it.
"Daddy, Daddy, that man just flicked you off!"
Shit. I shook my head and tried to look as innocent as possible. Miguel laughed nervously. "I think your son is imagining things. Matthew wouldn't do that, now would he?" He gave me the heavy side-eye.
"Of course not, sir."
Later, Miguel saw me in the break room and rolled his eyes. "Mary Mother of God, save us from the entitled jerkasses of the world."
"I know, right? I've never met anybody so self-righteously egotistical. Not even in New Haven."
"Oh." Interest tugged at his tone, like cold wind tugging at ratty clothes and creeping in. "Did you live in New Haven?"
"Yeah, for a couple years."
"Why? Were you born there?"
He was going to make me say it. I hated saying it, and I still do. It's like admitting, "Well, I used to be incredibly privileged and successful, but I fucked it all up and now I'm an addict and a whore and a clerk at Wal-Mart."
People like making you say things, sometimes out of honest reluctance to assume and then sometimes out of malice. This used to be a problem for me, back when people expected me to say things.
"I went to Yale, for a year. Had to drop out, though."
"Holy shit." Miguel blinked and looked away. "Like, holy shit. I'm trying to play it cool, but that's…impressive. You must be really smart, huh?"
I shrugged, irritated. I prefer it when people pretend not to be impressed. "Well, I dropped out, so I can't be all that smart."
"Yeah, but you got in. It's not right that you're stuck in customer service when you have a brain like that. I'll talk to some people. Hey, are you any good at math?"
So it was that even though math was my least favorite subject, I was competent enough to be promoted to Till Manager (largely through Miguel's influence). I counted each till's money before a shift and after the shift, then compared it against the difference the computer claimed it ought to be. My wage didn't go up any, since according to Miguel I hadn't been employed for long enough to justify it. No matter; it was a blessing just to get away from the customers. I mean, I like people. In theory. With several hundred feet and a pair of binoculars between me and them.
Anyway.
Things were looking up for me. I was five months clean, living in an apartment, capable of buying food for myself, talking to Raymond about leaving his employ, and I even had a savings account. Is this finally it? I wondered to myself. Have I finally managed to claw my way back into the realm of functional human beings?
Yeah, right.
I became a casualty of the unfortunate symbiosis between prostitution and drug use. I mean, I guess it isn't really fair to blame the prostitution, because I had already been an addict before I started that. Honestly it'd be more accurate to say that the symbiosis between prostitution and drug use noticed my battered sobriety shambling around after its eighteenth-or-so reanimation and tried to put it out of its misery.
Thing is, a lot of johns bring their drugs to the party. You know America, it's all sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Hand-in-hand-in-hand. And then it's only polite to offer to share, right?
For a while there, I was too smart and too scared to accept. But with my promotion came a sliver of self-worth, and with that came a reckless desire to feel good. My body remembered "feel good." My brain knew "feel good." I missed feeling good a lot. In all the wrong ways.
And so it was that just as my life was beginning to look up, I rediscovered my devastatingly addictive personality.
I don't even remember who it was that first offered it to me, though I suspect a student or a yuppie. Usually the older ones go for heroin, the I'm-giving-up drug. Young people like amphetamines and stimulants to help them work harder. I remember being a student like that. Anyway, one day I happened to be tired enough to accept a little pick-me-up from a very persuasive man. And it got easier and easier to accept such offers, and then suddenly it was impossible not to.
First went my savings account, vaporized in less than two weeks on meth. I used it to work longer hours on both jobs, to make more money, to buy more meth. I chased that high, propelled by the sense that I was indestructible, I was successful, I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life, I was God.
My coworkers noticed that I was looking sick.
"This isn't cool, Mattie. I can see the fresh tracks on your arms. Like, c'mon. I'm not stupid."
"Are you okay, Matthew?" Miguel offered me some of his lunch, and I shook my head sharp and fast, manic-dancing to the electric current running through my brain and down my arms like puppet strings, I was sweating and feverish and not hungry a bit and speaking without punctuation, "I'm fine Miguel never better."
When I ran out of savings, the paychecks literally couldn't come fast enough. So I started skimming off the tills. It was uncommon for a cashier to have exactly the correct amount left in his or her till; it took a ten dollar discrepancy for management to get involved. So when I counted them up at the end of the shift, I'd subtract a dollar or two from every count and I'd pocket the difference.
The habit grew, as these things do, and I got greedier. Especially when Raymond told me that he couldn't keep me on anymore, if I was going to keep relapsing and putting his operations in danger. It was only fair, I knew.
So I was homeless again, and luckily my paycheck from the grocery store was direct deposit into my account, because I was no longer at my listed address to collect it.
"Matthew, I need to talk to you in my office."
He knew. I knew that he knew.
"Is there any way I can just quit now, so you don't have to go to the trouble?" I asked hopefully.
Miguel sighed, knowing now that I knew that he knew. "I won't call the authorities, if that's what you're worried about. We're letting you go, and you're not getting this month's paycheck. So don't even ask." He ran a hand over his hair. "I guess you could just leave now, never see me again. But you owe me an explanation. You owe me that much."
And I did. So I didn't run.
His office was windowless, poorly-lit, puke green, miserable. He looked enormous in his rickety little chair, his beefy shoulders pushing at the seams of his button-up shirt, and he didn't belong here any more than I did. He belonged on the wrestling mat, or on a motorcycle, or in a swivel chair at the head of a great corporation. Big meaty man full of life.
Me, I belonged back on the street. Under a pile of newspapers. In a shallow grave.
Us being so tragically displaced from our proper roles in life, I hoped that he might take pity on me and quickly sketch a few regretful noises before sending me on my way. No such luck.
"Why are you doing this to yourself?"
A tense silence. He had a clock in the corner of the room, high-pitched and loud. Sounded like the chatter of rats. "I'm an addict." I shrugged, feeling like a little shit. "Not much rhyme or reason to it."
"That's a cop-out, Matthew. You're smart enough to know that." He stared me down across the desk, and what gave him the fucking right?
"I'm tired of being smart enough to know better," I spat. "I'm tired. I'm just exhausted."
He just kept staring, disappointed.
"And I'm sorry. Really, I am."
"Then stop."
"It's not that fucking simple."
"But it is. It really kind of is."
Ah, rock bottom. It has a specific flavor, desperation like a buzzing hum beneath the skin. I remember how hot my eyes felt all the time, the adrenaline rushes, and the way starvation made me jittery as a jonesing. I gave up the luxury of self-consciousness: I begged openly on the streets. I ate out of trashcans in broad daylight. I let a man sodomize me with a broom for fifty bucks.
It's hard to remember that era, because rock bottom requires and perpetuates a complete lack of reflection and consideration. If I had sat down and thought about it for even a second, I would've hauled off the nearest bridge and blessed the rocks that caught me.
Because I'm not very good at climbing my way out of shit. I just give up.
So I guess that's what eventually happened.
I lost myself on the streets and sold my body for money and over and over and over and—I was exhausted. This was getting exhausting, this business of going home with strange men, letting them fuck me for drugs or drug money, stumbling out in the morning to hide on the streets again and wait for my next john. Picture a boy, waking up next to a stranger in a house he's never seen before, lurching down the hall in search of a bathroom or an exit. Just a bathroom or an exit, either will do. Imagine him standing in a dark strange bathroom at four in the morning. There is half a line of cocaine on a small mirror—quickly snorted—and a razor on the soap dish. His reflection in the mirror is blank, expressionless. Close your eyes, and the sharp shape of his face follows you into the darkness, the stretch of sallow skin over bone and the deep shadows of his eyes. He picks up the razor, pops out the blades, slices his thumb shallowly. His heart has begun to pick up, you can see it in the pulse point at his neck, he feels the cut but it's separate from him, it's happening to a body that isn't his anymore. He has found both a bathroom and an exit. He considers.
In his defense, he is absolutely exhausted.
Well. What can I say for myself?
I guess I was just so fucking tired of everything.
So anyway, one week later Alfred Fucking Jones happened to hear my name from his neighbor, my doctor, and like any good former-best-friend-with-a-hero-complex, he waltzed into my hospital room and back into my life.
"I'm gonna take care of you from now on," he told me, and I said,
"Yeah, right."
And I never spoke to him again until this moment.
Now
Matthew, Matthew. Thank god.
"He's not around," I mutter into my shoulder.
Did you just…say something?
"Yeah. But he's not around. God isn't. To say you're welcome."
Alfred's face swims into my line of sight, pale and panicky. I try to register this on an emotional level, but I can't. God, Matthew, he says, but it sounds like he's underwater. Or I'm underwater. Or I'm in a bubble. He's blurry, and he puts his arms around me, gets right up in my face. His hair is on my neck. I wish I could feel it.
Then the bubble pops. "Jesus, Matthew, you're freezing. Can you feel that?"
"Stupid question. Reuptake. Or blocked pain receptors. Yeah, that. Can't feel the cold."
"Okay, you're not making sense. You're talking and you're not making sense." I want to lecture him about neurotransmitters and the way opiates are shaped just right to—but his voice is so rumbly and nice. His arms are heavy. "Not sure how to feel about that."
"You don't have to feel anything if you don't want to." That made way more sense in my head than out loud. It's also the exact opposite of the truth. You have to feel your feelings, even when you'd really rather not. Like shame, the shame I'm not supposed to feel, and a helpless smile spreads across my face, as uncontrollable and unwanted as a trip to the dentist's. When they give you the laughing gas, I mean.
"What does that—? Never mind. Can you walk? Do you need the hospital? What happened?" He looks so worried and sad for me, and wait a second, why? Why does he want me to be okay? If I were him and he were me, I would just love to let him freeze to death on the street after what I—what he—did. What he did? God, this analogy's stupid.
"Just go away," I slur.
"No."
And then he doesn't. Imagine that.
