I suppose I could have been a doctor or an architect if I had devoted a quarter of the energy toward that as I did toward supporting my drug habit over the years. Maybe I could have painted masterpieces or cured cancer. But at the end of the day, the universe is finite, and soon everything mankind has achieved over the years will some day be gone. Even Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin will one day be no more significant than a fossilized lump of dinosaur shit. Faced with that reality, getting high seems a hell of a lot more meaningful than trying to change the world.
Perfect, seasonless Los Angeles months passed, but neither of us seemed to notice. Susan somehow managed to hold down her job as the chief financial officer for a chain of Laundromats that operated all over Los Angeles County. She left for work each morning and left four syringes loaded with drugs for me—two dark brown shots of heroin and two light brown, potent speedballs—like a mother leaving her child a packed lunch.
Upon moving into the apartment neither of us bathed anymore. The bathroom lay pretty much unused, a symptom of both junkie constipation and poor hygiene. Garbage started to pile up, and Susan’s cat, Hemingway, started to rip into and eat from the rancid garbage bags and drink from the dripping faucets out of desperation. The cat, as well as Susan and I, started to look mangy and ill. But without even heroin to mask the hunger pangs, Hemingway started to mewl and cry something awful all through the days and nights.
Susan used to talk about how much she loved the cat, and how heartbroken she was when its brother, Sartre, had died of leukemia. But now, if she heard the cat’s cries at all, she never acknowledged them. He took to hiding away in the filth and the disarray, not even attempting to get our attention anymore. When the day came that I found him dead and starved, covered in his own watery shit and vomit under the kitchen sink, I didn’t tell Susan. I threw his ruined body off the balcony for the coyotes to eat and kept my mouth shut. Susan never once inquired as to the whereabouts of her pet, and Hemingway’s death remained my secret.
Susan ran her job into the ground pretty soon after. She would show up late and spend half her day locked in her office, with her feet on the desk and her tights around her knees, looking for working veins in her inner thighs and giving me protracted, blow-by-blow accounts of the whole process over the phone.
“Fuck…shit…it hurts like a motherfucker shooting here…. But I can’t have track marks on my Goddamned hands anymore…. God-DAMN! Shit! Someone’s knocking on the door! CONFERENCE CALL! BE WITH YOU IN FIFTEEN! Shit…. Argh, there’s blood everywhere….”
Sometimes when she’d get the hit, she’d nod out right there on the phone with me. I’d listen to her softly breathing down the receiver before silently hanging up. Sweet dreams, Susan. I’d imagine what would happen on the day that someone finally opened her office door and found her, nodded out, slack-jawed, bloody legs splayed, with the syringe still sticking out of her groin and the phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. Of course, the gig would be up soon, and Susan would be completely unemployable.
Pedro, my first dope connection, made the trip to our place only once. He reluctantly sold me the drugs and then spent an hour trying to convince me to quit.
“You’re a fucking DEALER, Pedro! Why the fuck are you giving me this speech, man?”
“You’re DYING, man! You an’ this crazy whore you shacked up wit’! Ain’t no dead junkie any use to me, man!”
He stopped returning my calls, even though I was into him for nearly $1,000 in credit. In a moment of phenomenal self-delusion I actually believed that he had cut me off because of his concerns for my health and well-being. Then I heard on the grapevine that he’d had a coke-induced stroke at the grand old age of twenty-nine. He survived, but the INS deported him as soon as he shuffled out of the hospital.
The job, the car, and the apartment all vanished in quick succession. Notice to quit the apartment appeared pinned to our front door because of the unpaid rent the day after the Laundromat canned Susan. When the notice appeared she seemed strangely relieved.
“Listen, we have to get out of here anyway.”
“What? Why?”
“I think the cops are gonna be looking for me, and soon.”
“The cops? What the fuck happened?”
“I stole from the company. A lot…” She looked like she was about to cry.
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“Thousands?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like what? Five? Ten?”
Quietly she said, “Fifteen, at least.”
We both sat in silence for a moment.
“Well…that’s great. Shit! Where’s the money! Let’s split!”
“It’s gone.”
“What? Gone where?”
“We spent it all, asshole! On fucking drugs! How much do you think I made doing the books for a fucking Laundromat? We’re broke!”
“Shit.”
“Yup. We’re fucked. Where are we gonna go?”
“Shit, Susan. I don’t know anymore.”
That Saturday night we had been up for almost forty-eight hours smoking crack and shooting speedballs. Half insane, I suddenly heard cop cars pulling up outside. We turned all of the lights out and the cop cars’ flashing lights illuminated the apartment with an eerie, rhythmic glow. My guts flipped in fear.
“They’re coming for us!” I whispered.
“The closet!”
We ran, shut ourselves in the closet, and sat in the dark, trying to smoke up the rest of the crack before the police broke the door down. Under a pile of clothes I found a flashlight and, balancing it in the crook of my neck, I tried to shoot some cocaine. My hands were shaking, the beam of light was unsteady, and I succeeded in tearing a big bloody hole in my arm and spraying blood all over the inside of the doors and our clothes. After half an hour, it all seemed quiet.
“Are they waiting for us?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” Susan replied, her eyes wide with fear. “Maybe they’re waiting for the feds to show up.”
“Or the INS. Or Jesus! Are there any rocks left?”
Another ten minutes—or it could have been an hour—dragged past before I worked up the nerve to open the closet door and sneak over to take a look out the window. Outside the lights were still flashing, and I could hear voices. I peered through a crack in the blinds.
“Oh shit! Look at this!”
Susan crept out to the window in time to see her car being towed off down the street.
“Motherfuckers!” She groaned. “My fucking car!”
The glove compartment has been stuffed with outstanding tickets. The plates were expired too, and one night, insane with cocaine, I had removed the plates from a car parked farther down the street and stuck them to our bumper. They had obviously reported it, and the city took the car. We were officially fucked.
There was no place left to run. We called Susan’s mother and told her what was happening. We asked to stay in her guesthouse for a while so we could clean up. Susan’s mother was in a cult called the Forum and was an all-around nut. The whole family was pretty insane, but her mother was something else. She lived in Ghost Town, one of the worst slums in Venice. Going there to clean up was as ludicrous as moving to Vegas because you have a gambling problem. But it was a roof, and a place to stay for a few weeks. It was about then that I started thinking about getting away from Susan, and Los Angeles altogether. But then I looked at her, jobless, homeless, and hopeless, covered in dried blood and rocking back and forth on her heels whining to herself in insane, cracked-out fear, and I realized that for the time being I was stuck with her. I mean, I had encouraged her into this habit. Walking away at this point would have been tantamount to murder. The last time she tried to kill herself, she fucked it up, cut her wrists the wrong way, and lost the feeling in her pinkie fingers. I knew that the next time she wouldn’t take any half measures. My only consolation was that at least the guns were in the pawnshop, for the time being.