EVERYTHING HAPPENED FAST FOR YEARS. A couple months on the street, a couple months in jail, a couple in the psych or the halfway and back on the street again. This job, that job, always only for a couple months or weeks before something happened. Sober for a few months and then not. A couple months on this pill or that one — Effexor, Risperdal, Lamictal, Seroquel, Latuda, Lexapro, Trazodone. I couldn’t even tell you what I was taking when I was taking it. I would wake up in the halfway house before a bellboy shift and think I had to go trim hedges. I would wake up in the psych thinking I was in the park, ready to go hit a lick. I would bang a speedball, come to my senses, and think it was time for Richard Simmons. I would wake up in jail nervous that I missed my PO appointment. Everything was time soup in my head. Dumplings of memories and noodley thoughts.
I woke up in a crack motel at three in the afternoon thinking it was three in the morning; I looked for my keys for thirty minutes, thinking I had to go to the warehouse by the airport to bag newspapers and run my route, only to remember that I didn’t have a car and my newspaper job didn’t start for another three years.
Even the books I read would twist and braid into one another. I would start a new chapter of whatever Hemingway and in that half of a blank page get mixed up, get confused, and brace myself for eighty pages of Milton, expecting verse, expecting marching feet, poetic contractions and confusion, and, instead, see those little sprints of sentences — simplicity and Paris, Africa, Cuba, Spain, godless expatriation, modernity, and all the hunting and the fishing and the bullfighting and the love not love, Key West, the only place of his I knew — and then I would forget again, and ready myself for a fight with Milton, with God and tangled meaning, no underlying iceberg truths, but God on the surface snarled in an iambic jungle, and then my roommate would come into our tiny halfway house apartment and bitch about his ex-wife, or the chow carts would get rolled in, or the public library was closing for the night, or the compulsions would come up through my stomach and force me out into the world.
In the story of my life that replays constantly in some faraway lobe in my brain, narration begins and ends and starts over. It gets longer every time, more details are added, and they change — they get brighter or dimmer and sometimes are just wholly fabricated. It replays in jumbled scenes, in that “unused” percentage of the brain. It sucks up the moments as soon as they are passed and incorporates them in its own logic. The story I tell myself constantly, about who I am and what I have done, where I am headed. And from that story, a memory is not what it seems, a dead recollection from a static cabinet in the brain — it is an echo from the unending narration in the other room, and the narrator is a creation of the main character, not the other way around. If you listen, if you unlock a door to a quiet room and put your ear to the wall, you can hear him running his mouth.
My brother used to say he could remember everything. That most people’s first memories start when they are around four or five but that he could remember much earlier than that. Six months, one year. He said he could remember the day I was born, as if it had just happened. On that day, he was three, and he came to the hospital with my sister and brother, who had been watching him while my mom was in labor. And when he went there to meet me for the first time, he brought his favorite toys with him. No one told him to do this; they just said he was going to meet his brother, and he got an idea. He brought two little plastic dinosaurs, a T. rex and a pterodactyl. When he would play with them at home, he would hold his forefinger and his thumb to his temple, and he would pinch and then drag his pinched fingers to the toy, to draw his consciousness, his immaterial self — the thoughts, the emotions, the fears, and secret joys — into the toy, so the T. rex could be him, could enjoy his child’s mind, and he could enjoy its powerful body, and he could run freely.
And when he saw me in my mother’s arms, wrapped up and staring silently at the bright room and the faces crowding around me, he patted me on the head, and he put his fingers to my soft baby head and dragged my newborn consciousness into the pterodactyl, and then he did it at his own temple and dragged himself into the T. rex.
My mom asked him, “What are you doing?”
He told her and she laughed, and she asked him if he loves his brother, and he said he does. And he said that since he is older and bigger, he is the T. rex, and I am the pterodactyl. And she laughed and my older siblings laughed, and he went and sat down on the little couch in the hospital room and played with the toys, put me in his right hand and flew me around while the T. rex stayed on the ground and marched and roared.
I wonder what he dragged from my head then, at that youngest age, getting older by the second. What did I come here with? Did I recognize myself as something individual, as something separate from the blaring hospital light, the arms of my mother, the beeping machines, the nurses running in and out and down the hall?
In that most vital of moments, that moment in which I was supposed to first conceive of myself as discrete, to orient myself within the three dimensions of life on Earth, to understand my physical extension into the world of things, my limitations as a shape of organic matter bound by the laws of physics and geometry, in that moment I was ripped from my mewling, helpless self, and I was given the wings of a gigantic prehistoric bird. And there, with that first blast of the light and noise of the world, where I was supposed to learn laws, rules, codes of conduct, the base-grounding relation on which all other conceptions and relations are built — I am my body and my body is me — I was given flight instead, and the rest of my life after that was one giant lamentation, one quick screeching fall and yearning for the sky. Your first moments on Earth should be a humbling experience, but I was given power. Without that foundational understanding, there was only disappointment and restlessness. Endless desire pulling at my worldly chains.
And this was the only thing I could think of as a possible reason for why I behaved the way that I did, why I felt the way that I felt, which was the animating question of all the therapies and theories of addiction. All those possible reasons that never held water for me because they weren’t specific or real. Because maybe my brother forgot to put my consciousness back in my head, and I was never wedded to my body in the way that I should have been.
In a letter he wrote me while I was in jail, my brother reminded me of how I used to cry when I watched the sun go down. He wrote me from college. College, just the sound of it conjured images of a different world, a better world, girls and boys and books and parties, big fuck-all parties that went late, where everyone got drunk, but no one ended up in jail or sucking crack smoke from a plastic tube, squirting meth into their arms for days that turn into weeks that turn into months. No, these parties took place at night, and then they ended, and everyone went to class the next day or maybe slept in and texted each other about what a good time they had.
I wondered what he thought about me. I wondered if he told girls that his little brother was off the map, in jail or in the wind, a junkie with an engine in his ass that won’t let him be happy. I wondered whether he turned this into a sob story to get attention and sympathy from the pretty girls in scarves and $1,500 winter coats. Or whether he didn’t tell anyone anything about me, just kept it close to the chest and pretended or just plain forgot. I would think about him whenever things would slow down, or, I guess, just imagine his life. I would sit on my bunk and wonder what he was up to, wonder how pretty the girls were, how expensive the coats were, how good the books were.
I was surprised when I got the letter. I wasn’t expecting anything. It had been a few years. But I was doubly surprised at how sentimental it was. I mean, it tore me up to read. And we have the same exact handwriting, so in a way it was like a letter I had written to myself.
He said he thinks about me a lot. He said he thinks about when we were kids, when Mom and Dad were off work, and the whole family would go to the beach, and we would bodysurf or throw the football and sit around and eat sandwiches from a cooler and get sun-kissed and tired and wait for the day to come to its gentle, pretty close. On those beach days where it seemed like our family was in a commercial or something. We would all stand there on the beach, staring out over the Gulf, watching the sun go low and dim and turn the blue sky pink and turn the water into oiled metal. Our dad would pull us together and tell us to watch for the green flash in the second after the last sliver of sun dipped into the water. The green flash, my brother said, he thinks we saw it once or twice, but he can’t remember if he just started saying he saw it and manufactured a memory for it or if, really and truly, we watched for it and it came. Our dad would try to explain to us what the flash was — a trick of the light that you could only see at certain latitudes, certain atmospheres, and clear conditions. He would try to explain the science of it all as best he could.
But what my brother wrote that really tore me up was something that I had forgotten. He said, one summer when I was probably around five or so, every time we would stand there and watch the sun set, as it started to get low, I would cry. Cry these adult tears, he wrote, quiet and solemn. Not wailing or throwing a fit but grown-up tears, like the sunset was a funeral. When anyone asked me what was wrong, I would say that I didn’t want the sun to go away, how did we know it would come back, and that I wasn’t ready. And when someone would ask, Ready for what? I would struggle to think of what to say, and I would just blurt out that I didn’t know, but I wasn’t ready, I didn’t want it, and I would ask my mom to make it stop, please, to make it stay there, and she would explain that it was gonna come back. This happens every day, she would say, this is natural and it’s pretty and it’s all part of a cycle. But my brother could see that it was still there, that grief.
So, on one of the evenings, he tried to help me. He put his arm around my skinny shoulders, and he waved goodbye to the sun, and he said, “Thank you, see you tomorrow,” and so I held out my hand and copied him, and I waved, and I said my proper goodbye, tears drying on my cheeks, and I was surprised at how it made me feel better. He somehow knew that that would help, the formal acknowledgment.
I’m sitting on my bunk reading this letter, and it’s ripping me up. I mean, it’s loosening up all this shit in my chest, and it’s turning into hot liquid and moving up into my face and sinuses and my eyes. And I get up, still holding the letter, and I go to the bathroom to be alone and maybe try to cry a little, but the whole unit is a goddamn panopticon, and the toilets have these little two-foot walls next to them. When I sit on them everyone, the COs and everyone else, can see, and so I just sit there on the toilet and fight the rising heat in my chest, and I beat it back, and I move my mind from thinking about the sun and its setting, and I fold up the letter and put it in the back of my bunk drawer.
I never laughed.
In the waning months of my junior year, the last few months of school I would ever attend, I was coming out of a three-day Xanax blackout, and I was in art class drawing an elephant. After days of talking cursive, slurring, and repeating myself, I was starting to be able to remember stuff if I concentrated really hard. Our teacher gave us an assignment to draw something, anything in the room. We had those big 18-by-24-inch sketch pads that open from the top.
I was sitting there, and I was wondering what day of the week it was, wondering what things had happened in the past few days that I would need to be brought up to speed on. I was trying to build my consciousness back up brick by brick, remembering who I was and what the rules of my life were, one by one. Just the facts. You are alive. Alive is the opposite of dead. Alive is something and dead is nothing. You became alive, snatched out of the dead nothing, in October. In 1991. This is your name. This is your address. You are sixteen years old. You live in Tampa, Florida, America, a city in a state in a country on planet Earth, a big island in an unimaginable sea. You have a family, a family is the people that you live with, the people who created you and your brothers and sisters. You are the youngest and you have two brothers and two sisters. You have black hair and hazel eyes. You like old movies. It is March. You go to school. This is school. This is where kids go during the day.
And while I am piecing this stuff together, I am staring at this clay figurine of an elephant and drawing it on the sketch pad. I am drawing it in blue pencil, and I am trying to copy it as best I can. To make it look perfect, exactly as I see it on the table. I am concentrating as hard as I have ever concentrated. My tongue is sticking out of the corner of my mouth, and I am chewing on it lightly like a small piece of chicken. You are in art class. Art is different from the other classes, math and science and history. Art is just basically colors and copying. You’ve gotta copy this elephant, so you can leave class. Art class is in the morning. The morning is when the sun . . .
And on and on, as I keep drawing. And after I finish the elephant, I am proud of it. It looks almost exactly like the elephant on the table, and so I add a few spirals on its fat body. Small, few, tasteful. Simple three-ring spirals, like a shell. And I rub my eyes and stand up, and I am shocked to see that the elephant is no more than four inches tall, in the southeast corner of the giant, yawning sketch pad. I thought I had drawn it large and in the center. I sat back down and got really close to it. I couldn’t believe how small it was, and the straight lines I thought I was making were actually kind of fuzzy, hard to see, minute little shakes from my unsteady hand.
My art teacher looked over my shoulder and made a small gasp, and she told me to sign it, so I did.
And she ripped it from the sketch pad, got everyone’s attention, and said, “Do you see what he did?
“Do you see?
“The tiny elephant alone in the corner of the big white page? Alone in the big wide world? This is how you use white space. This is how you use the page to create emotion.”
She tacked my drawing up to the board in front of all the drawings from the actual art kids who practiced and hung out in that cluttered room in their free time, and who I occasionally sold acid or pills to in the parking lot.
At lunch, I took my girlfriend into the room and showed her my drawing. It looked so funny up there, just basically a blank page blocking a few intricate still-lifes.
I said, “She thinks I did it on purpose. But really I was just fucked up. I thought I was drawing it regular sized!”
I sat on the table, and I started laughing and pointing at the way my page took up so much space, covering the shading and the meticulous care of the advanced art kids’ drawings, and I lost control laughing until my sides hurt. But my girlfriend wasn’t laughing. She was standing there really close to the board, staring at the elephant, and looking back at me with a kind of disappointment and faraway sadness that I was just starting to get used to.
“It’s really good,” she said, “she’s right. It does look lonely.”
I was still laughing, harder now.
There was another time, later, in county, when all of us were gathered around the TV in the dayroom watching Cops, but I couldn’t be sure if I actually laughed that time.
I was sitting in Palm Beach County Jail on Gun Club Road, in the middle of the narrow hallways of the twelve-story maze in the main detention center. And I wasn’t fed up with it yet, so I was watching TV and playing spades or whatever, that’s why I think I might have laughed. The novelty was still there.
Cops was on and we watched an episode that took place outside of Vegas. Everyone was making fun of the fat-necked cops and the tweakers and hookers with ice in their socks and tits falling out of their shirts. Everyone was having a good time watching it — the trailer parks way out from the strip, the cops and their self-serious monologues to the camera.
But then another episode came on, and after that song and the stylized opening montage, this real Bubba of a cop is driving his squad car and talking about what he does to unwind after work, talking about golf, and how necessary it is to decompress, and how he and some other deputies go out and play on their days off, about how many great golf courses are around.
And all the while he is talking, underneath his fat head there is a little strip of text that says “Palm Beach County, FL.” Everyone goes apeshit. We immediately start trying to recognize the stuff he is driving by, all the palm trees in the dark purple night, shut-down strip malls and abandoned houses. The text on the screen says he is in Lake Worth now.
I figure there must have been at least five guys in my unit who were from Lake Worth, and they start yelling “L-Dub” and “Gunshine.” The cops pull into one of these flat, low projects, a few square blocks of fenced-in Section 8 apartments, and I recognize it as one of the only spots north of Lauderdale and south of Tampa that you can get heroin that isn’t cut to shit. I had been walking down that street just a few months ago, and I suspect some of the guys in my pod even more recently. The cops creep through the fenced-in projects in that squad car with the camera whirring; people on the street staring or trying not to stare as the cops drive slow and swivel their heads around, looking for someone to beat up or shake down. They pull up to one of the units and this dreaded guy is leaning on his car; he is on the phone and wearing a big red-striped polo. He looks up and sees the car, and he drops his phone and bolts.
“Oh shit. I know that boy,” someone in the dayroom screamed, “that’s Russ.”
Russ is cutting through yards, turning corners, ducking under clotheslines, and dumping shit out of his pockets. The cameraman is shaking and struggling, and the cops are yelling after him and chasing. We are all screaming now and the whole unit is on their feet, crowded around the TV.
“Go, Russ, go.”
“Shake his ass.”
“Jump the fence.”
And for a second, we were all excited, watching Russ go rabbit-fast, turning corners, and putting moves on these redneck cops. We were invested in the idea of Russ getting away. We forgot that we were watching TV, and we knew how this was gonna end, that Russ and the cop had been cast for these roles long, long ago, and the ending had been written long before the cop spied Russ’s red polo and his dreads. There’s a whole gang of cops now, and they are working on cutting Russ off, on bottlenecking him.
He jumps up onto the chain-link fence, and one cop grabs his hair and puts him down hard. He sits on Russ’s back and twists his arms and cuffs him and takes out his wallet, looks at his ID and then the camera, and says, “Russell Jackson, you are under arrest.”
“Ayyy, I told you that was him,” the kid in the dayroom said.
The cop takes Russ to the car and lays him down on the hood. They’ve swarmed up now, naturally. There are three or four squad cars, and all these cops are excited to be on TV, bustling around, talking shit. One of the cops throws a Ziploc with a few bundles of heroin down next to him on the hood.
“He’s got priors, man. He’s fucked. He’s got warrants,” the kid in the dayroom says.
And just as he says that, one of the cops comes out of the car and says to the camera, “This isn’t the perp’s first rodeo. He was busted for selling H two years ago, warrants on VOP, failure to appear.”
The cop turns to Russ. “What do you think the judge will think of this, Russell?”
He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at the flashing lights with his cheek laying on the cold hood of the squad car and that “I’m fucked” look in his eyes.
The cop grabs him by the cuffs and says, “Russell Jackson, you’re goin’ to Gun Club.” And everyone in the unit falls over themselves laughing, grabbing each other’s blues and slapping one another on the arm, half expecting this buzz-cut cop to walk Russ into our unit right at that moment, just step out from the TV and plop him down on the bench to sit in the dayroom with everyone else.
But I can’t be sure if I laughed along with them. I can imagine it both ways. I can see myself laughing wild with my hands at the absurdity of it all, the TV like a mirror and Russ with that dumb look on his face, the play-by-play from his buddy and the fucked-up chronology of it all, the idea that Russ was probably sitting in some other unit in the same jail right now. I can see myself stomping my feet laughing, reaching out and putting my hand on the guy next to me, slapping his chest or arm, feeling the vibrations of him laughing too.
Or I can imagine myself sitting there, alone in the back while the crowd erupts in front of me, stone-faced, not even cracking a smile, thinking about how maybe Russ was shipped up the road already or maybe he was five years into his sentence and about to get out. Maybe he had already gotten out. Maybe he was leaning on the hood of his car, talking into his phone in a big red-striped polo right now, living in some fucked-up time loop like daytime Cops reruns.
I’m gonna say I laughed. Laughed along with everyone else. And so, it hadn’t been years because that just couldn’t be right. That couldn’t be possible. No one goes that long without laughing.