I don’t remember the night I fell in love with Julian because I was on too much coke. We had money then, Julian and I, money that would then be alchemized into hotels and blow and molly and whiskey at this shitty dive bar we went to in Kensington, Philadelphia. The lights were red in that bathroom — the one where we’d do line after line, with him occasionally snapping a picture when I’d crush powder up on my screen protector — because it makes it difficult to find a vein. I remember thinking it makes sense, I guess. It’s Kensington, after all. Can’t go enabling the wrong kind of addicts.
***
Wendy tells me I snore so loud she can’t sleep. She says it didn’t use to be like this. It’s not the first time she’s said this, but I don’t bother apologizing this time. Wendy doesn’t do ‘forgiveness,’ or at least she hasn’t — not since we became roommates, that’s for sure. Your septum’s already fucked up, you can’t do anything about it. For some reason, it cuts me deep when Wendy says things like that, even though they’re true. There’s this gap in my brain where I see things as how they’re supposed to be, and not how they are. I’m supposed to be a white guy from an upper middle class background. I was sent to a technical school as a kid and excelled there and then sent to an Ivy and excelled there too. That is what my body is supposed to reflect — I can’t have the physical body of an actual drug addict. It’s just not possible.
***
Julian grew up in Baltimore, Maryland — a city that, for my whole life, my parents warned me to avoid. One night, as we lay in his bed there, he recounts coming home from high school on the light rail, the city observable from the rounded panes like an enormous terrarium. On the way back, there’s a couple stops like Lexington Market, you’d see people in the iconic junkie pose. Like, doubled over, fuckin, on the ground, shit like that. Obviously, you know, high, sort of all… it was just sad.
As he dozes off, my mind races. A week or so prior, we had signed up to do security for a rave some of my friends were throwing at a local park. At the volunteer meeting, it’s explained that there will be two crowd monitors (so as to prevent creeps from running amok), two people watching the parking lot to make sure no cars parked too close to the entrance and drew unwanted attention, two walking monitors, and two people stationed by the train tracks to make sure people didn’t do some stupid shit. If someone starts doing some stupid shit and you need physical help to, you know, put them in their place, you’ve got to get someone with a battle jacket. One of them crust punks with the battle jacket or the shorts.
At some point, after the cumulus clouds of Geek Bar smoke subsided and we all got down to business, Julian began his rounds around the park, and I took off towards the parking lot uphill. As far as I know, I did a good job. I talked to people. I negotiated and de-escalated; I played diplomat. But it was always in the back of my mind. Later that night, after one of the crowd monitors had asked me to take her place for some time, and I was gazing out at the swarm of tube tops and Trueys, I realized it wasn’t so different from what I already did at these kinds of parties organically. I was already monitoring everyone to evaluate who looked most like a person who carried drugs, regardless of whether they were dancing, talking in the back of the crowd, sitting down on a log or lighting a cig by the train tracks. I knew the right openers and all the subtle ways to probe and poke, like carefully inserting a toothpick into a cake to check how much more time it needs in the oven.
***
We get out of Port Authority at roughly midnight. There’s a halal cart across the street, and as we pass it, a guy stops us and immediately starts recounting his life story. He tells us, in the voice of a man who didn’t have too many of his teeth left, about his ex-wife, who he’s been separated from for six years, how he can’t find a roommate due to his sleep apnea, with his snore audible from even 30 feet away, and how the homeless shelter is purposely telling him to go to addresses that don’t exist, and a mix-up is implausible because he knows how addresses work — he’s very smart, very skilled in addresses. Now Julian doesn’t quite understand this yet, but the guy’s high — he cannot stop licking his gums, his speech is fast and unending, and the sleep apnea, of course, is a blatant giveaway. He’s a cokehead who’s actively using, and I can tell because I used to be one too.
I tell him I can never really understand him, but I can send him my love; I can fiddle with the cross around my neck and say it’s all part of God’s plan and say God bless you. Yet, amidst the platitudes and the shared experiences, there is this sharp sense of danger. He’s looking for money. He’s looking for my money. He focuses on one of us at a time and looks at us in detail while still speaking, getting all up in our faces while still trying to act nice. He’s trying to find a phone, a wallet, some other opening — some ticket to being alive another day. As I clutch my belongings with hands in my pockets, I realize I have assumed the role of the police detective, scrutinizing the man’s body language for signs that he will commit a crime, telling myself it’s okay to portray him this way because that’s what addicts do. Not the kind of addict I was, of course. He’s different from me. I’m different from him.
***
I find out that Ashley did her first line of coke through her girlfriend’s Twitter account. I call her to ask if it’s true, and at first, she can’t give me a yes or a no, but rather went for a well it was New Years, and I was at Leia’s house, and these guys came in, these friends of friends — no, friends of friends of friends…
I find out that Seth did his first line of coke when I am with him on the plaza outside my dorm. We are on the topic ‘cause he’d asked me if I’m still celebrating six months sober the next week, which I am.
I find out that Allie did her first line of coke through her Twitter account.
I find out that Coraline did a line of coke while the two of us are at a bar, drunk out of our minds, listening to a shitty prose reading. I find out it is not her first.
I find out that Devin got through several grams of coke in two weeks by not only his Twitter account, but more so his jutting collarbones, his stick-thin arms, his malnourished face. Wendy jokes about it. He’s pathetic, she says. I could never live like that. She doesn’t drink as much as she used to. She won’t even let me keep a beer in the mini fridge. I don’t bother to ask why.
I find out that my father never explicitly told my mother about the time he almost died after taking too much Adderall, even though she was with him while it was happening. He was studying for the bar exam, and had already failed once due to English not being his first language. He had a spreadsheet containing a meticulous schedule for himself to adhere to. Adderall was simply how he kept up with it, the memorization. I remember him telling me I can still recite some whole paragraphs in my head. When he could feel himself fading away, my mother saw him, but didn’t notice anything wrong. Maybe she didn’t want to admit it could happen at all.
***
When I didn’t have coke, I’d crush up and snort one of two things: Ritalin when school was in session, and Wellbutrin when not. Of course, this all happened in the comfort of a home, or something close to one. Ritalin, along with Adderall, is a “study drug” — one I’d learned to abuse from a friend of mine who was also a white, middle-class guy stuck in a broken home in the suburbs. The moniker “study drug” is interesting in that it indicates the substance’s genuine ability to get you to a “successful” place in life. It doesn’t fully justify or excuse it, but it contextualizes it, affords it the privilege of humanization. This is a drug done by people who study. They mean to contribute to society. They mean to do their best.
***
For the first month or two of getting clean, I went to this recovery support group downtown: a privilege I wouldn’t have had if I couldn’t afford the money for transit, or the time away from working shifts at a job I didn’t have. In the group, there was only one black person and only one woman. The guy running it was this middle-aged guy who talked a lot about his time in prison. I remember thinking to myself the first time he mentioned it: I never could have guessed.
Funny enough, according to that guy, they snort a lot of Wellbutrin in prison too. I remember feeling uneasy after he explained that’s why it’s called “prison coke.” At different groups, like NA, they talk about “jails, institutions, and death” — the final destinations of active addiction — and for a while, I felt both guilty for how much it freaked me out to hear about it, and unclear as to why it freaked me out in the first place. I stopped going to groups and I stopped flipping through tacky-looking pamphlets. I chose to not think about it so much — all the resemblances in the fine print — in hopes that maybe one day, I wouldn’t have anything to do with my addiction, including recovery or key tags, and I would be forever exonerated, the sentence over.
***
The congestion is so bad I can’t sleep, no matter how tight Julian holds me. It hasn’t gone away since I got clean, really, but there are good and bad days. When I do manage to fall asleep, I still snore, according to Wendy. These, as I would find out, are all symptoms of a deviated septum — a common consequence of cocaine abuse, corrigible only by means of surgery. Devastated, I held my head in my hands and pondered just how badly I fucked up — how badly I had to have mangled my body that the only option to go “back to normal” meant cutting it up and putting it all back together. I wish my body could forget what I’ve put it through, but that’s not how it works, no matter how much money you come from, no matter how many junkies on the street you say you’re nothing like, safeguarding your phone and wallet with one hand, twisting your cross chain with the other.
***
One night when I was still using, Julian and I took a walk around the center of Philadelphia — the part with the skyscrapers and expensive hotels, far removed from Kensington, where the real addicts go. There was a corpse in the middle of the street. Some motorcycle accident. We were drunk and I’d been doing lines all day, so neither of us processed it, at least at first, but Julian noticed a watch on the ground, presumably belonging to the dead man. Instinctively, he reached for it and picked it up. Suddenly, there was shouting coming from somewhere distant. Police officers. Only then did the chalk, once outlining the watch in Julian’s hand, spawn itself into the picture. Julian dropped the watch, yelling SORRY, and we booked it. The truth is that we were addicts, and death was not real to us. We were the most alive we had ever been, our bodies of indestructible steel, healthy and young and filled to the brim with potential. To us, death was about as tangible as our concept of our own addictions. We admitted to being addicts, but never junkies, with their sleep apneas and homeless shelters. We were addicts, and death was not real to us until the comedown, until the nosebleed, until the vomit — until the money runs out, and everything else follows.
