A CHANGE IS AS GOOD AS A HOLIDAY 8 page

We were tired as well as sad and scared. I guess we were able to feel our tiredness because, having planned to detox, we didn’t have to run around and do the things we usually had to do, all the hard work that goes into maintaining supply. All that was going to stop this afternoon.

We sat on the rock and we were silent for a long while. I was remembering another time, a better time, on a day like this. It seemed like a lifetime ago, when we’d first moved to Melbourne. We were really in love and had oodles of hope. The future was a thing that gleamed.

That day we’d walked out along to the end of the rocks past St. Kilda Pier. They were huge black basalt rocks like the one we were sitting on now. It was a winter’s day like this one, sunny and windy and weird. We’d sat on a big rock well away from the view of the crowds on the pier and Candy had buried her head in my woolen overcoat and sucked my cock, gently and slowly. A police helicopter flew overhead and tilted to check us out and hovered there for a while. I didn’t give a fuck. I felt secure and warm, and as I came I reached my arm high in the air and gave them the finger.

That was all those years ago. Now here we were without radiance. The air seemed brittle and empty, like it was hard to breathe.

“I really think we can do this, Candy,” I said.

She reached over and squeezed my hand. She had her knees drawn up and her head buried in them and I knew she was crying. It made me feel awkward and stupid. The only solution I knew to tears and awkwardness was heroin, more of it, lots of it. Without any gaps that would let things in. Maybe this is why it was so hard to stop.

I rubbed my hand along her neck and tried to massage her shoulder blades through her pullover.

“I know it’ll be hard,” I said. “But I’m sure it’s like a bridge, and once we cross it, it’ll be okay.”

Candy sniffled and looked up and smiled at me, and the hard sun made her pinned pupils all but disappear. It was like looking into a pale blue mist. I felt so unhappy trying to smile back at her. Even heroin couldn’t quell the despondence, the foreboding.

I pulled her toward me and she slumped into my arm. Her head lay on my chest and she continued to cry softly.

“Can you describe what’s over the other side of the bridge?” she asked.

I stared at a container ship coming around the west side of the bay from the city docks. The ship was connected to a world that could answer the question, How do men build ships? How the fuck do they bother?

“I don’t think I can exactly describe it,” I said. “But whatever it is, it’s a place where things aren’t so fucked up all the time. Bad things don’t happen so much. And we’ll have money. And we’ll own lots of nice stuff. And we can have a baby and this time he’ll live. And we can get back to loving each other properly, without all this bullshit in between.”

My mind was drifting into the unfamiliar territory of hope.

“Across the bridge I guess it’s greener, and more peaceful. And we’ll have good friends and we’ll know who they are.”

“No cops,” Candy mumbled through her tears.

“No cops. If the cops come to the door, I’ll say, ‘What do you want? What the fuck is your problem?’ Cops can’t push us around across that bridge. Cops can’t come into our house and treat us like shit. Maybe you could do some drawing, painting, paint nice things. Maybe we’ll live in the country, grow vegetables, feed the chickens.

“Or maybe we’ll go live in Thailand—and not use. Live in an Asian country, nice and cheap, eat great food and chill out for a year or two. Thailand would be great if we didn’t use. Or the Kashmir, or the Ivory Coast, or Paris. Or all of them.

“What else? I think we could go canoeing, you know, whitewater rafting, stuff like that, mountain climbing, hang gliding, whatever. It’ll be nice to get healthy, sleep well, not have drugs in our system. I’m sure it must feel good.”

I felt fucking dreadful, in that everything I felt was dread. A bundle of nerves and need. I stroked her hair in silence for a while. “I love you, Candy.”

She was really bawling now. She lifted her head from my chest and her makeup was streaked and her nose was blocked and her lips were quivering. Her shoulders heaved with her sobs, and the words came out in short bursts.

“We really have to do this. We have to do it this time.”

“We will, baby, we will. We’ll really fuckin’ do it this time.”

The container ship was now passing where we sat. It was only about a hundred yards away and it seemed huge and silent and empty. A lone seaman waved lazily to us from the foredeck. He probably thought we were happy. It was ridiculous but I waved back. He came from the real world, which we were about to try to enter. I felt obliged to return the gesture.

We sat there for about an hour, which is always long enough to feel the heroin begin to fade. The downhill slide, when it starts to creep away from you, and you wind up tight like a coil as the need for action and money grows. Not today. But I was winding up tight with a different kind of nervousness and anticipation. Detox. Dry out. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Bonebreaker.

“I suppose we should start getting back,” I said. I wanted to get home and get comfortable a few hours before the early stages of the misery began.

We trudged through Port Melbourne and spent most of the last of our money on a carton of cigarettes and some chocolate bars and cookies. We knew we wouldn’t be able to eat much more than sugar over the next few days.

By three o’clock a bitter wind was howling down Heath Street, and it was pretty much time for another shot and we weren’t about to have one. The pits of our stomachs were laden with gloom, and underneath the gloom was a ferocious panic wanting to burst out.

It was time for secondary medication.

We lugged the TV upstairs and set it up on a table at the end of the bed. We had ashtrays and water and cookies, and talcum powder for when we began to sweat. We poured some port, and downed three Valium each.

The children’s programs had started on TV. I couldn’t stomach that so I propped myself up on some pillows and tried to read a book while I could still concentrate. I drank a few glasses of the port, and after twenty minutes or half an hour the Valium were beginning to come on and I was feeling wobbly and even a little comfortable. The heroin hadn’t completely gone away yet.

The first hours drifted on. The day turned dark and we watched the news and occasionally Candy read me a clue from the crossword. We watched a couple of lame American sitcoms. We were a little drunk, but it was not so much the surplus of alcohol as the absence of narcotics that was beginning to invade our minds.

At eight-thirty Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds came on. The cars were cool and it was kind of creepy. Apt too. I began to think it was hysterical rats rather than seagulls that were starting to screech and peck at me and Candy.

Dealing with the commercial breaks was hard without heroin, but all in all I liked the way a half-decent movie could make a couple of hours go by a touch faster. Or more to the point, a fraction less slowly.

We had to be careful with our pills, save them for when we would really need them, in a day or two. But at the same time we liked to set up that psychological buffer zone where you overload in case there’s a bad patch ahead. Anyway, the port was blurring our judgment a bit. We took two more Valium each at about eleven.

The midnight movie was A Hill in Korea, starring Stanley Baker. I was really drunk and pilled by now and I was drifting into restless five-minute fragments of sleep. I wanted to continue this trend and get some sleep the first night, and I figured a blackout would be the best way to go. We skolled two more glasses of port each and turned off the TV just as the Koreans were shelling the shit out of the temple where the Brits were holed up.

It worked. I slept for five hours. The first night was over. I woke at six to a hideous Friday. The room was cold and my bones ached. My bladder was full and my mouth was dry. My head was thick and fuzzy. The first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes was heroin. That was normal, but usually I had some, or some coming, one way or another.

I knew that only heroin would bring me to a bearable state of consciousness. I thought if I didn’t move I would hurt less. I lay there for an hour, willing myself to go back to sleep. But all I got were bad waking dreams flitting behind my eyes.

Candy was starting to breathe shallowly beside me and I knew that soon she’d wake and join me in the day’s misery. She rolled over toward me and her face looked unattractive and swollen.

I went downstairs and out the back to piss. We got the house for cheap rent because it only had an outside toilet. My breath made steam in the air. Willy, the alley cat who’d recently adopted us, followed me out, and as I stood pissing she arched her back and rubbed her flanks in and out against my shins in a figure eight. My feet were like ice and it was nice to have the warmth of her fur down there.

In the kitchen I opened a tin and dished out some cat food in Willy’s bowl. The smell of it caught me as I leaned down. Cat food. What is that stuff? I retched once, stumbled over to the sink and vomited over the dirty dishes. I leaned with my head on the metal edge of the sink and panted, watching my saliva fall to the floor.

I ran the tap and tried to shuffle the dishes around and get my spew down the sink hole. It wasn’t working so I had to take them all out and rinse them one at a time, stacking them on the counter. When I finished, the sink was clear and I vomited again, and this time it was easy to run it down the drain.

Candy was awake, lying in bed smoking a cigarette. Big black saucer pupils, like I hadn’t seen in a while.

“How are you?” she asked. It was clearly a rhetorical question. I answered it anyway.

“Fucked. I just vomited.”

“This is bad,” she said, overstating the obvious. “This is gonna be fucking awful.”

“We’ll be all right, Candy,” I said. “Let’s have some Doloxene and Serepax.”

We wolfed down a mouthful of pills. Our skin was starting to crawl so we tried to arrange the sheets and blankets in such a way that we didn’t touch each other. It was a bad time for TV, of course. No one should ever have to be awake between six and nine in the morning, unless Ren and Stimpy is on. We lay there as the day picked up and the wind began to rattle the windows.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. The pills made me groggy but there was a gnawing hole in my stomach. I tried to read but my eyes were beginning to sting and water. I drank a couple of mouthfuls of water and ate a Chocolate Weston cookie. It tasted like cardboard. Mostly I stared at the ceiling, willing the day to speed up and go away.

All this happened in a state of personal pain. I guess it was a similar morning for Candy too.

We tossed and turned in bed as our body temperatures fluctuated wildly. One moment Candy would be buried beneath the blankets shivering uncontrollably, and I’d fling the sheets away and lie there sweating and panting. Five minutes later our roles would be reversed. Every minute seemed like an hour.

At ten-thirty A.M. the American soaps began and we tried to allow them to distract us. It was hard going. Everything was becoming so extremely uncomfortable that it was hard to stare at any one thing for very long, even a TV. Most of all my hands were uncomfortable. My fingertips felt like they were going to burst. I tried to shake them, to get the demons out, but everything was uncoordinated and my arms and hands just went limp.

By midday we were starting to sweat pretty much all of the time. This is when the real tricky stuff began, because we knew we still had a few bad days to go and it was important to keep the sheets as dry as possible. The sweat would come quickly, with a hot flush down the body. It was like wearing a thin layer of slime. A while later your temperature would change and the sweat would turn cold and really fuck you about. It smelled strange too.

Every now and again we’d have to get out of bed, slowly and painfully, and wipe each other down with a towel. We’d wipe off the slime and shower ourselves with talcum powder and sprinkle a little on the mattress where we lay and jump back under the sheets before we froze. Then we’d feel a little warmth and comfort for four or five minutes.

Once or twice during the long delirium of the afternoon I raised myself up from the bed and stared out the window. The street seemed quiet. A workman parked his van. A mother walked by pushing a baby carriage. I found this world perplexing. I sank back down beneath the sheets and tried not to think about anything. But it was now more than twenty-four hours since our last shot. It was hard to focus on anything other than the terrible fact that sat like a stone in our stomachs.

We kept downing pills. They dulled the edges a bit, but by midafternoon the stomach cramps were cutting in. I took a few Brufen to counteract this but I knew from past experience that there was nothing for it but to weather the cramps for a couple more days at least.

The nicest thing in the world would have been a back massage, but we both knew that neither of us could possibly have done that for the other. My joints ached, my bones ached, my muscles ached. There was nowhere that did not ache. My muscles throbbed too, like my head, which was finally following the rest of my body into the pain zone. My skin itched and I was never comfortable, not for a minute.

We tried not to talk about heroin. Lack of. Like water circling toward a drain, this was the natural place the conversation would go. We had to battle against that flow. Say positive things instead.

“Ohh Jesus,” I moaned. “This is fucked. This is major league fucked.” I rolled over and lifted myself up on an elbow. “Listen, Candy. You know, if we do this properly, we only have to do it once.”

“What time is it?” she asked feebly.

“A quarter past three.”

“Friday?”

“Friday.”

“How much longer? I can’t stand it.”

“The worst’ll be over soon,” I soothed. “Maybe if we can get through tonight, it’ll start getting better tomorrow.”

Of course it was bullshit. But you had to cling to something on that first full day. The second and the third days, the fourth at a pinch, would be the worst.

By the six o’clock news a bad electricity was coursing through my body. I was stretched tight on an invisible rack, a rack of ugly, distorting force fields. The stomach cramps continued, the headaches became more concrete, more defined, and the diarrhea began. Candy was going through a vomiting stage, over in the corner with a bucket.

We didn’t sleep for a second that night, despite all the medication. Our eyes watered and our noses ran and we vomited bile and pissed a fruity piss and shitted something rancid. The only holes not bursting forth with poison and crap were our ears, though it felt to me my brain would explode any minute.

We got through another flagon of the port, and a couple of packets of cookies. The drunkenness helped ease the electric torture a little, although it probably increased the vomiting. We were desperate to sleep, since that would pass the time more quickly than anything else.

We had only four Rohypnols left and we’d wanted to save them for Saturday night or Sunday, as a kind of reentry reward, but we figured we needed them badly now. The heavy artillery of the small-stake pills. They fuzzed the edges some more but did absolutely nothing for the central issues of sleep and pain.

By one or two A.M. even the good stuff on TV was unwatchable, but we left it on for the mild distraction it could offer. A kind of background radiation.

It must have been around three A.M. that we began masturbating in the hope of bringing on relief from the tension. Living on heroin was like drifting through endless savannas of superspiritual comfort. Coming off it, your body became acutely physical. So it was easy to masturbate.

There was nothing sensual about it, nor was it about sex. To touch each other in any way would have been merely to increase our physical discomfort and distress. It was about release and the desire for oblivion. Masturbation was a pathetic substitute for smack.

But it was easy to come. We were like two chimpanzees on amphetamines.

“I’m going to masturbate,” Candy said.

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.

She wet the tips of her fingers and spread her legs beneath the sheets and put her hand down there. I started stroking my dick and it got hard in ten seconds. I rubbed my hand across my stomach to wet it with the slimy sweat and used that as lubrication. Candy’s legs shot out straight and she clenched her teeth and went “ffff, ffff” and was still for a second before her body relaxed.

I only had to pull up and down about five times and my body began to tingle and I came. It was a little painful, like something that tickled too much, but I guess it was the nicest expulsion of fluid I’d experienced in a while. We came at the same time, almost. Tremendous fucking effort! I turned the sound down on the TV and we lay as still as possible and closed our eyes and waited for sleep to come on.

We listened to each other’s breathing and it didn’t change.

Fifteen minutes later Candy said, “You awake?”

“Yep.”

“Fuck it. I still can’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

A sneezing fit came on, one of those fits unique to the heroin detox, seven in a row, painful and wet and disorienting. It rattled my head around and I was wide-awake again. I blew my nose and groaned. I touched my dick again. It felt possible. I was sure that somehow the microseconds of relief after masturbation would offer the body the chance to slip into sleep.

I started masturbating again, and Candy said, “I think I’ll do the same.”

We came almost immediately. It was functional and grim. Between three A.M. and dawn we masturbated six or seven times, and none of it got us any closer to sleep. In the end I was coming without even a full erection, and Candy said her cunt hurt because the muscles of her vagina were contracting without anything to contract onto. It was more than we’d come in a year or two. Dawn came like a defeat anyway.

We were in the real horrors by nine A.M. Saturday. Not just the physical stuff, but the very concept of where we were. The night stretched behind us and leaked back into Friday: heroinless. Ahead of us a new stretch, infinite, even worse to contemplate. It wasn’t that the idea of a life without heroin was bad. It’s just that in the middle of pain it was bad. Because the pain seemed potentially endless. And the antidote to the pain was heroin.

By now the street was filled with the usual Saturday morning buzz of activity. Families and shoppers and all that shit. I couldn’t bear to look out the window. The only positive thing was that after a day and a half we were getting marginally more used to the misery. Coping with it better. And we were a day and a half closer to it being over.

On the downside, the hideous pain continued without abatement. If only it would just ease into boredom and a little discomfort. Not yet. We were dehydrated and hungry. We were chain smoking when we weren’t vomiting or shitting or sneezing. Everything tasted bad and smelled bad. Our sweat smelled like formaldehyde. Our senses were opening up to the world; the world was clearly an unbeautiful place.

I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen and made up a jug of cordial. I found some Salada cookies and spread them with butter and jam. Willy was there hassling, and I realized she’d been inside for twenty-four hours. I emptied the rest of the tin of cat food into her bowl, this time without vomiting. As I bent to her bowl I noticed she’d laid a huge shit in the corner. I couldn’t even think of dealing with it. I’d let it harden for another day or two. I put her and her bowl outside and closed the back door.

I took the food and drink upstairs to Candy, my good deed for the day. She asked me to wipe her down with the towel. The talcum powder and sweat stains formed a brown continent on the sheets. There was nothing but sports or children’s crap on the TV.

We ate the cookies and drank the cordial and felt a tiny surge of well-being. This is why they invented public detox units. So you can eat properly and take a few vitamins while you’re going through this shit. And get your sheets changed.

In the face of despair it was hard to be positive. I must have had a rush of blood to the head.

“You know,” I said, “if we could make the effort to have a shower and change the sheets, we’d feel a lot better afterward.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well then, you have a shower first, then run a bath for me, then we’ll change the sheets, then I’ll have a bath.”

Under the shower I realized it was a bad idea. It was hard enough getting down to the bathroom and getting my clothes off in the frigid air. I hadn’t allowed for the fact that if everything else felt alien without heroin, so would a shower. The water attacked my hypersensitive skin, tiny malicious darts fucking up the already distorted electrical currents. It was too hot, then too cold.

I tried to let it soothe me. I was sitting down because standing up would have meant fainting. I lay down and put the washcloth over my face. I could hear my labored breathing, and the drumming of the water on the enamel surface of the bath.

Soon the shower had made a hot crop circle on my chest, but my feet were beginning to get cold. Temperature control was out of control. I sat up again and pulled myself tight into a ball, trying to get all of me under the jet of water. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine syringes with wings, floating toward me to lift me away on the feathery air. Then I thought I might start to cry and decided I’d better get out.

I dried myself quickly and turned on the taps for Candy’s bath. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked skinny and pale and distraught and it didn’t feel like me. I hated seeing my pupils that big.

It was a cold day and I ran back inside and upstairs as quickly as was possible in such a weakened state. I rifled through the drawers and pulled out a completely new—that is, dirty but dry—set of sweatpants and T-shirt and sweater.

“It’s worth it,” I said breathlessly. I was hot and weak. One more monumental task to go.

We ripped the covers off the bed and changed the sheets, breathing hard and flopping everywhere. We turned the blankets and the quilt upside down, sweaty sides away from us. I fell into bed and Candy went downstairs to have a bath.

It gave us a good hour or so, not much more. By the time it started raining and the day turned dark at four in the afternoon, both of us were lying crumpled and panting in a pool of muddy sweat and talc.

We’d taken far too many pills. Our second sleepless night was coming up and we had no Rohypnol, twelve Valium, six Serepax, six Lomotil, and a handful of seemingly useless Doloxene. Poor management skills and poor preplanning. We would have to be really careful.

Candy had to run downstairs and shit, and on the way back she made four pieces of toast. That would do us for dinner. We watched the Saturday night news, which was mostly sports, and took two Valium each. We tried to ignore the TV and sleep. We were delirious. Short of heroin, either sleep or death would have been good. Of course it was a forlorn hope.

We drifted through a half-arsed attempt at continuing the crossword. The Saturday night movie was Song of Bernadette, starring Jennifer Jones. It was another apt movie because it was all about Saint Bernadette having these visions of the Virgin Mary, and we were beginning to hallucinate too. The walls were wobbling and Bernadette was saying weird things and after a while I just lay back and stared at the patterns forming and shifting on the ceiling. It was not really pleasant to see the ceiling mutate like that but it was easier than concentrating on the movie.

Saturday night was a repeat of Friday night. In no particular order, we masturbated, sneezed, blew our noses, sweated, shitted, pissed. And lay awake. There was a late movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales, with Clint Eastwood, and I couldn’t wrap my head around that one either. We watched it without interest. Every cell in my body was sending messages to my brain that something was lacking, big-time.

After midnight it was all crap on all stations, The Six Million Dollar Man, soft cock rock on the music video show, stuff like that. Stuff that might have been bearable, even funny, in my normal life, my real life, back on heroin. Back on heroin. That sounded good.

The least pathetic thing was tennis, live from somewhere around the fucked-up globe, and it would be running till five A.M. There was something comforting about its hypnotic blandness. I watched a couple of sets after each bout of frantic masturbation or diarrhea. It seemed to pass the time, though it’s not something I’d ever watch under any other circumstances.

At some point toward dawn I must have fallen into a short, troubled sleep, because all of a sudden a noise jolted me upright and The Big Valley was on and Candy was hunched in the corner where she’d been vomiting into the bucket. She was rocking back and forth and bawling her eyes out.

“What is it, baby?”

Given our circumstances, it was a supremely stupid question.

Candy continued to rock and cry. I thought she must have been freezing in the corner like that.

I jumped out of bed and promptly fell over. I pulled myself over to Candy and cradled her in my arms. I stroked her hair.

“What is it, baby, what’s the matter?” I had a real limited repertoire when it came to dealing with emotional situations.

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it …” She went on bawling this for a minute or two. I was thinking, I’m with you, baby, I’m with you all the way. I can’t do it either. How can we get some smack? I should have said, “We can do it, we can do it,” but instead I said, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” which is not the same thing.

“Come back to bed. You’ll catch a cold.” Incredible the things we say. I put her back under the covers and lay wiping the tears away from her face. I hated seeing Candy crying. Was all this worth it, this detoxing bullshit? Maybe we could just not use so much hammer. That was it! Starting today, turn over a new leaf. Avoid this kind of pain, get it under control.

It was Sunday morning, six A.M. We hadn’t had a shot for sixty-seven hours. I was angry about the bullshit on TV and angry about the fucked world and angry about why drugs were a problem. I was angry and upset that Candy was crying. It was totally fucking unnecessary. I had no idea what to do with my anger. All I knew was that I felt, or everything felt, fucked and hopeless. So I lay there stroking Candy and saying it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay.

Then all that was on were the religious programs. Some pedophile Yank with a southern accent was saying, “If you will but surrender to Jaysus.” Fuck you, Jack. I slammed the off button on the TV and the room seemed to hum with a terrible starkness.

It was probably at that moment that I decided I would use hammer that day, whatever it took. Candy too, I guess. She kept saying, “I can’t do this,” and after a while I had to believe her.

We lay in misery until about nine and then turned the TV back on to watch some cartoons. The bullshit began, slowly at first, but soon enough fast enough. We started talking about how well we’d done and how using now after nearly getting over the hump wouldn’t really be failure, as such, and how nice a taste would be and how the hell could we get some?

We had no money. That was a part of the plan. Now that the plan had changed, having no money was a bit of a problem. But it was something that had never gotten in our way before.

Still, it was Sunday, a bad day under any circumstances. There wasn’t much book stealing and selling I could do. Candy couldn’t do a trick sick like this. I didn’t have any stolen credit cards. We’d told all our friends we were stopping, so they’d dropped us like hotcakes. We weren’t expecting any visitors, no smack Santa Claus.

But now that we’d decided we wanted to use, all the despair left us and the day took on an edge of frantic desperation, even enthusiasm. What we did in the end was very simple. We started calling our dealers and telling them the truth. There were five to call and we were sure someone would have a heart.

On the second call Lester said, “All right, I’ll give youse a hundred on tick.” Candy promised that by getting the dope she would get well enough to go do a shift at the Carolina Club and pay him back by Monday morning. Lester knew that no one fucked with him, so I guess it was easy for him to say yes.

Suddenly we had energy. We jumped out of bed and dressed ourselves and I ran my fingers through my hair to make it neat and Candy brushed her hair and put some makeup on.

We were so fucking excited. The world was okay after all.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 568