An excerpt from the memoir Junkie Love
I haven’t seen Becky in a month. Snowstorms wrack the Northeast as I arrive on a Greyhound bus from Southern California. The boy she is staying with is named Jerry. They met in college, before becoming junkies. Before she met me in a Vermont rehab and I took her with me to San Francisco. We weren’t in SF long before the police came looking for us. We’d been printing phony checks on a computer to support our dope habits. We fled. Becky returned to her family in Vermont. I tried to reunite with my wife in LA. That didn’t work for either of us. So we are back together.
Jerry lives with his divorced mother in a lovely two-storey Cape Cod in a Burlington suburb, with bushes shaped like elephants, magnificent oak trees, and a pathway to the front door made up of polished stones, which someone has taken the time to shovel. The interior design is strictly New England colonialism—maple railings and mantles, hand-stitched pillows and knitted apples, huge oil paintings of steam-powered catchers and harpoon cannons, with a kitchen bigger than most of my apartments. Jerry’s mom knows all about her son’s drug habit. She says she’d rather have her son shooting his heroin in the house, with clean needles, where she at least knows it is safe, than out on those dirty streets. God bless liberal parenting.
Becky and I fix and fuck on overdrive, in spare bedrooms and closets, in bathtubs and back seats. I take her from the front, from behind, from on top, bottom, and upside down. My wife is a distant memory.
I know I am dying. I can see the black edges of my life creeping in, literally see them from the corners of my eyes as they close up around me, waiting to smother me, snuff me out. And I don’t care.
Becky and I have taken our experience with phony checks back east with us. Making minor amendments to the plan, we are burning through banks at a good clip. We hit them for much less, opening up accounts with stolen checks and making instant withdrawals, $100 at a time. We’ve been cleaning up in this town.
It is 8 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Or maybe it’s Thursday. I’ve been here little over a week. We are still at Jerry’s mom’s house, upstairs in his bedroom, which looks like ten-year-old sleeps here, with its race car bedspread and wrestling posters, video game cartridges and controllers and empty bowls of Lucky Charms littered about. Another girl shows up. We can call her Debra. She is looking for the same thing we are.
We can’t find any heroin. We have money. But no one seems to be holding. The snow makes it tougher. Burlington is not like San Francisco. There are no houses storing the stuff in bulk. It has to be shipped in from far away, like produce. Snowstorms clog highways; nobody has been making deliveries of late.
We have a few Oxycontins to stave off the sickness, but since the pharmaceutical industry got wise and started adding gelatin to their pills, it makes breaking down and injecting them next to impossible. Lemon juice and vinegar don’t work, and heating the crushed pills will only turn them into a thick goop you can’t draw up.
Shooting is its own addiction. There were times in San Francisco when we couldn’t get anything that we would sit around shooting up beer or whiskey dregs, Sprite, milk, Tang, sometimes just plain tap water, anything for a fix. Doesn’t matter what you’re shooting, once that needle pierces the skin, the brain gets fooled into thinking drugs are about to be delivered, so it produces a high, the flip side of phantom pain for an amputee.
We score some cocaine and it doesn’t take long before the paranoia sets in. Seems Debra has legal issues, a boyfriend who is a big shot dealer, an ex-gang member, or maybe it’s an ex-boyfriend who’s still a gang member. I don’t know. But the cops are after him, or her, or somebody, and she won’t shut up about it. I’ve been around this shit since I started doing drugs and it still drives me nuts.
Soon Debra and Jerry are at the window, and, Look, there’s a van across the street that looks suspicious! “Could be the DEA,” Debra says. I want to reply that the DEA has better things to do than chase four inconsequential losers around the Vermont suburbs, but I am the new guy and want them to like me. I already feel self-conscious about my age. After me, Becky is next oldest, but she’s still in her mid-20s; the other two are babies.
Debra opens her purse. There is a lot of money is there. Debra says the DEA wants it. We have to run.
We’ve snuck out the back of the house and are weaving beneath the elephant bushes. It is much colder than I remember New England ever getting. Of course, we are almost in Canada. We’re trying to run but the snow has a slick layer of ice on it, which makes us lose our footing, before the crust cracks and traps our feet. The cocaine was very potent and the ringing in my ears will not stop. Debra tells us to be quiet. No one is talking. She points between two houses. There is that van again.
It is clearly not the same van, but I don’t want her upset with me. I’ve seen how much money is in that purse. I am sticking by her side. If I can get my hands on that money, Becky and I can take a break from this bank business, which will not end well, no matter what lies I tell myself.
We make it out of the suburbs by sticking along the woods that line Burlington, following the light of the moon through a shopping center. Now we are downtown, which in Burlington isn’t that impressive.
At the Holiday Inn, Debra plunks down the cash for a room.
We are all out of breath. Everyone lights a cigarette and inhales hard through the wheeze. We are going to hole up in this room, it is decided, until the DEA goes away or we can get some heroin.
I hate admitting how silly this all feels, especially at my age, these cloak and dagger shenanigans. Nobody gives a shit about us, and certainly not the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, which I’m guessing has bigger fish to fry. Guys my age have careers, families; they own homes and drive nice cars. They’re not running through shopping plazas like tweaked-out rejects from the Breakfast Club.
The paranoia is even getting the best of Becky. I try to calm them down. Relax, have a seat, turn on the TV. But Debra has already cracked the blinds, and sure enough, there’s that van again. I say it is a different van; it is a different make, model, and color.
“They changed drivers, and they changed cars, but they’re still following me!”
Debra, Jerry, and even my Becky are certain the DEA is going to break down the door any minute. I promise myself that I will never do cocaine again.
Debra and Jerry say they are leaving. Becky says she is too. I finally put my foot down. That’s it. I am not running around bumfuck Burlington playing cops and robbers anymore. I tell Becky that when she comes to her senses I’ll be here in this nice warm room, watching TV and waiting.
They leave. I lie on the bed and reach for the remote to turn on the TV and knock it to the floor. It lands next to the purse full of money Debra has forgotten.
I count the money. There is over $1,500. That could keep Becky and me rolling for at least a week. I start to put the money in my pocket, and then realize the problems it would cause. Purse missing money. One guy in the room. So I just take a fifty and stuff it in my pocket. But there is so much money, all those crisp green twenties, fifties, and hundreds staring back at me, so inviting. I am about to take another fifty when there is a knock at the door, and I am glad I at least got the fifty stashed in my pocket before Debra realized she forgot her purse. Fifty bucks is better than nothing.
I open the door. It is the DEA.
Badges are flashed, instructions given. There are five of them. One of them is even wearing sunglasses despite its closing in on midnight. They all have on black windbreakers with the big block letters on back. They ask where Debra is. They’ve got her boyfriend, they saw her come in. No use denying it, kid. Give it to them straight if I know what’s good for me.
Talk about a mindfuck. I can’t even answer. Do they have any idea how much this is screwing with my head?
The DEA finds the purse. They take all the money but leave the purse. They say to tell Debra if she wants her money back, she knows where to find them.
Then they walk out and leave me there. They never even ask my name.
Everyone thinks I stole the money. Debra has big shot friends and that money was theirs. It is not safe for me in Burlington anymore. Becky meets me at the depot and we use the $50 to get out of town and back down to Rutland, where we rent a room in a roadside motel. There are only a handful of banks in Rutland. We hit them all. The money goes fast.
We are running out of time.
Slate skies hang low over one-lane roads packed with dirty sludge and snow as one storm blends into the next.
We know how this scene plays out.
We pay for the night with the last of our money, shoot up everything we’ve got, and fuck our way through dawn until we are empty. Now it is morning. Check out time is 11:00 a.m. The sickness will be coming soon, and I know that despite our promises to stay together I am losing her.
Becky has fallen asleep on her stomach. I sit naked on the floor and watch her, the New England light graying her skin, wishing I could stop time, find a way to place us both in a box for all eternity, because nothing good is going to be happening to either one of us for a very long time.
The clock reads 10:46. I know because I am looking at it when they come.
When the police come for you, it is pretty much like in the movies. They bang loudly, but before you can answer, the door is kicked in, and you are spread eagle on the floor, hands cuffed behind your back, and ordered not to talk or they’ll shoot.
And that is the last moment I have with Becky as she is taken away from me in the back of a squad car.
I know not to turn around. I know doing so will be a mistake. But I do it anyway. As the taillights recede into the gusting Vermont snow, I catch that sad, lonesome wave goodbye from the rear window. And I am alone again, scared, looking up at a mountain I am too tired to climb.
When you say goodbye to someone at an airport or a bus station (or from the back of a police car), do not turn around. If you do, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
About the author:
Joe’s work has appeared in Bathhouse, Big Bridge, Bryant Literary Review, the Connecticut Review, Dark Sky, decomP, Dos Passos Review, Fringe, Gloom Cupboard, Hobart, Opium, and Thuglit, among others. The 2004 recipient of the Connecticut Review’s Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, Joe was also that year’s representative on the CT Poetry Circuit. Most recently, Joe served as editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream magazine, and as co-producer of Lip Service, a spoken word event in Miami, which was featured on NPR.
