Tweak

  Gack holds the needle up to her and she pulls back her sweater. There are all these white scars up her arm.

  “You a cutter, huh?” I ask.

  “I was.”

  “That’s kinda hot.”

  “No, it’s not,” says Gack, squeezing her bicep to get the veins to stand out. “She’s never gonna do that again.”

  She rolls her eyes and makes a face.

  When Gack hits and pushes it home, she starts gasping for air. “I gotta…I gotta…”

  “In there,” I say.

  She runs into the bathroom and throws up in what I hope is the toilet. That’s what it sounds like anyway.

  “Girls always puke,” says Gack.

  “Well, you gave her a fucking truckload.”

  I hear her voice calling from the bathroom. “Gack, get me a cigarette.”

  He looks at me and I put my pack on the floor.

  “Baby, you all right?”

  “I think so. Damn, this feels pretty good, huh?”

  I laugh at that. “You guys should go upstairs—check out some of the other rooms,” I say.

  “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

  Gack shoots me up and the shit is very good. I feel this surge of eroticism or something, all at once—maybe like an orgasm. Better than that, I’d say.

  I hold my head in my hands.

  “Good, right?”

  “Yeah. Take that girl upstairs this instant.”

  I turn the music up really loud and they go to fuck, or whatever. I draw on a piece of cardboard with these oil pastels Lauren has. At least I still have that. Drawing you don’t really have to think about anyway.

  I swear it’s only like ten minutes till Gack and his girl are back downstairs and she’s kinda freaking out, saying, “Gack, come on, come on.”

  “We gotta go,” he tells me. “I’ll be back.”

  Erin doesn’t say anything to me—she just pulls at Gack and looks spooked as hell.

  He definitely gave her too much. I’ve really only had one experience with amphetamine psychosis. This drug dealer, Annika, who was my friend Tyler’s girl, got really out there smoking speed. I came to her house in the Panhandle to buy a twenty bag, but when she came to the door, she immediately put her finger to her lips—telling me to get down, that the cops were outside. It was weird ’cause there was no reasoning with her. She kept saying, like, “I know what’s going on. You think I’m fucking stupid. Well, I’m not. I know. I know.”

  Eventually I just left ’cause she started yelling at me more and more—plus she wouldn’t sell me any speed. I had to go all the way to fucking Oakland to get it. I heard she was hospitalized that night.

  So hopefully Erin’s not gonna lose it. She’s so fucking young.

  I lock the door after they leave, then I go call Lauren. She answers, but sounds all stoned out.

  “Nic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Baby, I’m sleeping.”

  “Okay.”

  “You gotta come get me tomorrow.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” She yawns. “I love you. Call me in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  “You too.”

  We hang up and I draw and listen to music some more.

  Gack doesn’t show up again till, like, one thirty. He’s all out of breath. “Let’s get moving,” he says.

  “Get movin’ how? Is Erin all right?”

  “Yeah, I guess. She was hella paranoid—said she needed to just lie in bed for a while and sleep.”

  “Sleep? Dude, there’s no way.”

  “Yeah, well, come on. We gotta cut that crystal. I got some vitamin B we can use to cook it with.”

  “Whatever you say, man.”

  We go to the kitchen and find a glass and pour a bunch of crystal in with the vitamin B powder. We add a tiny bit of water and start to melt it down over the stovetop flame. Once it forms a liquid, we lay it out on a cookie sheet and place that in the freezer. It’s actually Gack who does it all. Five minutes later we pull out the sheet, and the vitamin B and crystal have fused together to make a layer of what looks like soap. He chips all the pieces out of the sheet and dumps it on the counter. It’s sort of powdery and colored off-yellow.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to be?”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “We just need to add more crystal.”

  I pull out both teeners—the one for us and the one we’re cutting. Both of them look really small already.

  “Jesus,” I say. “We did a fucking lot.”

  “Yeah.”

  For the first time I notice that Gack’s mouth is twitching. His eyes are wide and jumping. I look down at my hands. They’re shaking bad.

  “Fuck, man, you think we did too much?”

  “No, it’s cool,” says Gack. “We just gotta focus. Give me the rest of that teener.”

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  He asks if he’s ever let me down before and I pass the shit over, shaking my head. He repeats the whole cooking down, cooling process. What comes out is, well, a little better than before—but still flaky and powdery and yellow.

  “Dude, I would never buy that shit.”

  “It’s cool,” he says.

  He tries a few more times—letting it cool longer, shorter, experimenting with cutting it different ways. Somehow, with each pass, it seems to be getting smaller.

  “Fuck it,” he finally says. “This is good enough.”

  “What?”

  “We just gotta tell ’em this shit is raw—unprocessed. People’ll buy it. Trust me. Look, it’ll be better when I bag the shit up.”

  I go down and get my shoes and jacket and things. When I come up, all the “raw” meth has been separated into small plastic Baggies. Each one should, theoretically, sell for twenty bucks. I look at it skeptically, but don’t say anything. I know Gack is trying his best.

  “I’m sorry, man,” he finally says. “We’ll never use that cut again.”

  I laugh. “No shit.”

  “But come on, it’ll work out.”

  It’s late, like almost three, but the kids are still chilling around in front of the Church and Market Safeway.

  I wait by the car while Gack goes and talks with a few of them. He comes back a couple minutes later.

  “Fuck those guys, man, ain’t never got no money. Let’s cruise over to Castro.”

  So we walk fast down Market and there is no one around—I mean, no one. About a block away from the Safeway, though, some punk-lookin’ dude with a bleached Mohawk and big lace-up boots yells out to us. We stop. He comes up and wants to buy a twenty bag. He’s got sort of grizzly-looking facial hair and real spaced-out eyes.

  He looks at the sack we hand him for a long time. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Shit’s raw, dude, hella pure and uncut.”

  “Nah, fuck that.”

  “Look, man, just try it. We’ll roll back here in, like, twenty minutes.”

  “All right, but if this shit’s no good, I’ma track y’all down.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  The man hands Gack a crumpled twenty and we keep on moving down the street. There’s some guy sleeping across the sidewalk—wrapped in a blanket like a corpse. We have to step over him.

  Down Castro we manage to sell one sack to some gay couple in town from somewhere. Watching the men circle the block around 18th makes my stomach twist up. I actually think I recognize one of the guys—some Asian dude in a white Mustang. He just keeps circling, circling, circling. But, no, I’m sure it’s not him.

  As we walk back toward Safeway, we see that Mohawk kid coming toward us. He keeps playing with his nose.

  “What’s up?” asks Gack.

  “Dude,” he says, jerking around. “Something’s weird about this shit.”

  “Nah, man, you’re hella gacked out.”

  “Yeah, but something’s weird. I want my money back.”


  “Don’t we all,” I say.

  “Yeah, man, it’s not gonna happen.”

  “Dude, you better not fuck with me—you can’t sell bunk shit like that and get away with it.”

  His jaw’s really going. I feel this surging in my head—or pounding—or whatever.

  Gack keeps walking. “You know that shit’s for real, man.”

  “There’s speed in it, sure, but y’all did something.”

  “Whatever, man, yer trippin’.”

  “You can’t get away with it.”

  He’s so close to me, man, I can smell the sweat all over him. Gack keeps walking, walking—never stopping for a second.

  “If you don’t make things right, man, I’ll tell everyone y’all are selling bunk shit.”

  Now Gack turns and squares off in front of the guy. “All right, that’s enough. Fuck off…NOW.” He jerks his body forward toward Mohawk kid and Mohawk kid flinches back. I get myself up tall next to Gack and clench my fists and the kid runs off, yelling, “You guys are fucking finished.”

  My heart is beating a little bit. Actually, it’s kind of slamming against my chest and collarbone and whatever. “What was that?” I ask.

  “Nothing. Let’s get outta here.”

  We get back to my car, or, uh, Lauren’s car. Gack keeps telling me not to worry. If I give him a bunch of the sacks to take with him, he’ll sell ’em, no problem. Everything is working out, he keeps saying. For the first time, I’m not so sure. I think back to my life sober—working, getting up early to go on bike rides and shit, going to movies. I haven’t looked at a newspaper in over two weeks. There could be a new war going on and I’d have no idea. But this is the life I want to live, right? I mean, I’m happier.

  We drive around awhile and I feel like, there’s nothing else to do but go shoot more drugs—or smoke more cigarettes. We go back to Lauren’s and spend the rest of the night messing around in her room, not accomplishing anything. Gack manages to take apart a portable CD player of mine that was skipping, but he can’t put it back together. We have to throw it away. I’ve pretty much finished all the heroin, leaving just a little bit for the morning—except, of course, it was morning long ago. The sun is up when we finally sleep some. I’m wondering if this is fucking worth it. We’re kinda just goin’ in circles. When I wake up, I puke for a while in the bathroom. I lie on the tile floor and, ’cause no one’s looking, I cry a little. The feeling racks through me, but not a lot of tears come out. I’m sweating and shivering and I smell so bad. I take a shower, but the sour smell won’t leave me. My skin is gray, scaly, broken out. My body is eating itself.

  DAY 15

  After shooting the rest of the dope and a bunch of crystal, I kinda blot out the doubts for a while. I call Lauren and she still wants me to come pick her up, so I try to focus on the directions she’s giving me.

  I drop Gack off in the TL, with his promise that he’s gonna sell some of that whack, cut shit. Santa Cruz is only, like, two hours south of the city, but it feels like I’m going on this big road trip or something—freeing Lauren—staging a jailbreak.

  The coast highway runs along Ocean Beach, through Pacifica, and up along Devil’s Slide—a treacherous stretch of road with almost no barrier from the several-hundred-foot drop to the sea below—then winds down to the small coastal town of Santa Cruz. The cliffs are steep and unforgiving—the ocean surges, swells, slams against the rocks. Cypress trees and eucalyptus, pines and buckeyes, sway, sway in the heavy onshore winds. Everything is worn away from the salt and damp—the houses bleached out, faded and warped. I’m having fun taking the turns too fast and tight.

  Lauren’s shrink lives in some gated community where all the streets have “berry” names—Idleberry, Huckleberry, Boysenberry, etc. The guard at the front shows me where to find Jules’s house. It looks like all the others. It’s real big, but tasteless—boxy—tan, generic, nothing paint. I pull into the driveway and sit there for a minute, breathing.

  The front door opens while I’m trying to figure out my next move. Smoking a cigarette is the best I can come up with, but I stamp it out nervously as I see this woman coming out to greet me—or at least, I hope that’s what she’s doing. She has short curly hair, dyed to disguise the gray. She’s a little overweight and heavily made-up—her clothes conservative and not at all stylish. I get outta the car.

  “You must be Nic,” she says, way too sweetly.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Ruth-Anne.”

  I shake her hand and meet her eyes with mine. I smile.

  “Come in,” she says, and I follow behind her.

  The house looks out on a golf course and the ocean. Two teenage girls are eating bowls of ice cream at this long glass table. Lauren and a balding, very white man in a dress shirt are talking outside on two cushioned metal chairs. I assume that must be Jules.

  “Do you want some juice?” asks Ruth-Anne, her voice still way too cheery.

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Apple or grape?”

  “Apple, please. Thank you.”

  She pours me a glass.

  “Should I go out there?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  I walk outside into the windswept afternoon and the man stands instantly to shake my hand.

  “Nic, I’m Jules,” he says. His voice is very soft and soothing, like someone talking on one of those goddamn guided meditation tapes we had to listen to in rehab.

  Lauren lights a cigarette, so I do too. I pull a chair over next to her and put my hand on her thigh. She leans her head against my shoulder.

  Jules tells me, as kindly as possible, what a bad idea it is for Lauren to return to the city with me. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. He wraps his fingers around one another—long and pale with polished nails. He tells me that if I truly love Lauren, I’ll leave her alone to clean up for a while. I look in his eyes. They are striking blue. I say I want to help Lauren, but it’s ultimately her choice. Besides, we kind of have to see this run we’re on out to the end. We’ll bottom out soon enough.

  He tries to reason with me. He asks me if OD’ing on heroin isn’t bottom enough. I keep repeating that it’s Lauren’s decision and she says she wants to go home. She assures Jules she won’t use.

  He obviously doesn’t believe her, but it’s not like he can stop us or anything. For a while he drills me about my history. I answer honestly. I don’t hide anything.

  “Yeah, I’m definitely a drug addict—but, uh, it’s kinda working for me right now. I mean, I know it’s gonna end badly—but I gotta see this through.”

  “You don’t have to,” he says. “You want to.”

  He offers to see me for a free visit sometime—maybe get me on some medication. I thank him all over the place. Jules more or less says nothing the whole time. Lauren looks real out of it—tired—and I realize she hasn’t had any speed for over twenty-four hours. The depression, the painful crashing need to sleep, is sweeping through her. I actually have to support her with my arm as we walk outta there.

  “You’re making a mistake,” says Jules.

  “Probably.”

  As soon as we get down the block, we pull over and I watch for patrol cars while Lauren gets off with what’s left of the good crystal. I’m definitely using more than I’m selling, which is bad, obviously.

  I try not to think about money and how, at this rate, shit won’t last another week. Between the meth and heroin, Gack and me and Lauren are using over two hundred dollars a day. If you add food and cigarettes and eventually having to find another place to live other than Lauren’s parents’ house, well, I can feel the top of the ladder getting closer. I try not to think about it, but you know how that goes.

  “Better, baby?” I ask.

  She tells me she loves me and I drive us home. “We do gotta cut back,” she says.

  I agree, taking hold of her hand. “Yeah, plus Gack fucked up a whole teener. Shit’s unsellable. We gotta be really careful with what’s left.”

&nb
sp; She tells me that Jules said he would have to call her parents if she left his house. I ask what that means.

  “They’re gonna come home and try and talk me into getting help.”

  “What?”

  She tells me not to worry. We’ll go live in my car together—it’ll be all right. We’ll find a place eventually. Maybe we’ll get sober. If we get sober, her parents will support us.

  “We can have a baby,” she says.

  I just squeeze her hand. “How much time before they come back?”

  “It’ll probably be by tomorrow night.”

  “Fuck.”

  She keeps trying to calm me down, but I can’t really see her living in my car. I can’t really see getting sober, either. I kinda wish I’d left her in fucking Santa Cruz. We call Candy on our way back into town and I drop another eighty bucks on some heroin.

  We shoot most of the cut meth at Lauren’s. The cut makes both of us kinda sick, but we still make love like we do. There’s always that, isn’t there? I feel her moving on top of me on the whiteness of her bed. I feel the pillows and quilts. I feel all this luxury that is about to be gone—so quick, too. We soak the room with our sweat and I can’t feel anything, but I keep on fucking her ’cause I don’t know what else to do. My mind is going, going, going and even this isn’t stopping it, but it helps. When I was a little boy I used to masturbate like this. I was too young to come—but I had all this sexuality inside me and I’d play with myself for hours to escape, or whatever. Hell, maybe it just felt good. There were a few friends I had when I was little who would masturbate with me. It was when I was like nine or ten—maybe younger. We were all too little to have anything happen. I remember telling sexual stories to my friends—making shit up that would turn us all on. I would talk while we were doing it. It’s funny ’cause lying here with Lauren, I’m doing the same thing—making love to her in a whisper with my words and my body. That must mean something, right? I guess I’m still that confused little boy, or is that too simple?