Tweak

  Destiny directs us out of the Haight, and lower Haight, down Market and up into the Tenderloin. The rows of Victorian houses give way to corporate high-rises and then the gritty, twisting streets of the San Francisco ghetto—cheap monthly hotel rooms, panhandlers, small-time hustlers, dealers, and junkies. Neon signs, off during the day, advertise strip clubs and peep shows. The sky has blown completely blue, but the sun is blocked by the falling-down buildings, leaving everything cold and windswept and peeling.

  We stop the car on the corner of Jones and Ellis, watching the scourge of walking dead as they drift down the street. One man—a skinny white guy with no hair on his head, but a lot on his face—stands in front of an ATM machine. He turns his head toward the sky every minute or so, screaming, “Please! Please!” Then he looks back at the ATM. Nothing comes out.

  “Here they come,” says Destiny, getting out of the car with the 40. “Thanks a lot, kids.”

  “Cool, man, thanks.”

  “Have fun,” he says, nodding toward Lauren knowingly. She maybe blushes a little.

  A young kid greets Destiny and then jumps into Lauren’s backseat. He is accompanied by a tall, skinny white man with gray hair and a face that looks like a pile of pastry dough. The boy is thin, but strong, with a round nose and darting eyes. He wears a black bandanna tied around his head and ratty, baggy clothes.

  “Yo, what’s up? I’m Gack,” he says.

  The fat older man says nothing.

  “Hey, I’m Nic. This is Lauren.”

  “Cool, cool. You wanna G, right?”

  His voice comes out in quick, hoarse bursts. I just nod.

  “Word,” he says. “Yo, this is my dad, Mike.”

  Mike waves stupidly.

  “Anyway,” continues Gack, “you’re gonna give me the money, and I’m gonna go get yo’ shit. My dad’ll wait here.”

  “Dude, there’s no way. I’m not letting you walk outta here with my money.”

  “Come on, yo, there’s no other way. My dad’ll stay here and, look, here’s my cell phone, and my wallet, and I’ll leave my skateboard. Just wait two minutes, okay?”

  I look at Lauren. She shakes her head, but I say, “Fuck, all right.”

  I hand him sixty bucks and he leaves. Part of me expects never to see him again, but he returns ten minutes later with our sack. He comes all out of breath.

  “Yo, I’m hookin’ you up so fat,” he says, handing over a very not fat Baggie of white crystals.

  “Dude,” I say, “this is fucking pin as hell.”

  “No way, man.”

  I take out one of the pieces and put it in my mouth. The bitter, chemical sour makes me shudder, but it tastes familiar. “All right, fine,” I say.

  “Word.”

  “You have any points?” asks Lauren.

  I’m proud of her. I hadn’t even thought about getting rigs and there she is, coming right out and saying it.

  “Uh, yeah. You all don’t mess around, huh?”

  “No,” we both say at the same time.

  Out of his pocket, Gack pulls a pack of maybe five syringes held together by a rubber band.

  “Those are cleans?” I ask.

  “Fo’sure.”

  “All right,” I say. “We’ll take those and we’re cool on the short sack.”

  “Dude, that sack is fat.”

  “Whatever.”

  “All right, well, call if you need more.”

  “We will,” I say.

  And with that, Gack and his dad leave the car and Lauren and I drive off with fresh needles and about a gram of crystal methamphetamine.

  I remember Lauren’s dad’s house from the time we’d been together back in high school—but I also remembered it from when I was much younger. The place is a European-style mansion in Sea Cliff. It is four or five stories high, sort of boxy, with giant bay windows bordered by faded green shutters. Vines climb the gray-washed walls and white roses grow along the sloping stairway. It looks out on the ocean—rough and pounding, relentless. The top story, a bright, sun-drenched loft, used to be the playroom of my best friend and sort-of brother, Mischa.

  See, the divorce went down like this: My dad had an affair with a woman, Flicka, then left my mom for her. Mischa was her son. We all moved in together when I was five. Mischa was my age, with long, white-blond hair, blue eyes, and a famous actor father. He threw tantrums and would bite me, but we were also very close. His father was the one who had lived where Lauren’s father lives now. I would go over there and play video games with Mischa, or build Lego spaceships, or draw, or whatever.

  Walking in the door with Lauren—backpack full of drugs, drunk and stumbling—I can’t help but feel a tightness in my stomach, thinking back to the child that I had been. I remember going on walks with my dad out to Fort Point, a jetty that stretches out underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I remember eating sushi and tempura in Japantown, playing on the ships docked off Hyde Street, riding my bike through Golden Gate Park, being taken to the old Castro movie theater, where a man played the organ before every show. I remember my championship Little League team in Sausalito, birthday parties at the San Francisco Zoo, going to art galleries and museums. I’d been so small that my dad would shelter me from the cold by hiding me in his sweater. Our heads would stick out of the stretched-out wool neckline together. I remember the smell of him—that indescribable smell of dad. He was so there for me always—especially when my mom moved down south. Sober and living in L.A., I’d talked on the phone with him almost every day. We talked about everything—from movies, to art, to girls, to nothing at all. I wonder how long it will be before the calls start coming in—how long before he knows I’ve gone out, relapsed, thrown it all away.

  Lauren’s room is in the basement—basically just a large canopy bed and TV and not much else. There are books and clothes and things all over the place. The shades are drawn over the windows, and Lauren plugs in a string of Christmas lights above the built-in shelves along the wall. She puts a CD in the player, something I’ve never heard before.

  “Come on, let’s hurry up,” she says. “My parents will be home soon and I wanna get out of here before they come.”

  “Cool. You know, my parents’ weekend house in Point Reyes will be empty tonight. We can go stay out there.”

  “I gotta work tomorrow morning,” says Lauren.

  “That’s fine. We’ll get you back.”

  “My parents are gonna freak out if I don’t come home tonight.”

  “Make something up.”

  “Yeah, fuck, all right.”

  “Can I use this?” I ask, holding up a blown-glass jar, maybe an inch high, swirled with streaks of white and green.

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “You gotta Q-tip?”

  “Fuck, yeah, but let’s go.”

  “All right, chill.”

  She rummages around and gets me the Q-tip. I rip off the cotton from one end. I go to the sink in her bathroom and fill the jar with a thin layer of water. I pour in a bunch of the crystal and crush it up with the back of a Bic lighter I have in my pocket. I hold the flame to the base of the jar until the liquid starts to smoke and bubble. I drop in the cotton and then pull it all up into two of the syringes. I pass the one with less over to Lauren and set about making a fist with my right hand, watching the veins swell easily. My body is so clean, so powerful—over a year needle-free and my veins reveal themselves instantly. I think back to how difficult it’d once been to hit—when the veins all began collapsing, hiding under the skin. But now the veins jump up right away. I pull back the plunger, watch the blood rush up into the mixture, and then slam it all home.

  I cough.

  The chemical lets off this gas as it reaches your heart, or brain, or whatever and it rushes up your throat, choking you.

  I cough, choking like that.

  My eyes water—my head pounding like maybe I’ll pass out, my breathing going so fast.

  “Goddamn, goddamn,” I say, the lights dimming
out and really, I mean, there’s no feeling like it. The high is perfection.

  I turn and see Lauren push off and as it hits her I kiss her without saying anything and she kisses back and it is all so effortless, not like being sober and consumed by worry and fear and inhibitions. I kiss her harder, but she pushes me back, saying, “Come on, let’s go to the beach.”

  We get outta there fast and then we are walking in the sunlight, back toward Lauren’s car. It is a different world, man, heightened, exciting. I light a cigarette and my fingers move spasmodically and I start talking, talking, talking. The waves of the drug keep sweeping through me and my palms turn sweaty and I grit my teeth. I tell Lauren about the book I’ve written and the job I want to get at this magazine in L.A. and suddenly it doesn’t seem like these are impossible dreams anymore. I feel like it is all happening—that my book is getting published and I can get any job I want and I’m gonna take Lauren along with me in my new life. Nothing, I mean nothing, can stop me.

  “You know,” says Lauren, “my parents are going out of town next week, so you should stay with me in my house, unless you have somewhere else to go.”

  “No, no,” I say, everything fitting together perfectly in my world, in my mind, in destiny, and fate and blah, blah, blah. “That’ll be great.”

  “They’re gone for two weeks.”

  I laugh.

  Baker Beach is mostly empty. We pull into the parking lot and look out at the pounding shore break, sucking up the brown, coarse sand and dashing it to pieces against the slick, jagged rocks. The Golden Gate Bridge looms up to the right, and across the channel are the Marin Headlands—lush, green, rolling hills dotted with eucalyptus and oak, the red earth cliffs dropping down to the swirling water below. We get out of the car and I take Lauren’s cold little soft hand in mine. We walk down along the dunes and the wind is blowing sand in my face, and suddenly I stop and strip off all my clothes down to my boxer briefs and run, headlong, into the surf. I hear Lauren giggling behind me, then nothing but the roar of the ocean and the cold, cold, cold.

  The current is strong and I’m immediately struggling against it, ducking the swells and feeling the pull out the mouth of the bay. But I’m a good swimmer. I navigate past the rocks and begin paddling into the waves as they break along the beach. Growing up I’d surfed all along this coastline. My friends and I would stay out sometimes five or six hours. In the end I’d gotten very comfortable in the water, able to ride the big waves off Ocean Beach or down in Santa Cruz. I’d watch the pelicans riding the updrafts of the swells, or sea otters eating crabs, floating on their backs. I’d wake up early, heading out before the sun rose to get the morning glass. But as I got deeper and deeper into my using, my surfboards went untouched on their racks in the garage. I lost interest. There’s something devastating about that, though I try not to think about it.

  I mean, here I am, bodysurfing the breakers at Baker Beach, feeling my breath catch in my lungs from the frigid water. The muscle memory is all there, in my arms and chest. I look back at Lauren, stripped and lying in the warm sand. I take another wave in, then run up to her, kissing the white of her stomach and listening to her laugh and shiver. Then I run on, up and down the beach. Fast, freezing, but not feeling it, really. I look at everything, the trees, and shells, and tall sea grass. It all seems so new and exciting. My little sister, Daisy, never failed to point out the delicate flowers or intricately shaped stones as we went on walks together. She was so present and filled with wonder. Meth gives me that childlike exuberance. It allows me to see, to really see. The world appears miraculous and I laugh and run down the beach until I’m gasping for air—then back to Lauren.

  She smiles at me and I kiss her some more.

  That night I drive her car through the winding back roads out to our house in Point Reyes. The drive is so familiar. I know every turn. It’s the same route I’d used to get back from school every afternoon. We pass the little towns of San Anselmo and Fairfax, curving beneath the redwood forest of Samuel P. Taylor State Park. Then we come out on the green pastureland, obscured by the darkness and fog. We turn up our street, steep, steep, bordered by dense woods on either side. The car sputters some, but makes it—taking me home.

  My parents’ house isn’t huge or anything, but it is designed by some famous architect. It’s sort of very Japanese and minimalist, with mirrors and windows all over the place. It looks out on maybe half an acre of garden—wild, tangled vines, hedges, oaks, poplars. Gravel paths twist through the brush and in the spring and summer there are flowers everywhere.

  Seeing that the driveway is empty and the lights are out, I creep along to the different doors and windows and things. It’s all locked. I climb the faded wooden gate, wander over to the back doors until I find one that isn’t dead-bolted solid. I yank it open, breaking the base of the door where it has been secured to the floor. Turning on as few lights as possible, I go through the house to the front and let Lauren in.

  “Jesus,” she says. “I remember these paintings.”

  My stepmother is an artist. The walls of our house are covered with giant, swirling canvases. The oil images are dark yet organic—eyes, organs, branches, shapes repeated over and over.

  “They’re beautiful,” I say. “So haunting, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  We go up to the living room and I put music on the stereo—some electronic stuff I left the last time I’d been home. I open a bottle of sake I find in the closet and pour a glass. Lauren looks at all the art books and things on the shelves. I look at the photographs of my little brother and sister on the windowsill. There is one of Jasper in his lacrosse uniform, smiling. There is Daisy, who’s just two years younger than Jasper, dressed as an elf, with a fake beard and her tangled hair pulled back. And there is the whole family together, my stepmom, her parents, brother, sister, my dad, my aunt and uncle, my brother, sister, cousins, and, on the far right, me. Walking through the house, I feel dirty—like I’m this charcoal stain polluting everything I touch. I can’t even look at the goddamn photographs—it hurts too much. I drink the sake down.

  “Let’s go take a shower,” I say.

  “Yeah. You wanna fix some more first?”

  “Definitely.”

  We shoot up and take a shower. We have sex in my old bed until my knees are rubbed raw. After that, I smoke cigarettes and look for stuff to steal. I take a guitar and a couple jackets, but nothing bigger than that. Oh, and I need a notebook, so I grab this black thing with Powerpuff Girls stickers on the cover. It turns out to be my sister’s diary.

  DAY 4

  We spend the night in some kitschy Art Deco motel off Lombard—the outside all mosaicked with bright-colored tiles. Lauren doesn’t actually stay past midnight. Her parents were worried and wondering where she is. I listen to her talking with her father on the phone. Her voice trembles—wanting desperately to sound…what, innocent? Something like that. Of course, there’d been times when I’d done the same thing—lying about being sober, trying to hide the fact that I’d relapsed. Lauren is able to convince her parents—at least for now. They believe her, I suppose, because they want to. My parents had been that way.

  I got thrown into my first treatment center when I was eighteen. I had been doing meth for only about six months, but already my life had begun falling apart. I dropped out of college and ended up having a sort of breakdown—wandering the streets and talking to people who weren’t there. I didn’t really come out of it until a police car was pulling up beside me. The officer threatened to arrest me but eventually let me go.

  My dad helped me get into rehab five days later—a large, Victorian-style, falling-down mansion on Fell and Steiner. I still remember walking in there that first day. It had threadbare red carpeting, a rotted, creaking stairway, and long, misshapen, warped hallways leading to room after room of beds, beds, beds. There must have been around fifty of us in that house—all men. We had groups all day where we were educated about substance abuse, twelve steps, and ho
w to live life sober. Walking through those green-painted wooden doors, my whole body was shaking and I felt like maybe I’d throw up or something. My dad was there beside me, wearing that same old wool sweater he used to shelter me in as a child. His hair was clipped short, black and gray. His square glasses obscured his eyes, which were red from almost crying. Maybe he was shaking too.

  “Dad, please,” I begged him. “I’ll stop, I promise. Please, I don’t need to do this.”

  “You can’t come home, Nic.”

  “But Dad, I don’t belong here.”

  I was wrong. I knew it the first group I went to. One of the residents, Johnny, a squat little man with scraggy facial hair and a dyed black Mohawk, told his story. He talked about his descent into crack/cocaine addiction. What struck me wasn’t so much the specifics of his story, but rather the feelings he described. He talked about how until he started using, he had always felt like some alien, different from everybody. I think what he said was, “I felt like everyone else had gotten this instruction manual that explained life to them, but somehow I’d just missed it. They all seemed to know exactly what they were doing while I didn’t have a clue. That is, until I found drugs and alcohol. Then it was like my world suddenly went from black-and-white to Technicolor.”

  Of course that had been my experience too, but it didn’t mean I was willing to change my behavior. I loved drugs. I loved what they did for me. They relieved me of that terrible sense of isolation I had always felt. They gave me the manual to life that Johnny had described. I could not, NOT give that up.

  But my parents were so hopeful and the counselors would give you more privileges if you cooperated, so I did. I said what they wanted me to say. I shared about my commitment to repairing the damage I had caused. I talked about being willing to adopt the spiritual principles outlined in the twelve steps. And I suppose part of me meant it. I didn’t want to become like some of the other men at Ohlhoff House, grizzled, toothless, having lost everything. But I still had this feeling like it could never happen to me. I had a 4.0 in high school, for Christ’s sake. I was a published writer. I came from a good family. Besides, I was too young to really be an addict. I was just experimenting, right?