I spent some time living in a youth hostel, and then when I couldn’t afford that, I slept in a park. That was when I started turning tricks for the first time, really. I wasn’t making a ton of money or anything, just enough to get high and not starve. The few friends I still had I never told what I was doing to get money. I ate maybe a candy bar a day—Snickers usually. I weighed very little. I walked all night long. I walked all day. I had nowhere to go.
One day I saw that an old friend of our family’s was having a retrospective of his work at the Castro movie theater. He is a director who is pretty famous and all. His son, JT, is an actor and they were both scheduled to be at the opening reception. I dragged myself over there, my clothes torn and stinking. I tried to get inside, but the doorway was being guarded. Thankfully, though, JT noticed me and came outside. He put his arms around me. The bulk of his frame crushed me. He offered me a cigarette.
“How did this happen to you?” JT asked, his voice so soft—gentle. He took off his glasses and rubbed his dark, narrow eyes.
“What happened to you?” It was more of a plea than a question. “I remember when you were a little kid, you were, like, the golden child or something. You were so happy…so…light. I’d play with you for hours and you’d never cry or anything. Do you remember that?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, you were pretty young. But you were still, even then, so open and everything. And watching you grow up, I was always so proud of you.”
“I looked up to you so much. All the music I listen to, all the books I read, they were all inspired by you.”
“So what happened? Last time I saw you it was like, what, three years ago? You were lookin’ at colleges in Manhattan. You were all excited about going to school—writing.”
“Yeah. It’s just crystal meth, man. I wish I’d never tried this shit, I swear.”
“You wanna get off it?”
“I don’t know. I need to.”
“Well, look, I just broke up with my girlfriend and I’m moving back home for a couple months. Why don’t you stay with me at our apartment? We’ll get you a doctor, get you some medicine—you can just detox there and figure out your life, man. We gotta place in upstate New York you’ve never been to. We’ll go up there, get you straightened out. We’ll get my dad’s masseuse working on you. We’ll hook you up with an apartment, a good job. It’ll be all good.”
I agreed to meet him at the Four Seasons Hotel the next day. I went to my dealer’s place in Oakland. I spent most of my money on speed and pills, then I went back to the park in Fort Mason. I stayed up for a long time, just shooting drugs. I had gotten my backpack full of clothes out of the locker at the youth hostel. I actually had two backpacks, and then I had the brilliant idea of cutting the packs up and sewing them together to make one, giant, SUPER backpack. By the time I finished cutting everything up, however, I got really tired and passed out. When I woke up I had no super backpack and no regular backpack, either. I put all my stuff in a laundry cart I’d stolen and pushed it from the park, down Columbus, to the Four Seasons on Market. There were two large doormen with earpieces and walkie-talkies. They weren’t about to let me pass—all rags, a laundry cart full of clothes, an electric guitar, and a head full of so much heroin and meth I could barely talk. When they asked the names of the “guests” I was visiting, I just laughed.
“Look, you’re not gonna believe me. Can you just call up and ask if anyone is expecting me. I was told my name would be left with the, uh, front desk, or whatever it’s called. I’m Nic Sheff.”
That didn’t work. They wanted to know who I was there to see, so eventually I told them. Dropping my friends’ names got me yelled at that I better get the hell outta there. They said they’d call the cops. When I refused to leave and kept insisting that they call up to make sure, they finally agreed. After that they apologized, like, a hundred times and brought us champagne and a fruit basket.
We flew out to New York on the red-eye that same night. I just remember talking to a flight attendant for most of the trip, sitting on the floor in the back where she was preparing the meals and things. I’d had to do the rest of the speed in the bathroom at the Four Seasons, about a gram at once, so I was pretty much in a blackout for the next week. I managed to stay off hard drugs for a couple months, but then I relapsed and I was worse than ever.
Gack and Bullet and I actually walk by that same Four Seasons on our way back to my car. After all our deliveries and everything, we’ve made about three hundred dollars—plus we have a ton of the really good speed left. The morning fades in gray and cold. The streetlights extinguish one by one overhead. The wind picks up, leaving us all shivering slightly. Wet clings to the air, soaks through us—courses in our veins. We smoke cigarettes, but it doesn’t warm us. I crank the heat up as we drive to the bus station. My jaw is so tight and it makes these popping noises as I open and close it.
Despite all the drugs and everything, I wanna sleep. There’s a pounding in my head—the blood draining out.
I call Lauren from a pay phone and tell her what is going on with me. She agrees to leave the side door unlocked so I can go crash there after we find Joe and get my shit back. She sounds kind of annoyed with me for not having come over, but I don’t care. Isn’t that the greatest gift in the world—just not to care? I feel so grateful for it. That’s nothing I ever knew sober.
The bus station is surrounded by a virtual shantytown of tents and cardboard houses. A girl I went to rehab with had lived there before getting checked into treatment. She’d lived in a tent with three guys, one of whom was her fiancé. The cops would raid these homeless settlements every couple months. They’d make a bunch of arrests, then leave ’em alone to rebuild or whatever. The place seems pretty full right now—young punk kids with ripped clothes and spiked hair looking angry and desperate, fighting over cigarettes and blankets and cans of beer.
Gack and Bullet and I decide to split up so we can each cover a different entrance. There’s actually four ways to get into the station, so Bullet says he’ll keep circling the main lobby. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’ll do if I see Joe. I can’t really imagine confronting him and kicking his ass or anything. Still, I try and psych myself up—my heart pounding like crazy every time someone comes through the electric sliding doors.
The station is almost empty. The sound of a few footsteps echoes in the tile corridors. A few of the torn-up black seats are occupied by sleeping men and women wearing layers of tattered rags. Two police officers are there trying to rouse one guy who’s slid off onto the dirty linoleum floor. His skin is slick, like maybe it is covered in oil, and his long hair is matted together in one solid dreadlock. He has a long, long beard. The cops—male, with crew cuts and square jaws—are bent over him, shaking his shoulders. Both wear latex gloves. I go take a piss and when I get back all three of them are gone. Joe hasn’t shown up yet either. I huddle myself into a corner and wait.
I blink a couple times. Pink and green geometric shapes form against the white walls. It’s like a tower of flashing triangles is building itself up organically from the ground. I can’t get rid of them. Not like it really bothers me that much. I’m used to hallucinations a lot worse than this. The bus station hums and flickers with pulsing brightness. It’s all I can do to keep focused on the doors. I stand up and walk on over to Gack. He’s asleep at his post. I nudge him.
“Uh, s-sorry man.”
“Nah, dude, let’s go.”
“You sure?”
I nod. “He’ll get his anyway,” I say. “This is bullshit. If he needs the money that bad, he can have it. I gotta go sleep.”
“Yeah,” Gack agrees. “It’ll end badly for Joe.”
Bullet is still pacing the place like some tightly caged animal. It takes a little coercing to get him to let up. We get back in my car and I decide to buy them all breakfast.
“You can get four Home Run Pies for a dollar at Cala Foods,” says Bullet.
“Whatever you guys want.?
??
I drop them off in the TL and drive to Lauren’s. We agree to meet up later. Bullet’s got nowhere to stay, but neither Gack nor I offer any solutions. I want to help him, I do, but I can barely help myself. We leave him wandering and agree to meet up later. I smoke cigarettes in Lauren’s white bed and wait to fall asleep.
DAY 9
Since Lauren’s parents are gone, we’ve spent the last three days basically holed up in her house. Turns out her dad has a fantastic wine cellar that we’ve (or I’ve) been sampling from. Plus I’m a pretty good cook, so I’ve been raiding their pantry and things. I make coffee with a French press in the mornings, preparing pasta and salad and eggs—drinking Beaujolais, Bordeaux, pinots, and Chiantis.
I actually know something about food and wine. It was the summer before my senior year in high school that I went off to this study abroad program in Paris when I was sixteen. It was just for the summer and the thing was pretty structured and everything. You stayed in a hotel with all these other high school students—went to French classes during the day, then were supposed to eat together and go on these “excursions” at night. They’d go to the top of the Eiffel Tower or bowling or something. Drinking alcohol was grounds for immediate expulsion.
The first night I was there, I met up with this girl named Cappucine whose parents were friends with my stepmom. She was a few years older than me and had agreed to take me around the city. She lived just outside Paris in Saint-Cloud. We went to a bar that night and got very drunk—or at least, I did. We walked all over Montmartre—up the steps to the great church, the Sacré-Coeur. Looking down on the city with this girl and her friends, I felt so old—so mature—so cool. I was way into all those French New Wave movies like Breathless, Bob Le Flambeur, The 400 Blows, and Elevator to the Gallows. Walking around the city, a Gitane cigarette hanging perpetually from my mouth, I was Jean-Paul Belmondo, or Alain Delon, or one of those untouchable, unfeeling stars. I never went back to the hotel that night. I stayed with Cappucine. It wasn’t long before I was drinking in the morning. We went to visit her family in the south of France, drank rosé from vineyards in St. Tropez. I’d wake up and pour a glass of wine—or sometimes vodka—and drink that along with my coffee. I had my dad’s credit card and I bought all new clothes for myself at Chevignon and Agnès B. I decided never to return to the United States.
Again, fix the outsides and maybe my insides won’t be such a dark place.
Four months later, the credit cards were all canceled and I was finally convinced to come home and finish high school. Sitting in class back in the Bay Area, watching pep rallies and things, it was a little, er, strange. Here I’d been drinking ouzo and riding motorcycles around Montpelier—then suddenly I was dealing with curfews and the swim team. I wanted so desperately not to be a child anymore. I always thought once I was an adult, independent, whatever, these feelings of hopelessness and despair would go away. I could be like those characters in the movies. Drugs and alcohol gave me that feeling. Getting high, I was walking on the beach with Cappucine again, promising her a future and thinking that I meant it.
It strikes me how, being here with Lauren, it is more or less the same thing. Here I am, so old and yet so young. Stuck, suspended somewhere in between adulthood and a child’s fantasy. But I keep all this to myself, shooting more and more heroin and crystal methamphetamine.
I leave Lauren to meet Gack a few times. I park my car at the Safeway at Church and Market. We just stand along the street and say stupid shit like, “Crystal, crystal,” or, “You wanna stay up all night?”
The people who pass either just ignore us or express interest and we follow them around the corner and sell them a sack. It is that easy.
No one ever complains about how small what we sell them is.
We definitely aren’t making a ton of money, but it’s enough to at least use for free. Gack keeps trying to get me to buy walkie-talkies, but I don’t really see the point. I guess he just thinks it’d be cool.
So I split the profits with Gack and take whatever money I can home to Lauren. The heroin’s really working for her. She has this tendency to get all freaked out doing too much meth. We’ll be making love or something, and all of a sudden she’ll shush me—convinced there’s someone in the house, upstairs. Granted, most of the time it does sound like there’s someone up there. There’ll be this banging around, or the noise of footsteps, or a door being shut. None of it ever turns out to be real. I keep saying something like, “Baby, look, I know it sounds like there’s someone upstairs. It always sounds like there’s someone upstairs. But we might as well just assume that there’s no one up there because otherwise it’s gonna drive us crazy. So what if there is someone up there? What are we gonna do about it anyway? Let’s just keep telling ourselves it’s all in our minds—’cause it is, you know?”
I’m pretty good about convincing myself that way, but she is more invested in her paranoia. The heroin calms her down nicely. So when we run out, she’s all over me about calling Candy. It’s around eight thirty and dark outside. Candy can’t meet us for another couple hours, so I suggest we take a walk down by Fort Point. The gate is locked, so we park Lauren’s car up on the cliffs and walk down the worn, wooden, creaking steps. We actually hold hands.
Listening to Lauren, I’ve been able to piece together most of her story since leaving high school. Basically, it’s pretty similar to mine. She never quite reached the depth of depravity that I did, but she’s still got time. At least, that’s how I figure it. She went into her first rehab right out of high school, a dual diagnosis treatment center—one that dealt with both drug addiction and bulimia. Since then she’s had a couple jobs temping at law firms around the city, but mostly she’s just been in and out of different facilities and programs. Nothing ever took, obviously.
Fort Point stretches out to the pillars of the Golden Gate Bridge. The surf comes pounding in hard and fast against the rock jetty. Wind blows in from the mouth of the bay and the ocean is churning and spraying us as we walk. The lights from Marin reflect back across the channel and the abandoned military barracks—boarded up and covered in layers of graffiti—bend and shift under the weight of the salt air. I hold Lauren’s hand and we talk about how beautiful everything is and how there really is no city like San Francisco, after all. At one point an official-looking truck comes our way, headlights blinding us as we look back. Lauren panics some.
“Should we run?” she asks.
“Definitely not.”
The truck passes by without bothering us. My heart is maybe going a little bit.
“This is freakin’ me out,” she whines. “Maybe we should go back.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You don’t worry at all, do you?”
I laugh. “If you only knew.”
She asks about my plans for the future.
“I don’t know. I mean, what else is there to do? People might say I’m wasting my life, but it’s all relative. If I was a lawyer, I’d go to fucking law school—but I’m not. I’m a drug addict and so what do I do? Use, right? Use until the wheels fall off. We’ll get by, Lauren.”
I pull her in toward me and kiss her. “What more is there to life than this?” I ask. “Walking free through a city that we love—listening to the ocean—kissing each other—getting high. We’re so alive, you and I.”
She laughs now. “And when my parents get home—what then? We’ve got nowhere to go.”
“I’ll get a place.”
“For us together.”
“Sure.”
“So are we boyfriend/girlfriend then?”
“If you want to be.”
“Come on, Nic.”
“Yeah, of course we are.”
We kiss each other some more.
Getting into the car, Lauren realizes she forgot her scarf. It must’ve fallen off somewhere. I tell her to stay and I go running back the way we came. Tears well up in my eyes from the cold and I feel maybe like I’m flying—so grateful. Ever
ything is working out perfectly. I even find her scarf, at the very end of the point. I run back and she’s happy and we drive off to meet Candy and we listen to this old Tosca CD—smoking one cigarette after the other.
Candy has stitches all along her left cheekbone that weren’t there before. It looks all swollen and glossy. She pushes her hair back behind her ears and asks me, “So what’s the deal? How come it took you so long to call?”
“Well, I’m more of a tweakhead, you know. I just use this shit to level out the meth.”
“It’s good though, huh?”
I nod, looking at her. “Maybe you wanna come hang out sometime?” I say.
She turns her pinned, gray eyes on me. She’s still wearing too much makeup, but the scar makes her markedly prettier. I’m kinda sick like that.
“Sure,” she says. “But not tonight.”
“I could take you out somewhere.”
“Look, you’re just a kid.”
“In some ways.”
She passes over the dope and I give her some money. She lights a Parliament Menthol.
“We’ll see. Call me sooner next time, okay?”
“Sure.”
I drive Lauren’s car back to her house. Candy’s look stays with me. I feel it wrapped serpentine around my spine. She reminds me of someone—the smell of her. And then I remember.
When that movie star’s wife my dad had the affair with broke up with him, we moved to an apartment in the Mission. My mom had been forced to move to L.A. for work with an old boyfriend and I saw her only on holidays, like Christmas. My dad always treated me more like a friend than a son, really. I mean, especially back then. He took me everywhere with him—out to dinner, to parties. My godparents, a gay couple, lived across the street. We’d go over there for dinner and we’d all talk about politics and movies and things. They made me feel included, grown-up.