Tweak

  But, of course, then my dad started dating. He was single and young and it made sense that he’d go out and leave me with babysitters. I’m not sure where he met Audrey—at some gallery opening or something—but she was tattooed all over with long, long blond hair. She was maybe twenty-one or-two and smelled like incense all the time. She only babysat me like three times, but I’ll never forget that smell of her. She looked so beautiful and ravaged at the same time. She would crawl into bed with me as I was falling asleep and hold me and I’d smell her and be so turned on. I’d try to hide my small erection. One night she rented The Last Temptation of Christ and we watched that together. I was eight years old.

  But driving away from Candy, I think of Audrey and lying in bed with her. Candy has that smell—that same look. Something is tearing apart the lattice structure of my veins. I get home and go straight to Lauren’s room. I fuck her hard and it goes on and on. We soak through her sheets and mattress and carpeted floor.

  When it’s over I cook up a bunch of heroin and go to pick out a bottle of white wine from the refrigerator. I take it up to the kitchen and pour a large glass for myself. I’m naked and standing at the full-length window, looking out on the street below—feeling powerful. I eat an apple and bring one down for Lauren. The room is very quiet and I call out to her, but there’s no answer.

  When I worked at the rehab in Malibu, they made me take a CPR class at the Red Cross. I thought it was bullshit at the time—some thick-necked EMT talking too fast and asking stupid rhetorical questions. The class was maybe three hours long and I guess I paid attention. I mean, I got the damn certificate.

  Seeing Lauren on the floor, turning blue, my reaction is strange. I don’t panic or anything. A calm sweeps through me. I remember the EMT. What’d he say to do first? You shake them and shout, “Are you okay?”

  I do that.

  Check for a heartbeat.

  She’s got one.

  Check for breathing.

  No on that.

  All right, then open the air passage, tilt the head back, and start chest compressions.

  I put my mouth to her cold, small lips.

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  I feel her ribs and breastbone plate crack some under my weight as I push down. Her belly fills as I blow the air in. Her chest heaves.

  I reach over and grab the phone, dialing 911.

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  “911 emergency, how can I help you?”

  “Yeah, my girlfriend just OD’ed on heroin. We need an ambulance now.”

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  “Do you know CPR?”

  “I’m doing it.”

  “Where are you located?”

  “I don’t know the address. Sea Cliff. Trace the call, will you?”

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  And now the panic sets in. Fuck, man, she can’t die. Her skin is so transparent and the veins are blue, blue rising beneath the surface.

  “An ambulance is on its way, sir.”

  I hang up.

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  Check the heart.

  Still going.

  “God,” I say aloud. “I don’t believe in you, but now would be a good time to give us a goddamn miracle.”

  Breathe.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  And then, just like that, she gasps, gasps, gasps and jerks awake. She blinks twice and bursts into tears. I do the same thing, holding her.

  When I hear the sirens outside I go out and tell the firemen and whoever that she’s all right, but they come in anyway. They seem kinda pissed about the whole thing. Regulations say they gotta take her to the ER, but Lauren refuses. She’s naked and we can’t get her to put clothes on. She cries and cries—sounding like a sick cat or something. One of the bigger guys threatens to call the cops on us and that gets Lauren moving. She’s still way out of it and nodding all over the place. She clings on to me and I basically have to carry her up to the ambulance. She kisses me, but at that point I’m just trying to get her outta there. They tell me to meet her at the UCSF Hospital. I hate fucking emergency rooms, but I agree anyway.

  The only time I ever ended up in the ER was for a drug overdose, actually. I was living in New York, turning tricks. I’d been up for a couple days doing coke and crystal and drinking so much, I mean so fucking much. This very muscular guy whose name, I think, was Brian, had picked me up at this cheesy gay bar where they give you free drinks if you take your shirt off. They were his drugs. I had no money. I ended up back at my apartment in the middle of this orgy of guys. Vaguely I remember someone eating out my ass, while my dick refused to get hard. Then I just gave up and let whoever wanted to fuck me, fuck me.

  At some point I noticed a vial of GHB on the bedside table. I drank about three-quarters of it down, figuring that would do the trick. I started to black out and I had this total sense of relief. Finally, I thought, it’s over, and then I just fell out. Of course, I woke up at a nearby hospital, a tube down my throat, needles in my arms, a catheter in my dick, my ribs broken from the CPR. But the sick thing, the really fucking sick thing was my first thought when I came to. See, when I’d gone to the bathroom at my apartment, I’d managed to get alone with the bag of crystal and had hidden some of it in a bottle of Ambien I’d been prescribed. I knew it was still there.

  I made some grunting noises for them to get the tube out, which they did, me gagging and retching all over the place. Then the nurse left and I started ripping all the needles out of my arms. The catheter in my dick was this plastic tubing connected to a bag I could piss into. I started to pull the thing out of the hole in the head of my cock and it burned, Jesus it fucking burned, but it wouldn’t come out. Still, I just kept pulling until the pain got so bad that I begged the nurses to get the goddamn thing out of me, which they finally did. Then I got up, hospital gown and all, and started to walk out the front door. The security guard stopped me—physically dragging me back in. I kept trying to sneak out until they let me sign an AMA discharge form, ’cause I’d been such a pain in the ass. I ended up in my third rehab about a week later.

  I think back to my night in the ER and I go downstairs and shoot a bunch of heroin before driving up to UCSF. They’ve already admitted Lauren by the time I get there, so they let me on in. She’s sitting on a white cot in the middle of the cramped central areas. Doctors and nurses pass bits of paper back and forth, make jokes, enter information into computers. There don’t seem to be any other patients around, but everyone seems rushed and frantic. A doctor with a mullet tied back in a ponytail and soft, squishy features is trying to get something coherent out of Lauren. I think he’s trying to figure out whether she was trying to commit suicide or not—but he never just comes straight out with it. I step in, saying she had only done heroin one or two other times and didn’t know about the dosing. He talks to me as though I were Lauren’s concerned parent, the responsible one. He asks me all these questions. What’s her home life like? Does she need help getting into treatment? I fight so hard not to nod out while he’s talking. I’m not sure how well I’m doing. I ask him if she can leave and he says no. She has to be evaluated by the psychiatrist.

  “I go to a psychiatrist,” says Lauren. “Jules Bernabei. He works at San Francisco General.”

  The doctor ignores her.

  “Can’t we leave AMA?” I ask.

  “What?” the doctor asks.

  “I was in the hospital once and I just asked to sign this AMA form and they let me go. They had to. Come on, doctor, I’ll take care of her.”

  “No, no. I’m afraid not.”

  “Can you stop us?”

  “Yes. We can involve the authorities if you wish.”

  Lauren hands me her purse and I kiss her and tell her we’ll figure this out. She keeps pleading to get her psychiatrist on the ph
one, so they agree to page him.

  I’m not sure what I’m feeling but I go out into the thick, wet air and light a cigarette and pace. Maybe everybody is staring at me. I pull out Lauren’s cell phone. It’s two thirty. For some reason I call Zelda. Maybe hers is the only number I remember.

  Zelda is singularly beautiful. The first time I saw her was at some meeting in Hollywood. She identified herself as a newcomer—wearing big, round sunglasses, her red hair hanging down to the small of her back. I couldn’t stop looking at her the whole meeting—high cheekbones, a long, angular nose, chapped parted lips. Her body was so tiny—jagged shoulders, sticking out like angels’ wings. She looks like an Egon Schiele painting. I actually asked for her number that first day. I never do that. She gave it to me, but she was in this treatment program where she couldn’t get calls for three months. I forgot all about her until I came back to my old Sober Living one night. I’d just turned twenty-one and was celebrating my birthday at the halfway house. She’d checked in about a week earlier.

  We started talking and I felt so close to her immediately. It was like talking to myself. Of course, I later found out how much older she was than me—and, eventually, that she had a boyfriend. Plus she’d lived so much more than I had. She’d been married to that actor for seven years. All her boyfriends were famous in some way and her family was equally well known. She was humble about all this, but I was intimidated and never thought she could ever want me like I was increasingly wanting her. But we started spending more and more time together. I told her things I’d never told anyone.

  One night we went to the Chateau Marmont on Sunset. We drank black tea and she smoked cigarettes while a little girl, maybe six or seven, played this haunting, real minimalist piano music. I mean, she was just some kid messing around, but it was fucking great. Someone even tipped her twenty bucks or something.

  I’m not sure what we talked about, or why that night was any different from any other. She drove me home and we made out in her car and she cried the whole time. I fell ever more in love with her from that day forward. We kept trying to break it off, but would eventually end up seeing each other again.

  How can I ever explain what it was about Zelda? Sure she was amazing to look at, but there was something more. There was a sadness there, mixed with wisdom, and a pained humor. Whatever it was, I felt like I could see right down to the moths struggling on their backs in the base of her silver, shimmering soul. I also felt like we were meant to be together—she, this ageless beauty, and I, this old man and tiny child. When we kissed and made love it was like nothing I’d never known before—and that was sober.

  But she wouldn’t leave Mike for me. I’m not sure why. Maybe she didn’t feel safe with me. Maybe I was really too young. It tore me up—I mean, really.

  So I call Zelda from Lauren’s cell phone. She doesn’t answer. I leave a rambling message. Even just hearing her voice on the machine brings back so much. It actually makes me kind of angry and I hang up and pace some more.

  Eventually, I go back into the waiting room and try to sleep on two orange plastic chairs—no good. My legs keep twitching all over the place. The other thing is, I really have to take a piss, but the heroin has made all my muscles too relaxed or something, ’cause I can’t figure out how to make that happen. There’s a group of dark-skinned Hispanic women talking loudly now in the waiting area, their voices echoing off the linoleum. I decide to walk around the hospital some, since the woman at the front desk tells me the psychiatrist hasn’t even arrived for Lauren yet.

  I ride the elevator for a while, wondering if there are cameras in there—maybe I could stop it and shoot up right there. But, no, I’m too sketched out and I figure there’re probably cameras. So I just go up and down. Even the elevator smells like a goddamn hospital. Kelly, the mother of a friend of mine, is a nurse at a hospital in Oakland. In order to graduate from high school, I had to do all this community service. Kelly agreed to take me with her for a couple days around the hospital. One of the things I remember most was this guy with a horribly fat stomach. He was very thin, but his stomach was huge. I sat with him while we waited for Kelly. He asked me questions about school and things. He was very sweet and polite and positive. Kelly came in and asked him to remove his shirt, so he did. What he had was a colostomy—his intestine had been rerouted out his stomach. Thing was, he had developed a lot of fluid swelling at the base of the wound. I excused myself to get some water, then nearly fainted in the hall. Kelly later told me he’d be dead in a few months.

  The other thing I remember was this schizophrenic drug addict who’d tried to kill himself by jumping off a building. He broke his neck, but he didn’t die—he was a quadriplegic.

  “We’re just going to look at this small wound on his bottom,” Kelly said.

  She pulled back the sheet and the guy literally had no left butt cheek. It had been rotted away by some flesh-eating disease. The place quickly filled with the smell of decaying flesh and shit. This time I passed out cold in the outside hall. The next day she had me follow a urologist around—putting catheters in old guys’ dicks.

  I get outta the elevator and go check on Lauren. They tell me she’s sleeping and that they’re giving her an IV of fluid to rehydrate her. I call Gack from Lauren’s phone. His dad answers.

  “Hey Mike, it’s Nic, you guys up?”

  “Always. You wanna talk to little Gack?”

  “Sure. Fucking Lauren OD’ed. I’m at the UCSF ER.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Yeah. I had to do CPR and shit, but she’s alive.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so, thanks, Mike.”

  He goes to get Gack. I’m struck by how sweet these fuckin’ people are.

  I tell Gack about the whole scene and ask if he can get me any herb.

  “Dude, I got a little bit. It’ll take me an hour to take the bus up there.”

  “I ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Word.”

  We meet out front about two hours later. We shoot up some speed in Lauren’s car, then smoke a joint. I feel stupidly high.

  “So you saved her life,” Gack says. “That’s fucking intense.” I swear the fool never changes his clothes. He’s wearing the same bandanna around his head, Karate Kid style.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I was so weirdly calm about the whole thing.”

  “That’s gonna be pretty heavy for her when she realizes what you did.”

  “Yeah, well, if it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have OD’ed in the first place.”

  “Nah, she was just lookin’ for an excuse to start using again, right? It would’ve happened eventually. You know, my girlfriend lives right around here.”

  “Your girlfriend?”

  “Yeah, dude—Erin.”

  “Fuck, we gotta all go out sometime.”

  “She’s only seventeen.”

  “So?”

  He tells me about how he met her, trying to sell her a sack, actually. She lives with her mom—still goes to high school and all. Gack talks a lot and we walk around some. The UCSF hospital rests up in the dense forest and eucalyptus trees of the hills looking down on Golden Gate Park. The fog always wraps the place in a still wetness that is both eerie and idyllic.

  “I love this city,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  Lauren’s phone rings twenty minutes later and I answer.

  It’s Lauren calling from the hospital.

  “Nic, where are you?”

  “Outside. Can we go?”

  “Yeah, you gotta come fill out some paperwork.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be right there.”

  I say bye to Gack and agree to meet him later. He says he’s gonna go walk Erin to school. It’s five a.m.

  I walk into the hospital. I’m way too loaded for this shit.

  Inside they make me promise to watch Lauren closely and make sure she gets so
me rest. I agree—again, the responsible one. Then I sign some papers and take her home.

  I get whatever heroin’s left out of the cotton and shoot us both up with it. We fuck as the sun rises and she says almost nothing the whole time. I notice how thin she’s getting. Her bones cut into me. We pass out sometime around ten.

  DAY 10

  A few hours later the phones are ringing and ringing. The house phone and Lauren’s cell phone—over and over. There’s some light coming in the windows, so I can tell it’s real late and sunny outside. The caller ID on Lauren’s cell keeps showing DAD.

  He just keeps calling. None of this wakes Lauren up ever, but I’m feeling kinda worried and restless, so I shake her awake.

  “What? Fucking what?”

  “Dude, your dad keeps calling. They must have heard something about last night.”

  “Fuck. I bet the fucking neighbors called them.”

  Her eyes are all swollen and her hair is everywhere. Her breasts are sagging strangely, suddenly too big for her shrinking frame.

  “You want me to make some coffee?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I’ll sleep a little more, then figure out what to say.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saved my life.”

  “Nah, whatever.”

  “I’m falling in love with you.”

  “Yeah, me too, Lauren.”

  It feels like I mean it, but you can never be sure.

  I go upstairs and it is bright and hot. I make coffee and an omelet with avocado and sautéed mushrooms. While it’s all cooling, I set up a rig of meth. I hit a vein, but after I pull back the blood into the syringe, my hand moves and I feel a burning in my arm. I dig around some more. Maybe ten minutes go by of me just hunting and hunting and not finding any goddamn vein. Then suddenly I realize that the pressure has built up really high in the plunger, so I pull out and try to press it down. The blood has coagulated in the head of the needle. I push and push, but nothing comes out. Finally I press the thing down as hard as I can and then it gives and blood sprays out all over the white kitchen wall. After that I try to find a vein again and eventually get the shot off, though I’m pretty sure I wasted the whole goddamn thing. I try to clean up the blood, but the shit has dried already and is a son of a bitch to get rid of. I eat the omelet with toast and drink the coffee with a whole bunch of sugar.