Tweak

  If Lauren’s parents know she’s relapsed, I figure I’m pretty much fucked. They’re probably gonna come home early from their trip and then all this luxury living is over. I bring Lauren’s coffee down to her and find myself kinda wishing I never called the goddamn ambulance in the first place. She would have been fine. But, of course, I had no way of knowing that.

  I have trouble waking her up and when I do, she cries some.

  “You gotta call ’em,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want me to leave you alone?”

  “Just for a couple minutes. Hey…can you get me off?”

  I do. I hit a vein on her wrist. It’s the only one I can find.

  After that I go outside and smoke cigarettes in the backyard. The wind blows patterns in the cypresses and across the long grass. There’re three corgis out there that I’ve never noticed before. I wonder how long it’s been since they’ve been fed. They all bark at me, but I ignore it. Somehow the warmth and the clear sky seem to be taunting me. I’m aware of how pale I’m becoming. Maybe I should go swimming, but I feel weak. Even the meth isn’t getting me that high anymore.

  I’m on my third cigarette when Lauren opens the back door. She’s sobbing like crazy. Her face is all contorted and everything. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Me?” I feel scared for some reason—my stomach drops out all at once.

  “Please,” she whines.

  So I go in and see the phone is off the hook, lying on the bed. I pick the thing up and sit down, the words catching in my throat as I say, “Yeah, hello?”

  The man’s voice on the other end is broken with tears. He has a refined, sort of dignified Southern accent.

  “You’re Nic?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember meeting you before. You went to Lauren’s high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nic, Lauren tells me you saved her life last night. Son, I can’t tell you how much that means to me. I love my daughter very much and I—well—I love you for saving her, you know?” He chokes on that one.

  “I know you want what’s best for her too,” he continues. “That’s why I’m asking you—begging you—to help me help Lauren, okay?” There’s been a patronizing tone in his voice the whole time he’s talking to me, like he’s addressing a small child. Still, I play along.

  “Yeah, of course.”

  He goes on to describe some of Lauren’s history in treatment centers. He tells me that she’s a drug addict and can’t use like normal people and blah, blah, blah. I listen and don’t say anything. He asks me to try and convince Lauren to go to her therapist’s house in Santa Cruz for the week. He realizes she doesn’t wanna go back to rehab, but surely that’d be a good compromise. I agree, telling him I’ll do whatever I can. He says he knows he can trust me. I feel pretty sick inside.

  “Okay, let me talk to Lauren again,” he says.

  I pass the phone over.

  Lauren scratches at the back of her neck, says “okay” a bunch of times, then hangs up.

  “Jules is coming over after work to take me down to Santa Cruz.”

  “That’s your shrink, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I said I’d make you go.”

  “I don’t have to, you know?” She looks up at me. I see how glossy and red her eyes have become—like they are covered by a layer of wax paper.

  “I’ll pack my things right now,” she says. “I’ll go away with you.”

  I think about that. Honestly, I can’t see Lauren cutting it living in my car with me. I need her to have this house and access to her parents’ money. It’s not that I don’t care about her, but I’m just trying to be realistic. We gotta play things carefully—not throw away what we got working for us. I tell her this and she cries some. I drink the warm white wine from the night before, but she doesn’t want any. We make love tiredly to pass the time. We take a shower and then she packs and I get whatever shit I have lying around. Just as I’m about to leave, Lauren stops me.

  “Look,” she says. “Why don’t you stay here?”

  “Here?”

  She says she’ll leave me her car and keys to the house. She says she’ll go down to Jules’s for one night—that’ll appease everybody—then I can come pick her up.

  “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you, too.”

  She makes me promise not to let anybody stay here while she’s gone. Of course I agree.

  Then I leave, not wanting her psychiatrist to see me here. I drive Lauren’s car.

  It’s a funny thing about psychiatrists and therapists. I mean, I’ve been in therapy my whole goddamn life. It was sort of my dad’s religion or something like that. After my mom moved away, they made me go to this shrink in the city. She was a large woman who wore big, flowing dresses and had a furry upper lip. Mostly I would just play with the dolls and toys in her office. She had a little wooden house that I would put the dolls in. I remember her asking me, in this very level voice, where each of the dolls lived. I pointed to the different rooms in the dollhouse.

  “This is where the daddy lives,” I said, showing her one side of the house. “And this is where the mommy lives.”

  I gestured to the other side of the house.

  “And what about that doll?” she asked, indicating the one still in my hand.

  “Oh, that’s the baby,” I said. “The baby doesn’t have anywhere to live—he sleeps outside.”

  She scribbled in her notepad.

  Still, for all the therapy I had, none of it ever really fixed that feeling of torn-apartness inside of me. I learned how to express myself, that was all. And, for whatever reason, identifying the root cause of my problem—like fear of abandonment or something—didn’t change a goddamn thing. I could see quite clearly why I acted a certain way, but that wouldn’t make me any different. I sought out craziness. I was attracted to it. No therapy could take that away.

  One of the first serious relationships I had was with this girl named Lyric. She was a year younger than me and—went to my rival high school. She was a virtuous, good-natured scholastic wonder who ended up going to Harvard. Thing was, she was also bulimic and would get so goddamn drunk with me. Even back then, I mean, when I was only sixteen, my drinking and drugging had already started controlling my life. She was nowhere near as bad as I was—though we would usually start drinking around midday and keep going from there.

  This was the kind of girl I always ended up with. I have this strange magnetic pull or something that draws them toward me—and me to them. Knowing that it was all related to my childhood didn’t do a goddamn thing.

  So I leave Lauren’s, driving her car to the TL, the keys to her parents’ house in my pocket. I listen to music and feel so blessed—like the greatest hustler in the goddamn world. Not that it’s all an act. I see a lot of myself in Lauren—the little child, the desperate self-destructiveness, the way she tries not to care.

  I call Gack from a pay phone and we agree to meet in front of his hotel. I’m actually getting kinda low on meth so we gotta re-up later. I go to the bank and withdraw a bunch of money. I have to go in and see the teller directly ’cause I had to throw away my card. Amazingly I managed to cancel my card before Joe was able to steal any money from me, but I still have only a little over a thousand dollars left. It’s frightening how fast the money is going, but I figure Gack and I can up our dealing and make it back.

  The sun is falling lower in the sky, but it’s still clear and hot. It’s almost six o’clock. There’s a feeling, like, well, like fate is on my side. Any doubts are blotted out by drugs and the music in Lauren’s car and blah, blah, blah. I’ve got the windows down and a cigarette in my mouth. I cry at how good my life is—or at least, that’s what I think at the time.

  Gack shows me that he’s got new shoes on.

  “My dad bought ’em for me,” he says.

  They’re black skate shoes with thick laces.

  “Cool
, man.”

  “So how’s Lauren?”

  I tell him about her dad and the therapist in Santa Cruz and all.

  “You got keys?” he says.

  “Yeah. Hey, we should pick your girl up and bring her over. I’d like to meet her.”

  “Word.”

  “I need to buy some more shit, too.”

  “Cool. I got an idea.”

  We drive to Church and Market and cruise around there for a while. I try to get a little more of Gack’s story out of him. I keep telling him that this whole thing will make a great book.

  “My street education,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, man, you’re doing pretty good. You got some crazy angels guiding you.”

  “You too, man. I mean, what a great thing it was to meet you. I’m gonna pitch it, man, maybe to the SF Weekly or something.”

  “Dude, I’ll be famous.”

  “You deserve it.”

  Gack tells me about his foster parents, who live out in Napa. He ran away to the city when he was twelve. Until a little over a year ago, he’d been going back and forth between the streets and their trailer near Sonoma. He’d lived in different squats and abandoned houses throughout the city. He’d go home only when he ran out of options. Of course, once his real dad came back to find him, he moved in with him. His dad had a bad back and needed a lot of help getting around—plus he was on a shitload of pain meds. Gack doesn’t know much about his dad’s background.

  Gack saw his mom from time to time. She lived up in Napa too. She had six years sober—going to twelve-step meetings and things. He guessed he liked her all right. He seems pretty okay with the whole situation—though maybe those tracks on his arm suggest otherwise.

  Driving, I can’t get Gack to say just exactly what we’re looking for. He keeps repeating, “It’ll reveal itself.”

  “What will?” I ask.

  “We’ll see.”

  We drive and drive. The bars are just starting to open and the early dining crowds are gathering around the different restaurants on Market. The street kids are sitting around the front of the Safeway—looking to get high with no money, somehow. I see some of the kids we’ve been dealing to—not that I know any of their names. Absently I wonder about their parents, families, childhoods, whatever. They all sort of dress the same—tight pants with a lot of zippers, boots, hooded sweatshirts—as much black as possible.

  We circle the block a few more times.

  “There,” says Gack, pointing.

  “What?”

  “There. Pull over a second.”

  I wait while Gack goes running off down the street. I try to find just the right song on the CD player. I put that Talking Heads live album on track ten, “This Must Be the Place.” Somehow I just seem to flip right to it.

  It’s funny ’cause this was the song my parents’ friends Tim and Susan danced to at their wedding. They held the thing at our house in Point Reyes. Susan actually used to babysit me when I was little. But as I got older, I became really good friends with her boyfriend, Tim. Tim started surfing around the time I did and we’d go down to Santa Cruz together. We’d surf all day at Four Mile, or the Hook, or Steamers—floating in the cold, cold water, talking about music or whatever. We’d leave at, like, six in the morning and get coffee and muffins at the Beach Café. We’d stay out for hours, then go get burritos at El Toro—or Cole’s BBQ, if we were in Santa Cruz. Tim would make mixes for me of all the new music he was constantly buying at Amoeba, this huge record store on Haight. He’d take me to clubs with his brother-in-law, Xi. We’d dance and play pool and stuff like that. Tim was a great dancer.

  Xi introduced me to philosophy and the writings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Camus. He is from China—born at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The two guys, Tim and Xi, were such heroes of mine. I benefited so much from hanging out with them.

  At the wedding, a mariachi band played in our garden as Tim and Susan walked down the aisle. The DJ was this, like, six-foot-five, thug-lookin’ dude from some bar south of Market. Tim and Susan danced to this Talking Heads song together. They held each other and danced. The lyrics go something like: “I’ll love you till my heart stops—love you till I’m dead.”

  Listening to this song now, I think back to that night. I shucked oysters for the guests, helped set up speakers, helped build a shelter from the light rain over the dance floor. And, of course, I danced and talked and then woke up early the next morning to go surfing out at Drakes Estero.

  And now Gack is coming up on the car with some older girl who’s got this long, curling, natural red hair; white skin; and freckles, freckles, freckles. She gets into the back and Gack sits next to me and says, “This is Angela. She needs a ride back down Market. Can we do that for her?”

  I introduce myself. She keeps telling me how nice my car is and I try to get her to understand that it’s not mine—it’s just some girl’s and I’m like Gack, homeless and struggling. The only difference between us is this crazy stroke of luck, or God, or fate, or whatever—plus I saved up some money working while I was clean and blah, blah, blah.

  Gack is giving me that look, like, shut the fuck up—or more like pity that I always feel the need to explain myself, obsessed with showing people who I am so they’ll like me, or I don’t know what. I need to chill out, shoot some dope, and change this fucking CD.

  When we get to some alley off Market, Gack and Angela say they’re gonna go up to her place a minute. I’ve calmed myself down by smoking cigarettes and just forcing myself to be quiet. Neither Gack nor Angela talked much in the car, which always makes me nervous—but I kept telling myself it was all right. So now they walk off down the alley, but then Gack runs back and leans in the window.

  “Dude, I need your wallet.”

  “What?”

  “She’s gonna hook me up—but she needs to think it’s my money.”

  “That girl?”

  “Trust me.”

  I hand him my wallet.

  I shoot a little heroin and nod, nod, nod waiting for them to come back. I’m actually in some weird dream/hallucination thing when he knocks on the side door and I jump ten miles.

  He’s giggling like a maniac.

  “Dude, this shit is so good.”

  “How much you get?”

  “Two teeners.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “So we gonna go divide this stuff up—cut it—slang it. Word?”

  “You wanna go to Lauren’s?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “How much should I put aside for us?”

  “Half.”

  “Word.”

  We drive back to Lauren’s. I order us a bunch of dim sum from this place on Geary and a six-pack of Tsingtao.

  “You should tell your girl to come over,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, she’s never shot meth before. You think I could borrow some to get her off with?”

  “Dude, of course.”

  We eat pork buns and chow mein, drink beer, smoke cigarettes in the kitchen.

  “There are so many rooms,” says Gack.

  “Yeah.”

  “I ain’t ever been in no house like this before.”

  “Word.”

  “I’m gonna go get Erin.”

  “Take your time.”

  He leaves and I decide to check my e-mail on Lauren’s stepmom’s computer. As I’m walking up the carpeted stairs, though, I hear this strange yapping noise over and over. I walk down and open the back door. The three dogs are barking at the door. I let them in and hunt around for some dog food to give them. I guess I feel kinda bad about leaving ’em out there. It’s wet and cold outside.

  Lauren’s stepmom’s office is on the second floor and piled high with papers and photos of Lauren—but more of Lauren’s half sister. She looks around my little brother’s age, but with white-blond hair like I used to have. I log on and check my e-mail. There’s not one. No one’s written me. No
one has even tried begging me to come home. There’s nothing from my family—nothing from anyone. I wonder if I need to wait for Gack and his girl before trying that crystal. I decide I might as well wait—but in the meantime I can drink a bottle of red wine. I pick out a decent one and set about trying to write a story idea about Gack and Bullet and everyone. I figure I’ll send it out to the SF Weekly or the Guardian. Writing usually comes so quickly to me, but I spend at least an hour obsessively trying to get the perfect words out. Even after all that, what remains on the page is virtually unintelligible.

  Suddenly I’m scared. Writing has never been a struggle for me before. Somehow the idea of being this drug-fueled, outsider artist has always been really appealing to me. I remember this artist I knew in New York who was a recovering heroin addict and a big-time painter. He used to tell me that if being loaded helped him create better work, then he would definitely not have gotten sober. His work was better when he was off dope. After all, he said, art is the most important thing. I believed the same thing at the time.

  The doorbell rings. I go down and let Gack and his girl in. The trio of dogs follow me to the front door.

  Erin looks like she’s maybe eleven or twelve. She’s totally undeveloped—with a high soft voice and a tiny nose. Her blond hair is choppy and short. She has piercings all over. She wears an oversize hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and Converse tennis shoes. Her brown eyes are so wide open. She literally gasps stepping into the house. “This place is beautiful.”

  “Wine?” I offer her my glass and she drinks from it. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  The girl is so nervous, she can’t really talk. I put on some music—this old Amon Tobin CD—and Gack gets shots together for all of us.

  “First time, huh?” I say, feeling ashamed of myself suddenly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’re not gonna give her too much,” he says. “She’s got school tomorrow.”

  I watch Gack, noticing that his version of not too much is way fucking more than I would have wanted to shoot my first time—especially if this shit is as good as he says it is. Still, I don’t say anything about it. Instead, I ask Erin about high school and her friends and things. She can’t really answer with anything more than one syllable.