Tweak Read online

  They released me thirty days later and I moved into a halfway house in the city. I stayed sober three days. Then, one night, I said I was going to a meeting, but drove to hook up crystal instead. The car just seemed to drive itself across the bridge to Oakland. I never came back that night. When my parents found out, I was forced to go into another thirty-day program in Napa. After that I managed to stay clean for over a month, but when I went away to college in Amherst, Massachusetts, I quickly relapsed again. This time, however, I was able to hide it from my parents. As my behavior grew more erratic (stealing credit cards, writing checks to myself) and my lies more improbable (I just wanted to buy presents for Jasper and Daisy), my dad continued to dismiss what was happening—I was wasting away in front of him.

  By the time I finished my first year of school, my using had progressed to the point where I could no longer really hide it. At first it was just drinking and smoking pot, a little acid, but then I started asking around to get my hands on some meth. But since there was no crystal I could find in western Massachusetts, I started using heroin. I’d drive my girlfriend’s car into the slums of Hollyhock and just walk around till the offers started coming in. There was little doubt as to what a young white kid was doing wandering those streets. But the drug was expensive and snorting the white granulated powder was a waste.

  That was my excuse to start sticking myself with needles. Putting the drug straight into the vein allowed me to conserve it a little more. I stole the syringes from the science lab. I taught myself to shoot up by looking at a diagram on the Internet. It was a messy process. I’d miss the vein and pump the drug right into my muscles. It would burn so bad. I didn’t realize the veins were just under the skin’s surface, so I’d dig way too deep. Before long, my arms were covered in puncture marks and I’d lost a lot of weight.

  When I came home for summer vacation, I had my first experience with opiate withdrawals. It was just like in the movies—I was throwing up, shivering, sweating, scratching at my skin like there were termites crawling underneath.

  At first I tried lying to my parents, saying I had a stomach flu or something. The first moment I could get away, I went to get some meth from my friends in the city.

  Once I started IVing that drug, well, that was pretty much the end. After being off crystal for so long, my tolerance had gone back to nothing. Shooting it, the effect was so powerful, I plunged immediately into a period of about a week where, to this day, I have no idea what I did.

  I came to out of this blackout in my bed at my parents’ house. I could hear crying from the living room. My little brother’s voice was shattered by tears.

  “Where is it? Where is it?”

  I felt that familiar sickness in my stomach.

  “Are you sure it was in there?” my dad asked.

  “Yes,” wailed Jasper. “I had five dollars in there. Daisy, you took it.”

  “NO, I DIDN’T!” She was crying too and screaming.

  I got out of bed and started to pack. I didn’t remember taking the money, but I knew I had.

  There was nowhere for me to go, really, but I couldn’t stay. I filled my bag with as much as I could carry. I hoisted it on my shoulder, put my eyes on the floor, and started walking out of there.

  Out in the living room, my dad and stepmom stood blocking my exit—their faces red and contorted.

  “Where are you going?” my father demanded, on the verge of yelling.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Nic, we know you’re using again.”

  “Yeah,” I said—my head down. “I’m not coming back.”

  “This is bullshit,” my stepmom exploded, stomping across the room and slamming a door somewhere.

  “You can’t just leave,” my dad said, the tears coming now.

  “I have to.”

  “We’ll get you help.”

  “No. I need to do this.”

  “Nic, no, stop.” He reached out and tried to physically stop me. I pushed him hard.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I screamed. “Jesus Christ, you people suffocate me.”

  The truth was, I didn’t want to stop. It’s not like I enjoyed stealing or hurting my dad, or whatever. I mean, I hated it. But I was so scared of coming off the drugs. It was like this horrible vicious cycle. The more I used, the more I did things I was ashamed of, and the more I had to use so I never had to face that. When I reached a certain point with my drug use, going back just seemed like too far a journey. Accepting responsibility, admitting guilt, making restitution, hell, just saying I’m sorry—it had become too daunting. All I could do was move forward and keep doing everything in my power to forget the past. So I marched out into the hot summer air. I hitchhiked to the bus stop and made my way to my friend Akira’s.

  After that my parents really stopped believing anything I said. But Lauren obviously hasn’t taken things as far as I have. Her parents are still willing to give her the benefit of the doubt or something. So she leaves me alone in that motel room and I write and draw for a while, listen to CDs, then actually sleep a few hours. When I wake up, I’m hungry and almost out of meth. I call Gack and he agrees to meet me at twelve thirty in the TL. I drive to North Beach to get breakfast.

  When I was little, maybe six or seven, my dad and I lived at the top of California Street. It was a high-rise apartment that looked out on the cable cars and the gothic towers of Grace Cathedral. It was across the street from a small park with a sandbox, swings, and a wooden play structure. My dad would take me there to play in the mornings, then we’d walk together down to North Beach—the Italian district of San Francisco. We’d go to Caffe Trieste, a rustic coffee shop on the corner of Grant. I would hold his calloused hand and watch the pigeons and the cracks in the sidewalk. Inside the café, my dad would order me hot chocolate and a raspberry pastry ring. We would sit at a corner table—me drawing and my father writing in a notebook. He would drink cappuccinos. Sometimes we wouldn’t write or draw at all; we’d just talk. I’d run my fingers over the mosaicked tabletop and smell the coffee and ask my dad questions about things. He would make jokes and tell me stories. Opera would play from the jukebox.

  After breakfast maybe we’d walk over to City Lights Books—a damp, earthy-smelling printing house and bookshop. We’d walk past the sex show parlors and strip bars. After dark, women in tight leather costumes would hang around in front of the entrances, luring in passing johns. I remember thinking they were superheroes—Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Supergirl. I would talk with them and they all knew my name.

  Driving through North Beach this morning, I look out at the streets of my childhood. I stop my car and walk up to Caffe Trieste. Men and women stand outside talking and smoking. The sky has opened up blue and clear—the wind blowing hard off the bay. I go inside and order some coffee and a sandwich. I sit in the back at the same old table—the same old music coming from the speakers. I shoot up the last of the gram in their bathroom. The place is small and poorly lit. Someone keeps banging on the door ’cause it’s taking me so long to find a vein. Once I hit, I start to pump in the mixture, but my hand shakes and I shoot a bunch of it into the muscle of my arm. It burns something terrible and I groan in pain. My whole right arm goes numb and aches. I curse loudly and go to meet Gack. There is blood all over my arm when I walk outta there.

  Gack has me meet him in front of the hotel where he lives with his dad. It is named after some saint, but it looks like hell—barred windows, the paint peeling down to nothing, stripped away. He has a teener for me. I ask him if he wants to shoot some up with me right then, since I pretty much wasted the last one. He agrees and we go inside.

  The woman who runs the hotel is Indian and wears a traditional sari, with a bindi on her forehead and everything. She makes me give her my driver’s license in order to go up. She scowls through her thick, oversize glasses, her hair pulled back tight.

  “You stay only one hour. Otherwise you pay.”

  I follow Gack up the rotted-out, stained, carpet
ed stairs, to the third floor. Hollowed-out men and women pace the halls, smoking cigarettes and calling out to us with offers of different crap we can buy.

  “Hey, kids,” says a stoned-out-looking black man with a bald, shiny head. “I gotta get rid of this keyboard. You wanna buy it?” He holds up a small electric piano out for us to see.

  “Does it work?” asks Gack.

  “Yeah, man, it works good. You wanna try it out?”

  “Sure. Nic, you gotta second?”

  “Sure, sure, fine, whatever.”

  We follow the man back to his room. What it looks like is, well, just trashed. The bed has no sheets or anything and it looks like it is covered in dried blood. The floor is all ash and wrappers and porno mags and beer cans and tinfoil and videotapes. The man introduces himself as Jim. He shakes our hands. He clears off some clothes from the bed. He plugs the piano in, switches it on, and plays a simple chord progression, singing some R & B love song. His voice is deep and moving.

  “Right on. How much?” asks Gack.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty?”

  “All right, ten. Look, man, I just wanna get high, that’s all. Ten bucks’ll get me through the night.”

  “All right, ten bucks.”

  Gack hands him the money. Somehow he manages to pull exactly ten dollars out of his pocket, without exposing the rest of his wad. The man takes the money quickly and stuffs it in his jeans. “Right on, right on.”

  We walk back out into the hallway and into Gack’s room.

  “This is so great,” says Gack, holding up the keyboard.

  “Yeah, that’ll be fun to mess around with.”

  “No, man, you don’t understand. This is a start, a first step in recognizing my dream. I’m gonna start making music.”

  I don’t know what to say about that.

  Gack’s room is even more trashed than Jim’s was. Gay porn and cigarette butts and ripped paper and wrappers and shoes and jars of peanut butter and boxes of cookies are scattered all over the floor and bed. There is a washbasin in one corner filled with dishes. A computer put together with mismatching parts sits on the dresser. The fluorescent lights shine too bright and buzz overhead. Gack sets about clearing off a space to try out the keyboard.

  “Hey, man,” I say. “You got any more rigs or what?”

  “Yeah. There are some cleans in that bag over there.” He points to a brown paper bag on the bedside table.

  I reach over and find the needles and set about making us two big-ass shots. Gack asks if I want him to shoot me up. I hold out my arm and he inserts the point effortlessly and efficiently right into my vein. There is something chilling and erotic about the whole thing. He pumps the drug up inside me and I cough and feel the rush and it is so lovely, I mean, really.

  Gack shoots himself up and I say, “Hey, you wanna walk around with me or something?”

  “Walk around?”

  “Yeah, man, I’ve been away from the city for, like, over two years.”

  “All right, cool.”

  We walk back down the stairs. I get my ID back from the Indian woman and then we’re out on the street, moving fast down toward the water.

  “Was that really your dad the other day?” I ask, just trying to think of something to say.

  Gack stuffs his hands in his pockets, his arms jerking convulsively. “Yeah, man.”

  “You live together?”

  “Uh, yeah. I never knew him until a year ago. I was adopted when I was, like, two or something.”

  “Weird, man. How’d you all hook up again?”

  “I guess he just decided he wanted to meet me, so he came and found me at my adopted parents’ house.”

  “And you just went to go live with him?”

  “Yeah. He’s pretty cool. Sometimes he’ll bring guys back to the room, which is kinda fucked up.”

  “Guys?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s gay.”

  We walk on. The clouds are blowing fast overhead and I keep smoking cigarettes and bumming them out to Gack. Gack talks a lot of nonsense about different things—his plans for the future, things like that. I’m not sure where the idea to ask Gack to help me comes from. Suddenly I just trust him completely and I come out with it, walking down Market—toward the shadow of the Bay Bridge.

  “Look, man,” I say. “I’m just puttin’ this out there—so hear me out for a second. I’ve got about twenty-five hundred dollars left, okay. I’d been sober eighteen months, working, and I saved that up. Now, with a habit like I’ve got, I’m gonna burn through that pretty quick, unless I can figure out some way to make some money. So here’s what I was thinking. I don’t really know you, right? And you don’t know me, but you’ve been cool to me so far and I have this feeling about you.”

  “You felt it too, huh?” he says, stopping to pick up a crumpled bag on the sidewalk. He looks inside, finds nothing, and then throws it down again.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I knew we were gonna be friends.”

  “What?”

  “Yep, when I saw you that first day.”

  “Maybe I did too. Look, you know, I really respect you and all and I was just thinking we could buy, like, some big quantity of meth and then break it down and sell it together.”

  “Word. We should cut it.”

  “Cut it?”

  “Yeah, man. We’ll buy a bunch of really good shit, then cut it with, like, Epson salts or something. I’ll sell that shit so fast, man, and we’ll be able to use for free, maybe get a place to stay. I could, like, work for you. We could start our own syndicate, man. We’ll get walkie-talkies and shit.”

  “Well, just think about it, man.”

  “Fo’sure.”

  “And you know someone that could get us quantity for pretty cheap?”

  “I think so. Let me just make some calls. You wanna do this now?”

  “Well, uh, all right, sure. And, hey, do you know where I can get some heroin?”

  “No doubt. What you want me to work on first?”

  “The H, I guess.”

  “Cool, brother. Let me see your phone. Bullet’ll be able to help us out.”

  “Bullet?”

  “Yeah. I’ll page him.”

  “Word.”

  “Just let me get another cigarette.”

  I give him two.

  Bullet is homeless. He is tall and thin, thin, with a carved-up face and greasy hair slicked back. His nose is sort of twisted and broken. There’s an off-white scar running down his face and his Adam’s apple sticks out dramatically. He wears a backward baseball hat, loose-fitting pants, combat boots, and he smells like stale sweat and urine. His walk is clumsy, with those spindly legs of his and a head that is continuously bobbing back and forth.

  “Gack, man, how come you never call me?” He whines when he talks—always.

  “Dude, I’ve been busy.”

  “But you guys wanna score some dope, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, I got a number—but maybe we could work out a deal or something before I give it up.”

  Gack and I drove to meet Bullet at the Safeway on Church and Market. It is a well-known hangout for street kids and runaways. For one thing, you can go into Safeway and graze out of the dried fruit and nut bins without too much trouble. Plus there is one of those private, self-cleaning toilets out front that is great to shoot up in. It is already getting to be dark and the lights on Twin Peaks are flickering on and off, on and off.

  “A deal like what?”

  “Like you give me a nice fat shot in exchange for the hookup.”

  “No problem.”

  “The girl’s name is Candy. Here’s the number. Don’t lose it.” He writes it on the front page of my sister’s diary that I’ve stolen. There is a drawing of a girl with pigtails pointing at blotchy squares on a wall. Underneath it, Daisy’d written: “We are in L.A. with Nic. We went to a museum. We saw Napoleon things.” That had been this past January, just two months ear
lier. My family had driven down to see me and we’d all gone to the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard. Daisy went on to describe the museum and what she ate for lunch. Then she wrote something about seeing me and how I looked sad. She said it made her stomach feel all “fluddery.”

  Reading it, I know just how she felt. My stomach feels fluddery. I wonder if there might be a way to get the diary back to her. It was the last thing I ever wanted to take from her and yet, well, I did it. That’s always how it goes for me, isn’t it?

  Anyway, I call Candy. Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her, but I manage to convince her to meet me at the video store around the corner. She shows up in a yellow Cadillac with a tattered fur coat and dyed black hair that is light at the roots. She wears thick pancake makeup over broken-out skin. She is probably around thirty-something.

  “You want two grams, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  She hands me four tiny balls wrapped in colored wax paper. I give her eighty bucks.

  “This is great,” she says. “Do you always buy this much at one time?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, call me any time.”

  When I get back to my car, Bullet and Gack are hanging out, laughing and making fun of each other.

  “Gack told me your plan,” says Bullet. “You guys are gonna start your own little dealing syndicate, huh?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well,” he says. “You’ll never be able to do it without my help.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause every crime syndicate needs some muscle.” And with that, he pulls out a giant bowie knife from somewhere and waves it through the air.

  I suck in a bunch of breath all at once.

  “You got that junk?” he demands.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, let’s go then.” He puts the knife away and we drive down some side street to shoot up.