Is This All There Is?
My new job kept me excited enough to get through the holidays and into 1989. There was no doubt that 1988 had been a better year than 1987, since 1987 featured both a serious suicide attempt and a rape. Discovering LSD and freebase cocaine seemed like a step up.
I also switched from living with an ancient, hard-core biker to living with a young, pathological liar. This felt like more of a lateral move.
Work kept me busy and made me feel independent. But Gregg was still my drug connection, so I kept him around more often than not.
We used Steve, with his bad teeth, bad breath and completely rotted brain, to get our marijuana. I didn’t want Steve in my house, so Gregg walked miles to Steve’s house, disappearing for hours, often coming back with only a single joint. Steve frequently shared his own stash with friends, but as dumb as Steve was, Steve knew Gregg. Gregg never had any money.
Lots of people avoided selling drugs to Gregg.
For LSD we returned to Al, who was still living in his mother’s attic and planning to commit suicide at 30. Our acid trips were few and far between in winter, since sitting in a dark attic and listening to Frank Zappa for hours was not my idea of a good time. Staring at the walls was incapacitating.
No wonder Al wanted to kill himself.
With Kurt’s declaration that I was a coke whore came the end of cocaine in all forms. No one offered it to me in the bars anymore, either. I missed it terribly but at least I didn’t perpetuate any rumors.
Drinking was cheap and easy. I went to the bar at the end of the street, the one with one glass block window and no name, and I drank draft after draft after draft. I begged occasionally for quarters for the jukebox and then forgot to listen when my songs played. So I dumped in more quarters.
As I drank, I stared into the mirror in the bathroom at my empty eyes. I became stupid-drunk and falling down every night of the week, and didn’t leave the bar until it closed.
Sometimes Gregg was with me; sometimes I told him to get lost.
I had been in therapy for nine months, analyzing dreams and talking about Gregg and Larry and all the idiotic decisions I’d made with men over the years. I didn’t understand why these things kept happening to me.
I felt secure working at the museum because I managed to get there on time almost every day. Often I had very little sleep the night before but I didn’t want to disappoint my colleagues. I only called in sick about once a month, when I couldn’t possibly lift my fifty-pound-dead-weight head off the pillow, and they were understanding about it.
I even had something called “paid sick leave” so I was paid for those days, which gave me incentive to get back to work the following day. I wanted very badly to keep that job. And I was young enough, at 24, to drink every night and still show up in the mornings.
But a nagging question started in the back of my brain and worked its way to the forefront – a question that accompanied the dead eyes I saw in the bathroom mirror at the bar.
I started to wonder, without consciously debating it: Is this all there is?
And then I drank some more.
