Kurt and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time together, but the time we shared was quality.
Or so I imagined.
We actually spent most of our time with Fish, and often with Fish’s other friends. We did nothing but smoke cigarettes, freebase cocaine, and drink warm beer. Fortunately, I didn’t need much beer when I was doing so much cocaine.
Plus, I only cared about Kurt. I was crazy for him. He barely looked at me, but I spent most of my time staring at the side of his face: his long eyelashes, the tiny crinkles around his eyes. If Kurt didn’t know I was gawking, his friends probably did.
Of course everyone was a junkie, so nobody was really taking stock of the relationships in the room. Everyone was focused on the coke.
While I stared, Kurt paid almost no attention to me. He rarely spoke, he didn’t look my way, and he only smiled when the other guys laughed, usually at a sexist remark. I was oblivious.
In fact, I’d developed a super power. Whenever I smoked cocaine, I became telepathic.
While everyone was laughing about really dumb stuff, I looked around the room and analyzed the thoughts of all the other people.
Because I could do that.
At the end of the table, that woman with the dark, super skinny legs was thinking, You guys need to gimme some respect. I heard her clear as day, but she wasn’t talking.
I heard Fish: I am the most important man in the world. He didn’t say it, but I heard it.
I was as sure of these thoughts as if they’d been spoken aloud. I believed it was an added benefit of the drug. But I was only interested in Kurt’s thoughts.
I heard things like, You are so beautiful, I’m afraid to look at you.
I heard: I have never wanted anyone the way I want you.
I heard: You are my soul mate.
And I sent telepathic messages to Kurt, too: Please be with me.
I would telepathically emit: I love your eyes.
And: Be with me NOW. Please, just be with me. I craved that physical connection with him. I needed to confirm his love; sex was the only way I knew how to do that.
I sent repeated, urgent messages to Kurt without ever uttering a word: I’m falling in love with you.
One day, quite abruptly, Kurt pushed back his chair and looked at me.
“C’mon,” he said, actually speaking with his mouth.
Finally, I thought. It’s time!
I followed Kurt upstairs into a bedroom. Immediately he leaned down and bit my shirt, pulling it up from my stomach with his teeth. We did not kiss. We had sex on the floor, Kurt writhing underneath me like a venomous snake.
Afterward Kurt showed me the skin on his back, raw and bleeding. He shared these post-sex gouges and scrapes as though they were a badge. Then he walked naked, emaciated, across the hall to a bathtub with a handheld shower. He hopped in and rinsed himself off.
Kurt didn’t ask me to join him. I was so happy to have finally consummated the relationship, I didn’t even recognize that the whole experience was rather lousy.
With our clothes on, I followed Kurt back downstairs. He told Fish, “I’m gonna take her home.” Fish handed us the pipe, which we both hit, then the car keys.
Kurt and I drove back to my place in silence.
You’re so beautiful, I telepathized. I completely love you.
Kurt transmitted nothing. I went inside alone.
Recovering addicts sometimes say, “My worst day clean is still better than my best day high.”
I have been testing that theory for more than 30 years. Every time it gets so bad that I think I can’t take it anymore, I pull out the file in my brain of my very best day high.
That night at the lake was my very best high day.
The summer air felt incredible; the sky was amazing. The guys played music and laughed amongst themselves; I had the whole evening to myself, out in summer’s overwhelming natural beauty.
I watched a spider spin its web – a magical experience that would never be replicated. I wandered through the little neighborhood of tiny houses, all identical yet completely unique. I imagined the families inside, considering the breadth of it all, realizing for maybe the first time that I was one with the world, that humans are just animals, living our lives in unison.
It was like watching a National Geographic special about spiders and people. The way I have always seen the world is from a distance – and this was the ultimate distant exploration.
I don’t remember having any meaningful human interaction. Maybe that’s why I had such a glorious time.
And if I’d quit drinking when I saw the shooting star, I never would have had that day.
It’s no coincidence that all of my “good” non-sober days happened when I was outside appreciating nature. If I walked in the woods, climbed a tree, played on a playground, or went four-wheeling in the snow … that was always a good day.
I was sober for many years before I realized that drugs weren’t the key to making those days wonderful.
Nature made those days brilliant.
Not surprisingly, I turn to nature now when I’m having a really bad day sober. I go for a walk in the woods. I go kayaking or build a snowman or look for rainbows. I watch the birds at the feeders, the deer munching leaves in the yard. Nature is still glorious.
But that beautiful day at the lake – the one with the spider? It could never rival even my worst day sober.
I was so high that night – the way I was every night – that I couldn’t do anything but stare at the spider. I couldn’t learn anything from it, or commit it to memory, or even discover what kind of spider I watched. Like most days, I was a walking zombie.
I couldn’t connect.
Now though, even on my worst days, I am able to feel. I am able to be here, to be present and fully engaged.
Sometimes feeling hurts – it can be agonizingly painful, like being unable to breathe. Still, I know now that feeling pain is better than being dead inside. Drinking and drugs kill all feelings – joy included. I can only feel real happiness when I am completely drug-free.
Drugs didn’t give me the miracle of nature, the spider, the lake, the stars, the summer air. I just happened to be there that day. Drugs only guarantee that I have no control over where I go, what I do, or what comes next.
I can’t choose anything if I’m high. I can only go wherever the drugs take me.
One day – one day, in 15 years of intoxication – I watched a spider spin a web. That was cool. But it’s nowhere near as cool as waking up in the morning and going wherever I want to go.
Now, today – every day – I can choose anything … and today I choose to be present.
One summer night I was wandering down the street toward a bar in my cutoff jeans shorts and bare feet, as always, when Fish’s car pulled up. He held his arm out the window at me, a sort of wave.
The car pulled over. I hadn’t even been looking for Kurt, yet there he was in Fish’s car again – this time in the passenger seat.
“C’mon,” Kurt said. I forgot all about the bar.
A new guy was in back. “Ed don’t bite,” Fish said, then pulled out.
We drove way out of town. We landed in a secluded spot near a lake, where the guys hopped out and popped the trunk. Inside was enough drug paraphernalia to ensure that we could all go to jail for a very long time. I never questioned it; everyone did a tab of LSD immediately.
Tripping with Kurt? Yes, please!
Fish set up a workshop of sorts in his trunk, and started making rocks out of cocaine again.
“Is this crack?” I whispered to Kurt. I’d only recently heard about crack.
He shrugged. “Freebase,” said Kurt.
“Isn’t that the same thing as crack?”
Kurt shrugged again. And that ended the conversation. They passed the pipe.
LSD and freebase cocaine was the ultimate high. Combined with the gorgeous summer night, the full moon shining on the lake, and the tunes playing at just the right volume from the car radio, I was in heaven.
The guys were jovial and chatting with one another, but I had nothing to add to their conversation. I was more interested in the trees and light trails of leaves and sparkling dots on the water.
I wandered away from the guys to explore nature more fully. About fifty yards from the car, where the guys huddled and mumbled, I caught a glimpse of a yellow dot. I walked to where I could see it more closely.
With only the stray rays from the headlights, it was hard to find – but I found it. In the dark of night, there on a leaf, was a huge yellow-and-black spider, stealthily moving amongst the branches of shrubbery. As it continued darting back and forth, I leaned in closer. With only the moonlight as my guide, I realized that the spider was spinning a web.
I’d never seen anything more spectacular in my life. I stood and watched its intricate movements, its repetitive patterns, stalking from one space to another, silky threads combining to make a glorious, completely unique structure.
Kurt wandered over with a flashlight. “What’s goin’ on?”
I pointed. Kurt aimed the flashlight and stared. “Wow,” he said. It was even more wondrous under the light, but the spider stalled.
“Cool,” said Kurt, dousing the light. He went back to the car and I could hear him raving about the spider.
Time stopped while I was entranced by the web.
Later I sat on the ground, hitting the pipe occasionally, embraced by a brand new sense of serenity. The music played; the night’s warmth soothed me.
Just before sunrise, I wandered away again – this time into a neighborhood of saltbox houses, their windows still dark, laundry flapping in the morning breeze. I walked and walked, awestruck by the tiny yards and the feeling that anyone could live there, that we were all so human, so unified by our similarities, so insistent on our differences, even in each little house.
I watched their lights flick on, one by one, spellbound.
When the car pulled up and Kurt ushered me in, I despaired. I never wanted to leave, but it was time.
I hopped into the long, low sedan that Kurt had been driving when he’d taken me “for a ride” before. I finally understood that this was Fish’s car.
This time Kurt was out cruising with Fish and another friend. As we squealed away from the gas station, I looked at the dark-skinned, rail-thin guy in the passenger seat.
“That’s Chip,” Kurt said. He didn’t bother telling Chip my name. I wasn’t sure Kurt knew it.
Chip turned around and grinned, revealing a broken front tooth in his wide, yellow-toothed smile. “‘Sup,” he said. Then he turned back to Fish and started talking so fast, I couldn’t understand what he said.
Kurt, as usual, said nothing. I was okay with his silence. It made him mysterious.
After a few minutes, with Chip still rattling on to Fish at breakneck speed, I leaned over and whispered to Kurt. “Did they do that on purpose?”
Kurt lifted his chin at me and said. “Do what?”
“Fish and Chip,” I said. “Did they come up with those nicknames on purpose because they hang out together?”
Kurt, who obviously had never considered this, laughed out loud. “Yo,” he said to the front seat.
Chip stopped talking and turned around, since Kurt never said anything. “Yo!” Chip said.
“She said you’re Fish and Chip. Like the food!”
Fish and Chip roared with laughter. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but I laughed, too.
Mid-laugh, Chip started rambling again, about foods he wanted. We stopped at a CoGo’s and he bought beef jerky. He offered it to all of us and, when we all turned him down, Chip ate the rest of it himself. The whole car smelled like beef jerky.
We passed around pipes, drank warm beers. Everybody chain-smoked. We tossed our cigarettes out the window without a thought.
Fish drove with one forearm on the steering wheel, taking the turns ultra-wide, like we were in a school bus. Sometimes he swerved wildly in the middle of the road, or hit the brakes hard for no reason. We were moving very, very slowly compared to the other traffic.
I didn’t think about how wasted they must be; I guessed we were safe.
We drove around and around and around. We were in the suburbs, in the country, in the city. We really were just going for a ride.
Fish and Chip were yelling back and forth at one another, making no sense to me in the back seat, but I didn’t have anything to add. Kurt stared out the window, glanced at the guys once in awhile, smiled once in awhile. Once, he even put his hand on my leg and squeezed, but not for any apparent reason.
It melted my heart. I stared at him, at the side of his face, watching his dark eyes gleam. He never even glanced at me. I was pretty sure I was in love.
We passed a girl on the street and Chip leaned half-out the window and yelled: “I gotta get some work!” He sat back down and yelled louder: “Gotta get me some WORK!” It went on for half an hour.
We passed another girl, then a group of girls. Chip never stopped. “I GOTS to get some WORK!”
Finally he said, “Some WORK, ya know what I mean?!” Fish chuckled; Kurt snickered.
I had no idea what Chip was talking about. Why didn’t he just get a job? I was completely befuddled.
Eventually they dropped me off at the gas station and I walked the mile home.
Almost immediately, I wondered when I’d see Kurt again.
The house where Kurt and I first “hung out” belonged to a guy they called Fish. I never knew Fish’s real name, or why they called him Fish.
I got to know Fish that day, just a little bit, from watching him create rocks from cocaine, and from listening to him talk. Fish was not a nice man.
I didn’t understand why Kurt would befriend him.
Fish talked a lot, and ridiculed everyone who wasn’t in the room. He demeaned his wife who was probably working to pay the rent. Fish demeaned all women. It didn’t matter that there were a smattering of women at the table.
At one point, two little boys came into the house. All the junkies were sitting at the table watching Fish make rocks, and those two little boys ran right over to Fish. They were maybe 9 and 11 years old.
Each boy stood on one side of Fish. “Daddy,” said the older boy, tugging on Fish’s sleeve.
Fish didn’t even look up. “Daddy,” the kid said again. No response from Fish. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” he said, pulling on Fish’s arm. “I have to ask you something.”
Finally, Fish sat up straighter without looking at the boys, seemingly annoyed to be bothered in the midst of his project. The boys lit up.
“Daddy, can we take our bikes to Rodney’s house?” said the older boy. Fish considered the request, shrugged, and nodded. Fish never looked at either of them. He never said a word.
The boys grabbed his shoulders and hugged him, then ran out.
My jaw dropped. This man had children and he didn’t even look at them. He didn’t even talk to them. And they were exposed to the use of illegal drugs the same way I was exposed to Oreo cookies.
This broke my heart in a way nothing else had broken it before. I’d never considered the effect my actions might have on children, because I never saw any children. There were no children in the bars. There were no children at my jobs. And while I knew children existed in the world, it never occurred to me that children were aware of, say, cocaine.
I didn’t know parents used drugs.
I wonder whatever happened to those boys, if they survived to adulthood, if they became junkies, too.
But back then, I said nothing. I did nothing. I tried to forget they existed. I tried to forget that the guy making rocks was also named “Daddy.”
I only wanted to be with Kurt anyway. After that first gas-station-to-house date, I went looking for Kurt every chance I got.
Kurt never went looking for me.
I didn’t drive anywhere except to work, but I would walk all over town. I would walk to the gas station and wait. I would walk through the neighborhood, looking for that long car. I would go into bars and have a beer, scan the area for Kurt, then try another bar. Kurt was a very hard man to find.
Then one day, Kurt appeared again at the gas station. He climbed out of the backseat of a car and there I was, just waiting for him.
I’d almost forgotten those beautiful eyes.
Kurt nodded at me. “Wanna ride with us?”
“Sure,” I said.
I had no cool when Kurt was around. I didn’t even care that Daddy-Fish was driving. I would have done anything to hang out with Kurt. I just wanted to stare at him and absorb his vibe.
“C’mon,” he said.
I jumped in the car and off we went.
As I sat next to Kurt in this room full of strangers, I watched the guy at the head of table – who appeared to be finished organizing his garbage: some foil, a lighter, silverware, some liquid, a pocket knife, powder, some straws, a mirror.
Everyone else was watching him, too.
Finally he put a little white rock into the pipe, put the pipe to his mouth, and lit it. He inhaled, held the smoke in his lungs, and passed the pipe to the guy next to him, who did the same thing.
When the pipe got to Kurt, he did it, too.
“Is it PCP?” I whispered when Kurt handed the pipe to me. I didn’t want to be uncool, but I hoped Kurt remembered our unpleasant PCP encounter.
Kurt shook his head and pushed the pipe at me. “Coke,” he mumbled.
It’s cocaine? In a pipe? That made no sense to me. Why would anyone waste cocaine by smoking it?
I didn’t have time to consider my options, though. There were no more lines on the table. So I smoked the little rock of cocaine, too. I put the pipe in my mouth and inhaled. I held the smoke for as long as I could while passing the pipe to the next person.
Before I even exhaled, I could feel it.
Within a half-second, my inhibitions were completely gone. It was like my brain had disappeared and I felt free, beautiful, extreme serenity. The euphoria that came from snorting cocaine was nothing compared to this.
Instead of feeling like I was floating on a cloud, I felt like I was a cloud. I was simply flying through the air while still sitting in my chair, peaceful and one with the world, awestruck and inspired and clean and clear and 100% perfect.
Smoking cocaine created the most pleasure I’d ever had in my life, unrivaled by any other drug. Inside my head, the world was ablaze with a glorious summer sunshine, muted only by rainbows, and I was floating through with flawless ease.
I couldn’t speak or move or think.
This feeling lasted maybe 11 seconds.
Then it vanished completely.
Within a minute I was fully back on Earth, back at the dining room table with a bunch of strangers, hyper-focused on the guy with the garbage.
Having experienced ultimate bliss, I became immediately and suddenly completely devoid of all happiness.
My brain screamed, wailed, moaned: MORE MORE MORE! I NEED THAT AGAIN! WHERE IS IT? MORE! MORE! MORE! WHERE IS IT? WHAT IS IT? HOW CAN I GET THAT FEELING AGAIN?
And now, like everyone else at the table, I was watching the guy with the garbage. Because he was the one making that feeling happen for all of us, somehow, out of the mess he had in front of him.
I looked around at all the people watching him and thought, did they all feel that? I didn’t know what they felt when they smoked cocaine. Nobody was really talking about it. Nobody was doing anything.
Everybody was just watching the guy. And I watched them watch him, knowing why. I understood what we were all waiting for.
So I sat and watched him fiddle with the garbage, just like they did. We didn’t talk. The radio continued to blast. The only thing that mattered was that pipe was going to come around again.
And I was going to be there for it, waiting. Just like all the other junkies at the table.
Kurt and I did not drive far. In fact, we went only a few blocks. We parked in front of an old, brick house, much like all the other old brick houses in Swissvale.
I had no idea why we were stopping.
“C’mon in,” Kurt said.
I scrambled out of the passenger side, completely flummoxed. Kurt walked in the front door and held open the screen for me. It was a normal suburban residence with a dark, empty living area to the left and a dark but bustling dining area on the right.
A handful of people sat around the table, and Kurt sat down with them. He pulled a chair out a couple of inches and motioned for me to sit, but he didn’t introduce me. The music – classic rock – was too loud. Everyone who spoke had to shout.
The dining room held an eclectic mix: black, white, male, female. They were all unbearably thin. Their neck bones protruded, their wrists were like golf balls, the shirtless guy’s ribs were all visible.
A short-ish guy sat the head of the table, busily building something out of the pile of garbage in front of him. As he diligently moved stuff around, everyone else at the table sat and watched him.
I ignored all of them and watched Kurt. Sitting this close to him, at this table, in this room full of strangers, all I could think is: He’s gorgeous. I wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder what we’re doing. I wonder what we’re going to do.
Meanwhile Kurt lit a cigarette and grabbed a couple of beers from the room-temperature six-pack in the center of the table. He slid me a Budweiser without even glancing in my direction.
I cracked it open and sipped, staring at the wide eyes around me. They didn’t even notice I was there. Everyone was just staring at this guy and his garbage.
Suddenly a tiny mirror was in front of Kurt, long lines of cocaine sprawled on the glass. Kurt deftly made one line disappear, his gorgeous dark waves falling over his face as he leaned forward. Even snorting coke, Kurt looked cool. He slid the mirror to me with his left hand, and handed me a cut straw with his right.
I did a line, then looked at Kurt, who seemed oblivious to my presence.
Telepathically I begged for some direction. Is this for us? Or everybody? Should I pass it to someone else? Or back to you?
Kurt was silent, telepathically and otherwise. So I put the straw on the mirror and pushed it toward the center of the table, from which it rapidly disappeared.
Cocaine was like no other drug I knew. One line inspired this intense, powerful rush of overwhelming euphoria. It was like leaning back and floating on a cloud. Cocaine affects serotonin, dopamine and all the brain’s receptors, providing a feeling of intense calm, joy and peace.
Cocaine was, at that time, the single greatest feeling I had ever experienced. This feeling lasted for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, allowing me to float freely on that cloud forever.
Well, for ten minutes.
Then the euphoria dissolved, leaving me with warm beer, a need for another cigarette, and an inability to stop grinding my teeth.
As I clenched my jaw, I looked for more cocaine, for the mirror, for the straw. I waited, and waited. I stared at Kurt. He did not look at me.
Why are we all just sitting here?
What came around the table next was nothing like anything I’d ever seen before.
After all those nights standing at the gas station and waiting for drug dealers, I figured out that the local drug dealers just made their rounds whenever they had something to sell. They stopped at that gas station whenever they saw someone waiting.
I’m pretty sure Gregg never made any actual phone calls to anyone.
Since I was single for two minutes and had a massive crush on Kurt the cocaine dealer, I knew just where to go. I was looking for a long, sleek black car. And I was only at the gas station for about 20 minutes before it arrived.
Kurt got out of the car, all dark and skinny and mysterious, and strolled straight into the convenience store, not even noticing I was there. Before I could catch him, he was gone.
I thought: Should I follow him?
Then: No, I should not.
It was hard, watching him go past without acknowledgement, and not knowing if I’d even get a chance to talk to him, let alone ask about buying cocaine. I’d never done my own drug deal before.
I was standing outside the door, desperate but trying to appear aloof, when Kurt came back outside. He was smacking a pack of cigarettes against his fist. He saw me move in his periphery and acknowledged me with a brief, close-lipped smile and a nod.
He remembers me.
I ran to catch him before he got in his car.
“Hey Kurt …” I started. Then I didn’t know what to say. This was Kurt, after all. Kurt was eminently cool. And I was struggling not to appear desperate.
I didn’t want to believe, at that point, that I was a drug addict. I knew that sometimes there were real junkies, completely strung out, hanging out at the gas station. They stood and stared into the abyss until someone appeared with their fix.
I didn’t want to be that person.
I wanted to be confident and beautiful. I wanted Kurt to take one look at me and think, “Wow, what a knockout! I’d like to get to know her better!”
And then I wanted Kurt to give me some coke.
But I just stuttered at him. What was the coolest way to look hot and also say, “Can I buy some cocaine from you?”
I really, really wanted him to like me. He was the first person I’d found worthy of my affections in years. But I did not appear confident. I’m fairly certain that I came across more like a limp, dying weed.
So when I tried to speak, I was a complete dweeb. It was like asking someone for a date, and the last time I’d done that, in 9th grade, I’d been laughed across the room like part of a Peanuts cartoon.
Kurt saw me stumbling over my words and said, “Get in.”
He didn’t have to ask twice. I raced around to the passenger side of his car and hopped in. Kurt was very, very quiet. He offered me a cigarette, but I had my own. We both lit smokes and sat silently for a moment.
“Where’s Gregg?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not together anymore.”
“Huh.”
Maybe Kurt was waiting for the inevitable question; he was, after all, a drug dealer.
Instead I said, “What are you doing tonight?”
Kurt turned and stared at me for a second. I dragged on my cigarette.
He put the car in reverse and looked at me again. “Wanna go somewhere?”
“Okay,” I said, still trying to be cool.
But I was never, ever cool.
I’d never known a pathological liar before. There was no way to google such a thing in 1988, and I had no idea that this wasn’t a fixable problem.
I had only known Gregg for half a year and he’d lied to me a thousand times. Gregg lied to me about enormous things, like whether or not he had $400 for our vacation, about stealing the rent money to pay for cocaine, and about having a full-time job.
But he also lied about things that didn’t matter, like whether or not he’d had a sandwich, or his favorite song. I learned to believe nothing he said was true.
He did his best to make me believe his lies, too. He’d disappear for hours and hours, as though he were going to work, probably splashing in puddles at a nearby construction site so he could look like he’d been working.
Whenever I asked him about money, he reassured me as though I could trust him. He’d put his strong arms around me and squeeze, as though that confirmed that he was trustworthy.
Gregg was the youngest of six boys, all raised by a mother who died when Gregg was 14 and a raging alcoholic father. I don’t know what killed Gregg’s mom, but I knew that people who were raised by alcoholics tended to become alcoholics.
I didn’t see that in Gregg. He was a pothead, sure, but he seemed to be okay without alcohol. In addition to pot, of course, Gregg used sex to avoid intimacy. We both did.
But I saw Gregg’s family life as a pretty good excuse for being a liar. I imagined him being smacked around by his brothers for opening his mouth, beaten by his father in a drunken rage, with no calming motherly presence to save him from the horrors of adolescence.
I’d met his father; he actually existed. His father was drinking, sullen and brooding on the few occasions I’d seen him, living in the pitch blackness of an empty house. Gregg’s brothers had all moved away and left Gregg behind, where I’d found him flopping around like a fish on sand.
I couldn’t imagine the hell that had been his childhood. I tried to figure out Gregg’s motives, what made him tick. I guessed that if he ever felt safe, he would never have to lie.
But Gregg never felt safe, with me or with anyone else. Nothing I did could make him feel safe.
He lied about jobs, school, girlfriends, guy friends, disagreements, feelings and sandwiches. He lied when telling the truth would do. And since no one could trust him and he was broke, he always, always lied about money.
Gregg lied about everything. He didn’t seem to know the truth.
I believe Gregg could never be himself in the world. He thought he needed to be better, brighter, more handsome, more clever, funnier, smarter and nicer than he acted. He believed that lying about himself would make other people think more highly of him.
The opposite happened, of course; he never seemed to recognize this. He just kept lying about everything to everyone.
For me, though, lying is tantamount to physical abuse. Even during my addiction, I wanted to be honest. The only thing I lied about was my addiction.
Lying breaks trust, and I learned through this relationship that trust was the only thing that actually matters in a relationship. Without it, there’s no chance for a relationship to survive.
Eventually it didn’t matter why he lied. I just wanted to get away from him.
I made a reservation to take a short vacation with Gregg, as though that were something we could afford. Neither of us had a full-time job. Rather than see this as a hindrance, I considered it an opportunity.
“We need $400,” I told Gregg. “I need you to pay for this. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” Gregg said, kissing me. He often kissed me after lying; it sealed the deal for him. If I kissed him back, he knew he’d gotten away with another one.
“Seriously,” I said. “This is important. Four hundred dollars by next Friday, otherwise we can’t go.”
“Four hundred dollars,” Gregg said, “okay.” He kissed me again.
I asked him during the week if he had the money yet, and he assured me he was working on it. He never answered questions about how he would get the money, where it would come from, whether or not he’d be doing any work. He just kept telling me not to worry about it.
I assumed he was selling drugs or something else that I would happily condone if it meant we could go on vacation. I didn’t question Gregg’s methods.
On Thursday night, we packed and got ready to go. This consisted of putting toothbrushes in a plastic bag with some cigarettes.
“Do you have the money?” I asked before I could get any sleep.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
“Can I see it?” I was getting wise.
“I’ve got it!” Gregg said, offended that I would doubt him.
“Cool,” I said.
We went to sleep in my tiny efficiency apartment on the pullout sofa bed from my grandmother, waking many hours after sunrise for our trip.
I woke up gleeful, and went into the bathroom.
Gregg woke up less gleeful. When I walked out of the bathroom, he was in full-tilt panic mode.
“It’s gone!” he screamed. “The money is gone!”
I walked to where Gregg was standing next to a fold-out chair that I’d crammed in front of my interior door. Gregg had flipped the chair upside down and was standing in the space between the chair and sofabed.
“What are you talking about?”
“I put the money under this chair last night,” Gregg wailed, “and now it’s gone! Somebody must have come in here in the middle of the night and stolen it!”
“You put it under the chair?”
“Yes!” He was almost in tears. “It was right here! Someone must have broken in last night! It’s all gone!”
I looked around at my minuscule apartment. There was a 16-inch path at the foot of the bed that led to my back door, and no way in or out of the front door because of the chair. There wasn’t even room to walk.
“You’re saying that someone came into this room without waking us up….”
“Yes!”
“They came in and randomly looked under this chair …” I flipped the chair back for emphasis. “Then they found four hundred dollars and walked out without waking us up?”
“They must have!” Gregg wailed. “It’s all gone!”
It was as though Gregg believed this ridiculous story. In his mind, maybe it was completely true.
“You put all the money under the chair,” I sighed.
“I did!” Gregg screamed. “It was right here!”
“The money was not there,” I said. “It was never there.”
“I swear on my mother’s grave!” Gregg said. Briefly I wondered if his mother had actually died.
“Get out,” I said. “And don’t come back, ever.”
“I swear it was …”
“GO.” I said.
Gregg left, and stayed gone for a long, long time.
