Days came like dead moths on the bathroom counter. I got a letter from some people who said I’d fucked up school so bad that I had to give all the money back for the last semester. They said I had to give the money back right away. So I had no choice and went and saw my parents about it. They gave me money. Still I didn’t ever have money. I could get more money when school started up again, but I’d have to be real careful and I didn’t think I could be careful because there was always so much to do and I couldn’t get it all done and be careful.
Emily said we should get a dog and we did. We went to the animal shelter in Brook Park and got a dog for $60. It was a girl dog; Emily named her Livinia. Livinia was a mix of some kinds of hounds and she had a brown-grey coat that shone and she was very timid so we felt for her. And we said, We will protect her and she will be fine from now on forever. Emily said we had to quit dope and I said I would quit dope and she said she would too.
I went to the doctor, a psychiatrist. I told him I was fucked up. I had been to see a psychiatrist before. That had been at the VA, years ago, after Zo? left. I had seen this psychiatrist a couple months until one day I’d had to take Roy to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles all the way on the West Side because Roy was living on the West Side and I had forgot about an appointment I had till about half an hour before. I called the VA and they didn’t answer the phone so I left a message and said I had to cancel the appointment. When I called back to reschedule they didn’t ever answer the phone so I left messages for a while. It was three years. They still hadn’t returned my calls and Roy and I weren’t even friends anymore.
Now I went to see this other doctor, Dr. Kaufmann. I could see him for free because the government was giving him money to study on people like me. He was over at the college hospital and he didn’t want me to say anything but tell him numbers and go home and write numbers down, one through ten, all hours of the day and night, write these numbers down and keep track of them like they meant something and I didn’t write the numbers down like I was supposed to and I felt like a goddamn criminal.
When Emily went to detox I was supposed to not do heroin. I was supposed to stay home and get sick. Emily had signed up for the detox. James Lightfoot had told her about it. He had told Emily that there was a detox at a hospital downtown that was free the first time you went; the state of Ohio paid for it. So she went to the detox and I stayed home that weekend with the dog and the dog hadn’t been fixed yet and she was going around in a diaper and making sad faces because she missed Emily. And I think I meant to get sick. But I fucked up and shot dope all that weekend. James Lightfoot came over and we shot dope. James Lightfoot was still a friend of mine. He bought most all the weed that Emily and I grew and he’d track it out and sell it. Actually he was a lot of help to us sometimes; he was good at keeping up with things when he wasn’t too fucking strung out. But he was still undeniably fucked in the head with the sadness and had the death wish bad enough that it was a mistake to have him around when you were trying not to shoot dope. So what happened was James Lightfoot and I shot some dope and I didn’t get sick like I was supposed to have. This was more fucking up.
I went Monday and got Emily from the detox. We stopped on the way back and bought some heroin. Things went pretty much back to normal and Emily was pissed at me because we were still on heroin and she said it was my fault.
One morning the landlord called and said he was coming over with an inspector from the city to inspect the house. Emily asked him when he was coming over. He said two hours. She said okay. The problem was the grow room. The plants were just beginning to flower. We had to tear them down. We had to take everything apart. There was nowhere to take the plants and they were too big and too many to hide, so I had to hack them into pieces and stuff them into garbage bags and put all the soil in garbage bags and stuff the garbage bags wherever they’d fit in the car while Emily was taking apart all the hardware. Then we took down the tent and scraped off the Mylar that was glued to the walls. It was a motherfucking disaster and it made it so we were even more fucked, but the landlord was none the wiser so there was that at least.
Black went to jail. I was coming out of the psychiatrist’s office one evening when it was raining and I got a call from Raul. He told me. He said it was nothing major and Black’d probably get out on bail in a few days or maybe a week or two, but he said he’d sell me heroin till then if I wanted some heroin and I said I’d like to meet up with him right away. He had me meet him off of St. Clair. He was a while getting there. When he finally showed up it was almost ten o’clock. He said that he was sorry but he had been riding with his uncle and his uncle had got pulled over and the police had given them a hard time. I gave him some money and he gave me a bag of dope. The bag of dope was wrapped in a piece of white plastic torn off a shopping bag it looked like. I drove home.
Emily and I were going to split the heroin up. I caught a smell off the bag of heroin and I told Emily and she smelled it too and we agreed that it smelled like Raul ate a lot of fruit snacks. After we shot the dope I called Raul. He asked what I thought of the heroin. I said the heroin was fine and I asked him if he always was going to stick the heroin up his ass before he sold it to me. He laughed.
Dr. Kaufmann had made an appointment for me with a drug counselor at the hospital. So I went to that but the drug counselor’s office wasn’t well marked at all. So I couldn’t find it and I walked around the hospital in circles looking for it. When I found it I was 15 minutes late but it wasn’t my fault. They kept me waiting. Over an hour. Then I went through the whole thing with the nurse and she took my blood and asked me questions and she was very nice but the doctor, the drug counselor or whatever, was a dyed-in-the-wool motherfucker. I told him I didn’t have any confidence in Suboxones on account of they didn’t ever work on me at all. I tried them all the time. I’d get sick and I’d take a lot of them so as to not be sick and I could take four or even five, dissolving them under my tongue one after the other, and they wouldn’t help me for shit. I was telling the truth but he said I was a liar. He asked me what I was seeing Dr. Kaufmann for. I said I thought I was seeing Dr. Kaufmann for PTSD and he asked what could I have PTSD from and I said I’d been in Iraq. He asked me when. I said I’d got there in ’05 and left in ’06. He said the war had been over by then. So I left because I couldn’t stay there. And I remembered how when I was in Iraq I used to get chest pains. How I’d leave the wire all the fucking time and I started getting chest pains that would drop me to the floor like a heart attack and I couldn’t breathe, and then Shoo took me to see the PA at the battalion aid station, Captain I’ve-Forgot-His-Fucking-Name. And the PA—not a doctor, mind you, but he acted enough like one—wouldn’t see me and he told Shoo to tell me to come back at sick call the next morning. But I didn’t. I just had the chest pains instead. Normally I wasn’t around when they did sick call. Normally I was outside the wire maybe getting fucked up by a bomb or shot or something. I was nothing then and I’m still nothing.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE