When Teddy had finished, Scott looked up from his beer and out the window. Across the way, he saw Ned and Pam’s trailer, now abandoned, and Dawn’s, where he sometimes bought morphine or, if he was in a pinch, Vicodin. Randy Shit-Pants, who thought his dead father was living in his trailer’s heating vents, was filthy on his porch, smoking a clove cigarette and mumbling to himself. An airplane roared in low.
“I,” Scott started. “I don’t want to live here.” He picked up the eviction notice. “You know what this is? The kick in the ass to get me out.”
—
Scott had grown up on an Iowa dairy farm that later went to pigs. He once got a horse for Christmas. Scott never met his biological father, who, during a date, had forced himself on his mother. To save the family some embarrassment, Scott’s mother, Joan, was made to marry the rapist. She was sixteen. But Scott’s father soon made a clean break, never to be heard from again. The next husband was a mean cuss, a hitter; before they divorced, Joan had one child by him: a daughter, Clarissa. Then Scott’s mother found Cam, a cowboy, and they had three more children. One of Scott’s brothers became a firefighter; another delivered water for Culligan; and his youngest sister was a nurse. Clarissa was an alcoholic who lived in the worst apartment complex in Scott’s hometown. Locals called it the Beehive because tenants buzzed in and out of it.
Scott never got on with Cowboy Cam. He was too sensitive a kid to please the grizzled ranch hand. Scott took the ACT, got into Winona State University, and left home for college at seventeen. He soon outgrew Winona, Minnesota, just as he had outgrown the soybean fields and water towers of rural Iowa. Scott had known he was gay from a young age. “I needed to find others like me,” he remembered thinking before moving to Milwaukee. He finished at Milwaukee Area Technical College and later, at age thirty-one, received his nursing license.
Scott began his career in a nursing home. He checked vital signs, dispensed medication, monitored blood glucose levels, gave insulin injections, administered IV infusions, fed people through tubes, and cared for tracheotomies and wounds. He learned to make his hands light and quick, how not to puke, how to find the vein. Scott felt needed, and he was.
He rented nice apartments in up-and-coming neighborhoods: Bay View, the East Side. One year, his best, Scott took home $88,000. He sent money home to his mom.
After five years of hoisting limp women and men out of beds and bathtubs, Scott slipped a disk in his back. A doctor prescribed Percocet for the pain.1 Around that time, two of Scott’s best friends died of AIDS. “I fell off. I didn’t cope well.” The Percocet helped with that pain too.
Scott thought his pain would in time run its course, like any other illness. But when his doctor announced retirement, Scott found himself panicking. The doctor had become a treasure to Scott, like a bartender who pours to the rim; another might not be so forthcoming with the opioids. But there were other options. Scott began buying pills from fellow nurses and stealing them from work. His nursing-home patients too became regular suppliers, selling Vicodin pills at $3 a pop. Then they became regular suppliers without knowing it.
Several months after Scott started taking Percocet, he discovered fentanyl. That was when he fell in love. Fentanyl penetrated the central nervous system 100 times more effectively than morphine.2 It offered Scott pure, calm happiness; it pulled him toward the sublime. “It was the best feeling of pleasure and contentment I have ever felt,” he said.
In the nursing home, Scott would take a syringe and siphon fentanyl out of the Duragesic patches used for patients with chronic pain. He’d then swallow or inject the drug and reapply the empty patch, as his patients moaned softly in bed. “In your own heart, you convince yourself that you need it more than they do,” Scott remembered. “?‘If I do this, I’ll be able to take care of thirty of you.’?”
Like any other romance, Scott’s relationship with fentanyl changed from something thrilling and magical into something deeper and more consuming. Soon, he was no longer chasing a high but running from withdrawal. “The sick,” he called it. When he went without, he would shake and sweat, get diarrhea, and ache all over. “When you stop, it feels like you’d rather be dead.” By this point, Scott needed opioids just to function. When he felt the sick right behind him, he did things he never thought he was capable of doing.
One day in August 2007, some of Scott’s coworkers found him standing with his eyes closed, rocking back and forth. They sent him home and checked the patches, finding them drained. Scott’s supervisor asked him to submit to a drug test, which came back positive for fentanyl. The same string of events repeated itself in November, but Scott was still allowed to keep his job because his supervisor, who had a drug history, gave him another chance. Then around Christmastime that year, patients complained that a male nurse had removed their patches. Scott was put in a cab and sent to a clinic for a third drug test. He shut the taxi’s door and stood outside in the cold.
Behind the clinic’s doors was a waiting room full of other junkies slumped in plastic chairs and gloved nurses with flat expressions, giving off neither pity nor disgust. Scott knew that Christmas music would be playing. He turned his back on the clinic and walked away.
Scared, Scott joined Narcotics Anonymous and tried to stop using. But it didn’t take. “My life didn’t get any better,” he remembered. Four months later, Scott wore his best shirt to his disciplinary hearing in front of the Wisconsin Board of Nursing. The board ruled: “The license of [Scott W. Bunker], L.P.N., to practice as a nurse in the State of Wisconsin is suspended for an indefinite period.”3 That was the moment Scott decided to settle into a spot on the bottom and become a full-blown junkie. “I really cared about my nursing license,” he remembered. “When they took it away, I was like, ‘Fuck it.’?”
—
After Scott had lost his job and his upscale apartment, he sold most of his possessions and checked himself into the Lodge. At the shelter he met Teddy, who had recently been released from the hospital. He was drawn to Teddy for the obvious reason: Teddy was frail and sick and needed someone to help him climb steps and carry his food tray. Scott was still a nurse in heart and habit, even if he had lost his license.
Unlike Scott, homelessness was nothing new to Teddy. He had lived in shelters and under bridges since hitchhiking from Dayton, Tennessee, three years earlier. Teddy had grown up in a family with little money and fourteen kids. His father was an alcoholic who died young after slamming his truck into the back of an eighteen-wheeler. “Now, that’s an experiment,” Teddy liked to say when telling the story.
They made an unlikely pair: one a straight Southern man, who had lived for years on the street; the other younger, gay, and a new arrival at the bottom. But they became friends, and then decided to leave the homeless shelter together, as roommates.
Teddy’s monthly income, from SSI, was $632, and Scott was only receiving food stamps. They needed a cheap apartment, but they also needed a landlord who wouldn’t ask too many questions. College Mobile Home Park had a reputation for letting just about anyone in. When the two men visited the park, Office Susie showed them a small trailer without a stove. It was in a sorry state, but Tobin gave it to them and only charged $420 in lot rent. They moved in that week.
After leaving the nursing home, getting drugs had been a hassle. Scott would go to Woody’s, the Harbor Room, or other gay bars and hope to run into someone. But in the trailer park, Scott met several neighbors with methadone prescriptions and others who sold drugs. Getting drugs was as easy as asking for a cup of sugar.