Chapter Eighteen
6/21
Hi, I’m Nessa, and I’m an alcoholic. Okay, that’s not true. Why do I lie even to my own personal journal? Is it because I want it to be true, as if being an alcoholic is that much better than being a heroin addict? I guess in one respect it is, because normally it takes booze longer to kill you.
I’ve been sober six years, five months, and two days.
More regret: the first time I did heroin, I did it by accident.
My mom was working at a crappy downtown bar as a cocktail waitress when I was seventeen, and Candy and I used to go down there and hang out and try to get old guys to buy us drinks. Mom ignored all this, pretended we were drinking Shirley Temples and doing our homework.
Candy was, but I’d pretty much stopped going to school by then. It was summer though, and one night I was there without Candy. She had something else going on, I don’t remember what. Late that night, a guy with impressively long hair—-down to his hips, clean and dark and shiny—-asked me to dance. He had a mustache and big brown eyes, and wore a wifebeater and faded jeans, and he was probably late twenties.
Without a word, he took my hand and pulled me out onto the dance floor.
He leaped around, making me think of “Spill the Wine” by War—-“an overfed, long--haired leaping gnome” because that’s what this guy was.
When a slow song came on, he took me in his arms but shockingly didn’t try anything.
He shouted into my ear, “You want to . . . ?”
“What?” I yelled.
“You want to . . . ?” He held out one hand palm up and then positioned his thumb and forefinger under his nose as if he were holding a straw and theatrically snorted.
Cocaine.
Yes, I definitely wanted cocaine.
I was already drunk and stoned, but I smiled and nodded. He grabbed my hand and we headed toward the door. I stumbled after him, his hand surprisingly large around mine as he pulled me outside to a yellow sports car, opened the passenger’s side door, which lifted upward, and helped me in. He went around to the other side and got in himself.
I sank into the buttery leather seats and smelled money. I’d never been anywhere near anything this luxurious and expensive.
Who was this guy?
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Hoover,” he said with a smile and a wink.
He took a small mirror from the console, unfolded a tiny envelope, and poured powder from it onto the mirror. He used an American Express platinum card to cut lines into the powder, periodically smiling over at me in the dark with his gleaming straight teeth. Then he withdrew a prerolled hundred dollar bill from behind his ear, twirled it in his fingers like a baton, and handed it to me. I felt a tingle of excitement as I clamped one nostril shut, stuck the bill up the other, and snorted a line.
It diffused into my brain as I snorted another line with the other nostril, then handed over the bill and leaned back in the soft seat. He slid the moon roof open, reached across me, and tripped my seat’s recline button. I fell through the layers of night, my eyes rolled back, my body shuddering in silky, euphoric waves. I blinked, and then I watched the stars overhead reveal themselves one by one, coming into sharper focus until I could see minute details, rings and space dust and nebulae and supernovas.
“How you feel?” Hoover purred in my ear. I anticipated his hands on me but they never came.
“I feel sooooo good,” I said. My own voice sounded too slow.
He reclined his seat too, and pointed at the sky. We said nothing as we watched it rotate around us. I had never felt so connected to the planet, to humanity, to God himself.
What the hell was this stuff?
About thirty minutes later Hoover closed the moon roof and brought my seat to its full upright and locked position.
“You gotta go now,” Hoover said.
I raked my hair back and nonsensically said, “Me too.”
“When will I see you next?” Hoover said.
“What’s today?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Tomorrow night,” I said dreamily.
“See you then.”
He chucked the tip of my nose, pulled me out of the car, and turned me toward the bar.
I floated back inside, and whatever that shit was, I wanted more, because I hadn’t once thought about Nathan, or the trial, or my mother’s upcoming reality show.
I wanted more. And I got more, much more.
But not from Hoover. What I couldn’t have foreseen was that my mom would start dating him shortly after that night. She never asked him what he did for a living, what he did to have a fancy sports car and take her to nice restaurants and on tropical vacations. She was famously antidrug, but if drugs paid for all the luxuries in her life, so be it. She would just cover her eyes and act as if she didn’t know.
I only found out later that it was heroin. So of course, I wanted my best friend to feel the same things I had. And she did.