I sit and pack cocaine, musket-style, into cigarettes. I gently roll out some tobacco, then mix the drug with it and pack it in. I adopted this method some years before, in order to walk along Columbus Avenue and get high while cruising the Upper West Side. I turn to it now to calm myself with something familiar. That’s right. Calming myself by smoking cocaine at three a.m. Or perhaps I’m doing this because addiction forces you to a place of inevitability that must include overwhelming risk, shame, or death.
Jane is speaking, but it is not having the desired effect. Shortly after Room Service Rick is gone, I realize I have hit that place where none of it is working. I cannot get high and I cannot come down. I’ve walked out on a ledge, only to find that I lack the true resolve. But I’ve also closed the window and there’s no way to get back in. I think for a moment and decide to give it one more try. Now I’m slightly panicked. My heart is like a speed bag, thumping very fast in my chest now. As I dial the phone, I think how I’ve never been this aware of my heart beating before. RING RING!! Not ever. RING RING!! “Room service? This is Mr. Baldwin again in 224. Yes, I did get that delivery, however my friends have informed me that they will be a somewhat larger group and I’m thinking that perhaps we’ll need ANOTHER bottle of champagne, NOW, in order to accommodate everyone, so, yes . . . er . . . ah . . . Baldwin, room 224.”
Knock, knock. It’s Rick, staring straight ahead with a jaundiced look as he hands me the bill to sign. As I turn and put the paper on the counter, I follow his gaze over to the now empty bottle of champagne, upside down in its bucket. I turn back and he says, glancing over my shoulder, “Shall I take away the empty bottle?” His expression seems sad. Seeing myself reflected in this guy’s eyes, I glimpse a chance, in that moment: a last, unrecoverable chance. I actually sober up for four seconds. He’s Angel Rick now. He’s here to save me, not to deliver room service. But Mick keeps singing:
He don’t go in the light of the morning
He split the time the cock’rel crows
So I resume, muttering “Sure, sure” and gesturing him out. As I close the door, I feel as if I’m on a surfboard and an enormous wave is gathering. I’m now left to ride this colossal beast to the shore all alone. I take a few more gulps and I lie down and light a cigarette.
My heart starts fluttering. I sit up, gasping a bit for air. Jane is smiling. I lie down again and begin to breathe deeply and sharply, trying to calm myself down from an emerging megapanic. I inhale, attempting to push the air up toward my clavicle and down toward my lower back. I’m scared. My speed bag heart drums away inside me while my skin begins to feel wet and cold. As I reach my right arm across my body to get another drink of champagne, I begin to go completely deaf. Did Jane just look at me through the TV and mouth, “Oh, Alec”? Now the speed bag is replaced by a hummingbird, trapped inside my chest, trying to get out. It’s too fast. My eyes start to tear up. I start to whimper. Am I overdosing? I press my right palm over my heart and my left one over the right. I am trying to massage my heart and contain the hummingbird while gulping in air. I am fucked. I am so fucked. I actually know it now. The wave is gathering me. It’s going to fling me like a fucking paper airplane onto the floor. The bird gets faster. The wave is curled over me. Then there is this bizarre pause as the beat stops. Now my heart feels like a bubble gum bubble is blowing up inside of it. Puff, the bubble gets bigger. Puff, bigger still. Puff, and I have no idea what is happening and then the bubble pops. There’s a pop inside my chest. POP! Then I black out.
When I open my eyes, I have no idea how long I was lying there, knocked out by a hummingbird. When I raise my head, I find I can’t move without some corresponding tachycardia. Each motion awakens the bird. When I stop moving, the bird is quiet. I crawl across the carpet to the phone on the other side of the bed, a twenty-foot journey that takes me thirty minutes. I call a woman in the cast who will understand, I’m hoping. When she picks up, she sounds appalled. It’s nine a.m. on her day off. I try to tell her I think I need the kind of help someone needs when he’s just overdosed on cocaine, but I don’t use the word “overdose.” More than his own health, more than his life, the addict clings to the lie.
We drive to the emergency room, where the doctor asks if I’m on drugs. I think, “Fuck you, asshole. You’re gonna take my blood and find out.” In this business, even taking a standing eight, let alone getting knocked out by drugs and booze, is frowned upon. And a diagnosis of addiction can follow you forever. So I lie and tell him, “We’ve been working hard, Doc. Long hours. I took some speed.” He stares down at me on the gurney. He must be good at poker, because his expression doesn’t say, “You lying little shit,” which I assume he’s thinking. Maybe he’s seen lots of lying little shits like me come through there: black, white, rich, poor, promising, or hopeless. Or maybe he’s an angel, too? He seems kind when he says, “I’m going to give you something to sleep.” Although I can’t move my body, a tear rolls down the side of my face. “What’s the matter?” he asks. I say, “I’m afraid I’m not going to wake up.”
I slept the next thirty-six hours. I woke up Monday morning and had the day off. I was still rooming with this guy, however, who was trying to kill me. Tuesday morning, I went to work and never spoke with anyone about what happened. The girl who drove me to the hospital simply asked, “Are you OK?” as if I had poison ivy.
I returned to Los Angeles, alternately scared out of my mind and grateful beyond words, and went to a meeting of Cocaine Anonymous, an association of people who measured their lengths of sobriety more in months, weeks, and days than years. Due to the overwhelming grip cocaine had on its largely younger membership, relapses were more frequent. But as I had been warned in my first AA meetings, abstinence from drugs requires abstinence from alcohol as well, because otherwise the addict substitutes drinking for drugs.
And that’s just what I did. Rather than pull over to my dealer’s house at four p.m., I’d hit a bar. I’d never been much of a drinker compared to others I’d known. But I now found myself spending the fall of 1984 keeping my feelings and my drug addiction at bay by drinking liquor in LA bars.