Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I’ve been at the Gansevoort Hotel for almost two weeks. There have been other rooms, in other hotels. They are all near One Fifth — SoHo, the West Village, Chelsea — but feel worlds away, in neighborhoods I’ve never visited. I check in under names from childhood — Kenny Schweter, Michael Lloyd, Adam Grant-West — and explain that I’m in a fight with my girlfriend and am not looking to be found. No one ever blinks. They simply look at my passport, run the debit card, and hand me a key.

I’ve been at the Gansevoort the longest. I’ve stayed only a night or two, four tops, at the other places, 60 Thompson, the W, the Maritime, the Washington Square Hotel. These were after Newark, after the nights at Mark’s, and after New Canaan, Connecticut, where my friends Lili and Eliza checked me into Silver Hill, a rehab I immediately checked out of. After I scored from the driver who picked me up, he dropped me at a Courtyard Marriott hotel in Norwalk, where I stayed until the drugs ran out — romancing the prospect of dying a few miles down the road from the hospital where I was born.

I’ve changed rooms a few times at the Gansevoort and am now in a suite that the manager says, because I am staying at least a few weeks, he’s giving me for nearly half price. It didn’t just occur to him; when I changed rooms, I asked the person at reception what sort of extended-stay discount they could offer.

Every night I hear shouting from the street— Billy, keep it up. You better enjoy it while you can. You’re lucky you’ve lasted this long, Billy. There are vans parked along Gansevoort Street with metal boxes on their roofs that I’m convinced are surveillance vehicles. There are bland American sedans everywhere, and each one, I’m sure of it, is driven by a DEA agent or an undercover cop. Still, each night after midnight, I put on my black Arc’teryx jacket and black Parks & Recreation cap and shuffle out through the lobby and up to 14th Street to a cash machine at the corner bodega. The place has two of them, side by side, and only once am I able to run my card and key in the codes and amounts fast enough to get them to dispense more than the $1,000 limit. Usually I have to wait and get no more than five batches of $200. Night after night I do this and then load up on lighters. I wonder how many others like me the people behind the counter have seen. Hundreds? None?

I make my way back to the hotel, carrying whatever drugs and stems I have, because I’m terrified someone will raid the room while I’m gone. Twice I have dropped bags of crack in the lobby. My belt at this point has seven holes in it. It began with four. I’ve carved out one with a knife and two have come from leather shops that I’ve passed between hotels and cash machines. Still, my jeans are falling down around my hips.

I’m not alone in the room. Malcolm has been with me for four or five, maybe six, days. He turned up with Happy one night and jumped on board for the ride. He went to Dartmouth, he says. He’s black, lives in Harlem, is probably no more than thirty, and is beautiful. Doesn’t seem gay and can do enormous amounts of drugs without appearing shaky or anxious.

There is a night when I am convinced the room is about to swarm with cops and we race out of the hotel as if it’s on fire. We leave everything there — everything besides the drugs — and check into the W near Union Square. I pace the room like a madman, and Malcolm is patient and keeps fixing me glasses of vodka with ice and lime. He distracts me with stories about being on scholarship at Dartmouth and playing football. He dropped out a year ago but plans to return when he’s saved enough money or he can get a better break on tuition. He’s getting his real-estate license. When I ask, he says he knows Happy from the neighborhood, and when I remind him that Happy lives in Washington Heights, he says that he used to live there, too. Not much of his story seems to hold up but I don’t care. He’s gentle and sexy and being by myself right now would be unbearable. Being with him makes all the other nights that came before and the prospect of the ones to come seem unspeakably lonely. During some of those nights, I call numbers for escorts listed in the back pages of the Village Voice and New York magazine. None ever do drugs with me and most stay just exactly one hour. Their skin and their compassion — most at some point say I should slow down, that I might hurt myself — are never enough, never quite what I had in mind, and when they leave, I’m almost always relieved and disappointed.

The room at the W is small compared with the one at the Gansevoort. It’s cramped and the ventilation is worrisome since the smoke we make seems to just linger and not cycle through the vents. I’m terrified a fire alarm will go off as it once did at 60 Thompson. I think about checking into a third hotel, but I’m getting worried about money — there is twenty or so thousand left and I’ve already gone through more than twice that much — so it’s the Gansevoort or here.

We gather up what little we have and leave. Heading back into the Gansevoort is terrifying, and yet, as certain as I am that we are about to be busted, I stomp right back into the elevator, down the hall, and into the room. It’s precisely how it was when we left it hours ago. I head straight to the window to see if cop cars have pulled up in front of the building. Nothing. No one but the doorman and a few passersby. Then to the closet and the bathroom to see if anyone is lying in wait to ambush us. All is clear, but it takes a few big hits, half a bottle of vodka, and thrashing on the bed with Malcolm for the panic to fade.

Later, as the sun comes up, Malcolm steps out onto the little balcony. I’m going to have to split soon, he says. His cell phone has died and he says that he has to go back to his life. I convince him to stay one more night. We have enough to carry us through to early evening when Happy goes back on call, and I promise to really load up. The day clicks by as it usually does, the routine of sex and drinking and hits and ordering food that we barely eat repeats itself from the day before.

Malcolm’s talk of his life out in the world makes me think of mine, and I quietly pray for one of these hits to finish me off. I pack each one thicker than I had before and hold the smoke in my lungs a beat or two longer than it feels like I can. My neck throbs and my arm aches and I wonder when. Again, the lines from that novel. It would be now.

Malcolm packs up his things in the morning while I doze. I hear the toilet flush in the bathroom and notice he has nearly emptied the ashtray on the bedside table where I keep the drugs. He has left a few rocks and taken many. I let it go. Not because I don’t care, but because I knew he would steal, and the night before, while he was in the shower, I hid two whole bags in my blazer jacket to last me through the day until midnight, when I can get more cash. Our good-byes are brief.

The day grinds on. I try to listen to my messages — something I have avoided for days — but my cell phone produces a text message I’ve never seen before that seems prophetic: Memory Filled. New Text Rejected . The message keeps buzzing into the little screen, making it impossible to listen to voice mail. After a few minutes of trying, I give up. As evening comes on, a nerdy boy from room service brings a plate of nachos that I don’t eat. The truth is, I order food to have human contact. He is flirty and talks about NYU, where he is studying political science, the five guys he lives with in Williamsburg. As he speaks I am shamed by the youth of him: the pink skin, the clear eyes, the voice that doesn’t get snagged on sarcasm or exhaustion. He steps closer as he talks and I can almost smell the Ivory soap he must have used in that crowded loft in Williamsburg early that morning as he showered for work. He could not be closer now, and I could not feel further away. He is a boy at the beginning of everything, untarnished and lovely in a way he does not yet even know. And I am something else, not a boy, with hands covered in burn scabs and black soot from changing the screens on the crack pipes all night. I had, at first, thought about seducing him, but when he finishes talking, I can only scribble my signature on the bill and shrink away. When he leaves, the voices from outside begin to bark louder than usual. I finally am able to listen to a voice mail from Noah that tells me he loves me and is not angry but terrified I am dead. Just come home .