Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

It will all be forgotten: every locked door, every hour he fretted in bathrooms, every flight into the woods where no one could see. It is not until he is twenty-six years old that he remembers that he ever struggled. And then, when he finally does, he remembers it all.

There will never be any explanation for his childhood affliction. Nothing beyond theories, some commingling of psychology and pediatric diagnosis, but nothing concrete or definitive.

Katherine and he will date and kiss and go out and not go out and avoid each other and have dramatic reunions all through grammar school, high school, college, and after. She will go to Scotland to an illustrious university in an ancient town by the sea and read a trilogy by a great Scottish writer about a girl and her family — about everything — that she will quote from often. She will eventually drop out and drift to Montana. A few years later, he will go to a university in Scotland in an ancient city — this one in the hills and not nearly as illustrious — and read that same trilogy and never in his life stop quoting from it. Boyfriends and a husband of hers will refuse to let her see him. Girlfriends and boyfriends of his will eye her warily. As adults they keep their distance. They write many letters. He reads all the books she ever cared about. He carries her opinions and interpretations around as if they are his until at some point, sometime after Scotland, he begins to find books of his own and to shape, slowly, opinions of his own. He graduates from her and both know it, she long before him.

But before that happens, the summer before he goes away to a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, they drink a bottle of very expensive wine from one of two cases his mother is holding for a dear friend in a bitter divorce. They eventually finish off both cases and find out years later that it was very expensive indeed. They drink that first exquisite bottle of wine, with a griffin on the label, as they sit on a mountain called Indian. She throws pebbles into his shorts until it is clear that she wants him to take them off. She takes hers off, too, and he does the thing he had not done before but she had. It feels like a miracle that it is happening at all, but that it is with her makes it feel blessed, meant to be, but also something like incest. For years he will think it happened in a field her father owned, one night on the way to a play. But it will be her memory, her story, they agree on.

How can he be here? How? I look back through the peephole again and again, and each time I am hoping that the paranoid fantasy that Noah is at the other side of the door has vanished and there is no one in the hall. But each time I look, there he is. And not alone. A large man in a heavy tan coat is standing behind him. He is talking into a cell phone and I’m sure he’s a cop or a DEA agent.

It’s okay, just let us in, Noah calls out. Don’t get upset, we’re here to help.

Jesse, the guy on the bed, tenses up and asks what’s going on. I whisper for him to get dressed as quickly as possible, that it’s my boyfriend. He moves like lightning and is up, fully dressed and with his coat on in seconds. He heads for the door and I tell him to wait. Wide-eyed and jumpy, he spits, Only a second, I’m not sticking around. As quickly as I can, I grab the ashtray on the nightstand and dump the remaining drugs in a plastic bag and stick it, along with the remaining stem, inside my jacket pocket in the closet. I grab a cloth and sloppily wipe down the crumbs and residue on the nightstand and scan the room for other evidence of what’s been going on. Jesse moves toward the door as I grab my sweater and jeans from the floor.

Jesse opens the door, does not look back to say good-bye, and pushes past Noah and the man in the tan coat. I’m sitting on the bed as Noah steps into the room. Let’s go, he says, without even mentioning the guy who has just fled.

The man in the tan coat is named John, and he tells me he is a former DEA agent, that he’s pulled a string and called into the agency to find out that there is a file on me. Noah then tells me the police have shown up at One Fifth, asking to question me. That my name came up in a drug bust. Mark? I wonder. Stephen? My heart, which is already beating wildly, begins to pound hard with new dread. I’m getting arrested, I think as I eye John, who looks no different from the Penneys.

How did you find this guy? I ask Noah. I’m convinced he’s lied to Noah about who he is and that he does not mean well. Noah says a lawyer recommended him and I ask who. I don’t know the name, and the more I look at John, the more I think he’s snared Noah in a complicated sting to haul me off to jail.

We have to go, John says. We have to get you out of here.

It takes over an hour for me to get ready and it still feels like we’re rushing. I ask for privacy and load and smoke two huge hits in the bathroom. I let the stem finally cool and put it in my jacket pocket and load the remaining drugs in the stem so I won’t have to pack it later should I be able to peel away and take a hit. The high pushes away some of the immediate dread, and I wash my face and hands and run my fingers through my hair. I put on my turtleneck sweater, realize the bathroom is filled with smoke, and switch on the fan. Noah knocks on the bathroom door and I tell him to hold on. The dread returns as the smoke rises up through the vent. I sit on the toilet and take a deep hit off the stem and pray for a heart attack.

We leave the hotel without checking out and jump into a cab on Gansevoort Street. John tells me I’m lucky I haven’t been arrested yet. I look up at the driver and the obscured photo on the panel behind him. Jesus, I think, of course. I explain to Noah that nearly every cab I’ve taken over the last weeks has had a strip of cardboard or paper over the driver’s ID photo. That I suspect the drivers are undercover cops or agents of some kind. I try to explain to him about the cabdrivers and the Penneys and that this John here is one of them and the driver, too, and he doesn’t know what he’s just done to me by putting me in their hands. You don’t know, I whisper desperately to him as he pats my hand.

I finger the stem in my pocket and know it’s good for at least a few more big hits. I also think it probably holds enough to get charged with Intent to Distribute and immediately start worrying about where I can stash it if it looks like they’re taking me to a police station. Then I remember the cabdriver is undercover, and as I watch the city streak by outside the window, I start to shake with panic.

Noah puts his arm around me and says we’re going somewhere safe to talk. I ask where and he and John signal each other. They don’t seem to know what the next beat is, so I ask if we can get something to eat, and by that I mean, though I do not say it, something to drink. I need alcohol in my system to calm down.

We end up in the Seventies off Third Avenue and find a Chinese restaurant with a basement dining room that is nearly empty. I immediately excuse myself to go to the bathroom and take a hard long pull on the stem. After several moments I think I hear full-blown conversations about when to haul him in outside the door. I still keep pulling on the stem. It broils in my hand and I dab the edges with cold water to cool it down.

When I return to the table I ask the waitress for a vodka and she says they only have wine and beer, so I ask for a bottle of cold white. Noah begins to object but John turns to the waitress and says fine. It comes and I drink it down like water. I order food of some kind but when it comes I don’t touch it.