Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

The Carlyle’s dark bars and various ante-lobbies are a tricky maze, and I cross and recross the sitting area near a bank of phones several times and can’t find the exit. This goes on for a while, and as it does, my panic rises. I finally break out onto Madison Avenue and ask a nicely dressed woman if she knows where an ATM is. I worry she’ll think I’m mugging her or that she can tell I’m high, but she casually points to a Chase Bank across the street. I take out $800 and run back into the hotel and up to the room.

Brian is still out when Happy calls, and not knowing any other way, and dreading the prospect of leaving the room again, I tell him to come up but that it’s going to have to be fast. A minute later he’s in the little foyer — white sweatpants, huge earphones, wordless — and though I called for $300, I ask him if he has six and he says he has four and hands me eight bags and two stems.

The tide of relief that passes over me when the door shuts is almost as powerful as the enormous hit I pack in the shiny, clean new stem. I shove the extra stem and bags into my coat pocket, get undressed, wrap the towel around my waist, hop back on the bed, and fix a new drink. By the time Brian returns I am smoking openly and the porn is flickering on the TV screen. You scored, didn’t you? he asks, and I nod with a wicked smile on my face. Do you have any idea how close to being arrested you are? he asks, and I tell him to please relax. That I have one more night of freedom and I promise to stay put if he kicks back and lays off the talk of psych wards and cops. He agrees and sits in the chair next to the dresser.

I go through two liters of vodka and almost three bags of crack as I lie on that bed and talk to Brian and watch porn. I steer the discussion to his girlfriend, sex, and porn, and, for hours, he will manage to keep it clean on his end without disengaging.

At some point in the early morning he falls asleep. I oh-so-gently get off the bed and into my clothes, pack up my few things — phone, stem, drugs, lighter — and tiptoe out of the room, into the hall, and back to the world.

It’s a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, and four of us are renting a house twenty minutes away from campus, on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a blue raised ranch with aluminum siding and a deck in back, and to us it’s paradise. Ian is a dark-haired, wild-eyed boarding school hellion from New Orleans; Brooks, my roommate from the dorms, is a Cary Grant type from Maryland — Waspy, strangely old-fashioned, friend to all and enemy to none; and there’s Jake, a blue-eyed, curly-haired blond peace monkey who bartends in the summer and plays harmonica and sings in a Baltimore band called The Moonshiners.

There is always a keg on the back porch, and in the fridge piles of lamb chops and choice cuts of beef that we steal from the grocery store in the next town. The stealing begins one afternoon when Ian and I are walking through the meat section. He stops and points to an assortment of wrapped packets of lamb chops and whispers, Billy, c’mon, unzip the pocket on the back of my coat and drop a couple of those beauties in there. Ian scrunches his face with urgency, his eyes bulge, he pleads in his particular way, Jesus, Billy, c’mon, what are you doooin’? and though I’m sure I am going to get caught, I unzip the coat, grab the meat, and slip it in. The coat is an expensive ski jacket with a wide zippered pocket on the back. It holds the meat vertically, and as Ian walks through the store and we check out, there is no sign that he’s carrying our dinner on his back. From that day on we never pay for meat. When we go shopping we take Ian’s coat.

I read during the day, when I’m skipping class — Hardy and Fitzgerald mostly that year, Jude the Obscure a few times. On the weekends I read in my room, the one at the end of the hall, tucked away from the ruckus of the house. There is no one at school or in the house whom I talk to about what I read. I reread Salinger and Knowles and the books of my adolescence. Some of these copies still have Katherine’s scribbles in the margins, and I treat them like museum pieces.

Every once in a while someone has coke or acid but for the most part it’s pot-around-the-clock. Ian has a red Graphics bong he cleans and recleans and strokes like a pet. I keep a constant stash in my room and smoke off a short plastic bong and listen to Rickie Lee Jones and Bob Dylan and when I’m not reading just stare at the maroon-and-brown tapestry tacked to the ceiling. We road-trip up and down the eastern seaboard — Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke, Boston, New York — to see The Dead, Dylan, Neil Young. Mostly it’s me and Ian, and mostly it’s Dylan.

Brooks is the only one with a steady girlfriend, Shirley, who goes to school in Virginia. I hook up with two or three different girls on a regular basis — all of whom make Ian’s face wrinkle with disgust. Jesus, Billy, what are you dooooin’? he’ll say at the end of the night when it’s clear whom I’ll be taking back to my room. Jake has girls in Baltimore or in town who don’t go to college. We’ll never meet them. Ian will hook up with only one girl that I know of — a girl I have made out with a few times and whom I’ve told Ian I’ve fallen for — and it will be in the backseat of a car on a trip back from Boston while Brooks and I are in the front. We’ll see the whole thing. I’ll be mad and he’ll say he was asleep and didn’t know she was making the moves on him.

One night Jake withdraws money from an ATM and notices a lucky bank error for a sum that makes it seem like a good idea to buy a fresh keg and have some people over. We do and we drink and it gets late and someone notices that Brooks is not with us. Someone else says he’s on campus and we decide to go find him. Ian drives, I ride shotgun, and Jake takes the back. We stop at Newt’s, a grim honky-tonk bar that has all sorts of specials to lure college kids. Fifty-cent beers to get them in the door and tipsy so that they’ll start buying shots. Which is what we do. Tequila. Ian is always several shots ahead of us, but Jake and I are eager to keep up. After last call, we put up stools and chairs and get more free shots. We are all lit in the same way, have the same streaking comet inside us, and agree that heading over to one of the girls’ dormitories is the thing to do. Find Brooks. Drag him home. And so we go. Ian blares “Idiot Wind” in the car and shouts the lyrics, You’re an eeeediot, Babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe . He rocks back and forth against the steering wheel as he wails, and his black hair and red eyes gleam demonlike in the green glow of the Volkswagen dashboard.

It’s at least two by the time we get out of the car. We are roaring drunk from the tequila and there is an unstable voltage humming in each of us. Our breath clouds and shimmers in the freezing cold March air, and we move from the car to the dorm like a three-headed monster hell bent on mischief. We tiptoe through the halls and Ian finds a fire extinguisher to bring along for the journey. He pretends to squirt us and at some point it goes off. Glorious plumes of white cloud billow out of the red canister, which is, in that instant, the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever seen. Ian points his new weapon in the opposite direction, squeezes the handle, and again, a majestic slow-motion miracle blooms out into the hall. Jake and I need to have one, too, so we race upstairs to find two more. Jake finds one and I somehow don’t. They go on to spray each other, the halls, the doors, the floor, a girl who is sleeping. We get split up, but there is a sense that we’re still connected by some invisible electric tether and only a shout away.