Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

Two nights before the lunch, I’m at a dinner. I can’t remember which one or with whom but a few things can be counted on. I’m at l’acajou. I drink vodka. The waiters and waitresses top off my glass through the night. A gentle calm spreads into my chest with each glass and, gradually, the symphony of usual worries dies down. As those instruments still, and after the brief patch of ease begins to ebb, other sounds rise up from the pit. Agitated strings. Bullying horns. The pesky, restless want that feels like need. As I talk and listen and eat and laugh, I am waving my conducting wand, commanding the instruments to quiet. But as I wave more, I drink more, and as I drink, the sounds rise, become more insistent, and I excuse myself and go to the bathroom and call a number. This time it’s Mark’s and I arrange to go to his place after dinner. I worry a moment that the lunch for the author of the Winking Miracle is two days away and I need to be in top shape for that. But it’s two whole days, I reason. Even if I stay up most of the night, I’ll still have a full twenty-four hours to regain my footing.

I go to Mark’s and there is a blur of smoke and flesh and other people, and in the morning, this time, I don’t want it to end. The lunch is the next day, but still, somehow, it feels far away. A whole day and night and morning between now and then. It will work out. It always does. But this is the first night that wants to be two. Why this one and not the others? I look at the calendar from that time and it is graffitied with ink. Scribbled notes about lunch meetings, coffee dates, phone dates, drinks dates, trips to London, L.A., Frankfurt. Weddings, birthdays, benefits, plays, operas, book parties, screenings. So much to show up for, so much to camouflage for, to worry over. There is no busier period than that year when I am thirty-two and thirty-three. The sunstruck runup to the Jesus year. Someone — was it Marie? — always joked about thirty-three being the Jesus year — how it marked the end of one life and the beginning of another, the end of youth and the beginning of the undebatable status of adulthood. But I was twenty-four when she turned thirty-three, and adulthood seemed a world away.

Why was that the night that became three? Why did all the things that to anyone else, even to me, looked lucky, enviable, feel like burdens? It was the year I got tired, the year I began to give up. It was when the conducting wand broke and the sounds from the pit overwhelmed the conductor and drowned the hall.

I leave Mark’s by midday and check into a small hotel around the corner from the agency. It’s a cheap tourist hotel, one step up from a hostel, and I go there because Mark’s place is too sloppy, too smoke-charred, too exposed. The jittery paranoia I have seen in most of the crack smokers I have known has, during the last three or four times getting high, started to afflict me. This time it’s the most nagging, most persistent, and when I am at Mark’s, I find myself at the window, seeing what I think are unmarked police cars parked in front of his building. By morning I need to get out of there. I have Rico’s number, and I am pretty sure I can get him to deliver more in the afternoon. And so he does, and I stay up all night, alone and with reruns of the dingy and dated cable-access Robin Byrd Show, where rough-around-the-edges go-go boys and girls strip and let Robin perform oral sex on them. When this is over, I leave the station on all night. It runs low-tech ads for 1-900 numbers, with naked and half-naked men and women wooing the camera with talk of raunchy phone sex. The hotel room looks out onto an alley, and I lean out and look up at the panels of light reflected from other hotel rooms. Occasionally there will be a silhouette of a man or woman flickering across the brick, and I imagine a million scenarios. Sometimes a sound — a low crack, a muffled scraping, a window slamming shut — will echo through the alley, and a few times I call out, Hello .

Morning comes on fast, and by ten o’clock I realize I need to get home to fetch my suit for the lunch at La Grenouille. Noah has left dozens of messages, and beyond one phone call two nights before, saying I was alive and fine and not to worry, I have not called him. I still have a large bag from the night before and it gives me some comfort as I begin to face the day ahead. I reserve the hotel room again and take a cab to One Fifth to get my suit. Thankfully, Noah is not there, so I grab the suit, black shoes, and socks and haul out of the apartment, back into a cab and to the hotel room. It is noon by now and the lunch is at one. I can’t believe I’ve disappeared for two nights and a full day. Noah must be out of his mind with worry. But as much as I know this, I don’t call him, don’t track him down to let him know I am okay. I left a message on the voice mail for my assistant at eight a.m. to say that I would be going straight to the lunch, so that base is, for now, covered. But the lunch! Oh, Jesus, how can I go in this shape? I sit on the bed, pack the burnt, oily stem from the night before with a large rock, and inhale. My terror over the lunch, Noah, my office, and everything else vanishes like a flame suddenly cut off from oxygen. I roll up in the bedspread and let the flash of warm lightning race through my system. I lie on the bed for what seems like only a few minutes, but when I sit up again, it is five after one. The lunch. The glittering happy event that has sung its siren call for months has already begun, and I am strung out, unshowered, unshaven, and skinny from not eating. I take another hit and rush into the shower. It is almost two by the time I get out of the hotel and into a cab. After a shave and shower and the suit, I look in the mirror and, God help me, I convince myself that I look good. A little gaunt and shaky, but the suit, not to mention the bag and pipe and lighter I have in the breast pocket, gives me a shred of hope that I will be able to wing my way through the next few hours.

I get there and go straight to the bar and down a huge vodka. The lunch is on the second floor in a private dining room outside of which is a small bathroom. I duck into the gilded little toilet stall and scramble to pack the stem. My hands are shaking, as it’s been over twenty minutes since I took my last hit at the hotel and I can barely keep the flame steady. I inhale and hold it until my lungs sting and cough out the smoke. I wash my hands and rinse my mouth with soap to hide the smell and blow on the stem to cool it before wrapping it in toilet paper and putting it in my suit pocket.

The room has a long table, with flowers and bound galleys of the book arranged beautifully. People apparently have just sat down. There has been a sort of mingling with cocktails before the lunch, so luckily I haven’t been as obviously absent as I would have been if they had sat down at one o’clock. Jean stands as I walk in the door. I just got here! I’m so sorry I was late! she coos. So Jean doesn’t even know that I’m late. Another miracle. Somehow I talk to the author, her Legendary Editor, and a few others and sit down at the table, next to Jean, and the event glides on without my help and with no apparent controversy over my lateness. I tell everyone I have the flu and am not feeling well. I make up a story for Jean about some trouble in my family that I had to attend to, and she shivers with genuine concern. I excuse myself twice during the lunch to slam glasses of vodka at the bar downstairs and duck into the toilet to smoke. I say good-bye to everyone around three thirty, wander out onto Fifth Avenue, and when I see a man in his thirties handing out flyers for some discount men’s store, I recognize something in him and ask him if he parties. When he says yes, I ask, With rock? He flashes a smile and laughs more than says, Oh boy .