Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I throw a party at the apartment when Noah is out of town. It’s a Thursday night and I’ve already cleared the decks so I don’t need to go into work the next day. All evening I pretend to be tired — yawning and stretching, rubbing my eyes — hoping to encourage people to leave early. I imagine the first hit and the bloom of exquisite calm it will bring and I quietly, invisibly, detest everyone in the apartment for being there. I move through the apartment with my seltzer — what I always drink when I organize anything larger than a dinner party — and as I’m talking and smiling and hugging congratulations and thank-you-for-comings, I’m running down the list of things left to do. Check in with Noah to give him the sense that the night has wound down and I am heading to bed. Run out to the cash machine to get Stephen $300—maybe $400—to go wherever he needs to go to score. I’ll also need at least $300 to pay him for bartending, since he accepts cash only. I decide to tell him not to bother cleaning up, that I’ll do it so he can get going.

Stephen leaves around eleven fifteen and returns after one. I’ve just finished breaking down the bar, washing the glasses, and putting away the sodas and napkins. (He’ll include those two hours on his bill.) This night is important. Not because it’s the first time I sleep with him. Not because I spend another $700 I barely have. But because at some point, around four in the morning, when we have smoked nearly through the bag, Stephen calls his friend Mark, who, in a few swift minutes, is at the door with more.

Mark is a restaurant publicist. Tall, neat, angular. I notice right away how he vibrates. As if some electrical charge shocks through his body at a low but steady thrum. I also notice how he speaks to Stephen. Like Fagin to the Artful Dodger, he has some authority over him, and even though it’s clear he’s on his best behavior, I can see how their dynamic involves some commingling of brutality and care. As Mark holds up our stems and complains how oily and burnt they are, Stephen flutters around him like a nervous nurse attending a surgeon. Mark gives him a you-should-know-better look and shakes his head. Stephen doesn’t tell him that they’re burnt because of me. That I have, as I always do, scorched each stem with hits that pull too long and flames that are too high. Everyone I ever smoke with will complain about this. And though I will try, each time, to inhale as gently as I can, it always seems like I’m not pulling hard enough, as if the flame is too low, as if I’m not getting enough.

At some point after Mark arrives, Stephen stops speaking to me directly. There seems to be some new rule that Mark is the only one who can address me, and when he does, he is wildly polite, overly complimentary (the apartment, my looks). It’s as if I’m in the forecourt of a long con, and instead of feeling hesitant or cautious, I’m thrilled.

The night grunts on until ten or so the next morning. Stephen and Mark amble out into the day, and by Saturday night I have invited them over again. By Monday morning, my bank account is empty and Mark has suggested he and I get together on our own sometime that week. Noah calls a dozen or so times, and I let the landline ring, turn the cell phone off, and don’t call him back. On Monday afternoon, my assistant comes into my office and says Noah is on the line, upset and demanding to speak to me. I close the door, and he cries on the other end of the line and asks me to please stop. Could I just please stop. I feel awful and tell him of course and I’m sorry and that it won’t happen again. He presses for details and I get mad. Amazingly, he apologizes. I throw Stephen’s number away. I throw Mark’s card away. But it doesn’t matter. Both call over the next weeks and months, and at some moment, I can’t remember exactly when or which one, I write a number down. And at some other moment, not long after, I call.

It’s time to go. He’s had to pee for hours, but it’s always the last thing he wants to do. The problem — that’s what his parents call it— the problem is that if he goes, meaning, to the bathroom, he won’t actually be able to go. In the way he describes it to himself then, it hasn’t built up enough yet. There isn’t enough pressure. He will wait a little while. Wait until dinner is over, when no one will notice if he’s gone for too long. Sometimes it takes as long as an hour. Sometimes he can’t do it at all. And sometimes it only takes a few minutes. He never knows until he’s there.

It’s after dinner and he’s standing in front of the avocado green toilet. Noises happen behind the closed door — a dropped ice tray, cursing, breaking glass, louder cursing, a phone ringing. The house swells with urgency. From somewhere inside these sounds, a voice that will always remind him of wind chimes calls, Billy, are you all right?

Billy …, his mother calls again, but her voice fades.

Nothing for a few moments. Just the green toilet. Hurry, he thinks. Hurry. His hands work furiously over the end of his penis. A loud knock at the door. Then two. A different voice. His father’s. Jesus, Willie, don’t make a career out of it in there .

Little-guy cords — usually navy blue, sometimes green — bunch at his feet. Fruit of the Looms wrinkle just below his knees. He’s been in there for over half an hour. He’s come close at least three times, but each time it doesn’t work. Doesn’t happen. He knows it’s going to sting — like bits of glass trying to push out — but he just wants it over with. He shuffles in front of the bowl — left, right, left, right — and squeezes the end of his penis. Rubs it with both hands. The pressure builds and his brow is sweating. He has a terrified sense that if his parents find out, there will be trouble. His father has told him that he has to stop taking so long in the bathroom. When he asks his son why he jumps around and makes such a big production of it all, the boy doesn’t have an answer. Cut it out is what his father tells him, and he wishes he could.

He runs the water in the sink to cover the sound. The shuffle becomes a dance, the kneading becomes a fevered pinching. From a faraway room he hears his older sister, Kim, crying. His father yells her name. A door slams. His mother calls out. A kettle of boiling water whistles from the kitchen. None of these sounds have to do with him. But someone — he can’t tell who — is knocking at the door now. Just knocking, no voice. The boy is a panicked animal — jerking and jumping and pinching before the bowl. He braces for another knock. There is more shouting from down the hall. The sound of something breaking. His hands, his legs — his whole body riots around the pressure at his middle. He’s sure his parents can hear him, convinced they will come bursting through the locked door at any moment. He tries to stop the jumping but he can’t. It feels as if the whole house — his parents, his sister, the cats, the whistling kettle — has gathered on the other side of the door.

In a moment — the one he’s desperate for but can’t create — none of it will matter. In that moment, he won’t hear the slamming and banging and yelling. As the stinging pressure crests and his body flaps away from him, he won’t hear anything. In that streaking moment when he loses control and everything fades out in a flash of pain and relief, he will spray the wall, the floor, the radiator, himself.

He doesn’t see any of the mess until the little oblivion passes and he’s able to steady himself and direct the pee into the bowl. He aims toward the back to avoid the ruckus of water and it goes on forever. He sees there’s a big clean-up job to be done, and he’s already anxious about what to say when he’s on the other side of the door. Once he’s finally finished peeing, he begins pulling yards of toilet paper from the roll, spools that ribbon around his feet and begin to soak up the pool of urine on the tile. He wipes down the toilet and the walls behind and to the side. He gets on his hands and knees and begins sweeping the damp away in long wide arcs. He pats his pants down with the tissue until it pills and crumbles in his hands. He puts too much toilet paper in the bowl and it clogs and the water rises. He knows to put his hand up the drain and yank the paper free to avoid another mess. He plunges his arm in, tugs frantically at the clog, and, like an answered prayer, the bowl empties. Just as this happens the knocking begins again and now it’s both parents at the door. His pants and underwear are still bunched around his ankles. He hasn’t pulled them up yet because he knows that beads of blood have sprung up at the tip of his penis and it will take a few dabs of tissue and a minute or two for it to dry before it’s safe. Often he rushes through this part and will have to throw his underwear out later as little brown spots of blood bud and dry in the white fabric. He’s tried stuffing toilet paper in there, but it usually slips to the side and doesn’t work. Sometimes he forgets and tosses the underwear in the hamper and sees the dryer-dried briefs folded and spotty in his dresser drawer days later. His mother never says a word to him about the briefs, about the peeing — about any of it. This has been going on for as long as he can remember. He has no memory of standing at a toilet and peeing when he wants to.