Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I stop by a deli around the corner from the hotel and get ten lighters, six boxes of sleeping pills, and a six-pack of beer so that I have something to drink the second I get to the room. I wish I could take a hit before going into the hotel, but I know it’s now or never. I head into the new brick-and-glass building, and as I march, as slowly and calmly as I can, up the steps, I think of the clean sheets, the gushing shower, the room service, the immaculate surfaces, the safety. The place is crawling with guys who look like production assistants on movies — all hats and jeans and scruff. Thank God. Thank God I don’t stick out. Instantly I imagine I am in town from L.A. on a shoot and that anyone noticing my weight, the rings under my bloodshot eyes, the greasy hair poking out from my cap, will just chalk it up to a tight production schedule and late nights in the editing room going over the dailies. So with this fantasy flickering behind my movements, I go to the front desk and ask for a room. How many nights? the woman asks, and I make a quick calculation of the $500 room rate and the amount of crack I plan on buying from Happy. I tell her four nights and that I need to check in under an alias as well as needing a smoking room. She doesn’t skip a beat. She says, Fine, runs my debit card, looks at my passport, hands me a plastic room card, and off I go. I practically giggle from excitement and relief in the elevator as I’m heading up to what is the third floor from the top of the building. I clock that it’s high enough for a jump to matter. If all else fails, there is that.

The room is small, on the southwest corner, and dimly lit. The lights of SoHo, Tribeca, and Wall Street dance and blink on the other side of the large windows, and it feels, when I first step into the room, like being on the inside of a snow globe suspended in midair, high above the city. I stand at the window and call Happy for the last time.

He arrives around one. I’d smoked down what I had left from the bag at Rosie’s an hour ago, and my stem is now less than two inches long, caked with burnt, unsmokable residue. When I called hours earlier I asked for $2,000 worth. More than I’ve ever ordered. I can only give him $1,500 in cash — what was left of my limit when I went to the ATM before midnight and a new grand after. I ask him, this one time, to sport me the difference. He pauses, briefly, and starts counting out the bags and new stems. Nice hotel, he says, commenting for the first time ever on where I’m staying. Nice room . And he leaves. Looking at the forty bags of crack on my bedspread, the most I have ever seen in one place, makes me feel safer than I have felt all day. The bags look fuller, more jam-packed than usual, and the abundance, the dancing light outside the window, and the awareness that I will never leave this room sends a high through my system before I even light up. I lie down on the bed and drop the bags on my chest and face, one by one, and then all at once. It feels like an arrival. The end of a journey. Not just the panicked one of days and nights and weeks after relapsing, but the long one, the whole useless struggle. The lines from that novel rise up again, but this time with new meaning. It would be now .

I pull the curtains shut and pack a hit with one of the new stems and, more than ever before, let the crumbs scatter about. It won’t matter. I won’t see the end of this pile. There is no way I can survive this. I pack another hit. Another. And another. Happy has given me eight stems, and I load two more so I don’t have to wait for one to cool before I start the next. I inhale smoke nonstop for nearly an hour, naked and breathing more smoke than air. I am filled with smoke — warm, electric, big. I feel weightless in this dim room. I am almost nothing. I am, finally, about to be nothing.

I order bottles and bottles of vodka from room service, no food. I smoke and drink all night, and by morning I have gone through a third of what I bought from Happy and panic that I won’t have enough. By midnight, I decide to get $1,000 from the ATM and call Rico and ask him to float me a grand’s worth until the next day. I’ve never asked Rico for an advance but he doesn’t hesitate. When he comes around two in the morning — heavyset, cranky, and in a bulky red sweatshirt — he throws in a couple hundred extra, in addition to the thousand on credit. On the house. Eat something, man, he says, and for a moment he looks worried. But only for a moment and then he’s gone. I gather all the little bags together. A bigger pile than the night before and now, with only $4,000 in my account and a hotel bill ticking up, I worry, again, if I will have enough. Death and an empty bank account are racing neck and neck, and it’s the former I am pinning everything on.

I take all the sleeping pills out of their boxes and pop each one free from the thick sheets of safety packaging. I put the pills in a clear water glass from the bathroom and empty all the crack into another. My hands shake as I move the pills and the crack, and my whole body rocks in time with my heartbeat. I am drinking vodka like water and nervous each time I have to order another couple bottles that the room-service boys will report to the desk that there is something funny going on in my room.

The second morning comes on and the room seems smaller. I open the curtains and the day outside is gray, still. I am looking out the window at neighborhoods I’ve eaten and shopped and walked in for years, and yet I feel as if I’m seeing a city I’ve never been to. Nothing appears familiar and it seems less like a place I could go down the elevator and visit, and more like a photograph or a mural I can only regard.

I continue to smoke and am grateful for a ventilation system that draws the billowing clouds away as soon as I exhale. I have kept a window cracked to allow fresh air in, and for once I don’t worry about the smell seeping down the hall to alert other guests or hotel employees.

I stand at the window, towel around my waist, and notice across the lot behind the hotel a string of black SUVs and several dark sedans lined up in a row. There must be nine of them, and I think but am not sure I see two people sitting in the front seat of each. I stop breathing. One of them seems to be holding a pair of binoculars. My heart begins to slam in my chest. It looks as if they all have binoculars. Eighteen pairs of them, trained directly on this window, this room, me. My towel slips off and I drop to my knees and kneel up to the window. One of them is waving. It’s hard to tell but I’m sure he’s waving from behind the glass. There’s a reflection, but yes, yes, his arm is waving. Fuck, they’re all waving. Waving with one hand and holding binoculars in the other. I feel like I’ve been electrocuted. My arms and neck ache, and I think I’m having a heart attack. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! I shout to myself as I pace the room and pour a full glass of vodka, downing it in one gulp. FUCK. I immediately grab a new stem and jam it full. SHIT! I scream as I stop myself from lighting up. I can’t smoke it with the curtains open. Not with them all watching. But I can’t close them, they’ll storm the room. Oh, my God, they are going to storm the room. I run to the bathroom and turn on the shower to hide the sound of the lighter and the loud popping sound of the flame scorching the too-large chunk of crack at the end of the stem. It takes three long pulls to smoke the stem down, and I grab a towel and lay it across the base of the door to the room. Suddenly I notice that the ventilation system in the bathroom isn’t very good. The smoke hangs heavy and slow in the air at the top of the ceiling. I open the door and return to the room. Without looking out the window, I close the curtains, sit down on the bed, load up the stem, and smoke. And again. And again. I am low on vodka and without it I will shake out of control. After a few moments pass, I do it again. I’m terrified now of calling downstairs for more, but I do. I grab shampoo and streak the walls around the bathroom door and the vents of the air system, hoping to create a fresh smell. I drink the last of the vodka, load up more hits, and look at my watch and see that it’s after one o’clock. I have one more night left in the hotel and I know there is not enough money in my account for another. The vodka comes, and the boy who delivers it is not a boy but a man and too smooth, I think, too in control, and too, well, manly to be a room-service waiter. Fuck, I think. Undercover. I thank him, sign the bill, and when he asks if there’s anything else, I think, GET THE FUCK OUT! but gently say, No thanks, and keep my shaking hands behind my back. He leaves and I think I hear something above me. Is there another room above me or the roof? I can’t remember. I pace the room, light a hit, and decide whether to open the curtains and look up. It takes forty-five minutes and nearly half a bottle of vodka for me to pull back the curtains, lean out, look up, and notice that there is an open roof above this room and not another room. The building steps back at the top, and my floor is the last before it narrows. I look out across the lot to the line of black SUVs and sedans and think I see the flash of a lighter go off in one. And another. Are they trying to drive me insane? Why are they watching me? Why don’t they just arrest me? WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY? I suddenly feel light, flimsy. Defenseless. I try to stand but stay bent with dread, like a half-closed jackknife. I close the curtains and crouch on tiptoes back to the bed. The noises above — footfalls? Something dragging? Are they planning on scaling down from the roof and coming in through the windows? I realize how small this room is and wonder if they’ve rigged it this way solely for me — is it usually part of a larger suite, but when they saw me coming, they created a wired, camera equipped, roof-accessible space to corner me into a bust? A radio sounds from somewhere — in the hall? The roof? I jump off the bed toward the dresser. My towel comes off again, and I see in the mirror a rickety skeleton — elbows and knees and knuckles bulging like bolted wooden joints strung with thread. I am the marionette I have seen hundreds of times before but never thought was me. I am only sticks and strings and spasms. Money gone. Love gone. Career gone. Reputation gone. Friends gone. Hope gone. Compassion gone. Usefulness gone. Second chances gone. And if there had been any hesitation about dying, that’s gone now, too. I take a huge hit. There must be almost $2,000 worth of crack left in the glass cup. I have almost two full bottles of vodka, a water glass full of sleeping pills, two clean and three rough-but-usable stems left. I need to get it all down as fast as possible, to wallop my system hard enough before anyone breaks into the room. I’ve slept only a handful of hours over the last six weeks. I cannot remember eating. I’m sure my racked body won’t survive if I overwhelm it with what I have. The team of binocular-holding, lighter-flashing, hand-waving SUV drivers outside, who now seem to be on the roof, are, at any second, it seems, about to explode through the door and windows.