Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

They are on a highway heading home from Boston. They drive uncomfortably fast until the traffic congeals and the swearing and the steering wheel pounding starts. As his father turns the radio down and adjusts the heating vents, he imagines him before the great panel of lights and gadgets in the cockpits of the planes he flies. The ones filled with passengers who trust him to take them across the ocean, to London and Paris. There are times — like this — when he can’t imagine anything his father cannot do.

The traffic gets worse and his father grumbles at the cars in front of him. The boy stays quiet. He’s relieved that the attention has shifted away from him, from the reason they are in a car together today. They have gone to see a doctor — the one the Boston Red Sox use, his father said — to find out what exactly is wrong with him.

What precisely goes on at this doctor’s office, he will forget. Maybe he remembered in the car, ran it over in his head as they rode home, or maybe it had already slipped away. In any case, he will spend years trying to remember, but the only part that ever comes back will be the car ride itself. He’ll remember the old lines about wrecking the house and the strange, nearly sexual air of the day — so much talk about penises and pissing. Something clandestine and shameful about the whole trip, which had begun with his mother’s pinched announcement at breakfast that he and his father would be going to Boston to visit a doctor. He’ll remember how worried she looked and how far away. He’ll remember wishing the car would rattle at high speed right off the road and go up in a blaze. He will persist with that kind of wish for years — in school buses, planes, vans, trains. He’ll also remember — and this most vividly — a prediction his father makes. That very soon his friends — Timothy, Derek, Jennifer — and their parents will stop letting him into their houses for sleepovers or playdates. That it’s just a matter of time before they catch on, and once they do, there will be no way they’ll allow such a mess, such a monster, in their houses.

This last bit will stick. It will expand into a belief that they already know and are complaining to his parents and warning their children, his friends. He’ll worry, until they move away a few years later to a smaller town farther north and deeper in the woods, that secretly his friends and their families and even his teachers know about his problem and that there will come a day when they’ll make a spectacle of that knowing. He will imagine and sometimes think he’ll hear them say monster under their breaths.

And so they drive. His father presses on with talk of declining house values, promises of banishment. The radio mumbles low on the station that will still, years later, remain for him the source of the gloomiest, most desolate sound, and be the station playing in every car his father owns. As they get off the highway and begin to snake along the winding Connecticut roads toward home, there is silence and the occasional click of pipe against teeth. The world outside seems to be in on all of it: the trip to the doctor and the warnings afterward part of some long-considered, collectively agreed-upon plan of action. There is nothing physically wrong with you, his father eventually shouts, exhausted no doubt by the whole day. It’s just a matter of willpower. Of choice. God only knows what kind of permanent damage you’re doing down there. What kinds of things you won’t be able to do, later.

This last part must have been said on the way up the driveway or sitting in front of the garage because he will remember hearing the word damage as he looked up at the charcoal-colored ranch house, knowing that a new radiator and fresh wallpaper were nothing compared with what would be needed to fix him.

There is a bar in the Newark Airport Marriott. It’s almost midnight and I phone the front desk and find out that last call is at one. I shower and shave and clean up as best I can before going down for a drink and company. I put in a new pair of contacts because when I’m getting high, no matter how much water I drink or how many eyedrops I empty into my eyes, the lenses dry up and pop out. I have packed four boxes of contacts for this trip, and since I’ve been in the hotel, I have already replaced the left one once and the right one twice. I know I will have to be more careful but as with everything else — drugs, money in my bank account, time — at this point there seems more than enough to last. I wear my navy cashmere turtleneck because it’s thick and cabled and hides my rickety frame; it is also expensive and, I think, obscures the cracked-out truth of me. I wear my jeans, and even though I am now cinching my belt to its last hole, I still need to tuck the front of the sweater in to keep them from falling down. I know I will have to find a leather shop in Berlin to punch new holes.

Once I get dressed, I pace through the routine of taking a hit, guzzling a glass of vodka, going to the mirror to make sure I look okay, messing with my hair until I give up and put on the Parks & Rec Department cap. I start to get warm and a little horny and restless in my clothes, and I take my sweater off, lie down on the bed, turn on some porn, and jerk off. I wallow in the little patch of dizzy pleasure for a few minutes, and as it fades and I pour another vodka to cut the speedy buzz and mellow out the high, I think, Just one more, a big one this time to kick up my courage. And so one more. I put my sweater back on, fuss in front of the mirror, squeeze a few eyedrops in, pat down my hair, put on my cap, yank on my jeans, and before I know it I’m on the bed again, shirtless and shimmering and enjoying the short while before I need my stem, another drink, and just a little more time before I leave the room.

I finally make it downstairs to the bar and am immediately disappointed that the place is nearly empty and dotted with a few couples and business colleagues traveling together. I don’t see the vulnerable and restless loner I’m looking for — that magical kindred partner in crime, game for a long night.

I slam three or four vodkas and begin to get shaky. More than twenty minutes without a hit is pushing it, and I’ve been downstairs for at least half an hour. Vodka usually eases that jittery feeling, smooths the little wrinkles of horror that slip in as a high teeters toward a crash, but it’s not helping much now. In any case, I’ve got the largest pile of crack I’ve ever seen waiting in the room and there is no good reason to stop. I signal the waiter as calmly as I can, leave two twenties and a ten with the $35 tab, and make for the elevator.

The night swirls with thick smoke, and I go through nine of the sixteen bags by early afternoon. I have never smoked so much in such a short time — two bags, shared with at least one other person would normally be a big night — and my skin tingles with heat and I’m aware of every breath and every heartbeat. All my clothes and toiletries are scattered around the hotel room and still I have too much left to smoke to make leaving the room seem like a good idea. I call the cabdriver from last night and leave a dozen messages. He doesn’t call back. It takes hours to pack and clean up, with hundreds of pit stops to smoke and drink along the way.

With three hours before the flight, I finally make my way down through the lobby. As I check out, I notice, near the door, five or six men between the ages of forty and sixty. Each has some distinct but unspecific quality — gray slacks, grim shoes, Windbreaker. Head-to-toe JCPenney. They mumble to one another and it seems — though it’s not exactly clear — that they all have earpieces with wires tucked discreetly into their shirts. There is no one else in the lobby. Only one cab waits at the taxi stand. I hear, That’s him, from one of them, or I think I do, as I make my way through the electric doors to the breezeway outside. As I get into the taxi, I notice all five or six of them leaving the hotel and heading toward two or three cars parked in front of the building. The driver gives me a knowing look and states more than asks, Continental, which is of course my airline, but how does he know? I ask him and he says, It’s Newark, everyone flies Continental . I look at his ID displayed in the Plexiglas partition and see that the photo, just like the one in the cab yesterday, is obscured by a piece of cardboard. I begin to panic. He starts the car, pulls away from the hotel, and as I watch the cars filled with the JCPenney guys follow us, I know I am, right now, crossing over from one world into another. I can already imagine myself remembering this cab ride, how it will signal the end of the time when I was free.