Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

“The guitars,” Nik said, a concession lurking in a nod and pursed lips. Nik wore his sunglasses, but from where I sat at his side, I could see him dart glances at the room, at Tommy’s swollen white feet, at the array of pills on the side table.

Tommy’s face — his nose in particular — had grown doughy over the years. I tried my best to conjure how he used to look in the old days. Without moving my head, my eyes looked up and back, as if that would somehow help me see the past better. Maybe people do that with their eyes because looking at the present is too distracting. I could glimpse him standing at Nik’s bar maybe fifteen years back. It was horrible to contemplate how much the past fifteen years had worn on him, or, really, on all of us. He was truly unrecognizable, just a damp, congested distortion of his younger face.

I didn’t say anything to Tommy as we sat there, I just listened — how could I not, at this volume? — to the music. We all felt relief when the “hit” came on, “Blank Generation.”

I belong to the blank generation and

I can take it or leave it each time

The nihilism of the lyrics came with a bright up-hop to the guitar riff and some nice sloppy ooh s that made us all feel momentarily happier, though it couldn’t have been lost on any of us how young the music sounded, how ridiculous.

“It’s just the—” Tommy started, then paused. We looked at him. “Shit, I can’t get the word I was about to say. It is the strangest sensation, knowing something but not being able to remember it. How can you not remember it if you know you forgot it, you know?”

“It’s called aphasia. That sensation — you remember the thing but not the word,” I said. “Nominal aphasia is when you can’t recall names.” They stared at me. “I have it, too, all the time.”

“Oh, fuck, everyone gets that,” Nik said. Although Nik had an excellent memory for an unrepentant alcoholic. He never forgot anything.

“It doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, but I could tell he was still trying to think of it. Nik took out his gifts: his latest CD in a Collector’s Limited Edition case and a liter bottle of handsome-looking scotch.

“I figure if you can’t drink much, it should be the best, right?” Nik said.

“Thanks, man.” Tommy looked at it. “I can’t drink at all anymore, it interferes with all these meds. I can’t tolerate it at all. But it sure is nice to look at the bottle. You want a shot?”

I was so irritated by this. I just hated, deeply, the idea of Nik taking a shot. Right here, in front of bloated Tommy, in the morning. And I hated that Nik spent a lot of money on an expensive bottle of scotch when he had no money. And then, through my anger, I figured it out — he knew that Tommy couldn’t drink. He knew that he would end up drinking it himself.

Nik uncorked the top and poured some in a water glass. He threw back his head and slammed it down.

“Is that the way you’re supposed to drink that kind of scotch?” I shouted over the music, and I heard the pointless harsh scold in my weary rhetorical inflection. They didn’t even look at me, and who was I to rain my judgment on them, now, after all? This was a special occasion; I was a prig. Except there would be another shot, surely, and another, and then we would drive home, me terrified not that Nik would crash — he seemed unaffected by drink — but that he would be pulled over and get a DUI. Which wouldn’t be his first. And maybe he would lose his license and then wouldn’t be able to get to work. At the very least it risked a big fine, not to mention the possible bench warrant that was no doubt outstanding from previously unpaid tickets. Fifteen years ago Nik actually had to spend a couple of weeks in jail. All due to years of ignored traffic tickets. He stamped handcuffs in the LA County Jail. And washed police cars. They let him leave the jail to sleep, I think. I don’t remember. He was pretty careful for a while after that, to pay or respond to tickets. He had become more careless the last couple of years. Careless or reckless? None of this appeared to concern Nik in the slightest as he downed another shot. Tommy dissolved into a hacking coughing fit, and then we watched as he worked to find his breath.

As soon as we left Tommy’s door, Nik felt in the pocket of his jacket for a cigarette. In the walk down the driveway, he lit up and took a deep drag. He would chain-smoke all the way home. I knew Tommy upset Nik, and I knew that the scotch and the cigarettes calmed him down. I knew that. I also knew that he had coughing fits similar to Tommy’s. I had never bothered to ask Nik to quit smoking. Not once. I knew he never would. I had asked him about other things, drink and drugs, at various crisis points. He would not consider my concerns, my calculations, my projections in fear and the future. He would say, more or less, This is how I want to live and I won’t complain when it finally takes me out. Which was true, he did not complain. He wouldn’t curtail his life to protect against some theoretical consequence that might never come to pass. Unlike most normal people, he didn’t regret his habits and he never even pretended he would try to quit any of it.

By now I should have been used to his — what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accommodation, maybe? He wouldn’t call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used — the consoling part came later — whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other’s arms and swing in circles faster and faster until our brains’ equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would walk in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.

He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high — stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you feel giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can’t be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.

Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the Physician’s Desk Reference, the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and considered. He would root through his girlfriends’ mothers’ medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy you asked, How many should I take? Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn’t miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud’s cocaine, Leary’s LSD, Richard Harris’s scotch.