Jade Sharma - Problems

This little jail is made out of powder.

There is this powder people snort or shoot into their bodies that makes them feel good, but they end up turning into zombies, lying around, wasting their lives, getting older, and doing nothing. It makes you feel so good. It is a bad sci-fi movie, and you’ve seen it how many times?

“You can shut the door,” Elizabeth said as I walked into the bedroom.

“Here.” She handed me a methadone pill. Thank you, Elizabeth, for being so fucking considerate. You didn’t make me have to act nice .

“How much should I take?”

“What’s your habit like?” she asked. The way she was wearing her reading glasses, I felt like we were at CVS, and she was the pharmacist.

“About a bag and a half a day for the last ten days,” I told her.

“If you want enough not to be dope sick, half is fine. If you want to get a high, then take the whole pill.”

“Do you want money?”

“Nah, it’s cool. They’re only three bucks a pill,” she said. Was it even a crime if you didn’t pay for it? Was the crime taking the drug or having it on you? Did New York City consider my body a container?

Elizabeth chased the dragon, lighting it off aluminum foil. She must waste a lot that way because the smoke goes everywhere. I wondered why people didn’t use a bong or something to catch the smoke.

Elizabeth cleaned in red heels. Give that girl a bag of dope and watch everything sparkle. As she folded her size-zero jeans, she told me Candy’s story.

Candy lived Upstate. She and Noah had been friends when they worked at an art gallery together like ten years ago. She had gotten married, moved back home, and had two kids. Some dude had wanted to spend the rest of his life with that annoying bitch. She friended Noah on Facebook.

Facebook: the way to ruin nice memories by having to meet up with people you should just be allowed to wonder what had happened to.

Candy was pretty hot in a vulgar, all-American, skanky way. Blond hair, vacant eyes. She had that vibe, like you could do whatever you wanted to her. Just bend her over. Like she was used to it. Like she’d been fucked so many times she wouldn’t care if you had a turn. I kind of wished I could give off that vibe. Sometimes I tried, but it was always awkward. Something about me wasn’t easy. Whatever it was made it harder for men to forget I was a real person. Every time I fucked someone, it became complicated.

At some point, Candy got addicted to pain pills. Her husband was leaving her. He was going to take the kids. She had to get clean. She asked Noah if he would look after her kids while she kicked if she came to the city and picked him up. And for whatever fucking reason, probably because he was high out of his mind, he agreed. Then Candy came down and put the large, simple pieces together. Noah brought her to an apartment that looked like a junkie lived there. There was a girl nodding out with an extension cord around her neck, who woke up and asked Candy if she was interested in buying an extension cord. Noah said he would be gone a few minutes but was gone for hours. There was no power. She sat in the dark and saw mice brazenly run across the counters. Noah finally came home, and she went off on him. He brought her to Elizabeth’s to calm her down. After they ate, Noah started this shit with wanting to go and get clean with her. “They just keep going back and forth about it. She’ll be like ‘I’m going by myself.’ And then Noah will be like, ‘I agreed to help you and I want to.’ Then she cries. It never ends.” Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “They won’t fucking leave.”

“All I can imagine is babies wailing, and Noah and Candy passed out on the floor with lit cigarettes in their mouths and the stove on,” I said.

“Men our age are giant pussies,” Elizabeth said. “I need a real man. Like an old-school dude who won’t put up with my bullshit, you know? Someone who can take control of my life.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, pouring the dope onto a copy of The Rum Diary .

Lying on the bed. Giggling, on our bellies, swinging our feet. We were two girls at camp. She said, “Oh, Maya, when will we be swans?”

Elizabeth’s clavicles were pronounced. She had long dark hair. She could have been a model. Sometimes I wanted to touch her stomach because it was perfect, how flat it was. Her shirts hung flawlessly because nothing was there to push them out. Men fell in love with her. Men followed her down the street trying to guess her name, like in a movie.

She always dated men who were losers and assholes.

Haven’t you, haven’t you seen it all before?

I was in love with Elizabeth. I wished we could be together, cooking, laughing, talking. I didn’t want to have sex with her. I just always wanted to be with her and to hear her laugh at my jokes and to protect her. Or I wanted her flat stomach and size-zero jeans and low-affect attitude, as if nothing could fuck with her. Elizabeth would not cry in a grocery store if her sixty-year-old boyfriend didn’t pick up her phone call. Or maybe I did want to have sex with her. Who knew.

Elizabeth had lost her father very young. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was thirty-six and she was seven. In her living room, there had been a hospital bed with a machine attached to him that gave him chemo. The cancer spread to his brain. No one told him he was dying. Elizabeth’s mother told her not to tell him. The very last time she saw him, on his deathbed, he tried calling his office to tell his boss he couldn’t come in. When she hugged him, he whispered to her that he would take her to the beach for her birthday.

After her father died, Elizabeth’s mother assumed her husband’s four brothers, who lived close by, would help out, but they didn’t even come by, let alone lend her money. She was a middle-aged woman with two kids, and she had never worked. Overnight her life resembled nothing she could have imagined. She was a widow with bills to pay. She drove Elizabeth in circles all night, crying and cursing her dead husband and his family.

Elizabeth went to eleven different schools. Her mother-packed lunch was always the same: a small can of tuna, a plastic fork, a V8, and one of those little red balls of cheese. “I was the girl who smelled like tuna,” Elizabeth said with a smile.

At seventeen her mother bought her a one-way ticket to Boston. In Boston she lived in a house with other runaways and drug addicts. She got a job bartending. She tried heroin for the first time. Then she made her way to New York.

Elizabeth was always telling me her plans. She was always on the verge of getting clean. Then she would go into the bathroom, where Noah would shoot dope into her arm and her slight body would slump over, and then I would hear the obligatory toilet flush, as if anyone thought she was actually using the toilet. But she had been doing dope in secret for so long it was part of the routine.

I used to feel good. Elizabeth used to feel nothing. She used till the money was gone. She would vomit in the toilet, pass out on the floor, wake up, and do more. She told me once, “Ever since my dad died, I don’t care about being alive.” She mixed pills and dope and drank on top of it. She wanted oblivion, she said, and death would only be a welcome side effect on the way to her goal. How her ninety-pound body could handle it all was a mystery. How she was able to maintain a job, working ten- to twelve-hour days as an editor for a magazine, was also a mystery, but it was mostly a curse. She was stuck in the cycle of making money to blow on her habit and needing dope to sustain the long hours at the office. She always was saying that if she only made this much more then everything would be fine. But she would always need more money, no matter how much she made, because that was the nature of the problem, and the problem would never be solved as long as she could make money or keep her job. There was nothing to throw a wrench into the cycle, no free time to offer a moment of clarity. Where was bottom? She worked high up in a building, and then she went home to her apartment and shot all the money in her arm to feel nothing at all.