todd of tacoma

My friend crushed perc 30s before there was fentanyl, his generation’s before it was cool. If I had been born a decade later, I would have crushed perc 30s, too.

F

What happened was, to my friend, what happened was he was on a bus and found a vicodin in his seat. In the excitement of the moment, he blabbed about it loudly, too loudly for most passengers. This bus, though, did not carry most passengers. It carried a girl who knew where to find more vicodin. She was sitting right behind him and said, It sounds like you’re having a perfect day.

Sorry, I’ll shut up.

No, I don’t blame you.

They got to talking. Not even for very long, but long enough to poke the right tacks in their map of the journey ahead. She entered his number and called his phone and he entered her info as V Card and showed her and she snorted laughing. A laugh you could fall in love with. She wore this frighteningly pink lipstick, the kind with that thin silk perimeter that bounces sunlight into your eyes. My friend put his phone hand up as a visor and she asked what to enter for his name so she wouldn’t block him or report him spam.

Oh yeah, I’m F.

He turned forward when it was all over and smiled in the warm sunlight you bask in when you meet someone who will change your life forever. He didn’t look back till detox. That was who knows how many years ago, and I don’t ask how he jumped from vicodin to percocet because it’s obvious. When you find a vicodin on a bus seat you’re headed someplace special.

Me

My addiction story could have begun on a bus. Let’s plant me, for example, on a Greyhound I once took, headed for Bozeman, Montana, after a mental collapse in West Seattle. I’m headed to Bozeman to work at a summer theater camp there, not recognizing this is a laughable way to run away from problems. Toward children?

I’m reading the radio drama Under Milk Wood, inexplicably. Well, explicably. I’m reading a lot of plays this year, because I’ve decided to change my life through literature, a resolution that may have brought about my crack-up, and may bring more. I’m not a strong reader and reading doesn’t give your life much purpose, anyway.

Back on the bus.

I have to pee, so I get up and sniff my way to the toilet in back. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Halfway into this inferno, though, I spot my Virgil. She has a cast on and ripped black jeans and is reading Ionesco. I’m thrilled because of the aforementioned play thing. I want to ask her about, let’s say, Rhinoceros, because I want to tell her about the plays I’ve read, although not about Dylan Thomas. I’m not reading Milk Wood very carefully, so don’t ask me anything about it, then or now.

Something obvious about her arm, that’s what I ask her about instead, a story she’s tired of telling, I’m sure. But it’s the obvious questions, isn’t it? The sparks that start the fire. The match head striking the sidewalk. She tells me it’s a dumb story and it is. It’s not funny dumb, either, it’s just dumb. She fell over picking up a twig. I laugh, though, you have to laugh, so people know you’re chewing on what they say.

So, she smiles. And I think it’s earnest, I love this.

I forget I have to pee and I can’t smell the shit in the air now that I’m in it, so I sit across the aisle from her for a second. A lot of people disembarked at Spokane, so I can even kick one foot up on an armrest, which you’re not supposed to do.

She smiles again, this time at my temerity.

How to describe her smile:

I’ll give her the same pink lipstick V Card had. No, black! I love this. And not such a slobbery amount, either, or that weird veneer, because I want me to yearn to kiss her. I’ll have to put up my hand like a visor, too, like my friend did, remember that? I’ll be in the sunlight of the same big gas ball in the sky, but even more important, I’ll be in the fluorescence of this unusual girl’s unusual grin. It’s knowing but not at all. You’ve seen it, a concussed Cheshire Cat’s grin. Two seductive lips drawn on a mouthful of Froot Loops, you know. A diabolical Ophelia, coquettish and sipping the poisoned drink she’s stirred up just for you. That kind of smile.

So, I’m in the sunlight of the one eternal God, the sunlight that shone on all his creatures before it was cool and shines on their ancestors still, and I’m staring at this girl’s smile and thinking about asking her to stay with me until Bozeman, or to hop off with me early, in Bozeman. I don’t know where she’s headed, but I’d like her to head with me, instead.

Just then, when I’m ultimately and easily in love with this stranger, I notice what to any would-be addict is a red hot ember poking out of a travel bag on fire.

Adderall. Full bottle. (You were expecting vicodin, weren’t you, with the cast? But no, it’s adderall.) Dusty peach, my favorite color.

So, I don’t invite her to my summer theater camp. Instead, I tell her good talking to her, I have to pee, which at this point is a lie because I have forgotten I had to pee. I nudge the prescription bottle from its travel bag pocket with my left foot and swing my body counter-clockwise. I kick my right foot in the air describing circles in the sunlight, as a diversion, while stretching my left arm back and extending my fingers to grope at the floor like an arcade grabber. I’m careful, so so careful, not to shake or drop my prize once it’s in my grip. I cinch the bottle in my belt when I pretend to itch my stomach and, in the same movement, rise.

The bliss of walking to a bathroom with drugs. You’ve been there.

My magic show was good, really good, but in the end unnecessary, and possibly dangerous. Where were her eyes this whole time? Gone back to reading Ionesco. You return to the page when someone has to use the restroom, it’s just good manners. But the display was ostentatious enough to glue the eyes of every other Greyhound passenger to me.

I have to walk slowly now, careful not to jiggle or shake, hoping the bus won’t jerk, wobble, or catch a wind while I’m on this tightrope, afraid to rattle, treading with the grave focus of a man about to shit his pants.

But I breathe. You learn to do this. Act natural.

In the bathroom I have to recall I have to pee because the memory is gone. And I relieve myself, oh, do I relieve myself.

Mostly true

Later, I lie to this girl in a cast and it breaks my heart. She goes around, pathetic, asking if anyone’s seen a bottle of prescription pills beneath their seat. I have to say no, that’s all I can say.

She fires up a little cry. And the pity! I mean, I once loved her. Plus, she needs these pills. It’s a brand new prescription, and her doctor won’t give her a refill for thirty days, he watches her like such a fucking hawk.

Should I tell her? No, it would destroy her faith in people to know I’ve stolen from her. I want to make things better for her, not worse. The truth frees no one, trust me. You must lie. And lies are best told vaguely, so stick to the shallow and the murky.

Keep it simple.

A giant man in a kilt, with enormous boots on, stepped on your bag and left, oblivious to the pills stuck in the shank of his sole. He’s crushing them now, tragically, on a sidewalk in Coeur d’Alene, where he plays bagpipes with a band called Loch Up Your Women and Children.

Or, the bus had to stop abruptly and a young girl’s Dr. Pepper slammed up against your bag. Your adderall bottle’s lid splintered into pieces and pills shot out and each one stuck to the Dr. Pepper’s tacky wrapper. A clash of plastic bottles won by soda. The defeated pill bottle must still be rolling around here, empty, lidless, but it’s no use to you now, is it? I’m sorry.

Or maybe, while you were napping, a golden eagle swooped in through an open window and mesmerized the rest of us with her sad stories of a fraught nest, how she struggled to fly when she was but a starved fledgeling. Riveting stuff. Abusive nestlings, a mother on the river rocks every morning, afternoon, and evening, a father who left for a trout and never returned. But, in a happy twist, she forgives her mom now that she has eggs herself. She forgives her, but she won’t become her, that’s the moral. We laugh, we cry. Meanwhile, this sneaky huckster, still her mother’s daughter, clutches the bottle in her greedy talons and flies off. We all agree her story is bullshit.

What’s right is the enemy of what’s mostly true. What’s true is I’ve been mostly lying to you. I kind of said I would. It’s justifiable. What’s unjustifiable is I took this girl’s entire travel bag, not just her medication.

I’m sorry if I asked you already, do you see my bag anywhere?

No.

Mostly true.

No, because your bag is in my bag.

She gets off in Missoula. I discard her bag in Bozeman. There’s nothing else good in it.

Less than a week later, once I’ve run out of her adderall and am fired from the summer camp, I track down one of those shitty small-town dealers who can never find what you ask for. She gets me vicodin instead of adderall, and from vicodin I jump to perc 30s, the same way my friend did: obviously.

But that’s not what happened, either. I moved back to Seattle after my first summer sober in ten years, hold for applause, then I drank alcohol every day for another decade. I was at the midpoint of my life, in a dark wood.