It was a two-shot, a close-up and a wide-angle. For the close-up, they must have had Eyes Only on one of the Keebler elves on the cookie box, and the wide-angle, I guess that was from the Quaker Oats canister over the sink. The video picked up right at the point where I came out of the bedroom, wearing this semi-see-through kimono. And like I said before, I know I’m not God’s gift, but if you’re doing a Mrs. Robinson routine, you don’t need to be a knockout, just, you know, presentable. But on-screen, I looked really bad, scary bad…All those drugs I’d been doing, I guess they’d taken more of a toll than I’d realized. There were these dark bags under my eyes, and my skin was blotchy, and my hair was a freak show, and, you know, I do not have a mustache problem, but I swear I could see a shadow on my upper lip. I was a hag, basically.
And the kid, he was sitting there with a mouth full of cookies, terrified, and not in a good way…
Is there a good way to be terrified?
Well, you know, there’s virgin panic, that feeling you get when it’s your first time, and you weren’t expecting it, but all of a sudden here it is…But this wasn’t like that. It’s like I said to Dixon, this kid wasn’t an innocent. The fear on his face, you could see it in the close-up, it wasn’t like, Oh my God, I’m about to get laid, or even, Oh my God, what’s going on here? It was, Oh my God, not again…
Like he’d been seduced before?
Like he was damaged. Like it was too late for me to mess with his head, because somebody else had already been there, and all I was doing was plugging into this old nightmare. Only I couldn’t see that, because I was a fucking stoned-out hag.
You can imagine, watching the replay on this was complete torture. Seeing just how oblivious I’d been to the way this kid was feeling. And the things coming out of my mouth…Thank God, after I finally took him by the hand and started leading him into the bedroom, the screen went dark.
But it wasn’t over. “What happened next?” Dixon said.
“Just kill me now,” I begged him.
“If you’d prefer, we could watch it…”
In case you’re wondering, there are worse fates than death.
So I got the kid into the bedroom and I started undressing him, and even at the time, I knew there was something wrong. He was too passive—not nervous passive, more like catatonic. And then after I got his pants off, got him onto the futon, suddenly he wasn’t passive, suddenly I was the one who was scared, because this kid, he might have been younger than me, but he was bigger than me too, and all at once he was on top of me, with his face like an inch from mine and this fever in his eyes, and now he was the one running it, right, and it wasn’t fun, it was starting to hurt…
And then…Ah, man, this is bad…
What?
He called me “sister.”
Sister as in a nun, or…?
What, like one is less fucked up than the other? I don’t know, but at that point I just flipped out. I started hitting him—maybe I asked him to stop first, but probably I just started whaling on him. I hit him, punched him, four or five times, in the face, and finally he rolled off me, and I sat up, and he was just lying there on his back, shaking and crying.
And I was like, I can’t deal with this, I can not deal with this, so I went and locked myself in the bathroom and waited for him to leave. And a little while later I heard this thump and I thought, front door, thank God, even though the sound wasn’t right for that. So I gave it another ten minutes and came out, holding this toilet plunger like a club.
I did a sweep of the apartment. Kitchen: empty. Good. Living room: empty. Good. Bedroom: empty? The futon was empty, but the bedclothes were heaped in a pile on the floor on the far side, and then I saw this foot sticking out. “Oh, shit.”
Some instinct made me look over at the dresser. My drug-stash box was open. Marijuana was scattered all over the dresser top, and the pill bag had been turned inside out. “Oh, shit.”
I ran to him and dug him out from under the sheets and blankets. He was facedown, unconscious, and he’d thrown up at least once, but thank God he hadn’t choked on it—he was breathing, he still had a pulse. As I slapped his face to try to revive him, I ran a mental inventory of what had been in that pill bag: uppers and downers mostly—hopefully they’d counteract each other—but also some mescaline tabs I’d been saving for my last day in town. Not the healthiest mix.
The kid’s cheeks were raw from the slapping but he wasn’t waking up. His breathing was getting sketchy, and I realized I was going to have to call an ambulance. I dithered, trying to come up with an alternative.
How long?
Three, four minutes, tops—I swear—but this kid, he wasn’t growing any new brain cells in the meantime, you know what I’m saying? At least I didn’t try to put him under the shower—I knew from experience that doesn’t work—but still…
Anyway, I finally called 911. The dispatcher came on: “What’s your emergency?” And I’m like, “Accidental drug overdose…” She went through the standard Q&A—“What kind of drugs?” “Is he conscious?” “Have you checked his airway?”—and then she asked me where I was located. This was back before they had caller I.D., right? So I was about to tell her, but then I took another look at my dresser, at all that dope scattered around.
And the dispatcher said, “Miss? Are you there?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m here,” and gave her the address of the building across the street. And she’s like, “Is that an apartment building?” and I said, “Yeah, I think so,” and she said, “You think so?” and I said, “I mean it is—just hurry up and get here, OK?” And she said, sounding skeptical now, “What’s the apartment number?” and I told her, “Don’t worry about it. Tell the paramedics I’ll meet them on the sidewalk.” I hung up before she could argue.
The hospital was six blocks away, so I had like zero time. The one small blessing was that the kid had put his clothes back on before he took the pills, so I thought, At least it won’t be obvious what we were up to. I forgot that I wasn’t dressed…I wrapped him in a blanket and used it to drag him—no way could I carry him—and on the way out of the bedroom I bumped into the dresser. A bunch of stuff fell off, including a Valium that he’d missed. I popped that right away, thinking I was definitely going to need it.
I dragged him out the door and down three flights of stairs. I must’ve banged up his legs and his tailbone pretty bad, but there was nothing I could do about that—I was busy making sure he didn’t hit his head, and at every landing I had to stop and check that he hadn’t swallowed his tongue. Then one landing from the bottom I heard this click, an apartment door opened up, and this old Ukrainian lady who was always giving me dirty looks came out to see what the racket was about. And I, I was beyond reason at this point, I just smiled at her and said something like: “Allergy attack…Doctor’s on his way…Nothing to worry about!” She made this little, like, warding gesture with her hands, and shut the door again.
So I got the kid down to the lobby—my back was killing me by now—and of course the ambulance was already outside, and the paramedics were talking to the super of the building across the street. I dragged the kid out onto the stoop and started shouting, “Hey, over here!” and as everybody turned to look, I felt this breeze, and that’s when I realized, I was still wearing nothing but my kimono, and it was flapping open in front, and I’m like, Oh great.
The paramedics came running. They got the kid unwrapped, started checking him over, and we did another Q&A: “What did he take? What did he take?” One of the paramedics, he was all about saving the kid, and I liked that, that he barely even looked at me. The other one though, he was older, beard stubble, he did look at me, and he was pissed. He said: “Why did you give the dispatcher the wrong address? Are you too high to remember where you live, or are you just scared?” And I’m like, “I don’t live here,” and he’s like, “Yeah, right.”