We just don’t control how things go. That’s the gist of what her sponsor told her over a forty-two-minute conversation. Then she put down the phone and cried a little more and picked the phone back up and called Milly, got her voice mail. “Hi, it’s Milly, leave a message and I’ll get right back.” I’ll get right back. So brisk and confident. Milly’d had that message on her voice mail since before this whole drug thing with Mateo had started, three years ago, and she still sounded on it like everything was okay.
The beep went off. “Millipede,” Drew said slowly, warily. “Mateo’s gone. He took off. Call me. I’m so sorry. Just call me.”
Ten. Right Back There Again (2012)
In a one-room efficiency on West Second Street in a nondescript part of downtown Los Angeles — all low-rise beige apartments and a paucity of palm trees along the sun-baked streets — DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” coming out of the cheap speakers attached to the laptop, Mateo sits back against the futon and plunges into vacant bliss while Carrie shoots the syringe into his arm.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, I’ve been waiting so long for this,” he manages to say, before his eyes all but close and he’s with her again, her million little fingers scratching through his belly insides so nicely. God, it’s been so long since the last time in New York — eighty-six days exactly — and now it feels so pure, so pristine. It was worth the wait.
Carrie pulls out the needle. “Can you shoot me now?” she asks.
Mateo met her at a meeting in downtown L.A. when she had been only a few weeks clean. The minute he saw her — the cropped, bleached hair; the huge, beautiful, wary brown eyes; the pale skin and the perfect Cupid’s bow of a mouth twisted into a scowl; the large birthmark by her right eye; the nipples murmuring underneath her tank top and the skinny, tattooed arms folded across them — her whole surly, I-don’t-wanna-be-here energy — he knew he should stay away from her, knew exactly how she’d make him feel. He was at that meeting alone, no Drew or Christian, and later, he didn’t tell them he’d met Carrie and taken her cell number on the cheap phone Drew and Christian had bought him so he could stay in touch with them and other twelve-step people. This transaction took place while chatting after the meeting.
It was a very gritty meeting. It wasn’t the posh, arty, sober people of Silver Lake, the mostly yuppie former alcoholics and potheads with a sprinkling of fairly successful gay guys with meth problems and a couple long-ago glamour cokeheads like Drew. It was the derelicts and the quasi-homeless dirty, crusty kids of downtown, mostly junkies who’d either fallen from creative grace or, like Carrie, who said she was a singer, only ever fumbled on the fringes of L.A. creative life before sliding totally off the radar. Mateo felt at home there, relieved, with nothing to prove; there were even some blacks and Mexicans there. He sat there with his black knit cap pulled down low and his black shades pushed back up on it, his arms crossed over the threadbare green-striped T-shirt he found in the royal-blue duffel bag of clothes Millimom had thrown together for him when she came to see him at the airport before he schlepped out to rehab in L.A. and then, after leaving rehab, to Drew and Christian’s. His life had more or less been reduced to this bag, even if Drew and Christian had given him his own room to set it down in for a while.
So he sat there in the downtown meeting with his legs spread in the black skinny jeans he’d bought somewhere back in 2010, 2011—that whole foggy period when he was still managing to show up at Pratt but his life was becoming more and more of a nodding dream. That was when needles — spikes, with their horror and then their vise-grip allure, their absolute necessity — floated into the picture. That first time he’d let someone shoot him up, his gut told him there’d be no going back, and his gut had been right.
And in this meeting, he was horrified to learn it was one of those round-robin formats where everyone who has under a year’s sobriety has to speak when it comes to them. And he’d been exchanging glances, and then even a half-smile and a shrug, with Carrie, when the round-robin came to him.
“I’m Mateo and I’m a addick,” he said. Every time he said it like this, he thought of the Parentals and how horrified they’d be to hear him talking this put-upon slang—I’m a addick—but he loved it, because he felt it put him squarely with the subterraneans in the whole class structure of Twelve-Step World. At Silver Lake, once, he’d allowed himself to say it like that.
Drew, sitting beside him, smiled at him sidelong, amused, and asked, sotto voce, “You a addick?” Minutely, he nodded and smiled, and she scratched his knee for a quick second.
That was back when he had about seventy-two days. He liked Drew, he had to admit. She’d been a flickering presence in his life growing up, her trips to New York where she would down endless cups of tea in their kitchen with Millimom, and one vacation he and los Parentales had taken to the West Coast the summer he was thirteen. Drew was more or less Millimom’s best friend, and he’d always kind of liked her because she had a saucy, direct pushiness and deadpan bite that Millimom, with her perpetual air of just-barely-contained mourning for the planet lacked.
“You a gangsta,” Drew would say drily upon first spotting him on her New York visits, as he stood in front of her, just home from school, in jeans falling off his butt, his high-tops splayed out in every direction around the scrunched bottoms of his pants legs, his hair pulled back in a rubber band popping out the slot of his flat-brimmed Yankees cap, his backpack hanging precariously off his shoulders.
“He talks like a gangsta now,” Millimom would observe drolly, falling into her slow, signature nod.
He would tip his chin toward Drew, sitting there sipping her tea with her big, expensive leather bag at her feet, and pop back, trying not to smile. “Maybe I am a gangsta.”
“So come here, gangsta,” she would say, laughing, and he’d slouch toward her. Then she’d stand and give him a big hug and kiss while he stood there and maybe just barely put one arm up loosely around her back. “Your art is amazing,” she would say. “I am blown away.”
“How do you know about my art?”
Drew tipped her chin toward Millimom. “Who do you think e-mails me pictures of your art all the time with every tiny update about your awards?”
Millimom was staring down into her mug of tea, trying to look neutral, inscrutable, but with that bleeding-heart, just-about-to-cry look around the eyes that both touched him and drove him fucking crazy.
“You didn’t tell me you were doing that,” he finally said to Millimom.
Milly looked up at him, gestured innocently. “I thought your new work from school was good and I wanted to show it to her,” she said. “Are you mad at me about that, too?” She turned to Drew. “He’s always mad at me these days.”
“I’m not mad at you,” he said. “I just — I just didn’t know that.”
“And I send her my chapters,” Drew added. Drew wrote some kind of weird books, like she was a journalist who traveled around interviewing people and then wrote books instead of articles, he was fairly certain. He didn’t know what to say. He was sensing some peek into their back-world, which he didn’t really understand; he could just sense that it had been weird and maybe slightly lesbionic in that sensitive, touchy-feely white-girl way, and he didn’t want to really know more than that. So instead he just looked at Drew and shrugged and said, “Well, thanks. Welcome to New York.” He headed toward his room.
“Thanks for having me,” Drew called back drily.