“So, tell me about your connection,” I said.
“She’s a hospice worker with a terminal case.”
“And?”
“She’s a diverter. She’s helping us out.”
Diverter is the medical term, and the narc term, for a medical professional who diverts pain meds from the people who need them. The language of distance and euphemism. They’re thieves, and people like me and Doc pay them to steal from people in pain. I try not to have any more illusions about what I do. I used to be able to lie about it — to others, to myself. But after seven years clean, it’s hard to see this as anything but a hideous failure for me as a human being. My next drug possession case puts me at what’s known at the SAP pits, SAP being short for Substance Abuse Program. I can’t do this much longer — one way or the other.
“How terminal?” I asked him.
“What?”
“How terminal a case?”
“There aren’t degrees of terminal,” Doc said. “Trust me, I’m a doctor.”
“I mean how close to dead is this person?” I don’t know why it mattered to me, but it did. As if the closer to dead they were, the less I’d be ripping them off, somehow.
“Close enough to be designated terminal and have 24/7 hospice care,” Doc said. “That’s usually pretty late in the game.”
I nodded.
Doc said, “And it usually means a lot of pain meds.”
The drug talk, along with my system being weaned off meds the last few days, started to make me feel cravings that hurt. But they were cravings with hope — that tingle when you’re close to the drugs, in both time and distance. “Any chance for Dilaudids?”
Doc shrugged as we reached the two Santa Ana/Tustin exits for 17th Street. The second exit heads south toward Tustin, and we took that one. “Hard to say,” Doc said, lighting another cigarette. “Pain-management theory these days shies away from Dilaudids. But we should get plenty of morphine.”
When I still shot up, which I hadn’t done in this last slip from sobriety, so it had been over seven years before, Dilaudids were like gold. Generally, they’re about five to eight times more powerful than morphine, and you don’t need to cook them — you can do what’s known as a cold shake. Which is pretty much what it sounds like. You put a pill in some distilled water and shake it until it dissolves, and you’re ready to put it in the cotton and up the syringe and go.
“Listen,” Doc said, “there’s something difficult we might have to do.”
“Difficult how?”
“It’s a relatively new procedure. I haven’t asked Sandra if he’s on it or not, but this guy may have a permanent morphine vial implanted near the base of his spine.”
“Lucky bastard,” I said, and I sort of meant it.
“It’s the wave of the future. Going to hurt people like you and me. Pills and shit like that are going the way of the horseless carriage.”
“I don’t follow.”
“All drugs are going to be time-released,” Doc said. “Soon, they’re won’t be any pills to steal.”
“You said there’d be morphine at this place, right?”
“Right,” Doc said. “But, worst case scenario, you are going to have to cut the vial out of this guy.”
“I thought cancer patients had IV drips and patches and stuff.”
“They do, but in addition to that, depending on how far gone he is, he might have this semipermanent vial.”
“Why do I have to cut it out?”
“Well, no one’s saying for sure it’s there.”
“If it’s there, why the fuck am I doing the cutting?”
Doc shrugged. “Because I don’t want to.”
And that was that — his connection, his call. “But he may not have one of these, right?”
“He may, he may not. But you might want to wish he does — concentrated morphine drip.”
“I’m not cutting open some poor fuck who’s about to die,” I said.
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I was just warning you about some of the potential difficulties.”
I shook my head and looked at the faces of the other people driving out on the freeway. I wondered what they were talking about. What they were thinking they might have to do in the next half hour and how sick they made themselves.
As we got off the freeway, I realized how tense I was, realized I hadn’t been taking regular breaths, realized I’d actually been holding my breath. I tried to take in a few deep breaths while Doc swung across four lanes of 17th Street.
“Be careful,” I warned.
“It’s important to blend in,” Doc said. “Cops pull over people like you and me when they’re doing the speed limit. People drive like maniacs here. So should we, if we want to be left alone.” Someone honked and Doc gave them the finger.
I turned around and looked at the WELCOME TO TUSTIN sign behind us... This side was for the people just leaving Tustin and it read: Work Where You Must But Live and Shop in Tustin!
“Ah, yes,” Doc said. “Rustin’ in Tustin.”
“You from here?”
“That I am. And a more dull town, you’d be hard pressed to find.”
“Good punk scene here,” I said. “Wasn’t there?” I was from the East Coast and most of my knowledge of the West Coast scene had come from fanzines like Forced Exposure and Flipside.
“True,” Doc replied. “The old Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach saved our lives. But before that it was strip malls and before that it was orange groves.” He pointed out the window at the strip malls, banks, and yogurt shops that tumored all over state roads from here to Florida and back. “Thirty-five years ago, when I was a kid, this was ten miles of orange groves.”
A Vons slid by on our right. I took nervous breaths and felt my heart beat like a rabbit’s in my chest. A church with a high-peaked roof stood on our left with an announcement out front: WHY DO THEY WANT US DEAD? What the Bible says sbout Islam.
Doc said, “Almost there.”
I nodded and made several more attempts at a deep breath.
He took a left on Mauve and a sign reading NOT A THROUGH STREET greeted us as we headed down to the second-to-last house on the right. There was a Toyota in the driveway and we pulled up next to it, blocking one of the garage sides. I pointed, said, “What if someone needs to get out?”
Doc shook his head. “No one needs to get out. Look. This is a call I only get a couple times a year — the situation has to be perfect. We are going into this house and we are going to score, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Like I said, this is rare. The patient is alone, they probably don’t have much family, they may have none. My connection pretty much has the run of the place. It’s like an opiate candy store in there and we are here to clean them out, understand?”
It was starting to sound too good, but it also had a momentum that I couldn’t pull against. Plus, I needed to get high pretty soon or I’d be a wreck. I wasn’t in a position to argue.
“Give me the money,” Doc said.
I reached into my front pocket, took out a rolled wad of moist bills, and gave them to him.
Doc said, “Dude, you carry your money like a ten-year-old.”
“Sorry.”
“You have to stop apologizing for everything too.”
“Uhm... sorry?”
He counted out the bills and folded and rearranged them.
“Tell you what. After we make a few bucks here — will you use a fucking proper billfold if I buy you one?”
“Is that like a wallet?”