We sleep on couches in the living room and leave the next morning. We walk home, and all that day restaurants and bodegas and grocery stores are closed. The city grinds to a halt. People look distraught as they confront the locked doors and hastily scribbled We’re Closed signs all over town. Later that afternoon, the power magically comes back on. Everyone forgets, almost instantly, how helpless they were. Life returns and all is as it was.
We have dinner at the Knickerbocker that night, and it plays out like all the others. Pleas, threats, silences, tears. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I remember the night before; how, after we ate, I stood at Neeny’s window, dizzy from Sancerre and lack of sleep, and looked out over the southeast corner of Central Park to the Plaza Hotel, which was dark, darker than all the other buildings. I remember how silent the city was — no low hum of air-conditioning, no stray voices from televisions and radios. And how deserted the Plaza looked, huddled below, humbled. The city around it weary, spent, as if it had finally given up on its striving citizens, lost interest in the bother of it all.
Shelter
Where? the cabdriver asks me as we speed south, away from Chelsea, away from the Maritime, away from my family. Lisa’s taxi is nowhere to be seen, and in only a few blocks I’m not thinking about her, about them, anymore. I’m thinking about where to go next. I have half a bag in my pocket and a burnt stem. I need to get somewhere to smoke. We sail past the Gansevoort, where I know I can never return. Not after the morning three days ago with Noah and the private investigator. And not after — I think, but I’m not sure, I can’t remember exactly — leaving scrapers and ashtrays caked with drug residue in the room, maybe even a stem. I’m usually hypercareful. Usually I wipe everything down meticulously, repeatedly, so that no one who comes into the room to clean will ever know what has gone on. But we left in such a hurry and I was wild with panic from the stories of the police coming to One Fifth looking for me and DEA investigations. I picture the managers at the Gansevoort and the Maritime combing the rooms with police officers and DEA agents — fingerprinting the vodka glasses and television remote controls, collecting flecks of drugs from the carpet to test in a lab, fishing ATM receipts from the trash cans and calling Chase to get all my details. Nowhere seems safe. Whatever anonymity I enjoyed before now feels like it has disappeared. Noah and the private investigator can find me anywhere. I turn my cell phone off. Didn’t Brian say something about how they could track me by my cell phone signal? I’ll use pay phones to call Happy. I’ll tell him my cell is busted.
I finger the tiny plastic bag in my jeans pocket and trace the shapes of the few medium-size rocks it contains. Where can I go? Where? I need to get somewhere safe, and nowhere is. The cabdriver asks me again where I’m going, and I tell him to go east. East of Fifth, somewhere near Houston. East seems like a frontier. An unexplored country worlds away from the west Village and Chelsea where I have been the last few weeks. As we cross down onto Houston and barrel east, I feel like I am crossing out of a ruined country into a fresh new world. I’ve been here a million times and yet nothing seems familiar. The buildings, signs, restaurants, and even the people seem generic, implausible, somehow unconvincing as New Yorkers, as New York. Like a film shot in Toronto attempting to mimic Manhattan.
I ask the cabdriver to pull over at Houston and Lafayette. I notice the meter has not been turned on. I also notice that the driver’s photo has been covered with a strip of cardboard, but even so, I can make out a name, Singh or something like that, something Indian or Pakistani. The driver is black and definitely not Indian. I start to panic and fish a ten from my jacket and stick it through the small Plexiglas window. The black, non-Indian, meter-neglecting cabdriver laughs as I scramble out the door.
Where am I going? There is only $9,000 and change in my bank account and the end is in sight. I think through the list of hotels I’ve been in — Gansevoort, 60 Thompson, Washington Square, W, Maritime. I need someplace new and decide to try the Mercer Hotel. It’s the closest and I imagine a clean, serene room with extraordinary soaps and a powerful shower that will wash away the gritty ordeals of the last few days. Maybe this will be the last one.
I walk into the chic, quiet lobby and approach the front desk. I ask a young woman if there is a room and she asks me to wait a moment. She returns a minute or two later with a man, someone in his late thirties or early forties, with glasses. He immediately says, I’m sorry but there is nothing here for you. I ask him if there is nothing or if there is just nothing for me. He answers, I think you heard me, with a hostile expression. The woman looks embarrassed and will not meet my eye. It takes a few beats for me to fully take in what is happening. It must be clear that I am strung out. I realize I haven’t looked at myself in a mirror since leaving my room at the Maritime. Are my eyes bloodshot? Do I smell of smoke and alcohol? I can’t remember if I showered this morning. My face prickles with shame and I leave without saying a word.
Out on Mercer Street I’m terrified. I have somehow, without seeing it happen, tripped over some boundary, from the place where one can’t tell that I’m a crack addict to the place where it is sufficiently obvious to turn me away. I look at my hands to see if they are shaking. Suddenly, for the first time, I feel as if I might look and act and sound in a way that I am not able to see. Like body odor or bad breath that is only detectable to other people, my movements and my whole bearing could be invisible to me. I try to figure out if people are staring. If they are registering disgust as they walk past. My pants feel very loose. It’s been over a week since I’ve had a new hole punched in my belt, and my navy turtleneck hangs stretched and baggy off my frame and must, it just must, reek. Though I have been doing drugs, drinking liters of vodka a day, not sleeping, and running from hotel to hotel for a month, it dawns on me like a great shock that I might actually look like a junkie. I feel that whatever capacity I’d once had to move through the world undetected has vanished, that CRACK ADDICT is written on my forehead in ash, and everyone can see.
I am nowhere and belong nowhere. I can now see how it all happens — the gradual slide down, the arrival at each new unthinkable place — the crack den, the rehab, the jail, the street, the homeless shelter, a quick shock and then a new reality that one adjusts to. Am I now in the purgatory between citizen and nobody, between fine young man and bum?
I start walking. It’s late morning and the streets are full. They are full, but somehow it seems that a path is being made for me. As if people are stepping aside, avoiding me. Not wanting to brush up against me. Can they ALL see? Is it THAT obvious? Is there blood on my face? I need to get to a mirror. I see a dingy-looking bar somewhere north of Houston. It’s open and I head straight for the bathroom. I lock the door and my hands fly to the bag and stem and lighter and furiously pack a hit. I avoid the mirror, because if there is something hideous there I don’t want to see it yet, not before taking a blast. I turn the water on to hide the sound of the lighter. I pack nearly half of what’s in the bag into the stem and take a giant hit. I pull what feels like a galaxy of smoke into my lungs and hold it there until I choke for air. The room becomes a billowing white cloud, a sauna of crack smoke, and luckily there is a small window above the sink that I immediately open. Next to the sink is a mirror, and as the thick smoke snakes out through the window, I look. My eyes appear green and red, and the turtleneck collar of my sweater has what looks like white paste on it. The sweater and jacket seem three sizes too big, and there is snot dried and packed below my left nostril. Weeks of beard growth have grown in black, with flecks of silver and blond and red. Silver? I see an old man staring back in the mirror: gaunt, shaky, and frightened. Weathered. I take another hard pull of the stem and blow the smoke out the window. I take another. And another. I sit on the toilet and let the drugs dull the horror of the morning, and a low flame of calm begins to rise. Someone finally knocks. I take another quick hit off the stem before I clean off my sweater and face and splash some water on my cheeks. I look in the mirror again and see that I still look pretty rough. But now it seems slightly funny, less dire. The knock comes again and I pack up my stuff, flush the toilet, and head out through the bar to the street without looking left or right.