I see — oh, dear God, thank you — a leather shop and immediately go in, take off my belt, and ask to have a few new holes punched. This is the third time I have done this in the last five weeks. At one point, in some hotel room, I have taken a knife and stabbed out a new, albeit rougher, hole. The old guy behind the stack of bags and wallets eyes the weathered belt and me cautiously and says, You’re going to need more than just a few. He makes three and when I put the belt on it links, easily, to the last one. I consider having him make another, but judging by how quickly he makes the holes and rings up the price, it seems he wants me gone. I walk for a few blocks toward the hotel, but before I get there I know I need to change out of my mangy blue sweater. I’ve been wearing it for over a month. It’s stretched out of shape and the unidentifiable residue that crusts and streaks along the neck and chest is, I’m worried but not exactly sure, beginning to smell.
A few blocks away, I see a small Chinese restaurant. It’s the kind with only three or four tables that is mostly for takeout. There are no other customers in the store when I enter. I step up to the counter and ask if I can use the bathroom, and the boy there, no more than sixteen, says that it’s for customer use only. A woman I assume is his mother joins him and repeats that it’s not for public use.
I am desperate to change and also getting antsy for a hit, so I order three dishes and some egg rolls for takeout and ask, a little impatiently, if I can use the bathroom now. The woman says, yes, if I pay first. So I do. I walk past the counter to the back of the kitchen, where there is a tiny bathroom. Luckily it has a window and a mirror. I run the water and flush the toilet to mask the sounds of the clicking lighter and the popping sound the drug makes when it’s lit. I pack the stem and light up. I load it again, since I’m feeling far from relieved after the first hit. The rock pops at the end of the stem when I pull, and the glass at the very end cracks apart. This sometimes happens when you put a big cold chunk of crack in a still-hot stem and light up too quickly. I scramble as quietly as I can to clean up the small bits of glass, find the thank-God-still-intact rock of crack, and reload the broken stem. My agitation is high, so I pack in even more. The hit is big and I blow the smoke out the window and, thankfully, begin to feel a wash of relief as I exhale. I wriggle out of my sweater and see my torso in the little mirror. Ribs and bones jut everywhere, and the color of my skin is light gray. Little scrapes and burn marks and scabs speckle my arms, chest, and stomach. I feel, for the first time, beyond the desire for sex, as if I have passed into another state of being high, where sex no longer matters. I am relieved, because the body in the mirror is not one I would want anyone to see. I look more closely at the worst burn marks and cuts, the ones on my hands and forearms, and I shudder. I look in the mirror again and see how little skin I have, how my frame seems covered by the thinnest sheet, pulled tight. I look like I crawled out of a fire, starving. I have never seen my pelvic bones winging from my abdomen in the way they do now and I’m relieved, as I pull the sweater over my head, that this glorious, thick miracle of costly fabric covers all of it. I wash my face and hands, wipe away various stains on my jeans, and pick lint and hair and detritus from the rim of my trusty cap. I find Visine in my jacket and drown my eyes in it. I wash my mouth out with soap and rub it under my armpits to cover up whatever odor may be coming from there. I fire up another blast, blow on the stem, wrap it up, put the old sweater in the bag, and open the door that leads to the kitchen and the front of the shop. There are two men — heavy-jacketed, dull-panted, gray-shoed Penneys — and they are looking directly at me as I step toward the counter. The food is in bags, ready, and I grab them, thank the woman and the boy, and leave. As I walk west, I turn back and see the two Penneys exit the restaurant and begin walking my way. I change directions several times, and after twenty or so minutes I think I’ve lost them. I throw the Chinese food and the shopping bag with my old sweater into a garbage can. My heart is racing and I’m worried that I’ll be too panicky to make it through the check-in process at the front desk of the SoHo Grand. I’m too jumpy to stop at a bar and get a drink, so I decide to just go for it. Just get to the room. Once there, I will be okay. Once there, I can order room service, call Happy, drink bottles of vodka to take the sharp edges off. I am focused on the short-term relief of the hotel room, but under everything is a creeping knowledge that with not much money left, not much more weight to lose, and not many more places to hide, this is it. An end of some kind is near.
I stop by a deli around the corner from the hotel and get ten lighters, six boxes of sleeping pills, and a six-pack of beer so that I have something to drink the second I get to the room. I wish I could take a hit before going into the hotel, but I know it’s now or never. I head into the new brick-and-glass building, and as I march, as slowly and calmly as I can, up the steps, I think of the clean sheets, the gushing shower, the room service, the immaculate surfaces, the safety. The place is crawling with guys who look like production assistants on movies — all hats and jeans and scruff. Thank God. Thank God I don’t stick out. Instantly I imagine I am in town from L.A. on a shoot and that anyone noticing my weight, the rings under my bloodshot eyes, the greasy hair poking out from my cap, will just chalk it up to a tight production schedule and late nights in the editing room going over the dailies. So with this fantasy flickering behind my movements, I go to the front desk and ask for a room. How many nights? the woman asks, and I make a quick calculation of the $500 room rate and the amount of crack I plan on buying from Happy. I tell her four nights and that I need to check in under an alias as well as needing a smoking room. She doesn’t skip a beat. She says, Fine, runs my debit card, looks at my passport, hands me a plastic room card, and off I go. I practically giggle from excitement and relief in the elevator as I’m heading up to what is the third floor from the top of the building. I clock that it’s high enough for a jump to matter. If all else fails, there is that.
The room is small, on the southwest corner, and dimly lit. The lights of SoHo, Tribeca, and Wall Street dance and blink on the other side of the large windows, and it feels, when I first step into the room, like being on the inside of a snow globe suspended in midair, high above the city. I stand at the window and call Happy for the last time.
He arrives around one. I’d smoked down what I had left from the bag at Rosie’s an hour ago, and my stem is now less than two inches long, caked with burnt, unsmokable residue. When I called hours earlier I asked for $2,000 worth. More than I’ve ever ordered. I can only give him $1,500 in cash — what was left of my limit when I went to the ATM before midnight and a new grand after. I ask him, this one time, to sport me the difference. He pauses, briefly, and starts counting out the bags and new stems. Nice hotel, he says, commenting for the first time ever on where I’m staying. Nice room. And he leaves. Looking at the forty bags of crack on my bedspread, the most I have ever seen in one place, makes me feel safer than I have felt all day. The bags look fuller, more jam-packed than usual, and the abundance, the dancing light outside the window, and the awareness that I will never leave this room sends a high through my system before I even light up. I lie down on the bed and drop the bags on my chest and face, one by one, and then all at once. It feels like an arrival. The end of a journey. Not just the panicked one of days and nights and weeks after relapsing, but the long one, the whole useless struggle. The lines from that novel rise up again, but this time with new meaning. It would be now.