Out of Action
(chapter 14 of Something in the Way
by Preston Peet- copyright 2001)
posted at DrugWar.com Nov. 17, 2002
“Damnit, missed.”
“Hey man, you gotta be careful with
that shit, you’re gonna wind up with an abscess or something,”
Dan says, watching Thomas bend and flex his right arm, rubbing
his elbow, trying to get at least some of the drugs into his system.
Thomas waits for a vic
The two of them have been on a steady run
for a couple of days already with no sleep. Thomas’s tired,
over-pricked veins are not cooperating as they should. After large
amounts of coke and dope get shot into them, they tend to try
and hide from the needle and drugs, sinking low and not standing
out well when he ties off. He’s been sticking his arm for
nearly half an hour, over and over, struggling to find a vein
that will register, to no avail. There is a torrent of blood running
down his arm, which he has taken to wiping off periodically onto
his jeans, which hasn’t helped keep the area clean of dirt
and debris. With the extra blood it’s difficult to see where
he’s trying to hit.
In near hysterics, as soon he has a little
blood blossom up inside the rig, he just shoves the plunger in,
and hopes that he had the vein.
It’s a speedball, so the cocaine in
the mix numbs the spot he’s shooting. Therefore he doesn’t
feel the sting and burn of the dope going into muscle.
In the pre-dawn dark of the Tompkins Square,
back in the corner by the children’s swimming pool, the streetlights
cast a dim light. He’s been trying to hit almost entirely
by feeling for the vein. It’s only once he gets it all in
and doesn’t feel the rush that he knows he missed. He rubs
his elbow again, and finds a marble imbedded under his skin, deep
inside. Rubbing on it to try and massage some of the drugs into
his bloodstream does nothing more than irritate the spot, making
it sore even through the coke.
The swimming pool in Tompkins Sq. Park, NYC
“God, I fucking hate that! What a waste,”
whines Thomas aloud. Dan is wandering around the edge of the basketball
court, kicking at the piles of fallen leaves that have been blown
up against the fence. Dan didn’t miss, now obviously tweaking
and looking for who knows what. Thomas sighs and kneads the front
of his forehead, pushing against the headache the miss has wrought.
Though the coke won’t do more than give him this headache,
the dope will enter his system through the muscles. If he’s
patient, the dope will eventually ease the throbbing pain inside
his head.
Patience is not one of his stronger suits,
not when he’s out of gear as he now is, so he’s got
to get moving. Dan is off in his own world, so Thomas leaves him
to his trip, telling him to meet him back at the pool in a few
hours. Dan will probably be here for most of that time anyway,
bugging out. If he does leave, no big deal. They’ll run into
one another again sooner or later.
It’s early Friday morning, and the Sun
is just beginning to show the first signs of rising, giving the
sky that beautiful, deep purple cast that comes only right before
real dawn. As Thomas walks around, he continues to poke and prod
at the now very sore and bruised swelling in the crock of his
right elbow. This doesn’t interfere with his sales ability.
He quickly, and surprisingly considering it is the bare beginnings
a week-day, snags a customer.
The suit wants an 8-ball of blow, so Thomas
runs a quick mission for him, scoring big for himself by inflating
the asking price. Sure enough, when he gets back to the basketball
court with his pockets full of goodies not more than an hour after
splitting, Dan is passed out with his rigs sitting in plain sight
on the court beside him.
They spend the rest of the day getting both
wired, and increasingly opiated. Right through the day, they run
from nook to cranny getting high, suffering paranoid delusions,
then hiding from phantom cops until their hearts slow down enough
to get up and do it all over again.
In all this time Thomas makes no more than
a cursory attempt at wiping blood, dirt and debris from his arm,
certainly doing no thorough cleansing. The infection starts long
before he is aware that there is a serious problem, becoming well-lodged
in his elbow, festering. Even when he realizes the pain is increasing,
he doesn’t slow down. If anything he presses forward all
the harder, pushing himself to such a state of exhaustion and
delirium he is able to get under the agony growing in his arm,
and almost ignore it.
When it gets so painful that he can’t
use his right hand to shoot, he asks Dan to do it for him, and
they continue on. Upon arrival of dawn the day after the miss,
he is holding his arm bent close to his body, protecting it from
any and all contact. Dan has scored big himself earlier that morning,
and now Thomas suggests that the two of them go and visit a friend
of his, a sweet and lovely girl named Vanessa he’s met not
long before while walking down the 10th St. sidewalk. Though she
doesn’t get high, she is intrigued by Thomas, and has let
him crash over once or twice.
Vanessa wonders and worries
Working at a restaurant on Ave. A, she used
to see Thomas passing by outside frequently. When they finally
met, she told him she’d been wanting to meet for some time.
Her apartment is on 11th St., so in five
minutes he and Dan are ringing her buzzer. The first time Thomas
had come to her place, it only took a minute before he was telling
Vanessa that he needed to get off, asking did she mind if he did
it there. She’d said sure, not understanding what he’d
meant until he pulled out a rig, shot up in her livingroom, then
started talking about invisible coke bugs, holding out his hands
to show her, asking her to check them out.
“Stop it, you're scaring me,” she’d
finally told him. The pain Thomas felt when he’d seen her
expression, her eyes wide and her hand up to her chest, like she
was trying to ward him off, cut right into the high and enabled
him to stop hallucinating, immediately. Rarely was he able to
affect them, usually having to ride them out until they went away
on their own, but this once he somehow turned them off , or just
ignored them rather. That’s when he’d first had an inkling
that Vanessa was special to him in some way. He didn’t stop
getting high around her by any means, but he’d realized he
cared for her as a friend, and didn’t want to scare or hurt
her.
Now as he and Dan ring her buzzer, Thomas
is more than simply high. He’s starting to enter into serious
fever and infection delirium. The pain in his elbow has become
a thing alive, gnawing at his entire arm in a maniacal frenzy.
He in turn is intent on killing it by shooting more and more drugs,
which keep him awake, unable to sleep and get rest he desperately
needs. He hasn’t looked at his arm since the night before,
as it’s so swollen he can’t get his sleeve off without
inflicting excruciating agony. He’s been ignoring it as best
he can.
Vanessa buzzes them in, and they ride the
tiny elevator to the sixth floor. When they open the elevator
door, she has her apartment door already open. As filthy as he
and Dan are, she is clean. Just awake, she’s a bit tousled,
but in an entirely different class of messy than theirs. On her
it’s charming, delightful, where as on them it’s disgusting,
and smells. She takes one look at Thomas, immediately steps out
and takes his arm in her hand to help him into the apartment because
he is staggering, and looks like hell. He lets out a horse yell
when she grabs him, causing her to jump back. Then she goes all
concerned, insisting he come and sit and let her take a look at
his arm.
While Dan cooks up another shot for them
both, Vanessa helps Thomas get his jacket and many shirts off
over his swollen Popeye arm, as she calls it when she finally
sees it. His arm looks fairly normal from his shoulder to just
above his elbow, but below it’s huge, tight and shiny, with
streaks of bright crimson running up and down his arm from his
elbow to his wrist.
Once they’ve finally finessed the clothing
off and exposed his arm, Dan and Vanessa immediately begin telling
Thomas he really has to go to the hospital, that he is going to
loose his arm if he doesn’t get it taken care of.
“It was the most painful experience
of my life,” says Dan, telling a story about his own experience
getting an abscess cut from his arm in the hospital, describing
it in full-color, gory detail. Through his pain, Thomas listens
to the description of forceps holding open an un-anaesthetized,
scalpel-sliced abscess as a doctor scrapes out the puss and ooze,
which doesn’t help Thomas in the slightest. Now he’s
sure he doesn’t want to go to the hospital.
“No thanks, I’ll stick it out,”
he tells them, and does another shot.
Dan eventually takes off, but Vanessa insists
Thomas stay and get some rest. Passed out on the sofa, Thomas
doesn’t argue. As he leaves, Dan asks Vanessa to try to get
Thomas into the hospital, then he's gone. Vanessa lets Thomas
sleep as long as he will, calling in sick to her job. Having met
Thomas just a couple weeks before, she still feels an urge to
help him out. She feels awful watching him destroy himself.
His own groan of pain wakes Thomas. He’s
brushed his arm against the end of the sofa as he slept, and now
the infection is beyond ignoring. He can’t escape it. As
soon as he is awake, he does another shot, but it doesn’t
touch the pain. It’s impossible for him to stop moaning about
it. Each time Vanessa brings up the idea of a hospital, he waves
her off with his good hand and continues trying to ignore it.
Dan had found a guy selling Clonopines the day before, a fairly
heavy sedative. Thomas begins eating his share of them on top
of all the other drugs in him. Vanessa finally puts her foot down.
“Get up. We’re going to the hospital.”
“Are you crazy?” Thomas is belligerent,
insisting he can’t go to the hospital. “I’m out
of dope. There’s no way I’m going to sit for hours in
the waiting room without any dope. Tell you what. Loan me ten
or twenty bucks. I’ll go out, score some stuff to take with
me, then I promise, I’ll go.” The fact that his arm
looks like an incredibly ugly sausage isn't enough, nor the intense
pain. Only the loaning of drug money, bribing him to save his
own arm will work. She looks at him like he’s the crazy one,
which of course he is.
Thomas in a haze of pain and drugs
She’s really worried about his arm,
thinking he is going to loose it. He might appear nuts, but she’s
pretty sure it’s the drug abuses and prohibition stresses
that’ve made him so. The second time over to her place, he’d
brought a guitar he’d bought cheap off another junkie, and
had proceeded to play and sing for her. He’d sold it three
days later, but still, the thought he might not ever get to play
again makes her sad, and determined to get him to the hospital
any way she can. There’s no one else who can or will help,
not even Thomas himself.
“If I give you this money you have to
promise me that you will go and get what you need and come right
back, yes?”
“Of course I will. I promise.”
Thomas just wants the money. He plans on coming back, but there’s
no hurry.
“Hold on, I’m coming with you.
You get the stuff, then we’ll grab a cab right there.”
There’s no other way he’s going to get the money so
he readily agrees.
They start walking, stopping first at 10th
and B for some coke, and then he picks up a bag of dope back on
11th Street. Trying to hail a cab at the corner of 10th and Ave.
A, a couple young guys approach Thomas. Speaking softly so Vanessa
can’t hear exactly what’s being said, they mumble to
Thomas for a moment.
“Hey Vanessa, go on and wait for me
at 9th and A, I’ll be right there. I’m going to go run
for these guys for a minute. Promise, it’ll take just a minute.
Please.” She isn’t going to, but when he says please,
she breaks down and smiles.
“OK, but hurry. We need to get you there
soon.”
He runs off with the two guys. She continues
on to the corner.
He wants all the drugs he can get, any time
there’s an opportunity. Going to the hospital there’s
all the more need for drugs. He’s sure they’re going
to admit him, which means he’s going to have to go through
detox in there. He expects to be there at least a couple of days,
maybe even a whole week, so wants to load up as much as he can.
This is the insanity speaking, as anything he’ll be able
to gather together won’t be enough to get him through one
night, much less a week. But he is able to score another couple
of bags, one each of coke and dope, and then he heads back over
to meet Vanessa.
“Vanessa! Vaaneeessaa!” She can
hear Thomas a good solid minute before she can see him. She’s
a little surprised he’s come right back like he'd promised,
and flags down the first taxi she sees.
“Beth Israel,” she tells the driver,
finally on their way. Thomas is busy next to her on the seat mixing
up a shot in the back of the cab, managing to do it and get it
in him before they reach the hospital seven blocks away, doing
it all with one arm incapacitated. He’s had to figure out
a way to use his left hand to do the actual shooting, which is
difficult for him as he’s right handed. But necessity breeds
genius, and already good at getting high, it hasn’t taken
long to get the hang of it. When he was younger, he used to try
and write with both hands, thinking it would be cool to be ambidextrous,
but never got the hang of it. Now he feels like a pro. By the
time they arrive at the hospital, he’s lit again, and bugging
out.
It’s an effort to get him into the emergency
room and registered, but Vanessa manages brilliantly. The nurse
at the window tells him to have a seat, someone will be with him
shortly. He and Vanessa go back outside, sit down on the steps
that go up to the door of the emergency room, and smoke a cigarette.
“Thanks for all your help. I do appreciate
it Vanessa. Even fucked up I know you are really going out of
your way to help me. I'm not sure what I can do for you in return,
but if there’s anything I can do...” He trails off,
knowing that there isn’t much.
“Get your arm fixed, that’d be
nice.” They sit quietly for a moment.
“How about a story? I tell great stories,
and can make ‘em up on the spot. Would you like one?”
Once again she doesn’t know exactly what he’s talking
about, but says sure.
So he tells her a story about trolls and
a magic key, taking some time to tell it. She just stares at him
as he talks, listening to the fairy tale he spins. He does make
it up right then and there, even as scattered, wasted and in pain
as he is. She has tears in her eyes as he finishes. Right at the
end, a nurse comes out to tell him they are ready to admit him.
Vanessa is saddened by the waste she sees and hears during time
spent around Thomas, and longs to see him one day climb out of
this mess he’s in. She can tell if he could just get away
from the idea that he’s doing himself any good abusing drugs,
he’d have a chance to enjoy life and utilize the obvious
gifts he was born with.
They stand. Vanessa has to say her good-bye
out here, as they won’t let her into the back with him. She
hugs Thomas, and makes sure he has her phone number, telling him
to call whenever he feels like it, any time day or night. She
feels a bond between them that’s a complete mystery, not
having anything in common. He has an erstwhile girlfiend, but
that’s not important to Vanessa. She only wants to know him,
to help if she can. Then she turns and leaves.
By the time he gets a room upstairs, he’s
unconscious from his drugs, which he'd finished in the emergency
room, getting up from the stretcher and going into the bathroom
twice to finish them all. All that and the morphine they give
him for the pain puts him out. He doesn’t wake until the
next morning, remembering nothing about being taken up to his
room.
He’s told he’s on the sixth floor
of the Bernstein building at Beth Israel, where the hospital puts
all the medical cases involving addicts. It’s a locked ward,
meaning he can’t leave the floor without a doctors consent,
or he has to sign himself out against medical advice, a legal
phrase designed to give the hospital protection from lawsuits.
After Thomas has been given a small dose
of Methadone to relieve the withdrawal symptoms, a doctor tells
Thomas he has a case of Septic Arthritis. The infection has taken
root deep inside of his elbow joint, causing the massive swelling
and putting him in serious danger of losing his arm. The only
way to treat this type of infection is by administering antibiotics
intravenously, over a six to eight week period.
“What are you saying, that I’m
locked in the hospital for the next couple of months?” Thomas
is incredulous, and doesn’t believe it. “Can’t
you just operate or give me a prescription for pills or something?
I can’t stay here that long, I’ll go batty!” All
he can think about is not being able to get high that long, which
is frightening and not something he wants to deal with.
“Listen to me kid,” the doctor
tells him. “If you don’t stay and let us give you the
antibiotics, you will loose your arm, there’s no doubt about
it. Think about it. Here you’ll have a bed, good food, and
a chance to get a rest from the hard living you’ve obviously
been doing. Give yourself a break kid, it’ll be for the best.”
He’s right, it would be nice to get a rest. Thomas can feel
the soft, clean sheets beneath him, and smell the freshness of
them. There’s a TV in the room, and he’ll be able to
put some weight on, getting himself clean in the process. He won’t
get a better chance than this.
“OK Doc, you’re right. I’ll
stay. But can I get a shot for this pain, please?”
“Sure kid, I’ll send the nurse
in.” The doctor leaves. Thomas lies back on the bed, resigned
to the fact he’s going to be here a while.
The first major problem he discovers is he’s
not allowed to smoke, as it’s a smoke-free floor. This causes
serious difficulties trying to relax. He quickly finds one or
two people who’ve managed to smuggle in cigarettes. They’re
running a genuine racket, selling smokes at a dollar a piece,
far more than cigarettes cost even in jail. Having no money doesn’t
stop him from getting one of the racketeers to front him a couple
smokes on the promise he’ll be receiving money in a couple
of days. He thinks if these guys can get stuff in, so will he.
He calls Vanessa.
“Please, put five or six cigarettes
in an envelope, then come over. Call me in my room when you arrive.”
She does as he asks.
“Take it to the sixth floor,” he
says when she phones. “When you get out of the elevator,
turn to your left, and slide the envelope as quickly as you can
underneath the door. I’ll be standing there waiting, so you'll
know which door I mean. If you move fast, it should work fine.”
Vanessa is beautiful, and nicely dressed
she raises no suspicion in anyone. As she steps off the elevator
she sees Thomas immediately, takes the one step to the door, crouches
down and shoves the envelope full of cigarettes under just far
enough for Thomas to get a grip on the corner of the envelope
and yank it through. Blowing him a quick kiss, she jumps back
through the still-open door of the elevator. He jogs back to his
room to hide the smokes up in the ceiling, behind one of the ceiling
panels. Taking no chances, he takes one cigarette and puts it
into his night table, which turns out to be a good idea. Then
he has a much needed smoke in the bathroom. Ten minutes after
Vanessa has gone, two big security guards come in with a nurse.
“What did that girl give you?”
“What are you talking about?” He
feigns innocence, but it’s no good.
“We saw her slip something under the
door, and we want it, now.” The bigger of the two guards
says with a snarl. “If you just give it up now, maybe we’ll
allow you to stay, but if not we’re going to sign you out.”
As stir crazy as Thomas feels locked in here, he has by now become
appreciative to the idea that he isn’t on the street getting
high, and since he really needs to stay for his arm to get better,
the guard’s threat is serious.
“Alright, here you go, it was a cigarette.
There was another one but it was broken, so I flushed it.”
He reaches into the drawer and pulls out the cigarette he’d
put there just minutes before. He doesn’t admit to smoking
already, as this is a definite reason to be ejected from the hospital,
but he isn’t going to give up the few other smokes he has
hidden away either.
After he hands it over, the nurse hands him
a cup, and tells him to go pee her a sample. They want to be sure
he hasn’t been given nor consumed any illegal drugs. If it
comes out positive they’ll know he’s gotten high, because
he’s been here a couple weeks already, so anything in his
system should be out, other than for THC. But he’s not done
any illegal drugs, only nicotine, so they let him stay, not knowing
of the smoking. They warn him that he won’t have another
chance, that if he gets out of line once more, he’ll be out
on his ear, back out on the street.
What most helps keep him from blowing up
and busting out of the hospital are his daily phone conversations
with Vanessa. Her boyfriend Brian comes to visit her from Arizona
for a month while Thomas is hospitalized. Vanessa speaking to
Thomas so often annoys the hell out of Brian. He can’t understand
why she’s giving so much time to a looser junkie. It causes
a lot of tension between them, but she doesn’t stop taking
the calls.
Inside the hospital, Thomas decides he likes
being clean, and wants to stay this way. He tells Vanessa over
and over that he won't be going back to drugs, “well, maybe
one shot the first night, but no more than that.” He wants
to get a bike for messenger work, thinking the exercise and adrenaline
from biking around NYC would be a good substitute for the drugs.
Eventually his arm heals, and he is released.
The hospital gives him back the same unwashed clothes he’d
had on when admitted. They have a greasy sheen to them, and feel
disgusting to the touch. Being enclosed in a large plastic garbage
bag hasn’t helped them either, allowing armies of molds and
mildew to breed and multiply. His clothes reek to high heavens,
and he’s embarrassed and uncomfortable in them. Fortunately,
Vanessa agreed to meet him and doesn’t keep him waiting.
She’s sitting there smiling brightly when he steps off the
elevator. Jumping up and ignoring the stench, she gives him a
big hug, then hands him the fresh clean clothes she's brought.
They cross the street and walk into Stuyvesant
Park, where he immodestly changes his clothes. He feels strangely
let down, thinking there should be more of a fanfare of some kind
signaling his release. It’s very anti-climactic for him,
and he feels very lost and alone. He has nowhere to go, clean
though he is. Vanessa told Brian she was coming to meet Thomas,
and he wasn’t too keen on the idea. She’d had to promise
she will be right back.
Thomas changes clothes in Stuyvesant Park
Apologizing to Thomas, she walks with him
down 2nd Ave. with not much to say. Vanessa worries for Thomas.
She wants so badly to help him, but she knows he has to do it
himself. He’s been so enthusiastic about being clear-headed,
but she can see the hungry look in his eyes already and despairs.
They walk together to 9th Street, then say
goodbye. He walks West towards Broadway. She stands watching him,
praying he’ll call soon, and tell her he’s OK.
But when he does call three days later, it’s
to try and feed her a lame story about needing cash for a prescription,
at six in the morning. He keeps her on the phone for nearly fifteen
minutes, pleading and begging, trying different ways to ask the
same question; “Can I have some money?”
“Hang up the goddamned phone already!”
Brian is furious, and wants to know why she continues talking.
She ignores Brian, listening to Thomas on the phone, repeatedly
telling him “no,” but feeling so very awful for him.
Thomas tries a few more times, then there’s
a moment’s silence. Vanessa waits, still able to hear Thomas
breathing. Thomas feels humiliated.
“I’m sorry Vanessa, I really am.
I won’t do this again.” Thomas hangs up the phone.
While Brian continues bitching and griping,
Vanessa leans back in the bed, and starts to cry.
