No One’s Sleep (Chapter One, Continued)

I turn around and walk back to my building, all the while carrying the two Xanax in the palm of my hand. I’ll try to save them, I tell myself, trying not to cry, knowing they‘re the last ones I‘ll have. But they’re in my mouth before I reach Eutaw, and by the time I pass Lucy’s Irish Pub next door to my building, let alone take the elevator to my third-floor apartment, I have nothing at all. In a few moments I’ll fall asleep for a precious hour. But the Xanax doesn’t work liked it used to. I’ll awake needing more, always more, all the time, always more, still sick, always sick, and I won’t sleep again for a week. And by that time my job and my great Baltimore experiment will be over.

I had no intention when I moved to Baltimore, truly, of buying Xanax or any other drug on the street. I had been taking Xanax for anxiety for years¾by prescription, of course, as a complement to the medicine I take for my depression. But doctors are reluctant to prescribe across state lines, naturally, and I knew that once I moved to Baltimore I had to find a new doctor¾and fast¾before my limited refills ran out and I faced the likelihood of intense and painful withdrawal; even, as is warned, seizures and death. So I set a March 31st start date for my new job (as a web analyst) at a bank on Calvert Street at the intersection with Fayette, just across the street from the courthouse and only four blocks or so from the Inner Harbor: this will allow my insurance to take effect the following day. Finding a doctor in Baltimore, I thought, would be no problem at all. In fact, I never even gave it a second thought¾not at first, anyway. After all, isn’t Johns Hopkins, one of the most famous psychiatric hospitals in the world, located on the east side of town? How could there not be adequate medical care in Baltimore–especially psychiatric care for those suffering from depression and anxiety? Johns Hopkins, I imagine, must employ a hundred and fifty doctors at least. Quite possibly, even a lot more. But I had no idea it would take the bank until the last days of July to issue me an insurance card, when it was far too late to do me any good. By then I was in full blown crisis, long out of medicine and money, and was truly beginning to believe that I might not survive. The physical¾not to mention emotional pain¾had become, putting it mildly, unbearable. As badly as I loved Baltimore then, and miss Baltimore now, I was so sick that I couldn’t stay there another single day. That’s not an exaggeration: not another single day.

By that point I had tried everything I could think of to find a doctor: walking to the emergency room at the University of Maryland hospital a few blocks southwest of the apartment, even making an appointment at a clinic on nearby South Paca Street. The doctor I saw there was most pleasant, of course. “Do you know you’re a junkie?” she said. “No,” I said, “I didn’t know that. I didn’t even know what Xanax was until it was prescribed to me. Am I dressed like a junkie?” I asked, assuming she would notice my pinstripe suit, white French cuff shirt and blue Hermes tie with gold ringlets.

“Are your hands shaking?”

“Yes. Just as they have since I was very, very young.”

“Do you feel that you need Xanax to make it through the day?”

“Yes. It helps.”

“Do you feel that you need one right now?”

“Yes. I would like to continue the medication which was prescribed to me by my family doctor.”

“Then you’re a junkie.”

“Oh. So that’s the way it is, then.”

Then she made me wait in the lobby while my medical records were faxed from Kentucky. When they finally arrived, she handed me a one week prescription (with no refills), for half the dosage my body was accustomed to. Peach Xanax, they‘re called, because of the color. Only half a milligram. Looking her in the eye, I tear the prescription in shreds, let it fall like ash to the floor, and walk toward the door. There went another eighty dollars for the office visit, for nothing.

“Good luck screening out the junkies,” I say, turning to stare the bitch down without blinking. “I’m sure you’re very good at it.”

“You ever come back here again, I’ll call the cops,” the doctor says.

“Do it, bitch. Tearing up a scrip and refusing to take any shit from you is probably a Class D felony. At least.”

“I’m calling the cops right now.”

“Do it. I’m walking to work at Provident Bank on Calvert Street. And after work I’m coming straight back to my apartment at 11North Eutaw. You have the address. Use it.”

Back out on the sidewalk and walking to work, in the shadows and beneath the awnings on the east side of the street, I begin to think of a song by the Rolling Stones: “All my friends are junkies…that’s not really true.” You are a junkie if you’re foolish enough to walk into a clinic in inner city Baltimore. Yes, you certainly are. Even if you’re an officer at the city’s largest independent bank. Even if you’re paying $1500 a month for a 650 square foot apartment (with a full-on view of the upscale and lovely Hippodrome Theater) just a few blocks away from your office. “I’m a monkey man,” Mick Jagger sang. “Are you a monkey woman, too?” He was singing about heroin, of course. But I know what he’s talking about. I live with that sort of monkey all the time.

In late April, with a five-dollar tip for the driver, I exit a cab at a white clapboard corner store in east Baltimore at the intersection of Jefferson Street and North Montford Avenue. Three women, probably looking much older than they actually are, stand around the door and stop talking among themselves as I walk up the steps and into the store. I’m aware of how silly and out of place I look (even in my torn jeans, black Chuck Taylor’s, leather jacket and R.E.M. tee shirt), and how this little cab ride could turn out to have a very messy ending. But there’s no turning back now. The cab is long gone, and I couldn’t find my exact location even if I had a map. If something happens to me now, it’s rather likely that I’ll never be found. I’ll just become one of the disappeared, just another statistic; if I’m lucky, really, really, lucky, they’ll find my body in a week or so floating in the Inner Harbor. There’s no one here that I know, and I have two hundred dollars in my pocket. Knowing that I have the cash makes me feel even more vulnerable and frightened than I already am. I’m a mark, an opportunity, a target. But I have no choice now but to see this through. I’ve come too far and I’m too sick from withdrawal to back out now.

I walk to the back of the store, take a Gatorade out of the cooler, and pay the cashier behind the window. Shatterproof glass, I assume. Honestly, the extra security precautions in the store make me even more nervous. It isn’t hard to picture a gun pointed at the cashier, and endless cashiers before her. With nothing else to do, I walk back out of the store, into a cold and overcast afternoon. I have no idea what to do next. One of the men who moved the furniture into my apartment said he had a cousin who worked this neighborhood. Hook you up with some Xans, he said. They’ll know what you’re there for. Give ‘em a minute to check you out and you’ll be in business. And with no more than that sketchy bit of information, I walk the two blocks from my apartment to the Radisson, get into a cab, and give the driver the name of an intersection where, judging from the look on his face, he’s rarely asked to go.

“What you want?” the shorter of the women says as I stand, rather self-consciously, to the right of the door. She’s wearing a dark gray parka with a faux fur-rimmed hood and is looking at me, understandably, as if I just beamed down from the starship Enterprise. Her hair is done up in dreads, but she looks as if she’s been sleeping on the floor-o-r the street–for weeks.

Just meeting a friend.”

“Friend? What friend? I ain’t seen you before. You ain’t got no friends here. What you want? What you really want? Everybody come here want something.”

I say the words while I can still get them out without choking on my own voice. “Maybe some Xans or Klonopin.”

“Xans or Pins,” she says, smiling now. “Why didn’t you say so?”

She takes my hand and walks me deeper into the neighborhood, past endless boarded-up row houses that, maybe eighty years ago, were probably rather handsome. I notice that the streets are deserted, the stoops empty, lacking even the occasional face in the window in the few houses that actually look as if they may be occupied. I’ve seen and walked neighborhoods with this kind of dangerous vibe. But I’ve never seen one this…deserted. It makes me even more nervous and certain that something very unpleasant is about to happen. I feel as if we’re being watched, never mind the fact that I haven’t actually seen another soul since we left the store.

“I’m Tara. What you called, hon?”

“Depends, I guess. Eddie. Ed. Whatever.”

“You’re in the right place, Ed. I know everybody here. You gonna take care of me, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “You take care of me, I’ll take care of you We in business?”

“That’s my man,” Tara says. “Of course we are. That’s my man.”

We walk another block, still holding hands, and notice an older gentleman wearing dark framed glasses, a fedora, and a tan suit walking towards us on the other side of the street. I notice that he seems to be walking very quickly and isn’t bothering to look around as he makes his way down the street. He’s in a hurry. Too big of a hurry, I think.

“That’s Miller,” Tara says. “He live here, too, He always know what’s going on.”

We cross the street well in front of him, though the distance seems to close rather quickly. “Miller,” Tara says, “Where you going, hon?”

“Gotta see a man,” Miller says. “Who’s that with you?”

“This is Ed. He’s my friend.”

“Friend,” Miller says. “Cracker sure don’t look like no friend.”

No, I tell you. He’s taking care of me today.”

Miller won‘t so much as look at me. “What your friend want?”

By this time we’re following Miller down the street. I always walk fairly quickly and even I’m having trouble keeping up with him.

“Maybe some Xans or Klonopin,” I say.

“Well, which one is it?” Miller says. He laughs, rather unkindly, I think. “The man don’t even know what he wants.”

“Hold up,” Tara says. “You wearing me out.”

“Can’t stop,” Miller says. “I’m dirty.”

Even I know what that means. He‘s carrying heroin, or as I would hear it called later, heron. “Well, ya got any benzos,” I say.

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Xanax. Downers. Nerve pills. Maybe some pain pills.”

“Ain’t got none of that stuff on me,” Miller says. “No money in it. Gotta see a man.”

“That’s what I hear. You already said that. Later, then.”

Miller hurries down the street, sort of shuffling as he walks. He must be carrying a lot of stuff, I think. He moves like a man who thinks something might fall out of his pockets or his waistband at any second.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Tara says, leaning now against my right arm. “We can still find some things. You still gonna help me out?”

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll still help you out. But you gotta help me first. I can‘t go back with nothing. I just can‘t do it. The hell with it…I‘m jonesing.”

“I know it, baby. Tara won’t leave you. Just walk with me for a while.”

“I don’t even know where I am. I don‘t know a damn soul.”

“You’re with me, baby. You know me. You’re with me.”

I have to stop and think a second. Downtown is on my right, to the west. I could just take off walking on my own and eventually run into one of the north-south streets, like the familiar Calvert and, further east, North Charles. After all, I walk east from Eutaw to Calvert every morning. But I have no idea who I might run into before I get there, and at the moment I don’t want to be walking around alone. It’s not dark yet, like Bob Dylan wrote, but it’s getting there.

“Just what, exactly, can we get?”

“I know you got money,” Tara says. “Money talks. We can get anything we want.”

“Pain pills, then?”

“Depends on who we run into. And there are always…other things.”

“What other things? I’m not so sure I should be here, Tara.”

“But you are here, baby,” she says. “You’re already here.”

Just for a minute I picture myself with a needle in my arm. The thought makes me shiver, makes me nauseous, and I try to imagine what the endless row houses looked like when people and children actually lived here and the houses were still new. The people who helped build this city lived here, I suppose. But if there were once children, families, or even ghosts here, they disappeared a long, long time ago. They disappeared a very long time ago. And now I’m just another ghost, wandering aimlessly down an empty, dangerous, unknown street with a stranger and hunger and fatigue and worry while the spirit-spring wind is blowing cold in a city I hardly know. I’m walking in a fog. Where no one notices the contrast of white on white.

Tara and I watch as a woman exits a row house and walks, with an ease I don’t share, in our direction. Tara laughs and calls out: “LaDonna. What you up to, girl?”

“Hey, baby girl. What you need?”

“You got the Ready?”

“Ready?” Add confusion to my growing anxiety.

“You’ll like it,” Tara says. “It’s just crack, baby.”

“I got what you need,” LaDonna says. She’s pretty, I think, and young, with small features and small breasts and slender hands that don‘t appear as if they‘ve done a single day’s work in her life. In her red blouse and black slacks, she looks as if she’s heading to an office downtown. She looks like the sort of person I’ve been hoping to meet in the pubs. But since I moved to Baltimore, I really haven’t met anyone at all.

“You got Tens?”

“Fives or Tens. Whatever you need.”

Tara looks up at me. “Tens are always better,” she says, a little more animated now. There’s something different about her eyes. She can taste it now; she can taste the fix she’s been wanting all day, or perhaps even longer. Unfortunately, I know that feeling.

“Come here a sec,” I say, and walk up the sidewalk just a few yards so we can talk.

“I’m not really …following…this.”

“Dollars, baby. What we’re getting either costs five dollars or ten dollars. So, how many you want?”

“Tens are good? Eight of them, then.” I reach into my left front pocket and try to pull out four twenties as casually as possible. “Think that’s enough?”

Tara puts her hand on mine. “That‘s good. Real good. But not here. We’ll get off the street first.”

“I have things to do,” LaDonna says.

“Let’s walk up to your place, then,” Tara says.

LaDonna’s place¾or what she says is her place, as I doubt she really lives here¾looks habitable from the outside, but once we walk in it’s all wreckage and detritus, human and otherwise. There’s no heat, no running water, and the couch and two chairs are like those you usually see abandoned on the curb. Two men are asleep on the couch, one of them a very large and athletic looking man with a needle and syringe hanging out of his arm; a woman sleeps with her mouth open on one of the chairs. An older lady sits in the other chair watching the flickering and snowy television, occasionally holding a lighter under the end of a glass tube, inhaling slowly, holding in the smoke, and then blowing languidly it toward the ceiling.

LaDonna walks upstairs and returns with a handful of black re-sealable bags; it would probably take three or four of them to cover the palm of my hand. “Give Ed a taste,” Tara says. “He’s new.”

“Just put a little on your tongue,” LaDonna says.

I open one of the baggies as she says, putting a few grains on my tongue, which instantly goes numb.

“Did you feel that?”

“Um, yeah. I think so, anyway. It‘s…different.”

“It’ll get even better,” LaDonna says. “You haven’t even done it right. She’ll show you how. Time for you to bust your cherry.”

Tara smiles, leans against me again as I hand LaDonna the money, takes the baggies, and leads me by hand to an empty space along the wall by the couch. She takes a glass tube out of her parka; I notice that one end is filled with something that looks like copper wire.

“What’s that stuff?”

“It’s the chewy,” she says. “It keeps the powder at the end of the pipe.”

I notice that the end of her pipe with the chewy is charred and jagged from being broken. Maybe more than once.

“The heat,” Tara says. “Sometimes a piece will just break off. After a while you just get a new one.”

“I’m really not sure.”

“Just chill, baby doll. You like downers, right? You’re gonna feel real good in no time at all.”

Tara measures out a few grains of powder on the chewy, takes a lighter out of her coat, and places the flame under the end of the pipe. She takes a draw as the powder glows orange and melts, and closes her eyes with the pleasure she gets from it. The odor is hard to describe: it’s definitely chemical, with just a faint sweetness. After a few seconds she exhales; I’m surprised at the amount of smoke that drifts up toward the ceiling. She didn’t seem to take in that much at all.

“Your turn,” she says. “Here, I’ll help you. There‘s still some in there. Just let me melt it for you.”

I don’t even smoke, I think. And I can count on a single hand the times I’ve smoked pot. In fact, I’ve only bought one joint in my life. And now…this. I take a light draw like Tara tells me, hold in the smoke for a few seconds, and exhale lightly, almost like a sigh. Tara takes back the pipe, loads up some more coke, and we share hits until the first bag is empty.

“You good, baby?”

“I’m good. Relaxed, maybe. My lips are a little numb. Wish we had some music or something.”

“Maybe next time we chill at your place.”

“Maybe.”

“I know we will, baby. Here,” Tara says. “Have some more.”

We go through the contents of five more bags as people wander in and out of the house. The man with the syringe awakes, stands up, stretches, and walks upstairs with the needle still in his arm¾and even though I‘m curious about who or what might be upstairs, I‘m not about to follow him and find out. The older woman remains in front of the television, still smoking only occasionally, not even bothering to look as the people come and go. Women arrive, on their own and in groups and with men. But tonight, in this place, in this city, there is no one talking of Michelangelo. I fall asleep, finally, still against the wall, my head on Tara’s shoulder. In the morning she’s gone, along with the two other bags, my Seiko watch, wallet, and the six twenty-dollar bills I had in my left front pocket.