New Orleans, summer 2004
When I was little, they called me pig. Not a pig. Not the pig. But pig. And, so I was. Fat. Selfish. Nasty. Whether I became those things because of what they called me, or they called me pig because of the way I was, I don’t know, but I do know he is who I became. Over the years I would try to kill him, in different ways.
My dad came to get me out of a crack house at 6 on a Monday morning, because I had not been home since I left a week before to take the last exam of senior year. He knew I had his bike, and my girlfriend told them where I was. That week, she and I made out on the red brick steps of her mom’s front porch on Plum and Adams. I smoked a Marlboro light and told her I had some heroin. She pressed her lips together and opened her eyes big, as if to say, “Okay? What do you want me to say about that? That is scary.”
The rest of the time I spent at Alex’s while my girlfriend finished junior year. I couldn’t believe it the first time the sun rose on Alex and me that week. Only minutes passed since we started doing lines of cocaine and heroin, partying in his basement apartment the night before, but then the sun rose through the window. Powders in my nose and smoke in my lungs turned on biochemical faucets in my head. My body buzzed and skin tingled with euphoria. We looked at each other in surprise and laughed in the warm light coming through the window. The night was gone, and we would never get it back. Now the week was gone. Years later Alex died of an overdose. Then his life was gone, and he never got it back.
Before I woke up that Monday morning I recognized my father’s voice coming from the door. It was steady, like he collected himself and repressed his panic a moment before he knocked. He came to take me back home. The drugs I smoked and snorted the night before still swirled bliss in the black behind my eyelids. A hand touched my shoulder. The urgent whispers of a figure in the dark startled me awake. Where was I?
“Riley. Riley. Wake up. Your dad is here. You have to go.”
My father grabbed his bike and loaded it into the Landcruiser, so I told Alex,
“Turn on the light. I have to find my heroin. I had 5 foils last night.” The filament burned my retinas, and my brain shuddered before my hands shielded my eyes.
“Are you sure? I don’t remember that. Where is it?”
I searched my pockets and found a tin foil bindle of white powder cocaine, but I wanted my heroine.
“I don’t know. Let me check the couch. I know I had them smoking crack with Cole last night.” We pulled up the cushions and found nothing. Then my father stood at the door. The engine of his 1983 land cruiser ran in the dark outside.
“Come on, Riley, let’s go.”
“Go with your dad. Call me later.” Alex switched the light back off. From across the street, concrete crosses of graves made silhouettes against a dead pale sky. It was a familiar sight for me by then. My father never said anything in the car, at least nothing I can remember.
At the house, my sisters and mother dressed and got ready for school like any other Monday morning. I walked up to the third floor, and my skin crawled in desperation. Sobriety was unacceptable. I wanted to die or be sedated.
I laid the foil of cocaine under the lamp on my bedside dresser. It looked like a gram and a half of coke, but when I gummed it and rubbed it on my lips, it didn’t numb me up. The cocaine was no good, so I chopped all of it up and snorted it in one line. It burned badly, but as soon as it hit the back of my throat, I knew it was several times a lethal dose of heroin, the stuff we called China white.
I walked downstairs to my get some juice. My father cooked breakfast, and the smell of bacon fat filled the kitchen.
“Poppa, I want some orange juice. Can we go get some?” He poked the bacon popping in the frying pan. His left hand rested in his pocket, and I looked around in the refrigerator door open.
“Not right now. Go upstairs and go to sleep in the TV room.”
10 minutes later my little sister found me. Green vomit covered my clothes and most of the couch. The dying blood in my face turned my complexion gray, and my eyes rolled all the way back into my head. She ran to get my father who had returned from buying orange juice.
As a veterinarian he knew how the basics of keeping something alive, so he got on his knees and pumped my chest with his hands. A large glob of brown snot ejected from my nostrils, but vomit still blocked my airway. He sucked it into his mouth and spat it out to help me breathe. With bile on my lips, he put his mouth to mine and blew in breath. He could have breathed for me for days, but the amount of heroin in my system meant certain death.
On a Monday morning before school, my sisters waited on the front porch for the ambulance. My mother shook, doubled over in the doorway and watched her husband attempt to keep her only son alive. My father breathed for me and pushed on my chest. I lay on the ground dying like I wanted. My respiratory system would shut down, and soon my heart would quit pumping. 17 years into this life and I was already on my way out. How could I do that to my mother and father? How could I do that to my sisters? How could I do that to myself?
When I was a kid, my father used to ride bikes with me down the levee to throw rocks into the river at sunset, and during his workdays, he packed me around in the passenger seat of his Landcruiser while he made calls to clients. Everywhere we went everyone knew him and wanted his attention. They said, “Hey, Doc! Hey, Doc! Hey, Doc!” We went to different horse barns and properties throughout the countryside. One night we hooked a chain to his front bumper and tried to pull a dead calf out of its mother as it got dark outside and afterwards he let me have a sip of his beer in the back of the Landcruiser. I used to ask him every question I ever had, and he always knew the answer. He was the smartest man in the world.
At some stables, he pointed and said, “A horse kicked me in the knee, and I cried under that tree.” I didn’t believe him, because my dad never cried. At his clinic he was in charge of everything and everyone. One evening while visiting the bayou a man got shot in the head in a hunting accident. I watched my dad suck the bloody foam out of his throat, until help came. The guy eventually died, but not while my dad was working on him.
The first time it occurred to me that I really loved him and he loved me, I was 4 years old. He led me on a horse through a gate into a riding ring when I thought it. One time I had an awful cough, and he stayed up with me to give me medicine and make sure I was okay. My very first memory is on his hairy chest, waking from sleep, to choke back chunks of vomit in my throat. He took a break from putting together some crawler or toy for me to drink a beer and read on the chase lounge under a lamp. I was his only baby boy once upon a time, and he held me in his arms.
But now he knelt over me and pumped my chest with both of his hands and breathed for me, while he waited for the ambulance he hoped would come fast enough to save me.
The paramedics and firemen tried to get me to walk downstairs to the ambulance and go to the hospital, but I tried to bite them. In the ER, I spewed green vomit all over the floor and ripped the IVs out of my arm to get water out of a sink. It was Children’s Hospital, and young children were dying in the beds around me. It was an ordeal, but I survived.
Whether it was an attempted suicide by overdose or not, I did not know, but everyone seemed to think it was. I would have rather died than deal with the problems waiting for me on the other side of surviving. My mother’s father, Turkey, sat in a chair next to me, and I gave him a hard time about them not allowing me any water. I asked him if he wanted me to vomit in his mouth.
He laughed. I was his oldest grandchild, and he called me Turkey like I called him Turkey. He used to wake up before the sun to drink vodka in the 1970s, but in that hospital room, he had 28 years sober.
Submitted October 24, 2017 at 11:26PM by ASavageLost http://ift.tt/2zzVE8X Drugs
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