Too Many Spoons in the Road...

Groggy and half-drunk, I cracked a sore, rheumy eye, heavily caked with sleep, then tried both eyes. Ouch. I was in rough shape. I lay still, building up courage to face the day. It'd been a hell of a night. A Saturday night blast, and my pounding headache filled out the class-A hangover. I recalled shots of Tequila with beer chasers...a ruthless mix you pay for the next morning. My memory after the Tequila was slightly hazy. I slung an arm over Angel’s spot, but hit empty bed. With no breakfast odors, I figured Angel was still loading the coffee machine. Then again, it was Sunday, so she might have gone for an early walk; our building sat by the sea-path for False Creek, offering a surreal treat, especially in the morning. The earlier the better. It was always great for walks, but early morning temperatures created an often eerie experience; clashing temperatures produced a mist that clung to the water, wafting up into a foggy haze that swirled and wrapped you in a murky blanket, obscuring vision to ten feet. Unknown shapes loomed out of the cloudy soup, startling you until they disappeared, sucked back into the moist void...a mysterious, overcast cloak of invisibility. On days like these, the whole city vanished in fog...a churning cauldron of vaporous drizzle descended over the entire downtown. Collectively called the downtown drizzle, a Vancouver Monsoon, or a B.C. cloudburst. On the mountaintops, mist hugged the trees, drifting down the slopes to finally settle on the cold ocean. The catchers in the sky...so I'd always wear my people hunting vest. After adopting this city, we made it our home; we were happy and grounded, glad we made the long journey, joyously leaving Toronto's snow behind. I rolled out of bed, cursing the tiny jack hammers that pounded in my ears. Heading into our on-suite bathroom, I splashed cold water on my face, washing dream-dust from my eyes. After a few glasses of water to re-hydrate my body, the water leeched into my parched pores like an arid river bed inhaling rain. With hair stucking out at wild angles, I stuck my head in the shower for a lazy splash. Toweling it dry, I blasted it with the hair dryer, freezing my long locks in place with hair spray. One of the many pains of having long hair. I donned some green army fatigues and pulled on a fresh T-shirt. The back read, “Shit follows me, so watch your step.” It was a nice color, so I ignored the stupid slogan. The message's cosmic irony described my ill-fated and wacky life, but I should never taunt fate; it had a bad habit of biting me in the ass. In case we had left-over party guests, I yelled out good morning while descending our circular staircase. No response. I soon reached the main floor and saw why. Angel was sitting at the kitchen table, leaning back against the chair, a spoon on the table and a needle sticking out of the floor, still waving back and forth with momentum, where it slid out of her hand. My brain went berserk. No, I thought, not this, please not this. I rushed over, pulling her to the floor and immediately started CPR. I felt for a pulse. Nothing. It was like Cindy all over again, but this time with someone I needed and loved. I started pounding on her chest, willing life into her, pushing her chest with both hands, desperately trying to pump that beautiful blood through her system. Tears poured from my eyes as I continued the futile task. I started screaming at her to wake up, as if her soul still floated around and would listen to me. I tried mouth to mouth, but got no response. I tried willing my life into her. I tried pleading with God, but I was too late. Angel was dead. I sank to my knees and wept. My whole life imploded, squashing my guts and sanity. I was crushed by loss and despair. An ethereal vacuumed swallowed my entire existence...meaning vanished, as an emotional miasma poured disaster on my shoulders, quashing me with grief, regret, and despair. After a moment, anger mixed with sorrow. How could this have happened? I looked on the table and everything made sense. There were two bags of heroin on the table: one had pure stuff, the other cut. She’d taken a dose of the pure stuff, thinking it was the cut, and it was lethal. The pure bag had a little plus sign...something she missed. I looked at it with disgust and dismay, but let it lay…Charon’ s ferryboat to the Hades, or Morpheus’ link to dreams. Waves of guilt flooded my emotional whirlpool, and I flopped down, beside Angel...dolefully defeated, miserable, forlorn, and abandoned, my whole world traumatized. The second girl to die from my drugs—guilt pressed on me, cramming my soul into a dark crevasse, opening my pit of misery to add more remorse and pain. My existence was severed at the heart, my body a living corpse. I glanced around the apartment we’d put together, now an intangible collection of meaningless memories. I stared at the table, at the heroin, numb and dead to world. The sense of loss was unfathomable. Life in Vancouver ended: I was alone, and felt responsible for her death. I always kept the pure stuff in my pocket. All our plans dead—they died with Angel. I sat there, immobile, catatonic, my thoughts frozen, my mind a blank. We’d been hitting the heroin pretty hard the last few months, and I couldn’t understand how this could have happened. We both knew about the cut and pure stuff, and how I always kept them separated. She must have taken a really big hit—her resistance was like mine, pretty high. Mistaking it for the 33% cut stuff, and confuse that for the pure base was lethal—a hefty shot of the pure stuff would have been three times as potent, a deadly freight-train too enormous to fight off. I kept picturing Cindy’s last moments, falling back into the sofa, never to move again. My silent voice of caution, the one that knows my bad luck, had secretly warned me about something like this; I ignored it, as everything had been going so smoothly, and we had everything organized. About two months ago, I’d been at the table when Angel did the exact same thing; I was there, and told her it was the pure stuff. She quietly put half the hit back, as she knew how close she’d come to doing an overdose. We had a long talk about how dangerous this was, and I thought she’d been frightened enough to double-check. The newspaper was full of reports of people who’d taken an overdose; we empathized, confident we were too cautious for that to happen to us. I realized the arrogance we showed, and wouldn't realize that addicts screw up—at that point, we both knew we were totally wired, yet shrugged it off, as we seemed to have an endless supply. Close friends talked to us about slowing down, but we never listened. Maybe we should have stopped then: through tears and a cloud of remorse, I knew we should have cleaned up. We had everything; now I had nothing. Without Angel, the apartment was lonely and sterile. Picturing it filled with our friends, I knew it’d always be empty for me. Stupidly, I’d stopped listening to my inner voice or sense of impending doom, and now everything was gone. Over and done. Dead. I’d loved Angel, and living without her didn’t seem bearable. Staring at the heroin, I realized my hands were shaking, my body screaming for a hit. Still touchy from my hangover, I mixed a huge hit of the pure stuff, my fuck-it switch off, the shot easily triple what Cindy took so long ago, way bigger than my usual dose, and I automatically jammed it home without hesitation. I don’t know what I was thinking; the massive hit seemed to be an easy and painless method of curing a bubbling cauldron of sorrow and painful emotions. Dying would be a consequence I deserved, now more than ever…this was a second girl I helped die by sharing what I stole. Like a padded sledgehammer, the fix hit me like a dam bursting its banks, coursing through my system, shutting everything down, flipping off switches as it pulsed through my veins; my head dropped down as the world melted away, as I tried to douse the firestorm of depression that raged within me. Cindy had just fallen back, saying, “What a rush,” and lapsed into death. My breathing was controlled, and I could still produce a thought through the haze. I was able to put the syringe back on the table, and then fell back into Never-Neverland. My increased resistance over the last few months was high—the shot was enough to put me in a coma-like doze, but not enough to knock me out for good. Snapping back and forth in the chair, my head bobbing up and down as I fought for consciousness, I eventually slid out of the chair. Falling on the floor woke me up, and I managed to sit up. My eyes flickered, my mind kicking back in—I got back in the chair. This went on for a while, and the sight of Angel’s body slapped me back to reality. I was trying to kill a pain that couldn’t be assuaged by any drug known to man. The dose I took was the biggest I’d ever taken, and I instinctively knew why: I wanted to be with Angel. I got up and staggered to the sofa, falling back, I nodded in and out of a reality I wanted to ignore. Suicide called, and I thought of doing another hit, making sure I joined Angel on the floor, but I just lay there, letting my junk clouded mind remove me from this reality. The phone rang. After several rings, I snapped to and answered. It was Vince. After a minute, my somnambulistic mutterings told Vince something was wrong. I never did hits that made me a walking zombie, and he slowly asked what happened. I managed to say Angel was dead. Hearing it echo through my mind brought me back to the hard cold reality of death, and I started sobbing again. Vince told me he’d be right over. We’d given him a key, so Barry or Vince could just park and walk up whenever they were in the area. They’d become our closest friends. I fell back on the couch, trying to blot-out reality, totally wiped on down, unable to move. When the door rang, I just lay there until he let himself in. I stayed on the sofa, half in dreamland, and half in emotional failure, my tears like faucets that turned on and off. Vince came in, as I heard him lock the door. The next thing I knew, he was shaking me, telling me to wake up. I looked at him, tears welling up in my eyes and just repeated Angel was dead. Vince said something about me joining her, and he pulled me to my feet, walking me back and forth in front of the windows. When I was bit more responsive, he asked what happened. I managed to slur a short version of my wake up, repeating I found her dead, I found her dead. After some more questions, he understood the heroin mix up and what happened to Angel. He led me back to the sofa, let me fall back down and nod off. Zach wasn’t home; I was soaring in some ghostly realm, seeing Angel and Cindy drifting by my insubstantial body, floating with me in the clouds. The next thing I knew, Vince had a coffee for me, telling me I needed to wake up. I realized some time had passed, as it was freshly brewed espresso, very strong and aromatic. A few sips helped shake off my tendency to drift away, and Vince asked how much I took. I muttered too much. He again asked me how much I took, and if I tried to join Angel—I mumbled not enough, and just stared at nothing, moving my head in agreement. I could hear Vince saying I nearly got there, but was saved for a purpose. I could tell he was trying to snap me back to life, but the gigantic hit kept pulling me under. He kept talking to me, trying to get me out of the hypnotic hole I’d fallen into, trying to get me back to reality. I finished the coffee and Vince took the cup and brought me another. The caffeine seemed to help me remain awake, but I was still too stunned to deal with reality. I gazed at nothing, ass I was mentally disconnected; my eyes had that thousand-yard stare I saw in my uncle. On my third coffee, I was able to give Vince some semblance of an answer. He knew I’d found Angel after waking up, tried CPR, and that she mistook the pure heroin for the cut stuff I was selling. He said we needed to do something, but I had to snap out of my near overdose and return to the land of the living. Like a caring father, he said he didn't want to lose two of his best friends; I saw tears in his eyes when I could focus, and he repeated that losing Angel was enough of a tragedy, and joining her would hurt a lot of people that cared about us both. He said he couldn't bare to lose both of us at the same time. He mentioned taking me to the hospital—I reacted quickly, saying, "no, no, they’ll send me back. I can't go back." When he repeated back where, I knew I should let him know the full extent of my private hell. After drinking the whole pot of coffee, I could keep my eyes open, but my mind was still a blur. Vince kept telling me we had to do something, and asking why I was so afraid of the hospital, but I couldn’t follow everything he was saying. I just felt like bowing out, ending my pain and joining Angel. I looked at the table for the bag of dope, but noticed Vince had moved it somewhere. He quietly told me I needed to wake up, and my best bet would be to go to the hospital. That brought on another bout of fear, and he kept asking me what was so dangerous about going to the hospital. My messed up past reared its ugly head, and I knew I had to tell him the whole story; I needed to get it off my chest, and as a good friend, he deserved to know why I was so fucked up. I told him to sit down; I had some things to tell him. He nodded, almost like he was expecting this, and I struggled to tell him the whole story. I started with my messed up parents, Reform school, the abuse, and then escaping the school, finding the murdered girl in the woods, meeting Angel, Cindy, and Zoe, Cindy’s overdose and death, and our joint relocation to Vancouver. He sat there, quietly absorbing the story, thinking about the twist this put on things. He was crying quietly. I don’t know if it was for Angel, Cindy, or both; maybe the whole bunch of us, and the shocking revelation of the crap I’d gone through, keeping it all to myself. I told him about the abuse in the school, how I needed to get away for my sanity and remaining childhood, and how confused I was now, especially since my real pillar of love and support was now dead on the kitchen floor. I think he cried for all of us…it was a pretty heavy tale, and since I was his close friend, he really felt for me. He sat on the sofa and gave me a big hug; it wasn’t like Angel, but a friend I cared for, and I just fell apart, sobbing and crying until his shirt was wet with tears. I could feel his empathy; he didn’t move, didn’t care about his damn shirt getting wet, he just held his friend until I ran out of tears.