Penina Warren

A week before my eighteenth birthday, and against any sound advice I had received in adolescence, I began dating a twenty-seven-year-old drug addict—the person I will refer to hereinafter as K., a consonant which clangs in my mouth almost like metal. He first appeared to me as if on the run from himself: a card-carrying member of the existentially disappointed, armed with a desire to change his luck in life and an almost harassed looking beauty—flaxen-haired and ruddy and strong in that way of the classical outlaw hero—made all the better for being callused, covered in a sheen of dirt, dried out by the sun.

I suppose K. must have woken up one day to find that there was nothing left to do but wipe his hands clean of his old life and give into the American tendency to travel westward in pursuit of answers. That great epistemological tradition saw him through from the Hudson Valley of New York to the Great Plains of Colorado (in a ‘92 Volkswagen Golf the color of alfoil), delivering him, by some alignment of the stars, to an apartment just a short drive away from my family house in suburban Denver. My first impressions of K. suggest a man effusively generous with his love, so immediately impassioned that he felt moved to proclaim his loyalty to me after only two dates (if you’ll allow me the grace of calling drunk eating sprinkled-donuts on a bare mattress a date) and then again and again in those early days. While holding hands—one hand over AND one hand under the shellacked tables of diners; while texting—constantly, explicitly, often in the borrowed time afforded by the bathroom stalls of my high school during a passing-period; while kissing—with tongue, up against my parents’ car in a bid to please not say goodbye just yet.

Though K. had been open about his degeneracies early on—the alcoholism, the drugs, the teenaged felony (expunged), the dysfunction of his previous and plenty past relationships—I feel now that this was not information exchanged in the spirit of building intimacy, but a way to test the boundaries of the kind of behavior I might be willing to accept. He must have been able to see very clearly what I could not then: I was at an age where danger and excitement seemed to commingle, where their necessary distinctions threatened to collapse and flatten into one.

K. quickly became an important, almost epic, figure in my life, and I began to interpret his manic ruptures as elaborate gestures. One morning I mutely listened while he called his bank to drain the retirement savings account he had built up by working at the GAP warehouse for a decade, then accompanied him on a shopping spree at a mid-tier outlet mall (where he bought me two Adidas track-suits: one black, one red). We ate an elaborate dinner at the kind of restaurant which touts four dollar-signs in the Michelin Guide, and then, like the pull of gravity tipping me back down to earth, I got into trouble with my mom after missing several of her phone calls. I felt flanked by a double life: a child pretending to be something other, something greater, impossibly mature, swept up in the novelty of this bud, which was my first relationship, beginning to bloom and unfurl. I relegated logical thinking to something for people who were not in love. I did not need any of that, though from time to time I found myself startled anew with an acrid skepticism I could not tamp down: Don’t say things you don’t mean, I chided K. when he first told me that he loved me, two weeks in, that truth-seeing part of myself bumping up against the limits of what my heart, blind, wanted very badly to be true.

He found me in an epoch defined by a methodical mining of books—musical biographies, namely—for the cultural clout I could assume in the new identity I intended to construct for myself once I graduated high school and moved to New York City for college. In reading the follies of the greats, like Lou Reed and David Bowie, I was privy to scenes of personal heroes shooting up heroin in back booths of filthy clubs, invested in the nail biting vignettes that triggered intense feelings of relief and satisfaction when they did not culminate in disaster, but rather, subverted prediction in moments of ephemeral and spastic genius. There was no reading of extensive drug use as a cautionary tale, no real weight put on the ultimate destruction caused by them. I had culled meaning selectively, curating an idealized fantasy of hard drugs as a panacea for unrealized artistic potential. I had no intention of ever using the drugs myself, but for a moment, the mere existence of them became a direct tie to a historical moment, one I wished I could have experienced myself. I sometimes dreamt of using them, of becoming a cooler, more loose, more creatively fecund version of myself. This context feels like a small explanation for the cruel ways in which K. and I would eventually manipulate and use each other—the ways in which I would let myself be manipulated and be used.

The first time I saw K. use crack, the violence of the act subverted any romantic fantasies of hard drugs I had previously constructed. Crawling around in the darkness of an industrial alley on his hands and knees, I watched as the drug degraded him into his most basic self; stripping away the bravado and flourish, melting away my delusions of any capacity for depth or of a long-term future together. The drinking he had done that night worked to loosen a stream of usually suppressed desire, making his most base tensions and longings within reach, into topics for the episodes I would later have to restrain. As his synapses reacted to the drink and the drug, shifting and sifting through new levels of consciousness, the very nature of his desire had changed phase: unutterable doubt became pellucid truth. He had become some manic oracle, a loser alchemist, reframing his innermost fears as certain prophecies—it was as though the drugs had turned the man into a child right before my eyes, cleaving any connection to a previous history or socialization that might contend or reason with him. He was a baby, mesmerized and sustained by cheap entertainment, a kind of rattle, a game of peekaboo, so incredibly focused on this pleasure that he paid no heed to the fact that I had found him, that I was speaking to him, that I was crying.

 I fought to wrangle the muscle of his fleeing body into my car. On the street, he sobbed into the night: You’re so pretty but I can’t make it in this city anymore, I have to go home. I held on only to what was ancillary: for the first time in my life, a person felt it was a kind of prize to be with me. So I ignored the rest. Led him into the lobby of his building, into the elevator that contained the corkboard which held announcements (bingo night Wednesdays, street cleaning first Sunday come March), into his apartment, into his room, into his bed. I turned away from him as I slept, but I stayed by his side through the night.

That next morning K. was violently ill, groaning that the drugs had likely been cut with something. He spent the day vomiting and shitting. I ran him a shower and sat on the plastic toilet cover as he straddled the tub and wept. The steam in the room became concentrated, sweat welled in my brows and ran in a trail down the sides of my face, stinging the corners of my eyes and the pink lining of my mouth. I was tormented by desire to leave the room, to get up and crawl through the nearest port of egress, the window, the door, as I watched him exorcize the indignities of his reality. I went so far as to rehearse the exact steps necessary for me to reach the door, five steps forward, the turning of a handle, but even my slightest movement would prompt K. to yell out, as if he was in a great deal of pain, as if trying but failing to plead with me: Stay!

When the revulsion gave way, and I found that it usually always did—like a fit of harsh weather passing into total stillness—what remained was that it had felt good to be needed, to have been K. 's source of comfort and healing. It was as though I had peered straight through a wound to find at the base something moldering and terminal, and instead of cutting away the rot, of extricating myself from its toxicity, I decided I would double down, I would try to just feel grateful for having been chosen as witness. I fed him saltines and capfuls of Gatorade as he dried off. When he asked me to cut his hair (perhaps the impulse here was like the one to cut bangs after a breakup: the desire to create physical distance between the person of yesterday and the person of tomorrow), I did so with a pair of dull kitchen scissors, discovering newly exposed patches starting to thin, to recede at the temples.

Our relationship would come to be defined by these episodic moments of crisis—often substance induced—that resulted in temporary closeness but mutated us into general dysfunction. It was euphoric, brutal, addictive in its day-to-dayness, and even after he dumped me for S. in July of that year, we would continue to rely on one another, to see each other clandestinely. 

He had worked with S. on his landscaping jobs, and would eventually indulge me with the detail that she was the girl who planted the flowers while he mowed the lawns. From my own research, I found that she was working a side job as a cashier at a liquor store, that she lived in a trailer with her parents outside of Estes Park, that her dad had false teeth. The annals of Facebook revealed to me that she was straight-edge, and my enduring friendship with K.’s roommate rewarded me with the morsel that he was pretending to be sober while they were together. 

I moved to New York City and began my freshman year of university that August, but the distance did little to dull my pain or jealousy. Every time I heard S.’s name (during roll call, while eavesdropping on the telephone conversations of strangers), my spirit squirmed so profoundly that I winced in sympathetic response. Sometimes, in the lowest of these lows, hearing the three syllables of her name could make me cry. Then, one day, more news came in—S. and K. had moved in together. I sought emergency counseling at the university’s mental health center. The days kept passing. I was disappointed but not surprised with myself for feeling no guilt after K. and I slept together while I was home over Thanksgiving break, cheating on S. I held onto perverse satisfaction, the feeling that I had won, that the infidelity had been rather circular: an event that could be blamed on physics, attributed to Newton’s third law. S. had stolen K. away from me, it only felt fair to do the same to her, even if I could only hold him for one night. 

At the end of December, those liminal few days between the old year and the new, S. kicked K. out of her family’s trailer, prompting his move back to Upstate New York. When his call of distress came—K. told me had I not come he would have slit his wrists in the bathtub— I drove in the darkness to meet him at a cheap motel carved into the side of a mountain. I gave him a hand job under a scratchy blanket and he wept like a baby into the night. In the morning, I helped him collect his belongings; in the afternoon I bought him lunch at McDonald’s. Later, I snuck him into the cobweb-covered bedroom in my parent’s basement where we slept together on linens that smelled of wet rot. He had never flown on a plane before, had no bank account. I drove him to the airport the next day and supervised as he paid for his fare in cash, thinking to myself: I have never seen a person do that before.

I found that this black situation filled me with delight. All the vectors of possibility felt like a cartoon sun shining down on me, yellow and tentacled and smiling (when had my emotional responses become so distorted, so inappropriate, I wondered?). I spent the rest of my winter break in Denver amassing a mountain of marijuana to bring back to K. He had moved into his parent’s house and needed escape, he explained when asking for my help in supplying. I lived up to the task, eager and determined; a spiritual teacher’s pet pandering for approval, for acceptance. Winning him back had become a primary matter of importance, the pursuit a kind of sport for me. I knew that I was not improving anyone’s lot by providing the addict with his drugs, but I felt this perversion of good faith would be the means to my end; that it all might be absolvable later, during that time in the future when I could better afford to repent, be a good person again.

K. met me at my dorm on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street at the end of January, and during that first visit, burned through the lion’s share of my loot. We spent the bitter end of my school recess drinking Hefeweizens in a cloud of skunk-ish smoke, fondling each other under the synthetic duvet of my twin XL cot, and swiping into the dining hall every now and again to eat hard-boiled eggs (him) and chocolate chip cookies (me). We went on like this for a few months, eventually formed a routine: I met his train at Grand Central, like some devoted military wife; we meandered downtown to eat in the close quarters of dimly lit Italian restaurants where hundred year old candles burned; we danced up against each other in the basement of the Pyramid Club on Avenue A to New Order songs. I like most now to remember the quiet mornings that were the aftermaths of these nights—when we would walk slow, loping laps around Washington Square Park, take the train to The Met where I would feel, for some brief moment, that we might both still be susceptible to beauty, susceptible to goodness. Some version of love seemed to exist there, if only on a mezzanine platform, hovering a middle distance between two floors.

K. was jobless and all excursions were footed on the credit card I could barely afford to pay off. After he blew all of his own money on “fun”, I would give him twenty dollars of “beer money” when we parted ways. I went back Upstate with him infrequently, where we would lie to his mom about the status of his sobriety and fuck on his flannel sheets patterned with little brown footballs. K. refused to define our relationship this time around, keeping me in the purgatory of casualness, and any regard for my past or my future fell to the wayside. All I knew was the thrill of being together, the anguish of being apart. It was all I felt for a long time.

Springtime arrived cruelly. K. started full time work as a groomer on a horse farm in Rhinebeck; he could now pay for his own weed and beer. I wanted to be proud but instead found myself trapped in the straight-jacket of my own smallness. I resented that he didn’t need me to bankroll his vices anymore, that he had become distant and evasive. I worked fastidiously to pinpoint the exact movement that had triggered such a seismic shift in our dynamic—was it something I had said or done that tipped the scales?— neglecting to see plainly that this was how it had been all along.

I stayed in the city during spring break in hopes that K. might want to see me. When he told me no, that he did not want to, I distracted myself from the feeling in my chest by signing up for a shock study, as advertised in a paper flier distributed outside of the university’s psych department. A doctoral student connected the soft part of my forearm to electrodes and tested various intensities of shock until we settled on a level I could withstand, something that hurt but not enough that I wouldn't be able to tolerate it again and again, but when the zaps started coming, I wasn’t ready for the cumulative brunt of their random repetition. I pleaded with the student to turn down the intensity of the machine, that I was in pain, but she shrugged, saying that would no longer be possible. For several minutes, I watched a slide-show of tropical fish and birds and sat in the bodily prison of anticipating certain pain but not knowing when it would come. Eventually it did, and then eventually it ended. I was disconnected. I was asked if I could correlate the pattern between the fauna and the zaps. Was I only zapped when the fish were multicolored? I was told after that there had been no pattern at all, no meaning to be culled in any of that pain. It was a study being conducted to explore the effects of post-traumatic stress on the body, she told me in simple words, and the information felt like a kind of mockery. I didn’t want any of the pain anymore: not the zaps, not the feeling in my chest, but it felt like the lever to dial down the intensity was beyond my control, always in my line of sight but just out of reach, under the charge of some cruel operator.

After weeks of no communication, when K. asked me to source him an entire strip of LSD out of the blue, I got to work immediately, feeling both grateful for the opportunity and giddy at the prospect of reunion. I spent the $115 I had made from being shocked on the acid. The cash felt holy in my pocket as I picked up the drugs, sacred, like it had been printed for the exact purpose of bringing me back to K. When I got Upstate, K. hid the acid under a frostbitten trout in the freezer of his family home, and though I parted the next day with the precise instruction to set aside two tabs—one for me and one for him, to use together—in about a week’s time he had done all ten tabs with his friend’s little brother, a neighborhood kid commonly referred to by his sobriquet, “Manic Nick.” This would be our death knell.

 We would see each other a few more times that summer, and then not at all. The days passed, even when I didn’t want them to. I moved apartments once, and then again. I clung onto my friendships, tried to forget, lived in fear of the nights when I might wake up soaked in my sheets from dreaming—that realm in which I could not control when he came to me, or how he did, when my sadness held me like some hostile womb. Then I had had enough of it all, all that sadness, and decided that an iron will and positive outlook might make it all recede. I wrote at the time: I do not regret. But after a while the words got stale; there came a point when even I didn’t believe them. Wishful thinking had just become the flip-side of a coin called despair. I didn’t want to feel the latter, so I chose the former, but had anything really changed in me? Was there any meaning to be made from this pain—and could the story I told myself hold a happy ending without compromising its integrity, without causing the whole thing to collapse in on itself?

Was it possible to ever fully forget? I doubted, both then and now, that it was possible, that it was even what I wanted. And then one day I woke to find that when I thought about him—about myself when I was his—it was with the distance of a stranger: just two people I knew some time ago. Two people who fell together, fell apart, found that life continued to lurch forward despite the distance, despite the absence, despite the years. I tightened my line of questioning, grew more curious and more specific. Was it possible to find a way to live alongside my memory without being weighed down by it, to walk alongside it like two tracks running parallel, moving forward in the same direction but never intersecting? Probably yes, I was beginning to feel.

Until one day he called me. Six or seven times unanswered. It was night. He was in the city. He had not slept in days. He wanted to see me, he texted. I was outside, the wind whipped my face. It was winter again. I watched as the traffic lights cycled through their colors, listened as the cars whooshed past. I leaned against a traffic post in front of a Chopt salad, deciding whether or not to reveal to him where I lived, whether or not to answer his call again. The phone vibrated in my palm. Did I really want to jump back into the mouth of that volcano—that roiling red magma of our history?

I turned the phone off. I ascended the carpeted stairs of home like a plume of white smoke rising up and out of some blistering crater, not ash erupting into atmosphere and scattering but something steadier than that, something cogent and whole and protected, a kind of signal articulated, held firmly in the air by my own solitude. Inside I shed my clothes. Felt that sliding into my empty bed was like falling back into the self; like sinking into some old, favorite chair—and finding it a good place to rest for a while.