May 1985

There comes a moment when God stops everything and shines the Big Light on you. You’re presented with a problem that has no solution, and doing nothing isn’t possible. When that first happened to me in 1985, I learned the truth: the closer you get to God, the further you are from your humanity. I have yet to decide if that’s sarcasm, irony, or the wages of being holy. But none of it mattered at that moment. It was up to me to select the least shitty course of action, and I had to choose now.

“Don’t use the suicide spoon,” Tess said.

“The what?”

“The big one.”

This was the first time I’d ever looked inside her kit. In it lay two spoons. Both faux gold. The smaller of the two was slightly mangled and heavy with scorch marks. The other was basically untouched. A soup spoon? I wondered, because I ask myself stupid questions when I get nervous. Who the fuck cares?

I showed her the smaller one. “This?”

She nodded.

“You shouldn’t cook coated stuff … causes brain damage.”

“Har-dee-har-har, Sar-duh—I’m dying and you make jokes.” She lay on my sofa, used up, dopesick, but knowing she’d be getting well within seconds had perked her up.

“You’re not dying.”

But she was and had been ever since dope became the love of her life. Tess was an artist. Even though she sold a few paintings, the money they brought didn’t legitimize her. You have to be born an artist. Whether it’s a gift or a defect is a matter of perspective. Some called her a genius, but they didn’t have to clean up after her. The clichés are true. Genius does consort with madness, and it also creates a single-minded ruthlessness that gives genius a license to shit on people, especially those closest to them. Regardless, Tess was mine and always would be.

It all began and ended with what Tess called the dreampurple light. The anxious expression on a welfare mother’s face waiting for the mail to come on the first was dreampurple. The old drunk she saw burst into tears at the little store because old Graydon had caught him boosting a bottle of wine was hell dreampurple; giving the fellow her lunch money, oddly, wasn’t. There was no set rule for the condition except nothing in the natural world, no matter how stunning or powerful, could ever be dreampurple. Tess was born with a dreampurple mind, but it began to fade in her late teens. That’s when she discovered the pills that led her to heroin. She swore that it gave her back the thing she loved and needed most.

It’s not my object to present a DIY on fixing. Let’s say it involves powder melted in a (in this case a smaller) spoon by using a (in this case a red cricket) lighter, then carefully drawing the stuff into a hypodermic needle without air bubbles. Everyone said the bubbles go to your heart and kill you. No one knew anyone that had happened to, but junkies are like anyone else when it comes to needing stupid shit to believe in.

I hesitated … it was my big moment, and I felt God’s Hot Light on the back of my neck.

“C’mon big sister, be a nice guy. Slide it in easy-like.”

“Say that again, and you’ll be picking up teeth,” I whispered as I shot her up. The effects were immediate, like what Oswald did to Kennedy’s head. Tess was a different breed of junkie. Smack usually turns the user into a useless drooling mess. Although that would happen to her later in the day, she was someone who became very happy, funny, witty, and alive when she was high. Both pupils enlarged like Bowie’s weird one. Tess was on top of the world, but I’d never felt lower: I just fixed my little sister, has it really come to this?

“That good? Not gonna die on me?”

“Nope.”

Tess couldn’t do it herself. She had a strange complex about not being able to shoot herself up after she’d been dry for a few days. But just the first one, she’d be fine after that. Some sort of mental hangup. Usually one of her tenth-rate boyfriends did it for her (all of whom she called “Earl”), but the last Earl had damned near killed her. I made her promise me in the hospital to come see me for that first dry hit in the future. She knew I wasn’t fucking with her, and I knew that she would turn up sooner than later.

“You mean it? No rehab? No speech? Just bring it and you’ll do it?”

I rose, went to the window, and peeked between the drawn drapes. Junkers do not like bright light. The world was going on in the 1985 fashion. It was the year of the power ballad and mall rats. A pastel, dayglo season that smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes and cinnamon. There was something hopeful about the mid-eighties that I could never lay a finger on. It was more than Michael Jackson moonwalking or power tie money, or the vast amount of teen girls imitating Madonna, painted lips as red as a chimpanzee’s vagina. There was a certain optimism that didn’t last. Alas, sometimes forever comes in 1989. Yet I was a bystander of that world. Even though I was only twenty-six, the era had already passed me by. I had but one purpose, I served the Saint of the Unknown Martyr. Anyway, I figured a world like that would keep moving along without my input, and that God would do the same after watching my big moment come and go. He has yet to tell me if I’m wiser; some things a person cannot judge herself.

“What’s the big spoon about?”

Tess seldom lied to me in the technical sense, but she had the irritating habit of releasing information a bit at a time, usually when it was too late to do anything about it. I really didn’t want to know, but since I’d taken responsibility for her, it was my duty to know as much as I could. She was a tremendous bundle of contradictions that somehow added up to the truth. That’s art, I guess.

“It’s my marilyn-monroeverdose,” as though that explained everything.

“Say that in dumb fucker.”

“Only if you tell me why you kept your promise.”

“Because I’m a dumb fucker,” I said.

“What a coincidence! That’s my reason too. Got anything to eat?”

Junkers crave sweets. You get used to watching them dump ten packets of sugar into a cup of hot chocolate. It usually brings them to dentures. By 1985, I’d been dealing with Tess’s habit for eight years. When she was on the nod, I avoided being in public with her. She’d be up and even charismatic, then all of the sudden, without warning, the smack in her system dropped into low gear, and the result was a half-awake blob of protoplasm. It was the same as hauling a drunk around. At least dope doesn’t stink.

I kept her limited food groups stocked in my apartment. Vanilla ice cream, Hershey’s syrup, Mountain Dew soda, Pop Tarts, and “Chocolo’s,” which was a fudge Twinkie-like thing that was only on the market for a couple of years; I figure it got the hook after spreading all the diabetes the FDA would allow from one item.

“How come I never see you eat anymore?” she asked.

I was like Mom and could survive on cigarettes and black coffee for days on end. Tess was the only non-smoking junker I knew. She considered the habit disgusting and even “bad for you;” I’ll let the irony lie where it is.

Do you know what you’re doing to me? was the big question I never asked Tess. The answer was sprinkled like ashes on our lives. Mom asked her that plenty. Her answers were the usual “defensive wound” sort of slogans that sound right, but actually deflect the guilt back to you.

Sometime between her two bowls of ice cream and syrup, she asked why I had fixed her.

“The same reason why you disappear into the bathroom with your kit, like I don’t see,” I said. “Some shit must happen—like there’s a law.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cunt, you know?”

“I am what I am,” I said. “Hey! Do you know how many times I’ve dragged you to rehab?”

Tess scrunched her face sarcastically, as though seriously pondering the question. It was a gesture from childhood that coasted on nostalgia, for without that I would have wanted to beat it out of her face.

“Dunno, six?”

I made a sound like the buzzer on game shows when the answer’s wrong. “Seventeen, not including jail. On average, every six months. I have finally got the picture. Everyone wants you off the shit but you.”

“The big spoon’s my ticket out,” she said mainly because she was quick to change that subject. “I figure a big-ass shot from it should do the job, should it need doing.”

And you wonder why I’m a cunt, I thought, putting out one smoke then lighting another. But what she said released an old memory from the dungeon. “Like what Mom did for Nora?”

Upon mention of Nora, the buffer of the smart-assed, unrepentant junker, which she habitually placed between us, vaporized. All her stories and aversions and justifications puffed off like summer fog after the sun leans into it. I liked seeing that, almost as satisfying as giving her a sharp slap in the face.