Max could cut a line and rail it with something approaching finesse. He was careful, almost professional about it; with graceful stroke of credit card or razor he could spread an entire gram into a row of perfectly formed lines in seconds flat. Lisa left the handling to him. She would clip up little portions of drinking straws, or roll up crisp, new dollar bills while he cut lines for the two of them. He refused to cut them on anything but glass. No CD cases, no cleared desks. No metallic surfaces. By the end of some of their wilder nights, every mirror in their apartment was laid out horizontally on its back.
“I hate waste,” he’d tell people when they inevitably criticized him for his anal retentiveness. “You recycle, don’t you? Check the faucet when the water leaks? Turn the AC off when you leave the house in the summer time? Same concept: conservation.”
When she was eight Lisa moved with her parents from their big house in rural Georgia to an apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Her father was offered a promotion, but had to relocate in order to accept. Her mother told her all about California with great enthusiasm, the beaches and the sunshine, the big exciting cities with shopping and restaurants. In fact, her mother was the most excited out of the three of them. At first, Lisa was excited too, although she was sad to leave her friends, nervous, and still a little confused over the whole ordeal in general. What was wrong with their current house, and didn’t her father like his old job, anyway? Still, her parents assured her that she would enjoy the move, and they were both so excited that she let most of her concerns go unaddressed.
In Georgia, Lisa’s room had been in the top floor of their house. Her bed sat just beneath a large skylight. It was her favorite part of the house. Lisa had loved to study the starry sky on clear nights as she fell asleep. On cloudy or rainy nights, she’d have a terrible time sleeping, tossing and turning, nodding off only to snap back to consciousness after only a few moments, her eyes lost in the darkness surrounding her, until the clouds would blow over, the sky would clear and by moonlight or starlight her bedroom would slowly appear all around her, lit as if by magic, a world of familiar and comfortable forms painted in the dim bluish shades of the evening. She could simply not sleep in a room without knowing that the stars were hanging above her. So when they moved and Lisa complained about missing the stars, her mother stuck little glow in the dark star stickers to Lisa’s bedroom ceiling. But it was never the same. For months she suffered insomnia, the unnatural green glow of the stickers unsettling her whenever she would begin to doze, invading her dreams and populating them with strange creatures and green-tinted rooms, empty and foreboding, until finally she took a ladder from the storage closet of their apartment and tore the stars from the ceiling, dropping them to the floor one by one, herself. From then on, she began to detest the idea of going to bed, and could never sleep if any light shone into her room at all.
Which is perhaps the reason why she became so fond of cocaine the first time she was introduced to it at a party her first year at UCLA. The first time she bought her own eight-ball of cocaine she was up for two days straight, railing lines between classes or in darkened lecture halls, until she ran out and came down hard on a cloudy Wednesday morning, falling into the deepest sleep she could remember for the entire day and through most of the following night.
She met Max that year, and their shared addiction wasn’t the only reason they hit it off so quickly. She’d thought he was beautiful the moment she saw him: tall, lean, with dark hair and bright blue eyes. Unusually articulate, he found his way into her bed quicker than any of the boys she’d courted in high school, and once in he never left, but rarely slept. They spent hours in bed, getting up periodically to cut lines on the mirror laid out over her bedroom desk until the sun peaked through her blinds. The two were inseparable, taking the same classes whenever they could, eating out, partying with the same group of friends, sleeping infrequently, mostly when they couldn’t get hold of their dealers and had to make it through a few days on caffeine, Adderal and will power alone.
Despite their habit Max never let their grades slip. The oldest son in a family of business executives and tax litigation lawyers, he was raised to follow only one imperative: excel.
“Do you ever feel guilty about this?” Lisa had asked him once, watching him carve out lines. “I mean, wouldn’t your parents be mad?”
“Nope,” he’d replied. “Not as long as I don’t get caught. My parents won’t care as long as I’m clean on paper. And I am. We both are.” He looked up at her with a grin. “Baby, we’re absolutely beautiful on paper.”
Which was true. Max’s worst grade, a B+ on a midterm paper in Philosophy 1 their second semester, weighed on him so heavily that he dedicated an entire week to preparing the next assignment, sitting at his desk every hour he wasn’t in class, writing draft after draft and doing extra research on criticisms of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He wrote five extra pages and turned in a three-page long works cited list for a ten-page assignment. Lisa stayed up with him the entire time, studying French and cooking brownies, almost entirely for the smell (the coke killed her appetite), long into the night. They finished four grams that week between the two of them, and Max got an A+ in his class. They slept the entire weekend away, burying themselves deep in each other’s arms and surrendering to their mutual exhaustion.
By their second year they were renting a place together, paid for partially by their parents, partially by the cocaine he’d begun selling to his frat brothers. On their first day in their new apartment, Lisa took out a two-hundred-dollar cash advance on her student credit card to buy an eight-ball and beer for the night. They invited all their best friends over. The lot of them got superbly coked up, and within three hours they’d unpacked and organized the entirety of the apartment.
Mark, a friend of Max’s from one of their business classes, and a first-time user, looked around the house, hands planted on his hips in approval. “They should market this stuff to businesses. Talk about productivity.”
Max laughed, picking up one of his mirrors and inaugurating their coffee table with it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Max announced, pouring a gram out over the glass before spreading his arms, “The Glass Pad is officially open for business.”
The Glass Pad became the official name of their apartment, like a little nightclub, and it became famous, or perhaps more appropriately, infamous, amongst their friends. On weekends it was the designated gathering place, and they’d meet at The Pad before going out to frat parties or clubs, and once those closed down, they’d bring their small group home, dragging the night out as long as they could, usually until the morning began to creep gingerly through their living room window. Lisa hated to end the night. Often, she’d stay up long after most of her friends had left, cutting lines herself once Max inevitably fell asleep, usually just after daybreak. He’d pass out in her lap, and she’d stroke his hair and lean over him to reach the mirror until the last of their group left.
It was not until the middle of that spring’s semester that their lifestyle really began to weigh on Max. As word spread, people had begun bugging him constantly to buy his product, and often enough he’d run out and have to deal with turning people away, keeping only enough to get Lisa and himself through the next week before he could replenish his stocks. One day, he came home particularly unsettled with a story which Lisa nevertheless had to find hilarious. That morning, one of his fraternity brothers had decided it would be fun to get wasted and spun before an economics lecture they shared, and upon sighting Max in their lecture hall had broken out into a particularly damning rendition of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man, slinging a heavy arm around Max’s shoulders and crying out: “Hey there Mr. cocaine dealer, sell a gram to me. I’m fiending and I’m sick of innuendo!”
“You have to admit,” Lisa squeaked between giggles, “It’s rather clever.”
Max grumbled. “I’m just lucky that Professor Green is always late to that lecture.”
“Oh, whatever. He’d have just ignored it.”
“And what if not? What if he called security and they asked to check my bag? I had four grams with me today.”
“Tell them it’s for your term paper: The Real Cost Curve of Non-Taxable Regulated Markets, or something like that”
“I’m serious about this. It’s getting dangerous out there. They raided a couple of the frats down in San Diego just a few months ago and arrested a lot of people. I think I need to cool it for a bit.”
“You’re just being paranoid.”
“Maybe, but paranoid isn’t necessarily wrong. I just want to be cautious. I’m gonna quit selling for minute. In fact, I think we should maybe both think of taking a break, cleaning up a little. Maybe focus on school for the rest of the semester. What do you think?”
“I think you’re over-reacting. We’re doing fine in school, why do we need to clean up? Besides, you and I both know we can quit whenever, but we’re just going to end up dead tired. Plus, I’ll gain all kinds of weight. Once you calm down, you’ll change your mind.”
“No, I’m serious this time. I think it’s about time we began thinking about this for real. We had a lot of fun, but we can’t really keep this up forever.”
“Well, how are we going to keep paying for the apartment if you quit dealing?”
“You let me handle that. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
Lisa agreed, convinced that within a few days Max would have given up on this idea of his and things would be back to normal. But by the next week Max had found a paid internship working part-time for a finance magazine one of his uncles freelanced for, and pretty soon Lisa found herself alone through most of her days, sitting in their apartment watching television and reading the novels that had been assigned in her Comparative Literature course last semester but that she had never actually finished long into the nights, constantly tired but completely insomniac, watching the red glowing light of the alarm clock next to their bed flash from minute to minute while Max slept quietly and with enviable peace beside her. Most nights she had to fight with herself, jealous that he should find it so easy to rest in his choice of their new life while she had to suffer so much loneliness and boredom against her will, with him lying unconscious right beside her, only an arm’s length away.
She began spending upwards of twenty dollars a day on coffee during her school days, and whenever she was home her instant coffee maker was running as well. She began getting up late at night and making herself snacks from sheer boredom, curling up on the couch and watching The Late Late Show until she finally passed out, most nights around four or five in the morning, falling into a restless and fitful doze until Max woke her up around nine so that she’d make it to her first class. Most mornings he’d have a thermal of coffee prepared for her, and would stroke her hair while she sipped it sleepily, before hurrying out the door, either to his internship or to class.
Lisa’s grades began to slip as well, but she couldn’t bear to tell Max. She began hiding her returned essays and tests from him, ripping them up before she even left her classrooms. The subterfuge, the constant assurance to Max that everything was fine made her feel more and more distant, more detached from him by the day. She missed their former life, when they’d chatter about everything or nothing at all late into the aging night, desperately and valiantly attempting to stave off the coming of the next day. She grew lonelier and more exhausted, and she began gaining weight. Max assured her otherwise, that she looked the same, but she trusted the scale above his perceptions.
Finally, she gave in to herself; she crept out one night after Max had fallen asleep, taking her cell phone with her, and once she’d made it out the front door she made a phone call to Benny. Benny was Lisa’s dealer when she’d first started college, back even before she’d met Max, and the two hadn’t really spoken since their freshman year. When Max started dealing, Benny had accused him of moving in on his territory, and Lisa, caught between the squabble, had sided with Max. What else was she to do? She had been in love.
She met with Benny at his old apartment just off the strip, plucking herself down on his cluttered couch, between a pile of High Times issues and a laundry basket brimming with unfolded clothes.
“Sorry, I didn’t expect company,” Benny apologized sheepishly from his dresser as he rummaged around for a card to cut the coke he’d poured on his coffee table. Lisa was a bit annoyed that he hadn’t used a mirror, the way Max would have, but she didn’t say anything. “Normally the place is a lot cleaner than this, but my roommate has been outta town so I’ve been getting messy.”
“It’s okay. I mean, a bit of a mess is a little relieving, sometimes.” Lisa thought about how pristine the apartment she shared with Max always was, and realized that she was serious; it was hard work keeping up an apartment while you were in school. Especially when you’re always groggy.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” replied Benny, grinning triumphantly as he pulled a little razor and electronic weighing machine out from the drawer. “Well, I’ll cut you that gram. Do you want a little bump while I measure it out?”
“Oh, definitely. Thanks.”
Lisa watched Benny spread a line out for her before he went to work calibrating the measuring machine and weighing out her cocaine. Lisa inspected the line while she rolled up a dollar bill from her purse, noticing how the edges were a bit messy, how some of the coke got caught in the textured wood of Benny’s coffee table. Benny did not cut lines as clean as Max. In fact, he didn’t do anything like Max. He was messy, scattered, a bit absent minded. She felt proud of how clean and perfect her life with Max was, but at the same time she yearned a bit for this kind of innocent clutter, just a bit of mess to liven up her life. Besides, it was a little endearing; Benny had always been more approachable than Max. Back when they had all hung out, Benny had been one of Lisa’s first friends; a lot of people knew Benny, and liked him. Max, on the other hand, was a little more intimidating, a bit less open and welcoming. Lisa remembered some of her friends complaining how they felt as if Max was judging them, weighing them against himself.
“Thanks for doing this, Benny. I’m glad you’re not mad at me, I mean, after the Max thing and all.”
“Hey, it’s cool. That was a long time ago, I don’t even think about it anymore. Really, I hardly sell at all anymore. And besides, Max is your boyfriend. Wait, he’s still your boyfriend, right?” Benny shot an eye up at her.
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Darn.” Benny shot her a little playful grin, to show that he was just kidding, or maybe just half kidding, but definitely not making a serious pass at her in any matter. He used his razor to scoop and then wipe Lisa’s gram into a little pouch before handing it over to her.
“How much?” Lisa asked.
Benny shrugged. “Going rate’s forty-five, but whatever you have is fine. I got a good deal on this stuff.”
Lisa rummaged through her purse and pulled out two twenties and five-dollar bills and gave them to Benny. “Thanks again,” she said.
“Have another bump with me?”
Lisa checked her watch. “Sure, I guess that’s okay.”
Benny cut another few lines and they continued talking, catching up on each other’s lives. Lisa was surprised how much had seemed to happen in Benny’s life, compared to her own. Other than moving in with Max and their decision to quit cocaine little seemed to have happened to her. Benny, on the other hand, told her stories about new friends he’d made running around town, going to clubs and raves and little parties held in stuffy apartments. He’d travelled over the summer, backpacking through South America with a friend. He’d begun taking trips up to San Francisco occasionally to see a girl he liked who went to San Francisco State. “We’re still really close, but we don’t want to date long-distance. It’s kinda nice, because each time we meet it’s like falling for each other all over again. It’s hard to leave sometimes, though.”
“That’s kinda sweet, Benny.”
“Well, your boy’s not the only guy who can charm a pretty girl every once and awhile. Or be charmed in return, I suppose.”
Lisa shrugged. “Guess not,” she checked her watch, and was surprised at the time. It was past 3 am. “Oh wow, it’s late, I need to run.”
“Sure,” Benny walked her to the door and hugged her goodbye. “Come back any time. I miss talking to ya, Lisa.”
“I will, Benny,” she said before hurrying out the door.
When she got home, she was careful to slip the key into the deadbolt lock and turn the knob quietly so as not to wake Max. But when she opened the door, she found him sitting up on the couch, waiting for her. She stood in the door for a moment, studying him as he looked up at her, before stepping into the apartment and closing the door behind her.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Out. I was talking to Benny.”
“Benny, huh?” Max got up from the couch and walked up to Lisa. He inspected her eyes. She knew they’d be dilated.
“You’re coked up,” he said, flatly.
“I had a few lines,” she walked past him over to the couch, where she plopped down and began fiddling with stuff in her purse.
“Geez, you’re downright spun. I thought we weren’t doing this anymore, Lisa.”
“No, you’re not doing this anymore. I’m sick and tired of feeling so sick and tired all the time. I can concentrate when I’m like this, I can stay awake and aware. I don’t doze off in class or feel sleepy all day. I need some energy, Max.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have to rely on cocaine for energy, Lisa. I do fine without it. Hell, I feel better than ever.”
“Well, we’re not all as goddamn perfect as you are, Max.”
Max sighed. “You’re just high. We can talk about this in the morning, I guess. I’m just happy you’re okay. I was worried when I woke up and found out you weren’t here.”
“How long have you been up?”
“Just a few minutes, I was about to call your cell when you walked through the door.”
“Huh. Well, you’d better get to sleep, you have work and school in the morning.”
“So do you, Lisa.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Of course not.”
Lisa gave him what she thought was a dirty gaze, but Max just rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said, before retreating to the bedroom and shutting the door. Lisa watched the bottom edge of the door until his light flicked off. She turned on the TV for awhile, but was too coked up to pay attention, and soon she found herself pacing the room restlessly. She pulled out her bag, tipped a little make-up mirror from their bathroom onto its back and cut herself a line. She snorted it impatiently, tipping her head back and letting the metallic flavor of the drip roll down the back of her throat, and then grabbed her coat and took off out the door for a walk.
Outside, an early morning mist had begun to roll through the streets, and the light from the streetlamps dazzled her momentarily, spilling out through the air, refracting in a million directions, lighting the world with hazy golden streams of light. The mist was beautiful, but it felt cold against Lisa’s skin, so she decided to walk uphill, hoping to find higher ground above the mist. She walked up the street for several minutes before she got to the edge of campus. She walked up a large hill close to the building where her chemistry lab met, and after a time she broke through the mist into the cool, dry air of the night. She kept walking uphill until she got to the building. She was surprised to find that the doors were unlocked, and she crept through the halls of the empty building until she found the restrooms. She looked back and forth between the men’s bathroom and women’s bathroom for a time. She thought about going into the men’s restroom, thinking that it might be a novelty to rest her little make-up mirror on one of the urinals to rail a line. Then she shook herself and decided that was silly; she was no little girl to get all worked up about running around in the boy’s bathroom. She entered the woman’s restroom and reached into her purse for her supplies. They weren’t there. Lisa froze. She’d left her gram sitting in the bathroom at her apartment, along with her little mirror. She’d forgotten them completely.
“Shit,” she cursed under her breath, before realizing she was alone. “Damn it,” she said louder. She was getting tired, and she realized that she was not going to make it back to the apartment before she came down. “Well,” she said aloud to herself, momentarily grateful for her solitude, “I might as well find someplace pleasant to come down.”
She exited the bathroom and found an elevator. She pressed the little up button and was concerned for a moment that the elevators weren’t running this late. But then she heard the elevator’s chime and she watched her reflection split in the shiny glass of the aluminum doors as they parted. She entered and pressed the button for the top floor of the building, watching the doors close back in on themselves. For a moment she imagined getting trapped in the elevator during her come down, how terrible and claustrophobic it would feel. She imagined herself curled up on the floor, balled up and shivering as her body began to metabolize the last of the cocaine, breaking into a cold sweat. Her body began to ache at the thought. She wasn’t that high, was she? She hadn’t had a come down that bad for some time, but then again, it’d been a while since she and Max had quit. Max. What was she going to do about Max? Would he let her keep using, or would he get angry with her? She realized that he’d been relatively calm tonight, that he could have gotten much more worked up. But in the morning, he would expect her to apologize, to assure him that she’d keep clean after this, or at least try. But she didn’t want to try. She wanted her old life back. But she wanted Max, too.
The elevator chimed again and she realized that she’d made it to the top floor after all. The doors opened up and she exited, and began looking around for a stairwell. She found one at the far eastern end of the hallway, and climbed it. The door on top had a chain wrapped around it, but the large metallic lock attached to it had been broken long ago. She realized suddenly that Benny had done it, that she’d come here long ago when she and Max had first met, and that the three of them along with a few other friends had climbed the stairs of this building, where Benny had broken the lock with a pair of clamps and they’d sat up on the roof for an entire night, legs hanging off the edge of the building, admiring the neon city lights from far above the city. She’d completely lost that memory in the host of similar ones, and she thought back on it with nostalgia as she unhooked the lock, pulled the chain off and pushed upon the door.
Outside, Lisa walked to the edge of the building and looked out upon the city. Below her, the nighttime mist continued to roll in, thick, like an eerie tide swallow the tops of some of the smaller buildings. Before her, the sky was partially overcast, clouds rolling in from the south, but directly above it was a still, solid black. Lisa could feel her pulse begin to slow, her breathing becomes more labored, and her muscles began to ache with fatigue. She was no longer high, she was just exhausted. She sat down on the ledge of the building, watching the strange shape made by the juxtaposition of the mist rising from below and the clouds rolling in from above, the very top of the pale neon skyline shining against the surfaces of each. After a time her hands began to shake and she leaned back and she began to break into a sweat, lying flat on her back and staring straight into the empty sky above her.
She pondered her life for a while, and then began to think about the next day, the one that always inevitably came, no matter the virulence with which she tried to ward it off, no matter how much blow she managed to do in a night. Time felt as imposing as the clouds rolling in above her. She closed her eyes, and for a time she imagined the mist below her was a deep ocean, and that she could throw herself into it, swim confidently through its dark waters or let herself sink peacefully to the bottom. She was so tired.
She opened her eyes. She lay there staring up into the concave night hanging above her, waiting with anticipation to fall out of consciousness and into a deep and easy sleep, considering in the meanwhile the strange contrast between the glowing clouds to the south and the bottomless pitch black well of the evening sky to the north, under stars to dim to see through the cold city lights.
By Lee A. Flamand