Yippee! Sunny gave me a whole gram of cocaine for my birthday! Well, it’s a bit different from regular cocaine, which we’ve already tried together a couple times within the last month. That feels a lot like speed, but more numbing, and it makes me stay up all night long. Whenever I snort a few lines, I run around like a chicken with its head cut off, except I’m more of a know-it-all. I’ve come up with several theories about the nature of the Universe — none of which involves a God, by the way, cuz I don’t even know if I believe in you anymore, you’re just another one of the voices inside my head.
Sunny just laughs at me and calls me crazy. She likes coke because it makes her want to have sex for ages and ages. I had to make her stop last time because she was rubbing me raw. Then she got all sulky and sat on the edge of the bed for hours in a stony silence while I tried – and failed – to get some sleep. In the morning, she seemed better and we didn’t talk about it. She never likes to talk about emotional stuff. If we argue or fight, she just brushes it off later.
Anyway, this new stuff is called “free-base” cocaine, whatever that means. It’s a hard little rock that you smoke instead of snorting the powder. But it’s made from the same thing as coke. Sunny got it from this guy she works with at GasCan, he’s the supervisor. She ended up confiding in him about how we’d done coke together and he said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” Then gave her a hit of it, which she said was the best thing she’d ever felt in her life.
“Except me?” I whined.
“Well, except you,” she agreed, looking fondly at me.
For my birthday, she takes me out to dinner at Carpaccio’s after giving me the gram, which sits in my pocket wrapped up in tin foil with a tiny ribbon around it. We eat rare steak and drink red wine, even though I’m not of age. She’s already nineteen; she orders a carafe and two glasses, and the waiter asks no questions.
“Better stuff yourself good. You won’t be able to eat much for a while after we smoke it,” she explains, cutting her steak. She’s excited, eating quickly.
“Why not?” I ask with my mouth full. I like the way they lined up the roasted vegetables at the edge of my plate, drizzled with a fancy garlic sauce. It’s yummy, and expensive. Sunny has gone all out for me tonight.
“You won’t want anything else afterward,” she warns. “You’ll only want more of it. I thought I would die of craving. But it went away by the next morning. And it’s worth it.”
“Mmmm,” I say, sipping my wine. “I will always want you, Sunny.”
Then she takes me to a small motel, which is not as fancy as the restaurant. This whole evening is costing her a lot, though, so I understand. There are two double beds with colourful itchy bedspreads and abstract paintings of faces on the wall behind them.
“Reminds me of Thelma and Louise,” I laugh, looking around the room. Sunny gives me a blank look and then I realize that was me and Myname’s joke. I haven’t talked to Myname since I was visiting Mom at Christmas; I wonder what she would think if she knew I’ve done coke.
Right away, Sunny opens her shoulder bag and pulls out an empty 7-Up can. Then she sits down on the bed and starts working away at the can. She dents the bottom of the can with her thumb, pulls out a pin and pokes a bunch of holes in the indentation she has made.
“Bottoms-up,” she says. She is not looking at me, but at my pocket.
“What?” I say dumbly.
She points to my pocket. “You’ve got the stuff.” Still not looking at me.
“Oh!” I giggle, and pull it out. “But first a birthday make-out session!”
I jump on her and push her down on the bed, kiss her. But her mouth responds only a little. Her two hands come up and around me briefly, she gives me a little kiss, and pushes me gently off her body. I pout.
“Let’s smoke the rock,” she says.
I hand her the tin foil and she takes a little rock, puts it on the pop can where the holes are. She lights it and it sizzles. It smells very sweet. She hauls on it for what seems like a full thirty seconds, then finally hands it to me and falls back on the bed. I look down at her, holding this can pipe in my hand. The rock is reduced in size, looking a little melted. I re-light it, put the mouth hole of the can to my face, and inhale.
OH MY GOD . . . My breath keeps sucking inward on a cotton-candy cloud of sweetness that seems like it will never end. I’ve never tasted or felt anything so delicious in my whole life. I mean, I could say that all my bad memories and negative experiences fall away, but I don’t even know what “bad” or “negative” even means at this point; those words have no meaning, nothing has any meaning at all – there is only good and sweet and comfort and pleasure and sweet and endless breath.
This lasts for a total of three minutes and then starts ebbing away. Sunny’s hit has lapsed already and she is grabbing for the can, which slips from my hand. In silence I watch her suck hard, barely aware of who she is. A raw craving hits me in the throat and I need another hit, now. I need it. I reach out and pull the can away from Sunny’s face, suck from it again.
“You’re getting more than me!” she snaps.
But the rock has vanished to nothing but a light brown smear of goo. I’m sucking away and getting nothing but a vague memory of the first hit.
“No I’m not, you are,” I say.
She grabs it from me. “You took it all.” Opening up the tin foil, she puts another small rock on the can and lights it up. She turns herself away from me, merciless, making me wait my turn. I light the remains of the rock and suck hard, falling into bliss for another few minutes.
This goes on, turn by turn, grab by grab, hit by hit, until we look into the tin foil and find nothing but a crumb. Then there’s no crumb, even. Then we’re on our hands and knees on the floor, picking through the carpet. Every piece of lint appears to be a rock, every speck is a possible hit.
“There’s one, there’s one, there’s one,” Sunny keeps muttering through gritted teeth. It’s like I’m invisible.
I am invisible to myself, as well. My skin and face are numb, my hands are shaking, my breath comes in fast, shallow gasps. After what seems like forever, I pull Sunny away from the floor. “Stop it, stop,” I grunt, “There’s none left.”
“There must be, there must be. You took it. Did you take some and hide it? We have to get some more.”
“There’s no more, Sunny. Stop.”
She tackles me on the bedspread and pushes my legs open, starts licking me and goes on licking me till four in the morning. But I can’t come; I never do. I am totally numb. She seems vacantly annoyed when she finally comes up for air, her face distant and almost unrecognizable to me. Giving me a fatal look as if I’m broken, she turns over and falls asleep. After sobbing for awhile in my loneliness, I fall asleep too.
When dawn comes, I wake first. Her eyes are still closed and she still looks like a stranger to me. I feel as empty as the burnt out can on the floor. Suddenly, I know that I have done something terribly, terribly wrong – something I won’t ever come back from in my life. It’s like you’re gone from me, but worse, it’s like you never existed. Everything I ever believed was just plain fake. All of it.
Spring is sprung. The world is all slush and drizzle, and I feel depressed. I finally told Sunny I’m not smoking that stuff anymore, so she’s not hanging out with me as much now. We’re still together, but on weekends I am working at Frydom to pay my bills and doing homework to keep my average above eighty-five percent. She goes downtown and scores some rock and spends the night driving around smoking it. Sometimes she even shows up on my doorstep very late at night, which Gretchen Hanover hates. She expressly requested that I don’t have friends knocking at the door all hours of the night, but Sunny doesn’t respect this. She doesn’t respect anything or anyone when she’s on that stuff.
It makes a person mean. Really mean. The second (and last) time I did it with her, we had to go downtown to get it from her friend in Toronto because her supervisor at GasCan had gotten fired the week before. Sunny was desperate. She didn’t even talk to me the whole time we drove into the city.
“Why don’t we just stay home and smoke a J?” I pleaded. “Let’s just snuggle up and watch a movie and get baked.”
“Boring.”
“It’s not boring, it’s nice. You’re nice. I miss my Sunny.” I took her hand. “I haven’t seen you since Tuesday after school, and now it’s the weekend and I have to work tomorrow morning. I just want to spend time together.”
“Well, it’s not my fault you left home and decided to rent your own place.” She was wearing her glasses, which she’d put on to impress me before we got into the car. Her profile was so sexy, I loved her mouth and her hands on the steering wheel. But she was impenetrable and wouldn’t even look at me.
“It’s my weekend, too,” she said, “And this is how I want to spend my time. You don’t have to come with me.”
“But I want to be with you.”
“Well, shut up and come along, then.”
Not long after, we arrived at Yonge and Bloor, where her college friend was standing on a corner. She handed Sunny a twisted piece of dirty cellophane wrap. Nearby, I noticed a handful of homeless people strewn around the sidewalk like random pieces of trash and just as crumpled up and dirty. Two of them were on their hands and knees, combing through whatever was in the gutter, picking up tiny pieces of dirt and examining them between their grubby fingers. I nudged Sunny and pointed to the people.
“Don’t point,” she scolded. She was already heading down the street, pulling me by the hands. “They’re just dirty crackheads, Elle. Don’t worry about them.”
“But -”
“Let’s go!”
Lately I’d noticed Sunny becoming more and more belligerent towards me, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I tried to be as sweet as possible, to the point of saying nothing at all half the time. I gave her money for our weed and alcohol when we partied; that night, I’d even contributed half of the score for the rock, even though Sunny wanted it more than me. I just wanted her to be happy, but I thought she might be getting sick of me. And it made me want to die, I loved her so much.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Why are you so mad at me all the time, Sunny? I love you.”
She stopped, too, and faced me. I could see that she had to take a big breath in order not to get annoyed. “I love you, too, babe,” she said patiently. “Now can we go?”
We got in the car and drove to a park in the Don Valley. I’d heard about some woman getting raped and murdered there this summer and was scared.
“Don’t worry,” said Sunny in a terse voice. Everything she tried to offer as a comfort ended up sounding like an order.
We smoked the freebase cocaine, but this time it tasted less sweet and didn’t offer as much of a high, at least for me. The moment I finished inhaling, a deep sore craving filled me and I knew nothing was ever going to fulfil it. Not Sunny, not this drug, not you, not my mother.
I am Mawmouth, the gaping jaws that gulp down all the pain and loneliness in the world. My mouth does not breathe, it does not even vomit – in my need, I only devour.
I felt this emptiness eating its own emptiness till everything was inside out and I refused to take the pop can pipe from Sunny and she didn’t even ask what was wrong. She just kept sucking and sucking till her face turned a swollen unhealthy pink. Then she got down on all fours and, gritting her teeth, plucked lint and bits of dirt from the ground as if they were precious jewels.
We’re high on crack, I suddenly realized. We’re crackheads.
This understanding hit me from nowhere, although maybe it came from you, if you even exist. Suddenly I felt a strength in my heart, a warmth and power that counteracted the cold void of Mawmouth that I’ve become and always been. It surged through me like a storm as I stood up above Sunny who was still kneeling, scrabbling.
“I’m NOT gonna be a crackhead,” I said to her. “I’m not going that low. And if you want to, then you’re on your own.”
“Just one more,” she muttered, chewing on her cheeks, eyes glazed.
“Stop.”
“Just one more.”
I didn’t know this person. She wasn’t the sly, sweet, strong, sexy companion I met at that little stream some forevers ago. She wasn’t the best kisser in the world, or the best lover. She was not fun or nice.
Sunny was the devil.
The knowledge arrived like a full-speed train. I’d been taken in by none other than Satan, the master of disguises. They told me when I was a kid that he might appear as an Angel of Light, so I always thought he’d be wreathed in a big fat halo, lending a helping hand in a dire crisis when I was at my weakest. I did not realize he might show up at a teenage drunk-fest and awaken my deepest fires of lust. I didn’t know he’d be so beautiful and make me feel so good.
Sunny, my angel of light.
Well, I didn’t leave her there. I couldn’t. She would’ve been digging around in the gutters of Toronto until she got taken in by a gang and sold as a sex slave. I sat there, numb, worn out, existing in solitary pain, until she finally came to her senses and stood up. Then she looked at me for the first time in about three hours.
I said nothing.
“We can get some more,” were her first words.
“There is no we,” I answered, “Not if you’re being this way. Let’s go home.”
She got mad. She threw a tantrum, dumped her bag out on the ground and rifled around for money, demanded cash from me, wrenched on her curls with both hands. “I hate you!” she shouted at me again and again.
But eventually she got in the car and drove us home. I brought her to bed, washed her puffy face with a cold cloth, and wrapped my arms around her. I spooned her like that, her back against my tummy. Sunny was restless because she was still high and irritable, grunting, trying to move away from me. But I held her fast. Since I was fairly sober, and exhausted from worrying all evening long, I dropped off into a doze and dreamt I was spooning Myname and we were going to get an ice cream and eat it at the dock, but when we went there and sat down to dip our toes in, the lake was completely frozen. Myname jumped down and started skating away from me on her bare feet, sliding across the hard water in a summer dress, on a sunny day.
When I woke up, Sunny was gone.
I was angry, I’ll admit. But I didn’t care where she’d gone. I didn’t even phone anyone to find out. I just put on my Frydom t-shirt and matching visor, and walked to work. I ate French fries for breakfast and a stale hot dog for lunch. Afterward, I went home, worked on math, called Persephone who was busy, called Chloe who was busy, called Mrs J who was busy. I’d lost all my friends through simple neglect.
I’ve been doing this every weekend for awhile now, and there’s a strange pacifism to it. I’ve known this feeling of peace before, when I used to run to the Slimes and find you there in the trees, sky and water. And when as a child I laid down on the bed for a good long think. And then, in my school work throughout high school. Maybe I was just finding myself in all these things, and that is what I’m finding now. I am no longer angry with Sunny; I’m still in love with her, even. I’m in love with the strongest, best version of her.
Since I can remember, I’ve always thought that loving somebody means you must love the worst aspects of them. When my mother would lie in bed for days upon days in the dark, I thought I was supposed to love her then. When Charlie and I sat on top of each other, slapping and squeezing each other’s skin till we were breathless and ashamed, I thought all of that was part of loving him — I still thought I had to love him when he sleepwalked into my room with no pants on. I thought I had to love my sister Bonnie’s spiteful face and her mean sarcastic wisecracks. So, it was perfectly logical that no matter Sunny behaved, I had to love her too.
But that was before she became a crackhead and almost took my dignity with her. Since then, I’ve invited her over in the evenings and watched her fidget with restless longing beside me. I’ve made love with her, eaten meals together. Sometimes she even breaks into a peal of laughter that reminds me of the sweet joker I met nearly a year ago. I can’t join her on whatever nasty adventures she decides to go on, but I can love the little bits of goodness that come back every now and then.
The epiphany that night in Toronto led me to find a little place of the Slimes, a little piece of you, inside me. And it came in the form of something surprising – something I’ve always been told was wrong and bad. My connection with you visited me in the form of pride.
The Mennonites always preached that pride was sinful. “If you have too much pride in what you do and what you are, you’ll get a swollen head,” they warned. “Pray that you don’t succumb to pride.” Humility — forever humility — was the goal. Your biggest gain could only come from complete self-sacrifice, like Jesus giving up his life on the cross. Even my mother insulted me for being proud, and she linked that word with selfishness. I prayed so hard against having these in my heart. I prayed that you would give me a new heart, in fact, one wholly without pride and filled with selfless submission.
But now, I see that you didn’t give me a new heart. You let me keep my old one, where Girl #2 lives. She is proud of her abilities, her grades, her hard work, her sense of morals. She likes to do good and well. She saved me from Sunny’s downfall. In the end, my pride wouldn’t let me become a crack addict. I just wouldn’t go there. No matter how bad things got, I had to make at least an A-average and get on the Honour roll, simply because of pride. So I’m going to hang onto that from now on.
And by the way, I don’t care even really care whether you exist or not.
The fact is, I exist. I do.