Gallegos stopped, peered at him. “What just happened?” he asked.
I wondered for a second if you were my father, Mateo almost told him. That’s the thought that, unbidden, had floated into his head. But he didn’t tell Gallegos that. “I lost track of my thoughts,” he said instead.
For eighteen months, Gallegos helped Mateo focus on the future, so that by the time he graduated from high school, he was a bit of a star. He’d been able to quiet that bubbling resentment he’d felt toward Millimom and Jared-dad and live peaceably with them. That was the summer of ’09, after high-school graduation, when he knew he was bound for Pratt, when he parted ways amiably with Gallegos.
And that’s when that slow free fall into the drug H had begun — at Oscar’s party after the last day of school, then intermittently throughout that summer before college. Just when his life was more or less his for the making. He really didn’t understand it, how inevitable it felt that he’d go into that free fall. But he also didn’t want to understand it. It felt like a gift, a solution, beyond the need for understanding. It made him feel like he was finally where he’d wanted to be his whole life — very far away.
True, Hector had gotten him smoking the stuff — those long, infinitely serene sessions with Hector, the becalmed dog, the shadows of feet passing by the curtained window in the filthy basement apartment. And it was after the second or third smoking session with Hector that he started to feel truly dopesick for the first time, the onset of what felt like the flu from hell, a shaking, sweating fetal-position misery tinged with a panicked need to get more H to cut the sick. In one of those sick spells, not at Hector’s, who’d left town to spend the winter at some friend’s empty apartment in Palm Springs, but at a using friend of a using friend’s place in Jersey City, he’d let someone shoot him up for the first time — a fucking pimply New Jersey high-school kid named Eddie! — and in that moment, he relinquished that bit of mental dignity of the user who tells himself that he can control things, that there is a line he hasn’t crossed. I’m a slave to this, he thought, not with horror but relief. Now he could simply go there. When he closed his eyes now, needles, syringes, ties, and fat, willing veins danced in his head.
At noon on a Tuesday, returning dopesick to the Christodora, relieved to know that the Parentals were at work, he waited for the elevator in the empty lobby — Ardit had stepped away from the desk, where a game show murmured on his tiny portable TV. Before the elevator arrived, he heard a clambering down the stairs around the corner — footsteps, but also dog steps, the rattle of a dog leash.
“Shit!” It was the voice of Elysa, Millimom’s actress friend. In a moment, he heard her footsteps recede back up the stairwell. He peered around the corner to find Katsu, her new pit mix — Kenji, his childhood love, had died years before — double-tied to the stair railing, panting just aside Elysa’s wide-open pocketbook. Apparently she’d forgotten something and run back upstairs. He peered inside her bag, absently stroking the panting Katsu’s head for a moment, then plucked out Elysa’s wallet, extracted the wad of bills in the fold, dropped the wallet back in the bag, and ducked out of the Christodora just as the elevator doors were parting for him. Not until he was halfway across the park did he dare to thumb through the cash, which totaled $187. He’d intended to rummage around inside the apartment to pull together the bills and change for his next fix, but now he didn’t need to. In less than an hour, he was back in Jersey City, nodding — as was the pimply high-school kid and a few other randoms, all of it compliments of Mateo. He’d safely averted the worst of the dopesickness.
When he looked at his phone seven hours later, he saw a voice mail from Jared-dad: “Do you know you were caught on camera?” went the message, in an impossibly flat tone of disgust. “You need to get home right away and tell us what exactly is going on. We are assuming you have a drug problem and now basically the whole building knows, too. You are in deep shit, Mateo.”
There was also a text from Millimom: “Please please please come home.”
He didn’t come home until the next day, protected from dopesickness with the rest of the stash he’d bought, tucked between his shoe and his sock, terrified they’d find it and take it away from him. Ardit glanced up at him as he shuffled in and looked away, disgusted, shaking his head.
“You better get upstairs now,” Ardit said.
Upstairs, he found them sitting at the kitchen table — they’d stayed home from work waiting for him to come back. His jig was up. At least he didn’t have to sneak around them anymore. He stood there, staring at them, fighting the urge to scratch himself or hug himself against the oncoming achiness, and they stared at him with a hollow, resigned look. They were sad, he could see, because their best-laid plans were blowing up in their faces.
“Is it heroin, Mateo?” Jared-dad asked.
He nodded. Millimom started to cry.
“You,” Jared continued slowly, “have to go upstairs with us and apologize to Elysa, so she understands you have a drug addiction. Then you’re packing a bag and we’re getting on Metro-North with you and taking you to a rehab in Connecticut. We’ve already called. This is all part of the deal, and if you don’t like it, you can get your things right now and turn around and never set foot in this house again. We didn’t sign up for this.”
“Why’d you sign up at all?” Mateo was surprised to hear himself shoot back through his achy malaise.
Milly stood. “Mateo, sweetheart, please, just go along with us on this. You need help before it gets worse.”
He capitulated to her — not him, but her. He went to the rehab. But a few months after that, it got worse anyway, culminating with the infamous Sculpture Incident of October 2011, which had gotten him kicked out of the apartment for real. That’s when Drew stepped in and got him into that rehab in California, then to her place — and to the AA meeting that day with Carrie, track marks fading under his long-sleeved jersey. And the round-robin coming around to him. “I’m Mateo and I’m a addick.”
“Hi, Mateo,” everybody said, singsongy.
“I have seventy-nine days today,” he said. Everybody clapped and said things like “All right!”
“Uh—” What should he say? “I guess I’m grateful for my sobriety.” Then — he didn’t know why — he kind of laughed a little. Like he was laughing at what he just said. It did sound mighty clichéd. “Uh, I have a lot of cravings. A lot of fantasizing.”
Heads bobbed in accord around the room.
“And a lot of — like, about the future. I wanna go back to New York. I’m an artist. I wanna finish school. L.A. freaks me out.”
People laughed.
“It’s too fuckin’ warm, man, this is fuckin’ January!” he said, egged on a bit by the laughter. “But I guess — some nice people are putting me up. And my parental figures in New York really can’t deal with me now anyways. So I guess I’m just trying to stay focused on today and not freak out over the future.” Always best to fall back on a twelve-step cliché if you’re stuck for your next line, he thought. So, voilà. “Thanks.”
“Thanks, Mateo,” everyone chorused.
Carrie was sitting across the room from him, three rows back in the concentric circles of chairs, so the round-robin never got to her. But when he finished speaking and was twisting his torso in his seat to stretch, he caught her eye and she smiled sweetly, as though to say, Nice job, and he smiled back.
At the end of the meeting, when he was helping put away chairs, she came over and asked if he was going out to coffee with the others. At the IHOP, they sat together at the end of a long booth full of their fellow struggling derelicts, some crankily silent, some too boisterous, no one at ease in their skin.