On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.
What harm could it do?
I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it
‘Yep?’
I paused for a second and then rushed into it.
‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please… five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you…’ – this came to me on the spur of the moment – ‘… I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me…’
I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.
He released a long sigh. ‘Jeesus!’
I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.
Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes.’
‘Thank you… very much.’
He gave me the address of a café on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain yellow T-shirt.
I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.
The café was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso. Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a few different blocks at that.
‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’
I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd.’
He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.
I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already way over time.
‘About three years ago,’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo. And we toured a lot.’
I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for the long haul.
I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.
‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead in. And direct.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing Shakespeare and this guy is offering me… well, you know what he was offering me.’
Geisler’s delivery was slow and deliberate, his voice like gravel. It was an actor’s voice. I also got the impression, as he went on, that he had never spoken about this stuff to anyone before. His account of the early days of MDT was much fuller than Melissa’s had been but was essentially the same. In his case, he’d received the pitch from Vernon, been unable to resist and after a couple of 15mg doses had memorized the entire text of Macbeth – thoroughly intimidating his cast and crew in the process. He’d then gone on, over the early rehearsal period, to take a further dozen pills, an average of about three a week. The pills were unmarked, but Vernon’s partner, a guy called Todd, had shown up one day with Vernon and explained the dosage and something about what was in MDT and how it worked. This Todd character had also asked Geisler questions about how he was responding to the drug and if he’d been experiencing any adverse side-effects. Geisler had said that he hadn’t.
Two weeks before opening, and under intense pressure, Geisler had cleaned out what he had in the bank and upped his intake to six pills a week – ‘Nearly one a day,’ he said.
I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.
‘Then, in the few days before we were due to open, it happened – my life fell apart. From a Tuesday to a Friday. It just… fell apart.’
Up to this point, Geisler had kept both his hands under the table and out of view. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now as he moved his right hand up and reached out to take his espresso cup, I saw that his hand had a slight but noticeable tremor. I thought at first that it might be a symptom of alcoholism, a morning-after shake, something like that, but when I saw him leaning forward, gripping the cup to make sure he got it up to his lips without spilling any of the coffee, I realized that he was probably suffering from some neurological disorder. He replaced the cup, very carefully, and then put himself through the laborious process of lighting a cigarette. He did this in silence, pointedly making no comment about the difficulty he was having. He knew I was watching, which almost turned it into a kind of performance.
Once he had his cigarette on the go, he said, ‘I was under a lot of pressure, rehearsing fourteen, fifteen hours a day… but then… before I know it, and out of the fucking blue, I’m having these periods of memory loss.’
I stared at him, nodding my head.
‘I lost track of what I was doing for hours at a time.’
Barely able to contain myself, I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, go on.’
‘I still don’t know what I got up to, exactly, during these… blackouts, I suppose you’d call them… all I know is that between the Tuesday and Friday of that week – and as a result of what I got up to – my girlfriend of ten years left me, the production of Macbeth was cancelled and I was thrown out of my apartment. I also ran over and nearly killed an eleven-year-old girl on Columbus Avenue.’
‘Jesus.’
My heart was racing.
‘I went to Vernon to try and find out what was happening to me, and at first he didn’t want to know, he was scared, but then he contacted Todd and we met up. Todd was the technical one – he worked for a pharmaceutical company. I could never figure out what their story was, but it soon became clear that Todd was siphoning this stuff out of the labs where he worked and that Vernon was just the front man. It also emerged that Vernon had mixed up a batch of tablets and had been dealing me 30- instead of 15mg pills, which meant that my dosage had shot up dramatically without me knowing it. Anyway, I told Todd what had happened and he said that I needed to combine the MDT with something else, another drug, something to counteract the side-effects. That’s what he called these blackouts – side-effects…’