Torn & Sewn on Fabric Row

July 11th, 1993.  I'm walking double-time toward the pay phone on 4th and Bainbridge, around the block from my hovel on Monroe.  This particular summer night finds the heat and humidity particularly oppressive, soaking my T-shirt with sweat just a few steps out the front door.   Emerging from the arctic climate of the apartment's central air, the swelter hits my body like a freight train and I buckle.  But I'm off to the races again after a curt pep talk. Holed up in my little 3rd floor walk up the past week, there's clearly a powerful need to replenish.  In fact, I thought it was Thursday afternoon until I stepped outside into the darkness.

I live in the heart of Philly's Fabric Row, just a few blocks off the busy strip of bars and restaurants on South Street, which means the roads are usually lined with cars looking for parking on a Saturday night.  Night?  Clearly.  Unless I'm losing my vision. Saturday?  That's what the ATM receipt says.  Where did the week go?  Where it always goes for me these days. A short reflexive pause to survey the landscape and then I'm back into tunnel vision mode: my mission, the score.

The roll of twenties in my pocket is slick with perspiration as I race to the rendezvous point around the corner past the Famous 4th Street Deli.  I don't recognize my connection but nevertheless make her out at once, not far from the pay phone.   Her expression - her demeanor - makes it clear she's no South Street reveler gearing up for the clubs; she's a courier, my Sherpa's intermediary, and her body language says as much.  Tonight, she's my lifeline and I love her more than she'll know.  (Random trivia note: Denzel Washington uses this very phone in one of the scenes from the movie Philadelphia.)

I walk up quickly but nervously to my new love, with an eye peeled always for the cops.  My paranoia unbounded, everyone smells like Five-0 out here tonight.  And there's a good chance they are, heightened fears aside.  So the exchange is made fast: currency for goods.  Two thumbnail plastic baggies chock full of lumpy white bliss pressed into my palm and my bank roll likewise into hers, passing the baton without acknowledgement in this felonious relay race.  She blinks, tucks it away, then picks up the pay phone and dials.

Having scored the primary supplies for the evening, a rush of relief radiates through my fingers.  A wordless au du to my new lost love in a rush, I quick-step across Bainbridge's double wide expanse to the north, veering left a bit in order to sneak through Leithgow, the side street that splits 4th from 5th.   Swinging into Phila Deli around the corner on South, a prescription is filled for several six packs of beer constituting the oh-so necessary brakes that'll slow my heart down to earth once I run out of blow.  I've long ago learned that waiting until the need arises to buy alcohol often leads to wild heart palpitations crawling out of your skin when you first glance at a clock and it reads 4am, long past closing time.  My connection's still glued to the pay phone gabbing obliviously as I pass her by again, this time lugging two large grocery bags of booze back to my humble abode.

How will this particular ride into heavenly oblivion distinguish itself from the countless journeys that came before?   Simply put, it was to be my last for 14 months.   I'd stumble thereafter just once again, in September of 1994, but this trip would effectively put to bed my particular cycle of addiction to cocaine.  What follows is a sketch of the events and my state of mind that finally put the kibosh on this slow motion suicide carnival ride.

I shove the key into the outside door and hurry up the two flights of stairs to my place, the "penthouse" of the three units in this converted multi-family house.  Back into the deep freeze, chilly sweat soaks my skin.  It was actually the nicest apartment I ever rented, narrow but deep with high ceilings, central air, and my own mini-washer/dryer unit to boot.  I also had a private staircase in the apartment itself that led up to the roof where I could sunbathe with a view of city hall and much of the rest of the city.  All for $525.00 a month from 1992 - 96 with no rent increase, two blocks from the heart of the South Street action.   The one downside?   It was so narrow that getting furniture of any size up the stairs and in through the door proved challenging (I ended up having to sell my larger couch prior to moving in).   Still, it deserved better than me, at least better than the me who inhabited the joint the first couple years.  In those days it was merely my cocoon, used to wall off the world for the drift into madness.   Other than being stumbling distance to a plethora of bars and restaurants with take-out beer and the fact that it served as a kind of midway point between the cocaine meccas of Chester and Kensington, I might as well have lived on the North Pole for all I availed myself of its vibrant surroundings and culture.

I rush into my place and toss the beer into the fridge.   That's just medicine, needed later to come down safely from the mountain.   But who wants to entertain such notions now?  It is time now to climb!  The cocaine experience started out socially for me with a dysfunctional sub-culture from which I learned much things I'd rather have never known.   As Jim Carroll would caution, they were a "constant warning to take the other direction."   In the end, it degenerated into isolation, much as it would later with alcohol.  Grabbing a CD jewel case already scratched/sticky from the counter, I get to work.  The door to my bedroom closed?  Check.  Blinds closed?  Check.  My body flailed out on the mattress?  Check.  Okay, we're ready.  Next, the contents of the first baggie are dumped out on REM's Reckoning (or some equally random case), the chopping begins, the separating, the lining up.  Finally, the snorting.  Eventually, the bleeding.  Rinse and repeat for the next 20 hours, with an occasional beer break mixed in to keep the blood pressure below bursting.

My highs are euphemistically described elsewhere in this blog as wired wakefulness and concentrated bliss.  They were certainly all that, but also something more.   It sounds so awful as recounted here (and believe me, I've held back the uglier details something fierce on these pages; my candor has its limits), but in the moment it was wonderful beyond description, all happening away from the horrors, up in the serenity of my head.   No other drug has ever come closer to bringing as much happiness to me.  It always arrived with a truckload of misery, to be sure; however, not nearly as much as alcohol eventually rained down on my life.   On balance, the happiness was artificial and short lived, the misery real and persistent.  Still, if that was all there was to this equation, I never would have stopped.   Happiness is happiness, who is to say what is artificial or real?  And long or short-lived, it was better than the alternative.  No, the kicker in the mixer that kept me clean was simple biology, chemistry.  I would be dead pretty quickly continuing down this path.  Cocaine isn't compatible with biological life, not for long, not for me. And of course, there were the finances.  You plunge into coke, you don't end up working a whole lot at a time when you need that income the most to keep the white stuff coming (well, you can work a shitload for long stretches at first, but not too effectively).  All that to say, it's expensive.   So coke didn't work for me chemically or financially.  But I digress, so back to that day ...

By the time the sun goes down on Sunday, the coke is history.  I'd licked the last of it off the jewel case, the baggies long since torn asunder in hopes of finding some long lost morsel hidden in microscopic crevasses within.  Without luck, of course.   It was then time to turn to the come-down beer in the kitchen fridge with gusto, slugging three in rapid succession just to slow the heart down to what I surmised was a safe jack hammer pace.  Thank you, Her Doktor!  That was an hour or so ago.

Two beers further into my come down routine now, bent over on my sofa in the living room.  Thinking about things.  Left my full time job back in March.  I'd been with that company for seven years but the consulting position I accepted paid a lot more and I could make my own hours, could choose when to work and when to "relax" (all dangerous things for someone with my proclivities).  Of course, I haven't been with a client for several weeks now, what with the marathon blow binges and all.  They really eat into one's productivity.  So, no real savings, no discernible cash inflow to help stem the outflow.  The result is that my phone will surely soon be shut off for non-payment in the coming days.  Next the cable.  Then the electric.  My credit's fucked.  I am almost 31 years old and have not yet begun to live life, afraid in fact of trying.  These ruminations reach a crescendo over my psyche and I stew.  The reason for this reflective mood?  I'd switched on the tube to kill time coming down and the movie Clean And Sober happened to be on HBO.

I tend to enjoy irony and often watch movies such as Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses while drinking, fully understanding - even embracing - my condition and yet at the same time never giving thought to rectifying things.   I always figured heretofore that rectification for me would be death and death would be here soon enough.  This time, though, Clean And Sober is really getting its hooks into me. It's not a particularly wonderful flick.   You never get to see the protagonist on his slide (he's already pretty much bottoming out when we first meet him).  You do, however, see the consequences of his addiction pretty starkly.  And Michael Keaton is great in his first dramatic role.  All told, right movie, right time, right tone.   I don't believe in fate, or that I'm somehow special, an omnipotent being arranging this fortuitous chain of events just for me.  It is a happy coincidence.  In fact, the movie has been showing pretty regularly of late on cable and I'd caught pieces of it earlier in the week, coked up and drinking down just as I am this evening.  But it didn't strike me then like it's hammering me now.  An hour into watching, I feel light headed and look down to see a rapidly spreading little pool of blood on the carpet.  My hand goes up instinctively to my nose, warm sticky wet. I dash into the bathroom with my head tilted back.  Then I drop to my knees in the john and cry.

Cut to Monday late afternoon and I'm attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.  I have a sponsor before I leave.  Thus begins the first year of real sobriety for me as an adult (hell, the first month).  I re-join my old employer within a week and stay put there for another seven years.  I stabilize.  For a while, anyway.

I'd stick with AA for a few months but the spiritual aspect of the program eventually had me searching elsewhere, eventually reaching out to Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). I've maintained my ties with SOS to this day, now with a successor organization, Lifering.   AA is great but there is never only one way to anything, including sobriety (if something works for you, keep at it).  My biggest misstep during this stab at sobriety was that I didn't get professional help for depression.  When I slipped in 1994, I quickly righted myself when it came to the coke (once and done, clean now for 15+ years).  Ironically, the only reason I drank again was to come down from that coke episode but the cork wouldn't fit back into the bottle.   No, the come-down booze that coke spurge necessitated was my full fledged plunge into the briny deep of chronic, progressive alcoholism over the next dozen years.  I think I've documented that swim and subsequent arrival back onshore sufficiently elsewhere on these pages.

This aspect of my experience has been exhausted here.  It's certainly exhausted me.  Perhaps it's time I attempt to dredge up some happy days for prosperity next.  It could happen.   But that'll take digging deep to find.  Until then, silence will reign on this blog.  With maybe just a bit of bad poetry to bridge the gulf.