That do-over lasted two weeks.
It felt like a failure of epic proportions. Our relationship had begun as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we both had lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy. It made the obvious clear: What was gone was gone permanently. There was no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
That realization made it all the more difficult to pretend it could be otherwise, which made it all the more difficult for me to get clean. My oasis was gone.
What the fuck was I going to do now?
CHAPTER NINE
CALIFORNIA ODYSSEY
I used my superpower—finding crack anytime, anywhere—less than a day after landing at LAX in the spring of 2018.
I drove my rental to the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood, where I checked into a bungalow and by 4 a.m. had smoked every crumb of crack I’d brought. The clubs whose bouncers had served as my primary sources were closed, my calls to Curtis went unanswered, and my valet connection was AWOL.
I remembered a small crew of panhandlers who perpetually hung around a row of stores across from another club, near the corner of Sunset and La Brea, about a mile away. Like any worthy crack haunt by this point, it set off my spidey sense. When I pulled into the parking lot, there they were: a handful of guys loitering around a dumpster near the back. They’d improvised a small encampment of sleeping bags. They were clearly users.
I walked up and asked if they had anything that they’d sell. They did not and, at that hour, had no interest in looking elsewhere. Another guy from the group stepped out of the adjoining convenience store. He said he was sorry, that he didn’t have anything, either, but he knew where to get some. He said we’d have to drive downtown.
He was about fifty and looked like he’d just gotten out of jail—in fact, he told me he’d been released that day. He kept pulling up his pants because he hadn’t gotten a belt yet, and he carried everything he owned in a plastic CVS bag. That made him just desperate enough to get in a car with a stranger who easily could have been a cop.
I was just desperate enough to invite him in.
We hardly talked during the twenty-minute drive. He told me his name and that he’d served in the Air Force. Once we got downtown, past Pershing Square, he directed me through the deserted streets of the city’s flower and fashion districts. Office and bodega storefronts were locked up tight. In the predawn darkness, a vast homeless enclave bloomed along the sidewalks on both sides of the street. Bunched together, block after block after block: pop-up tents, leaning cardboard boxes, tarps.
The scene looked postapocalyptic—or at least post–American Century. The area seemed darker than the rest of the city we’d just passed through, almost de-electrified, like the primitive dwellings that covered so much prime real estate. Trash littered the streets and the heavy, warm air stank of garbage and rot and sweat. Random shopping carts were piled high with a lifetime’s worth of possessions; most of their owners were passed out nearby. The only cars I saw were police cruisers. We slid by at least three in the first few minutes after we arrived. A spooky silence added an even eerier atmosphere.
It was a dangerous place to visit and a more dangerous place to live. There was no brotherly, down-and-out kinship at that hour: when two people encountered each other, both froze and stared until somebody walked away—if somebody walked away. There was no “Hey, bro” conviviality. There was no testimonial to the human spirit underlying the nihilism.
There was no fucking poetry to it at all.
“Pull over here.”
My guy got out with the $100 I gave him and told me not to stay parked on the street—too many cops. I watched him disappear through a cut between two tents, then circled the area. I was starting to get nervous after my third pass—conned again!—when I recognized my guy waving at me, a specter in the shadows. He got in the car with $100 worth of crack. I handed him another $200 and told him to use half of it for himself.
This time I only had to circle once.
The guy asked if I could drive him back to Sunset and La Brea. I dropped him off at the encampment there, then sped to my bungalow, the sun barely peeking over the horizon.
I returned to that scene by myself a few more times during my five-month self-exile in Los Angeles—a death wish, really. I’d head there after the clubs closed at four and the after-hours clubs closed at six and X, Y, or Z dealer had clocked out for the night. None of it would be up and running again until past noon. That was too long for me: I couldn’t wait six hours for my next hit. The sun was up and I was still rolling, frenetic, jonesing.
Even in that crazed world, there’s no master network available to someone who’s up twenty-four hours a day, smoking every fifteen minutes, seven days a week. Nobody can attend to those needs. No matter how big a dispensation system somebody like me pieced together, there were always gaps in the service.
This downtown tent city filled in those gaps.
The first time I returned there alone I found the cut between the two tents that I’d watched my Air Force buddy slip through. As makeshift and chaotic as the layout seemed, there was a remarkable logic and consistency to it. I went through and stepped around people curled up on thin pieces of cardboard. Beyond them, I noticed a tilting, unlit tent. I pulled back a flap. It was pitch-black. All I saw was the gun pointed at my face.
I
