UGLY AS SIN/INTERESTING AS HELL--FROM CHAPTER IX: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

KICKING

"You got to eat shit,
To have visions."

--ALLEN GINSBERG


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"ART"
--CHARLES BUKOWSKI



Nobody goes into a hospital “well” and certainly I didn’t. My demons were doing a little jig in my head as I rounded up some reefer, a bag of dope and a few grams of coke the night before I was to go into Montefiore.
Bernstein was chief of diabetology at Montefiore. His status at the hospital provided me with a private room, which, unbeknown to him, comforted my demons.
When the nurses and technicians began arriving to give me the initial and obligatory chest x-rays, blood tests, and other preliminary testing, my father and Jean left the hospital, leaving me a step closer to what I had in my pocket. Two residents came in next to take my history, and I couldn’t wait for them to leave as well. I’m a fiend for isolation.
As I said, I had a private room, which meant I’d have no problem using the coke I’d brought with me. I’d brought my own syringes, too. I’d swiped a spoon that was on my lunch tray. I went into the bathroom and got my shot ready. I stared into the toilet.
“What the fuck am I doing?” I asked.
“You fuckin’ idiot, flush that shit away,” I answered. I opened the vial and let the powder float down like snow hitting a puddle. Poof. Gone. It was the smartest thing I’d done in well over two years. I felt like I’d taken the first important step among many to come. I felt empowered. I also felt like reaching into the toilet bowl and getting some of it back.
Later that evening, a doctor visited me. He was a psychiatrist who knew about addiction. He asked what I was using and how much. I did my best to be honest with him. He thought I’d be able to be comfortable if I took some tranquilizers and, if I needed it, a sleeping pill for the next few days. If, however, he cautioned, I was feeling lousy, he’d prescribe methadone for a few days or increase the dosage of what I was about to take. It sounded all right to me, and it was no great hardship getting through that night.
Bernstein visited me the next morning, and after asking how I was doing, proceeded to put me on a twelve hundred calorie a day diet to get my diabetes stabilized; he also told me about The Diabetes Self-Care Center, how they instruct the diabetic in using a glucometer (a small and portable instrument that allows the testing of blood glucose), nutrition, exercise and insulin, and how the three interact together in this carbohydrate-based diet. “I’m interested,” I told him, and he said he’d talk to me further about it as the days progressed.

I began reading the introductory booklets about diabetes the nurses had rounded up for me as if I was newly diagnosed. The only thing that took me a long time to figure out was the “food exchanges.” For example, if I gave up a slice of bread worth “x” amount of calories, I could substitute that with other foods worth “y” amount. But two carrots meant three and half stalks. It was a royal pain in the ass.
One day my father came early and I told him I wanted to go into the program Bernstein told me about. He said it was all right with him. Also, he’d like me to go back down to Miami with him, hopefully before I’d begin the program. “I’d love to go,” I said, “if Jean could come with me.”
He hesitated for a second and said, “I’ll get back to you on that one.”
It was time, I felt, to force the issue.
My head cleared up little by little. The glucose, booze, narcotics, reefer and other substances that coated my body peeled away layer by layer. One day, I awoke and felt “clean.” I can think of no better word than that. The world, still held safely at bay by the confines of the hospital, was manageable. My thoughts were able to return to practical things, like getting a job. I began to answer ads for public relation positions from the New York Times. Jean brought a portable typewriter and I’d bang out cover letters, include a resume and send them out.
I was getting bored, and a bed was not opening up in The Loeb Center. The nurses had begun instructing me about the use of the glucometer and, while I was still clumsy, it was just a matter of time and repetition before it became easy. Bernstein said it didn’t appear a bed would be available anytime soon and thought it best for me to be discharged and begin The Diabetic Self-Care Program.
“Jerry,” I began, a hint of nervous embarrassment in my face, “not that I want to do this now, today, but do you think I’ll ever be able to have a cocktail or smoke a little reefer again? ‘Cause I gotta tell ya, I love smoking reefer.”
He looked at me, not as if I was an idiot for asking, but puzzled for a second. “I really don’t know. Everything is relative to the individual. I don’t know enough about this kind of thing to say one way or the other. Knowing you though, you’re not a moderate kind of person.”
We spoke about Miami, Jean, and my folks. He’d gotten to know Jean over these last few years and bouts of illness, and liked her a great deal. He’d also at one time treated my mom for some of her physical ills as well as her “anxiety.” “Well, I’m sure you could use the rest, the sun, some good food and swimming. But you need your sanity more. If you can both relax...if not, come back. Nothing’s written in stone.”
After he left and I was waiting to get discharged, I thought about what we’d spoken about. Right now, I did not want to drink or smoke reefer. I wanted my system free of any mood altering shit in order to get a clear picture of how my body was doing. Once I got that, once I got out of that program and knew what I needed to know, then I’d decide. As far as Florida was concerned, I wanted to go down there if my parents were willing to have Jean as well. And even then, I’d take it a day at a time. Next, I called Jean and told her I was coming home.

Before going to my apartment I made two stops, the first to a surgical supply pharmacy to purchase a glucometer and the second was to The Diabetic Self-Care Program. I made an appointment to have my initial physical and stress tests the following Monday.
The next day was Jean’s birthday and we (my father, brother and his date) surprised her by taking her to Peter Luger’s, a legendary steak restaurant under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. Afterwards, we came back to my apartment to have coffee and talk. They were interested in my new toy, the glucometer and wanted their blood tested. I unwrapped the new machine and went to work. It resembled a scene out of a Roger Corman or a badly shot vampire movie. There was blood everywhere. When I tried to get a drop of blood from pricking their fingers and then placing it on a test strip, the blood would drip onto the table, chair, and floor or run down their arms. Finally, when I did manage to get their blood on the right part of the reagent strip and insert it into the machine to get a reading, everyone had a reading indicating they were diabetic. The next day, when I brought the machine back, thinking it was inaccurate, I discovered I hadn’t properly inserted the strip to begin with. It added between thirty and fifty points to their tests. I told them all to cancel their doctor’s appointments, but Jean and I made another appointment. My father had told me that if we wanted, we could accompany him to Miami. I called the diabetes program and pushed back my tests two weeks, and two days later we were in Florida.

My mother hid her horror well, and she did her best to be gracious and hospitable to Jean. By the third day, she didn’t have to try any longer. She took to Jean, and Jean took to her. They found a commonality of interests and seemed to understand each other in ways that suggest, in retrospect, a desire to be with and love difficult, if not selfish, and exasperating men. My mother had shed a part of herself that she never thought she could, her value in appearances.
I was eating well, sunning, swimming, and exercising. Some nights, we’d go to the dogs. We all loved to gamble, especially my mom. She’d root home her dog with all the fervor of a religious zealot, and when she won she’d whoop and laugh and jump up and down. She seemed younger than I ever remembered her. The two weeks we were there flashed by quickly, but I was anxious to get back and begin what, I hoped, would be a life very different from the one I had been living. Questions, which gnawed at me like my inability to have satisfactory sex with Jean, were tamped down. I tried to believe it would resolve itself when other things settled into place. We were enjoying each other in other ways.

The program was an eye-opener. For the first time since I became diabetic, I was able to see, chart, and understand my disease. I was able to gauge how my glucose fluctuated in relation to my intake of food and exercise.
There were two other people, Ruth and Mary, who were going through the program as well. We struggled together. The staff was excellent, and while we didn’t think we could learn and assimilate all they were planning to dispense, we did. By the end of the week, we could eye-measure our food portions to the correct carbohydrate count, titrate (measure) our dosages of regular insulin to what our blood glucose counts were, and eat a meal.
Carbohydrates are crucial to being well balanced in this program. Depending on age, weight, and whether or not the pancreas was functioning to any appreciable degree, the staff would calibrate the amount of insulin to the carbohydrates to be consumed. From those measurements, we could decide whether we wanted to lose weight, stay the same or gain a few pounds.
I was taken off my usual insulin and put on two other ones: UltraLente, long-acting insulin without real peaks or valleys. It’s used to cover the body’s basic metabolic processes; and Regular, used when eating meals. The amount of Regular would be measured against my blood glucose and how many carbohydrates I’d consume at any given time. It’s short-acting insulin that peaks in two to four hours and is out of the system in six. I injected the UltraLente twice a day, once in the morning when I awoke and later, between five and seven in the evening. These drugs freed me to decide what I felt like eating and when. If I decided during the heat of summer I didn’t want to eat lunch or if I was having a physically difficult time and didn’t want to eat, I’d skip the shot and the meal. I could never do that using my old insulin. Come Hell or high water, I had to eat because the insulin dictated peaking periods. By monitoring myself four to six times daily, I knew pretty well what my glucose, hence my diabetes, was doing. I learned that insulin takes hold more slowly in the mornings and so I’d eat less early. I learned that in the face of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar or insulin shock) not to panic. Instead of ravaging my body with sweets, a simple glass of skim milk would suffice. I was educated about different foods and how quickly they broke down in the system and learned their carbohydrate count. I grew comfortable with taking my insulin shot anywhere and even through thin materials, which enabled me to take the shot in restaurants without feeling self-conscious. The one thing I couldn’t control, besides some emotional mood swings, was my body’s natural change and decay. If you’re going to worry about controlling what you can’t, you’ll never control what you can. At the end of the two weeks my Medic Alert bracelet came in the mail. On its back is engraved “Diabetic, Takes Insulin,” with a number to call collect if I became unconscious anywhere due to insulin shock or any other accident. It was time to put what I’d learned to the test.

Finally, I thought, I had embraced my diabetes. I had become “the good son.” I was clean; booze and dope were no longer polluting my system. My family had accepted Jean. I’d turned it around.
I began looking for jobs and was met with rejection after rejection. Slowly, frustration was turning into anxiety and depression. I began chipping away at the thin and brittle barrier between me and some kind of mood alterer. Drinking was easy to rationalize. A glass of wine at first. In a short amount of time, it was scotch; and then, shorter still, cocaine, and finally junk.
Trying to stem the tide before it overwhelmed and drowned me, I quickly returned to Florida and my parents. My brother, who’d been living with them there and working at a job that my father had gotten him, took me the second night I was there to the Carlisle, a hotel that had just been remodeled and would soon become part of the South Beach we know today. He was friendly with the piano player and singer and wanted me to meet him. I ordered a cognac and by the end of the night I was snorting coke. I wanted to do the same thing the next night, which we did. Soon I’d made my own connections and began shooting the coke in our room, next to my parent’s bedroom, much like I’d done with heroin at my parent’s home in Seagate nearly twenty years before.
I needed to see a podiatrist while down there and my folks had me go to theirs near their condo. I had never had great sensation in my feet and so didn’t notice that the doctor was digging out a hole in the bottom of my left foot. When I finally asked him what he was doing, he said that he was removing the diabetic ulceration, which Bernstein had told me not to worry about. I yelled at him, which is rare for me. That night my foot blew up. It was nearly twice the size that it was the day before. And it was painful. Not tremendously painful, but painful enough so it suited my purposes. I went back to the podiatrist and had him write me a prescription for Percocet, which I eagerly filled.
After a few weeks of ingesting as many pills as I could, I decided to go back home to New York and see Bernstein. My decision was based on fear, healthy fear.
Bernstein sent me to a vascular surgeon who wanted me to go into the hospital immediately and start on I.V. antibiotics, which I did. In two weeks, the hole in the bottom of my foot healed into the size of a pinprick. Jean came to pick me up that hot day, at the beginning of August 1984. I felt like shit. I didn’t know what I was going to do, let alone how I was going to go about doing it. I was whittled down to a nub, with no job and a continuation of the ebbs and flows of my life. I had the cab stop on 2nd Avenue and 10th Street. I got out, bought a pint of booze and walked around the corner to the street cocaine dealers and bought however much coke I could afford.
In less than two weeks, the hole the size of a pinprick began to widen and “weep.” I called Bernstein. He told me to elevate the leg that night and call him the next day. It didn’t take that long. The next morning I awoke in a sweat and had a fever of a hundred and four. Four toes on my left foot looked a bluish green. I called Bernstein. Don’t wait, he said, get right in a cab and go to the emergency room at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, he’d be waiting for me.
He got me a room, hooked me up to another I.V. and the next day, early in the morning the vascular surgeon amputated my four toes, leaving me the big one. Sometime later, he told me that necrotic tissue had been covered up by new skin so there was no way of knowing what lurked underneath. How prescient he was! But it was not my foot that held the necrotic tissue, it was my fucking mind. I never told him of my diet of booze and coke that made all those fun and games possible.
I was heavily sedated for the first few days, and still heavily sedated after I became somewhat conscious. The pain, this time, was indeed excruciating. When the nurse came in to put a fresh dressing on the wound site I watched, amazed, that all that bloody gauze was where my four toes once were. It reminded me of the old magic trick where the magician just keeps pulling and pulling fabric out of his top hat. But the pain meds kept coming. My body began clocking the four hours until my next fix. And the next. And the next.
As I became accustomed to my surroundings I began to note just what kind of place I was in: the vascular surgery ward of a major New York City hospital in a poor section of the Bronx. It seemed that Jaws had come out of the ocean and established residency there. I was on that ward for the better part of two months. I saw many people came in to have a toe amputated; they came back a week or two later and had the ankle removed; and still later to have everything below their knee sawed off. Every day it seemed there was a “code blue.”
Jean came nearly every day bringing me food. How the hell she did it after working a full-time gig, I’ll never know. Being a prick, I had little trouble thinking I deserved all her attention. Besides, I was still receiving four hour doses of narcotics, allowed to smoke cigarettes to my heart’s content, and was able to, during the evening, get into my wheelchair, go to the rec room on the ward, and see an amazing phenom, Doc Gooden, pitch for the Mets. This was not all bad.
What was disconcerting was that my amputation site wouldn’t heal. After the operation my doctor did a skin graft that was designed to fill in the hole. But because there was a nurses strike for two weeks after my operation, the hospital had to postpone what they determined as elective surgeries. For the next twenty years I had to scrub the site out at night and dress it in the morning, using Betadine and gauze pads.
Ritchie, my last roommate, came in with heavy guard chains for his own T.V. Soon we became friends. Both his legs were shot. While in Korea he was captured, tortured and beat unmercifully around his legs so that every three months or so, he’d need operations to restore whatever tissue he needed to marginally walk. He chained smoked Kools, was married to an ex-belly dancer who now was a nurse on Riker’s Island prison, and lived in Yonkers. He, more than anyone else, educated me in how to play doctors for pain medication. He had four or five of them scattered throughout New York City. There was another interesting thing about him and his wife: they were peculiar animal lovers.
When I finally got released from Montefiore, I met up with Ritchie the next day to score some drugs. After getting some Dilaudid we went back to his home to shoot it. Before entering he told me not to worry about the four Dobermans that would bound out to greet him. I was pretty loaded already from my own prescription of Percocet so I was not all that concerned. But when I walked in, a powerful odor hit me, and I was overwhelmed by “caw” “caw” and screeching sounds. The first room I peered into had six or eight monkeys swinging from branch to branch and a bevy of parrots clocking their activity. “Wait,” Ritchie said, when he saw my expression. “Wait ‘til you see this.”
He took me downstairs to his garage. Inside a mesh cage stood a full-grown lioness.
“How the fuck did you get her here?”
“My wife smuggled her in as a cub.”
“Cool,” I said.
After shooting the Dilaudid, we talked and nodded off for the rest of the afternoon. When evening came, he brought me into his backyard to look behind some bushes.
I could see, through a window into the garage, the lion’s eyes, fierce green orbs, following our every movement.

Jacques Hassoun writes in, Melancholia and the Cruelty of Depression, ...“The object we call a drug is established by said addict in place of what immediately departed from his life... Being amputated from that part of himself that allows him to consider the future, he is expelled from the civil order, from the City; as a result he is no more than a suffering body, craving whatever might pull him out of an infinite sadness. And even today, day after day, through ersatz drugs, the user takes care of this body that has no existence apart from its suffering...”
And it didn’t. From there, it was welfare and food stamps and rehab and small jobs and drinking, arrests, and desperation. Things I thought I’d never do, I did. Until I stopped through the help and interventions of Jerry Bernstein (once again, always there) and a psychiatrist he recommended, who put me on a cocktail of anti-depressive and anxiety medications that I’d be taking for the next few years.
Because of the internal balance I was able to achieve through psychopharmeceutical, psychiatric and social interventions, I was able to get out of the bind I’d been in, look around, and decide what I could and wanted to do. I decided that I wanted to somehow be around literature and writing. I enjoyed the time I spent as a teacher and now set my sights on that, with a different emphasis: teaching “gifted and talented” students. I applied to and was accepted by Teacher’s College/Columbia University. I eagerly began taking classes that September.
The classes engaged me, and I enjoyed being on the campus of Columbia. Being grandiose, and steeped in my own particular history of reading, and in some cases knowing the writers of the “Beat Generation,” I felt good about being in the same place as them. When it came time to do my student teaching, I choose Stuyvesant--probably the most prestigious public school for gifted students in the metropolitan area--and arranged an appointment with the chairman of the department.
Bill Ince, the chair of the English department, wore Irish tweeds, had intelligent blue eyes and, after listening to my brief and selective history of practically growing up in Greenwich Village, introduced me to one of his English teachers who allowed me to student teach in her class. Barbara could see that I knew my way around the classroom and we became friendly. I wasn’t intrusive, but tried to add to what she was instructing her students. Oftentimes Barbara letting me lead the discussions. In one of her classes I met Saul, who was writing his senior college essay on Ginsberg’s poem, “Howl.” I felt hopeful that a kid from his generation was drawn to that poem, which had been so important to me. I told Saul and Barbara that Ginsberg was my mentor during my New School days and then asked Ince if he would want me to try and contact him to give a reading at Stuyvesant. After some equivocation because of Ginsberg’s reputation, the opportunity was too good for Ince to pass up.
That night, I pulled out an old address book and dialed the number I had for Allen. He picked up. I didn’t have to spend a great deal of time reminding him of our time together nearly twenty years ago. I told him why I was calling and he agreed to read for the students.
Ince was elated when I told him. His chest puffed up as he made plans to inform the principal. There was a terrific buzz around the school and the event was filmed, a copy of which was given to me. A few weeks later, I had a similar visit from another one of my current friends, Jason Miller, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer. It was then that Frank McCourt, who was teaching at Stuyvesant at the time, and I started to become friends. Both he and Jason shared an Irish heritage and their resistance to the Brits occupation of Ireland at the time.
One day Ince called me into his office. He whispered to me that one of his teachers had contracted the HIV virus and would be taking a leave of absence. Ince said that there was a list of teachers a mile long who were waiting for a slot to open up at Stuyvesant, but he had the power to give the position to me, should I want it. Something stopped me from immediately accepting it. I thought about my continuing studies at Columbia, and the amount of work I would have to do should I accept the offer. I asked if I could have the evening to think it over.
The day that I took over his class, the departing teacher, with a look of fear and defiance in his eyes, told me he’d be back soon.
I was immediately struck by the depth and endless curiosity of my students’ minds, and the amount of work I had to do to keep up with them. By the end of my first term of teaching, going to classes at Columbia, as well as all the other things a human being has to do, I began to have difficulty juggling everything. I knew something had to go: I dropped out of Columbia, thinking that I could, after putting in some time at Stuyvesant, be eligible to take the test to become a full-time licensed teacher. Still, I found myself exhausted by the constant stream of work; it seemed I had endless papers to grade with nearly a hundred and fifty students. Unlike teachers in the math department who could put tests through a scantron to come up with a grade, English teachers had to go over students’ papers line by line and then talk to them about it. I still didn’t believe in preparation. Me, make lesson plans? Fuck that. I figured I was smart enough to go into the class, read the material along with the students and wing it.
I had the idea to take the students’ papers to the Cedar Tavern, have a few cocktails, pretend I was a serious critic of their work, before going upstairs to have dinner with Jean. Yeah, I knew it was crazy thinking, but maybe, just maybe, I could get away with it. My grandiosity was in control of my thinking. The way I saw it, I was the one who brought Ginsberg and Miller to read. I was the only teacher who was given space in the student newspaper. The kids I came into contact with were crazy about me. But I knew, from the moment I accepted the position, that I’d done the wrong thing for me. And now I was just flailing my arms, treading water, trying not to drown.
But I was, in booze. The only things keeping me afloat were my shakey defenses of grandiosity and self-aggrandizement. One day after class, a junior who was incredibly bright, sexy/attractive, and had an obvious crush on me, asked if I would read something she’d written and talk with her about it. Of course, I said, flattered and full of myself. We met one day at a coffee shop across the street from the school where I knew it was frowned upon for teachers and students to intermingle, especially those of the opposite sex. But I was me, the rebel teacher; the teacher on the side of the students; the teacher who understood the “square” dodgy presence of those who by birth were their parents.
During our “conference” I told her that I thought her work was terrific and encouraged further investigations of her perceptions and creativity. I also took the time to tell her a little more about myself than the other students knew and even “let it slip” that the Cedar Tavern had been where I spent time “kicking around” in Greenwich Village. She shared with me that she and her girlfriend had obtained illegal driver’s licenses and frequented some of the hotter spots in New York City during the week and on weekends, as those curious and sophisticated teenagers are wont to do. I told her to keep writing and it wouldn’t be a bother to me to read whatever it was that she wanted me to.
One early evening I was at The Cedar by myself. A hand gripped the crook of my arm. I turned to see her staring up at me and smiling. I felt myself blushing. What are you doing here, I inquired, trying to get my bearings. She told me that she was meeting her friend to go to Nell’s, a popular spot with those “in the know” on 14th Street, and asked if she could come up to my place, which she knew was across the street, until it was time to see her friend.
Once upstairs, after some chit chat, she sat on my lap. We kissed. She coyly asked if I wanted her to come to my place after she and her friend parted ways that evening. I played it off by saying that if she did come over I didn’t want her drunk and laughed with the tingle of expectation.
Much later that night, my doorbell rang. She was very drunk. I told her she should go home and offered to put her in a cab. She refused, and went into my bedroom and lied down, fully clothed. I went and lied down next to her. Had she been less drunk, or I more so, we would have fucked. Of that I have little doubt. I was unable to close my eyes, let alone sleep. The next morning, I got her up and she left. I couldn’t go to work and called in sick. Within a very short period of time, I was stopping on 10th Street before going to work and picking up cocaine, going to work and doing coke in the bathroom, getting home and drinking and then shooting the rest of the coke and drinking some more. A short time after that, I went to Ince and told him that I’d gotten a diabetic ulceration in my amputation site and would have to go into the hospital.
I called up my psychiatrist who I’d stopped seeing by then and told him I had to see him. I had unraveled completely. He got me a bed for the next day and put me on a suicide watch. I’d done some pretty despicable things in my life but the worst was taking advantage of kids. Even though Goethe had said, There are no things which I can’t consider myself guilty my behavior had been too disgusting for even me.

I thought I must have been hard-wired to go through trying to get clean over and over and failing. Bukowski once said that suicide was very comforting because he knew that the cage was never completely shut. If I could have looked at it like he did, I would not be here now to tell this tale. I could not pull the proverbial trigger.
Once the booze and drugs cleared from my system and I felt better, the suicide watch was lifted. Unlike all my previous hospitalizations, I was in no hurry to leave. I called Ince from the hospital. He told me that he had to give away my program to another teacher but would make sure he’d find me suitable substitute work on an everyday basis when I was ready to return. I decided too, that the day I’d be released, whenever that day might be, I’d go to an NA (Narcotics Anonymous) meeting and called their local number to find where the closest was to my pad and what times they were held. In my new found commitment to honesty there was one important thing that I had to do: I had to speak to Jean.
Jean had come to the hospital one afternoon after I’d been there for a few weeks. She began telling me how hopeful she was that this time would be different and was sure, that although we’d been through a lot in our time together (which was nearing a decade), our love for each other... I stopped her and said, with as much sensitivity as I could gather at the time, that I did not think that what I felt for her was “love” in the way she wanted, and that she deserved to be “loved.” Moreover, I thought that it was best for her to move back to San Francisco and begin a life for herself where, if she was lucky, some man, who would be lucky as well, would fall in love with her without the strum and drang that our relationship had been burdened with. It took us two more years to disentangle from one another, but she did and it was the hardest thing I’d, up until that point, ever did with another person who I relied and depended so heavily on. The day she left and I watched her get into a cab I felt that a piece of my flesh was ripped away from my body. And I’m sure she must have felt the same.

I stuck to my plan. I went to an NA meeting the day I was discharged from the hospital, an unusually hot April day. I did not want Jean to meet me when I left the hospital. I wanted to do whatever I was going to do on my own. There was a three o’clock meeting on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. I walked in there and immediately smelled the disinfectant. I read the 12 Steps and 12 Traditions that were posted on the wall. They didn’t impress me. They were much like what I had heard and been taught during my time spent in Therapeutic Communities. My motivation for being there was strictly self-serving fear; I did not want to use again. At least not today. A few people, seeing I was “new” came up to me, introduced themselves, which increased my anxiety. They told me that I was “welcomed” and not to worry, which made me worry a little more. I went home that day and had dinner with Jean. Then I went back to a meeting the next day and the day after that. It seemed to work. I made a few friends and began going out to dinner and coffee with them. That seemed to work, too. I got, as they suggested, a “sponsor” and that seemed to work as well. Then I went back to work at Stuyvesant, which was more than a little awkward, especially when I’d run into the junior who I almost had a tryst with, but I was able to diffuse that situation. I was beginning to hope that things would work out.
“Hope in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up first,” the old saying goes. I’d managed to put some exterior structures in place: part time work, NA meetings, a few friends to socialize with, Jean and some help from my parents. And as long as my exterior looked good, I was able to twist, turn, repress and rationalize some of my internal concerns. I tried, when my internal conflicts arose to “keep it simple” as the program advises and my friends and sponsor suggested. I figured I didn’t need to “work” the 12 Steps, that I knew myself and had already written a memoir about the “sins and evils” of my past life. I rationalized that my parents support of me was similar to the Nazis reparations to the Jews. I knew, however, in my heart that I was, in the jargon of the program, “Taking the easier softer way.”
That fall I was surprised to be invited to my brother’s wedding. He was marrying a neighborhood Italian girl who he started seeing when in high school, and the on again off again romance had resulted in a wedding date after twenty some odd years. My brother and I, aside from our drinking and drug taking had not had a relationship. I’m sure due to some parental arm twisting I was invited.
Jean and I cabbed into Brooklyn. My parents came up from Florida. My father wore a striking rose-colored sport jacket influenced, no doubt, by the Jewish/Italian gangsters of Miami. I felt extremely awkward. And what with NA I knew I couldn’t drink. I was happy when the evening ended and my brother and his now wife was spirited away in a limo.
And so it went, one month passed; two became six; six a year, and then two. Jean had returned to San Francisco and I was having a difficult time accepting my role as a substitute teacher. I felt that I was baby-sitting. I was still frequenting The Cedar Tavern even though I wasn’t drinking and even though the program suggested no hanging out in bars. I felt I had to stay in contact with Joey Diliberto, one of the owners, who I’d grown close with over the past twenty-five years and who had indeed become closer to me than my brother. And so, one day at The Cedar, a regular there at the time, told me that a friend of his who owned a bookstore on Astor Place might be looking for a manager. I went to see him, told him some of my background, and he offered me the gig as the night manager. I was eager to leave my current job and turn a page.

In many ways I was back in my element: being around books, managing a retail operation in Greenwich Village, socializing with other ex-drunks and drug addicts, and going to The Cedar, the famed hangout of artists and writers since the 1950’s and having club sodas where present day drunks drank. Yet there were obvious changes in my life, too. For the first time in a very long time, I was really living alone; I’d stopped going to NA meetings and started going to AA meetings and consequently the “sober” friends and sponsor I had went by the wayside; I’d not had sex with anyone in over a year, and that part of me began to itch. Also, I’d developed a “frozen shoulder” a common, though painful, enough occurrence in diabetics and was referred to a shoulder specialist. When I told my new doctor how much pain I was experiencing he prescribed Viocdin. I reasoned that this was “legitimate” pain and I tried to diligently control that medication as I stretched and exercised the shoulder, but found myself either taking an extra pill occasionally or “predicting” when the pain would arrive and take one to ward it off.
“C’mon, Norman, balance. Don’t fuck around. Balance,” I admonished myself. It seemed to work. My shoulder unfroze. I patted myself on the back, and went on.

DETOXING IN & OUT OF HELL--FROM CHAPTER VIII--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Near Christmas, the real estate market, after years of unprecedented growth, tightened, much like the noose around our necks. My emotions, sloppy and unwelcome, found relief only when soothed or silenced by drugs and alcohol, in great quantities. This time, I went back to using heroin in conjunction with all other types of medications. Everyday, I’d go down to the alphabet blocks and find what I needed which would be bolstered by what I had at home, or could get from Paul. Each day presented a consistent configuration of misery, remembrance, anger, regret and avoidance--not necessarily in that order.
There were times when Jean would come into the bedroom and I’d be out cold, the needle still in my arm, blood trickling down from my vain and curling around my arm. At first, she’d run down to The Cedar Tavern and bring Dutch upstairs to discern if I was in trouble or not, but soon she’d become expert at being able to decide that on her own.
It was bad and it was ugly in the same and different ways. It’s grimly ironic that the outer world resembled my inner one. Sometimes, when I was able to stand outside myself and watch, it was hard for me to believe that it was me waiting under a bucket that contained mine, and the ten or twenty other drug addicts’ dope. The bucket would descend from the highest point, dropped by a person who balanced himself on a beam, inside the skeleton of an abandoned building of broken brick and wooden planks, and I’d watch myself watch the bucket as it came down from heaven with dollars exchanged for bags that honored the request for nepenthe. My inner world had become wizened and my imagination, my means of escape, lost the playthings so necessary for me to take flight: humor and music. I stopped listening to the latter and had subverted the former, the first and, for me, most important benchmarks in my spiritual decline. I became as boring and as predictable as bad writing. Don Quixote had wandered off, not to tilt at windmills or twirl golden curlicues of language, but to waste away in rigid habit and was tracked, not by Sancho Panza, but by Detective Joe Friday and his partner, Nurse Ratched.
My diabetes was addressed every day in this way: I’d take an insulin injection each and every morning, sixty-five units of NPH-U100 and then I’d ingest sugar, and heroin, and Luckys (“if that ain’t love it will have to do, until the real thing comes along,”). Processed love. Sugar, heroin, and nicotine coated my system and, to me, it was as important as breathing. In fact, one allowed the other to happen. If I thought that a giant condom would’ve protected me from the world in the ways that those substances did, I might have worn that as well, although I’d have probably put on my Floyd Patterson disguise. I’ve often wondered, and still do, that had I not used alcohol and drugs the way I had, would I have been alive to tell this, or any other tale. There is no way of answering that question, of course, but I’d be hard pressed to deny, out of hand, anyone’s desire to keep their life free of mood altering chemicals because of the problems they eventually cause if used in quantity over long periods of time.
My piss was white, thick, and heavy. When it mixed with the water in the toilet bowl, I could see it as a separate entity. I tried to discern how I was doing diabetically by the color of my urine; slightly yellow, or yellow meant I was better balanced than if it was white. Frequently, I’d develop what I labeled “junk hiccups.” I’d remember my first bout of heroin addiction when after a few days of constant use I’d hiccup furiously. The hiccup was sometimes accompanied by the “dry heaves.” Little did I realize that my system was so saturated with glucose that I was dehydrated. My body, having little nutrients to sustain it, coupled with a very high blood sugar count, was beginning to feast on its own proteins and fats, drying out my system. Hyperglycemia in its most crippling form. The body eats itself up. I’d drink ice water continuously to no avail. Only when the symptoms would cause me abdominal pain or other concerns like that would I slow down from my route of self-destruction and try to eliminate my use for a day, perhaps two, and eat something healthy. Even that, however, meant a bottle of wine with dinner in order to assuage my emotional brittleness. After the symptoms receded, I’d pick up where I left off. “What marvelous recuperative powers I still have,” I thought.
Periodically, Jean would reach her own point of saturation. She’d demonstrate that to me by throwing various things around the apartment in brief displays of frustration and anger, accompanied by a scream, yell, or curse. I’d ascribe various psychological determinants to her make-up depending upon the time of day, month, or year it was. She was tough as nails, a gun moll, and a man’s woman when I wanted her to go to the Lower East Side for me on a drug run. She was loyal if she covered for me, had great insight if she believed in my abilities to eventually right a listing ship. Or, she was a controlling bitch, doling out dollars to a suckling infant. Consumed by her own failure, she nurtured mine and truly believed in Hollywood’s sucker punch: love conquers all.
Jean would come home and ask me what I wanted for dinner. It would depend. It would depend on what drug I had, what drug I was shooting, what drug I wanted to get and when I wanted to get started. “You have to eat,” she’d say. I would confirm that but say I’d eat later. “Later,” sometimes meant never. “Eat” could mean a slice of pizza or Swanson chicken potpie or chocolate pudding, pie, cake or ice cream at six in the evening or three in the morning depending on nothing except circumstance. Often, after sleep would take me, I’d snap up in bed as if someone stepped on a dry twig, sweat sealing the blanket to me, dizzy, knowing I was in the grip of insulin shock but too disorganized to get out of bed and into the kitchen. I’d wake Jean. She took one look at me and knew what it was I was experiencing. She’d come back from the kitchen with soda and a Milky Way and stand over me as I ate and drank it down. She’d implore me to see Bernstein, and I’d shake my head affirmatively. She’d ask when, and I replied soon. She’d say I needed to stop, and I again nodded my head. We were all right. We were all wrong. We were helpless. Then Jean, who had never threatened to leave and who had never gave me ultimatums, did.
It was a day much like any other of recent months. I’d awakened with a knot of fear in the pit of my stomach and a sense of existential dread. It sounds (even to my own ears now) overly dramatic. It is not. Anyone who’s lived the life of an addict for any period of time can recollect what that fear felt like and, though words are more often than not inadequate to express that sense of dread I felt, it is enough to say that each moment I had to spend without the benefit of a buffer or analgesic was fraught with more than just a belief of impending doom. It was doom. An addict alone, especially an active addict, is in bad company.
Jean, I thought, had forgotten to leave me money for my day’s fix. I called her at her office, and when she told me that she was not going to do that anymore and that I should call Bernstein or anyone else who I thought could help me and take care of myself and by so doing would be taking care of her as well. I hung up on her. I was furious. The fucking nerve she had in telling me that shit now! The fucking nerve in telling me anything! Who the fuck did she think she was? I took in the sonofabitch and I can throw her ass out. I called her back and began to tell her a few of the things written above. She hung up on me. I thought for another moment and decided to change tactics. I called her up and told her we’d talk about this when she got home. She told me that wouldn’t do. Instantaneously, the fury returned. I called. Again, she hung up.
Jean had run the limit on her credit cards. I’d already kited enough checks to merchants and friends in my neighborhood to hold my own Ben Franklin convention. I walked upstairs and knocked on Paul’s door. Judy opened it and invited me in. When I asked where Paul was, she said he had gone to see his parents. She invited me to stay for coffee, but I had other things I had to do and thanked her. I left quickly. I made a few more calls but to no avail. Left with very few options, I called Jean.
After pleading, cajoling, lying, and wearing various guises masquerading as the truth, I convinced Jean that after hanging up on her I’d call Bernstein, level with him, and ask him to get me into Lenox Hill Hospital as soon as a bed was made available. It was only after that that she told me where she’d hidden some money in our apartment. Once Jean had divulged where that money enzyme was, my being turned to the broom closet, or couch, or mattress, or garment, honing in on its next task, breaking down the substrate so that digestion could occur. It could not wait to get her off the phone and fulfill its biological destiny.
My teeth brushed and money in hand, I went down to Eighth Street and Avenue D. They were selling a pretty good bag of dope there, Executive. It was cold but I hardly felt it, having my hand around the bills in my pocket.
I had enough money to buy a “deck” of heroin. It cost a hundred dollars and you’d usually get an extra bag for that amount. I gave the money to Willie, waited up the block for ten minutes and when he returned I gave him two bags from my purchase and we went our separate ways. Just having the scag in my hands the tension began to ebb. There is most definitely a physiological response before you ingest the dope; my bowels would loosen a little, a layer of sweat began to dry, my mind, geared for disappointment, betrayal, or apprehension, slowed down to where I could think of more than what I’d been obsessed over a second before.
Now, however, the walk back seemed too slow and unreasonable. There was a car service located near Tenth Street and Avenue B. Usually, a few cars were available, and for three bucks I had one drive me back to my apartment. Once inside, I thought for a few moments of all I could possibly do to delay dialing the numbers that would signify the beginning of the end of this drug run, before I decided to call Bernstein. After weighing the options I thought I had, I decided it would be better to play and manipulate this angle than any other. I’d fuck her, fuck him and fuck them! No one was going to tell me what to do without them paying a high price! The world had fucked me long enough, I thought. They’re not going to do that again without a fight from me. His receptionist told me he’d call me back within the hour. I’d be somewhat embarrassed to talk to him on the phone in an hour but I couldn’t wait without doing some of the dope. I proceeded to do what I’d hungered to do since I awoke and then waited for his phone call.
Bernstein had me come in the next day. This time I wasn’t sitting atop an examination table staring at the fish on his map, nor was I thinking of an opening line to say to him when he entered. This time, I was waiting to be called into his office like a wayward child or student about to be chastised. I wasn’t ready to give up the life, but I couldn’t let on to that. I needed to feel my way around this new set of circumstances while I figured out how it could best serve my demon.
After telling him what my life had been like these past few months, trying my best not to stink up the room with the stench of self-pity, I laid bare most of a rather boring and predictable life, which the life of a drunk or drug addict is when his habit supersedes all other entities of concern. The only facet of it that I embellished was the amount of junk I was using. I did this in expectation of his suggestion that I be hospitalized. The more heroin he thought I was using, the more methadone I’d be given to detoxify which would keep me sedated very nicely for a few more days.
Again, without criticism or judgment, Bernstein looked at me sitting across the desk from him and suggested I go into Lenox Hill Hospital. There wasn’t much more to say. I was eager to get from his office to Jean’s where, once I told her the process had begun to get a bed for me, she’d give me money to score more dope.
They got a bed for me two days after I saw Bernstein. In anticipation of that call, I waited and tracked down Paul. He supplied me with a few grams of coke which, I knew, would not be affected by the methadone they’d give me like heroin would be. Yet, on the day of my hospitalization, I was in the East Village getting as much junk as I could before reporting to the admissions office of Lenox Hill. I was supposed to be there at one P.M. but didn’t arrive until almost three because the connection I had took me and a friend of his to Williamsburg in Brooklyn to cop. He told me that the dope, which he’d had the night before, was much stronger there and the bags were bigger. We got into his friend’s car and drove over the Williamsburg Bridge. By the time we copped and drove back, I had snorted two bags and Jean, who had taken off from work that day to accompany me to the hospital, thought I’d gotten arrested or had died.
While Jean was in the living room calling Lenox Hill Hospital and telling them we were on our way and waiting for me to finish shooting a speedball into my arm and then throw some stuff in a bag to take with me, I secreted syringes, a spoon and Q-tips to go with some of the coke and the few bags of dope I had left, to the hospital. I joined her, lit-up by the cocaine pulsating through my body, wanting to do more but unable to, and we left for the hospital.

Lenox Hill Hospital is located on East 77th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. I had no idea of what I looked like in the the admission section filling out one of many forms but, if I thought about it at all, which I didn’t, I couldn’t have looked all too good. The heroin was as my connection said it would be, strong. My head was nodding forward as I wrote, no longer buoyed by the cocaine. With this knowledge came some skewered self-consciousness. I put the pen down and went into the bathroom where, after making sure the door was locked, I proceeded to shoot some of the cocaine I’d brought. It did what it was supposed to do, and I went out and sat down and tried to finish the questionnaire without getting up and going back to the bathroom.
Finally, I finished the forms and was taken up to a room where I was told someone would come into see me shortly and to get undressed and into a hospital gown and pajamas. I’d brought my own from home and once again went into the bathroom to inject more coke and the last of the junk before being denied the opportunity. I don’t remember how long I spent in there but I heard Jean’s voice asking if there was anything wrong and that a nurse was here to take my vital signs. Quickly, I placed the syringe, spoon and drugs in a pocket of my pajamas. I was sweating some by now and when I emerged, it took me some time to adjust to the light. I looked at Jean and then the nurse looking at me and felt humiliated. The nurse, in her early thirties I thought, came over to where I stood, unable to decide where I should go or sit, and said in a voice so low as to be just audible for my ears, “Have you ever tried N.A.?”
“Huh?” I replied.
“N.A. Narcotics Anonymous.” she said.
“No, I haven’t. Should I?” I said. By this time my eyes were closing without my ability to stop them while the coke was pushing the roller coaster the other way. Here I was being asked questions and trying to conduct a conversation, about what I had no idea.
“We’ll talk some other time,” the nurse said and guided me towards the bed where she took my blood pressure and left. Jean stared at me and finally asked, “How much did you take?”
“I don’t really know,” I replied, “but obviously enough,” and smiled this ridiculous smile.
“I meant how much did you take with you? Norm, maybe you should just get dressed and leave. I know I’m going to.” And with that, she got up and left.
For a few seconds, I sat on the edge of the bed watching the empty space that her body left. I thought for a few moments before deciding to go into the bathroom and use what remained of the coke. The last shot elevated my jitters and I, with syringe, spoon and empty vial in my pocket, left my room to find a suitable place to dispose of the evidence. It wasn’t too difficult and when I returned, a young doctor, probably a resident, was waiting for me with the same nurse who was there before. I knew she’d ratted me out, but I had nothing left to feel frightened about but was frightened nonetheless. He asked me the questions I expected him to, and I invited him to search the room and my belongings, which he did. I’d secreted my last bag of heroin underneath the tongue of my sneakers for use later that night knowing that by next day I’d have gotten the first dose of methadone, negating the properties of opiates. I was pretty manic while talking to this doctor, and he must have ordered a sedative because a few minutes after he left one was brought to me and, a few hours later another one was administered as well. Late that night, while the room was dark and only the little T.V. that was hooked-up next to my bed was playing, I did the last of the drugs I’d brought with me and began thinking of who I could call that would bring me more.
Bernstein came to see me early the next morning, but I was so out of it from what I had ingested and the other doctor ordered, that he took one look at me and said he’d be back later to talk. When he did return, I’d been given methadone and some other drug to help detox me and was pretty high from that. He told me that he planned to complete this process in ten days and then release me. He suggested that I take this opportunity to speak with someone in the hospital, a psychiatrist, whom he thought would be better able to help with this problem than he could. I thanked him but did not take him up on his offer. Instead, I spoke with the nurse about what she’d told me during the first time we met. She told me about N.A. and its antecedents. It was the first I’d heard about groups like that being for people like me and not those Bowery bums that I thought A.A. was designed and designated for. I told Jean about my plan for attending those meetings and did manage not to call anyone else to bring drugs in and, in a few days, when the effects of the methadone was no longer acting like another narcotic and my blood sugars were stabilized, I felt good enough to begin thinking that I could basically do this on my own and would get a job after they released me. I told this to Jean, and she was relieved that I was finally thinking this way and sounded committed to making our lives together work.

It was a wintry snowy day when, with Brasz, I went to an agency located somewhere in the garment district, to apply for a bartending job I’d seen advertised in the papers. I was depressed and miserable but, even though I was smoking a little reefer and drinking again, didn’t look too bad. And, as usual, we needed money.
The employment agency had one long and thin rectangular room. It had plastic folding chairs on both sides of a water cooler which had no water, although an empty bottle perched on top of the mouth. Mostly Hispanics sat on the chairs while others tried to find room by standing at odd angles. Most were smoking. I pretended I had an appointment and walked into the door that had the name of the gentleman I’d spoken on the phone with earlier. He was slightly perturbed when I pushed my way in, excusing myself, but saying we’d spoken. Maybe being white had something to do with his subsequent generosity, but whatever it was, he gave me a clipboard and a card to fill out and then directed me to the restaurant that was hiring staff. It was a new Lindys, once a revered name in Broadway’s legendary eateries, but now a chain store of many different restaurants and saloons owned and operated by the infamous Riese Brothers. They were known by those who worked in their restaurants or competed with them as bastards of the first order. Their ways of doing business were cut throat and how they treated their staff was supposedly worse. I needed a gig and, as mom used to say, when you’re hungry, really hungry, a shit sandwich tastes like filet mignon.
Their new entry was located in the corner of The Port Authority, facing 42nd. Street and Eighth Avenue. Brasz and I went there and I had a talk with Mr. Avinash, the General Manager, after I filled out more forms they required. After Avinash reviewed my application, he asked me what shifts I wanted and after I told him he gave me the job. It seemed too easy.
New York’s infamous Port Authority was a refuge to America’s lost and disenfranchised, was home to our nation’s homeless, was where runaways ran to, was a hub for those who worked in New York City but lived in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and all points between to enter and exit, was a way station, pit stop, and bathroom for the prostitutes, transvestites, addicts, hustlers, pimps and degenerates of all stripes and colors. The Port Authority. I was getting closer to Hell, at ground level. I could smell the sulfur.
The Port Authority provided enough street level drama to host it’s own television series. Like any port offering the exchange of people and goods and services, it operated on a 24/7 basis. This bred and fostered a culture of predators and victims, a brief and illusory haven for those who’ve left their own particular rendition of hell, and all manner of peoples who operate outside the boundaries of man or god. It was a place where I could practice what I was good at and attuned to, the observation of any and all manifestations of madness in, and outside, myself. The illusions, or delusions, that I had of myself were rapidly being punctured by the reality of where I was and what I was doing. No longer could I say I was here doing “research” on the underbelly of New York’s tapestry. No longer did I think that bartending was another form of the rough and tumble night life or food for the poet in me or vehicle for romantic interludes, each so necessary, alone or in consort, for me to believe I was Savage, somebody. Yet, here and now, there was no mistaking this for what it was and, what I was. I was working in a bus station, the lowest form of commercial transportation, in an area that could be described as a urinal or armpit. There were no beautiful ladies sidling up to the bar for a drink, no athletes, performers, entertainers or artists having achieved notoriety or struggling for some. Here, I was unable to dream. Here I was “somebody,” but all in lower case. Here was nowhere for me.
Having lived in Project Return, the next block over, during the early Seventies, familiarized me with Times Square and its habitués. My eyes, from the earliest of ages, were attuned to seeking out and finding the unusual, the perverse and, the illegal. They didn’t have to look too far.
My shift began at six and I arrived at four-thirty. I wanted to eat, look over the bar and get comfortable with how it was setup. Luckily, I had no pains in the ass beer kegs to tap. We sold only bottled beer.
The restaurant section of Lindys was adjacent to the bar and could be entered from the bar by a narrow passageway than ran the width of both or from two other entrances, one on 42nd Street and the other on Eighth Avenue. Windows wrapped around the entire establishment. The saloon could also be entered by a door on Eighth Avenue or directly from a door inside The Port Authority.
Mr. Avinash welcomed me that first night and showed me my locker. They required the staff to wear uniforms. I was given a bartender’s vest with a Lindy’s logo and a name tag. I’d always despised wearing anything that smacked of orthodoxy which smelled, to me, of stupidity. If I wanted you to know my name, I’d tell you. If you wanted to know my name, you’d ask.
I was allowed to order anything from the menu except steak, lobster tails, or roast beef cuts. I ordered a bacon cheddar cheeseburger, fries and, for desert, the famous Lindy’s cheesecake and coffee. The food wasn’t bad but tasted pretty much like the standard fare you’d get at a Greek diner except, here, you’d pay double the going rate. The waitress, Beth, was a willowy dyed blond, fortyish, with bad skin and dull brown eyes. She brought me my food and, with a tired air, welcomed me into The Riese Brothers’ family by saying, “Good luck” to a person about to walk his last mile. As I ate, I watched people peer in and enter Show World across the street. Show World was a multi-floored emporium of sex shows, peep shows, massage parlors, “Hot Lesbian Sex” shows and “Chicks With Dicks,” performances by transvestites. I’d never gone inside but was always curious. .
After I finished, I left a tip larger than what I knew most patrons would leave. Beth noticed and tried to give it back to me saying I didn’t have to do that. I know that, I told her, that’s why I did what I did and to stop in for a drink after she got off from work. It wasn’t that I wanted her to return the favor, which she did, but I wanted her to bring in her friends and coworkers if she could. She couldn’t.
Some people, as soon as you lay your eyes on them, you know they’re “wrong.” You realize that in their hearts some form of depravity beats. Tony, my partner behind the bar, had multiple forms. “DEVIANT” in that beautiful old faded technocolored neon was written across his forehead, with one or two letters half-gone or missing. No bigger than five foot four or five, he seemed like Kong behind the bar. He was the kind of bartender who served you but, if you paid attention at all, knew it was not him who served you, but you who, he believed, served him. You were there merely to either pay him or have your money taken.
Tony was an old time, died in the wool, drug addict and thief. In the two weeks I worked with him, I saw him do some wicked and disturbing things. The first thing he asked, after we were introduced, was whether I did any dope. He looked at me as if he were doing a personality profile and, without any wariness, asked that question many would not, even after being acquainted for a long time. When I put that observation in front of him, he waited a beat before saying, “It’s in your eyes. I know I can trust ya.” And that was that. After that, he told me he was stepping out for a bit to cop at The Peerless Hotel, a place on 43rd. Street, off Broadway, and a known heroin spot. He brought back a few bags for me. His other actions were, how can I say this without sounding like the hypocrite I sometimes am, fucked-up. When a woman would go to the ladies room, he sometimes snatched money from inside her purse if no one else was watching. When a man would leave for a few minutes to take a leak or call someone, the money he’d left on the bar would be a little light when he returned. One evening, he said to me that if business ever picked up in this “fuckin’ hellhole” to where they were raking in some “long green,” he was thinking about bringing in his own cash register to help divest them of some of their profits. I’d heard about another bartender doing that at an East Side saloon years ago and wondered if it was him.
Mr. Avinash would not change my hours, except to the graveyard shift. I’d have to come in at eight and work until four in the morning, even though we hardly had customers there until midnight. When I tried using my diabetes as an excuse not to work those hours, he answered me with a one word expletive, “Quit.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Tony announced to me the evening after that, “This fuckin’ bar is a drag. Can’t make enough bread to support a habit of a flea, you know what I mean?” I shook my head indicating that of course I knew what he meant. “But I’m goin’ outa here with my guns loaded, you know what I mean?” This time I did and didn’t know what he meant, but shook my head anyway. That night, besides going out to get his dope, he didn’t ring up one sale, (not that we had many of those), and, while saying goodnight and goodbye to me, he loaded five or six bottles of booze into a duffel bag and took them with him. I never saw him again.
Hardly anyone had made this a place to stop by for a drink except those who arbitrarily came in or those you didn’t really want to see after you saw them once. I used whatever money I made on drugs and left it to Jean to pay our expenses. My world had shrunk to this expanse of habit and, without sex, without music, without humor, was fast becoming necrotic.
One evening, towards midnight, I had one person sitting at the bar. He was one of my few regulars, a big, burly construction worker from The Grand Hyatt, then being built on 42nd Street and Lexington. He seemed nice enough, although we never spoke much. He was on his third or fourth J&B when a guy straggled in and, with nineteen empty stools in front of him, sat next to the construction worker. As he did, I could see the construction worker’s neck tighten, his shoulder’s haunch and his eyes lower. I went up to them and tried to position myself in such a way that I simulated a wedge between them and leaned forward and asked the guy if he wouldn’t mind taking another seat. The guy made no motion to move nor did he acknowledge that I’d even spoke but instead asked for a vodka tonic.
“You might have had enough,” I said.
“No, no I haven’t. I’m all right, I am,” he said. “Let me have one and then I have to be going.”
I looked to the construction worker who seemed as immovable as the buildings he worked on, and turned and made the drink. When I’d finished and turned back, the guy was trying to say something to the construction worker who was trying to pretend he wasn’t there. “Shit,” I said to myself, “this is not going to be good.”
“Hey Norm, get this fuckin’ guy away from me,” the construction worker said. But the drunk, if he heard anything, made no move nor did he respond. “Norman, I’m gonna hurt this fuckin’ guy,” he said again. “This motherfucker is lookin’ to get hurt.” I placed the guys drink three stools away from where he was.
“Hey pal, let me buy you this drink. Take a seat over here, would you?” I requested, but to no avail. I then went around where they both sat. The construction worker gripped me by the crook of my arm and brought me to his left side, furthest away from where the guy could see. He then opened a gym bag he had on his lap and lying on top was a .357 magnum pistol. He placed his ham-like hand around the gun and inserted his finger into the trigger, gripping the arm.
“If you don’t do somethin’ I sure as hell will,” he said in a voice without inflection.
“Don’t do nothin’, wait here. I’ll take care of this in a second,” I instructed. I hurried to the other side of the bar to the restaurant where we employed a security man, who had about as much desire to perform his duties as anyone would who earned minimum wage to protect profits and property that had nothing to do with them. Quickly, I told him the scene around the other end and to avoid something terrible just follow my lead.
We hurried to the other side and saw the guy still trying to say something to the construction worker who now had swiveled around in his stool with his back to the other guy. The security guard and I hurried over to where the guy was sitting, put our hands on the edges of the stool, picked it up with the guy sitting on it, and carried him down to the furthest end of the bar. The security guard stood over him, not letting him off the stool. When I turned around, the construction worker had gone, leaving some money on top of the bar and a bullet, standing straight up, next to his untouched J&B.
I couldn’t live any closer to Hell without taking up permanent residency. What money I was making was going into feeding my fiend. I decided not to go back to work there except to collect my thirty-six dollar pay check. Mr. Avinash asked why I hadn’t given them notice. “Notice this,” I said as I turned my back and walked away.

My fantasies of dying would present themselves at times that were often predictable but sometimes shocking. I’d lie in bed at night wishing to be diagnosed with an incurable disease that would legitimize my eventual death like cancer, or help explain my aberrant behavior, such as having a brain tumor. But then, while standing on a train platform I’d see the lights from the impending iron horse approaching and, in a instant, imagine myself caught, in flight, across the light’s beam, splattered against the face of the oncoming beast. Sometimes, I’d laugh at the romanticism I’d given my demise but too often the truth of my despair had soiled whatever humor or irony I could generate. These thoughts, or fantasies or what some psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers or watchers of Oprah, would call suicide ideation, were not new to me. I’d had them at least since puberty, after I became diabetic. I’d never had anyone in my family offer words or actions that showed empathy or understanding in regard to my diabetes while cancer, brain tumors, leukemia and the like were fawned over, loved, understood and respected. I’ve no idea if that fact alone shaped some of what I’d become, but certainly I am sure that diabetes was, at that time, too slow a death for me and not nearly romantic enough for me to appreciate.
Perhaps, it’s not the flash of brilliant intuitive insight that lights the inter cranial sky like lightening across a hot dark humid summer late afternoon day, but the slow, almost imperceptible, accumulation of knowledge that prompts one to action. Or perhaps it was instinct; perhaps, it was just animal, protean instinct wrapped and honed in Twentieth Century human garb that appeared when my sixth digit disappeared.
Unfortunately, my mind, maddeningly ambivalent, made it difficult to decide and act, even though the evidence was overwhelming. Fortunately, money, always a prime motivator in my decisions, once again came to the fore. Having little of my own and Jean having money only to keep our bills paid and relatively up to date, prompted me to call Bernstein’s office and make an appointment. This time, I did not ask to speak with him. This time, there were no discussions weighing the merits of this and that. This time, I was not sanguine about my life after I cleaned myself up. This time, I didn’t know what came after “this time.”
Sitting opposite Bernstein I tried not to lie. I laid out for him, in detail, my diet of heroin and processed sugars, my constant depression but left out my thoughts of suicide. As I was talking, I could feel being tugged at by my demons who didn’t want me to let go of my sickness. That’s how they get paid. “Tell him this, but not that; offer to go into a hospital, but not right away. Bargain with him; negotiate this. You’re smart, see what you can arrange to stay out, just a little bit longer.”
“I wish I knew more about addiction,” Bernstein began, “but I do know something about diabetes. I’d like to put you in Montefiore Hospital, consult with some doctors there who do know about addiction, detoxify you and get your diabetes stabilized. After that if you feel, after speaking with some people up there, that you need a drug program we’ll discuss that, or if there’s outpatient alternatives, we’ll discuss that. What I do know is a program that’s just come to New York City, The Diabetes Self-Care Program, and I think it’s something you’d benefit greatly from, once we get you stabilized.”
“Yes, it’s something I’m interested in, but geez Jerry, Montefiore, the Bronx?”
“How far would you go to get some heroin Norman? C’mon will you,” he said impatiently.
“I’m sorry, I sound like an asshole. Get me a bed, please.”
“It might take a little time, but hang in there.”

Jean came home and I told her of my decision. “I’m relieved,” she said.
There was nothing to do now except wait for the phone call...and use drugs.

pgs 179-186: From Chapter VIII: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE CRUST OF ADDICTION, INSIDE THE PLAYPEN--FROM CHAPTER VI--CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

My folks were, by now, suspicious. My behavior and appearance looked and sounded all too familiar. While in Lenox Hill Hospital, a friend of the family, the same person who had assisted in getting me into New York City Community College, had recommended a psychologist, Dr. Irving Handelsman. After some prompting I made an appointment. I called and spoke with him, but before I could see him, I would have to take some psychological tests on 86th Street. He’d see me a week after that.

Christmas morning, 1972. Diane had gotten up first to go home and change. We were going to The Palm Court in The Plaza Hotel for brunch and then out to her family’s home in Princeton, New Jersey. I made sure that although I was spending more and more money on junk, I’d have enough to cover the tab at The Plaza. I was running with Raymond on my lunch hours up to Harlem to score. When I couldn’t go with him, he brought the stuff back to me. I got up, lit a Lucky, went into the bathroom, shaved, showered...and fixed. I remember putting on a Billie Holiday album and listening to some of her last recordings on Verve, when she was singing with Ben and Sweets, The Hawk, and the rest, sounding oh so old and young in the same moment. It was rumored that she would have to drink a fifth of scotch just to get her vocal chords to loosen before she could attempt to sing. If you could sing like that, would you make a pact with the devil? Would you be willing to live with that amount of pain in exchange for the jolts of ecstasy that come with living life a few speeds below God? I will never know, of course, what it felt like playing Bird’s alto break on Night in Tunisia, nor Billie’s way of twisting the word love around her tongue and mouth like she invented and owned, not only the existence, but the essence of it. However, I do know something about hitting the right chord with a word or sentence that came from a place I knew nothing of, and that’s magic enough for me. And so, I sat on the corner of the bed and listened while she sang, and I tried to sort out why the love of a beautiful and smart and talented woman, the talent that I obviously had, but just as obviously did not believe in and thwarted, that the friends, the job, the family, was not enough to dissuade me from doing what every fiber and bone in my body was telling me to do: destroy it.
Diane looked lovely when she came back to the hotel. We walked to The Plaza and then into The Palm Court. There is something eerily beautiful on holiday mornings in New York City, especially to those who live here year round with little or no means of escape. It is quiet and respectful. The hotel was decorated in plush reds and greens burnished woods and plants and ferns small and large and larger, Christmas trees and Christmas wreaths as centerpiece and ornament giving one the impression that this was how it looked for as long as The Plaza had been in existence. The attention to detail was still there. The silverware weighed heavy in your hand; the dishes were china, the glass, crystal; the service effusive; the food wonderful and plentiful; the cost...worth it.
We cabbed it to Penn Station and caught the train to Princeton. Her parents, she explained, were “disappointed” with her over her two divorces and lack of a “real job,” which translated into “failure” in their worldview. She needed, in their humble opinion, either by benefit of marriage or her own endeavors, to achieve financial independence and so carve a place in this world that would be a hedge against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. “Jewish guilt or Catholic, what’s the difference?” I thought, they were “all variations on a theme.” Today, however, I felt removed. After all, it wasn’t my family we were visiting. But I was curious to observe the dynamics of this family. For to watch heredity in action is fascinating, even when you don’t know a person very well. However, it’s enthralling when you not only know that person, but love them as well.
I was Woody Allen, to Diane’s Diane Keaton, in Annie Hall that afternoon. I felt like a Jewish caveman coming from the brisket of beef emotionalism of my family to the clipped-edged bread of Diane’s folks. Her father, dressed in a worn cardigan, button down shirt, corduroy slacks and loafers, sat in his old glove of an armchair and hardly turned his head when we came in. You might think he saw his daughter just this morning instead of last Easter. She went over to him, he nodded hello, and allowed her to kiss him on the cheek. He turned his head when she introduced us. I went and shook his hand. I asked him how he was, he said, “Fine, thanks.” and that was that. Her mom was a little more demonstrative and friendly, but not much. As nuts as my parents are, I thought, is preferable to this ice. But what the hell is “preference” in this regard? I “prefer” to get shot by a cannon instead of a bazooka? I “prefer” to get cancer instead of leukemia? Fucked is fucked. Sometimes, our sight is limited to only what we can see.
We stayed as long as was necessary. I don’t remember much about their home, the dinner, the conversation, or the ride back to the train station. Diane and I spoke about our families and how each was crazy in its own way, whether suffocating close and overprotective, or cold, aloof and castigating, each family induced feelings of failure and guilt. Merry Christmas, and pass the heroin, please.

That Tuesday, it rained all day. A cold and dirty New York City rain was falling when I left to meet my father at Handelsman’s office. I asked Diane to come along, though I told her to wait for us at a pub across the street, on Lexington Avenue and 38th Street.
My father was already there, sitting on the edge of a sofa with his back to me, talking with Handelsman. Handelsman saw me and motioned me inside. I took a seat in a swivel chair, at the farthest end from them. He looked like who he was: a retired Naval officer, in his late fifties, of medium height, well built, close-cropped bristle of gray hair on top of penetrating blue eyes. He spoke in short, direct sentences. My father turned to face me. I knew something was wrong. “Norman, no sense in wasting time--your time, my time or your father’s money--I think you should go into a drug program, tonight if possible,” Handelsman said, looking directly at me.
I paused, for effect. “What are you talking about? I’m not using any drugs, what are you talking about?”
“You’re trying to bullshit me and your father, but I’m not buying it and I hope he won’t either. I got your tests back. I’m going to say it again: Immediately, tonight if possible, go into a program, full time, 24 hours a day. It’s the only thing that we’ve seen work with addicts. And you’re an addict, no doubt about that.”
I puffed up, pretending I was egregiously wronged. “Listen, I don’t know why you’re saying that, but I’m not using drugs. I’m smoking some reefer, but I ain’t using dope and I resent you saying I am.”
“Resent it all you want,” Handelsman continued, stone cold sober, looking at me like he could see through me--which, of course, he could. “You’re shooting that shit into your veins right now. The only successful therapy for you is in a program.”
“I’m not going into a program. Why can’t you treat me?”
“I can’t. You’ll come once or twice because you’re curious, or maybe looking for magic, and then stop. You can’t do anything that’s difficult right now, and therapy is difficult. I can’t treat you; you’re simply not old enough. Emotionally, you’re just an infant, not old enough for therapy. But go into a program, complete it, and come back after you’re clean, then I can help you.”
“I’m not going into a program,” I protested. The lights in the room were starting to spin. I could not look in their eyes. My father, who had been staring at me, now turned to Handelsman.
“What should I do doc?” he asked him.
Handlesman faced him squarely and said, “Don’t be an asshole. Do him some good, but most importantly do yourself and the rest of your family some good. Cut him off. He’s been sucking on your tit for too long anyway and as long as your tit is out there and it’s fat with milk he’s going to keep on sucking it until it’s all dried up. He’ll never get any help and will probably die. I can’t make it any plainer than that.” He turned to face me and continued, “Grow up and get some help Norman, then maybe we can do something and you can be something.” With that he stood up.
Outside, I said to my father, “He’s fulla shit. I’m using a little pot, that’s all.”
My father looked long and hard at me and said, “Don’t lie to me willya? Jesus Christ, just don’t lie to me. I feel so stupid. So much like a jerk. You know that expression, Fool me once I’m a fool, fool me twice you’re a fool?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
He wanted to say something but stopped short. I thought he wanted to have someone beat the shit out of me like I had seen him do many times to those he caught stealing from him, even those who had worked for him for many years, perhaps, especially them. But all he said was, “The car is parked in a lot a few blocks from here. I’ll drive you back.”
“Diane is with me; I want you to meet her.”
“I’ll get the car and meet you on the corner.” He walked away and for the first time I could detect a slight slouch in his gait.
Diane sat in the back seat on the way to The Navarro. I noticed him looking at her in the rear view mirror. I couldn’t tell if he was attracted to her, impressed, or just wondering why a woman like that was with me to begin with. If one were to look inside the car at the three figures sitting in there, no one would have guessed that we knew each other at all.

My use escalated in proportion to my fear and, I became reckless, going up to Harlem alone and at odd hours. I saw ghosts in doorways, cops in rain gutters, and stickup men and murderers waiting for me around every corner. I felt something was coming and it was coming soon.
One day to the week after the meeting with Handelsman, my parents came to my room. They looked pretty beaten themselves. “Norman,” my father began, “we’re letting you go: no money, no contact with us and especially with your brother. We’ve already sat “Shiva” for you. (“Shiva” is the Jewish word for the period when a family sits in their home for a week mourning the death of a family member.) I, we, your mother, and me want what’s best for you...and for us...always have. We want you to go into a program, but that’s up to you. We just wish you good luck.” They had stood the whole time. Now they both turned and, without saying another word, left.
I was stunned, but to keep from becoming hysterical, I used some of the junk I had stashed in my room. In fact, whether or not they would have cut me off or had given me thousands of dollars would have mattered hardly at all. For alcohol and drugs, by this time, was a prelude to, or an ending for everything. If I felt lousy, I used. If I felt good, I used. In order not to get too high, or too low, I used. I had long ago passed that line of demarcation where chemicals were used to enhance or alter my experiences. Now I used them to not experience, and used heroin because I simply did not want to feel.
But for a moment I panicked. I felt the air was being sucked out of me. I called Areba. They would not even talk to me without a deposit from my father. I called my mother. She told me there was nothing she or anybody else could do, and hung up. After a period of time, I calmed down and tried to figure my next move. My rent was paid through December, another week and half. I’d move in with Diane. I still had stolen merchandise to take back for cash, and I still had a gig. “O.K. don’t panic, you’re cool for a few weeks anyway,” I told myself and further admonished, “Get some fuckin’ backbone, will ya?”
New Years Eve, 1972. I was now out of The Navarro and living with Diane. I’d been able to lie to her for the time leading up to moving in with her about my stopping to use, blah, blah, blah, but I knew, in my heart, that Handelsman was right. I needed a 24 hour residential program to watch my ass constantly if I stood any shot at all at beating this fucking demon, but I also knew that I would not go in anywhere as long as I had a dollar in my pocket, a roof over my head, and a way to go. Steve, my old Seagate buddy, had invited us over to his apartment in Brooklyn, on Shore Road, overlooking the Verranzano Narrows Bridge, that I’d seen being built from my bedroom window in the early 60’s, to celebrate the new year. Neither of us felt much like celebrating, but we went because the alternative of being alone with each other was getting to be worse. I had a few bags of dope which I used before he picked us up and kept one for later. Raymond and I had spoke before about hooking up later in the night. Drug dealers were always more generous on the new year, and we didn’t want to miss what could be dope heaven. So with one foot planted in the past, another in the here and now, and a third waiting until I could make an excuse to leave, I sat and tried to tolerate the next few hours.
It was a small gathering. Donny and Tony and their girlfriends, Steve and his future wife, and Diane and I. To be honest, I don’t remember much of what we spoke about. I just kept watching the time and waiting. Finally, I went into his bedroom and called Raymond. Then, I went over to Steve and told him flatly that I needed to leave to meet someone and get some junk. Donny, seemingly disgusted with what I had turned into, kept his distance. “Fuckem,” I thought. I’d always remembered a line from B. Traven, Morals is the butter for people without any bread. Steve said he’d drive us back. I made no apologies but said “goodbye” and left. Diane, who could not as yet identify, nor articulate what she was feeling, sat beside me and understood that this was what it was, a struggle, a battle of herculean proportions. What she hated was her powerlessness to stop me, her inability to do battle with an inanimate substance that I’d invested with so much power over me, that was larger than this life, a life that was filled with betrayals, insecurities and fears. Steve dropped us off on 23rd Street and sped off. He would have stayed with me all night if I let him. I put Diane in a taxi and walked across the street to Raymond’s building, buzzed twice, buzzed again, and waited.

New Years week, Diane and I went to The Museum of Modern Art, to see an Avedon retrospective. I stared at his picture of Pound, with all those meaty creases in his face, his eyes were mad and beautiful and suffused with grief, fucking grief. I was done. I was just waiting for somebody to stop me. We walked back on this cold January night along Fifth Avenue from 53rd to 91st Street not saying much. There was nothing much to say. I told her how well we fit together, how our hips and flanks rubbed against each other walking and how we were probably thinking the same thoughts. She squeezed my hand tighter. Both of us knew the end was near, but we didn’t know how it would be played out.
The next day at work I noticed shoppers hanging around the book department who seemed “off.” They seemed to be watching me as I went from my register to the back to get change. Some of them who left turned up hours later. I knew it was time to leave. And I did.
Diane came home that day from work to find me in her bedroom shooting junk. Enraged, she slapped my arm that held the syringe. The needle ripped from my vein and landed on the floor. I sprang up and slapped her across the room. It was the worst thing I had ever done to a woman in my life, much less one I loved. I sat down on the edge of the bed and just stared. She came and sat beside me. “Norm,” she almost whispered while stroking my head, “I love you, but you’re going to have to do something. I’ll help you, but it’s you who’s going to have to do it. But, I have to tell you, whatever you decide to do, you can’t do it here.” She went into the bathroom to wash her face. When I heard the water running I went, picked up the syringe, injected the junk into my other arm, and told myself something I’d been saying for many, many years: “Tomorrow.”

Paula, the woman who had told me about Areba at Addiction Services Agency, now told me about programs that were free: Phoenix House, Daytop Village and Project Return. Both Phoenix House and Daytop were 12 to 24 months while Project Return was nine. Phoenix House was still shaving heads (a punitive measure designed to penetrate the denial system of hard core addicts), and Daytop’s therapeutic community was located in upstate New York. Still thinking like an addict, I opted for the shorter program.
Project Return’s storefront was in Hell’s Kitchen, on Ninth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Chris Maples, the director of this facility, was a big, white, walrus looking man in his early thirties. He didn’t speak as much as he drawled, like he was from the midwest instead of the city where he’d grown up. The storefront was a small, ugly establishment that, upon entering, had a desk and a few chairs. There was a larger section in the back room that was setup like a classroom with many cheap folding chairs and a blackboard. I sat opposite Chris as he explained how they could arrange a hospital for me to detox in or I could go to a hospital of my choice. Either way I had to come in “clean.” “There’s something else that you should know about, Chris,” I said.
“Lay it on me,” he responded, deadpan. It seemed he had heard it all.
“I’m diabetic; I use insulin, needles, syringes everyday. I need to eat pretty much on time, need certain...”
“Whoa man, hold on a second...wait a minute baby,” he said with his mustache curling into a smile. “You mean to say,” he continued, “that you ate good out there shootin’ dope? You were really picky about what kind of food you’d put in your mouth...and takin’ care of your sickness man, that was a real priority?...are you sayin’ that to me?”
I stammered a bit, felt embarrassed but finally said, “Well, not really, but I do have to eat right, that goes hand in hand with what I have to do and I thought...”
“Yeah, I know what you thought, but don’t think too much--that’s what got you in so much fuckin’ trouble to begin with. We’ll take care of your fuckin’ diabetes man, and the food, well, it ain’t from the fuckin’ 21 Club but you’ll survive. Either you want to do this thing or your bullshittin’ yourself.”
“No man, I ain’t bullshittin’ myself; I just wanna make sure.”
“I know what you’re tryin’ to do, and I know what you’re really trying to do even if you don’t. You want to clean up but you’re gonna make it so hard that you say to yourself, ‘How can I do this man, I gotta take care of myself and this and that bullshit and sooner or later you’re gonna run yourself right out the fuckin’ door man, and into a bag of junk. Now, just get yourself detoxed and we’ll help you do the rest. You won’t eat like you did in the past, but you won’t starve either. And whatever you need, if we don’t have it, we’ll get it. Now get the fuck outa here, and call me when you’re ready to be discharged and I’ll have a staff member pick you up at the hospital. I don’t want you to spend one fuckin’ day by yourself on the street. You got that?”
“Got it. And thanks.”
“Don’t thank me for shit. I did nothin’ to get a thanks for.”
“Then thanks for nothin’.”
“Get the fuck outa here already, and try not to kill your stupid self before you get into a detox.”
I left as the next beaten up, thin, Puerto Rican took my seat at Chris’ desk, and the process began all over again. It was January and it was cold. Junkies had a harder time navigating the streets in the winter. Residential programs might be a pain in the ass, but they usually had heat.
Back at Diane’s, I made two phone calls, the first to a woman who I knew had detoxed a little while ago. She said Mt. Sinai was pretty good. She used the word “pleasant” to describe her stay. The next phone call was to Carol to ask if she was holding any dope. She was, and I went over and got some.
After a weekend of waltzing around each other’s feelings, Monday was almost welcomed, even though it meant I was going to Mt. Sinai to be admitted and Project Return after that. I imagined myself a convict about to turn himself in. I can’t help it. I’m always looking for romance, no matter how mundane and pedestrian the situation is. Besides, living it is always more boring or horrific than remembering it.
Sitting across from the admissions person in the emergency room, I had the distinct feeling that Mt. Sinai did not want to deal with drug addicts. They liked their nuts “shelled” not messy, unpredictable, intractable and “borderline” as drug addicts were generally classified in those days to be, and maybe even now as well. They had an outpatient service for addicts I was told. Quickly, I told the gentleman that only that morning I had been in a train station and imagined myself jumping into the oncoming express. He found a room for me.

They really weren’t equipped to deal with a drug addict. A psychiatric wing in a hospital is equipped to treat with a host of mental illnesses such as the many forms that depression can take, schizophrenia of certain varieties, affective and personality disorders that Jean be part of a chemically dependent persons’ profile. But chemical dependency, if that is the primary disorder, is not something that traditional hospitals were prepared for in 1972. I believe Dr. Otto Kernberg coined the term, “Borderline Personality Disorders.” The border that exists between neurosis and psychosis. I’ve always considered it more than just ironic that artists have defined the internal condition much quicker than scientists have. Maybe Homer predicted it all, but a wonderful saxophone player, Dexter Gordon, who played in “’Round Midnight,” wrote a tune in the 40’s I think titled, “Disorder At the Border,” intuitively felt “borderline.” Dexter, interestingly enough, was a drunk. At that time the professionals had not yet integrated the psychobiology, neurobiology, and the field of psychoanalysis that are now regarded as the cutting edge in treating these disorders. Now there is a scientific basis that during the period, usually preverbal, that the child’s body, in its reaction to stress--whether one traumatic episode or a cumulative series of episodes--in an effort to restore balance, “dissociates” from that stress or “object” and then “splits off” from that object which can, and often times does, result in lifelong patterns of reacting to external and internal stresses. It has been equated to an early condition of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Scratch the surface of an addict of any kind, and you’ll more likely than not, find the Janus face of “mom” deep deep into the abyss staring back at you. I wonder if that’s what Nietzshe had in mind. Addicts, as borderline personalities often are, were not good candidates for traditional verbal therapy because of their low tolerance for frustration. They were not, on the whole, very verbal in regard to identifying feelings because their traumas had taken place before they had the ability to speak; a primitive or archaic trauma(s), and usually, when they could identify what they were feeling, ran from it. They were not particularly good candidates for pharmacological interventions because of what drugs did for, and to them. In short, they were a very difficult population for traditional modes of psychotherapy and psychiatry at that time. Mt. Sinai did know enough about addiction to detox me using methadone. The process lasted about a week. Aside from individual therapy with a psychiatric resident and his attending physician, there wasn’t much else with the exception of getting my diabetes under control. My blood sugars were stabilized by keeping me on a restricted diet and, after the drugs started to leave my body, my head cleared. That was a good, and not so good, thing. I felt lighter, faster, but now, in a rush. An addict wants things yesterday, and since they had what I thought then was a “basket-weaving” approach to mental illness, I reasoned I could speed up the process. The sooner I could get out, the sooner I could go through Project Return, and the sooner I could get out, the sooner I could get back with Diane, and the sooner I could do that, the sooner I could get back with my family, and everything would be O.K. In not so many words I told this to the attending psychiatrist assigned to me. He persuaded me that just honoring a three and a half week commitment would be a step in the right direction. I couldn’t argue with him, although his interns also benefited from my decision. Fifteen of them were able to probe a white, Jewish, articulate, college educated dope fiend in sessions lasting an hour at a time. Their inquisitions felt like a beehive of dentists looking for cavities with those little silver hooks. I stared into those scrubbed-faced, bright-eyed interns and saw what a disappointment I must have been to my folks and, twisted role model for my brother. They listened to my story, asked questions, and split. Not even a “thank-you” at the end. I guess they’re used to working on cadavers which, as long as it’s nobody they knew, or love, are free of reciprocity and are, best of all, wordless.
Hospitals in general, and psychiatric wings in particular, are fascinating places. Our minds are so eccentric and so wonderfully misshapen that lending, or trying to lend, order to them so that they might function in a disordered, irrational, inchoate world leads, most directly, to many complications. I had the chance to see, and in some instances get close to, other patients struggling for equilibrium in this topsy-turvy world. There was beautiful Valerie, a fifteen year old who had the body of a ballerina, a mind of her own, and a wildness of will. Coming from divorced Park Avenue wealth, she’d had a history of running away and finding men in bars who would take her home, fuck her, and throw her out. Brad, a sixteen year old, acne faced introvert, also from divorced Fifth Avenue old money, found men to seduce and then hurt him, and had come down from a preparatory school near Saratoga, to play havoc with his body and family. Mr. Patrick, a grizzled sixty year old who, when I first met him, couldn’t talk and had to be fed by the orderlies and, after many shock treatments, began to see a curtain lift. The others wore paper slippers and did the “ol’ thorazine shuffle,” where they’d walk along, holding a railing, spit dribbling down their chins, not knowing, or caring, where they were or why they were there. And there was Carol, twenty something, who fucked interns, residents, doctors, orderlies, nurses, and anything else that showed a pulse. She had tits I wished the horses I’d bet on had for noses. We laughed and sang and tried to sort through the mess that we found ourselves in. We all walked through the same fire, but our flesh burned differently. Some people never see this side. What boring lives they must lead.
My fantasies, before sleep would claim me, were, as I view them now, childish, grandiose, bourgeois, and, finally, when all is said and done, delusional. The only thing now that keeps my embarrassment at bay is that it was simply the truth. And to me, as I recall and recollect, touching. It took a lot of work for me to be able to say that now, but at that time I’d imagine myself strong, healthy and responsible. Responsible to my diabetes, and responsibly concerned for my family. I’d imagine myself going into Project Return and coming out the other side with the riches of the world before me. I’d be driving a Porsche again, with Diane beside me, as we’d tool through a countryside, bucolic and inviting, my accomplishments, fused and translated into status and stature. I’d have the respect of artists, and the notoriety that accompanies success on the grandest of stages. I’d make up for the terrible anguish I had put the people who loved me through. We’d all be together again, this time out of love and desire and not out of a need that bordered on sickness. It does not make me proud to say that, but this work would be a lie if I didn’t.
Besides a young do-gooder social worker, who kept persisting that she be allowed to get in touch with my parents to facilitate a “constructive dialogue” between us and whom I had to tell that should she get in touch with them without my permission I would find her and strangle her in the night and probably get away with it since I happened to be in a “fuckin’ nut house” at the time, I had a pretty good stay at Mt. Sinai. Besides using the time to heal emotionally, there was a gym upstairs that allowed me to physically heal and get stronger as well.
February is Diane’s birthday month. She visited me on a frigid evening, looking beautiful and wearing a coat she loved, a fur, three quarter length, very elegant. Eyes followed her wherever she went, but on this night there was an added sensuality that made you, whether man or woman, consciously or not, follow her sight and scent until they no longer registered. We walked into my room where I kissed her lightly and wished her a happy birthday. She took my hand and led me into the bathroom, closed the door, and leaned her back against it. I smiled as she untied the belt and slipped the fur from her shoulders. There was nothing else to undo after that.
The day before I left, I spoke with Chris Maples at Project Return, and arranged for a staff member to be there when I got discharged. I didn’t want to give myself one day out on the street. I thanked some people for what they had done for me, gave out and took some phone numbers, and left. Maxwell, a young black staff member, accompanied me to the Induction Facility on Forty-Eighth street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. But first, before getting there, we stopped for a hamburger; the first real food I had had for three and a half weeks and the last real food I would have for months.

pgs 88-94--From Chapter VI, THE DESCENT: JUNK SICK: CONFESSIONS OF AN UNCONTROLLED DIABETIC

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015