I started dating (let’s call him Bruce) the summer after my sophomore year of high school. He would pick me up from my embarrassing job at Panera Bread. He didn’t drive—one of his friends was always at the wheel but it was clear he called the shots; he may as well have been driving.
He’d just graduated high school.
We had two mutual friends, though we never overlapped in any way until the late Spring of that year. But I had an impression of him before I knew him; just bits and pieces.
He was built like a bull (not my type) and back before I knew him he would stand by the doors before homeroom asking for change to buy cigarettes. People called him “angry Bruce” and he did look angry.
He liked Nirvana and Alice in Chains and whenever he wasn’t asking for change he was riding shotgun in someone’s car with his arm slung out the window, blasting his grunge music.
It was well known that he’d kissed the prettiest girl in town: I remember that very clearly. They had a brief “thing” because she liked to do coke and he was the kind of guy who could get coke.
The prettiness of this girl played a role in my interest. He called her by her hair color, which added a certain sexiness to my understanding of their brief “thing”.
I felt unbearably jealous when he told me, at the beginning of our mutual interest, that she actually caused a car accident when she crossed the street in a short pleated skirt. He got around to flattering me in just the right way, drawing a likeness between my face and the face of this car-wrecking cheerleader, and I agreed to be his girlfriend.
His mother was dead and he lived with his stepfather and, as he said, “my stepdad’s bitch,” in the basement of a tasteful house in the coveted, upper middle class part of town.
He wanted to be a journalist. Hunter S. Thompson was his hero. In the fall he would move into the dorms at Salem State.
In a shitty twist of fate he became fixated on me the same season he became fixated on heroin (that summer), and my weekends were spent in cars driving to North Reading, where he lived before his mother died and had a few friends who got him into heroin, and that’s where we headed when he wanted it.
I only met this particular friend of his once. He came to our town one night because his mother found a syringe in his bean bag chair. He looked like a child, and he didn’t say much. We were at our mutual friend’s house, in the only room where we could smoke cigarettes and watch TV without parental disturbance. There was a fishtank, and he ran his finger across the glass, following the one fish, only looking up when he was directly addressed. It made me want to cry. My friend noticed it too; she said, “did you see him with the little fish? That was so sad”.
When we were in North Reading, I stayed in the car with whoever was driving.
Sometimes he came out of that house high, after longer than usual, and sometimes we’d trample up into the woods and he’d get high there. I was happy to just sit and smoke cigarettes, laughing with them, completely oblivious to what was going on in their bodies when they were sniffing and smoking this and that. He was happy when he got, as he called it, “fucked up.” And it was a contagious sort of happiness.
He never offered me any and I never asked. When we were in a bigger group it was the same; for some reason, he was the only one who ever did heroin.
Nobody lectured him. He wasn’t the type of person who could be swayed.
We had fun. It was a fun summer.
In the fall I started at my new school, and he slowly stopped going back to Salem for class.
My memory gets hazy around the timeline of things. I know we saw Open Water in 2004, when it came to the local theater which perpetually operated about six months behind the mainstream theaters. I know that was around the beginning. I know that I found it more unsettling than he did–the thought of a couple being stranded in the deep of the ocean as a storm comes in.
He was born in May. He would be 39 years old now.
Bruce liked horror; didn’t scare easily. We also saw The Grudge.
I made one friend in the fall of my Junior year. A pretty girl who loved musical theater and was dumped by her boyfriend very suddenly, right around the time we became friends. She cried on my shoulder and sometimes I told her about Bruce and his heroin. He was back at school but eager to leave every Friday, to see me and to do heroin. My new friend had a car and somehow he convinced her to do the tedious drive to pick it up a handful of times.
She was the first person to directly express an appropriate level of concern regarding Bruce. She was also a bit sanctimonious, which I hated; my annoyance lightened the newly clear concern, but it was there. A new sinking feeling.
Bruce got quite depressed at school as the days got shorter and the weather made the summer woods unpleasant on the weekends.
It all progressed as you might expect.
He became needy, he started overdosing, he sensed my distancing and began a truly devious campaign to keep me byway of making me believe I was the only reason he wasn’t already dead. He said, possibly more than once, “I tied off my arm the other day and the only thing that kept me from shooting it was the thought of you”.
It all got increasingly dramatic. He called my home phone line from the emergency room more than enough times for my parents to get the impression that he wasn’t really good news. He dropped out of school. He got kicked out of his stepfather’s basement. He worked a substantial number of hours at a local pizza place, but he spent his check on heroin, and he sort of faded from couch surfing into homelessness.
His half brother went to the same elementary school as my little brother, and there’s this picture of us outside the elementary school on graduation day; he’s wearing a flannel shirt, looking like he’s trying to get back into my good graces, and I’m holding two styrofoam cups along with my big shoulder bag looking thin and exhausted by a mixture of concern and rage.
When he was high he went on and on about how cool it was that Layne Staley died from a “speedball” injection of heroin and cocaine. Or so he said, so I would jump to worrying about his drug problems, which became our short lived love language.
I broke up with him sometime around Christmas. I don’t know what gave me the resolve that particular day, but I had recently realized that there was a world of potential boyfriends out there who weren’t injecting drugs and becoming homeless.
Although I went on to train drug users living in shelters to save their health with better injection techniques, I could never shake the shudder of watching him tie his arm off with a tourniquet and register the needle in his vein. Even years later, as I sat next to a poster outlining the parts of a syringe and a cartoon demonstrating the best way to do it, after watching who knows how many people shoot up and sometimes overdose, I could never focus my mind on the completion of the process.
The nod with the needle still in there; careless post-injection behaviors.
My life of staring at something and not looking at it.
For years I’d dream about Bruce in the worst of ways. That he was a ghost standing near the bird cages outside of my bedroom, and I was the only person who could see or hear him. That his abscess grew and grew, like Jared Leto’s did in Requiem for a Dream.
Three years after I broke up with Bruce I dropped out of college and was working full time at a stationery store in Cambridge, right across from Harvard. Me and some old men. I was very depressed and drinking heavily just to fall asleep because I kept having these unbelievably grizzly nightmares. I was hungover every day and I didn’t really have a plan for my life.
Bruce walked in one day with a cardboard sign which said something like “anything helps” tucked under his arm. He’d lost some teeth. I knew he was homeless and I knew he was in the area but somehow I let myself perpetually forget; it was too bleak.
A woman who looked twice his age followed him into the store. Of all the things that could have moved my soul regarding the state of Bruce on that day, it was the sight of his partner. She wasn’t pretty. There was no way he thought so either, not deeply, not purely–I knew him at least that well, I thought.
Or not. Over the years she remained the cover photo on his facebook page: she sprawled across the screen on her side, poorly lined eyes gazing (I suppose) seductively at the camera. They were on and off again it appeared, clearly in some form of deep familiarity but not entirely without the arousing drama of routine breakups. I knew he was missing a mother figure, of course. I knew his childhood had been one abrupt loss after another until he corralled some version of its trajectory under the control of heavy addiction and stubbornly kept it there–his last and long standing tent in the wind, demarcating the space of him within reach and the vast length of him ever disappearing. Survival kit and skills and followers always in close enough tow to periodically remind him that any good addict punctuates their danger binges with periods of pink-cloud abstinence. So it seemed. But I have no idea–I was never there with him, I don’t know if he ever got truly close to tasting pleasure in a life without that little sprinkle of heaven and hell, mainly there to level out the absence of both or neither in the end.
And there was an end, and I know absolutely nothing about it.
My memory is cluttered.
I hated myself for thinking about the un-beauty of his partner and I hated how the old men–my superiors–were giving me an intense look that indicated I should be on high alert because these types usually shoplift. I desperately wanted him to leave. Desperately.
He looked me in the eye with a familiar intensity and said, “I’m a shell of a man.”
I don’t remember what I said; I walked away from the cash register and stood next to him in the middle of the store, half watching his girlfriend test gel pens, feeling dazed. That’s the last thing I remember.
He died in 2020, after a lifetime of suffering in a way I’ll never know. I don’t know how he died, but I can logically assume it had something to do with the addiction and injection lifestyle. When I heard the news I thought immediately about how funny he was; how he really didn’t care what people thought. Obviously; he begged for change on the steps of our high school. But also (after I eventually unblocked him, I don’t remember why) when he posted on Facebook about progress in halfway houses or memes about addicts or little anecdotes from days of work at a Dunkin’ Donuts, or some joke accompanying the number of days he’d been “clean” this time.
I thought about him when I learned about harm reduction work and made it my life in New York City. I thought about a lot of heavy substance users that I’ve known and loved in one way or another, but him specifically, sometimes, because he gave me my first tour of drug harms and maybe if I hadn’t been myself or there at all things would have gone slightly differently for him.
Not in some big way but in the butterfly effect sort of way that nobody understands.
I know the facts of heroin like a well practiced second language at this point, but I don’t actually understand. I feel like I’ve never looked at the sun or felt true darkness—the needle and the damage done.
But heroin is more than oblivion and overdose and abscesses; it’s ritualistic. It requires certain supplies. The right needle gauge, the right entry point. Cooker, cotton filter, lighter, ascorbic acid, powder. Bevel up, tie off, register, release tourniquet, slowly push down. Immediate surge to the sphincter muscle which shrinks the pupils.
Tiny pupils. Vision of a world more manageable.
You can see it in the eyelids, too. Hear it in the vocal cords. A release of all urgency, all unpleasantness.
It has a precursor in most cases, from what I’ve seen. A specific emotional need not met in childhood. A surgery. Prolonged trauma, short and visceral trauma. A soul never at ease. Self loathing. Grief. Not feeling safe.
Sometimes just because drugs feel good.
I often replay a scene from one of my days at the harm reduction shelter. A hot day. A man overdosed very suddenly right at the entrance of the main building. I ran over with Narcan, but somebody beat me to it and the man was already coming out of it. EMTs got there faster than usual. In the middle of my relief a paramedic suddenly gets very upset when he hears how many milligrams of Narcan were given. He says, “it’s cruel, it’s cruel, you could have done half of that and spared him a lot of the withdrawal pain he’s in now.”
I say something along the haphazard lines of “better safe than sorry” and he walks away, waving off bystanders who run up to him with questions for the incident report, walking past the ambulance to one of the more remote benches on the campus where he then sits and puts his head in his hands.
He seems to be crying, and I both do and do not understand.
Mara Birkerts lives in New Mexico. After working in social services for ten years in NYC, she now runs an online book business and is completing a mystery set in the Boston area.