A Portrait of a Friend
Matt and I would sometimes stay awake hanging out in my room for over 48 hours straight. We’d just sit there in my dingy room, listening to the same cassette tapes over and over again, only leaving the room to go pick up and very sparingly use the restroom. The amount of heroin and crack we’d binge on was probably enough to kill normal people. Matt would disappear for days or weeks and then come home to binge use with me. On his days out of the house, he’d take suboxone and go to work as a pedicab rider in the city. He’d sleep at his practice space in the mission and bank a ton of money. Then he would come home and blow it all in these two-three day spurts. We lived in a squat in ghostown, so none of that money had to go to rent. We’d share everything, regardless of how much money I had to pitch in. Matt was always such a gentleman. He’d always let me take the first hit, even if I hadn’t pitched in any money at all. He was never stingy either, the hits were always fat and he’d even let me have the push most of the time. I also was always given my own bag of heroin to shoot. Our habits were so high that splitting one wouldn’t be worth it anyways. Matt didn’t always foot the entire bill, I usually had some cash (or at times, all of the cash), but this is just to say that he always made sure I was taken care of. He was a good roommate. We looked out for each other. There was never anything romantic between the two of us, but our lives together were in ways, inherently romantic. We never hung out briefly for an hour or so, it was always these days long benders. Just laying in my room with flickering lights, Blondie or Bruce Willis’ “the return of Bruno” playing in the background. I don’t know what we even talked about, but we could lay in there forever, never sleeping, sometimes eating but usually only ice cream or candy. Whenever we ran out of drugs, we’d make the run together. It only seemed fair. It was certainly safer, that’s for sure. Matt has been jumped so many times I’ve lost count. And I was solicited for sex every time I left the house. It just made more sense to travel in a pair. Sometimes other people would join us. The only one who ever stayed longer than a handful of hours was Jaymes though. He was a pretty regular addition. We’d each have our little stations set up. All of our tools laid out. I never fucked either of them. Never really even thought of it. Other people would bring it up, but it seemed like such an unnecessary tension that we never cared to consider. I was often only in my underwear. But nothing was ever sexual. Our lives were grimey and sexy, but so apathetic. We were so caught up in the drugs that nothing else even made a difference. We had real conversations though. We talked about literature, and music, our plans for the future, the things that happened to us in the past, the paths that led us to where we were that day. Matt’s story was always more mysterious than Jaymes and mine. Come to think of it, I guess I don’t really know much about Matt’s past. He is an insanely talented musician, and almost always had a girlfriend. It was kind of weird, because they always seemed like these really nice, really wholesome girls. I couldn’t believe that they’d actually stay over at our house. Sometimes Matt would leave them upstairs in his room, and he’d come down to mine and never go back up. They’d leave and he’d stay in my room. I never knew what they thought about us, about the situation, about our lives. I never really thought about them much at all. There was one girl I thought was really nice. I remember once feeling really badly that Matt had left her upstairs. I don’t think that she did any drugs at all. They dated for a long time. A lot longer than you would expect. It always blew my mind that Matt was so good at cleaning up for a few weeks, going on a binge, and then going back to real life. He had been an addict for years. We all had been at this point. Matt seemed to be spending more days clean than not at one point. I started to try to do the same. We would do well for a while, but every time we saw each other all it took was one look and one of us would be on the phone, and we’d head out the door to pick up. Someone was always saying sorry. “Sorry I fucked it up for you.” But it didn’t matter. We wanted to use so we did. I haven’t seen Matt in a couple years, but the last time I saw him he didn’t look so good. He had just been jumped again. That girlfriend had long broken up with him, and his glasses were being held together in two different places by masking tape. He was still really sweet though even though the world has been so hard on him. He still shared his drugs with me. I wonder how he’s doing now. I hope that he’s alright, that he has a book to read, and that he isn’t alone. I hope that he’s with a friend, because he was always so good at being a friend.
