Needle Freak, page 12
“Cool. I’ll get them and meet you out at your place. Probably take about an hour,” Mark said. “You think he’ll be okay till then?”
“Guess he’ll have to be,” Shane said. “Nah, he’s okay.”
“Okay. I’ll try to hurry.”
“Thanks, Mark.”
“No problem.”
Shane sat with Jack while they waited for Mark, but they didn’t talk for a long time. They smoked another bowl and Shane got up to get them each a beer. When he returned with them, he opened Jack’s and passed it to him, took a drink of his own and watched Jack out the corner of his eye.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jack said, eying him warily. “What?”
“What the hell is LBJ?”
Jack laughed. “Heroin, PCP and LSD.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Shane said.
“Nope,” Jack said.
“Polvo?”
“Same thing, minus the LSD.”
“But why?”
“Fuck if I know. I don’t do it.”
“That’s so… stupid.”
Shane was not one of those people who never did anything wrong, for whom breaking the law would provoke an anxiety attack and a case of the vapors, but what Jack described was so dangerous.
Jack watched him thinking and smiled at the look that passed over his face. He did not smoke a lot of weed, but he had smoked it off and on in the past and it always made him feel pretty good about the world. It was nice of Shane to be so concerned, Jack hadn’t had a lot of people in his life that would have cared, but he was worrying over nothing.
“I never did it. It is stupid,” he said. He smiled at Shane and Shane smiled back. “Especially the PCP part. I mean, why? But anyway, I feel lots better. When is your friend going to get here?”
Shane looked at the clock on his phone. “Pretty soon,” he said.
Jack picked up his beer off the nightstand and took a sip. It had gotten warm from sitting there, but he didn’t mind. “Okay. Shane, did I ever tell you about Phineas?”
“Who?” Shane asked.
“I haven’t seen him since I got here,” Jack said. “Maybe he’s gone. I think that would be nice. I don’t want him anymore.”
“Jack, what are you talking about?” Shane asked.
Jack pulled the blanket back around himself and lay down with his head in Shane’s lap. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
Chapter 9
It wasn’t easy, but Jack weaned himself off of heroin with the help of the five Oxys. It took him a week and there were some parts of the withdrawal process that he just had to suffer through, even with the help of the pills. He took a full 80 milligrams that first night after Mark showed up. After that, he cut the pills in half and gradually lowered the dose until he was through it. It was sheer hell and if he’d had heroin or any way of getting it, he never would have made it and he knew it, but all he had were the pills. Jack had little interest in pills and zero interest in trading one addiction for another to become a pill head.
After the first night, he didn’t throw up again, but he still had cramps, he still got the shakes, he still sweated like a pig and felt like he was going to vomit even if it never happened. Toward the end of the week, his appetite started to return and when it did, he ate like a man who never expected to see another meal again as long as he lived. Shane was a single guy who did not entertain or often have visitors, so the food he had in the house was basic bachelor fare. Jack made sandwiches and ate Shane’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch, made DiGiorno pizza and ate every last slice. He drank gallons of water and craved sugar and salt in equal measure. Hank followed Jack through the house, licking whatever he dropped up off the floor.
One night after Jack had been clean for three days, Shane came home with a case of Bud Light and they drank all of it. Jack drank sometimes, but alcohol was not his drug of choice. Still, he enjoyed himself and he saw the attraction. Until he woke up the next morning with a hangover that felt like someone had blown a crater in his head.
Jack was starting to think that this normal way of life wasn’t so hard after all. He hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Phineas since before Zane left him in the parking lot of Donovan Automotive. He almost never thought about Steve. Zane seemed to be right about that, too; no one cared that he was dead. Jack hadn’t seen it on the news when he was staying with Zane. He looked it up on the internet and there wasn’t even a mention of a man found dead in his room at the Last Chance Motel in Biloxi, Mississippi. Steve, who had made such a strong impression on so many lives, did not even warrant an inch of space in the obituaries. Not only did no one care; no one seemed to have even noticed.
It was a little surprising how easily Jack had shed that life and the memory of it himself. He still remembered living like that, the things he had done and why he did them, the people he knew, but he didn’t think about Steve much. He didn’t want to think about him though and he wondered if that might be the why of it. It had never worked that way with Phineas, but Phineas was altogether different. Phineas had not been real until Jack imagined him. Only then had he taken on a life of his own. Steve seemed to be going about it the opposite way and that was fine with Jack. He didn’t need Steve Walker anymore and he didn’t need Phineas the clown. He hadn’t needed him in a long time. The clown had moved on from being a pleasant distraction for an abused boy and morphed into a parasite infecting the man. Jack didn’t know why he was gone, he was just glad that he was.
He was getting used to normal, but the life of a homebody wasn’t for Jack and once he was clean, he started going with Shane to work. He didn’t have a job himself and without a drug habit, the desperation that came with it was gone, too. He smoked still and that wasn’t cheap, but Shane bought cigarettes by the carton anyway. One thing the addiction had done was keep him busy. The constant pursuit of cash to feed his gorilla sized habit hadn’t left him much time for idleness in the past. Jack Handy was no more and the new and improved Jack Donovan was bored.
Shane had fired the woman who worked the front desk at Donovan Automotive two days before Jack showed up, so the mechanics who worked took turns answering the phone and wrote down appointments on a yellow legal pad. The lack of organization had started to become a problem and Shane would talk about putting an ad in the local paper or a sign up in the window whenever the phone rang, but then he would forget about it.
Saturday there was no one there except for Shane and Jack, so Jack answered it. He had no idea what he was doing, but he wrote down a woman’s name and phone number and a little note about what she wanted. Shane looked at it when he came in from the shop where he had been replacing a serpentine belt on an SUV.
“Jack, did you write this?”
Jack was idly doodling on a different legal pad and glanced over at it. “Yes. A woman called. Patty something. Her ‘check engine’ thing on the dash won’t go off.”
“Is that what this says?” Shane frowned at the writing. “Damn, your spelling’s worse than mine and I’m fucking dyslexic.”
Jack shrugged and went back to his doodle. “I’m a dropout. You graduated high school at least. Sorry.”
“No, it’s cool,” Shane said. “You want a job?”
It took Jack a second before the question clicked. He was a lot slower to understand things and make connections, even simple ones, than he remembered being before the drugs had had their way with him. Sometimes when he noticed it, it made him a little sad, but mostly he didn’t think too much about it. “What?”
“A job,” Shane repeated. “You want one?”
“Uh. Sure?” Jack said. “What kind of job?”
“The kind where you answer the phone when it rings, take down appointments, fill out orders… that sort of thing,” Shane said. “It’s not that hard. Hardest thing is making sure the appointments don’t overlap too much and we can get the parts and shit.”
“But you just said you couldn’t read my handwriting.”
“Yeah, but you can read it, right?”
“I guess.”
“And you seem to have a pretty good memory.”
“Yeah…”
Shane waited for Jack to continue and give him an answer. When he didn’t, he said, “So, you want a job or what?”
“Okay,” Jack said.
He was there every day already anyway and other than a change in scenery and the occasional passing encounter with customers and the guys who worked for Shane it wasn’t much more entertaining than staying at home had been. At least being Shane’s secretary would give him something to do.
“Can you start today?” Shane asked.
Jack noted the amusement in his voice and looked up to see Shane smiling at him. That lazy smile of his that reached right into his eyes when it was real. Jack smiled back. “Yeah, I think I can do that,” he said.
Shane walked by him toward the door between the office and the garage.
“Shane?” Jack said.
Shane stopped. “Yeah, Jack?”
“It’s weird you know, being sober. I don’t remember ever being bored this much when I was stoned.”
Shane turned back to him and studied him, frowning, a line of worry forming between his brows. “Jacky…”
Jack breathed out a soft laugh. “No one calls me that anymore,” he said. “Except for Zane. I don’t know why he does though. He ain’t anybody. I’m nobody to him. Seems kind of… what’s the word? Too friendly for a drug dealer.”
“Jack,” Shane said, correcting himself, but also to get his attention. “We can find stuff for you to do.”
Jack grinned. “I know. Don’t worry, Shane, I was just saying. You know… thinking out loud. Can we go see Grandma tomorrow?”
The next day was Shane’s day off. Donovan Automotive was closed on Sundays. “Yeah, we can do that,” Shane said. “She’d probably really like to see you. She’s going to cry though. Just fair warning.”
“I know,” Jack said. “But then she’ll stop. You know what I miss?”
“What’s that?”
“Snickerdoodles. I don’t think I’ve had one in… a long time.”
Shane laughed and reached over to ruffle Jack’s hair. It was a gesture that was at once familiar and strange for both of them. He had done that often when Jack was little, before Hal and all the bad shit that followed. Like the snickerdoodles, it was something that belonged to the past. It made Jack smile. He was smiling more and more often these days.
“Maybe Grandma will bake some if we ask her real nice,” Shane said. “All right. If the phone rings now, it’s for you.”
Jack raised his hand and gave a thumbs up. Shane returned to the garage and Jack went back to his doodle. It wasn’t very good, he didn’t think. He was trying to draw an elephant, but it looked more like a cow with something growing out of its nose. Shane’s friend Mark was an artist. He drew a lot and Jack liked the pictures, enough that he wanted to make them and be able to do what Mark did. He probably never would. He was too old to start learning how to draw, but the desire to do it was strong enough that he tried anyway. So far his efforts were laughable and the results disappointing, but he enjoyed doing it. Mark had said to start simple and he was starting simple.
He had to put his face really close to the paper to see what he was doing though and he wondered if that had anything to do with why his elephant insisted on not looking much like an elephant.
The phone rang and Jack reached over on the desk to pick up the receiver. He put the phone to his ear in the cradle of his shoulder and filled in the pupil of his cow/elephant’s left eye as he said, “Donovan Automotive. How can I help you?”
Thinking about seeing his grandma Chloe for the first time in over fourteen years kept Jack up half the night. He hadn’t been thinking when he asked Shane about it and he did still want to go, but he was also afraid just like he had been about seeing Shane. He wasn’t a junkie anymore, but he was still damaged; he didn’t think that was ever going to completely wash off. He couldn’t undo any of it and he couldn’t change what he was, and in spite of the damage the drugs had done to his eyesight and the changes he had made for the better, he was and always had been self-aware. He still sometimes felt like a pretender in Shane’s world. It was a tumultuous soup of contradictory emotions; a combination of fear, elation and excitement.
Eventually he did sleep and Shane let him sleep in until nearly noon. “Grandma goes to church,” Shane said when Jack seemed surprised by the time. “She wouldn’t have been home anyway.”
“Church?” Jack said, like the word described something he had never heard of before. “Oh. Okay.”
“Yeah, so relax. Have something to eat. We’ll leave in about an hour,” Shane said.
“Shane?”
“What?”
“Do you go to church?”
Shane snorted. “Me? No. Grandma sometimes tells me I should, but she’s not pushy about it, thank God.”
The irony of him thanking God did not escape Jack. “Do you remember that picture of Jesus?” Jack asked. “The one Mom had?”
Shane’s smile vanished. “Yeah, I remember,” he said.
Jack considered telling Shane about his thoughts on Playgirl Jesus, but Shane’s reaction to the mere mention of the memory made him change his mind. Jack was jaded to such an extreme that he could find humor in such things, but Shane wasn’t and would not. It was strange to realize that in some ways Shane was more fragile than he was. Shane had been through a lot and survived it, but then he’d been saved, taken care of and protected, while Jack had been forced to grow a thicker skin and build escape hatches in his mind. It had forged him into a different sort of creature than his brother. It had made him strong, which was a novel idea for someone who was so accustomed to thinking of himself as weak.
He reached across the kitchen table and touched the back of Shane’s hand. Shane’s hand jerked and he knocked over his cup of coffee. It dripped off the edge of the table onto his leg and he jumped up.
“Fuck,” he hissed, swiping uselessly at his jeans.
“Sorry,” Jack said. He took his hand back and put both of them in his lap. “I just thought… You looked sad. I’m sorry—”
“It’s not that,” Shane said. “I just have to go change my pants now.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything about it,” Jack said.
“Jack, it’s fine,” Shane said. He went over to the counter and pulled off a long section of paper towels from the roll beside the microwave. Then he sopped up the mess. “It’s fine. It’s just coffee.”
It wasn’t just coffee, but Jack knew when it was best to let a thing drop. He hadn’t intended to upset Shane.
Hank couldn’t go with them to visit Grandma Chloe, the assisted living apartments did not allow animals. They made exceptions for service dogs, Shane said, because the man who lived two doors down from their grandmother was blind and he had a German shepherd, but Hank was just a dog.
Shane hooked Hank up to a chain he kept in the front yard for him and the dog sat there by driveway looking dejected as they pulled away.
Sunrise Home was a three story apartment building for retirees and elderly people who wanted to maintain their independence while having access to assistance and neighbors of their own age to socialize with. It was like a nursing home without the nurses, endless hallways, regulated visiting hours and the persistent stench of industrial cleaner. Chloe Donovan lived in a second floor apartment and she wasn’t as old as some of the residents. She still had a car and drove herself, she did not use a walker to help her get around and in fact had more energy than some people half her age, she preferred cooking her own meals, had no interest in playing bingo and they would be hosting ice cream socials for the denizens of Hell long before she would be caught wearing an adult diaper. She intended to die quietly and without any fuss sometime in the very distant future.
Shane tried to make time to visit her at least once a month and he called her on the weekends. He had talked to her a couple of times on the phone since Jack returned, but he hadn’t told her about him yet. He was waiting for the right time even though he knew there was never really a “right time” to spring such things on a person. He didn’t tell Jack, but he was worried about how she would react to his sudden and unexpected return home after so many years, too. Grandma Chloe wasn’t an angry or wicked woman, though she did have a temper when she was riled. It still seemed unlikely that she would shout or scream or rage about it. At the worst, she would cry. Shane hated to see her cry, it always made him feel like crying, too, but he knew she would want to know. It was only natural that she would, Jack was her grandson after all. She would want to see Jack and all of the tears wouldn’t be sad ones. It was time.
They pulled into the parking lot at Sunrise Home and before Shane had even parked, Jack knew something was wrong. It was nothing significant; he didn’t jerk or cry out or say anything. It was more a feeling Jack got from him. A tension in his body that hadn’t been there before.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.
Shane didn’t answer until he had found a spot to park. “Mom’s here,” he said. “That little blue sports car back there, the convertible, that’s hers.”
The bottom dropped out of Jack’s stomach. “Oh,” he said.
His first inclination upon hearing this news was to tell Shane to start the truck and take him home. They could come back another day to visit Grandma when Kate wasn’t there. But instead of doing that, he took a breath, let it out as he steeled himself and opened the door to get out.
When Shane just sat there, Jack hesitated. “Come with me?”
Shane ran a hand over the back of his neck and glanced over at him, sitting there half in and half out of the truck. “I can wait here. I don’t mind,” he said.
“Um… Well, you could, but she hasn’t seen me in a long time,” Jack said. “I really think you should come with me. I mean… I’d like you to. And besides, it’s like ninety out here. Probably hotter on the blacktop. You’ll cook.”
