Come Up and See Me Sometime. Erika Krouse
get your own planet.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Whatever you want. You’re god.”
“Isn’t it lonely?”
“You choose your neighbors by marrying them.” Cliff raised his eyebrows and nodded.
“Do women get planets?”
“Nope. Sorry. They go to their husband’s planet.”
Cliff told me that in the Main Temple in Salt Lake City, they have an office ready for Jesus, complete with a desk, separate phone lines, pens and paper. “Mormonism is all about real estate,” he said.
“What was it like for you, growing up like that?”
“When you figure out that no deity is keeping tabs on how often you brush your teeth, it’s a little depressing. I mean, what’s the point?”
“Cavities.”
“I mean, to everything? Existence?” Cliff stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. “Nothing. No point.”
I grew up with no religion, so I don’t have these existential crises, although I respect them in others. I never thought that I was living for the sake of a god. I was just a human being. So it came to be its own point. Life.
WE HAD been dating for months and I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t have sex with me. There were many things I didn’t understand. Sometimes I lay on his bed while he wrote or read. I rolled onto my side.
“Cliff?”
“Honey?”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing, that’s all right, baby.”
“What do boys want?”
“Girls.”
“That’s it?”
“Some boys want other boys.”
“What do you want?” I asked. “I mean, what do you want?”
“Socialism.”
“What do you want?”
And on. Me naked, him reading something, with a cigarette between his teeth.
So I was stupid to have been surprised when I opened the door to his bedroom and found him with a needle in his arm.
We stared at each other for a second. He looked down and pulled the needle out.
“So,” I asked clearly, “are you addicted, or just a dick?”
He turned around and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a bag of needles, razor blades, a scale, a mirror, a bag with a thin layer of white dust, and a small plastic container with a chewing-gum-sized wad of black, sticky stuff. He spread it all on the bed.
I picked up the white bag and cocked my head to one side.
“Cocaine,” Cliff said.
I touched the plastic container with one finger. “So, this is heroin.”
He opened the container, turned it upside down and then smacked it against the mirror until the wad fell out. I looked at it and its reflection.
“How often do you do this?”
“Once a week. Once a week for three days. Or four. Not so much the rest of the week.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Cliff touched my face.
I tapped the mirror with the heroin on it. “How much of this stuff does it take to kill you?”
Cliff picked up a razor blade and nicked off a small dab. It was the size of a sunflower seed, smaller, even. I looked at the rest of the heroin lying on the mirror. I had a sudden urge to put the whole gob in my mouth and swallow it.
“Give me some,” I said. I was just testing him, to see what he would do, I think.
“No.” He put his arm around me. I let him pull me down to the floor and kiss me. It was unreal. I thought about the Mormons and their planets.
I touched that place inside his arms, the small red dot. I was strangely moved by this part of him, so soft, so violated. He kissed me again. Before he closed his eyes, I saw myself curving away in their darkness, and wanted to go to that place where he was.
All that night, I stayed awake and watched over him. He whimpered and reached out for me every now and then. He looked so soft in sleep, fingers curled under his chin. I tried to fit everything together in my head.
I couldn’t help it. I know it’s very bad. But as I watched him sleep, I felt a strange kind of new respect taking shape. This was a man who sought out a controlled substance and injected himself on a daily basis. Say what you will, but that takes initiative.
I RENTED a movie called Drugs and You. We watched it together in Cliff’s apartment. It talked about heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, crack, smack, heart attacks, insomniacs … I could rap the whole thing. Cliff barely listened. He caressed my hand.
“What you need,” he said midway through the rehab stuff, “is a pet. I’m going to buy you a hamster.”
“No.”
“Everyone needs an animal to love.”
“Who says?”
“Nietzsche.”
“But I’ve got you. You’re a fucking animal.” I gave him a raunchy smile, even though it wasn’t true. We barely ever had sex.
“You need something else,” Cliff said.
We watched the movie until Cliff got up and disappeared into his room. In a few minutes, I followed him. He was cooking up. This is what my life had become—I knew phrases like “cooking up.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said.
“Why? What did you expect, honey?” He put the needle down. “Listen. This is my life. I don’t want to change. On the other hand, I love you. You can do whatever you want with that information.”
“Well, tiger, don’t get all emotional on me.”
He stared at me for a minute. “Once I got so emotional about you, I threw up.”
“You threw up over me?”
He brought home a parakeet and named it Fido. He tried to get it to talk, and to sit on our fingers. But whenever Cliff opened the cage door, Fido flew at me, biting. He latched onto my earlobe, or the skin of my neck. He drew blood. I grabbed at Fido and stuffed him back in his cage each time.
“You taste like chicken,” I told him through the bars.
Cliff gave up and kept him inside the cage while I was there. I always walked right over to the cage in the corner whenever I came over. Fido and I tried to stare each other down through the bars, his little round eye pitted against my own.
“I might leave you,” I told Cliff. But I didn’t leave him, and I didn’t leave him.
IT WAS OUR anniversary, three months. We were going to go to dinner at La Cocina, and then have sex. We had to plan sex in advance, to make sure that it fell on a sober day—my rules. Mostly because there was no other way to do it.
I showed up at Cliff’s apartment but he was late, so I let myself in as usual. I mooned around, in love. I touched things—his calculator, his shirts.
By the time he opened his door, I was already there to greet him. He grabbed me around my waist and held me. I put my arms around him. He said into the air above my head, “I shot up tonight.” As his mouth opened to say these words, I felt something drop into my hair. I touched it. It was his gum.
“Oh no, I got gum in your hair. I got …” Cliff was distraught, groping