Instinctive Drowning Response

Part 7: Holes That Can't Be Filled

Maryrose dies on Wednesday. There’s a funeral two weeks later, but Campbell isn’t invited. He moves out of Tony’s and in with a bartender from Little Joy. Everything is good until the guy finds blood spattered on the bathroom wall and a syringe under the couch and tells Campbell to pack his shit and go. “I’ve lived with junkies before,” he says. “They’re nothing but holes that can’t be filled. And they steal.” So it’s back to Tony’s, back to the house where Maryrose died. He continues to shoot up on the couch where she shot up and to shower in the tub where her heart stopped beating. It’s a curse, having to relive the worst over and over, trying to breathe that air, and he knows that if he doesn’t get away, he’s going to die too.

The first step is to retake the reins of his habit, be a man about it. Without too much suffering he manages to taper off to two hits a day. What eventually derails him is some punk at the bar who knew Maryrose saying something stupid about “that’s what happens when an angel dances with the devil” and then, later, a photo he happens upon while scrolling through the pictures on his phone. It’s Maryrose the day before she OD’d, looking like a ghost already. And he’s the one who did that to her. She was just chipping when they met, and trying to keep up with him is what got her hooked. It’s not a new realization, but this time it hurts enough to serve as a reason for backsliding into a three-day bender that hollows out his head and scrapes his bones clean of flesh. Oh, baby, he thinks when he finally pops to the surface on a bright fall morning when the tree shadows look like claws grabbing at the sidewalk, I can’t come meet you there ever again.

* * * 

He and Maryrose tried to kick together after a bad balloon of what was supposed to be tar burned going in and made them both vomit their souls into the kitchen sink. This even after they’d been warned not to buy from that dealer by someone whose brother had ended up in the hospital just from smoking the stuff. If they were so strung out they’d risk shooting rat poison, it was time to quit. They threw some clothes into a suitcase, gassed up Campbell’s Toyota, and headed out into the desert. Traffic on the freeway inched along, and the city stretched on forever. They stopped for lunch at Del Taco, but neither of them could eat. Then the army of windmills near Palm Springs freaked Maryrose out, the relentless turning of their giant blades suggesting an inexorability that was at odds with her lace-winged fantasy of bucking her fate. They checked into a desiccated motel on the shore of the Salton Sea. Even though the thermometer outside the office read 100 degrees, Maryrose wanted to walk down to the beach. It was covered with fish bones and scavenging gulls and had a stench that stuck in their throats. Back in the room they turned the noisy air conditioner to high and shivered under the thin blanket, unable to decide if they were hot or cold. Maryrose clutched her cramping stomach and kicked her feet. “My legs,” she moaned. “My legs.” She sat up, lay down, and sat up again. Gritting his teeth against his own agony, Campbell limped into the bathroom and drew her a glass of water. She drank it down but immediately vomited onto the linoleum next to the bed. Campbell placed his hand on her burning forehead and tried to mumbo jumbo some of her pain into him. He finally passed out for a while, waking near dawn.

They dragged themselves out to the car as soon as the sun bubbled red on the horizon and turned back toward L.A. Tony was still up from the night before. He sold them some shit, and they fixed right then and there, marveling at how fine they suddenly felt. They never discussed the trip as a failure, only joked about what fools they’d been for thinking they could go cold turkey. Vague plans were floated to try to kick again in a month or so, this time with some Xanax or Klonopin to help with the withdrawals, but they always found some reason to put it off.