Burnaway

[cont.]
Why couldn’t his grandmother just accept he was an addict so his doctors could give him a prescription for Suboxone? He could keep his highs and not risk slipping into these overdoses. But no, his grandmother wanted him completely clean and the doctors never argued with her money.
Another nurse came in with more pills. Take these. Drink this. How do you feel? No one in the clinic would be satisfied until he said he was happy being drab and empty like them.
Hondo wanted out of the rehab center, wanted away from all these nice nice people. They had no clue how he worked. You’re safe here. You can heal here. If they really wanted him to feel safe, they’d let him nest, build his own cocoon. Like that would ever happen. He couldn’t even leave his bed without it being remade. Tidy tidy everywhere. Order was not the ultimate virtue; it was a kind of prison. He needed a nest. He would be happier burrowed inside.
Burrowed. Yeah, the last time he kicked heroin, Alex had convinced the Santa Monica Museum to let the four of them build a nest in the project room across from the store. Alex was amazing. If he weren’t gay, he could be president. He could see solutions before anyone else even noticed the problem. The nest was Alex’s idea as a safety zone for him to finish detox. They had hauled in bag after bag of shredded paper from offices downtown and filled the room floor to ceiling with paper. White paper, pink paper, green paper. Like thick confetti. Then they had spent a fabulous week burrowing into it, fashioning two rooms, one anyone could look into, the other more private. They had to dig their way out and then replace the paper so the hole looking in was pretty small. Hondo was there the entire month while the museum was open, sometimes they were all there. They thought of themselves as gerbils and developed acrobatic activities to do in the space, mostly tumbling. Tommy juggled and twirled colored flashlights, making the small space glow like a rainbow. It was hanging out in there that he figured out how much Lori liked to be tickled. Whenever he did, she’d squeal and they’d discover a group of eyes peering into the hole to see what was happening, so Lori would tell him quite loudly to stop tickling her and everyone would laugh. Children would come over and he’d stick out a hand begging for food, scaring the crap out of them until they got the joke. And then he’d toss out a handful of Tootsie Rolls and watch the kids scramble for them. Everyone thought they were crazy but most people responded the right way, by laughing their heads off. He was happy laughing with them. He was happy there. The museum people were very nice, if a bit horrified at how seriously they took the idea and wouldn’t let them stay all night because of insurance issues. The installation was messy and ended up a bit smelly, even with the urine going into plastic milk containers. Paper absorbs smell most effectively. He liked it that way actually. He wasn’t supposed to but he did. Here at the clinic everything was clean and exposed. This kind of clean hurt to breathe. He missed Lori. Lori teased him that he took being born in the year of the Rat too seriously. In a way she was right. He didn’t like living this clean. He needed to leave. He needed to smell life, not Lysol and ammonia, half hidden in floral air fresheners. To get out, he told the clinic staff exactly what they wanted to hear and after being as lucid as he could for 36 more hours, they released him, after he told them he had made a serious mistake using heroin and promised to readmit himself into their clinic in a month, once he had finished doing the work for his upcoming show. I have a problem, he told them, and I am committed to becoming whole again. They smiled, he smiled. He knew they would release him because his grandmother wouldn’t want anything to interfere with his upcoming show. She needed him to show he was a genius again. What stupid games she played.
At home he found someone had cleaned it out and left flowers and new furniture. His grandmother’s idea of how he should live imposed on him again. Why was giving flowers supposed to inspire good health? They were dead and then wilted, they turned to scum. What kind of sign was that? He didn’t want this stiff new couch. He didn’t want dead cow hide in his living room smelling of preservatives. If he didn’t eat meat, why the hell would he want a hide in his fucking living room? Where was all his stuff? The piles of his favorite clothes were gone, the newspapers and magazines he kept for ideas, the cool empty take-out containers he was saving to photograph, the tower of beer and whiskey bottles, the peanut butter and jelly jars he used for drinks. He went into the kitchen and started throwing the row of matched glasses against the far wall. When he started shaking from the exertion, he sat in a corner and put his chin on his knees, trying to do what Lori encouraged him to do – breathe in on the count of five, hold for a count of five, breathe out on the count of five, hold for a count of five. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. That’s what it’s all about. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Lori and Alex came over minutes later and they hauled him to the beach while it was still light. The cleaner had flushed all of his drugs down the toilet so there was no reason to stay home anyway. Walk with me, Lori told him, let the poisons escape with each breath. Bring in the clean salt air to chase out the bad. Feel the sand, can you feel the warmth of it, and hear the waves, lapping over each other. Watch that unending cycle of the waves, the quivering edge of the horizon, the birds gliding in the sky, the rich magic of sunset. How the blues go red and gold and even green before folding into darkness. And after dark at the club, the music was good. Dancing was good. Four four rhythm so loud the music and his heart pounding in sync, like one movement. Sweet. It would have been better with drugs but he didn’t want to go back into rehab and besides he had no stash and Alex wouldn’t let him near either of his dealers. Listen to the music, Lori told him, find freedom in the music. Lori could really dance. It was like her spine melted and she became sound, swaying and bending like a melody, like a slender tree directing the storm. Lori was the best part of his life. They went back to his place and smoked some weed to take the edge off and Lori showed him how flexible she was. He liked her on top so he could watch her. The sex was always excellent. Juicy. It was like she was dancing, gyrating in and out, her small breasts bouncing with each thrust. And then she talked. He smoked more weed and let her words weave in and out, a basket weaver of sentences. Yeah, Lori was a basket weaver of sentences.
Their problem, she told him between tokes, was sensitivity. Sensitivity was an actual, scientifically proven phenomenon, occurring in about 20% of the population. Studies had shown that this group did not block stimuli the way the other 80% did. This 20% didn’t have the normal filtration system so these ‘special’ people were often overwhelmed. She would be a good teacher, he thought, she really liked to talk. She believed what she was saying. She had good diction. On the one hand, she continued after he had started sucking her toes, the response to overwhelming stimuli could be depression, self medication, and antisocial behavior or they could become even more attuned to their environment, to people around them, to their own thoughts and imagination. The trick was turning the abundance of stimuli into a constructive way of living. Think of stimuli as grains of sand, she told him, forcing us to create layers of mucous around it, to build pearls to keep it from shredding our insides. That’s why in addition to making art she took long walks every day, practiced breathing exercises and stayed the hell away from people who drove her nuts.