Chapter 2: Shady Sadie pt. 1

    Joey Newton had two parents but he might as well have been an orphan. The dynamics of his family had always been confusing to me but, from what I could understand, his parents had been divorced for several years. They each owned a house of their own but lived together in another county about a twenty minute drive away. Their neglected son, Joey, lived alone in his mother's empty house. Traditionally, this would have been bad parenting but I had come to believe that her absence was probably for the best. About once a month she would come back to her son after a particularly nasty fight with his father. Their touching reunions consisted of a handful of Ambien and Goldschlager out of the bottle until she was out cold in the living room, a Virginia Slim still burning in her hand. On more than one occasion, full fledged parties took place with her passed out in an armchair in the middle of everything. Joey’s simple manor and the way mother gorged herself on prescriptions made me think he might have been born with a little something in his bloodstream, the poor kid. I had never met Newton's father but I had overheard stories about him being viciously violent, dolling out beatings unprovoked.

    The house itself had been modern and stylish at one point. The living room had an enormous mounted flat screen in front of tasteful if ragged leather furniture. The kitchen housed stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops but the degree of disrepair dispelled any sense of class. Years of cigarette smoke tinted every surface a sickly yellow. A layer of grime coated the house and outlasted our half-assed attempts at cleaning. For myself and the other addicts, the state of the house was what made it homey. I stayed here often but the only lawful residents were Newt himself and a pack of aging lap dogs. There was a fat boxer named Maggie, her wildly energetic pup Marley, a sociable toy poodle named Stella and an ancient Shih Tzu named Kayla with matted fur hanging over cloudy eyes.

    Newt himself was tall and impossibly lanky. He moved around the house in an awkward bouncing sort of way while he sucked down down Camel Blues. His clownish demeanor made him genuinely lovable and, though we didn't share a drug of choice, I considered him one of my closest friends.

    Newt was a thoroughbred coke head. It always interested me how different personality types were drawn toward different drug habits. When you fixated on a substance, it became a part of you. Traits started popping up in your behavior that were more the drug’s than yours. I imagined junkies in Richmond were much like those in DC or Portland or Shanghai. We tended to be soft-spoken and apathetic. The dope took any given personality and made it understated. Cocaine drew a different crowd. Newt and the boys he got high with regularly were edgy and anger prone. Quirks were magnified and everything about a person seemed to get louder. Generally, you only really got along with your own kind but there was something special about that house. Half of us could be nodding off downstairs and the other half could be absolutely gacked a floor above and we still found a way to get along. It might have been touching if any of us had been clear-headed enough to notice.

    As my birth family’s home became more and more uncomfortable, I started spending more and more time at Newt's. Regardless of the day or hour, company was always welcome. His open door policy gave us an escape. It got to a point where the only time I spent at home was an occasional pit stop to collect some food or sleep for a few hours. The regulars at Newt’s developed into a family with a single thing in common: a general dissatisfaction with the families we came from. Lacking authority figures, we held parties and sold drugs out of the back door with impunity. The constant addict traffic provided a dependable source of income. The income provided a dependable means of bringing more drugs. This narcotic ebb and flow was the means by which we supported our habits.

    Newt spent his afternoons working up a pile of bills to give his sole drug dealer, Ivan. He was significantly older than us, probably too old to be selling drugs to high schoolers but the profit he made off our constant purchases was too lucrative to abandon. Because he came to do business daily, I saw him all the time. Still, it was never enough to set me at ease around him. Ivan's eyes bulged from his skull and his pulsing jaw muscles twitched with an excess of dopamine. Being around him was unsettling; he never truly relaxed. I ran on a lower frequency than the powder heads so just a glance at him was enough to make me want a Xanax. Whenever he came by, he insisted the blinds were drawn on the front of the house. Under his vigilant watch, nothing was exchanged outside of a locked den upstairs that regulars at Newt's house referred to as “the room.” Ivan would let himself in the back door at eight or nine every night, take a quick walk around the house to make sure the windows were taken care of, go up to the room and scrape powder off a brick about the size of a deck of cards. During our parties, the coke heads didn't leave the room aside from occasional trips to the garage to dominate the beer pong table with an intense, competitive focus. Ivan didn't miss shots in pong often and, when he did, he winced as if the mistake caused him physical pain. He carried an aura of unadulterated stress. The atmosphere of the parties stayed tense until his eventual return to the room. At one or two in the morning he left to serve his late night customers. I was never upset to see him head out for the night.

    If it were up to me, I could have done without the constant parties. I usually found myself drinking like I was alone. There was an art in avoiding conversation and getting to know too many people. The majority of the guests weren't as involved in substances as we were which meant hiding away in the bathroom for a shot of dope. Drunks pounded on the door, eager for a piss and made the process a headache. Even the room wasn't needle-friendly. Apparently sniffing shit cut with Oragel and baby Ex-Lax until your nose bled was just fine but a little needle crossed the line. As a junky, I was the sole member of a discriminated minority. Anything the coke heads didn't do themselves was deemed “sketch.” Heroin was as unwelcome upstairs as on the ground floor among the drunks.

    To be honest, I was always confused about why Newt held the parties anyway. Only a select few esteemed guests ever made it through the locked door of the room. You needed to carry a bag of blow to spend too much time in there without getting shifty-eyed looks. Before anybody left the room to return to the drinking downstairs, Ivan insisted on personally checking their nostrils for residue. It was a pointless practice; the entire party was well aware of the activities upstairs. Loud music from the home entertainment system in the living room drowned out conversation. Even so, any loud sniffing or snorting was reprimanded in the room as if somebody would discover some big secret. One audible snort too many would be met with a chorus of "Sniff quieter!" from the boys.

    If you wanted to get into the room, it took standing in front of the door, knocking and saying your name. If the room decided you were welcome, the door was quickly opened to let you in then immediately closed. When he was around Ivan's paranoia seemed to infect everyone taking bumps. As much as I liked Newt's goofball charm, trying to spend time with him while Ivan was around was exhausting. Cocaine culture was laughable but if you needed a little pick me up to maintain the pace of the party, it was worth putting up with. Junky behaviors had purpose. Junky’s were bold. What blow was missing was some good old fashioned physical withdrawal to get the gackers out of their comfort zone every once in a while. Give me a brazen crackhead over a skiddish power huffer any day of the week.

    Aside from having a place to be that wasn't home, there were advantages to attending the get-togethers. The best thing about them was access to all the free alcohol you could drink. If a group of guests came with more guys than girls, it was expected that they would provide some extra booze which ensured it would be a fun night one way or another. Girls who were willing to spend the night in the dump of a house were generally the bottom of the barrel and though they were fitting matches for their male counterparts, I wasn't interested. I hoped for the nights with fewer screeching, cake-faced chicken-heads and more bottles of liquor. With the generous contributions of the house's guests, I was able to maintain a daily booze habit. In the late afternoon, a few hours after I woke up, I started off finishing the spare beers left in the fridge. If there was a bottle of decent liquor nobody killed the night before, I would switch to that before guests started turning up with the fresh cases and bottles. If I wanted to have any shot at getting to sleep, I had to be drunk enough to pass out wherever there was an open couch which meant keeping my alcohol intake going at a healthy clip.

    The night I met her was pretty much like any other night at Newt's. Ivan had brought some quality shit and, after a few rails, I was feeling amped and ready to join the party downstairs. Ivan made sure to examine my nostrils thoroughly.

    “How’s my brain looking?” I stared at the scummy ceiling with my nose in the air. Ivan frowned at me. After a line, I couldn’t help but tease him for his caution and his reactions never disappointed. Bounding down the stairs, I went into the kitchen to have a drink and even out. I turned sideways and edged my way through the sea of bodies. A blue plastic bottle of flavored Pinnacle sitting on the kitchen table called to me. It was clearly meant to appeal to the females in attendance. Vodka was far from my drink of choice but I wasn't doing the shopping; it would have to do. I poured a shot and, as I tipped the bottle back upright to screw the cap on, the shot glass was scooped up and downed by a person to my left. I turned and shouted “What the fuck do you think you're doing!?” but regretted the coke-induced outburst as soon as it passed my lips.

    The girl who had taken my shot grinned at me, displaying prominent canine teeth. She had pixie-cut, platinum-blond hair that looked almost silvery in the dim kitchen. This coupled with her pale skin and pastel lavender top gave her the appearance of being faded out at the edges as if I was seeing her through frosted glass. Still smiling at my knee-jerk frustration, she took the Pinnacle bottle from my hand, filled the shot glass to the brim and pushed it towards me.

    At these parties and elsewhere, I focused solely on getting fucked up. As far as I was concerned, the guys were there to bring us chemicals and the girls were there to make sure the guys showed up. Socializing was awkward with the music booming over everything and the people I cared to talk to were too busy making themselves paranoid upstairs for decent conversation. It surprised me that I wanted to know who this shot thief was. I checked my motives: was this just the coke? Or maybe the booze had me scrambled? What was different here?

    She lacked the thick layer of makeup and push up bra that served as a standard-issue uniform for the girls who came here. It made her stand out. More importantly, her green eyes housed the smallest set of pupils I had ever seen. I looked down at her arms and spotted little pink dots in fields of sickly yellow bruising. Being fair skinned myself, I had seen enough needle damage to recognize track marks when I saw them. This was a junky in the flesh. Seeing somebody who obviously mainlined at Newt's house was like being in the middle of a foreign country and running into somebody from your home town. I lifted the shot to my lips and smelled sugar and the the astringency of alcohol. I tipped it back and tried not to make a face though the taste of the vodka was gag-inducing.

    She put a hand on my chest and stood on her toes to speak into my ear. “Your friend told me we would get along.” she said happily. I felt her breath on my cheek as she spoke. It sent a flash of goosebumps down my spine. I looked at her, confused, and she turned and pointed towards my buddy Danny sitting on a couch in the living room. He was offering Stella the poodle a mixed drink in a coffee mug. When she sniffed at it and turned away, he shrugged and took a drink himself. I had to give it to him, he knew what I was into. She leaned in to speak again “Where can we get high at this place?”