The crowds grow. The rooms fill. Friends bring friends and we stop having to ask so much. I don’t really know why. I know we take it all very seriously and I know that people seem to respond to that, to the seriousness of this ridiculous thing, the ridiculousness of being so serious about it.
On the night we sell out the club we started at in Echo Park, Tony is the first one to arrive, already at the door by the beginning of sound check. He’s memorized every word to every song. He asks me for pages with the lyrics printed out. I see him singing when I scan the room from the stage. He sways, sipping his scotch and soda, raising it in the air to cheer at the end of each song. I can feel his pride in me. His glee. It’s comforting to have him there, and even though I worry about his drinking, I think maybe he has it under control, at least for now.
So I am shocked when he calls me one afternoon to tell me he’s addicted to heroin and he’s scared he’s going to jump off the roof of the ten-story building where he lives.
I don’t know what I thought, but not this. His voice is creaky and desperate as he tells me he’s been shooting heroin in the bathroom, just as Dad used to do. He’s also smoking crack, taking a mountain of pills and drinking a fifth of whiskey every night. The words fail to register. I just thought he was a kind of dime-store drunk. Heroin? Fucking crack?
“I don’t know what I might do, Mick. I’m scared I’m just going to kill myself. I need help. Can you help me? I don’t know what to do.”
He doesn’t seem like the proud, strong, tattooed guy singing along at the side of the room, but more like the sad boy with the shaved head whom I remember from Synanon, the one who sat alone at the edge of the playground until he was nearly seven years old.
I tell him not to move. I drive my car across town, speeding the whole way, hoping he doesn’t jump, thinking about my brother, the one who guards me, the one I must guard the way a boxer guards a broken rib. I keep him on the line the whole time. I’m on Sunset. I’m passing the fire station, I’m going under the 101, I’m turning left on Second Street. Please don’t do anything. Please. I’m almost there, I swear. I’m not leaving. I’ll be right by you. We can go somewhere and talk about it. We can go somewhere and not talk about it. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Please don’t die.
I turn right on Wall and see him sitting on the concrete stoop of his apartment building, his hair big and wild, his neck thin, his eyes squinted, his shoulders slumped in his gray sweatshirt, the padlock hanging beneath his chin. I get out of the car and he gets up and I throw my arms around him. He feels heavy, empty, like I am holding a dead body.
“It’s okay, big bro. We’re going to get you sorted out.”
“I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mick. I don’t want to die. I can’t do this anymore.”
“It’s okay. Let’s just get in the car. We’ll go talk it out. I’ll sit with you while you kick if you want. Just like Dad always talked about. I’ll sit right next to you. You’re going to be okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
“It was so stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking fucking with that stuff. I can’t be here. I just can’t be here anymore.”
“I know. I know.” He buries his head in his big hands, his body shaking.
“I feel so sick.”
“You don’t need to do anything but get in the car.”
“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die,” he keeps saying as he rocks back and forth.
He gets in the car and we call Dad and Bonnie and he tells them the whole story, how he smoked heroin on a whim at a party and then started buying needles and packets to heat and inject. He’s been taking Vicodin and Percocet for years now, he says. It started with a back injury, but he just kept it up, taking more and more. He’s up to forty-five Vicodin pills a day, along with the fifth of whiskey. The crack came last. He bought it to try speedballs, injecting the heroin first, then smoking the cocaine rocks with a glass pipe until he fell over on his kitchen floor.
“It wasn’t even fun. It was just like trying to extinguish something by the end. Like trying to bury myself beneath the drugs.”
For a brief moment, they think he’s joking. Nobody knew how bad it was. They tell us to come over to the house in Westchester, that we need to figure it out as a family, that they’re here. We’re all here. “No one is going anywhere.”
We drive to Westchester and by the time we arrive, Bonnie has called five drug rehab centers. She hugs Tony at the door. She tries to talk to him about the different options, but Dad is furious, already knee-deep in tough love with that gruff no-bullshit voice of his. “That’s really fucking stupid, you know. What the fuck is wrong with you? Didn’t you learn anything from me? Heroin? That shit will kill you.”
Tony stares at the ground, too weak to respond. He’s got huge black circles under his eyes and heavily chapped lips, that wild look as he shakes lightly and taps his foot. I sit next to him, an arm draped around his shoulders.
Two hours later we are standing in the parking lot at Brotman Medical Center, a twelve-step-based rehab facility on Venice Boulevard. It’s dusk, a cold blue sky retreating to blackness over us as we stand in the wind. Tony throws up behind an ambulance. His body is already going through withdrawals. A paramedic asks if he needs help and I tell him we’re on our way to the drug rehab. He nods like he’s seen it before.
Upstairs, we check Tony in and they put him in an empty white room. His tremor has gotten worse. He has a terrified look in his eyes as we gather to leave. He shouts at Dad, “What the fuck did you ever do, old man?! Huh?! You think you’re so much better than me?!”
I tell him to calm down. I know he’s anxious and angry from the withdrawals. “Fuck off!” he yells at me and kicks a chair which bounces off the empty white wall.
“Have fun kicking heroin,” I say, walking out, exhausted, annoyed, angry, worried.
We don’t hear from him for a week. The doctor calls and says he couldn’t go on methadone because his liver was too weak, so he just had to kick cold turkey. They could hear him screaming from the nursing center down the hall, pounding on the walls and retching into the bucket they left for him. It was hard to witness, but there was no other way because the mixture of opiates and alcohol over many years had destroyed his liver. The doctor tells us he had the worst liver enzymes they’d ever seen and if he would’ve waited one more month he would be dead.
I’m just glad he’s there. It feels like he’s safe, for now, like we are standing on the edge of a nightmare. We imagine these things romantically sometimes, the pirates on the run, the sanguine Dope Fiends one step in front of the law. But it’s not like that. It’s fear and worry. It’s my father’s desperate anger and tears, the truth we quietly acknowledge that if he died, if we lost a brother, a son, it wouldn’t feel romantic or tragic or mysterious. We would only feel cursed.
* * *
WE ARE MAKING a record. We are debating reverb. We are editing guitar riffs. I am singing, listening to the songs come to life, trying to imagine if this particular version captures the feeling, the specific one, the one that is mine, the contradiction that I swore to uphold at the altars of David Bowie and Robert Smith. Is the snare too loud to feel like loneliness? Does this keyboard effect really capture desperation? How much chorus pedal on this part makes it sound restless? The scream is too loud, the whisper is too quiet, the rack toms need to sound like trash cans in an alley, the voice should be in an empty field at midnight, not a church on a Sunday morning. I don’t know. I don’t know. Make it longer. Make it shorter. Make it meaner. Make it quiet. Make it loud.