Halfway To Nowhere (With The Engine Stalled)

📅 Spring/summer 2017

【ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ/ɢʟᴏʀɪғɪᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ】

It had been a few disorganized-feeling months since Kato and Nick had started chilling together. Or maybe ‘chilling’ was the wrong word, because coke was about as non-chill as you could get, outside of meth—which Kato was tempted to touch at some point but also vaguely afraid of. Nick swooped in to warn him off of it, waving a hand and shaking his head both one spring afternoon after Kato had voiced his curiosity.

“Nah, bro, it’s not worth it. The two things you don't wanna be, man, a junkie or a tweaker. Those are the no-no’s: Crystal and dope.” 
“Oh, but being a crackhead’s all good?” Kato asked sarcastically, one eye watering, sniffing back the bitter-tasting drip from too-long a line of blow. 
“Eh, you do coke, dude. You’re class.”

Being ‘class’ was cool. Being fucking trashed was cool. And it was especially fucking sweet to have someone to call up and just get destroyed with, because outside of the weird bar hook-up who had very first turned him onto coke when he was 17, Kato hadn’t had too much opportunity. His friends drank, sure, but none of them really touched anything harder than weed, other than Fawkes, on occasion, and yeah—! They could get fucked up together sometimes. 
That had been cool, doing that; taking molly together and having sex actually feel like making love. That had been cool, doing that; taking molly together and having sex actually feel like making love. She drew the line there, though, and she was no fan of his coke habit at all. He tried to half-hide it from her, but they’d started dating in spring and she just straight up knew him too well. She’d be ticked off instead of pleased t find that he’d cleaned her apartment while she was out, and she’d make sideways comments if she noticed that he was chattier than his usual. He couldn’t hide that: Coke just made him talk or write. Lyrics, music, poetry, FUCK, it all just seemed to be there and happening, too fast to get it all down, sometimes, so he’d give up and engage someone about something; anything he knew anything about. Roman history was his favorite and cocaine was great because then he never felt like he might be boring his audience to death with it all.

When they were just friends it hadn’t mattered enough to argue about, but Kato and Fawkes dating started to mean that they fought, too. They just did. About coke, yeah, but also about how they spent their time and who used a tone and whose fault it was that one or both of them was mad now. They fought hard and loud and messy and that’s when Kato would tend to go and find Nick, instead.

The two of them would waste themselves and Kato would bitch about his relationship, or himself, or his life, and Nick started to talk a bit about his reasoning, too. And that's how Kato learned Nick was doing it all to stay off dope.

They’d crept backwards toward the topic, more, over the course of their irregular and inherently high hangout sessions; Nick didn’t come right out the way Kato did, with all the shit he’d ever felt like self-medicating over. They weren’t really friends outside of using together—a sort of unspoken truth between them—but sometimes the session would be chiller, lower-key, with less cocaine—or with the chemically-induced intimacy of MDMA. And then Nick would talk a little more, and they started out not with “Why the drug use?” but back at “Why you been puttin’ up with my sorry ass tonight?” 

Nick described himself, through a laughed-out cloud of weed smoke, as something of a “stranded extrovert.” He liked people, quite a bit, even if it hadn’t always been that way—“shy as a kid,” he’d said, then moved on—nowadays he really wanted to be with people. But it was tough. 
“I’m actually pretty fresh outta rehab. For heroin,” Nick confided, and that had been that, where he first mentioned dope. “I lost, ya know, my entire circle that I used to smoke or shoot with, right? Because I can’t get dragged back into that. So I’ve been kinda...lost, a little. I like to have a crew! And like, I met plenty of cool people in rehab, right? And I can shoot the shit with them. But I dunno...since high school, I’ve made most of my pals through, like, havin’ a ‘good time’ together. Everyone from rehab, they’re trying to go totally sober, and, well…” Nick gestured between himself and Kato, then to the paraphernalia on the coffee table. “Good for them, but I need this shit to keep from major league slippin’ up again. Can’t exactly talk about that though.” 
Kato huffed some sympathetic chuckle. “Okay, yeah. Gotcha. For what it’s worth, I’m trying to keep all this a bit of a dirty little secret, myself. Like, I get it. I don’t really wanna let on to my crew that what I’m doing is...All of it.”
“Hey, I don’t let you do all of it. No meth, no dope. I’m a good influence.”
“The best, Nick.”

For a little while they’d left it there, because they weren’t that close—Kato didn’t even really talk to him about the band, for dirty-little-secret separation reasons—and most of their bond was as superficial as passing a pipe or saying “Yeah, you can finish that line.” But curiosity was curiosity and Kato had the friends he had, whose stories he was privy to—and there was just something compelling about comparing and contrasting the reasons people had for the shit they did. It was interesting; it was like having data. Or insight. And that was what led him to asking, sometime in late spring, about the start of The addiction, the one that Nick was trying to outrun or outgun.

“What got you started doing dope, Nick?” he asked casually, taking a puff from Nick’s pipe for a change of pace and rather captured by how the weed burned and glowed. He passed it to his left with an expectant eyebrow-raise. Nick seemed to take his time drawing from it.
“Man...bit of a heavy question, K,” he finally said, the smoke leaving his mouth thick enough to briefly obfuscate his face. His eyes were red around the edges, but hey...Kato’s were, too.
“You don’t gotta answer right now, I’m not tryina kill your vibe.”
“Nah, nah...it’s all good...Kinda appreciate you asking, I guess. It’s just kinda like…” Nick made some ambiguous gesture, like he was holding a balloon as it rapidly inflated. “Ya know? It’s bigger than it is. Or looks bigger than it is.” He took another puff from the pipe.
“Yeah, no, that’s the shit. I’ve got a couple friends who are recovering; recovered. That’s why I’m asking. Seems like there’s always a million things or feelings in it. In the why.”
“In the why…” Nick repeated. He passed Kato the pipe and mumbled something that sounded like a snippet of the Village People song, ‘Y.M.C.A.’
“‘Young man, are you listening to me? ...buh-bum, Young man, what do you want to be?..’” Nick leaned back. “...I wanted to be my dad when I was little. Like most boys do, I think...He was tall and funny and just great, yanno, my best friend. He died when I was in elementary school...Lung cancer.” He shrugged. “I feel kinda like...it all goes back to that in a way? Not like I started using then. I was, yanno, little. But when I dig for, like, ‘why,’ deep down, right…? It’s probably that. Losing my dad.”
“Sure, yeah,” Kato said. It made enough sense; like ‘Key and Hunter, sorta. Ish. Minus some stuff. “So...your dad liked you, then?”

Maybe the foreignness the concept held for him came out too obviously in his tone; Nick had seemed to become concerned and it wasn’t alleviated by Kato’s explanation that he could count on one hand the people he knew who’d had positive—or even neutral—paternal relationships.
Turned out Nick could be a finger up on that hand, though, because yeah, the loss of his dad had hit him hard. There was other stuff, too: Clinical depression, an anxiety disorder that Kato was bowled over by and nearly refused to believe. (“Man, why do you think weed’s my drug of choice?” Nick had laughed; “I’m just good at containing it. Can’t judge a book by its cover and all that.”)
But it had been little things like that, ‘in the Why.’ The smaller ones, the depression and the anxiety and the collateral stress he picked up from his overwhelmed, suddenly-single mother; feeling extroverted but nervous underneath, and rather alienated at school because of that, even with friends—and then the big one, the wound in his heart caused by the loss of his father, which festered, alternately painful and repressed, until high school, where Nick met a medicine for it.
“I had a girlfriend and she and her crowd...they were my first real ‘crew,’ right? And they ran a bit wild, and I wanted to run a bit wild, and they started on some shit, so I started on some shit. It was just kinda party drugs at first, but then someone’s older cousin started chillin’ with us, like, buying us beers, so we thought he was cool, and that we were cool for partying with a college-age kid, but he smoked dope. And we were like, fifteen, and like, ‘damn. He’s cool. He does dope. Dope’s gotta be cool.’” 
“Oof,” Kato offered.
“Oof,” Nick agreed.

He explained that heroin had seemed “pretty damn alright at the time.” It didn’t feel like it hit that hard—like, it hit—but it didn’t break reality the way psychedelics did. Even knowing what it was, it just hadn’t seemed that intense. Really good, yeah! But not...out of control. It’d just been easy—a word Kato had heard a lot from Anarchy, too—‘easy.’ 
Nick hadn’t thought he was still dealing with the loss of his dad—but said that there must have been some grief deep inside that chasing the dragon chased out of him. The anxiety, too: That had started to seem better.
He felt less nervous. He felt less sad. It didn’t seem like as scary a drug as health class said it was. And hey...he was College-Kid Approved Cool.

Addiction had been nearly impossible for him to see or fight off as an impulsive, still-grieving high-schooler, though he finally had to face it when his mother was forced to kick him out after his withdrawal-driven cash-swiping and pawning of household items got to be too much. Still though, Nick relayed that instead of shaping up, he’d kind of gone adrift, after that: His girlfriend had broken up with him and so he ended up directionless, wandering the rough life in NYC, chasing his next high and not much else...until recently. An old middle school friend reconnected with him and started trying to set him back on the straight-and-narrow. She helped him start to clean up, assisted him in getting a job, and in renting an apartment—and dutifully, he’d done his best to stop using dope. 

By, apparently, doing next to everything else under the sun.

“Like, I know it’s not exactly healthy, but at least it’s not heroin, yanno?” Nick said casually one time in early summer, lacing a joint with ketamine and rolling like he did it for a living. Kato nodded like harm reduction meant anything to him and inspected the Rorschach-like staining on the tinfoil he’d just finished smoking a crack rock to nothing off of. He decided he should buy a pipe.
“Yeah, sounds reasonable. You’re a fucking logician as hell, Nick.”