Excerpt: Drugs Are Nice

Editor's Note: The following excerpt has been reprinted with permission from Soft Skull Press.

[My boyfriend] Bill's here. Bill doesn't mind me being a total mess. Unlike [my best friend] Rachel, he's never known me any other way. I think he finds it exotic that he has to pull me from the tub at night and pat me dry, slip a nightgown over my head. If my mother drives up to visit and gives us a cucumber he knows to cut it for me, as I'm so suicidal, I can't be trusted. Apparently I'm homicidal too, as he makes me sip his coffee first if I pour him a cup. Though that might not sound very romantic, it is. There's something quite exclusive about a relationship where one fears being poisoned and the other fears that she's going to do the poisoning, and neither one calls the police or the hospital, and neither leaves. We have an underwater sort of love: we can't see or hear each other -- or anything else -- very clearly, but we wrap around one another like currents caressing seaweed.

We can feel ourselves changing in slow motion.

One of the changes is we've both run out of money. I could do a few nights of prostitution to cover all our bills for the month, but it's not like that with Bill. I was trying to reach Jean Louis [Costes] through other people's bodies, trying to hold on to him by not holding on. With Bill, I'm already burrowed all the way in. There's no need to find a new way home.

I apply at a temp agency, trying to break into secretarial work, but the lady there says I'm too "excitable" and she can't "in good standing" send me out on a job. During my typing test, she points out, I kept exclaiming and gesticulating. The only job left to me is waitressing at Friendly's. I take it. It's hard! I have nightmares every night about customers ordering things not on the menu like nuts and bolts that I have to rush out to find, and when I came back, I have six new tables. Even Friendly's doesn't work out for poor Bill, and he's stuck scrubbing toilets for my dad's company -- and my dad, who pays him in cash under the table, keeps short-changing him.

In the evenings, Bill and I work on our third eyes. I get a book of Zen koans from the library and Bill and I stare at each other and try to picture one hand clapping, or the stick not hitting the person. We paint every day and do automatic writing, where I set the timer on the stove for twenty minutes and we have to write every single thing that goes through our minds no matter what -- no thinking about it, no correcting a spelling mistake, just go!

Bill is a man of few, few words. One time I asked him to describe me, and he said "weak and strong." That was it. When pressed, he eventually, after a whole day of thinking on it, added: "messy hair and a cup of coffee." Bill gets maybe five or ten automatic writing words down and then there are simply no more. So he starts drawing chairs or chandeliers or electrical outlets and unplugged plugs. Those are the things he's obsessed with. Apparently he has few thoughts, except about chairs, chandeliers, and outlets.

And, once in a while, we do drugs.

For Jean Louis, art is war. For me, it's a spy mission. For Bill, it's like surgery. He plays his black and white, triangular guitar every day, but he has no ambition, no need to conquer or to sow the seeds of himself. Maybe one person might see something he's done someday, or listen -- one right person, but really it would be preferable to be left alone for more careful application of scalpel to gray matter.

I, however, want a lot of recognition and admiration and even the bad stuff -- I want to be called the worst at something as well as the best . . . just so long as I'm the most. I want power. I have Linda [my father's girlfriend] to prove wrong, and my other two parents, and [my best friend] Rachel.