Cheese for Me

I was living in Atlanta at the time, in an apartment above a real estate office in midtown. You turned the faux-brass handle and entered a short hallway whose carpeting looked like the pelt of some malnourished cat. A pair of bedrooms on your left. On the right was the door to the bathroom and just past that the small kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a tiny living room which had been turned into a third bedroom by dint of large sheets of pink Styrofoam that our third roommate had scored from a construction site nearby. The name of an industrial manufacturer was embossed diagonally at upon these sheets at 18 inch intervals. It was a small apartment, made smaller by the makeshift room, but well-supplied with views. Each of the bedrooms looked out on the city and the window at the back of the kitchen led out to a flat rooftop from which one could see the trees above Piedmont Park.

We took possession in October and by the middle of that month I'd found a dealer. I worked at a software company all the way out in the suburbs and each day I'd drag my drug-poisoned body through the clogged channels of the city to my job in the basement of one of those office complexes that are typically occupied by dentists and insurance agencies. I shared my cube with a software developer named Ernest Shanks. He was a saggy black man who favored shiny pants and shirts and who talked incessantly about all the money he'd made in his career as a consultant. His confidence was in sharp contrast to my daily terror of being exposed as a disinterested addict who'd lied on his resume. We had company meetings in a little boardroom that had been outfitted with garish carpet, a faux-mahogany table, and a bay window that seemed more suited to the hosting of pork-chop dinners or the reading of Christian Science literature than the machinations of a future software giant. Our CEO was a short man with a brittle comb-over who held himself very erect and who constantly swigged cans of strawberry slim-fast from a small paneled refrigerator against the wall. His speeches were accompanied by the refrigerator's contented purr and the loud gurgles of his stomach as the slim-fast established its laxative effect. Sometimes, with a slight wince, he would lean his fists on the table and then, after a moment's pause, he would hurry to the bathroom just off the conference room, pulling shut the hollow door with self-conscious firmness. We would wait quietly while the exhaust fan's roar was interrupted by a quick series of muffled explosions. Moments later the CEO would reappear, serene, contemplative, his tones softer, exuding confidence.

Autumn came on fast and the days were gray, the gutters overflowing with the brilliant pulp of fallen leaves. By the time I left work in the evenings it was already dark and as I drove back to that little apartment, just another set of of brake lights in a river of red, I was frequently gripped by a feeling of loneliness so intense that it approached a kind of ecstasy. The gray office towers floated like ships above the misty expressway, and as their countless lighted windows loomed out of the fog I felt my anonymity, my smallness, my lostness. It was easy enough for me to justify another visit to the dealer.

During the Christmas holidays my brother went to New Orleans to visit his friend, an avuncular lawyer he'd known since college. I was invited to go but declined. I knew they'd spend all day drinking and visiting blues clubs and I was not in the mood for music. Our roommate in the foam compartment went to South Carolina and was then scheduled to represent some obscure magazine at a political conference in California. I was all alone. This idea both thrilled and terrified me. I had become merciless with myself. I was at a great distance from my body and used it only as a vehicle for pleasure. I'd learned to ignore its protestations. I slept very little and ate only when it was necessary. With nobody about and no work to regulate me I was afraid I might overdose. To guard against this possibility I instructed my dealer to switch me, for the holidays, from heroin to cocaine. On the 23rd I began my new regimen. At first everything was fine. I deposited a yellow mound of cocaine on the office desk I'd rescued from the curb outside a local fire station. It had metal drawers and plastic top made to resemble highly varnished wood. From the desk I looked out on the sodden city, a field of gray in which red and amber lights twinkled. During one of my trips to the store for cigarettes or beer I returned with with an old issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. I vaguely remembered bargaining with the Pakistani behind the counter and of pressing bills up against the bulletproof glass to induce him to slip it into the bag with my sweating bottles.

I worked my way through the cocaine. The skin of my face felt loose. My eyes floated in pools of warm oil. My hair seemed to hover like smoke above my twitching scalp. I found a picture in that magazine of a girl standing among the rocks of a dry creek bed. The day was gray and a chain of small mountains brooded in the background. She wore rubber boots, a yellow bikini, and a brown sweater. She was looking back over her shoulder at the camera with an expression of painful shyness in which one could discern glimmers of enigmatic hope. I was fixated on that picture. It was not perfect. Her bottom overhung her long tanned legs in what seemed a most unflattering way. It was an unflattering picture and yet here it was in the magazine. It seemed an unflattering picture and yet I could not stop looking. And it occurred to me that some photo editor had perhaps anticipated my state of mind exactly, the dreary darkened apartment in an empty city, the mound of cocaine, the overflowing ashtrays, the feckless blob of sentiment and adipose moving restlessly about inside, waiting for a deliverance that would never come. It was a picture from the end of a world and perhaps from the end of my world. There was something there, in that picture. The sky was so cloudy, the terrain so forbidding. The girl must be cold but she bore it patiently. Her little bikini. It was not so unflattering. I could not stop looking. It seemed to me that if I could only focus long enough I would come to some understanding that would set me free. It seemed strange to me that the sight of this girl filled so perfectly the void in my heart. I held the magazine up to the light, I went to lie on my bed and contemplate it there in complete silence. Sometimes the girl would waver and disappear in a blaze of thick blue fire, only to emerge again with white boots and gray skin and a black bikini, her lips moving as if trying to tell me something, something.

I allowed myself to fall in love. I lay still and imagined our life together from start to finish. I began to talk to her, to tell her all, my fears and my dreams. I told her about my crazy fantasies of transcendence and easeful death. She listened to all with an expression that was at once fixed and mutable. I could see small waves of feeling pass across her face from time to time. I loved that face. I felt its lines were written on my heart and that I would never forget her. I cried and held her close when I became paranoid and could not sleep. Sometimes I would press myself up against the wall, tennis racket in hand, while I waited for the footfalls on the stairs to reach the landing and for the doorknob to turn. She did not like this behavior. She felt I was losing my grip on my sanity. I told her that I might doubt anyone or anything but never her. And I told her that if I could survive this time in my life I might become a decent man who could treat her with the care and tenderness which she deserved.

When my brother and his lawyer friend found me I tried to tell them everything. I'd written four pages in a notebook and was attempting to crack the code of my own nonsensical scrawl. They made me drink vodka and V8, and then they ordered a pizza. The lawyer took me out on the little back roof where he spread out a poncho on the wet shingles and, patting it with his hand, invited me to sit. He told me it was time I considered a change in my life's direction. The night was not cold. The sodden bare branches of the trees seemed to wind like roots through the darkness. The lawyer's face hung in the air nearby, glowing like a lantern. I closed my eyes and focused on the soothing vibrations of his voice and the way it relaxed my aching brain. When I came back inside they made me eat two pieces of pizza, cut into small pieces and softened in a bowl of beer. Then they led me into my bedroom. My brother had cleaned. The cocaine and the ashtrays were gone. The carpet had been vacuumed. The sheets were clean and the magazine was gone. I was very glad the magazine was gone. I didn't want to see the girl again; she'd left me heartbroken and I resolved to never think of her again, but when I closed my eyes she reappeared, twitching, shuddering, palpating her limbs like a crazy woman. A buzzing sound came from her mouth. She did not remember me at all.