White Out Read Online Free PDF Page B

top it had a doctor’s name and phone number in big block letters. And below that, in even bigger letters, it read:
    Heroin Detox
    One Day
    Safe Painless Medical Procedure
    $1000
    That billboard rose right in the middle of the main street in downtown Baltimore for maybe a year. I saw it every day. So I started to figure there were some people who wanted to get off heroin.
    I know it sounds odd, but back then that came as kind of a surprise to me. I’d quit before, of course. But it was always a practical, short-term thing. No money. Habit too big. Gotta back off it a while so I can get high on ten dollars again. That kind of thing. But really quit? Quit for good? I wasn’t used to thinking of heroin as something you wanted not to do. At least not in the daytime. It took me a little while to figure it out. It was a process of deduction. If there’s a billboard advertising a way to get off dope, there must be a desire to get off dope. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And if it costs a thousand dollars to get off the shit, people have got to want to get off it real bad.
    A thousand dollars. We’re talking about junkies. A thousand dollars is fifty twenty-dollar white tops. So the presence of that billboard implied that there were some junkies—probably rich ones, but still—who were willing to trade fifty white tops for no dope.
    That didn’t make too much sense to me. People said the doctor had a way of taking you off it with no withdrawal. It still didn’t make much sense, but it was something to think about.
    Plus I’d been kind of seeing my ex-girlfriend Eva again. She was living in New York with the guitarist for some band. She’d tell him she was visiting her parents and drive down to visit me. We got extra high and tried to have sex for hours. I’d tell her how great it would be if she’d just move in with me. Cat was a drag. Eva understood. In late May she came down for the last time.
    On a humid Sunday afternoon we drove fast to cop. Then we drove slow through the dusk after fixing. Down Route 40 through the east side of town. Deep Baltimore. It was my favorite Sunday drive. We stopped at a red light. On the left-hand side there was a glass-enclosed building. It looked like a car showroom, with the raised floor and full-length windows designed to display the new vehicles. But instead of new cars, the building sold new wheelchairs.
    Some were motorized. Some had red leather. One had thick armrests like a couch and an extra-high back. It turned slowly on a mirrored dais. On the sidewalk in front of the building, an old man leaned on his cane and stared at the beautiful wheelchairs. The setting sun lit up the chrome spokes.
    The light turned green. But we couldn’t go because an old woman was slowly caning her way across the intersection. When she was about halfway through, the light turned red again. A car behind us beeped. I looked in the rearview mirror. It was a very old man in a Buick. I could see his angry lips moving in my mirror.
    “I got a new name for old people,” I said. “You want to know what I call them?”
    “What?” Eva said.
    “Faggots,” I said. I was joking around.
    We drove a little more.
    “I can’t take this,” she said.
    “Take what?” I said. “I was just joking around calling the oldsters faggots. I don’t have any kind of problem with real gay people. In fact, one time I did something kind of gay myself.”
    She began to cry softly.
    “It was an accident,” I said. “I was drunk.”
    “It’s not that,” she said, wiping her eyes and looking out the window.
    “Then what?”
    “You want me to move in with you. But everything with you is so…makeshift.”
    For some reason that word seemed particularly damning. It was the worst thing she could have said to me. I didn’t say anything for a while.
    “Yeah, I know it’s makeshift,” I said finally. “But this is a special party time. Not makeshift, more like fun. A special occasion. Not makeshift. Don’t