By Any Other Name
Non-Fiction by Jill M. Talbot
“Many a late adolescent, if faced with continuing diffusion,
would rather be nobody, or somebody bad, or indeed dead —
and this totally and by free choice — than to be not-quite-somebody.”
—Erik Erikson
Virginia Woolf wrote, “I want to write a novel about Silence ... the things people don’t say. But the difficulty is immense.” I’m in a writing group for people with mental illness. I don’t have the confidence to join other writing groups. But it’s time to rewind. None of these are events I’m proud of but here goes nothing. Here goes giving silence its voice.
When I met Nathaniel I was walking alone in the Downtown Eastside. He just assumed I was looking for drugs. Why else would a girl be walking around the Downtown Eastside alone at 2 a.m.? Apart from the obvious. The truth was more complicated. It’s more accurate to say that I was looking for any escape. Nathaniel mumbled when he spoke but we rarely spoke much.
Silence and heroin used to be my best friends. Nathaniel introduced me to heroin and to Craigslist escort ads but not to silence; silence has always been with me. When you’re a kid they call it selective mutism, when you grow up you’re just socially inept. Only two people ever made me feel like I didn’t have to speak and one of them was Nathaniel. The other one is for another story.
We often hung out in his garage. There was a red toolbox with two school pictures of his two sons, one with missing teeth. On the wall was a picture of a half-naked woman. What made me think that I belonged there? I even went back to his garage when I was clean and sober and in treatment.
Nathaniel had a baby face. He had a unique way of walking, as if he were gliding. I was shocked when I saw this exact same walk in a fellow patient in a psych ward. I remember his name also being Nathaniel but it seems like that’s too much of a coincidence; I don’t trust my memory. Nathaniel was the best and the worst thing to ever happen to me. He made me feel like I was in a movie.
Silence was safety. Music can be used to drive away homeless people. “Baby Shark,” for instance. Or heavy metal used in Abu Ghraib. Meditation relies on silence. I also remember his hands being big and calloused from mechanic work.
Nathaniel never let me in the house, even when his family was away. You know something’s wrong when you’re jealous of the kids and not the wife. When I was young I always wanted to be let in the house, as if I were a stray cat. By the end I knew my place. By the end I wasn’t jealous of the kids or the wife. Sometimes we went to my place if no one else was there. What will I change Nathaniel’s name to, I wonder? I’m tempted to use real names.
I always loved driving with Nathaniel although he often had to give me a plastic bag to throw up into. I imagine Nathaniel’s hands and I try to go back in time. I try to feel the wind on my face with a cigarette driving fast. I try to remember without remembering puking. I never remember Nathaniel the way he really was.
It’s funny how heroin looks like heron and heroine. The truth is that heroin is another form of silence; silence and death are cousins. I realize that real heroin is hard to find these days, being replaced with fentanyl, but this story takes place a while ago.
Shakespeare was wrong, a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet. To describe the distance in miles is not the same as describing it in kilometres. Heroin is a perfect name. The truth is that I usually called it “down.” You can tell how much you love something by how many names you have for it. I won’t list all of the names I have for heroin.
Nathaniel never seemed damaged or disordered which is surprising given how much crack he smoked. I don’t know how anyone manages a crack or coke addiction, just a little bit spins me into a dark depression. So far I haven’t given you any reasons to like Nathaniel so my attachment might seem absurd.
I wonder if I would still feel safe if I were to go back to the garage. For some reason I doubt I would. I no longer get warm and fuzzy feelings thinking about him. Maybe I simply no longer have warm and fuzzy feelings. Maybe it wasn’t him but the heroin, the two just always went together. It plays in my head like a movie. A silent movie. Facebook once asked if I wanted to friend one of his sons. Both sons were in university at the time. It’s scary to think of how much time has passed since we met. I don’t have Facebook anymore and it’s done wonders for my sanity. Everything I’ve ever done has been an effort to escape. It doesn’t take long to escape the escape.
Now I’m jealous of the girl I was before going to rehab three times, before completely falling apart. I’m not sure if we should call it stupidity or innocence. Perhaps desperation. Desperate, innocent and stupid all seem appropriate, and all inefficient. In hindsight, it’s strange that I wasn’t introduced to heroin sooner. I was lost and attracted predators like shit attracts flies. Was Nathaniel a predator? It’s hard to say. Nathaniel was Nathaniel.
When Nathaniel wasn’t watching porn, working on cars, or smoking crack he was playing slots online. There was no money involved and I wondered what the purpose was. He played like a rat pulls a lever to get a reward. Later I met a coke-head who also played slots online. I was stranded somewhere in Vancouver and he invited me to his place just to hang out. The next day I returned to see if I could get my favourite toque back as I had left it behind. He looked surprised and irritated and explained that he had thrown it out.
Once I posted a Craigslist ad saying that I was looking for down and was actually successful. I met a French Canadian crackhead in Abbotsford who watched cooking shows non-stop. He worked on stolen cars. I guess I’m lucky I never got into too much trouble. What am I saying? I got into plenty of trouble, just no legal trouble.
I remember encounters that ended in assault and I tense up. I feel more now than I did at the time. At the time I couldn’t feel, it’s how I did so much damage.
When I think of heroin I get goosebumps. I remember the way the powder turned to liquid which turned to smoke. And you would chase it. That’s if you knew what you were doing and got good stuff, which I usually did because Nathaniel always had the best connections.
I’m starting to forget how it tasted. Whenever I’m cold I’m reminded of withdrawal. Of sweating and kicking the wall. I miss the great relief of using after being sick. I miss being a kid in the garage, even though I wasn’t really a kid. I wonder why he took the pictures down when he did. I wonder why he never worried about anyone entering the garage from the house. He made me pee outside when it was late and the Safeway was closed. But this was all a lifetime ago and it’s possible that he offered me a bucket which I refused to use.
No one has ever understood why I wandered the streets. I wasn’t afraid of being hurt. I either didn’t care or I wanted to be hurt. I wanted to be somebody else. I wanted to be free. I wanted my fake names, they felt more real than my actual name. The person they assumed I was felt more real than my day-to-day life.
Now I’m alarmed when I feel scared — fear means that you care what happens to you. I think of all of the other encounters I’m not yet ready to write about. Or perhaps I don’t need to write about them since they were all more or less the same. My life is made up of before, during and after Nathaniel. Or before, during and after heroin.
I think of a poet saying not to sugar-coat and realize that’s why I love poetry and resent my upbringing. We sugar-coated so much we lived in a goddamned gingerbread house. One twelve-step meeting was called Devious Frightened Loners and I went to it for the name alone. I think of a group called Devious Frightened Gingerbread People. Addicts also don’t sugar-coat. The cliche about us being dishonest is false, we merely have greater motivation to avoid the truth.
I started running away for the night when I was fifteen and I’m not sure when it stopped. It’s been awhile now. I need to pinch myself to feel real — to put everything together like a collage. To remember and to forget — sometimes those are the same thing. To remember is to alter the memory slightly such that the original no longer exists. But if something’s not remembered, how can you tell that it happened at all?
I try to recall what else was lost in encounters. A wallet, a toque, a phone, an SFU hoodie from my boss, and self-worth. I remember a group called Finding Safety, I remember asking if it were ever found. I remember the writing workshop in rehab; it made rehab bearable.
I think again of Nathaniel’s calloused hands and think of the times we tried to pretend we were real people going for gelato in East Van or ice cream from McDonald’s. Or of the times we went to the park late at night. I remember holding hands. It was rare for him to be kind this way, or to do anything other than smoke rock and watch porn. By this point I no longer felt jealous of his family or friends, instead I grew to feel sorry for them. Once I went through the toolbox to see what was there. Some tools, some straws, a pack of smokes and a Starbucks card. I thought of pocketing the Starbucks card but knew that it would be empty. And his sons on the outside; never growing, never changing.
I chew on some nicotine gum and try to think about something other than Nathaniel, while a part of me seems determined to think about Nathaniel, as if I can find something that’s missing. If I write for long enough I might solve the question of silence. I don’t know why I have this compulsion to go back in time. Maybe it’s actually a sign of safety — I feel safe enough to go back. The hell if I know. I will change names because I have to, but also because it’ll make the story mine.
I remember the time I called Nathaniel’s house phone and hung up when a child or woman answered the phone. I can’t really recall, perhaps it happened more than once. He questioned me about it but he didn’t really seem annoyed. It was more like he was teasing me, but it was clear that I wasn’t supposed to use that number.
I texted Nathaniel recently, a friend wanted me to get her some ecstasy, but really I just wanted to see if his number still worked. Surprisingly it did. He asked me what I wanted and never replied when I told him I was living in South Vancouver.
The more I edit this, the more it becomes something else. It’s no longer mine if I write it. That’s the best and worst part of all of this. I know I contradict myself. It is mine and it isn’t mine.
Opposite of Nathaniel’s hands were the hands of the cardiac surgeon I found on Craigslist when he was in Vancouver for a conference. His hands were soft and I felt weird imagining the places they had been, the people they had been inside. Surprisingly he didn’t lecture me about smoking. He told me that smokers had more successful transplants and they weren’t sure why.
When I was eighteen my parents told me that I had to travel if I wasn’t going to school. I went to Europe with nothing planned but three days in a hostel in London. It was a nightmare. This was all before heroin. Heroin kept me safe in so many ways. I didn’t need to act out. I could be alone and be fine. I could hide in the garage. I wasn’t so desperate, stupid and innocent.
I remember when Nathaniel got me pregnant and I tried to tell him that I wouldn’t have an abortion. It didn’t work. He believed that I would wait too long but not that I would simply choose to keep it. I wanted to get back at him for having a real family, he had just got back from a family vacation. Stupid, in hindsight. Desperate, stupid and innocent.
I wanted to lie down on the bed in the hotel where his friend was staying, where they smoked crack and I smoked down and he said, “She’s my baby,” as he hugged me, as if he was using me to make her jealous.
I’m still holding onto the person I was when I was with him. I didn’t feel young at the time but that’s foolish, in hindsight. I was definitely young and desperate and stupid and innocent. I keep mixing up the order, perhaps it doesn’t matter. This all started before I was on disability.
I wasn’t technically a child when I met Nathaniel but a part of me had never grown up and that was the part that was with him. One time he told me about overhearing one of his sons having sex and said, “My son is a man!”
Perhaps addiction is as difficult to write about as silence is. Perhaps you have to be in it in order to write about it and who thinks of writing while being high or dopesick? There’s no worse feeling than being dopesick and yet I forced myself to go through it many times. It cannot be explained so I will not try.
Addiction is getting into a hot bath only to not get out even though the water has gone cold. I listen to Elliott Smith (heroin addicted singer-songwriter), “Maybe I got a problem but that’s not what I wanted to say, I’d prefer to say nothing...”
Sometimes I feel like writing is playing Marco Polo with myself. I can’t really explain. Sometimes all I want to do is to hide in a box like we did when we were kids. I think of Nathaniel’s sons and the school pictures with missing teeth. Now they must’ve graduated from university.
I’m tired and can only think of the past in short bursts. I feel like a cokehead. Cokeheads need an audience. Heroin addicts don’t need anybody. It’s not surprising which one I chose.
I pause and the writing group discusses cat stories. I welcome the distraction. Perhaps I should stick to fiction. Or is this healing? I’m done for the day even though the group isn’t over yet. I imagine putting the memories away into a box and burying it in a garden. Or putting it away on a shelf. Hiding it underneath the floorboards. Putting it in the red toolbox.
What would my life be like if I had never met Nathaniel? Would I still have gone to rehab three times? Would I have spent more or less time in the psych ward? I want to rock back and forth thinking about this. Perhaps I still need to grieve the loss of heroin and in doing so will grieve Nathaniel and the girl I was. I don’t know what else to tell you.
Our trades of drugs for sex became more frequent and the feeling became more nauseating and empty. When I was younger it felt exciting. Desperation changes everything. Perhaps I was wrong before or perhaps there are different kinds of desperation. He got really mad if I got high and said I was going to go find a bathroom only to not return.
I want to write about silence like Virginia Woolf, I want to write about hope, even when there is none. The search for hope is what matters. And I’m alive, goddamnit, that must count for something.
I think of the time I accidentally set my hoodie on fire with a cigarette while Nathaniel was driving. How would our relationship be different if I were in the driver’s seat? Could I be the one with calloused hands and kids and tools?
Towards the end Nathaniel was not as comforting. It was the typical end of any addiction. I want to go back to when we went out for ice cream — gelato.
We need to pause here. I keep going back so much I’m afraid I’m losing track of the person I am in the present. The writing group is talking about the shadow, Carl Jung. Seems appropriate.
The group is silent again. I wonder if I were to go back if I would even remember which garage it was. I had gotten lost a few times before.
I took some Tylenol 3s last week for a dental issue and the feeling of warmth brought me back. I’m proud of myself for only taking 4/10 of the white pills. I want to prove the cliches wrong. But sometimes I think I don’t have cravings because I’m not the same person as the junkie girl from my past. I’m not the kid I was.
Perhaps that’s all for now. I don’t want to remember Nathaniel’s garage. I don’t want to know what became of his sons. I don’t want to go to his Facebook page. I don’t want to imagine the toolbox. I don’t want to sit in the dealer’s car. I keep contradicting myself. I don’t know what I want. I want heroin, real heroin, the stuff they stopped selling (don’t let me know if it’s available again). Craigslist escort ads also no longer exist, nor does East One, the psych ward that was the inspiration for my first real short story. This is enough of what people don’t say. Perhaps there’s a reason why it’s left unsaid. I have a bad habit of oversharing and trauma dumping.
Most songs I can think of about silence are about women refusing to be silenced. Once again my life doesn’t fit the mould. I am writing about things that aren’t meant to be written about so it fits in that sense, albeit not without guilt. Are secrets and silence the same thing?
But back to Nathaniel, back to puking and being all itchy from too much heroin.
I will never go back to the garage.
I was hoping that if I wrote that I would intuitively know that it was true. But how can I possibly know?
I go for a walk and the cherry blossoms fall like giant snowflakes. I cling to my writing like it may save me. I cling to the past and to the future. In elementary school I was valedictorian and had to write a speech about the future. I had no idea what was to come. What a thing to ask of a thirteen-year-old.
I still think of texting him to ask if I can visit the garage again. Perhaps I would if I lived closer. But that would be dangerous. Hang out in the barbershop for long enough and you’re going to get a haircut, as they say in twelve-step meetings.
I wonder if his wife finally got rid of him.
The elephant in the room is a balloon animal. Heroin seems like a dream now, was it really a decade of my life? Silence can take over your whole psyche until you’re just a corpse. Silence can be deadly. Once you write about silence it’s no longer silent. It’s okay to grieve silence, it’s okay to pop the balloon. I want to go to the ocean, I want to start over. It’s getting hard to breathe. I feel like something is trapped in my chest. A doctor once told me that nobody gets clean in Vancouver, and yet here we are. I haven’t used opioids in many years, not counting the Tylenol 3 from the dentist.
I ask a chatroom for a male name and someone says Nathaniel. Naming things is a responsibility I don’t want to have.
Virginia Woolf was right, it’s difficult to write about silence. It’s also difficult to write about time when your memory is foggy, backwards, or simply missing. Multiple puzzles mixed together with missing pieces. Perhaps it’s simply difficult to write anything.
I suppose you think I can’t remember because I was high. This is not the case. Or maybe it is, the hell if I know. Do I even want to remember is a better question.
I listen to composer John Cage’s song of nothing but silence, “4’33”. I watch the orchestra perform this on YouTube. I think of erasure poems and blank canvases. Sometimes it’s what’s missing that matters most. In drama, silence is called a beat, in art it’s negative space, in poetry it’s a break. The sub-text of silence can be anything. Scars speak a language of their own. Cigarette burns shout. The difficulty is immense indeed. I wonder why they get real musicians to perform “4’33”. Anyone can perform silence. I watch another video, this one with a pianist.
I once wondered if a boy I saw nearby was one of his sons. How would I know? Maybe writing isn’t supposed to be easy. We remember what matters; if we remembered everything we would crash like a laptop malfunctioning.
When I first got my cat she didn’t make a sound for six months. I wonder what happened to her to make her so quiet, or maybe it’s what didn’t happen... Now she meows at me frequently. It’s as if she knows I’m writing about her. I watch her play with a toy mouse. She brings me back to the present every time I rewind. I remember ho old she is because she was born when I got clean. In a month she will be four years old.
In twelve-step meetings you’re encouraged to identify as a junkie. In other places you’re encouraged not to take it on as an identity. I go back and forth from one to the other. It took up a decade of my life, it deserves a name. Silence deserves a name.
I remember Nathaniel as a giant jack-in-the-box, popping up out of nowhere when I’m trying to meditate. I took a course on memory in university and I wish I could remember what I learned. I did get an A+ in that class. Now all I know about memory is that it’s unreliable.
I was a student at SFU when I met Nathaniel but there were multiple versions of myself and the student was different from the junkie. I am not the same as the student or the junkie. I am not sure who I am, only that I listen to Taylor Swift and drink coffee. I also like cats but who doesn’t? Psychopaths. Outside it’s sunny.
I wish I still smoked cigarettes. Perhaps I will take another Tylenol 3. What a silly name, it sounds so innocuous but it’s an opioid. It feels just like down. However, when the dentist asked if I needed more pain meds I said no. That at least I can be proud of.
I want to start over but I also want to move on, start a new project. Forget about Nathaniel, as if that were possible. »