Wite-Out

In the lagging, overcast mornings or in the pale afternoons or in the nights that came suddenly, the orange sun slumping behind the trees, Glorianne and I would sit on her bed. A bare white leg, freed from the folds of her muumuu, would rest casually against my own as together we’d look at magazines or the TV that was forever mumbling away, the volume so low no words were discernible. It was a familiar comfort.

“What do you want to be?” Glorianne once asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Fashion designer?” I was immediately embarrassed. It sounded so big and unlikely. Pointless, even. Who did I think I was?

“Can you sew?”

“No. I can draw, though. Sort of.”

Glorianne repositioned herself, rocking on her buttocks and becoming a smidge taller. She leaned in toward me, almost conspiratorially. I could smell her plain soap. Why fashion, she wanted to know. What about it drew me to it? Why did I like drawing? I wasn’t used to this kind of interrogation. It was never important to know the reasons or motivations behind anything, as if to voice them could unravel any declaration. Besides, questions were time consuming, and nobody ever had time.

My interest in fashion must have originated from Mom’s September issues, whose heft and scent were like something consecrated, holy. In the relief of our lake cabin’s bedroom, the curtains pulled against the late-summer sun, the box fan set to a soothing whir, Mom and I, prone on the bed, elbows kissing, would study each page of Vogue. Bazaar. Mademoiselle. I was eight, nine, ten. Wore a sandy, half-dry swimsuit, a constellation of new freckles. Both of us barefoot, our ceiling-ward toes occasionally grazing, our hair rough from lake water, admiring slouchy gabardine and jewel-toned rayon, dolman sleeves and dropped waists. We rarely spoke, instead emitted enraptured oohs! in unison. We were not intimidated by the runway’s absurd, exaggerated, or clashing fashion, for it was permissive. Invent your own way! it said. We knew to translate these looks into approachable, abbreviated things, to reduce them to synecdoches. A costume-y nautical getup became Mom’s striped tee embroidered with a gold anchor found marked down at Marshalls. As a child, I loved the game of this, the creativity it inspired, the challenge it demanded—to work only with what I had available to me. I remember I wanted pedal-pushers like the girls in Bananarama, so I took to wearing my four-year-old sister Molly’s jeans to school. I donned my galoshes even in summer because, if you squinted, they might pass for Janet Jackson’s booties. “This time, I’m gonna do it my way,” she said in her video for “Control.” I worshipped her.

Mom, an enthusiastic consumer, took us to White Flower Day sales and Labor Day sales and Back-to-School sales and Dollar Days sales and Doorbuster sales and Last-Minute Shopper’s Saturday sales. I’ll never forget the evening she took us to Emporium Capwell for new school clothes. Not a soul was in the section I shopped, one that was neither for children nor for juniors but somewhere in between. It was confined to a quiet, softly lit corner in which every out-facing sleeve from the clearance rack was irresistible. I piled them all atop my arm and made my way to the dressing room, which, because of its vacancy, seemed like a secret world—a world of mirrors, a million me’s. In my private room, I changed into the various outfits, aware they weren’t entirely in style but knowing that if I were to pair this with that or that with this I could evoke Janet Jackson’s white button-down or Madonna’s off-the-shoulder sweater.

Mom was proud of my choices, smiled as I spun around so she could check the fits. Helped me wiggle out of a gray drop-waist dress with a big red bow I wore on the first day of school. I loved it for its shapelessness, its resemblance to a barrel, its almost-ugliness I could make hip with jelly shoes and globe earrings, lace gloves from the Halloween section at Sprouse-Reitz.

Fashion was the thread that tugged through me and Mom, connecting us, providing closeness.

Glorianne continued to ask questions that forced me deeper, to mine into myself to discover not simply answers but also the reasons for my answers. Her questions made me feel smarter about myself. Smarter in general.

“I saw in a magazine once this chick wearing a big, poufy skirt, a Cinderella-type deal, with, like, a wifebeater. It looked so cool, you know?”

“You like contrast. The unexpected.” Her eyes narrowed, glinted. “What else?”

“Why do you care?” I asked, not meanly but sincerely.

When I was young, Mom and Dad chose the 1960 Joe Jones hit “You Talk Too Much” as my theme song. I hated it. It was a dumpy tune that made me hide and cry while they laughed over their meat loaf. “Toughen up,” Dad would say. “We’re just teasing you.” The song was dedicated to me because I’d often follow Mom into the bathroom, where she’d be wrestling hot rollers into her hair and gluing fake eyelashes atop her real ones. With a splayed issue of Highlights, I’d read aloud science facts and knock-knock jokes. Mom would groan and ask me to go play someplace else. But I’d keep babbling on and on, waiting for something from her.

Maybe waiting for her to say Interesting! or Who’s there?

I was emotionally needy and she was stretched thin, all of us tugging at her all the time, pulling her like taffy this way and that. She had to make breakfast, pack lunches, nurse, take some of us to school, pick some of us up. She had to Windex the toothpaste splatter off the mirror, defrost the pot roast. Run to the bank and then to the dime store. There were dentist appointments, booster shots, step class. She had to shave her legs and paint her nails. Watch her soap and read her experts. Give mini facials in tract-home living rooms: cleanse; tone; masque; moisturize. Pick up thumbprint cookies from the bakery, guest mints for the crystal dish, flowers from Safeway. Have the gals over because it was her turn to host. Load the dishwasher. Refill the ice trays. Insert the diaphragm, the spermicidal foam.

It’s no wonder she couldn’t give me the attention I required; it was already fragmented, scattered all over the place like so much broken glass. She, like everyone else to varying degrees, was preoccupied with maintaining the values of flash-ripened capitalism, the extrinsic markers of the middle class. Buy the things to beautify the body and the home, to reflect upward mobility, to keep up with the neighbors, to expand and then contract the mind without even leaving the couch, to gain acceptance, to pursue happiness. In the Reagan 1980s there was the diffuse anxiety to scramble to the top before those riding on amnesty or affirmative action could—the undocumented folks like Grandma Coco, who was deported back to Central America with Dad when he was a year old, before returning with paperwork in order, taking a thankless factory job and buying a small starter home whose mortgage she and Grandpa Jim defaulted on. Everyone, even Grandma, was a threat to the wealth many believed they were entitled to.

Mom suffered the cognitive dissonance of dragging around four young kids and collecting federal assistance while simultaneously denigrating the so-called welfare queens who shrank the wealth gap and diminished the status of what she was aiming to become. In other words, she was getting in her own way. Both a victim and an accomplice of the largely unchecked racist, classist, and misogynist rhetoric of the time. Atop this, a red button somewhere in Russia that could wipe it all away in an instant.

Nevertheless, Mom was by no means a negligent mother. She knew exactly where we kids were at all times. Constantly checked up on us to make sure we weren’t climbing too high or putting things in our mouths we could choke on. There was plenty to worry about back then: white windowless vans, Halloween candy rigged with razor blades, Satanic child-sacrificing rituals. She knew all about it because she watched the nightly news avidly from the kitchen as she shook chicken legs in a Ziploc. Because she had seen the faces of missing children on the milk cartons. There was strangulation by superhero cape, asphyxiation by jawbreaker, so many drownings in backyard pools despite the warnings on novelty inner tubes. There was the I-5 Killer and the Freeway Killer and the Golden State Killer. The earthquake drills, the forest fires (“Only you”), and the sleeper waves that warned us away from the shoreline. Not to mention the Tot Finder stickers in bedroom windows, the Mr. Yuk ones under the sink. Everything was a threat in the 1980s—a nationwide overreaction to the second-wave feminist movement, which put mothers in the office and sent fathers hiking with divorce papers. It was an anxiety propagated by a hyperbolic and fearmongering media.

Mom had once cautioned me that a bunch of kids had died from sniffing Wite-Out and to stay away from the stuff. I recall later holding my breath as the girl one desk over dabbed it on her sixth-grade geography report. How I’d watch with a combination of fear, envy, and curiosity the classmates who removed bottles of it from their pencil boxes and painted over misspelled words. How casually they wielded death!

The first time I saw heroin was at a birthday party in 1996. I was twenty years old, naive, a fake-tough tagalong. I glimpsed it, inadvertently, through a flashbang gap in a bathroom door slammed shut with a quick foot and a curse word. In that sliver I saw a frothy pile of taffeta and tulle, pink and sky blue encrusted with jewels. I saw dirty, dimpled arms, greened by the slept-in bracelets of bicycle chain and rhinestone Petco cat collars. Those teenaged girls in vintage dresses, with greasy dyed-black hair and baby fat, held steady their needles, bit leather belts tight around soft biceps.

The sight of them through the crack in the door imprinted my brain the way a gruesome highway wreck does. I became obsessed—the instant memory both terrifying and exhilarating. It was something about the trespassing of flesh. The willingness to endure self-inflicted pain in order to experience pleasure.

Part of its impact was the context. The contrast. A birthday party at a plain, farmy house. School pictures of the birthday girl hanging in the hallway—cowlicks, freckles, missing teeth. A supermarket sheet cake with brightly dyed sugarfat. How innocent it all seemed. The mom and her friends were in the next room playing cards, classic rock, dumb.

I feared everyone’s lack of fear there. So much so, I wanted it. It was a dizzying and disorienting feeling. I felt sickish. Swimmy. The sensation of sniffing Wite-Out, maybe.

When I finally tried heroin, it was not to get high. It was not for the reported bodily sensations or the altering of my environment. Its conscious aim was twofold: First, it was to erase the old me and become someone else. Someone who wasn’t scared all the time, who wasn’t constantly overwhelmed, who felt unable to bear the load of life. Who wasn’t shy and uninteresting and adrift. I’d become Mercedes. Or one of the girls in the bathroom at the birthday party; the same kind of girl who had had Wite-Out in her pencil box and a jawbreaker bulging her cheek, staining her tongue blue. Second, it was to be heard. I was disheartened by my own voice. Embarrassed by its eager pitch, its limited pool of phrases. I learned at some point during puberty that my body spoke louder than the words I couldn’t find. Doctors and dance instructors and relatives made asides about weight gain and cellulite and breast buds, respectively. Boys and old pervs gazed at my derrière and told me I was fine. I used track marks, half-mast eyes, and overall physical neglect the same way I had emaciation a couple of years before: to communicate nonverbally the pain I was in. The anger I carried. The defiant bravery I knew was somewhere inside of me. I wanted to reject everything and everyone with the same intense disinterest I’d believed everything and everyone held for me. To accept and confirm myself as the outsider I believed everyone already thought I was. To be able to impress, repulse, or trouble without ever even opening my mouth.

What I couldn’t predict is that the chemicals heroin bestowed me, the physical sensations I had assumed would only be the inconsequential by-product of the preeminent act of getting high, were the exact ones my brain released when Mom held me, when she comforted and supported me. And that had been what I was really after.

How strange that a substance found in one specific flower is the same, structurally and functionally, as the peptides our bodies not only also produce but are able to receive and read as well. That this substance is compatible with the puzzle-piece receptor sites that teem our neurons, bespeckle our brain matter, smoothly locking into them as if it was always meant to be. And that the primary function of these chemicals, whether of inherent, botanical, or laboratorial origin, is to comfort. To mitigate pain, modulate emotions, and give a felt sensation to maternal affection.

In various studies over the past thirty years, mammals whose opiate-receptor sites had been either blocked with antagonists like Narcan or altered due to genetic mutations were unable to bond with their babies or mothers, respectively. It works the other way around too: In 2019, scientists in Japan found changes in the number of opiate receptors of baby mice who were separated from their mothers—pointing to a correlation between early life stress, maladaptive behaviors, and chronic physical pain in humans. The correlation between Mom holding me and me holding dope.

It was the drug itself, I soon realized, wrongly, that I needed—not the attention I’d get by doing it. It was the one thing that really liked me, loved me. Held me and comforted me and protected me from all the bad feelings. It was my terry-cloth mother,* my laboratory surrogate. It was the shameful thumb I sucked under the table while stroking the edge of my tattered baby blanket across my face.

Mom’s protection of me was lopsided: too good at guarding my physical being from the dangers of the world but lacking when it came to conditioning and encouraging my psychological being. And without psychological strength, I couldn’t calibrate the fears she’d instilled in me. They became outsized and irrepressible. Her fears were, ironically, what ended up crushing me—not the hot grill of a jackknifed semi or the cruel heart-shaped cavity in the chest of some dude I’d never even slept with. I moved through the world afraid because I couldn’t trust anything: nothing internally (that is, myself) or externally.

In her essay “On Fear,” Mary Ruefle describes a toddler whose facial expression rapidly alternates between joy and terror when she’s met by a dog. “It struck me that her face would probably continue to change, albeit at a slower rate, every time she was approached by a dog for the next couple of years, one day coming to rest on that expression that was likely to signify forever after how this human being felt about dogs.” The young child had not yet learned, either by experience or instruction, what to choose—fear or joy.

I chose fear. Learned it through Mom’s cautionary tales, through Dad’s loose violence. I moved through the world stiff and breathless. Even after heroin anesthetized it, there was another fear that kept me going: that of dopesickness. Ruefle cited a passage about psy-ops in a CIA manual that stated that the fear of something is more motivating, more torturous than that actual something. In other words, what goes on psychologically when we anticipate something terrible is often more damaging than the actual physical pain we endure at the end of it. Recalling the aforementioned reward system, which produces more feelings of well-being when one’s expecting a reward than when one receives said reward (remember: the monkeys, the light, the juice), it’s clear we’re driven by states of anticipation, both positive and negative, that utilize past events or accounts to determine future outcomes—that is to say we move only in the shadows and the foreglows. In the crepuscule between life and death.

Glorianne’s protection was the fun-house mirror of Mom’s: stretched where Mom’s was pinched and vice versa. There, sprawled on her bed, she wasn’t afraid to know me. To ask me my thoughts, to ask for a hug or receive one without questioning its motives. I’d go into her room with magazines and read her highlights from articles about the people and things I was obsessing on: Julia Butterfly Hill, Lauryn Hill, trepanning, Prada, orchids. “Interesting!”

Then I’d slink behind a hollow door, mere feet away, and cook my dope in a cereal spoon. I’d curse and yell when my blood coagulated in the needle’s chamber before I could shoot it up, would curse and yell at Dale when I suspected he was holding out on me. I’d slam the front door at late hours, underdressed for the weather. Hop into strange cars going strange places; all that mattered was what was hidden behind the dash. I’d return wobbly and brash, banging around the kitchen for a midnight snack. About this, questions were hardly asked. At least not ones that went deep enough.

Referring to the mid-century experiments conducted on rhesus monkeys by psychologist Harry Harlow wherein infant primates were separated from their mothers and provided with two inanimate surrogates: one made from wire that held a bottle of food and the other made of soft terry cloth. The monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cuddly, comforting “mother” over the cold and stiff yet food-providing one. ↩

Tags