I made a point of learning everyone’s names. The good thing about Seth’s drug buddies was he wasn’t screwing any of them, so in that way they were all fairly harmless.Don’t shit where you eat,Seth had said once about his ability to keep his circles from overlapping. They asked me if I got high, and when I told them no, they asked me why not.
“He’s going to be a doctor,” Kyle said with what seemed to be true admiration.
“No, that’s his sister,” Seth corrected. “Hiroku’s an artist.”
They all nodded like that was a profession of the highest order.
“Hiroku’s writing me a song,” Seth continued, “for our first album. It’s going to play on the radio, and everyone will hear it and fall in love.”
“I don’t have anything yet,” I told him, feeling the pressure of his expectations, as if their success hinged on my ability to craft the perfect song.
He patted my leg reassuringly. “Don’t worry, baby. It will come to you.”
“Well, if you’re not going to be a doctor,” said Melody, the girl who’d initiated this strange conversation, “then why don’t you get high with us, Hiroku Hayashi?”
My recollection of this girl makes her sound kind of idiotic, but she was actually something of a seer, and her questions came from a place of complete innocence, childlike and earnest.
“Hiroku doesn’t get high,” Seth answered for me. I glanced over at him, annoyed. He shrugged his shoulders. “What? You don’t, babe.”
“I know I don’t, but you can let me answer for myself.”
Seth huffed, crossing his arms. “So answer her then.”
The girl’s head went back and forth between us like a tennis match. It was a little weird to have somewhat of a personal disagreement in front of spectators, but there we were, and our audience was captivated.
“I don’t get high,” I told her patiently, “because it seems like a bad idea.”
They all kind of loosely nodded like meerkats. “I used to think that too,” Melody said. “A few minutes ago I said ‘this seems like a bad idea,’ but now I’m here and it’s sooo beautiful.” She sighed and hugged herself and sounded so peaceful and gratified. “It’s like flying, Hiroku Hayashi. Don’t you want to fly with us?”
“Hiroku doesn’t fly,” Seth said like the hammer coming down. “He’s OSHA. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Melody shook her head.
“Safety first,” Seth answered like he was Confucius. Then their high kicked in full-force, and they all kind of collapsed into themselves, heads nodding, eyes fluttering, mouths slightly parted as if their souls were going on a spiritual journey and leaving their bodies, anchors in the real world, behind.
“I wish you could see what I see, Hiroku,” Seth said with a long, happy sigh as he melted into the couch. A contented smile poured lazily across his face. “There are no places where the sun doesn’t touch.”
I watched them all slowly fade away as if being overcome by a strange paralysis. I pulled Seth’s bodily vessel closer to me and kissed his forehead, silently wishing him a safe journey.
The more time I spent with Seth and his friends, the more desensitized I became to their drug use. Snorting painkillers is deceptively “clean.” No needles, no blood, no outwardly visible traces except maybe a chronic case of the sniffles. The high was over after a couple of hours, so you could continue on with normal life without it being too much of an inconvenience.
As far as addictions went, it was easy enough to hide.
With his trust fund money, Seth was able to afford the good stuff—Percocets, Percodan, Demerol, Vicodin, Tramadol, Suboxone, and when he was lucky, OxyContin. Some of them were tamper-proof, which required some combination of cooking and cooling to bring them to a crushable, snortable state. Seth and Kyle were practically kitchen chemists when it came to pill-to-powder conversions.
If Kyle was out or Seth was desperate, he’d get heroin or some synthetic mixture from James or Davonte, but Seth didn’t trust the black market stuff, so he was always mixing the powders to reduce his chances of getting a bad batch. Sometimes Seth added cocaine to the mix for a different high—in those times he was hyped up and horny or else really aggressive and snippy. It became so that I could determine from his behavior what he’d recently taken.
I observed Seth’s drug use with a detached kind of curiosity. I could come down on him and scold him for his reckless behavior or give him ultimatums which he would undoubtedly fail, but I knew that would only make him hide it from me, and at least with the way it was now, I could keep an eye on what he was doing. He also seemed to take a lot of precautions, which reassured me because it meant he wasn’t using opiods in a purposefully destructive way, but that he really seemed to be trying to self-medicate.
Like most things regarding Seth’s choices in life, a lot of it came back to his bipolar diagnosis and how his prescription drugs had failed him, which made me wonder how much of his behavior was even within his control? Could therapy help him, as I’d suggested it might, or would it only make him feel like a failure because his chemical imbalance would never be resolved by talking it out?
Kyle and I became friends as well. We spent enough time together in Seth’s apartment that we started hanging out at school when it was convenient. I learned his supplier was a nurse who worked at an assisted living facility. Though he didn’t tell me who or which one, I sensed the nurse was a relative of his, and selling drugs was a way for them to supplement their income.
It would be so much easier if I could think of Kyle as a bad guy, using people like Seth as a way to profit from their addiction, but Kyle wasn’t making a ton of money at what he did, and he was addicted to the drugs himself, which made it hard for me to hold it against him.
It also wasn’t difficult to get the drugs. Seth’s other two dealers weren’t great people, but their customer service was worthy of a five-star rating. At any time of day Seth could make a call, and ten minutes later there’d be a knock on his apartment door. No questions and no complications, they were like the Uber of drug dealers.
It was in this highly sanitized, highly “safe” environment that my curiosity at what it might feel like to fly with them began to grow.
