Shadow People By Victoria Mikael

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Shadow People


   Since the age of fourteen, alcohol helped to douse recurring depression, anxiety, and bad/cloudy memories. And back further, all the way to montessori kindergarten, I have vivid recollections of my six-year old self circling a beige Victorian school house during recess, a plastic bubble pipe in my hands for - you guessed it - blowing bubbles - but I used it in the way I’d seen my Dad and his roommates use their pipes, joint, and cigarettes. I took deep inhales from the mouthpiece and blew out the bubbles/pretend smoke, while also exhaling my not-pretend worries and fears. Looking back, it's evident that I was searching for ways to cope and replicate how I’d learned to do so from my parents and their friends. 
   For most of my teenage years, drinking, as a coping mechanism, had worked, as it was what was in my blood, from both my maternal and paternal lineage. And it felt natural to surround myself with people who were doing the same. Water seeks its own level, and by 19, my level was filled with an almost constant state of inebriation and drug experimentation. A goal of mine was to experience all the highs and then find the one - or golden combination of them - that would most expertly soothe and obliterate all at once. The one that would satiate all my pain and anxiety the best. 
   It was the 4th of July weekend, 1996, when Nate said, “The 4th is a bullshit holiday. Let’s leave the country.” So me, Nate, and Sami drove from Seattle to Vancouver, BC. I guess we were all junkies by then but Nate and I knew we weren't as bad as Sami. We had jobs, paid our rent on time, showered regularly, called our moms most weeks and did all the regular things that functioning members of society do. We knew when to reign it in. But it was true the tar didn’t hit as hard anymore - Sami said it happens with opiates sometimes and was part of getting strung out. That’s why I was careful and kept a calendar, making sure we didn’t use too many days in a row, lest we get actually hooked. 
   We didn’t want to drink Bud Light or set off fireworks and when Sami claimed Vancouver was where we could score China White, we were all in. She said it felt like kissing God. “Didn’t Belushi say that?” asked Nate. “Yeah cause it’s true,” she sighed and closed her eyes dramatically. Nate and I looked at each other and smiled; A spiritual experience sounded great, necessary really. The ride up was raucous and giddy. We blasted Crass and the U.K. Subs, and passed the time scream-singing, chain-smoking, and sharing nips of cheap whiskey between wild laughter and air-drum solos. The mood changed when we were hassled at the border and detained for four hours. 
   The immigration cops made fun of Sami’s fishnets and my bullet belt, ran Nate’s name, and messed with him over some old DUI. When they let us go we found a joint they’d missed, still wedged in the crack of the passenger seat. “Jesus Christ, we’re lucky,” I said as we passed the smoke between us till we found the downtown lower east side. The “D-LESS,” Sami said, was where all the good shit was. She’d copped here before, said it was easy and that Canadian pigs don’t fuck with users, only the dealers get hassled and even then, barely. I was still nervous. I parked and we walked through whispers of people the likes I’d never seen. I’d watched plenty of Dateline specials about addiction and had already spent considerable time around drug addicts.…but I’d never witnessed anything like this.  
   There was a deeper hollow in their eyes that made them look like half-erased souls. Any light left was eclipsed by sores in the hinges of their arms and abscessed scabs on the backs of their hands. We got scared and tucked ourselves into a dive bar called The American, laughed at the irony and ordered a trash-can sized pitcher of beer. We were playing darts when we noticed the long spindly shape of a man standing in the doorway with an odd and ominous energy. He staggered into our light where we could see sallow features and gowed, iron-gray eyes. 
   Gowed was the smacked out state-of-being where we wanted to take up just semi-permanent residency, cause only junkies wanna be high all the time. Sami said the guy looked, “kinda hot in a scarecrow way,” but I  thought he looked like a bird, specifically a loon, and called him that in my head - even after he’d told us his name. The Loon smelled sour, like onions and feet and his long gray fingers seemed to try to hold onto and emphasize his words as he talked but all his gestures were in slow-motion and his hand movements only served to emphasize how high he was. His pepper-grain pupils veered lazily into opposing hemispheres like he’d been hit over the head with a hammer, and we couldn’t tell which one of us he was responding to when we asked how to get high around here, but Sami decided it was her and insisted on going with him. 
    When, after an hour, they returned, I asked the Loon if we could get high at his place but he said he had roommates. “Come on, we can go up the road though,” he said and we followed. The sun glared down at me, searing hot rays exposing what a piece of shit I was. She burned into my skin the feeling that if my Swedish grandmother could see me she’d clasp her heart and scream with disappointment. But Maud, the wild Irish one from my mother’s side, who mixed valium and whiskey, left her kids, and ran away to Italy with a man half her age - she’d have understood. Maybe that’s why I kept pursuing narcotic masochism and placing myself in terrifying situations. Self-destruction was woven into the very quilt of my DNA. At least on mom’s bloodline.
    My fastidiously tidy and fiery paternal grandmother, Marian, was cut from a vastly different cloth and world view. Her people wanted to live, were stubborn as ox and would do anything to survive. Born to immigrant parents who struggled throughout the Depression and raised, "without a pot to piss in,” Grandma Marian told me that the best meal they could look forward to in those days was baked cabbage with melted cheese on top - and that she felt lucky they got it once a week. She stood barely 4’11 but her resilience and sense of self were mighty. And she could have a temper. I’d caught a glimpse once or twice, and it was enough to inform me she’d sparred with men and demons twice her size and survived it all. This was not a woman to be fucked with. 
    I wanted just a fraction of her fortitude, her fight and willpower. But in that moment in the heat of the sun I felt like a coward. I hated how my insides heaved with guilt right before getting high - like I was streaking a permanent stain across my legacy. “Tori, it's already stained,” I’d pretend to hear Maud laugh through a gummy smile. I resented her for abandoning my mother and uncles but sometimes listened to her in my mind because she was also the one to say, “Fuck all” to everything and everyone and she gave me an excuse to be bad. And so what if I wanted to walk off the ledge sometimes and slip away discreetly? 
   I would ask myself and assess before each slipping away…“Is this really so wrong? This slipping away?” I’d answer every time, “No,” but still felt guilty. We found a park with dense bushes we could crouch behind. The snot-nosed families nearby cramped our scene but we paid them no mind and went about the business of getting high. I added water and cotton to a spoon we stole from The American, sucked up the dope with my needle, shook it, and watched the grains of God dissolve. I squeezed my hand into a fist and my veins rose up plump and blue, and and after the prick and sink into my skin from the needle, an instant and escalating high made my chest swell with all-encompassing love for everyone, even the snot-nosed families. 
   Laying on our backs, Nate and I took a photo with the Olympus Stylus my Dad had given me for Christmas. Our eyes closed in an opiate bliss and the muscles in our mouths slackened and turned downward while we murmured sweet-nothings of narcotic-induced adoration. The loving arm of a blossom branch stretched over us with flower faces so robust I said that they almost looked obscene in their beauty but then Nate reminded me that maybe we were the ones who looked obscene. Sami went to go fuck the Loon. We told her, “No, don't, you probably shouldn’t do that,” but she went off with him anyway. I took the keys and walked to the car for my smokes and phone card so I could make a call to a friend back home; I needed to tell her that I loved her and left a long message from a pay phone letting her know. She’d tell me later that I sounded like a different person, someone false and far away. 
   I wanted to get high again but not near the families so we waited for Sami and the Loon. When they did, the Loon took us under an overpass that lead to Kris Kristofferson’s grizzled doppelganger who said to us, “Hope you guys got shoes on,” as he plunged a needle into the abscessed hinges of his arm and I wondered if he ate every meal off the blade of a knife. I said, “You look like Kris Kristofferson.”  “Thanks, I’ll take it,” he laughed. He was welcoming enough but when I looked down at the ground, I saw an ocean floor of sharps, spoons, rubber ties, and other junkie remnants. I thought about needles in haystacks and haystacks of needles and the tough girl inside me folded, turned to Sami, Nate, and the Loon, and said, “I can’t do this. No way. Let’s just please get a room. I’ll buy.” The Loon scoffed like I’d asked if I could get a pedicure while we’re down here. But even Sami and Nate agreed this was too gnarly, even for us, so we parted ways with him and found a lop-sided motel where we paid a grimy man through a grimy partition and mimed a cross over our hearts before entering. 
   The floors of the room sloped so severely, they resembled the slanted floors of a fun house. This made us all laugh nervously, then Nate compared it to a sinking ship. I said, “Yeah, probably with lots of history,” my feeble attempt to assign some charm to the glorified flop house we were about to get loaded in. I pulled back the comforter only to reveal a spattering of wiry pubic hairs on dark yellowed bed sheets. A curious circle of maroon-colored crust was embedded into the center of the shag carpet. We took turns guessing what caused it. “Someone’s spilled spaghetti bolognese,” I said, “ordered from room service,” and we laughed. “It’s steak sauce,” said Sami. And Nate said, “Dismemberment,” while dividing up the dope.  
  We got high and Sami cried about the screams down the hall, then said she shouldn’t have fucked the Loon. “I’m pretty sure his roommates were watching - it was horrible,” she confessed. “I still love Damian, please don’t tell him what I did.” Annoyed by her theatrics, I moved to the window and yanked up the shade. The building stretched around in the shape of a sharp C and directly across from us, behind a window identical to ours was another hotel guest getting high. They waved and squirted water from their rig as casually as if I’d just glimpsed them watering their begonias. The distance between us was defined by a sprawling junk valley of rotten garbage and “probably some human remains,” said Nate. 
   We all agreed we’d be safer driving home high than staying the night so we checked out and when we stumbled out into the dark, we realized we’d shot and scratched away six hours of the day. We piled into my rusty hatchback and I tried to focus on the road while my passengers nodded off to the rhythm of the road and a Bad Brains tape. The white was a clean, potent high, but it still made me queasy and I fought a clawing, wet nausea with sticks of Dentine and Snapple. Sami kept smoking all the cigarettes. Nate was cool and calm, as always, but we each had pupils as small as tiny dots. At least my eyes are dark, I told myself, so less noticeable. Their pin-pricked blues would be a dead giveaway. 
   Sami said it was too hot in the car and barked at me to pull over. “No,” I hushed her up,“We’re almost through.” She unbuckled and perched between us, sweaty and urgent. The border patrol agent had dogs this time. We hadn’t seen any dogs before. Sami noted their size and said German Shepherds have something like 300 million scent receptors and asked, “From exactly how far can they detect the scent of drugs?” Nate told her to relax and that there’s no way anything has 300 million scent receptors. “We’re cool, they already fucked with us on the way up - they won’t do it again,” he said. “Besides, we shot all our shit anyway. We’re fine.” But she whined so much we had to keep telling her to shut the fuck up. “Everything is fine, Sami,” I growled. 
   My stomach cramped cause I knew if they pulled us over they’d see how high we were, but they asked maybe three questions and waved us through. After the car climbed back up to 65 mph, Sami told us she’d smuggled a quarter of white she’d stolen from the Loon, and had it stuffed down her socks. She sat smiling at us, proud, and like she expected us to be thrilled. But I felt a boiling rage building and when Nate asked if she’d share any she said, “Nope. Saving it,” I glared at her in the rearview, and Nate emitted a long, whistling sigh to emphasize our mutual disgust. Sami argued she couldn’t share because she was saving it for Damian. 
   I started to see shadows walking across a dark hallway, outlines of people going in and out of rooms. I stretched my eyes and remembered it was a freeway not a hallway.  I tried to keep focus but kept getting distracted by the complex lives of the shadow people, working, waltzing, conversing, and some even praying across the yellow and white lines. It felt like such cruel mental gymnastics, having to decipher between reality and heroin mirage. I silently prayed to God, Buddha, both Grandmas, two dead friends, and anyone else who might be listening. I told them, This isn’t me, this isn’t any of us. We’re good kids, please just help us get home and I’m so sorry and I will never get high again. 
   It was close to midnight when we made it home, and annoyed as we were with Sami, we let her crash on the floor. She was gone in the morning. By noon I’d walked back my vows to my higher power and dead loved ones, and had spent the day in downtown Tacoma, hungry and hunting for a replay of that God-kissing high from up North. We settled for coke and tar instead and got good and gowed with the guy who helped us cop. We told him all about the junkie-boat flophouse and the German Shepherds at the border.  “300 millions scent receptors?” he laughed, “As if.” 

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Victoria Mikael is an emerging writer and poet, originally from the Pacific Northwest where she launched an online/in-person feminist writing collective and facilitated weekly writing workshops for a Seattle women's shelter. Victoria's poetry has been published in Pearl Moon Quarterly and Cordella Press. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland where she is looking forward to hosting further writing events and building a new writing collective. She can be found under the name @LadyHouse_Glasgow on Instagram.
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