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Accumulating Hells

She can never be as loyal to you as she is to her addictions. This is one of the first rules you learn when falling in love with a crack addict. Then there's also the insatiable need for money. The electricity is in perpetual danger of being turned off. Rent is always due. The telephone disappears and reappears. The cabinets are devoid of food.

There are some things you can overlook: the missing VCR, the periods of self-loathing when she doesn't want to be touched, the constant needling for more cash. Then there are the things you can't overlook but do anyway: the stretches of unexplained absences, strange cars in her driveway at four o'clock in the morning, the chronic lies concerning even the most trivial matters.

So many times you've been tempted to just walk away. It would be so easy. It would be the easiest steps you've ever taken. Yet you stay. She is your addiction. Maybe not this scrawny zombie sleep-walking through the ruins of her life. Sometimes you barely know this new woman. But you never forget the woman she was before the chemical decimation. You catch flashes of her from time to time. Out of the corner of your eye. A certain gesture, a turn of phrase, and it hurts all the more, knowing she's gone without going anywhere. So you hold on a little longer, a little tighter, maneuvering across her crystalline web of deceit.

She is the only woman you've ever loved and she is the only woman you've ever struck with a clenched fist. A strong jab to her stomach that doubled her over for ten minutes. Looking back, it was almost as if you instinctively knew where bruises seldom form. You punched her in the stomach with all your strength and still she would not relinquish her white-knuckled grip on the crack pipe.

The pipe was still hot when you wrestled it away, prying her fingers off one by one, pinning her to the bed with a forearm across the jaw. The crack pipe you found was only the broken end of a radio antennae with a cheap screen and a piece of wire coat hanger. All her good crack pipes were destroyed the last time you rummaged through her underwear drawer.

You want to kick her head in. You want to snap her neck. You want to break her down until there's nothing left of her back for the monkey to cling to. Instead you make love and she promises to be good.

In the meantime, you pay her gas bill. You buy school clothes for her son and wonder if he comprehends what sort of sinister metamorphosis his mother has undergone. You wonder if he respects your unwavering loyalty to a woman who has treated her son with apathy for the last three months. A woman who feels vindicated when she blows her food budget on dope.

Another night passes. Another night you sleep alone, trying to make sense of your obsession, your accumulation of hells. You dream of a final solution and re-imagine yourself as a Robert DeNiro or a Charles Bronson. You see yourself kicking down doors and confronting the nameless dealers infesting the city. There's the brief widening of the eyes. The slim realization they have been walking the wrong path. A momentary enlightenment before the bullets shred their wasted bodies. Hollow booms of the 9mm followed by copper casings ejecting in slow motion cascading across the dirty linoleum.

Violence is the only language these roaches understand.

But you don't own a gun and you're weak and accepting. When alcohol was the problem you accepted the progression of hours at a half dozen taverns in the area. You accepted it because she was with you. You accepted her strategically timed trips to the bathroom to powder her nose. The logic is simple. The more cocaine she snorts, the more alcohol she is able to consume. The more beer she drinks, the longer she stays at the bar, the more time you share with her.

Who could predict the emergence of crack cocaine as her drug of choice? She is neither black nor from the inner city. She is a white woman from the suburbs. She's not supposed to have access to crack. She's not supposed to be able to walk away from you so easily.

You feel as if you're holding on by your fingertips to a runaway Amtrak and it's only a matter of time before she skips off the tracks. You know you won't be able to walk away from the wreckage. You know you'll never be the man you were before you met her.

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