Sick - Porochista Khakpour

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City.

      And there I was at semisweet eighteen, the girl in the neo–Malcolm X glasses and black turtleneck writing in East Village twenty-four-hour cafés all night, who subsisted on coffee and cigarettes and bagels, who had friends who were downtown artists and poets and writers. Soon I knew where to drink without being carded, and soon I was the girl drunk for the first time in her life, on St. Mark’s Place, vomiting on the sidewalk, not a single gutter punk or club kid blinking an eye. (I’m soooooo happy right now, I remember slurring into my friend’s arms, who had tried to stop me until she realized my whole point was to get out-of-control drunk that first time I properly drank, trying every single mixed drink on the menu of the cheap café.) Suddenly I was the girl at every reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Café, dragging notebook papers full of poems I’d never read but wanted to baptize in good creative energy by carrying them in those spaces. Suddenly I was the girl who was going to clubs alone, who’d only return to campus to sleep away a few remaining daylight hours. Suddenly I was the girl with New York City boyfriends; suddenly I was the girl making out with girls casually as if it was nothing to me, at good old Sarah Lesbian College.

      And suddenly I looked sick—looked like we all did, as heroin chic had taken ahold of the nineties and certainly our campus. To look just barely on the wrong side of life and the right side of death was a desirable thing, my friends seemed to agree. And that worked, because just as suddenly: drugs. Since that first hallucinatory surgery experience as a child, I had not had a drug experience. But at Sarah Lawrence drugs were all around me, in abundance. It was both a golden age and last gasp of counterculture; drugs were a part of life for nearly every young person I knew. It was hard to resist. The girl I’d imagined, the one who smoked cigarettes and wore all black, and went to poetry readings and puked on St. Mark’s, was of course a girl who dabbled in drugs. I remember reading Go Ask Alice back home in LA a bit feverishly, all its warnings sounding mesmerizing, like all the This Is Your Brain on Drugs ads that had a secret allure to me. I always wanted that escape, and before I could even escape the body, I realized there were easier ways to escape the mind.

      Dabbled I did. Pot doesn’t count, everyone would always say, and so I went back and forth with that at first. It did little for me unless I mixed it with alcohol, always a bad idea but my kind of bad idea, the centerpiece of so many lost nights and wayward weekends. But then I had a boyfriend who confided in me that he’d begun taking coke, and if I wanted to, I could come to a “cocaine party.” Hard drugs were not so inconceivable to me, as my first friends at Sarah Lawrence were all in “MacCrack-House,” what they nicknamed the dorm hall MacCracken, which was known for its junkies. The first drug I saw done in my life—before marijuana even—was heroin, when I wandered MacCrackHouse’s halls freshman year. I was eighteen and was being invited to watch friends shoot up in their rooms. It was all vaguely glamorous—everyone in black patent leather, the soundtrack mod and industrial, people exhausted and beautiful, nodding in and out, luxurious and wasted. I dreamed of trying it, but I never did—one reason being that I saw the negative effects quite rapidly (and I ended up losing three friends to heroin from that time to a few years after graduation). But cocaine was something else to me, something that somehow seemed less deadly, but nonetheless sparkly and dangerous. I agreed to go to the party.

      And that night—in a cramped dorm room filled with students I did not know and had never really even seen on our campus, sitting cross-legged on a dirty carpet, with action movie soundtracks blasting in the background, and a CD cover with a rolled dollar bill and white dust on it being passed around—was the start of a casual relationship I had with cocaine all the way to one last bump in 2015.

      “Am I doing it wrong?” I whispered to my boyfriend over the Pulp CD, as I rolled and rerolled the twenty-dollar bill, hoping there was no residue on my face.

      He squinted to inspect my face like it was a science project—people could be so serious on coke—and said, “No, you got it. Someone is a natural!”

      I was. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would—it was like coffee but the high was very positive for me then, no anxiety at all in the mix, and it lasted for just the right amount of time, no long trips to worry about. It also did not seem to addict me in the way I feared, but my love of it also told me—just as cigarettes had proven—that I was indeed an addictive type. The drug found me over and over my next few years—once in the form of a present from a socialite who liked me and left an eightball in a cracked chocolate rabbit on Easter Sunday morning, often in the form of bumps from someone’s back pocket, and then in daily endless supply from a friend who became one of the premier dealers on campus, and who in exchange for hiding her stashes in my room gave me as much access to it as I wanted. I dipped in and out of lines and bumps, often using them when big papers and early mornings were involved. It felt like just another part of me that I’d discovered in New York City—what New York City artist girls did if someone else was buying, especially.

      In one of my earliest encounters with email I wrote to my California hometown best friend that I had tried cocaine.

      Wow, you have changed, she wrote.

      No actually I’m just more myself than ever, I wrote back.

      And because this was the nineties, Ecstasy and mushrooms soon came in the mix, and marijuana became another staple as the thing you used to come down from all the other stuff. On any weekend night, either at Sarah Lawrence parties or at a downtown club in the city post-internship hours, I had all sorts of substances running through me. And not only that—I was well aware my substances involved other substances. You knew your E was cut with either heroin or amphetamines. Sometimes even your pot could be laced with PCP or just a “cocopuff” (pot sprinkled with cocaine). Once I even accidentally smoked crack thinking it was a cocopuff. None of these were big events, eventually, just things you did.

      God Bless the Nineties, I remember scrawling on the whiteboard outside my dorm room in dry erase cursive—I would have tattooed it on my body, except I was still some years from being able to afford tattoos. But it was the right era for me, I always felt, I still sometimes feel. Everyone I knew was an iconoclast, a misfit, so different that we never considered we could all be the same, never thought that if enough people owned “alternative,” wasn’t it just mainstream? Never mind. The halls were always vibrating with nineties conscious hip-hop or druggy rock, like Gang Starr or Pulp, and we were always on something. Time was always running out, but in the best way, semesters just a hurdle to another break that I didn’t want anyway—why go home when you could be in the middle of all of it, whether on campus or in the city? Who needed parents, stability, goals, a future? I was alive, in a moment, for once. My friends were free spirits, losers, anarchists, skaters, punks, taggers, club kids, strippers, professional junkies. I have very few memories of getting any work done, but I did remain diligent about my New York City journalism internships, as they were more than anything an excuse to have a purpose in New York City. I got to tell people, I work in New York City, even if it was for free.

      There’s a photo my parents took of my first day at Sarah Lawrence. I entered that first day in cutoff jean shorts, Pumas, a white T-shirt and baseball cap, styleless ponytailed long hair, makeup-free—the suburban uniform of any Southern California nineties kid. It took only a few hours there to realize I stood out, and in not a good way. By the end of my time there, in a photo from my senior year, I had a calculated mask of red lipstick and black eyeliner, hair in a studied frizzy shag, neck and fingers covered in costume jewelry, a frayed leopard coat on top of a black leotard and leather pants. I was at least a dozen pounds skinnier, my skin a bit gray; I gave off an air of dirtiness, in all meanings of the word. I had become something else, something that I would have once been frightened of, and that was the point.

      Along the way, I just barely made it from tipping over completely into the dark side. We didn’t have exams, grades, finals, any of that, but we had the equivalent and I was never sure how I passed some classes. There was one semester in my sophomore year when I hardly went to class at all, always in the city, school just an afterthought. While friends of mine dropped in and out of rehab and took leaves of absence, I was proud that nothing got out of control for me. I couldn’t have afforded it if it had, after all. I treated my breaks at home as “drying out” and would assume my parents had no

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