We All Fall Down

Akira lived in the basement apartment of his mom’s house.
Actually, I didn’t even know he’d be there, but I knocked a couple times and then his voice came through—soft, always calming.
“Yeah?”
The bathroom window was still broken more than a year later. I could see the reflection turned upside down of the tall grass and the eucalyptus leaves crackling together like newspaper cutouts. The Presidio stretched out all the way to the beach behind me. Just forest and army housing. Akira lived at the very edge of the city. I’d always loved that.
“Hey, Akira, man, it’s Nic.”
He became suddenly visible behind the dirty glass garden side door.
Long dreads all tied together behind his head. Eyes soft and lined and smudged with black underneath. Skinny, skinny like me.
“Holy shit, Nic, what the hell?”
He opened the door and I stepped forward, giving him a hug. He smelled like pot and incense and something else familiar.
“I always knew you’d show up like this,” he said, keeping an arm over my shoulder. “I just had a feelin’. So what’s going on? How you been doin’?”
My eyes looked down beneath a shadow covering the base of the door and cobwebs and things.
“Great,” was what I told him.
I followed him inside. I mean, I knew the goddamn way.
I’d been using again for about five months at that point. I was enrolled at Hampshire college, but I’d pretty much done nothing my last semester there except teach myself how to shoot drugs and finally make it through all of the original Legend of Zelda. No one knew I’d relapsed, though. Not even my girlfriend.
But coming home for summer break, back to San Francisco, well, I was pretty much ready to self-destruct good and proper. As much as I’d tried, I couldn’t find crystal meth in Western Massachusetts. Heroin, though, was everywhere, so I’d gotten pretty sick on that shit. Actually, when I went to see Akira, I was trying to wean myself off of opiates with a whole bunch of Vicodin I’d stolen.
Opiates weren’t ever really my thing, though.
I mean, crystal was the drug I’d fallen in love with.
Actually, it was Akira who gave it to me for the first time. But, look, I was gonna find it one way or the other. I was searching. Akira just helped me find it. I woulda done the same for him. He’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. I sensed that about him the first time we met.
So there I was, being led back to his room, where I see the same bed and couch and Bjork poster and record player and actually a fucking drawing of mine that I did and forgot over a year ago.
Since then I’d been in two rehabs. At one point, I’d been sober and going to meetings for over six months. As it was, it had been more than a year since I’d done crystal. I mean, I hadn’t done it since the last time I saw Akira.
We sat down on the bed together and we talked and laughed and smoked a bowl.
Then I asked him—all casual like.
“You still talk to D ever?”
Akira looked at me and then looked at me again.
“Ha, ha, man. What you thinkin’ ‘bout?”
“You know, if the factory’s still on, or what?”
He lit a cigarette—a True.
He offered me one.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it’s goin’. But D ain’t there no more. She went crazy, man, so Gavin’s running the place now.”
“Crazy?”
“Uh, huh, all paranoid ‘n shit. You wanna see if Gavin’s around?”
“Sure,” I said, again, not wanting to sound too, uh, desperate or something.
So Akira called and, yeah, the factory was still operational.
We got in the car together—my dad’s car. We both lit cigarettes and drove listening to a mix tape I’d made. The afternoon light was turning dull and gray as the fog slowly stretched out across the bay. The Bay Bridge kept going on for way too fucking long, spilling out onto the different East Bay freeways like veins running in every direction.
The cookie factory was a series of warehouses with trucks coming in and out. There was a smell of cooking dough always—hot butter and sugar. There was a code Akira had to enter to get in the big electronic gate and then we drove around back, to the offices they’d converted into a sort of live/work space. The work being selling drugs.
I always loved how the place just looked like straight outta some fuckin’ movie. It was like magic, exciting, full of possibilities. Of course, it also looked like the kinda place the cops would straight raid in some drug trafficking movie. I could see the helicopters circling, the flashing sirens, the guns being drawn. Really, the place was a perfect set up.
But not that night, I told myself. That night was protected—sacred—my night. I willed everything to be okay.
We climbed up the cement block stairs and then around to D’s, or, uh, Gavin’s door.
Akira knocked.
It was a good couple minutes before we finally heard something click. Then the door opened very slowly and the arc of a crossbow was pushed out, the arrow sticking right over Akira’s head.
“Who’s with you?’ asked Gavin.
Akira sort of crouched down lower. “What? No one. What’re you talking about?”
Gavin panned the crossbow slowly above our heads.
“Alright,” he said. “Come in.”
We went quick through the door, both of us trying to maybe duck down a little.
Gavin locked everything, then let the crossbow hang down. He still hadn’t dropped it though.
“Akira, Nic, it’s been forever, right?”
His eyes were very wide. He had a dirty truckers hat covering a bald spot, with long hair still trying to hang down in back. He had on loose shorts and a tee-shirt and big ol’ construction boots. His hand was bandaged, which he quickly pointed out.
“Nearly cut it off with a hacksaw. Good thing I jerk off with my left hand, huh?”
What I did was, uh, laugh awkwardly. That’s what I can give myself credit for.
The factory was set up like this, right? A waiting room with a big screen TV and couches to sit on. Gavin’s office is in the back and, normally, you wait in the waiting room while they fill yer orders. But, that night, Gavin led us back to the office.
Basically the office was a bed and four computer screens all playing different porns. There was a swivel chair, where Gavin sat. There was also a table in the corner with a woman sitting at it. She said absolutely nothing to us as we entered the room and Gavin didn’t acknowledge her. She was too busy with a big pile of cocaine on the table. She was like a fucking precision machine the way she was going about cutting and doin’ those lines.
Cut a line.
Do a line.
Cut a line.
Do a line.
It was fucking crazy.
But, anyway, Gavin asked us the question that made me love the cookie factory more than any place in the whole world.
“So ya’ll wanna line of coc, or, no, meth, right?”
“Awesome,” we both say together.
“Meth?”
“Yeah,” I answered that one.
Fuck, I’ll tell you what, when he handed over that plate with the two generous lines of crystal cut there, man, it was like they almost looked evil to me. I could see it right there, in the color and smell and texture. It was sinister. It was like being in the presence of death.
But, fuck, I did the goddamn line, now didn’t I?
Akira did his line.
I counted.
It wasn’t very long before the rush of it exploded in me like thousands of Cupid’s arrows shot up and down my whole body.
I breathed out long, long and slow.
There was no turning back, right?
Motherfucker.
And then that girl cutting lines sat up and spoke suddenly. Her eyes were crazy open and her words were hard to understand. Her accent sounded Jamaican maybe.
“Earthquake,” she said.
We all looked at each other.
“What?” asked Gavin.
“Earthquake,” she said again.
And then it hit.
The whole fucking place like lurched on its foundation and then just started shaking, shaking shaking. The sound of metal and concrete grinding came through deafening.
Growing up in San Francisco, I’d been in the big ‘89 earthquake when the Bay Bridge collapsed, but I’d never felt the world shaking around me like that night at the cookie factory.
Akira and I got in the doorway—force of habit from countless earthquake drills at school.
The shaking went on.
And then it stopped.
“Holy shit,” Gavin almost yelled. “What the fuck?”
“Man, a fucking earthquake,” was my brilliant observation.
“Yeah, and she sensed it, man,” said Gavin, pointing over at the girl. “That fucking bitch sensed it—like a goddamn animal.”
The woman didn’t respond.
She went back to her whole line cutting/doing thing.
In my stomach I knew.
There was a tightness there, a knotting and twisting.
That earthquake was the start.
It always worked out that way.
I start using and the whole world just closes down on me. There are never new opportunities, no call backs ever come—my car gets towed and I end up losing everything all over again.
The world shuts.
I always know it’s gonna come, but I try to tell myself it’ll be better next time.
And maybe the earthquake wasn’t a sign—didn’t mean anything.
But a week later I’d been kicked outta my house and would eventually find myself living in the park behind Fort Mason.
So you tell me?
‘Cause it goes the other way, too.
The longer I stay clean, the more the world just opens up with possibilities and hope.
But it’s so hard to remember that shit.
And I guess that’s the fucking problem.
So today I wanna remember.
Let me tell you what happens:
It
all
falls
down.
Just like that.
Every fucking time.