Baltimore, Maryland
July 1985
I curled two fingers under the chin of my mask and tore it off.
I chipped away at myself with the tip of a syringe when no one else would do it for me.
The nurse’s assistant, the friend of a friend’s cousin from the suburbs, traded me unopened needles for coke in a Port parking lot. I told her I would look for her at the party.
Where she descended on all five feet and two inches of me like a whore of the Holy Spirit. “Your accent is pretty. So are your eyes. Why are you wearing this jacket? It’s July.” Off comes the jacket. A hand snakes up my shirt. Cigarette breath on my neck.
“I didn’t know you were into Irish girls.”
“I didn’t know I was into girls.”
She was into me, and I couldn’t sleep over it tonight so I went into me. “Fuck,” I whisper, strained, into the cold side of my pillow after collapsing onto it. Lift my clouded head to check my clock. 1:58. My whole body is hot with the sex I want but cannot have. Crawling out of my skin as always. I sit up to adjust my window fan, but it only blows in warm air from outside. I scratch at the imaginary ants marching up the back of my shirt. My reflection in the mirror above my dresser shows a junkie, a flushed and breathless mishap whose hair sticks to her face.
The second floor of our rowhome is an oven. I don’t know how my little sisters do it, since the sun beats into their room during the day. The box fan in their room sounds like an airplane wing turbine. Mom and Dad get the sole air conditioning unit in the whole house. My brothers sleep on old couches in the basement because the third floor is unbearable in the summer. My narrow corner room is now even warmer. It smells like sweaty sheets, detergent, the pot in the coffee can on the dresser, and the Joe Camels in a busted carton that I sometimes share with the older of my two sisters.
Yeah, I suck at being a role model. But it isn’t for lack of trying. After all, I taught my youngest sister and brother how to read. She turned into a bookworm. He developed schizophrenia. You win some, you lose some. The old feverish feeling threatens just under my skin. Nausea teases my stomach. I turn on my lamp to cook a nice little pile of smack for my syringe. As long as the younger ones don’t turn out like me, Mom won’t boot me from the house. I do what I do so I can push drugs under her watchful eye. My pill sales to the other moms in the neighborhood help pay for groceries when Dad’s longshoreman’s union is impotent against his fat-cat employer, or when my little brother has to go the hospital, or some other expense comes up. When the other moms can’t afford me, I ride around with my friends so we can deal blow to the preppy kids at Johns Hopkins and the midshipmen who venture up from Annapolis.
In the seams of my brother’s old Notre Dame jacket, I have little compartments where I hide powder and pills and joints that I roll myself. The artsy kids love those. Another compartment where I keep the money. Another where I keep brass knuckles. That’s why I wear the jacket in July.
But this night is a home night for me. I just want to sleep. My body keeps me awake in the heat with its demands. Smoke shot up fuck yourself Dr. Pepper smoke some more, pace your cage, swim in the spoon over the lighter. I haul my heavy sunburnt legs off the mattress. I stayed out in the sun too long yesterday at a metal concert, but it paid for itself in the fresh bills in my pocket.
I stumble lightheaded to the bathroom to piss out the Dr. Pepper. Another addiction? No, I just like the taste.
“You’re a fuckin’ asshole, Angel! A fuckin’ asshole! Your fuckin’ mother shoulda named you Devil, fuck you!”
Ah, the neighbor couple arguing again. I look up at the window above the toilet.
“Aw shut up Diane! Crazy fuckin’ bitch! I’ll break your fuckin’ neck!”
“You better watch your fuckin’ mouth or my brothers will put you in the river, you wop son of a bitch!”
Jesus. But she’s right to use the “my brothers” warning. Those always work for me, feminism aside. I flush the toilet in time to drown out the sound of crashing furniture. She needs to leave him.
I shove myself into more clothing to climb up to the roof through the skylight. Cigarette in mouth book and flashlight in hand. I sit in one of the lawn chairs we keep up here for nights like this one. A police siren from the direction of the harbor. Pollution stench to high heaven from the river. The air won’t move. I feel pressed in from all sides. I light the cigarette and play with it absentmindedly smelling tar and my scent and my oily sweaty hair. What an animal. Look at the gaping cracks in the veneer of her civilization. The gaping cracks will look back at you.
Look at you, Catherine Shaughnessy. C for Catherine and K for Kate because you don’t give a fuck. Kate is a good drug -dealer-next-door name. Not so threatening. Some call me K-Mart because I have a “decent selection.” Others call me the cocaine leprechaun, which I don’t appreciate as much. But no one calls me a thinker.
I click on my flashlight. Time to continue my journey through my latest find at the used bookstore. A gem from some philosophy major’s bookshelf: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.
They would have never taught us anything like this in my Catholic school (not that I would know, I didn’t stick around to graduate). Maybe all the drugs have freed my mind too much, but for some reason I want to understand this evil. Before Gorbachev changes his mind on glasnost and before China silences all this new talk about the Cultural Revolution.
I’m just a (kind of) American girl living in a (kind of) First World country. I have no frame of reference for the totalitarian experience. When I was small and cried because I couldn’t get the toys the other girls had, Mom put me in her lap and showed me a history book with pictures of Jewish children under SS men’s gun barrels. She told me to be grateful for what I had and when and where I lived, since I didn’t live under the rule of “history’s most wicked men.” Dad, meanwhile, showed me how to steal toys from rummage sales when Mom wasn’t looking.
Maybe I am the wicked one, as I sit in my heroin euphoria reading about totalitarianism, smug to have never lived under it. I flip through Arendt’s dense tome looking for answers.
First there was heroin to conquer me. The totalitarian state inside me blasts its propaganda through the needle tip so I cannot cover my ears or eyes to block it out. But you feel so good now, what more could you need? It is not enough.
I take a long drag on my cigarette, close my eyes to remember her. A party at an apartment off Towson State’s campus featuring their women’s basketball team. It brought out the local lesbians to smoke my pot and snort my coke and fight over feelings. Not my ideal crowd but customers are customers. The friend of a friend’s cousin from the suburbs wears nice clothes and jewelry and makeup I could never afford. She has a Vogue face; I have an Irish face. She still kissed my Cheshire Cat mouth and ran her tongue along the lobe of one of my stick-out ears. Kissing another girl, shooting my drugs, why do they feel so great if and as they debase me?
Do I still go to Hell if I don’t believe in it? Would it be so bad? My Hell is here in Baltimore in a family where I mother as much as my own mother, yet she is ashamed of me. She thinks I do not hear her tell my sister Sarah Jane to not be like me, but I hear all of it, and I tell Sarah the same. Sarah insists on thinking I’m the coolest–someday that will end. When it does, I will retreat further into my monsterhood. Sarah will be the useful one. I will be superfluous. I flip through the book clumsily enough to get a paper cut.
Totalitarian ideology hypnotized people in its long-term thinking. These projects were to benefit a future generation, so it did not matter what they did in the present. Superfluous people in a neat goose-stepping line to the death machine. They let themselves be convinced to sign all their freedoms and rights away and be led to giant public spectacles where they clapped idiotically like cymbal monkeys while the voice of insanity blamed and promised and prophesied.
“Kate?”
Sarah’s voice behind me startles the cigarette from my mouth. It lands on the book and burns the page. I smack it with my palm to put it out. “Shit, Sarah! You can’t just sneak up on me like that.”
“What’re you doing up here?”
I curl into a ball on the lawn chair. “Reading. How come you’re up?”
She sits in the other lawn chair and fidgets with her braid. “It’s too hot to sleep.”
“Tell me about it.” A sticky land breeze whips through the neighborhood. “When’s the last time you showered, baby sis?”
“Why?”
“You smell like sweat.”
She blushes and scowls at me. “Bitch. I took a cold shower earlier and it didn’t work.” She reaches for my cigarette. “You don’t smell any better.” Puffs on it angrily, coughs because she’s still learning.
“Give that back. You need to go back to bed.”
“Let me see your book.” I hand her Arendt’s brick of a book.
“What’s totalitarianism?”
Oh, shit. Sarah is intelligent as hell, but she’s only 13. How could she possibly understand something like this? Says you, Kate. “Well, baby sis, it’s like this. Here in America, we vote for people to represent us in our government. Our Constitution gives us rights to free speech, to bear arms, to vote, it outlaws chattel slavery, and it basically ensures that the government can’t control too much of our private lives. Now, whether it actually does or not is up for debate. Depends on whom you ask. But in a totalitarian state, the government controls every part of your life, no questions. You don’t vote. What you eat, what you wear, where you can live, where you can shop, your school, your job, your religion or lack thereof, everything you see and read and watch and talk about is all controlled by the government. They use slave labor like it’s nothing. Moreover, if you say something they don’t like, you get taken away and killed.”
Sarah’s watery eyes are big and bright as if she likes what she hears. “Like the Soviets?”
“Uh, like the Soviets a long time ago. When Mom and Dad were kids. Back then, they sent millions of people off to die for no reason. And that’s how they stayed in power, because everyday folks at best played along, or at worst gave up their own family members to the secret police.”
“How did people just let this happen to them? Why didn’t they fight back?”
I take another long drag. Hand the cigarette to Sarah. “I don’t know for certain, that’s why I’m reading this book. There were a lot of people who did fight back. But something tells me it had to do with–some people deciding they didn’t care anymore if they went down and took everyone else with ‘em. They thought about the whole world instead of their own block, you know, and were more excited about being in history books than caring if their beliefs would get them or their neighbor killed by the state apparatus.”
I study my little sister’s reaction carefully. “Don’t look so excited, Sarah. Millions of human beings were murdered so totalitarian states could see their ideas made real. Like the Holocaust. It’s not a joke. And see, back when this was happening, countries didn’t have nearly as many nuclear warheads as they do now. So, if I were you, I’d be a little more scared. But whatever, you’re just a kid and you don’t get this shit.”
“Hey, I never said I didn’t get this shit. It’s scary but what if it also works? If the government doesn’t let people do a lot, it means they don’t let them do a lot of bad things too.”
Seriously? “Doesn’t work that way. People will do bad things even if it’s hard. It’s the part where the government doesn’t let people do good things, is the problem.”
Sarah sits with my remarks. Starts to speak, gives up. “I guess. You’re right, it’s bad. Good night, Kate.” She slinks over to the skylight and disappears. Sarah thinks good can result from evil? Cute. Good cannot result from evil. I am living proof. All the good I do is stained by the evil I inject into my arm and the evil I sell to my customers in little plastic bags. My good strangles dead when my evil is tasted on my lips by another woman, when I breathe it into her like a succubus. Something good that results from evil is only good until its cover is blown.
I hope Sarah doesn’t suspect that I like girls. She isn’t allowed to see under the mask.
I put out the cigarette, rub my eyes, feel fatigue pounce on me. I want to go back to sleep steeped in ideas about how people turned on each other after injecting beliefs like drugs. More land breeze to blow my hair against my face, give me a second’s worth of buoyancy like I could float away from myself to peace. Back into the house that is too small for me and my problems–my fault, as I could always get a real job and move out into my own apartment like my older brother did–and into the bed that smells like me the animal. My room has cooled off only a little. I lock my door so I can sleep nude.
The next morning, I lie in my bed to smoke and think. My room gets light with the sun as my radio alarm clock plays 98 Rock. The new Dire Straits song “Money for Nothing” wakes me up. At least I do not get my money for nothing. I deal my drugs and clean the house and babysit my younger siblings. Only when my supply dries up and the withdrawal is bad do I stay in my room with my puke bucket while Sarah Jane helps Mom around the house. Other than that, I am the live-in maid and governess. I should be grateful, though, that I am not on the streets like some of my peers. Mom would never abide her favorite girl prostituting herself for heroin.
It’s not my fault my mother enables me, nor is it my fault that I got addicted to a grown-up’s drug at 14 because I found a full syringe at my friend’s house. The brown elixir within chased away inaugural feelings of superfluity; I did not need to be useful for this drug to make me feel important. Powerful. Now as I lounge against my sweat-stained pillow I see an animal’s comically pale body drained of power.
My brain is where my power is. And perhaps my evil too. Continents and centuries. Thinking sucks. That’s how people fell into the totalitarian trap in the first place. Who could have expected thought and ideology to seize whole peoples by the throat, wield logic in cans of Zyklon B, and abort the future of freedom? It starts with an idea to fix the world’s problems. It ends with a quantity of dead bodies so vast that it defies the concept of murder. Each stepping stone between them is a stronger hit of intoxicating belief. No wonder God kicked us out of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge.
I don’t want my PhD. I want my MTV. Give me passive entertainment so I don’t think myself or my neighbor or my country to death.
I pull out my diary from under my mattress.
When there was no more life to live and no more fucks to give, her ideas were overwrought and the needle helped her not, Catherine Shaughnessy, 23. Cause of death: overthought.
I take a cold shower after my morning hit. Dress in a t-shirt and shorts that are too short for Mom’s liking. She shakes her head at them from over her magazine when I come downstairs.
“And you wonder why you get burnt, Katie love.”
“But they look good on my ass.”
“Your arse? What arse? Help me in the garden quick before it’s hot now.”
I follow Mom around our tiny backyard with the hose and some shears. She talks to me through teeth clenched around one of her expensive cigarettes I am not allowed to smoke.
“You need to come with us to Mass tomorrow, love.”
“What I do now?”
“You haven’t been in weeks. It isn’t good for you.”
“They don’t want me in there.”
“Well Jesus wants you in there, and more importantly I want you in there.”
“Okay.”
Even junkie dealers listen to their moms sometimes. I help mine trim her flowers and hedges carefully. I am the only one of her kids whom she trusts with her garden. This is one area where I can somehow cultivate life from dirt.
And there is a shitload of dirt. Mom and I garden for an hour while the neighbors wake up. Down the alley, a girl I went to school with slips out the dented back door of the local womanizer thinking no one can see her. The next-door couple shouts at each other over breakfast. Another neighbor whistles at my shorts.
“Fuck off, my mom’s right here!”
“Sorry, Mrs. Shaughnessy!”
But no apology for me. I hate living here. Sarah and our littlest sister Mairead come outside with their frisbee. Mom points at them.
“Girls, you eaten breakfast yet?”
“No ma’am.”
“No playing till you’ve eaten. Back inside.”
They grumble but obey. Mom sighs. “Mair needs to start wearing a bra. My youngest, God, I’ll be in my grave soon.”
“Time flies, Mother.”
Mom raises an eyebrow at me. “Don’t get smart. It makes you feel old too, you were changin’ her diapers a minute ago.”
“Yeah, and not wearing a bra yet then.”
Mom shakes her head and returns to her hydrangeas.
I don’t want to feel superfluous. I don’t want to be the evil. My arm starts to ache where I shot up earlier. “Mom, do you wish you didn’t have all of us?”
Mom bolts up from the soil. She puts her little garden rake in my face. “Catherine Marian, how dare you ask me that. You know why we had the lot of ye. We’ve talked about this.”
“But that was so long ago. And now I embarrass you and you tell Sarah not to be like me. How do you think that makes me feel?”
Mom glares at me behind her sunglasses. “Embarrassed like me, Kate. That’s how it should make you feel. Because you have it in you to be so much more. And you don’t care.”
She resumes raking the soil. “You could be such a good mother if you didn’t shoot drugs. If you went to Mass, if you found a man to take care of you, if you didn’t do naught to bring embarrassment on yourself, love. That’s why I tell Sarah Jane to not be like you. She needs to grow up properly. I don’t trust her like I trust my little one.”
“And you don’t trust me either.” Mom shoots eye bullets at me. Rolls her shoulders back.
“Go back inside, Kate.”
I go inside to find the boys and Dad in the living room. Sarah and Mairead in the dining room. I make coffee in silence, take it up to my room, and drink it without waiting for it to cool while I smoke another cigarette. I open the window in front of my desk to let in an aroma of cut grass. Maybe Hannah Arendt can tell me something I need to hear this morning. I stare at the book cover wondering what it was like for her to understand totalitarian evil so thoroughly without participating. Another hour passes as I absorb what happened to countries when they perfected the ultimate warhead, ideology.
Turns out, it undoes them from within. Turns out, the final conclusion of totalitarian logic is to conclude totalitarianism. Is the conclusion to my addiction ending the addiction by ending me? Is it possible to think oneself to death?
I don’t have time to answer. My sisters are in the yard under my window, and they want me to come outside.
Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash
