Now Inhale

Photograph by Daniele Levis Pelusi

Now Inhale | An Essay | Indigo Sawyer

I am 14 when my brother hands me a joint. We are inside our mom’s townhouse, my bedroom. He is sitting on the bed, rolling it. I am standing near him, watching, being nosey. Grownups in my family usually will strongly suggest that anyone under eighteen leave the room when the grown folk are doing whatever. I hold it, he lights it. “Put it to your mouth,” he says. “Now inhale.” He has not been a grownup long. He is twenty-two.

It is early afternoon that summer day in 1982. Crack cocaine is not yet an epidemic but is making its way through urban neighborhoods—and suburban, believe it or not, but some people are good at keeping secrets—and through workplaces during lunch breaks.

I cannot remember if my brother’s on-again, off-again, long-term girlfriend is on her way to work at a local hotel, but she is also there, sitting across from my brother. Her job is conveniently close to my mom’s house, where my brother pops in and out occasionally, when he’s not locked up or bingeing on his drug of choice, drowning his grief and God only knows what else. I am barely a teenager. What do I know? I also do not know whether my mother eventually confronts my brother about smoking marijuana in her home. If so, I do not hear it. I never hear her discipline him, which is likely where she goes wrong. Where mothers of boys sometimes go wrong.

“Go get your brother,” my mom said once. It was probably dinner time or maybe he needed to take out the trash. When I arrived at the bedroom we shared, he was not there. Neither was he in the bedroom that my sisters shared. The window was open. The curtain was swaying in the breeze. “He’s not here,” I remember saying. He was never there. He was often with friends at a local creek in the neighborhood or somewhere causing a ruckus. He was 11 or 12. I was 3 or 4. Eight long years between us, fifteen between the eldest and the youngest (me). I was an only child it seemed by the time I hit my teens.

In 1982, my mother is forty-six. She is one of the older moms in our neighborhood and for some reason this causes me to feel shame. By the time I am a teenager, she has already parented for nearly 30 years. We move from one townhouse to another between my freshman and sophomore years. Probably during summer. By the time I hit my teen years, my mother was tired. Maybe she was tired before and I did not notice.

She talks now as though she does not remember how much she drank or cursed or antagonized me. She talks now as though she does not remember all the stuff she expected me to know by osmosis. “How do you spell pneumonia?” I ask her once. “Look it up in the dictionary,” she says, while laying on her bed after work one evening. I liked words even then.

I am unaware when my brother hands me the joint that four years into my future I would snort cocaine on my way to work, with a woman twice my age. Her husband hassles her about the amount of drugs flowing through their tiny apartment. He’s a delivery driver, I think. For UPS maybe. He is the level-headed one between them. His name is Bruce. Or Butch. One of those one-syllable B names. A name that sounds like a nickname. Their son, an offshoot, an abbreviated suffix version, cute but needy. Clingy, the way babies are made, until they don’t need their mother as much, then at all. A teenager, as blind as I was, could see he needed her. The baby. The husband. But we were digging addiction ditches and our own professional graves.

Her baby is less than a year old when I meet her for the first time at work, and she eventually offers to pick me up for work so that I can avoid the bus, then the subway in and around Washington DC. It saved me money, these rides; this companionship, however skewed, slanted her way from the beginning. It is 1986 or 87. I ask myself—still—why a mid-30-something-year-old woman would want to be friends with a teenager, and perhaps I already know the answer. Perhaps I could have said no. No to the rides to work, no to the tiny bag of cocaine she slung toward me in the passenger seat of her compact car, no to the joints she passed when we got together after work, when neither of us thought it important to go home, or check in, because eventually there were other 30-something coworkers in the mix, who brought and shared their own addictions with any receptive soul. The soul that was (perhaps) reeling from all the heartache that preceded or one in the mood to try something new.

A friend from my neighborhood tracked me down after I hit that first joint and kept asking what was wrong with me. I remember standing on the sidewalk outside our townhouses trying to decide which way to go. My spit was bubbly, and I would learn later that effect has a name: cottonmouth, like the snake, (the venom: not lethal if treated promptly). But, of course, with no drug tests at work and (virtually) no accountability at home to start, I would continue down Experiment Road for another 14 years, and 14 months into an international pandemic I will call someone to facilitate my reintroduction to it, with a glass of tequila or some whiskey. What’s wrong with you?

The footsteps left before me were easy to step into. Could my mother explain disciplining me to me? Might she justify that he-male, she-female are not the same and cannot pursue the same experiences, the same addictions? When I am a teenager, there is no sibling to tell her I am not in my bedroom, waiting for dinner. My mother probably looks for me herself. Maybe she doesn’t.

I walked out the front door.