Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Read online

  Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls is a work of memoir, which is an act of memory rather than history. The events and experiences rendered here are all true as the author has recalled to the best of her ability. Some names, identifying characteristics, and circumstances have been changed in order the protect the privacy of certain individuals.

  Copyright © 2020 by Nina Renata Aron

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Milkweed Editions for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Wife” from The Carrying by Ada Limón, published by Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, in 2018. Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions (milkweed.org).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aron, Nina Renata, author.

  Title: Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls / Nina Renata Aron.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020003061 (print) | LCCN 2020003062 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525576679 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525576693 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Aron, Nina Renata. | Drug addicts—United States—Biography. | Drug addicts—Family relationships—United States. | Man-woman relationships. | Codependency.

  Classification: LCC HV5805.A76 A3 2020 (print) | LCC HV5805.A76 (ebook) | DDC 362.29/13092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003061

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020003062

  Ebook ISBN 9780525576693

  crownpublishing.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover photograph: hannahargyle/Getty Images (flowers)

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part 2

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part 3

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Part 4

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  chapter one

  On a Hunter’s Moon, I burned his name. The drummer in my band told me to do it. We were sitting at the bar drinking well whiskeys and cans of beer. A Hunter’s Moon is powerful for intention setting, she said, winding her long, chemically straightened hair into an apple fritter–sized bun atop her head. She secured it not with an elastic but with a wrist flick and a twist of another piece of her hair, some sleight of hand I’d always envied in the girls who could do it. It stayed in place perfectly. She pulled a few baby hairs out to fall in front of her ears, and they made small, wispy parentheses around her face. Fleetwood Mac was playing.

  Write down what you want and burn it, she said, knocking back the last of her drink.

  Women suggest these types of things to one another.

  A Hunter’s Moon is powerful for intention setting. This was the kind of oblique advice I was getting a lot. I didn’t know where to hook into it, how to listen better to make it feel real, like something I could act on. Still, I let it wash over me, this language I was trying to learn. My earnest, beautiful, California girlfriends, knowing I needed them, were doing their very best, circling with candles and crystals. I welcomed their warmth the way I imagined I was supposed to, with an open, wistful gaze, and slow, New Age nodding. Just that week, one had shown up with a bottle of rosé and made the measured, straight-faced suggestion that I “sage” him from the premises. This will cleanse your space of him, she said, proffering a bound, faded bundle of expired flora and a lighter.

  I was constantly cleansing him from my space. Every few days, for example, I’d clean our bathroom, wiping with Lysol-drenched paper towels the delicate spray of dried blood that lay over most surfaces and reminded me of the splatter of colored dye on the outside of a jawbreaker, the first layer that makes a white paste in your mouth as you suck it away. Living with a junkie involves a lot of effluvia. Everywhere, there are oozes that must be wiped away. It seems there’s simply more of it all: The sweat that goes immediately cold on the disregulated slab of his body. Piss that didn’t make it into the toilet bowl. There’s blood and vomit—vomit every day—and the rotten, volcanic secretions of abscesses. And when I come home from work and he lunges for me, kisses me, all babybaby and half on the nod, and we fuck dreamily, devotedly on the couch, there’s spit, and there’s come.

  Sometimes in the trash can I find wadded-up paper towels or bits of toilet paper he’s used to wipe the blood away himself, and sometimes blood-stained T-shirts or socks or floral dish towels, which stiffen as they dry as though rigor mortis has set in.

  I didn’t know how to tell my friends, those well-meaning rays of blond hope, that intention setting was already my life. Intention setting was the blistering fever that came over me when I couldn’t reach him and I had to type fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you over four inches of an email box—my version of a breathing exercise—until I could calm down and go back to my work. My drafts folder was full of these ten-point fuck you blocks, and hundreds of other half-written love letters and hate letters I’d nearly lobbed his way, all intentions to reform or renounce him. Intention setting was what I was doing all those mornings I pulled the car over to cry with my head on the steering wheel, it was the cement resolve I felt harden in my gut when I saw how much money was missing from my bank account. It was the ominous thump of my own helplessness, the rhythm of my days and nights. What I needed was something for intention keeping. Do they make a tincture for that, I wanted to ask, some rose-petal elixir to heal me?

  Later that night, I did as my drummer friend said. I stood above my kitchen sink—swaying slightly, rocking the bourbon baby of my body—and burned a small strip of printer paper on which I’d written K—M—S—I AM LETTING GO OF YOU in junk-drawer ballpoint pen. I’d considered I WANT TO LET GO OF YOU—Write down what you want, she’d said—but that seemed too aspirational, not present tense enough. No, I don’t want to, I am.

  The paper curled hot orange and tears welled in my eyes as the flame climbed slowly closer to my hand. I wanted it
to be Satanic, the dark, measured wildness of casting a spell, untying and setting loose some force in the universe. It felt more like something out of a Taylor Swift video. A pathetic, overearnest micro-victory against obsessive love while my eyeliner ran. The tiny blaze appeared perfectly controlled. I let the ashes fall into the dirty cereal bowls, narrowing my eyes to summon the sense that this time would be consequential. I really mean it this time: the refrain of sick people the world over. The thing is, you do mean it each time. That night I certainly did. I swallowed the lump in my throat and thought, I am letting go, motherfucker. Starting right now.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  The disease he has is addiction. It’s in the headlines every day, killing more people than ever before, taking over the country. I look at graphs in the newspapers showing steep, almost vertical upticks in overdoses and deaths. I read all the stories—about the cheap, pure Mexican heroin flooding the market, about school-age kids left to fend for themselves as their parents descend, then disappear, about small-town librarians carrying NARCAN to reverse the overdoses happening in their bathrooms, about the cops in a futile, all-out war to stem the tides of supply and skyrocketing demand. At work, I surreptitiously watch Vice videos about Canadian teenagers panhandling so they can snort crushed-up Smurf-blue Fentanyl, chasing ever-shorter highs. They amble around hot parking lots, sending text messages in search of ten more minutes of oblivion, more pills they can crush into the powder they snort off the backs of public toilets. You can see any prospect of future joy receding as their faces slacken and their lids grow heavy.

  But even the constant reporting on the recent surge in drug horrors—seen as more horrifying now that the people affected are increasingly whiter and younger—cannot adequately document its monstrousness. Each time I read one of these stories, watch a film, or look at a graph, I think about all that lies outside the frame, the heartaches those headlines don’t show, the creeping messes they won’t account for and couldn’t possibly contain. They say addiction is a “family disease,” and I ponder this a lot, the astonishing rippling outward of bad decisions and risky behaviors—the impound lots, eviction notices, and pawned heirlooms, lives caught up, just as mine is, in managing everyday grief, accommodating each day a little bit more, more than you ever thought you could handle.

  * * *

  •   •   •

  A cool morning in early autumn, Oakland, California. K is poised to get out of the car and onto the BART train to head to a job I’m not certain he actually has anymore. He presses play on the music on his phone and pulls the hood of his black sweatshirt—the addict’s veil—gruffly up over his headphones. In the way a different person (me) might straighten her skirt or reach for her purse, K readies himself for public view with a series of small, personal movements. They are designed to hide as much of himself as possible. In more desperate times, he has ridden the train looking for people to rob, seizing upon couples he could intimidate by threatening to hit the woman. He wouldn’t hit a woman, he said when he first revealed this to me, but the tactic always worked. And the guy gets a moment to shine, he added. All he has to do is fork over the cash and he looks like a hero. But K’s habit is not that out of control at the moment, and besides, he has me.

  His waking hours are a careful calculus. To get from sunrise to sundown, he needs forty dollars—thirty for heroin and ten for crack. Maybe a couple bucks more from the change jar for one of those plastic containers of lemon or lime juice that junkies use to break down crack. Bodegas in bad neighborhoods sell them on the counter. I used to wonder what they were for. He doesn’t actually shoot drugs in front of me; the actual moments when he’s getting high are more like an open secret between us. He usually goes to the bathroom to do it, and I can often hear him humming innocuously from behind the door, sometimes whistling, sounding carefree and maybe a little excited, like he’s Mr. Rogers buttoning his cardigan and donning his loafers, readying himself for a wholesome adventure.

  He’ll do the first shot, a combination of the two, to get the first high of the day, the only true high. After so many years of shooting dope, speedballs are the quickest way to feel something. He’ll do a second shot of the heroin he’s saved later, to come down a bit from that bell-ringing height. And he’ll need another one at night, but will rarely have enough left. His evening shot will just be a rinse—the weak residue of heroin left over in the cotton. It would be best if he could save himself a wakeup shot for the following morning, but he never finds a way to. (Does anyone? The wakeup shot might be a junkie myth.) At night, he might have a drink or take some pills or smoke some weed, but none will quell the mushrooming dopesickness—or the fear of dopesickness, which he tells me is just as strong as the sickness itself—that will peel him out of sleep around 4:00 A.M. and linger, a light panic, throughout the morning.

  Dirty as it sounds, there’s something neat and straightforward about his routine. It depends upon other humans—through cooperation, manipulation, coercion, force—yet it also remains pristinely single-minded, self-directed, and selfish.

  So many of our habits come to feel like rituals, but if you think about it, few are truly nonnegotiable. I like to have a cup of coffee with a splash of milk every morning, but if there isn’t coffee or milk at home, I simply wait. The day might take on a different shape, a detour to stop at a café or a trip to the market. Maybe I’ll go without coffee until later in the afternoon. This isn’t like that. The necessity of getting drugs and the wolfish entitlement to be high arrive anew each morning with the rosy light of daybreak, and he sets about, diversionless, feeding that urge.

  Addiction is biological, of course, but that isn’t all. It’s emotional and psychological. Often, the addict retrofits an entire philosophy of life in order to justify his behavior. For example, K might say he’s always been a nihilist, but I think that was just a way to account for his penchant for drugs. There’s also something almost religious in the devotion this type of addiction, this practice, requires. The focus of the addict is chilling in its intensity. It’s not like my morning coffee. It’s more like the monk at the sound of the meditation gong. A zombie at the whiff of blood. A pattern that won’t be interrupted, challenged, or moved. Its lack of variation feels like the purest dedication, though it also appears almost robotic. It is not enviable, but it is stunning—awe-inspiring—in its way.

  I gotta get to work, he says as we sit parked in front of the train station. Outside the window, commuters stream by with briefcases, students with earbuds and backpacks. All have a bounciness that seems foreign to the moment, to the air inside the car, to the culture of our relationship. I watch them pass with longing and judgment.

  I know he’s going to ask me for money, and that he’ll save it until the end so that the shame of the question might be lost among the last of his shufflings. His eyes dart around the car’s interior and then eventually up to my eyes, where they pause flatly. He rolls the window down just a couple of inches, then rolls it back up. Nervous energy. He so often appears poised to bolt. Can I borrow forty bucks, he says, with no question mark. My pulse picks up at the sound of that word, “borrow.” Just the sound of it, the nerve of it, rankles me. (Pro tip: a drug addict is never, ever borrowing money.) My eyes close for a long moment and then open again, and the daylight pours back in.

  My calculations are ceaseless, too. My bank account has $211 in it. Our phone bill is overdue, and I need to buy groceries on my lunch break. But I get paid tomorrow, and it isn’t the paycheck that goes entirely to rent, it’s the fifteenth’s paycheck, the one for bills. I’m owed a few hundred dollars for a copyediting job. And there’s child support coming. But forty dollars a day is two hundred and eighty dollars a week. Eleven hundred and twenty dollars a month. Enough to open a savings account, rent a room, take a trip, run away. An extra grand a month would be a life-changing sum. Or maybe I just crave a literal life change. That’s the itch coursing angrily t
hrough my blood, a fix I don’t know how to get. The money he needs we don’t technically have, or we have it but we shouldn’t spend it, we can’t go on spending it like this. I can’t make it fast enough, and if he’s making any, it isn’t making its way home. Not a dollar, not ever. On a different morning, I might ask if he is really going to work. With exhaustion and exasperation in my voice, I’d say, You can just tell me if you don’t have that job anymore. I might even get angry, berate him for a few parting minutes for being aloof or opaque or conniving or a liar. Sitting in the car at the BART station seems to call forth the worst of my rage—why are these transitional spaces, these thresholds, the moments before separation, so ideal for quick, machine-gun bursts of fighting?

  But not this morning. To comment is to risk lighting up the entire, intricate network of resentments that lay like a power grid beneath our relationship. Today the surface is fragile enough. I can tell he doesn’t feel well.

  Honesty is supposed to be the hallmark of a loving relationship, but I’m expert at swallowing my next thought just as it’s about to make its way out of my mouth. I say nothing. I don’t know if I even think anything. I open my black leather envelope wallet, a grown woman’s wallet, the one my mother bought me for my birthday, saying, I’m a professional who needs a few nice things, and I pull out two twenties. I hold the money in my hand and look at K for a long minute, talking with my eyes, feeling the perverse power I hold as the gatekeeper, breadwinner, granter of wishes. I can make dopesickness disappear. It’s money I withdrew from the ATM on San Pablo on the way home from work the night before, anticipating this very interaction, knowing my role. That I will give it to him is a foregone conclusion. I don’t know why. I only know that every day I think I’ll do something different and then I don’t. I set out to do the opposite of this—to make my life the opposite of this—and then discover that this is a decision I seem to have already made.