Time

CW: Substance/alcohol abuse

***

I’d lost count of the years that had gone by since I’d last walked the streets of Seattle. 

It felt like forever, the last time I’d prowled around the city at night, heading to a show, reading the concert flyers plastered along every lamppost and wall. I’d missed that feeling in the air, the way the closer I got to live music, the excitement would start flitting around from person to person along the clustered sidewalks. 

Nothing ever felt like that after the move to San Francisco. As the years rolled on, nothing ever felt as real as it did back in Seattle—back when, every other night, I’d meet up with the boys, head to a show in some old dive, cram inside a hundred-degree room with a throng of sweaty moshers, headbang, throw myself around, drink myself into oblivion, vomit into a urinal, stumble back home at five in the morning, and then have to go to work the next day. Sneak into bars to see my friends play in bands. Get wasted on cheap beer and crash at buddies’ apartments. I missed those days, those days when every time was a good time. Back when everything was funny. Even drugs used to be funny. Heroin used to be funny.

I’d lost count of the years that had gone by since I’d last found heroin funny.

All I knew was that enough time had passed for our band to replace our singer, move to California, make a couple of records, and go on a few tours. Enough time had passed for me to go in and out of rehab and wish it had been me who had died instead of Nolan.

When Nolan overdosed, the band had wanted to relocate. Because none of us could stand Seattle anymore. Everything we’d loved—the scene, the clubs, the hunting for Nick Cave and Gun Club records in Fallout, the hanging in the back of Cellophane Square playing pinball—it all felt haunted. 

We used to be our own tribe, me and Ducky and Chad and Nolan. Our band was our life. Whenever some jock or macho-meathead guy down in the Central District would call us freaks and laugh at us, whatever, we would laugh right back. We didn’t need them; we understood each other. Getting shitfaced and rock and roll, that was our creed. We lived that way together.

Our band had been about to blow up. We were about to sign a record deal.

Then Nolan overdosed.

Sometimes I thought I could still hear his ghost hollering in my ear, “You only live once!” That’s what Nolan always used to say right before doing something idiotic—he was that guy who did entire sheets of acid. Screamed vulgar things at cops. Picked fights with jocks and laughed when they beat him up. Went swimming in the shipping canals. Right before he did any of it—he’d get all smiley and chirp, “What the hell, you only live once!” 

It was sort of ironic, really, the way Nolan would always talk about living when half the stuff he did could probably kill him. But he didn’t understand irony. Like I said, getting shitfaced and rock and roll—that was what he understood.

Nolan was also that guy who did too much heroin. 

Honestly, so was I. And that had put a strain on the band.

Things had gone downhill after we started using. Nolan and me, we made ourselves an inviolate haven inside our world of drugs. We’d sit around the house nodding off and come to rehearsals high. Shoot each other up in the bathroom and insist we weren’t hooked. That we were only doing a little bit of heroin because “we wanted to” and that “we could stop if we wanted.”

It became our thing, getting high together. We basically isolated ourselves from the rest of the band and ruined everything we had. But of course, in our junkie mindsets, we were right and everyone else was wrong. 

I vividly remember a time when Nolan and I were sitting in a parked car, both of us so high we could have eaten the stars, blasting the radio. We’d been drinking, too—Nolan had whipped gin out of somewhere, and of course, when I hesitated and told him we shouldn’t drink while high, he’d responded, “What the hell, you only live once,” and that was that.

Then that Dada song came on the radio— “Dizz Nee Land”—and immediately after Nolan heard those first few notes, he bellowed, “THIS IS MY FAVORITE SONG.”

“This song?” I said incredulously.

“This is my favorite song,” Nolan insisted. “You know, man, these people are always telling me, don’t do drugs, don’t get high, but what the hell, that’s what I do, that’s who I am, I’m always gonna do drugs and go to my Disneyland. I’m in Disneyland right now! I’M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!”

He proceeded to take an enormous swig of gin and promptly fire the bottle out the window, his empty eyes staring off into oblivion. Looking absolutely out of his mind. Then, at the top of his lungs, he bellowed the next line of the song— “I just saw a good man die, I’M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!”

            All these years later, I still held the belief that Nolan was a good man. A good man with some demons—you could hear that in the songs he wrote—but a good man nonetheless. Looking back on that memory, it almost felt like there, in the car that night, Nolan had prophesied his future. Or mine, since by some cruel twist of fate, I had been the one who survived. I saw the good man die. I lived on to do an obscene amount of drugs over the years despite what happened to my friend, I made the band a living hell for my other friends, I ruined that special tribe we used to have. I ruined everything. And now the band was done, and I had nowhere to go.

            So I was on my way back home to Seattle.

            I just wanted to walk down Pine Street and see Squid Row again. Walk past the Frontier Room on 1^st Avenue and see who was playing. See if Muzak had any old Saints records. 

            So, when I finally came home, I headed straight into the heart of the city. As I walked around, searching for some of the storefronts and faces I remembered, my heart fluttered in anticipation, waiting for that galvanizing moment things would start to look familiar.

            But soon, my heart started to sink. Because they never did.

            I didn’t recognize anybody. It seemed like all the freaks, all the long-haired metalheads and the scenesters and the skateboard punks, had gone away and been replaced by yuppies and hipsters. All the old clubs—the Crocodile, Central Tavern, the OK Hotel—were all gone. I saw a clothing store where the Vogue used to be. Springhill Suites Marriott where RCKNDY was supposed to be.

            Where were all the concert flyers? Where was that feeling of excitement in the air?

            As I wandered around Pioneer Square, like I’d done so many times in years past, I couldn’t help feeling more lost than I’d ever been. I should know this place. I grew up here. Hell, I threw up here. So many times, I’d stumbled out of Gorilla Gardens on Fifth and Jackson puking into the street. But of course, Gorilla Gardens had to be gone as well—now a FedEx office stood on its corner.

            I sighed and stared at the cars shooting down the streets, the strangers shuffling down the sidewalk. This was supposed to feel like coming home. But this place didn’t feel like home anymore. 

If I couldn’t go home, where could I go? Not back to San Francisco. Not back to overdosing in my trashed apartment and waking up in detox on a regular basis.

            The sound of someone calling my name yanked me out of my sullen reverie. My head snapped up, and when I turned around, somehow, I finally saw a familiar face.

            “Hack?” I cried. No way! My old buddy, Hack! We’d always called him that, the boys and me, because the first time one of us gave him a joint, he erupted into this violent coughing fit, like he was going to blow out his lungs. He used to be way straight edge—but then he started hanging out with us. We pulled him along on a lot of our misadventures, back then. A lot of misadventures that involved alcohol, police, and running.

At least—this guy used to be Hack. I could see in the hard lines and grizzled beard that masked his face that this wasn’t the Hack of old—the goofy, naïve, bubbly friend me and the boys used to hang and jam with. I could see, physically, that he’d gained a whole lot of weight, but his expression said something like he’d gained a lot of emotional weight as well.

“Man,” said Hack. “You look terrible.”

            Hack and I decided to get some coffee and catch up. Coffee at some new place I’d never heard of. Who knew what record store had been sacrificed for this coffee shop to stand here?

            Hack and I talked for a good while. I asked about some more of our old friends. Turned out, Ducky left Seattle shortly after I did—no news since. Chad got married, had a couple of kids, still lived around. Derrick drank too much nowadays. Jeff had been divorced and in and out of jail. Hack himself, he’d been struggling paying healthcare for a while. Seattle had gotten so expensive, and the years of drinking from our party days had messed up his liver. He was thinking of leaving Seattle, too.

            He asked about me—said he’d heard our band’s records, so we talked about those—and I told him that I’d been clean for almost a year now.

            “How’s that been?” Hack asked me, although I think he knew the answer already. Hard as hell. Ι felt like I was dying every day. I couldn’t remember how I used to get by before I started using. 

How could other people stand it, being conscious all the time? Always thinking? Always feeling? I sure couldn’t stand it. Always having to listen to my brain scream, You could’ve stopped him, You enabled him. Always hearing those whispers that twisted and pulled at my insides, You ruined the band. You should be dead, not him.

            “Impossible?” Hack answered for me, nodding slowly. He could see it plainly, just by looking at me, that even though I technically wasn’t using, I was still messed up. Hell, I knew I had the junkie aura surrounding me. I carried it with me everywhere I went. It was almost like Nolan’s ghost haunted me; you couldn’t see me without also seeing him.

            “I feel you, man,” Hack offered. “For me, not drinking, it’s like…” He trailed off, looking at me with such an authentic expression of understanding that my stomach lurched and my eyes welled up.

            I sighed and said, agonizingly, “It used to be so much fun. Remember when we were kids and we used to get wasted at shows? And get trampled in the pit?”

            Hack laughed weakly. “Yeah. You were always throwing up.”

            “Yeah,” I said. “I was. And remember that time, when we were like, freshmen in high school, and we were at some show and the cops came and tried to shut it down, and Nolan went out and started bashing in all the windows of their cars?”

            “You only live once,” Hack whispered. 

            We were both quiet for a minute.

            “And Hack,” I started again, “Remember the Ditto? And the Grey Door?”

            “Yeah.”

            “It’s all gone!” I burst out. “It’s all—I came back and I was hoping I could see all that again. But it’s all gone. All the record stores are gone, all our friends are gone. It’s like I’m not even home.”

            “Well,” Hack said hesitantly. “Things change. I guess Seattle is pretty different now. But that’s what time does.”

            I stared into my cup at the swirling black void that was my coffee. Stupid time. Maybe this place wasn’t home after all. Maybe that time was. Back then. 

Where I couldn’t go.

            “At least time didn’t change Nolan,” I said finally. “Nolan’s stayed the exact same all these years.” 

 “That’s because Nolan’s dead,” Hack said, and so promptly that it hurt. I still didn’t like saying Nolan was dead—accepting that fact was a pill that had stayed lodged in my throat for years, one I just wouldn’t swallow. 

“What’s dead doesn’t change,” Hack went on. “But what’s alive does. I mean, look at us. We’re a little worse for wear these days. Don’t have the tolerance we used to!” He smirked a little bit, trying to joke, but his eyes were sad. “But we’re still here. Still alive.”

I felt the sting, the burning whisper deep inside: You’re still here. Nolan’s not.

“I feel like I died when Nolan did,” I confessed after a while.

Hack nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Me too. Broke me up into pieces too. But that was years ago. You gotta put yourself back together and move on. I mean, we both figured out the hard way that we can’t just avoid thinking about it. I nearly drank myself to death before I learned that I had to just deal with that and everything else that was going on in my life. Gotta accept, like, Nolan’s gone, our scene is gone, good times are gone. But we’re not. I’m not. You’re not.”

“But what the hell?” I demanded. “If all the good times are gone, then what is there?”

“I meant those good times are gone,” Hack said stiffly. “There could be more coming up. Doesn’t look good now, but hey, you never know.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “But, like…where?”

“I dunno, man,” Hack said with a shrug. “All I know is—and I’m saying this as your friend—You gotta take those memories and move on. You can’t keep living in the past. Nolan can, ‘cause he’s dead. But you can’t, ‘cause you’re still alive.”

“What, did you go to school and study philosophy or something?” I teased him. But deep down, I knew he was right. I couldn’t wallow in the past anymore. I was pathetic. Nolan himself would be ashamed of me.

Another quiet moment.

This time Hack broke the silence: “I do miss the Grey Door. And remember the Met?”

I wanted to burst into tears, memories flooding my brain. “Hell yeah, I remember the Met. And the Showbox?”

“Yeah,” Hack said, smiling, a distant look in his eyes. 

We sat like that for a while, throwing stories back and forth. Remembering times we got kicked out of clubs for being underage, Nolan’s one-liners he’d fire at cops, the ridiculous clothes we used to wear. Old bands like the U-Men and Girl Trouble. The infamous incident with Hack’s first joint.

But after a while, I knew I had to leave. 

I knew things could never go back to the way they were. Those good times, they’d had their moments. The bad ones did, too. The ones riddled with drugs, lying, record label pressure. It went up and down, back and forth. Good times, bad times. Everything was always changing. 

Maybe now, it was my turn.