put numbers to this phenomenon. But I am all the study of a body I need to know that a finger down my throat and a needle in the crook of my elbow are a singular stroke, the same violence.
Drugs let me lose my body, transcend from it completely. In high school, I was a pothead, so my hunger was not my own; rather, a ravenous extension of bong hits and blunts. I lost the mindless hours of cookies—the guilt eclipsed by giggling and spacey ramblings. In college, cocaine meant losing 35 pounds in two months, at which point my mother said I had never looked better. But heroin was the magic bullet I’d waited for all my life.
At 20, I offered my arm over to a man who had cooked a roux on perfect simmer—a single serving spoonful just for me. All night, I threw up. I threw up in his bathroom and in the bushes. I threw up in the alley behind the bar and all over the neutral ground as we waited for the streetcar. And yet, I felt perfectly full. There it was. Because once the dope is in your blood, it cannot leave through your mouth. Once I had felt the warm feeling of full up inside my skin, I was free to empty myself of anything else that might slip inside.
When I did dope, I ate with my fingers and fists.
I ordered racks of ribs, macaroni and cheese. I ordered three chocolate croissants for breakfast, made trips to the Quarter for beignets. Fried shrimp, loaves of French bread, vats of remoulade, slabs of cheesecake. I ate with abandon. I ate with gusto. And never did I have to jab a finger down my throat. The more I ate, the more dope I shot.
I knew junkies who subsisted on candy alone—the old sugar junkie stereotype true in my observations. And I knew junkies who did not throw up as often as I did—who tempered their habits, who were satisfied with a simple, straightforward nod. But I was not that kind of a junkie. I was a junkie who had lived on a diet—I lusted, in all my dopey fullness, still, after emptiness. I lusted, still, after hollowness. I was not high until I was laid out on the sidewalk vomiting. Only then did I feel full. Only then did I feel like my mother’s daughter.