The Bent Spoon; A Story of Addiction

Written April 9th, 2014, published online April 15th, 2014

By Don DuPay

I clutched the sides of the bathroom sink with both hands and watched as my vomit spewed from my mouth and splattered sideways onto my hands and wrists. I gagged and sucked in my breath, waiting for the next hot gush to explode. “Sweet Jesus,” I gurgled, “Oh God!” What exploded from my stomach was sour and curdled. How could this food have tasted so good going down and so hot, and like acid, coming up?

My vomit had plugged the sink, so I scooped it with both hands and let it drop into the nearby toilet. The convulsions in my stomach had lessened somewhat, and I turned on the cold water, splashing the remaining puke down the now willing drain, as I stood hunched over the sink basin. I pushed, with my arms, raising up and forced myself to look at the image in the mirror. I didn't know that person. It wasn't me. And yet it was.

I looked down at my left arm and saw the short trickle of drying blood where I had injected the mixture of cocaine and water. I had filtered it into the needle through the pinch of a cotton ball, resting in the bent spoon. As I felt the rush, I dropped the rig on the floor in my hurry to puke. I stood up-right and washed the blood from my arm and dabbed at it with a piece of toilet paper, making sure it stopped bleeding. It was slightly swollen where I poked the needle in, like a bee sting swells. 

After wiping my face and mouth with a big wad of toilet paper, I looked around and located the bent spoon, the tiny piece of cotton and the needle on the floor. There was a minuscule wet spot where the cotton had fallen on the floor and the needle had bent at an angle, looking askew and surreal. 

I sat down on the toilet holding my head in my hands and feeling the sweat on my forehead and began talking to the wall. The same wall I had promised too many times before that I would “never-ever-ever” shoot cocaine again. What was the matter with me? What the hell was I doing with my life? I was a fuckin' cocaine junkie and I knew it and I hated it. I hated me.

I looked at the bent needle and wondered if I could straighten it out and use it again. Reaching for the needle, I looked closely at it and in my exhausted state, tried to straighten it, pricking my finger accidentally. I sucked the blood from my finger until it stopped oozing. Before long, my stomach started retching again and I threw the needle as hard as I could against the wall, breaking the needle off and smashing the plastic syringe. It could never fuck me up again, now that I had destroyed it. No sir, never again. 

Goddamn worthless drug addicts, I had hated them at one time. I was better than this. Or I used to be better than this.

It had been a long road getting there, not exactly what I'd thought would happen, but it had been a choice. I found myself in my early forties, divorced by my wife, the one that had always been a little odd most of our twenty years of marriage. She told me one afternoon, in a cold, matter-of-fact way, that she had decided she was a lesbian and was divorcing me for a woman she had fallen in love with; a woman named Claudia. I would be getting the papers in the mail. She was odd, yes—but this? 

A few months later, after we'd parted ways, I received the papers, telling me I was newly divorced and free to remarry. I experienced a feeling that I hadn't expected. I felt deliciously free. But free to do what? Was it time now, to explore that unexplained urge that had been an undercurrent in my thinking for a long time?

Years before, I'm a white kid, growing up in Portland, in the 1950s, in a very white neighborhood, and attending Grant High school. There were no people of color in the neighborhood and no people of color attending Grant. I was white. The neighborhood was white. The school was white. Everything around me was white. But as I emerged into puberty, I found that I was secretly attracted to black girls. I casually mentioned it to my mother one day after school, telling her how "cute" I thought they were. “Well you get that out of your head!” she said, looking at me sternly. “We're white. You just don't do that. You don't mix with coloreds!” So I never mentioned it to her again, and tried to push it out of my mind.

My parents owned a large and successful family restaurant in the 50s and my summer job was busing tables and scooping ice cream for the patrons’ desert. One of our dishwashers was a black teenager named Willie who went to Jefferson High.

I naturally gravitated toward him and we became fast friends. I had a car. Willie didn't, so we tooled around town together being teenagers, drinking the home brew he bought for a dollar fifty a quart, from a guy who lived at the top of the stairs of an old house on N. Commercial Street. Another dollar bought a pin-joint rolled in yellow, wheat paper. 

We'd park on a side street and drink and smoke and talk about girls. I felt I could safely share my secret fascination about black girls with him. He was easy going and didn't judge me. A week or two later, I found myself at a party with my friend, two quarts of home brew and three black girls that attended Jefferson High school were with him. We drank, listened to music, and both flirted with the girls. But I never got up enough nerve to actually touch one or snuggle up close, so I studied them, admiring their beautiful even, brown, skin, pretty features and perfect measurements. 

After smelling the heavy, musky, sweet perfume they wore, I blurted out to one of the girls, encouraged by the alcohol in the home brew, "You smell really good!" I told her. “We wear TABU!” she replied proudly, pulling a small bottle from her purse and showing it to me with a flirtatious tilt of her head. 

She held the bottle out so I could smell it. I sniffed and smiled, but felt awkward at being the only white guy in the room and wondered if they weren't secretly making fun of me, as they gazed at me, smiled and flirted. My fascination for brown-skinned women remained a secret for years, a secret I didn't act on. My mother made it clear that associating with black women was a different kind of taboo, and was not allowed in our family.

During my twenty year marriage with the woman I thought I knew but realized slowly, I didn't know at all, I had many opportunities to be around black women, but I had never had the courage to do it and for a long time, I thought maybe it was wrong. 

When I'd turned twenty five, in 1961, I joined the Portland Police Bureau and worked for six years as a street cop, then eleven more years as a burglary and finally, as a homicide detective. As a young patrol cop, I'd been primarily assigned to the North End, where many black owned clubs and taverns were located. One of my favorite haunts was a club called Van's Olympic Room over on Vancouver and Fremont. It’s not there anymore, being demolished in 2014 to make room for a much larger building.

Friday and Saturday nights exotic dancers would "table dance" on top of a grand piano, wiggling and undulating seductively and smiling at the male patrons. By law they had to wear pasties covering their nipples and a G-string covering their slender pelvis.

I would sit, with my coffee, in my police uniform, checking out all the gangsters and dope dealers in the place, taking notes at the table on my pocket notebook, but really I came to watch Thelma dance. Thelma was a pretty black girl, with a bikini body, long, slender chocolate legs, short curly hair, and big doe-like brown eyes with long false lashes. Thelma's skin was always shiny and rich looking, almost like it had been oiled. Like most black girls, she used cocoa butter cream to condition her skin, so it wouldn’t get “ashy” and dry. She wore glistening, purple eye shadow and bright red lipstick that looked wet when she moved her lips. The pasties she wore had four inch tassels attached, and when she jiggled her breasts she could twirl them in opposite directions at the same time. I was impressed. 

But I wondered if her nipples were pink like a white girls, or brown like the rest of her body. As she danced, I could smell her heavy perfume, not TABU, but it was musky and spicy at the same time and smelled exotic and irresistible. I could smell her and I felt I could almost feel her too. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but didn't dare. I could only admire Thelma from a bar stool away. I was a cop, and I was married. And I was white. But still, I wondered, and fantasized about Thelma. I wished, secretly. Being around black women only made my secret urges stronger, because of the forbidden and illicit element to their association. There was just something about black girls. They had a charisma and personal self-confidence that white girls didn't seem to have.

I have often wondered about the inexplicable urges human beings feel, urges that are left unexplored, ignored or repressed. I wondered if my wife's increasing lack of interest in me sexually was the result of her urges to be, not with a man, but rather with a woman? Was she ultimately more honest than I, when she finally told me she was in love with a woman and was divorcing me? She had made her decision--and it set us both free. She was free to love, and sleep with a woman, she told me. She could be happy now and didn't we all, “have a right to be fuckin' happy” as she put it?

I sure as shit wanted to be happy. I wanted excitement and something different, and the divorce left the door wide open for me to finally act on my urge and pursue a black girl.

It was now time to act, and I knew I had to jump on my decision because time changes everything, and I was tired of waiting, and listening to what other people told me was right.

Time moves with the quickness of an arrow or a spear, as it passes. You can see it but it speeds towards its end, falling victim to gravity and when it does, it leaves a mark in the grass. A point. A dot. A period. And a period signifies the end of something. In this case, it was the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. 

When I was finally able to hang up the worn but still shiny policeman's badge I had worn for 17 years, in 1978, after I ultimately resigned, for health reasons, I felt completely free. I was relieved to hang up my career and pull the pin, divorcing myself from the Portland Police Bureau.

My time in law enforcement had been unrewarding and confining, the way a jack-in-the-box is confining, just waiting for the lid to be opened so it can spring into action. I was tired of trying to be the model citizen, a shining example, a pillar of the community or a role model. I had seen the fast life as a policeman, and now I wanted to taste a little of it myself. 

As I stared at the bathroom wall, with my still sweating head resting in my palms, all of these assorted memories whirled around in my brain spinning to a stop and then starting again like the closed loop movie of my life. In 1979, I finally found a beautiful, thin, girlish black woman; a cocaine addict named Artent who was introduced to me by a dope dealer of my acquaintance during my cop days, who I'd begun associating with after I resigned from the force. Maybe Artent was following her urge too, as she told me she had been “shopping around” for a white man who wouldn't hit her or cheat on her and would treat her "nice." 

Our urges collided, and we clicked. I fell in love first with Artent and then ultimately with the cocaine that she brought with her. Having this beautiful creature in my life fulfilled my urge. She was like pie with ice cream on top. She was skinny and small boned, like a little Minnie mouse, with small delicate hands and a perfect body. She had a small, heart shaped face and beautiful, full, red, mouth. She was simply gorgeous. I fell for her the minute I saw her in her rayon flowered dress and strappy high heels. 

The fast life with Artent was a blast, but it was a burner too. Deep inside I knew I was killing myself a little at a time, every time I used cocaine. I killed my self-respect, hating myself for being what I had never intended to become—a junkie. 

The ride ended for her when Artent was murdered in Seattle, in 1980, in a dope deal gone bad, by a black man who was jealous that we were planning to get married. I'd always suspected that she might brag about me and I was right. She made the mistake of telling the man that we were going to get married and in a rage of jealousy, he made sure that would never happen. The Seattle detective told me on the phone that she had been stabbed 27 times, and her body dumped in Seward Park. Her life movie had ended. She was dead in Seattle, leaving me addicted, sick, disgusted with myself, and angry at her for getting herself killed and leaving me alone. I was at bottom. I couldn't go any lower except to be buried in the dirt. I had to climb out. I had to be me again. I had to be able to look at myself in the mirror and be proud of what I saw again. I had to become a man again.

And I did. It took a while to pull myself out of the muck I'd willingly jumped into feet first, but I did it. I quit cold turkey, got a job at a fast food restaurant as a manager and started looking for better work. However, if I could go back in time, would I do anything differently? I've often asked myself that question. If I could go back in time to avoid the ten months I was addicted to cocaine, would I? What if being black for a while taught me something? What if cocaine taught me something too? “What if yes was the right answer instead of no?” I still don’t know the answer to that question.

I have been both a good man and an imperfect, highly flawed man, floundering when I should have been steadfast, and a thrill-seeker when I should have said no—but I stand here now, the sum total of my experiences. I make no apologies for that year; for the 10 months I was a cocaine junkie. Because the truest reality is that, for the most part, I hurt no one but myself. The other reality is that I survived and came out on the other side, far wiser than I'd been before, but a whole person, with my flawed past and my mistakes to reflect on; not to mention all the friends I lost to drug addiction too, the police I used to know, the drug dealers, the friends.

I wouldn't trade the experience but I wouldn't do it again either, if I had the choice. We each choose our own path in life. Sometimes we come to a fork in the road. Right or left, wrong or right? We are never sure until we reach the end.