I Was There the Night He Died Read Online Free Page A

also for no good reason. Mental health has a price, but I’m determined to pay it.
    All of my heroes have been dope friends, so the initial decision to self-medicate wasn’t difficult. Besides, woozy booze was always my recreational drug of choice—Dexedrine was for working. For getting down to work sooner. For keeping at the work table longer. For making the imagination click quicker. And it did. And did and did. I’ve written and published six novels plus two collections of essays in the last fourteen years, all the while being busy with making up for the money that rarely comes from writing literature. But teaching or writing book reviews or doing whatever else for a paycheque never needed pharmaceutical assistance. Never deserved pharmaceutical assistance. Art was holy because life clearly was not, and that little pill that washed over my tongue each morning was the consecrated wafer that turned the body and mind of merely tepid me into something burning and bright; just like W.H. Auden and Delmore Schwartz and Jack Kerouac and every other dedicated worker in words who knows that the human spirit needs a little chemical boost if it’s ever going to soar where it’s supposed to.
    But nobody flies for free. When Sara was alive, I could cover the cost, or at least better ignore how expensive the bill was. Living alone for the first time in eighteen years, however, everything that’s odd or ugly or unhealthy about yourself is amplified, no one around to distract you and no dutiful couple things to do to soften the crazy corners of your mind. Plus, for almost a year after the funeral I wasn’t seriously writing, the first extended period since my mid-twenties that I hadn’t been filtering all of that artificial energy through my fingers. Not tap-tapping at my laptop, I turned all of that chemically concentrated attention on myself, a wooly woodpecker in a brightly lit house of mirrors. All dosed up and nowhere to go, I got sweaty panicky waiting for the light to change from red to green. I purposefully bumped into texting-obsessed strangers on the sidewalk I knew didn’t see me coming. I counted heartbeats at night instead of sheep. (Not that there was much of a chance of my getting an overabundance of rest anyway—without a dog at the end of the bed cramping your feet and a woman to fight with over the blankets, a bed can be a very uncomfortable place.) When I got into a shouting match with a street person who, I was sure, called me an asshole when I said I didn’t have any spare change, I knew it was time to get help.
    Surprisingly, my biggest worry—missing the creative kick of the morning’s first black beauty—hasn’t been a problem. With enough Mountain Dew and a good night’s sleep behind me, the words have found their way onto the page and the pages have been adding up. I’m a hundred pages deep into Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) and the only thing I’m lacking right now is my record player and LPs back in Toronto and enough heat to unthaw my fingertips. If only heating blankets were as portable as turntables.
    I get up from the kitchen table and head to the basement. My dad had—has—everything the do-it-yourselfer could want: every tool, every spare part, every kind of nail, screw, and washer, each of the latter kept in individual glass baby food jars, their lids nailed to the underside of a ten-foot-long suspended two-by-four for easy see-through identification. Let’s see if he has an extension cord. Of course he does—of course he has two: a six-footer and an eighteen-footer.
    Upstairs, I pull the heating blanket off the bed and attach it to the shorter extension cord and then plug the longer one into it. Back in the kitchen, with the connected cords plugged into the outlet, I drape the blanket around me like a cape and sit back down at my makeshift kitchen-table desk. Immediately, I feel waves of electric heat washing