The Story of Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell's First Shot

Trigger warning: graphic drug use (heroin). Mention of sex with consent issues (nonviolent).

September, 1995

It was the week before my sophomore year in college, and I drove back home over the mountains to get some stuff I'd forgotten at my parents'.

The phone rang as I piled random shit into garbage bags: dirty clothes, notebooks, broken jewelry. "Gracie, it's for you!" my mom called.

"Who is it?"

"Tamara."

I slouched out of my room and grabbed the receiver from her. "Hello?"

"Hey," Tamara said. "You're in town, right? Want to hang out?"

She came and retrieved me in her rattle-trap Honda. I was glad she and Connor had broken up, though she wasn't much safer of a driver.

She bumped over a curb, a long cigarette poised between her fingers. "So, uh, hey," she said. "I know this guy who can get heroin."

I straightened. "I've got twenty bucks." I'd been curious about heroin since I was fourteen and my mom told me never to do it because it was too good.

We drove to a tiny house in a bleak neighborhood. A pit bull stared at me through the chain link fence, drooling profusely, as I waited in the car. Tamara came back about ten minutes later, rummaging in her purse as she slid into the driver's seat. She pulled out a tiny chunk of black tar, wrapped in cellophane.

"We shoot it up?" I asked.

"Yeah. Let's go to Michael's house. I told him I'd do some with him."

Michael was the brother of a guy I'd dated as a freshman—probably been the nicest guy I'd ever gone out with. Michael's huge lips gaped into a trumpet-bell of surprise when he saw the black tar. "Heroin? No shit?" He grinned, flinging back the bangs of his mullet. "Kickass."

The shit smelled like vinegar mixed with rat shit as Tamara cooked it up in a spoon with water. Michael had a package of syringes—his mom was diabetic—but we couldn't figure out how to draw the shit up: the needle kept clogging.

Michael called his friend Zane, who came over and instructed us how to filter the shot through a little nub of cotton. Then came the insurmountable task of actually getting the shit into our veins; Tamara and Michael hunched over their arms, cursing as they missed and raised little welts on their arms, but I was too chicken to even try. Zane gave me a little half-smile and offered to shoot me up.

"So, where are you from?" he asked as he tapped the crook of my elbow.

"From here originally, but I go to college in Olympia now." I winced slightly as he jabbed the needle in.

"College girl, eh? I love smart girls." I sucked in a breath as blood bloomed in the dark liquid of the syringe. He pressed the plunger home, and I felt a pressure in my vein.

Zane withdrew the needle and watched me as the dope exploded in the back of my skull. I sighed as a joy more profound than anything I'd ever known spread through me.

He grinned. "Pretty nice, huh?"

I nodded.

We sat watching The Simpsons. The rest of them talked while I was pulled down into lucid dreams: images of a wide meadow, fleshy vines creeping up the twisted limbs of trees so tall I couldn't see the tops. I watched behind my eyelids as the vines burst into bloom, the flowers all different: some had television screens in their centers, playing The Simpsons; some blared like trombones; others had wind chimes for pistils, which tinkled lightly in the balmy breeze. It was all so real, and so beautiful.

"Hey."

My chin jerked up, and I blinked at Zane, who sat next to me on the couch, smiling. "You look tired. Want to go lie down?"

I nodded dumbly. He took me into the spare bedroom and stripped off my clothes. I didn't want him to, but I didn't really care. Everything felt so good, and all I wanted to do was lie back and watch the dope dreams unfold.

***

I took some heroin back to Gabe when I returned to Olympia. He was living in Patrick and Rick's garage. He'd made a nest of sleeping bags in a corner amongst piles of crushed Natural Ice cans. I was jealous of him, living in the center of the action. I was living twenty miles out of town with my grandmother.

He cackled when I showed him the tiny baggie. "You have heroin? No way."

We fumbled around trying to find a vein, but managed it. I had to plunge out the garage door to puke in the weeds and trash behind the house. Then Gabe and I lit some candles and sat listening to a Dinosaur Jr. tape and talking about our grand plans of living in a shack in the wilderness after I graduated.

Dope was the first thing that had ever made the world seem right, like it was a place where I belonged. The risks seemed far away, pale in comparison to the benefits. There was no way I'd give up something that made life feel this good.