Page 256 - A Little Life: A Novel

had binges in which they cleaned or organized their apartments or studios
for hours. But he remained fat. His sex drive had vanished. His studio and
apartment remained disasters. True, he was working remarkably long

stretches—twelve, fourteen hours at a time—but he couldn’t attribute that
to the meth: he had always been a hard worker. When it came to painting or
drawing, he had always had a long attention span.
After an hour or so of picking things up, the studio looked exactly the
same as it had when he began, and he was craving a cigarette, which he
didn’t have, or a drink, which he also didn’t have, and shouldn’t have
anyway, as it was still only noon. He knew he had a ball of gum in his jeans

pocket, which he dug around for and found—it was slightly damp from the
heat—and stuffed into his mouth, chewing it as he lay supine, his eyes
closed, the cement floor cool beneath his back and thighs, pretending he
was elsewhere, not in Brooklyn in July in the ninety-degree heat.
How am I feeling? he asked himself.
Okay, he answered himself.

The shrink he had started seeing had told him to ask himself that. “It’s
like a soundcheck,” he’d said. “Just a way to check in with yourself: How
am I feeling? Do I want to use? If I do want to use, why do I want to use?
It’s a way for you to communicate with yourself, to examine your impulses
instead of simply giving in to them.” What a moron, JB had thought. He
still thought this. And yet, like many moronic things, he was unable to
expunge the question from his memory. Now, at odd, unwelcome moments,

he would find himself asking himself how he felt. Sometimes, the answer
was, “Like I want to do drugs,” and so he’d do them, if only to illustrate to
his therapist just how moronic his method was. See? he’d say to Giles in his
head, Giles who wasn’t even a PhD, just an MSW. So much for your self-
examination theory. What else, Giles? What’s next?
Seeing Giles had not been JB’s idea. Six months ago, in January, his

mother and aunts had had a mini-intervention with him, which had begun
with his mother sharing memories of what a bright and precocious boy JB
had been, and look at him now, and then his aunt Christine, literally playing
bad cop, yelling at him about how he was wasting all the opportunities that
her sister had provided him and how he had become a huge pain in the ass,
and then his aunt Silvia, who had always been the gentlest of the three,
reminding him that he was so talented, and that they all wanted him back,

and wouldn’t he consider getting treatment? He had not been in the mood