Cocaine Hearts

Cocaine Hearts

Feel everything. Survive nothing.

A Short Story

I’m twenty-three and my heart beats like it’s trying to escape my chest.

Not because of the coke — though there’s that too, a rail on the back of a toilet seat in a club bathroom in East Hollywood where the bass comes through the walls like a second pulse. Not because of the girl waiting outside the stall, the one with the shaved head and the laugh that sounds like breaking glass. Not because of the three missed calls from my mother glowing on a phone I’ve flipped face-down on the sink.

My heart beats like this because I think it knows something I don’t. Like it’s been counting down since birth and now it’s in single digits and the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

I wipe my nose. Check my teeth in the mirror. Smile.

The smile works. It always works. People see the smile and they think: he’s fine, he’s having the time of his life, he’s the guy you want to be next to at 2 a.m. on a Saturday because his energy is a contact high and you don’t even need what he’s having.

But I need what I’m having.

I unlock the stall door.

Here is what I know about myself at twenty-three: I am broke, I am beautiful, and I am running out of time. Not in a cancer way. Not in a ticking-clock way. In the way a song runs out of time — the beat keeps going but you can feel the outro coming, the slow fade, and you’re still dancing because what else are you going to do? Stop?

I don’t stop.

My name is Jonah and I haven’t slept in my own bed in eleven days. I’ve slept in Ava’s bed, and in Marty’s car, and on a rooftop in Silver Lake where the sun came up over the 101 and the city looked like something God had spilled and never cleaned up. I slept on a bathroom floor in a house I didn’t recognize, using a stranger’s jacket as a pillow, and when I woke up there was a pit bull licking my face and a woman I’d never met making eggs and she said “you must be one of Danny’s” like I was a category, a type, a recurring character in someone else’s story.

Maybe I am.

Danny is my best friend. Danny is also the worst person I know. These two facts coexist without contradiction because at twenty-three, the people who keep you alive and the people who are killing you are often the same people, and sorting them into categories is a luxury for the sober.

Danny sells. Not heavy. Not cartel weight or gang territory or anything that would make a good movie. Danny sells to people like us — art kids, music kids, server-by-day-DJ-by-night kids, kids who aren’t really kids anymore but haven’t figured out what else to call themselves. He sells eighths and grams and little baggies that look like origami, and he’s good at it the way some people are good at making you feel welcome: naturally, without effort, like the universe built him for this specific function.

I don’t sell. I’m just always nearby when it happens, which is its own kind of involvement.

My mother called three times tonight. I know what she wants to say because she’s said it before, in the kitchen of our house in Glendale, standing by the stove where she makes lentil soup that tastes like childhood and guilt.

“Jonah, I think you need help.”

She says it like help is a place. Like I can drive there, park, walk in, and come out fixed. Like there’s a version of me on the other side of some door that looks like the kid in my high school yearbook — the one who got a scholarship to Cal Arts, the one who painted murals in the school hallway, the one whose teachers said gifted and special and going places — and all I have to do is reach him.

I don’t tell her that I’ve met that kid. I met him at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, alone in a parking structure, grinding his teeth and staring at his hands and thinking: if I’m so gifted, why do I feel like a gift that was never opened?

I don’t tell her that.

I tell her I’m fine. That I’m working on something. That I met some people who could help with the music. That L.A. is just like this, you have to give it time, you have to be in the rooms where things happen.

The rooms where things happen are clubs and house parties and the back seats of cars parked on Mulholland at 3 a.m. where the city spreads out below you like a circuit board and someone passes you something and you take it because the alternative is feeling what you actually feel, which is:

Nothing.

No. Worse than nothing. The specific kind of nothing that used to be something. I used to paint. I used to hear colors — synesthesia, the therapist called it, before I stopped going — where a C-sharp was cobalt blue and a dog barking was burnt orange and the world was this layered, textured, overwhelming tapestry of sensation that I couldn’t turn off.

Now I can’t turn it on.

The coke turns it on. For twenty minutes, forty if the stuff is good, the world gets its texture back. The music has shape. Colors have weight. I can feel my own hands again. And then it fades, and the fade is worse than the nothing because now I’ve remembered what it’s like to be alive, and the comparison makes the deadness unbearable.

So I do more. Obviously. That’s the architecture of the thing — not a spiral, like people say. A staircase. Each step up gives you a better view and takes you further from the ground, and the ground is where you live, and the view is where you want to be, and no one tells you the staircase doesn’t have a top. It just keeps going until your legs give out.

The girl with the shaved head is named Soleil. Soleil like the sun. She’s a photographer. She shoots concerts on a camera older than both of us combined, all grain and blur and accidental beauty, and when she showed me her portfolio on the roof of Danny’s building I looked at her pictures and felt something crack open in my chest.

“These are incredible,” I said.

“They’re chaos,” she said. “I just point and hope.”

“That’s what makes them incredible.”

She’d looked at me then. Really looked. Not the way people usually look at me — the quick scan, the assessment, the calculation of what I can do for them or what they can get from being near me. She looked at me the way you look at a painting in a museum when no one else is around. With patience. With the willingness to not understand yet.

“You’re scared,” she said.

I laughed. “Of what?”

“I don’t know. Everything. You move like someone who’s running from something, but you never leave the room.”

There’s a party tonight. There’s always a party tonight. This one is in a warehouse in the Arts District that someone’s cousin is converting into a gallery or a dispensary or a creative co-working space or whatever the current euphemism is for a place where people with money pretend to be people without money.

Danny drives. I’m in the passenger seat. Soleil is in the back with Marty and a girl named Trin who designs sneakers and talks about ayahuasca like it’s a personality trait.

The radio is playing something I don’t recognize — heavy bass, a vocal sample that sounds like a prayer played backward — and Danny is talking about a deal he’s working on, something bigger, a connect who moves through the music industry, and I’m watching the streetlights through the window and thinking about something my mother’s priest said to me once.

I was seventeen. I’d gotten caught shoplifting spray paint from a hardware store — not because I couldn’t afford it but because the theft gave the art something the purchase couldn’t: urgency. Father Kaplan sat me down in his office, which smelled like wood polish and old breath, and he said:

“Son, it breaks my heart to say this, but I believe you are a very troubled and confused young man. I believe you are searching for the answers in all the wrong places.”

And I remember thinking: You’re right. Actually, I am. I’m pretty troubled and I’m pretty confused. And I’m afraid. Really, really afraid.

But what I said was: “And I think you’re the Antichrist.”

I got banned from the church. My mother cried. My father — who’d been gone since I was nine — called for the first time in two years to tell me I was an embarrassment, which was rich coming from a man whose departure was the original lesson in disappearing.

The point is: the priest wasn’t wrong. I was searching in the wrong places. But here’s what nobody tells you about wrong places — they’re warmer. They have better music. The people in them don’t ask you to sit still and be fixed. They dance with you. They burn with you. And when you’re twenty-three and your heart beats like an engine with no brakes, the wrong places are the only places that match your speed.

The warehouse is already full when we arrive. Bodies, smoke, a DJ elevated on a platform made of shipping pallets, the bass so deep it rearranges my internal organs. Someone hands me a drink. Someone else puts their arm around my shoulder like we’re old friends. We might be. I’ve met seven hundred people in the last six months and I remember maybe forty of their names.

Danny disappears into the crowd. He’ll be working the room — handshakes, hugs, palm-to-palm exchanges so smooth they look like affection. Marcus heads for the DJ booth. Trin starts talking to a man in a linen shirt about consciousness.

Soleil stays next to me.

“You good?” she asks.

“I’m great.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I look at her. In the warehouse light — purple, strobing, unreliable — her face flickers between versions. Concerned. Beautiful. Patient. She is the only person in my life right now who asks questions and waits for real answers.

“I’m not good,” I say. “But I’m here. And here is loud enough that I don’t have to think about not being good.”

She nods. She doesn’t try to fix me. She just stands there, shoulder to shoulder, and watches the room move.

This, I think. This is the thing I’m going to ruin.

Because I ruin things. That’s the other thing I know about myself at twenty-three.

I ruined Cal Arts. Full scholarship, studio space, professors who believed in me, and I lasted three semesters before the panic attacks started — the ones where the world lost its color and I couldn’t paint because the canvas looked like a dead screen and my hands felt like props attached to someone else’s arms. I started self-medicating. Weed first, then pills, then powder. I stopped going to class. I stopped going to my studio. I started going to parties where nobody knew I was supposed to be somewhere else.

They didn’t kick me out. I just stopped showing up. The scholarship evaporated. My mother drove to Valencia to collect my things, and the look on her face when she saw the state of my dorm room — the empty bottles, the stained mattress, the canvases I’d slashed with a box cutter because they weren’t good enough, because I wasn’t good enough — that look is the thing I’m actually running from. Not the fear. Not the emptiness.

Her face.

The understanding in it. Like she’d always known this would happen. Like loving me had been a long preparation for this exact moment.

It’s 1 a.m. and I’m on top of the world.

Not metaphorically. I’m on the warehouse roof, four stories up, sitting on the ledge with my feet hanging over the edge and the city sprawled out in every direction like a dare. Danny is next to me. We’ve split something — coke, molly, I’m not totally sure, Danny’s a mixologist — and everything is sharp and bright and present in a way that makes me want to cry.

“Do you ever think about what happens when we stop?” I ask.

“Stop what?”

“This. All of it. The parties, the shit, the running around. What happens when we’re forty?”

Danny laughs. “Bro, I’m not making it to forty.”

He says it casually. Like it’s a weather report. And the thing is, I believe him. Not because he’s suicidal — Danny loves being alive, he’s the most alive person I know — but because this pace has a mathematics to it that even I can calculate. The late nights, the substances, the driving when we shouldn’t, the people we owe money to, the people who owe us money. The math doesn’t add up to forty. It adds up to a very bright, very loud thirty-something if we’re lucky.

And here’s the thing the priest didn’t understand, the thing my mother doesn’t understand, the thing the therapist I stopped seeing would probably write a paper about:

I’d rather die young and happy than live long and sad.

I know how that sounds. I know it sounds like something you’d tattoo on your ribs at nineteen and regret at twenty-five. I know it’s a bumper sticker philosophy, a romanticized delusion, the kind of thing people say when they haven’t actually watched someone die young and seen how un-romantic it is.

But sitting on this roof with the wind in my face and the bass coming up through the concrete and my best friend next to me and the city lighting up like a neuron firing — I believe it. Not as a philosophy. As a feeling. And feelings, at twenty-three, are the only currency I have left.

Soleil finds me an hour later. I’ve come down from the roof. I’m in a corner of the warehouse, sitting on a speaker that isn’t working, and the high is fading. The texture is draining out of the world like water from a tub. I can feel the edges going soft. The colors going flat.

She sits next to me. Pulls out her camera. Takes a picture of me without asking.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Too late.”

She shows me the screen. In the photo, I look exactly like I feel: a young man, jawline sharp, eyes wide, mid-fade, caught between the person he’s pretending to be and the person he actually is. It’s the most honest image anyone has ever made of me.

“You see it, right?” she says.

“See what?”

“The fear.”

I don’t say anything.

“Everyone in this room is performing,” she says. “You. Danny. Trin and her ayahuasca shit. The DJ. Everyone. But in the photos — when people don’t have time to arrange their face — you can see what’s underneath. And what’s underneath you, Jonah, is someone who is terrified.”

“Of what?”

“Of being ordinary. Of being still. Of sitting in a quiet room and finding out there’s nothing there.”

The speaker I’m sitting on vibrates. A new song. More bass. The room keeps moving.

“Maybe there is nothing there,” I say.

“There is. I’ve seen it.”

“In a photograph.”

“In you. Right now. The fact that it scares you is proof it exists.”

I want to tell you this is the moment I changed. The moment the right girl said the right thing at the right time and I put the bag down and called my mother and went to rehab and came out clean and started painting again and everything was golden, everything was healed, the prodigal son returned, cue the credits, roll the inspirational music.

But cocaine hearts don’t work like that.

Cocaine hearts beat louder. That’s the deal. That’s the contract you sign when you take the first hit, the first drink, the first risk that crosses the line between alive and reckless. Your heart beats louder and you confuse the volume for strength. You think: I am feeling more than other people. I am living more than other people. My experience is more vivid and more real and more NOW than theirs, and you don’t realize that volume and strength are not the same thing. A heart that beats loud is not a heart that beats strong. It’s a heart that’s working too hard. And hearts that work too hard don’t last.

Three weeks later, Danny gets arrested.

Not for selling. For driving. He’s coming back from a party in Malibu at 4 a.m., PCH, the road curving along the coast like a snake digesting something, and he drifts into oncoming traffic. No collision — the other car swerves, Danny swerves, nobody hits anything except the guardrail. But the cops find product in the car. Enough to bump it from possession to intent to distribute.

Danny calls me from jail. His voice is flat. The bravado stripped out of it like paint thinner on a canvas.

“Jonah,” he says. “I need you to go to my apartment. There’s a bag under the bathroom sink. Get rid of it before they get a warrant.”

I go. Of course I go. Because that’s what you do for your best friend, for the worst person you know, for the person who has been both your parachute and the thing pushing you off the building.

I let myself in with the spare key. The apartment smells like weed and fried food and cologne. It smells like every night I’ve spent here, every morning I’ve woken up on this couch, every version of my life that led to this exact moment: standing in a bathroom, holding a bag of white powder that could send me to prison, trying to decide what to do with it.

I should flush it.

I hold it over the toilet.

My hands are shaking.

I’m smiling.

I don’t flush it. I don’t use it either. I stand there, in Danny’s bathroom, holding the bag, and I have a conversation with myself that lasts about ninety seconds and covers the entire span of my adult life.

The voice that says take it sounds like freedom. Like rooftops and bass and the twenty minutes when the world has texture.

The voice that says flush it sounds like my mother.

The voice that says you’re going to die, Jonah doesn’t sound like anyone. It’s just a fact, sitting in the center of my chest, patient and undeniable, the way gravity is patient and undeniable. Not a threat. An observation.

I put the bag in my jacket pocket. I leave the apartment. I walk to my car. I drive to Glendale.

It’s 6 a.m. when I pull into my mother’s driveway. The sky is doing that thing L.A. skies do at dawn — pink and gold and impossible, like the city is apologizing for what it did to you last night.

I sit in the car for a long time.

The bag is in my pocket. My phone has seventeen texts from people who want to know about Danny. My hands have stopped shaking. I’m not smiling anymore.

I go inside.

My mother is in the kitchen. She’s making coffee. She’s wearing the robe she’s had since I was twelve — faded blue, fraying at the cuffs — and when she sees me she doesn’t say where have you been or what have you done or I told you so. She says:

“Are you hungry?”

And something in me — the last structural beam in a building that’s been burning for years — cracks.

“Mom,” I say.

She turns.

“I think I need help.”

I say it like help is a place. Like I can drive there. Like there’s a version of me on the other side of some door. I don’t know if I believe it. I don’t know if the door is real.

But my heart is beating. Not loud. Not strong. Just beating. The ordinary, animal rhythm of a body that hasn’t stopped yet.

She crosses the kitchen. She puts her hands on my face. Her palms are warm from the coffee mug.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

I still have the bag. It’s in my jacket, on the chair by the door, six feet away from me. I can feel it the way you feel a person watching you from across a room — not with your eyes. With your skin.

I don’t know if I’m going to flush it.

I don’t know if I’m going to make it.

I know this: my heart is a cocaine heart. It was built — by genetics or trauma or bad luck or the specific cocktail of beauty and emptiness that is being young in Los Angeles — to beat louder than it should. To mistake volume for life. To chase the high because the ground is unbearable.

But today — just today, just this one morning with the light coming through my mother’s kitchen window and her hands on my face and the coffee getting cold on the counter — today it’s beating at a normal pace. A human pace. The pace of someone who might, if he’s lucky, if he’s stubborn, if he doesn’t pick up the jacket on the way out, live long enough to find out what’s on the other side of the fear.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe everything.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as the heart keeps going.

Cocaine hearts do really beat louder.

But louder isn’t stronger.

And stronger isn’t forever.

And forever was never the point.

End.