ENTER THE MONKEY KING

January, 2011. Berin and Ayla had been gone for about two weeks when Ivan started talking about monkey dust again...and this time, he called it by name. We had both been depressed and out of sorts since the bleak little Christmas we had spent together in the apartment on Elm Street. The weather was cold and snowy, and as the snow accumulated in mountainous drifts outside our living room window, we entertained ourselves by watching movies and Family Guy episodes, which, thanks to the free cable we had somehow managed to acquire with the help of one of Ivan's friends, who was apparently gifted in hooking up the wires left behind by the apartment's previous tenants without the knowledge of the cable company, seemed to always be playing on some channel or other. It was one of our few bright spots. Money wasn't just tight, it was close to nonexistant, and for the first time in my life, I had to struggle to make ends meet. I'd lived on the edge of poverty before, but I'd been a lot younger and infinitely more confident about my ability to make it as a writer. In college, which I attended in my early twenties, I'd had to work as a waitress to pay the bills my student loans and grants didn't cover, and had somtimes even resorted to pilfering toilet paper from the rest rooms of fast food restaurants. But, back then, I'd been part of a community of young, cash-strapped students, some of whom were also single mothers like myself. We had known that our moneyless state was merely a temporary one and had taken solace in our respective dreams of a successful future following out graduation from school. This was different. I was ashamed of having squandered my divorce settlement money in such a short time, and too embarrassed to reach out for help from the usual government sources. Finally, after giving in and applying for food stamps, I learned from my case worker that, even though I hadn't worked for a year, I was probably eligible for at least some kind of unemployment compensation. The thought hadn't even occurred to me, despite all the times my ex-husband had collected unemployment during sporadic lay-offs from the railroad where he had worked during the years we had been married. So, hoping for the best, I made the necessary calls, and was awarded the sum of $295 a week. It seemed like a windfall at the time, even though it was barely enough to cover the $675 monthly rent on the Elm Street apartment. But it was at least better than living off the money that Ivan made from selling his monthly prescription of suboxon.

Suboxone is a form of Buprenorphine HCl and naloxone HCl, a synthetic drug used to treat opiate addiction. Although I wasn't aware of it until just after that Christmas, Ivan had been taking suboxone ever since returning from Denmark the previous year, even though he insisted that he wasn't really addicted to opiates. However, he told me, many of his friends in Europe who had been involved with opiates, mainly heroin, had taken it regularly and urged him to try it as well. It gave him "energy", he explained, and when he relocated back to Bangor, he had gone to a local clinic where he'd been able to get a prescription of his own. This seemed a little suspect to me. After all, I wondered, what kind of doctor prescribes an anti-opiate drug to someone without bothering to substantiate whether that person is actually addicted to opiates. But my concerns were inconsequential to Ivan's way of looking at the situation. For him, suboxone was not only a source of energy, which he claimed to need in order to get through the day, it was a source of much-needed income. At the beginning of the month, when he recieved his prescription, he would fill it at the drugstore and then divide the pills into those he intended to keep for himself and those marked for sale. While I did my best to keep our little household afloat with the money from my unemployment checks and the food stamps I received each month, Ivan made the rounds of his Suboxone customers, all of whom seemed more than willing to shell out ten bucks for one of his little orange pills. Some of them, Ivan told me, would even pay half-price for a small piece of a pill. My $295 a week seemed like a hard-won pittance compared to the $100 or so Ivan would bring home after just one afternoon of Suboxone sales. It didn't seem to matter to him that he was engaging in a highly illegal activity that could, if he were ever caught, land him in jail.

"Everyone does it," he told me, with more than a hint of disdain toward my "mainstream" attitude. "Besides, you've bought Ritalin off the street. You're in no position to judge."

By "everyone", he of course was referring to the other people he knew for whom drug use was a daily part of life. But they weren't people I respected, even though some of them were regular visitors to our apartment. In fact, that had become a huge bone of contention between us. Ivan had always been someone who collected a wude array of friends and acquaintances from all kinds of unusual backgrounds and walks of life. Naturally outgoing and blissfully unburderned with the normal amount of prejudice that most of us have to overcome when it comes to deciding with whom we are willing to associate in social and personal situations, he seemed almost pathologically determined to take every new person he met on face value. If I voiced misgivings about a new relationship, he would often become angry, denouncing me as "arrogant" or "pompous." But, until now, most of his friends had been reasonably intelligent people with at least some sort of ambition in regard to making a good life for themselves. The ragtag contingent of suboxone users who had begun stopping by our apartment were an entirely new wave of humanity. One which I mistrusted right away. When Berin and Ayla had lived with us, we had maintained a semblance of a normal life, even with the fighting and discourse that had so frequently marked Berin and Ivan's day to day interaction.

Now, I found myself kept up half the night by a steady succession of nocturnal visitors who Ivan would immediately usher into his room, where they would sometimes stay for hours, talking loudly and taking God knows what kind of drugs. I knew it had to be something more than Suboxone. Ivan's claim that the drug gave him energy were belied by his inability to stay awake in the daytime. More than once, he had even fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation, or over dinner, his eyes glazing over as he slumped forward into his plate of food. Worried for his health, I had even called the clinic where he got his suboxone prescription and told them my fears. The nurse I spoke to had informed me that she couldn't dicuss his case with me. And of course when Ivan found out that I had called, he was livid, and, true to form, had lashed out by bringing up my own Ritalin use.

"I just don't want these people here," I told him. "It doesn't matter if I do too much Ritalin. It doesn't even matter if you're doing other drugs besides Suboxone. I just don't like having these people around."

But it was a losing battle. The way Ivan saw it, the fact that he contributed to the rent with the money he made from selling his Suboxine gave him carte blanche to have whoever he wanted in the apartment. And because I knew we needed the money, I didn't argue as fervently as I might have otherwise. By the end of January, I felt marginalized and oddly superfluous in what had become my own home. I knew things were going on inside Ivan's room...things of which I was sure I would not approve...but depression had started to get the better of me once again, and, as had always been the case, I tried to stave it off by withdrawing into a daily, often nightly, regime of writing. I had been working for some time on a screenplay, which, with the help of an agent I had managed to secure in New York, I hoped would be my ticket back to "the real world." Day after day, night after night, I sat at my computer in the living room, music playing to shut out the sound of Ivan and his friends' voices as they congregated behind the closed door of his bedroom several feet away. Through it all, Ivan continued to display signs of excessive drug use. It wasn't until I overheard him talking to one of his friends one night that I finally discovered what he had been taking along with his regular doses of Suboxone. It was Klonopin, a drug used to treat panic attacks and anxiety. Taken with Suboxone, was affecting Ivan's system like a large dose of sleeping pills. Angry and terrified by the possible physical consequences, I confronted him, demanding that he stop taking it. He responded with the usual sneer and battery of aspersions directed at my use of Ritalin. But this time I was adamnant. It was time to make a choice: stop using klonopin, or move out of the apartment.

"You can't kick me out of my own apartment," he replied.

"It's not your apartment," I told him. "I pay more money toward the rent than you do."

"But you couldn't pay it without my help, " he countered.

Unfortunately, he was right. As usual, the argument went nowhere. His friends returned that night, ensconcing themselves in his bedroom, while I took my place at my desk in the living room and wrote into the night.

It was a few days after the klonopin revelation that Jared Lawson stopped by. As usual, he was accomnpanied by one of the many young women who always seemed to hover around him, like groupies around a rock star. Like most of the rest of them, this one was somewhere in her early to mid twenties, reasonably attractive, and dressed like a trailer park fashionista in a tight, glittery tank top and hip-hugging jeans underneath a short black leather jacket. I couldn't figure out what seemed to make him so appealing to young women. He wasn't good-looking, and with his black hoodie pulled up tightly around his bony face, he still reminded me of a walking, talking cadaver. If there was anything that set him apart from the rest of Ivan's friends, it was that he was, without question, intelligent. He seemed to have an almost encyclopediac knowledge of the drugs he bought and sold. No matter what drug it was, if asked about it, he could rattle off not only its medical name, but its known side effects, the date when it had first been manufactured, and the penalty for having it in one's possession. Apart from his storehouse of drug knowledge, he had an unexpectedly philosophical streak as well, occasionally quoting such philosophical luminaries as Kirkegaard and Nietzsche in the midst of conversation. But on this particular day, as he and Ivan greeted each other, and then slipped off into the privacy of Ivan's bedroom with the unknown young woman following behind, I had the sense that there was something new going on. As it turned out, they were only in Ivan's room for a short time when Ivan reemerged and made his way across the living room to where I was sitting at my computer. Before I could say anything, he opened a small plastic baggie no bigger than a quarter, and sprinkled a small line of white powder on my desk.

"I want you to try this," he said.

"Ivan..." I began, but he was in no mood to take "no" for an answer.

"Come on, Mom," he pressed. "I just want you to try it. Just once. Please."

"Is it that speed you keep talking about?" I asked.

"It's called monkey dust," he said. "Jared gave it to me. He wants you to try it, too. Come on, just do it. It's free."

I stared at the white substance on my desk. It didn't look like anything I hadn't seen before. It could have been anything. But from the look on Ian's face, I knew that he thought that it was something very special. "Aren't you almost out of Ritalin?" he asked.

"I have enough for tonight," I replied.

"Right. And then you'll be out," he said. "But if you snort one line of this, you can write all night on it, and still have enough Ritalin to write tomorrow. One line will last you til morning."

"No," I said. "I don't want it."

Ivan looked at me as though I were a drowning woman who had just refused to grab hold of the life preserver he was offering me.

"Okay, well, I'll just leave it here in case you change your mind," he said. "But you really should try it. It's the answer to all of your problems."

I studied his face. He seemed more alert and upbeat than he had for weeks. And the sneer which usually accompanied his references to Ritalin versus the drug he was now calling "monkey dust" had been replaced by a strangely earnest expression. As his mother, the expression worried me. As a writer perpetually in search of energy to maintain my "creative regime", I had to admit that I was intrigued. But I didn't tell Ivan that as he returned to his room and closed the door. I continued to write for several hours, then, feeling my focus beginning to wane, reached for my vial of Ritalin. The sight of the white powder still on my desk distracted me for a moment. I glanced over at the closed door of Ivan's bedroom. The three of them were still in there, oddly quiet, and I began to wonder if I should check on them to make sure that they were all right. As I was trying to decide, the bedroom door opened, and Jared emerged from the dim-lit, silent space, his groupie behind him. He paused and looked at me.

"Did you try it?" he asked.

"Of course not," I replied. "I don't take speed."

"It's not speed," he said. "It's a combination of a lot of different drugs, but in their purest form. It's like nothing you've ever had before. Just make sure you drink a lot of water. You don't want to get dehydrated."

Great, I thought. Health tips from a drug dealer. I told him, again, that I had no intention of sampling his wares. He smiled.

"I told Ivan not to push you," he said.

Then he and his groupie left. I sat staring after them for a moment, then got up and went to check on Ivan. Poking my head into his room, I found him sitting on his bed, a drawing pad propped open against his knees as he sketched intently on one of the pages.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Drawing Berin," he said.

It had been a long time since I had seen Ivan pick up his sketch pad and draw anything. His interest in music had succumbed to a similar fate since Berin and Ayla's departure for Denmark. For a moment, I felt a spurt of relief that he was actually doing something relatively normal after spending hours just sitting in his room with his two visitors. Then suspicion took over.

"Why now?" I asked.

"It's the dust," he replied. "It opens a creative portal. It's amazing."

There was that word again. Amazing. I watched him for a moment while he continued to draw, seemingly oblivious to me, then returned to my desk. Taking my place once more in front of my computer, I thought of how few Ritalin pills were left in my vial, and how much effort it would take to secure replacements in the week that remained between tonight and my next visit to the doctor. Except for my Ritalin, and the occasional pain pill I'd been prescribed over the years, I had no real history with drugs. Mostly, I was scared to take them, afraid that I would be that one isolated person who tried one drug, one time, and just happened to have an adverse reation that ended with my unintended death. But Ian had seemed so much more at peace than he had for weeks. And he was drawing...

I reached for the straw that Ivan had left on my desk, poised it over the little white line of powder, and inhaled. I felt a sudden, bitter rush of discomfort in my nostrils, followed by a bitter, metallic aftertaste in my mouth. Then nothing more. I clicked back onto my computer and resumed my writing. The next time I glanced at the clock, an hour had passed. I was astounded. An hour? How was that possible? I had been writing for two hours without flagging, totally immersed in my work, and feeling as good as I had felt since Christmas. More than good. If Ritalin gave me the energy I needed to focus on my work, this so-called "monkey dust" gave me the same energy multiplied by ten, with the added bonus of a euphoric edge that I had to admit was pretty welcome. It wasn't some scary, dangerous new drug at all. And, as Ivan had told me over and over again, it was legal. If it was legal, it had to be all right.

I stopped writing and got up to check on Ivan again. He was still in the same position on his bed, still drawing, but this time he looked up at me as I stood in his doorway.

"Did you--"

"Yes," I said,

He smiled, as though we had just shared a wonderful, new, very important secret.

"It's going to be like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters," he said. "Just like the sixties when LSD was legal. Dust is going to change people's lives. It's going to open people's minds and taken them to a whole new level of understanding and creativity."

"We'll see," I said.

It was close to four o'clock in the morning when I finally called it quits with my writing and laid down on my bed to try to sleep. But I couldn't sleep. I felt as though I would never sleep again. Restless, I went back to Ivan's room and found him still drawing.

"Can I see what you're done?" I asked.

He showed me his sketch pad. It was filled with the same picture of Berin on almost every page. She was naked with long dark waves of hair swirling around her, as if pushed by wind, and intertwined in the wild strands were strange, small, demonic faces, their features twisted back in grotesque smiles.

"I don't think Berin would find these sketches very flattering," I said.

"It's not really her," Ivan replied, taking back the sketch pad. "It started out being her, but now I'm just drawing what I feel."

Then he went back to his work, drawing more hair, more faces, and more grotesquely demonic smiles.

To be continued....