We were about to play the game, forty or fifty of us in the south-side junior high parking lot. Most of us in flannels, trench coats, army-surplus jackets, black jeans, maroon corduroys. Hoodies and beanies and fishnets and lace-up boots. Half were sitting in our cars, engines rumbling, cigarette smoke pouring from the windows. The rest were on foot, waiting for the signal to start.
It was tag, basically, but the ones who were “it” had cars. Each car had a driver and a tag-man in the passenger seat. The runners got a head start. Their goal was to make it three miles across town to the north-side high school parking lot, in the dark, without getting caught.
There wasn’t much to do on a Saturday night in Bismarck, North Dakota. Not in the late fall of 1997, not ever. Justin wanted to play because the alternative was sitting in the basement of the party house we went to every weekend, smoking under a single bare bulb and staring at the asbestos-covered pipes. Neither of us ever wanted to be home, and I always wanted to do what he was doing, even if it scared me a little. He and I had met two years earlier, when I was fourteen and he was fifteen and I sat down next to him at a party. I liked him, thought he was cute, but we became so incredibly necessary to each other as friends that we could never risk dating.
We both had older brothers and sisters, and our parents had given up on curfews. He drove a red Oldsmobile, the Dead Kennedys or Lard or Willie Nelson playing on the cassette deck. Always a trunk full of beer. But when we played the game, I was usually the one driving. Justin would spend the night jumping out, racing through hedges and alleyways, chasing kids down to haul them back to the car.
The cops knew about the game. Bismarck wasn’t big enough for secrets, and we were racing right through the middle of town. We sometimes had to duck down alleys to avoid getting pulled over. Justin sat in the passenger seat, leather jacket over flannel shirt over waffled long johns over his skinny arms. Greasy blond hair hanging in front of his face. A huge smile on his thin lips. Cigarette between his fingers, smoke spilling out of his mouth when he said, “Did you see that kid?” or, “Oh, shit. Go!”
Twenty years later, in the summer before the pandemic, I texted him: “Do you remember the name of the game from high school—the one where we drove across town and tried to catch people running?”
He was living in a studio apartment in Bismarck. Had never really left town. I was in Minnesota, sharing a duplex in Minneapolis with Lynn, my best friend from high school and one of Justin’s closest friends. He had to drive past our memories to get to the liquor store where he worked, so I figured he would remember better than me what the game was called, what the rules were, who we’d played with. He texted back a minute later. I watched the ellipses form. I waited.
“Ditch!”
There are a lot of ditches in Bismarck. So many.
There is Double Ditch on the riverbanks, where we wandered high bluffs in the dark, scaling and sliding with beers in our hands, trying not to break a leg or get swept away by the Missouri. There are all the ditches we crashed our cars into along River Road, Hay Creek Court, and Highway 10. We would walk to friends’ houses and call someone to come take us home. We jumped over downed cottonwood trees in the ditches, hoping to avoid the police and our parents, trying not to lose our lighters and the tiny sacks of weed stuffed in our pockets.
There is the ditch I lay in when I was under one of Justin’s friends, grass so high you would never know we were there. Two hundred pounds between me and the party and the red cups of jungle juice we’d been drinking. I couldn’t move, couldn’t even kick a leg loose. His weight on my chest made it hard to breathe while I tried to talk him out of whatever he wanted to do to me. Justin must have noticed I had disappeared because he started yelling my name from the back of the barn, the music blaring behind him.
He found us before anything happened. I was a cool girl, a one-of-the-guys girl, but he could see in my face I was also a girl who had never been trapped before. I wonder how many times he saw it on other girls’ faces. I wonder how many times his so-called friends did things that he hated. It must have been hard to be a good guy in a world with so many bad guys.
Justin and I would spend almost every night together, wading through high school drama, talking about breakups, abortions, mental-health crises, and pregnancies on the bluffs over the river, about car crashes and suicide attempts and graduation sitting in his backyard. I can taste the Coors Light, hear the Burlington Northern train cars flying through the gully down the street. By the time we were graduating, half the kids we knew were working and living on their own. He was always helping someone through something, even when he was barely holding on himself.
I wanted to get out of that town so badly. And right after I turned seventeen, I boarded a plane to go to college in New Mexico, a state I had never set foot in, with my dad’s old army bag full of clothes and nothing else.
Justin must have wanted to get out too. I say that like I don’t know, like I don’t remember him talking about getting the hell out a million times over.
For years I went home to visit regularly. He and I would hop from party to party and bar to bar, sleeping on people’s floors and couches, sharing sleeping bags pulled from his car, occasionally passing out in someone’s front yard. After Lynn and I landed in Minneapolis, we would drive home together from the city. Justin was the first one we would call when we got to town. Whenever I saw him, I was sixteen again. We’d spend eight hours on barstools catching up. Sometimes we would sit on the rough carpet of an apartment building’s entryway, waiting to be picked up, because there were never enough cabs in that town full of bars. Sometimes Lynn would wake her mom to drive us to their farm in the middle of the night.
I saw people from high school everywhere we went. I strained to remember their names, while Justin knew everyone. In our twenties we drank homemade “apple pie” at our friends’ weddings—apple juice mixed with grain alcohol. I finished grad school and had a kid. Justin was working off and on toward his bachelor’s degree. He was fiercely protective of Lynn and me, like he might kill someone who hurt us. These were the friendships that had blossomed at fourteen, when your world begins to come into focus, when everything matters and your friends mold you out of clay, mixtapes, and hand-me-down flannels. If you grow up surrounded by hundreds of miles of wheat fields, with only the other kids who are stuck there with you to relieve the boredom, the friendships you make are often for life.
It is minus eleven degrees, and I have just passed Fargo. The fields are covered in snow. The ditches contain drifts that could bury a man upright. The sun has just set, and the sky and the snow are the exact same shade of bluish gray, except for a sliver of pink on the western horizon. For forty years I have looked at this land and this sky, and I have never seen it this color. It’s like an abstract landscape, with only subtle differences in shading to keep the canvas from being monochrome.
It’s early February, a few days before Justin’s forty-second birthday, and I am driving “home,” though no one in my family lives there anymore. They left a decade ago when my parents retired to the East Coast. Lynn’s family farm, where we spent long summer nights in front of a bonfire, was sold, and the entire family relocated west. Some friends have moved, though others have stayed. I haven’t been back in three years—not since the pandemic started.
This morning I lamented the inconvenience of going to his funeral: driving six hours each way; digging through dusty closets and the detritus of the basement to find old photos; missing out on piano lessons and sleeping in. Heat blasts from the vents in the car, cracking the skin on my knuckles and drying my eyes. The wind is blowing snow from one side of the highway to the other, and the swirls look like wisps of smoke in the headlights. Harry Belafonte is singing “Day-O” on one of the only radio stations that will come in clearly. There is an echo behind his voice in the recording from 1956, like he is the only man in a cavernous room. It sounds beautiful and lonely. I realize I am looking for him in this moonlike landscape. Harry Belafonte, or Justin, or anyone familiar.
All through the six-hour drive I’ve been repeating in my head like a mantra, Fuck this fucking town. Fuck fucking heroin. And then, when the city lights appear on the hill near McKenzie, Why didn’t I call more often? I have the impossible feeling that when I get there, I will step into a warm bar and hear his laughter.
Lynn is mad that Justin died before his birthday. She thinks she would have called him then. I am mad at myself because I should have messaged more often. I had books to recommend and all kinds of life news. I’m six months pregnant, for one. How did I let a whole year slip by? I am certain my calls and texts would have saved him. That is the sort of magical thinking I indulge in: that I can keep someone alive by talking on the phone, despite all the good evidence proving otherwise.
The next day I survey the back room of the Am Vets hall. The place is packed, and every seat is taken. There are poster-board collages of photos. There are small ham sandwiches and salads I will refuse to eat because I can’t possibly stomach that much mayo while pregnant. I am baffled that everyone I know from high school has gray in their hair. How old are we? Six years ago some of us talked about dragging Justin to a fancy treatment center, but we knew he wouldn’t have gone, even if we’d had the money to pay. (We probably still don’t.) Back then he made just enough at the liquor store to not qualify for state-sponsored health care.
In the receiving line Justin’s father tells me, “He didn’t mean it. Fucking fentanyl.” I am stunned, incredulous. Justin wouldn’t have messed around with fentanyl. Is his father just saying that to make himself feel better?
Someone hands me a butterscotch-smelling shot the color of creamy caramel. One of Justin’s old friends is giving a speech that could be about anyone. “He was a good guy,” or something like that—the vague, sentimental way male friends talk about each other. I roll my eyes. I have been in town for less than twenty-four hours, and I am turning back into my sixteen-year-old self. I’ve been smelling the butterscotch shot far too long for a woman waddling under the weight of pregnancy. I imagine the way it would burn going down, then hand it to an old friend who also lives in Minneapolis. She swallows hers, and mine, like she never left this place.
We head to Lucky’s Bar—one of Justin’s favorites. There is general catching up. There are piles and piles of pull tabs. There are nachos and burgers and shared plates in plastic baskets going around. Allison, another friend from high school, says, “We should get together for something other than funerals.” She is usually sarcastic, but this time she sounds sincere. She doesn’t mean just us out-of-towners. She means all of the friends who still live here too. She is referring to the way that forty hits and you don’t see your friends as much, unless your kids are both on the same basketball team, or you work together at the hospital, or you both play in the all-consuming spring women’s softball league. She is calling out the fact that we have grown light-years apart: Friends who once lived together in dirty houses, arguing over the chores and drinking beers in the yard. Friends who remember years of my life better than I do. All of us seated around the table as if we did this every Friday.
Hours pass. In between catching up, we talk about Justin and who he was at fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, forty. People wander in and out. Everyone gets drunker. I can’t drink, but I feel I must get an O’Doul’s if I am going to stay. No one is talking about how he died. It is a given. He was a heroin addict in the era of fentanyl. This is the end we all knew was coming. Heroin has always seemed like Russian roulette to me. With fentanyl around, there are just a lot more bullets in the chamber.
I want to talk about it, though. I want to talk about what the hell happened to my friend. I want to talk about the way addiction can give you the illusion of choice, even as it kills you.
Waiting to order my O’Doul’s, I stand in line behind a woman I went to high school with, and I start a conversation, but the truth is, I have absolutely nothing to say to this woman. We are not close, never were, just two people from the same small town. She asks if I like being pregnant: “It seems like it would be so weird.” Is she testing me, or does she really want to know?
“It is very weird,” I tell her, and I try to tease out the precise details of why: The living being inside me. The way it becomes harder to carry the body I have always carried. The permanence of it—not the pregnancy, but the condition of being a mother.
I think she was trying to distract me from how high she is. Her pupils are huge, and this has made her prettier. That’s how I looked through most of my youth: Big pupils like glossy obsidian. I saw the world reflected in a fun house mirror and heard a carnival in my ears. Legs heavy, middle soft and warm. A heart that raced or operated in slow motion. I spent years like that, eating and smoking and drinking and swallowing and inhaling. The aftereffects have made the whole era hard to remember. But it is somatic. It is ingrained. I can’t look at her and not feel warm and fuzzy and queasy inside.
I am also incredibly annoyed that she, too, is forty-something and still fucking around. There is a tinge of jealousy there. I have one kid at home and one in my belly, a very needy dog, and a job that starts at eight in the morning. I can’t do whatever I want anymore, especially if what I want is to get really high and check the fuck out. I don’t want to judge an addict, but right now I am mad at everyone in this town who is buying, selling, and using, because all of those people are connected to each other and to Justin. And because I am mad, and because I miss him, and because I want to know who killed my friend, I decide to ask her. She asked about my pregnant body. Who cares if I’m implicating her in Justin’s death? Whatever rules exist in polite society don’t apply at this funeral party.
I ask who sold to Justin. She demurs. I persist. She rebuffs each name I throw out. I keep going, thinking maybe she will flinch if I say the right one. She gives me a reason why each of them couldn’t have done it. Then she gives me her theory. Later I tell Lynn all of this in the car on the ride home, like a rookie cop in a television show. She says it doesn’t really matter. These people have been pushing poison pills back and forth to each other for years.
What the woman in the bar line told me was that Justin had questioned the safety of the pill. She might have been lying, but she didn’t have a good reason to. What she’d heard was that he’d questioned it, and then he’d taken it. I imagine his desperate need for what the pill should have been, the pain and sickness that were probably already on him when he had it in his hand. I don’t know that I could have stopped myself either. The thought of him holding the pill, sweating—I can’t lose it. I see him there on that ledge: the deep desire for comfort and warmth and a cure for pain; how the invincibility of youth had given way to the need to get through the day. He’d reached a point in his life where he couldn’t get off it, couldn’t get out of that town, couldn’t get away from any of it, any more than I could have gone back.
I partied with them for years—drinking, smoking, and swallowing whatever I could find. Until I didn’t. I stopped because I couldn’t handle the headaches. Because I couldn’t show up to work that way. Because I got into grad school. Because I worried about my heart stopping. Because the fear of dying had become greater than the fear of living without mind-altering substances. Afterward I felt guilty over everyone I had probably helped bring down with me. It was a weighty, Catholic guilt that I held on to for a very long time. Because the truth is, I stopped for my own sake. Not because I could have hurt someone. Not because I did hurt people.
I have always imagined that I was just more rational, less cavalier than the others. That I only took those risks because I lived in a place where there was nothing to do. But that feels like just an attempt to intellectualize addiction. What separated me from Justin in those last few years was geography and a different social circle. We’d both gone through a series of personal tragedies in our thirties. We’d both struggled with serious mental-health problems. But my vanity had led me to the gym to work out. My future husband had pushed me to quit smoking.
This is the part of the story where someone tells me, You couldn’t save him. He had to save himself. Every time I hear something like that, I want to scream.
During one of his semesters in college, Justin had an internship in a US senator’s office. He felt out of place. He was a little older than the other college interns, but his discomfort had more to do with his working-class parents and his farmer grandparents. For Justin, senators were people in Creedence Clearwater Revival songs, not people you said hello to when they passed by on the way to their office. He was thoroughly amused that he had gone from basement punk parties to a political internship.
There was one story he told me: He’d been tasked with answering the phones while everyone was out to lunch. He was leaned back in the chair, feet kicked up on the front desk, when the senator’s chief of staff walked through the door and raised an eyebrow at him. He shot up and mumbled a greeting to her. At this point in the story he was just giggling. As he told me the story, he impersonated the chief of staff: “Who the hell does this kid think he is?” He loved those small moments of rebellion.
A few years after his internship, he did a short stint in treatment where he met a pretty woman from a very small town. The summer I first saw her, she had a raggedy punk haircut. When I came by late one night, they were both sober and holding hands in the dark on his parents’ stoop. The night air was perfectly still, and they smelled like Camel cigarettes. He laughed at all her jokes. I didn’t think she was that funny, but I was glad he was so entertained by her. I could sense love radiating from him—the kind of protective love I had once experienced myself—and it broke my heart, because she didn’t seem like the kind of person you could pin down for long.
Over the next few years she fluttered in and out of his life. She didn’t want to settle down but liked his company. If I had to guess, I’d say she’d dated a lot of other guys who weren’t very nice to her, and Justin was so nice to her she didn’t know what to do with him. I say this because it’s an easy stereotype to attach to the two of them, and also because I saw those patterns play out over and over again among women who used: first you beat yourself up, and then you let someone else do it.
Justin never would have filled that role for her. He just wanted them to lie on the couch and watch movies together all night. I think he wanted to do that for the rest of his life. I think he thought if he could just have her, he would stay sober—they would stay sober. He wanted to heal every wound she’d collected.
After she overdosed on benzos, he didn’t have a lot of reasons to hang on.
I always thought ditch was about the chase. It was about riding around when we had nowhere to go. It was about running as fast as we could, even if it wasn’t clear where we were going. About feeling the cold air burn our lungs as we tried to find each other in the dark. The game was really about making it to the safe zone, a place where no one and nothing could catch us. A place we’d made up. We crept down side streets and alleyways and ran through strangers’ yards and leaped fences as if our lives depended on winning. Our futures were fictional. The game was real. The smokes in our pockets were real. Our friends running toward us were real. But so were the police, and life after high school, and our bad habits.
Justin sent me a picture of himself about a year before he died. It was an unseasonably warm October night, and I had just been to see a band we both loved. We stayed up until 4 AM talking on the phone about music and writing and books. I made my usual pitch, told him I thought he should move across the country, go anywhere. He treated the idea like it was more impossible now than ever. I asked if he would at least come to my wedding in a few months. He waffled. Money this, life that. But, “sure, send the invitation.” I knew he wasn’t going to come.
While we were talking, he sent me a selfie. In the photo his arms were still thin and willowy. There was no waffled undershirt, no soft flannel, none of the leather of his youth. Just tracks on white skin, the same arm that once hung out the window of his red Oldsmobile, waving a cigarette as he’d smiled and said, “Get in!” His breath a cloud in the cool night air. His eyes full of anticipation.
