r u alive?

A ghost is born.

It was about a week into my recovery when I got the dreaded text message from Lacey.

hey its lace

r u alive?

What could I have written back? I’ve gotten clean. Looks like I’ll be alive longer than expected. How bout u?

Instead, I followed the drug counsellor’s advice and changed my phone number. But it didn’t stop Lacey from haunting my drug-addled dreams. It’s been more than a year and she still shows up on occasion, like a ghost knocking on my nightmares.

You see, of all the things I had to quit when I came home, drugs turned out to be the least of my attachments. Sure, it was hard. There were plenty of sleepless nights; sheets drenched in sweat. And so very itchy!

But the real struggle was quitting the company I used to keep.

The friends you make in life — the citizens you meet at the gym, or went to high school with or even your family — those connections pale compared to the ones you make when you’re high.

And they’re not even real friends. They’ll rob and stab and cause you all sorts of unspeakable damage at any opportunity.

“I’ll ride for you,” they’ll say, when you’re treating them to pizza and crack.

Broke? Got no dope?

“I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

And yet, the connections with those crack-smoking peers were like none I’d ever known. These dubious friendships were forged in the flames of our shared despair.

That’s why I’m having a bit of a hard time with Lacey’s recent death.

She wasn’t the first person I hung around with who died. Sherry’s heart burst while she was getting high. Rhonda’s body was found hunched over against the wall of her upstairs bedroom — days after her overdose. Max smoked some tainted dope and died in his girlfriend’s arms. Or at least, that’s what she thought. But then he gasped, his eyes opening impossibly wide — as if he saw his own ghost. A moment later, he closed them for good.

I died once too.

“Breathe in,” Lacey’s half-brother said, while sitting with me at my Airbnb. “Deeper… deeper!”

I sucked in so much fentanyl, I promptly laid back on the bed and allowed my heart to stop. No point in fussing about it.

Apparently, there was much debate among my company as to whether someone should administer Narcan and attempt to revive me. Lacey’s half-brother wanted to get into my online bank account first. Lacey later told me she lobbied hard for bringing me back to life. I took it as a sign of her affection. She really cared. Then again, I still had much to give her.

But enough about my return from the dead. I don’t know exactly when Lacey shuffled off her crack-ly coil, or even how. It happened in spring though, which is as close to a happy time as crackheads get. You’ll see them as soon as the snow melts, chattering amongst each other on park benches, sitting on curbs, sprawled out on the grass of downtown parks.

Everyone’s in high spirits. Winter is understandably harsh for the homeless. Lacey probably spent it holed up at Shawn’s dismal apartment with about a dozen other people in various stages of strung out. She was the only one Shawn allowed to sleep in his bed — for a price she didn’t seem to mind paying. When she finally flung open the door to Shawn’s apartment and stepped into spring, her heart must have sung like a sparrow.

Honestly, I don’t know much about her life before crack entered the picture. What I do know came to me by way of the most unreliable narrator of all: Lacey.

She told me she used to dance on cruise ships.

“Seriously, she wasn’t just a dancer,” the father of one of her children told me once during a crack-smoking session. “She was the marquee performer. She was amazing.”

Lacey, according to Lacey, had worn many hats. She taught creative writing to elementary school children. She was an addictions counselor. She had three children. (Some say four.) And custody of none.

Cohen was real. She often logged into Facebook on my laptop to stare at picture after picture of her oldest boy, named, of course, after the poet Leonard.

She told me about the first house she bought in Hamilton with her husband. He was a drummer. She bartended. They had a baby boy. It must have felt like spring every day.

Once — I think it was Cohen’s 15th birthday — I offered to drive her past that old stone house. We could just sit in the car and maybe honor that chapter of her life. Although she never saw Cohen, she took his birthdays very seriously. We pulled in front of the place and she was already chattering about the games they used to play in and around that house. She loved baking and throwing birthday parties for her boy.

I remember looking at her face, soaked in tears, and trying to find that brownie-baking mom. By then, her obsession with picking around her mouth had left it cratered and constantly bleeding. Her flaming red hair was home to all sorts of creatures that I’d sometimes see crawling across the pillow while she was asleep. So many scars too.

Once, someone hit her over the head with a brick while she was sleeping at Shawn’s place.

“Why would someone do that?” I asked.

“She thought I stole her jacket.”

Lacey wasn’t my girlfriend or anything. I would just pick her up at the drug den because smoking crack by yourself for days on end was a lonely business. I had been seeing and hearing things. Lacey kept me grounded. But also, on high alert. She was always stealing from the rented apartments. I still owe Airbnb a few hundred dollars.

She had a lot of physical pain too. Although, some in the crack-smoking community were skeptical. By her own admission, Lacey couldn’t go half an hour without crack or else she would hunch over in the most excruciating pain. I always knew when it was time to pass her a rock because she would emit a short piercing shriek.

Some days when I was too sick to get out of bed, or just wanted to try a day without being high, she’d hiss and curse.

“You’ll be one of us soon enough,” she howled, before slamming the door behind her.

There will probably be a service for Lacey. Family members are posting sad-emoji’ed pictures of her on the socials. Like me, she probably had forgotten that she was loved. Cohen will be there.

People will, no doubt, call it a tragic end. The thing is, Lacey was a tragedy long before I met her. A body animated, it seemed, solely by addiction. Whatever came before — the Hamilton hipster mom in the house with the baby and the husband in a rock and roll band — was gone.

“Too far gone,” people said to me at the time. “She’s too far gone.”

I never believed them. No one is ever too far gone. I introduced her to my favorite TV shows, made a Spotify playlist just for her — she was very particular about her soundtrack to getting high. She showed me all kinds of crafty crack-smoking techniques. How to cook it just right and maximize the scrapings.

I took her with me to apartment after apartment. Even a few trips to Niagara Falls. I was thrilled to receive her grocery lists — Lacey wanted to cook dinner! And I despaired of all the things she kept taking from me — the bills she feathered out of my pocket while I was asleep, the money transfers to shady figures. Oh, and all the times people warned me that she would be the death of me.

What did it matter, I figured. She’d have to get in line. Because I had already been planning to be the death of me.

I think I would have paid any price just to have someone around. Someone to talk to and listen to music and watch TV and tell bad jokes to. We could pretend to be normal.

For a while, she was my only friend in the world. And it was the loneliest feeling I ever knew. Because my best and only friend was already a ghost.

—

There were a few songs of mine that Lacey actually liked, even obsessed over. She played this one over and over again. In German, Klopfgeist means ‘knocking ghost.’