This afternoon, I’m leaving. I’m going back home, to Switzerland, where people still have a minimum of clothing. If they still have a minimum of clothing, it is because in Switzerland, we have roots and values. Our ancestors are watching. When a Swiss puts one foot in front of the other, the scene holds. In the United States, there is none of that. People float. We see them wandering on this vast plain that they have plundered and as nothing holds them back or supports them, things are running dry. I imagine that’s what it’s like when you finally cast off. We are losing our footing. We splash around for a few moments, then let ourselves be taken back by the big blue. These drifting entities impress me. I envy the unbearable lightness of their beings and if I had been more courageous and less Swiss, I would have stayed among them.
Leroy is early. He is waiting for me in his big black car which vibrates to the rhythm of the bass. I hurry to pick up the last things lying around. I check that I have my passport and my ticket and I go out into the street with my suitcases. Leroy lowers the sound and gets out of the vehicle to help me.
In Jamaican patois, wa gwan means: “Are you okay?” Leroy was born in Kingston. He has lived in Poughkeepsie, New York, on the banks of the Hudson for around ten years, and he continues to speak Creole. He says things like “ya mon”, “raated” or “bomba clat” and I love it. A good Jamaican patois is like a beautiful Valais accent. It’s melodious, deep and in terms of sweetness, it’s unbeatable. I slump into the back seat. This morning I didn’t take my amphetamines, I’m exhausted.
- Are you ready for the journey?, continues Leroy, starting the engine. (Are you ready for the trip?)
Mi tink yu was dead
To his right, in the front seat, half a dozen phones beeping and flashing. I deduce that the road will be long. Leroy is the driver you take when you want to go directly to the airport without going through Manhattan. The problem with him is that he never just goes from point A to point B. Along the way, he systematically makes small detours. He stops here and there, leaves for a few moments, then gets back behind the wheel without making the slightest comment. I don’t know exactly what he makes, or what he sells – although I have some suspicions. I also don’t know if driving students who don’t get anything and who pay in cash is a way of hiding his side activities or if it’s part of his side activities. To clarify this matter, it’s today or never, because I don’t think he and I will ever see each other again. I plan a strategy to approach the subject, but my eyes close. They close with the same determination as when undergoing general anesthesia. The struggle is in vain.
When I wake up, Leroy is leaning over me. He shakes me nervously. I stand up, not having the slightest idea where I am or with whom.
-Lawd Gad (Lord God) he exclaims. Mi did tink yu was dead (I thought you were dead)!
We are at JFK. Leroy asks me what happened to me, but at that moment I don’t yet make the connection between my sudden discontinuation of amphetamine and my semi-coma. I pay him and slowly walk towards the check-in counter. What would he have done if I hadn’t woken up? When you’re driving a drug cart, you don’t necessarily want to deal with the corpse of a Swiss student in the back seat. Would he have first gotten rid of the body, somewhere on the side of the road, behind a tree or a trash can, or would he have used up the rest of his stock before taking care of the dead woman?
I get on the plane and immediately collapse. I dream of Trevor, my tattooed boyfriend who massacres everyone with darts. If I didn’t return to Switzerland, I would have stayed with him. We would have moved into his trailer in Arkansas, I would have bought myself a gun and I imagine that at some point my father would have come looking for me.
Weaning the hussar
For now, unfortunately, my father is picking me up at Geneva airport. It’s 8:26 a.m. The Swiss flight from New York has just landed on the Cointrin tarmac. I am inside, my suitcases too and in these suitcases, there are no medicines. When leaving the big blue of the United States of America, I left my buoys behind. I told myself that bringing hard drugs home wasn’t a good idea. A bit like with algae and viruses. Better to leave them in their ecosystem. It was ultimately Victoria, the student who took over the lease of my apartment and who bought the furniture that I myself had bought from the previous tenant, who inherited my pharmacological stock. She couldn’t believe it. At first she refused. “No I can’t. This is too much, really I can’t.” (I can’t, no really, it’s too much.) When she realized it was her or the container on the street corner, she started crying and then hyperventilating. Then she took me in her arms, hugged me tightly and said: “Malka, you will always remain in my heart.” (You will stay in my heart forever.)
Now that I think about it, it’s not to Victoria that I should have left this heritage, but to a drug dealer like Leroy. In the USA, the quality of illegal drugs is not monitored. Consumers who have neither the means nor the time to go through medical and legal channels expose themselves to dangers from which we, drug addicts cleared by medical diagnosis, are spared.
I don’t know what the situation was in the 2000s. What is certain is that today, in the 1920s of the 21st century, the illicit market abounds in pharmacological substances. My friend Helmut, who currently lives in Los Angeles, spent an entire year using meth thinking it was Adderall. During Covid, when drug shortages began to rage, he supplied himself, “because cheaper and more practical”, from a dealer who delivered to your home. Apparently, the dealer himself was not aware that what he was selling was not Adderall diverted from the legal market, but crystal meth produced in clandestine laboratories.
