The Florida Shuffle is not just about moving from one bad place to another; it is about doing so without aim or sense of place. It is about people who, at the end of a twenty-eight-day course of rehab, or a stint at detox, find that they have nowhere to go. It is about never growing up. To spend one’s twenties moving between clinical settings and halfway houses is fundamentally arresting. Sometimes people return home after years of “working on themselves” to find that they do not quite fit in anywhere. The Florida Shuffle becomes a way of moving through life, and the only lens through which one understands it.
Last winter, I was living in a sober home on the border of Pompano Beach and Deerfield Beach—a few streets down from the motorcycle dealership where the rapper XXXTentacion was shot to death, the previous June. When I moved in, the oldest tenant in the house had lived there for six years, the house manager for two, another tenant for ten months. This stability is rare. But then, between August and March, twenty-one people passed through the house, settling in for a few days or weeks before they relapsed, or moved elsewhere, or died.
My friend Brandon, who had moved into the house in August, left one night in February without telling anyone. He visited my room to ask for a cigarette before leaving, and I wonder now what was crossing his mind as he stood there, leaning against the doorframe.
Later that night, I walked down the street to 7-Eleven to look for him. People often wound up there, by the dumpsters—always the dumpsters, an unofficial annex of the departed. None of my housemates would come with me; they sat looking at their phones, and then at the TV, sighing, having washed their hands of Brandon. The stragglers by the dumpsters, the pawnshop, and the laundromat all said that I’d just missed Brandon; he’d breezed by about seven minutes earlier.
Brandon was diabetic, and had never been able to manage his disease—that is, even when he could afford insulin, along with the ancillary drugs that he required for neuropathy. Around 1 A.M., he called me. He was drinking stolen red wine behind a Target, where he was planning to sleep before going to work at Panera Bread, in the morning. There was a spigot in the alley where the freight trucks dock, a benefit of choosing Target over Walmart.
A few days later, Eddie, a housemate who had been clean since July, overdosed and died in a motel room in Deerfield Beach. He had left in frustration on a Saturday and was dead by Wednesday. I can still see him bounding around corners—his forehead framed in grease and dirt and sweat from the garage where he worked, his tattoos beginning in a sleeve around his neck and ending at his ankles. They had set him back something like twenty thousand dollars through the years, he said. We liked the same music, and on the speakers in the back yard we would play Townes Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen, John Prine and Warren Zevon: “Carmelita, hold me tighter / I think I’m sinking down / And I’m all strung out on heroin, on the outskirts of town.”
It robs you of something, after a while, to see this sort of thing happen, over and over. When Eddie died, not knowing how to express our emotions, or how to apprehend them properly, we said to one another, “That’s crazy about Eddie.”
Most young addicts I knew didn’t get funerals with a viewing; they were burned to bits in furnaces and, as ashes, thrown into the ocean or tossed to the wind from a mountaintop. I wonder, if I had the opportunity to look on my dead friends one last time—if I could see them as they were in the end, as pale bodies—whether that might startle me into something like closure.
Instead, I see them on Facebook, the dead I have known and still know. I have become obsessed with death; I see it everywhere.
A couple of weeks after Eddie’s death, I ran into Brandon walking down a sidewalk in Pompano. He was wearing a waiter’s uniform, from the restaurant where he worked at night, and carrying an old patent-leather satchel that I had given him. He was heading to a liquor store that sold cheap margaritas on Fridays. He said he was going to San Diego soon, to live in a motel where the rooms cost twenty-seven dollars a night. The sky was orange and roseate as we parted. We said, “I love you, man,” and promised to keep in touch, but we never did.
After Michelle calls me in June, I walk from West Camino Real to Palmetto Park Road, where Michelle, who is driving Dylan’s car, is stalled in traffic. She doesn’t have a license, and she doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift. I can’t drive stick either, and I haven’t driven at all since I was nineteen, when a judge revoked my license after I was arrested a couple of times for driving drunk. But I take the wheel, and we manage to move the car to a parking spot in front of Boca Raton’s City Hall.
In order to afford drugs, we must drive to the pawnshop to trade in Dylan’s Xbox, so Michelle calls Jacob, who lives in the apartment below mine, and whom we know from our recovery groups; inviting anybody to join our hateful dissolution seems unwise, but she tells me that it’s fine.
“We should go to 7-Eleven while we wait for him,” I say. “And get forties.” Somehow, I never can get past age seventeen.
When Jacob arrives, I offer him some of the Four Loko that I have stolen from 7-Eleven. He declines, saying that he is coming up on a sobriety anniversary, of six months or whatever, and, after all, he is driving. I am aghast. “Why are you here with us, then?” I ask. “Because Michelle said you guys needed my help,” he says. Jacob drives us to the pawnshop, where we pawn Dylan’s Xbox for sixty dollars, and to the dealer, to buy heroin. Jacob doesn’t use with us, nor does he regard us with disdain.
Soon we are shooting up in the car, taking turns with the syringe. The tip is frayed and curling backward, so that it snags against the flesh; removing the needle reminds me of excising an ingrown hair. In my eight years of intravenous drug use, it is the first time I have shared a syringe. Never again, I tell myself, but, a few months later, I do.
Here I am again, still hung up on this adolescent outlaw kick of mine, slouched by the window in the back seat of Dylan’s car, crowded with tools and clothes—everything he owns, I suppose, as he no longer lives anywhere—my head now dropping low. The heroin is likely fentanyl—and it isn’t lovely and it isn’t terrible, either, but it is not the same as it used to be. End-stage addiction forecloses novelty.
We go everywhere that day with our dirty blood and hot bodies and Michelle’s pretty dark hair falling down her back in greasy skeins, and I hate who we are. Somehow, we are on the beach, and I wish we were young and fun, svelte and bronze, and maybe I even say this aloud. I wish I liked the beach.
If we minded how we lived, the consideration was mild. If we worried that our sober home might evict us for using drugs, we also understood that we could fall back into detox, where we could watch Netflix over Gatorade and Valium, and then have chicken cordon bleu in bed. Then we could transfer to yet another treatment center or sober home. Beyond one place, another like it stood, and whether or not we said goodbye seemed not to matter—we trusted that we would meet again. So long as we were not dead, we were fine, there was hope—we would make it, after all. ♦