The Weird Sisters of Centro Clinic

"'Martyrdom is a privilege,' she said softly. 'We shall be like stars; like the sun.'"

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

Three witches preside over the methadone clinic.

Their weird magic keeps the viscous methadone syrup flowing through the temperamental machines that dispense it.

The Three Sisters' pulsing power prevents fights over girls and drug debts. It cleans urine samples of the illegal drugs present in them, and it ensures that the door to the facility's only single-occupancy restroom unlocks itself when someone is overdosing inside.

Everyone knows it, but no one will speak of it.

The Three Sisters are ancient and ethereal. They are awesome in the august sense: Potent, capricious, at turns both generous and terrifying.

It might appear that it is the doctors and nurses, the counselors and security guards who are in charge of things, but in reality, it is the Three Sisters who run the show.

Everyone knows it, but no one will speak of it.

***

Our Lady of Stability floats in front of me in the line that leads into the dosing area, shifting from foot to foot with suspicious frequency. I recognize this dance, immediately render my diagnosis: She has consumed half her body weight in water preparatory to a drug test that she will probably fail.

The short, kind man who directs operations in the dosing area motions her forward. He notes her birthday, verifies her dose, and then points toward a green light indicating an open dosing window.

After she learns that she doesn't have a drug test today, Our Lady of Stability turns around and tosses me a relieved smile. There is something apologetic in it.

I beam back a look that I hope conveys encouragement, commiseration.

Beneath her purple bob, I note porcelain skin and a prominent, slightly hooked nose. An '80s nose, the kind that can make or break a face. In Lady S's case, it makes her.

She has an angular, slightly masculine jaw. Her eyes are different colors every time I see them, and the left and right irises rarely match. Today, they have absorbed the purple of her hair and the haint blue from her water intoxication.

I sense Our Lady of Stability again a few days later.

This time, I am in front of her in the dosing line. As soon as I realize this, I feel a strong compulsion to allow her to cut in front of me. However, there's no way to make this offer without it seeming creepy, like a come-on.

"Oh, thanks," Our Lady of Stability graciously accepts as she slides in front of me.

I hadn't said a word. Now, I am unable to speak.

There are marks all over her face from picking her skin. The fresh, pea-sized lesions rage red; the older ones have faded to a blotchy gray-brown that makes them resemble freckles.

"As soon as he sees me, he's gonna make me pee in a cup," Lady S sighs to me.

I calculate and transmit a Morse Code smile that tells her that I understand, that I, too, have been there.

Who am I kidding? I am there. Will probably always be there.

I don't know how to say those last two parts in Morse Code, though.

This time, the short, kind man does ask Our Lady of Stability to submit to a urine test.

"You okay, Ryan?" He asks her gently as he hands her the urinalysis cup.

At first, I think his question is unnecessary. Later, I consider that maybe it was just an attempt to nudge open a door.

"Feeling a little manic these days," Our Lady of Stability admits.

The urinalysis tests at Centro Clinic give results in under a minute. There is a temperature check, frequently subverted by microwaving one's own clean (or synthetic) urine, then taping a vial filled with it against one's taint for safekeeping.

It is secure and warm there, a poor man's womb.

From the floor all the way to where they meet the ceiling, all four of the bathroom's walls are covered in mirrored panels; the room belongs in a gay bathhouse in Berlin.

Now that our urine tests are no longer supervised, there is no need for Whizzinators, the prosthetic penises that probationers / parolees used to affix over their real things. These devices held clean urine in their "scrotums," which their wearers would squeeze in order to mimic a normal stream of urine.

Without all of this observation, this technical innovation, this elaborate deception, the bathroom seems lonely, purposeless. I wonder if somehow the Lady has been called there so that her magic can fix it - that cosmic order might be restored.

After she emerges from the many-mirrored bathroom, Our Lady of Stability confers with the methadone conductor for two or three minutes before he motions her toward a window with a green light. Then, as she's walking away and I am giving him my birthday, he calls to her:

"Ryan, do you want a copy of the Patient's Bill of Rights?"

She declines. She looks past the conductor to me and offers a sad smile that says See, I told you so.

I don't see Our Lady of Stability for a few weeks after that. When she comes back, she looks better.

I wonder if, like me, Lady S feels worse when she looks better. I have the feeling that I could ask her that, out of nowhere, and that she wouldn't think it was strange, wouldn't mind answering.

Our Lady of Stability strikes me as someone who, like me, has the capacity for both scabrous lying and transcendent truth.

Or is it scabrous truth and transcendent lying?

I can't keep the two straight, sometimes.

***

Our Lady of Sunshine terrifies me.

Her grim grin proclaims that she busts balls from the time that she opens her eyes in the morning until her methadone drags her under 10 or 12 hours later.

I estimate that she's in her mid to late 40's. She's a broad, white woman with dirty blonde hair that looks diseased, somehow - as though rising wealth inequality and global warming and the gendered pay gap have been manifested in hair form.

I expect her voice to be as harsh as her words are brash, that it will sound like a smoker's. In actuality, it's velvety: Somewhere between pay-by-the-minute phone sex operator and enthusiastic infomercial narrator.

It makes it all the more jarring when she fucks someone up with her words.

Lady Sunshine banters endlessly with the Medicaid cab drivers and the papis who hang around the clinic before and after they dose.

Her Spanish is vigorous, streetwise.

I later learn that she lived in rural Mexico for 11 years. She moved there for some guy who wouldn't lay a finger on her but insisted on her telling everyone that he beat her.

They had a setup for collecting rainwater for drinking and bathing.

"I looked like I Dream of Jeanie in those days," she tells me. She takes out her phone and shows me a picture. She kind of did.

Sometimes, Our Lady of Sunshine brings her grandson with her to the clinic.

He looks about four, and he is stout and tough like her. He has a melon head that sometimes pulls him in the opposite direction to the one that he wants to go in.

"Big head, big brain, this one," she looks at me and laughs. She adds an eyeroll that tells me that she doesn't believe it.

Lady Sunshine has the acid strength of a woman who has rejected comfortable delusion for abject accuracy.

I wonder if her toddler grandson is on methadone maintenance already.

Somehow, I have gotten on Lady Sunshine's good side. I think it's because I gave up my number in line to push a fellow patient who was in a wheelchair through the dosing area one day.

"I'm so glad you're not dead, sir!" Lady Sunshine blurts out one morning.

She appears suddenly and demands immediate recognition, like inclement weather.

I have no idea why she's calling me sir. The part about thinking that I was dead seems much more understandable.

"There was a rumor that the tall, professional-looking guy who's always here in the morning, that he died of an overdose!"

A frisson of fear shoots through me. I wonder if it could be prophecy.

She studies my reaction as I contemplate what the appropriate offering is.

"I'm glad I'm not dead, too," I tell her. It's mostly true.

I say: "I don't smoke cigarettes, but if I did, I would give you one."

"Maybe two," I add for good measure.

She gives me a hurricane hug.

I try to hug her back with enthusiasm. Ever since I was little, I've been criticized on account of my hugs lacking sincerity.

Our Lady of Sunshine seems like someone with whom hugging could very quickly turn into punching.

"We call you the Methadone Mayor, you know," she tells me. "We think you look distinguished."

"I have nicknames for people, too," I confess.

***

Our Lady of Silence has the maximum allowed number of take-home doses. She comes in once per month, on the sixteenth or seventeenth, to collect her bottles.

The staff don't usually prefill take-home bottles. Instead, the nurses fill and label them one-by-one as you wait at the dosing window.

For Our Lady of Silence, though, they get them ready the night before.

It is rumored that Lady Si has been coming to the clinic for 37 years.

I can never remember what she looks like. As soon as she turns away, I forget what I've just seen.

I am left with an impression of striking, sorrowful elegance - the kind of international-policy-shifting beauty that detonates on the covers of National Geographic and Time. She has this pure presence, like a Cherokee woman near the end of the Trail of Tears.

Once, a couple of years before I started coming to the Clinic, the staff went through a bad time with a patient who was a dealer.

This guy was no smooth small business owner. He was amoral, volatile, more than a little vicious.

He would wait outside the Clinic with an empty two-liter bottle each Friday (take-home day for many patients). He'd cajole people into selling him their methadone, then offer them bags of "dope" to make up the difference.

His "dope" had something vile in it.

Three people overdosed. One died.

Someone owed him money, and the dealer broke the unspoken rule - that methadone clinics are a safe zone for beatings, just as churches are off-limits for arrests - and kicked the shit out of him in the men's bathroom. There was blood splattered on the ceiling, I am told.

The staff were fed up, but there wasn't much they could do. Calling the police on a patient was against facility policy because it violated harm reduction principles and detracted from the Clinic's reputation as a safe space for addicts (or so the higher-ups opined).

What kind of safe space has blood spattered on its ceilings?

Lady Silence heard what was going on with the dealer. She came to the Clinic on her appointed day, waited until this tough customer set up his methadone-buying operation outside.

With the poise of an empress, Lady Si approached the dealer. She leaned over and seemed to whisper something in his ear.

The entire interaction took maybe 15 or 20 seconds.

He picked up his bottle, left the Clinic, and wasn't ever seen again.

Not at the Clinic, and not around town, either.

***

At least within the Clinic, Lady Silence never speaks.

On the appointed day, she links arms with Our Ladies of Stability and Sunshine, and they remain that way until they are beckoned one-by-one into the dosing area.

Sometimes, the Three Sisters arrive in a single Medicaid cab.

On other days, Our Lady of Silence drives the group in a midnight blue Ford F150. On those occasions, the Weird Sisters somehow manipulate the center console so that all three of them can ride in the front.

They smell of cigarettes, of yearslong Section 8 housing waitlists, of cheap drugstore perfume made subtle and holy through suffering.

When the three of them are together, their magic is world-warping.

They glide through the junkies crammed into the clinic as easily as Moses parting the Red Sea.

As they pass, rotten teeth regenerate; aborted fetuses re-implant; awful sins are looked in the eye, then forgiven.

***

"Ryan's in the hospital, but she wants you to know that you're special... She threw an I Ching for you, and it said something like: 'Whom the gods intend for greatness, they must first torture.'"

Lady Sunshine relays this message as carefully as a diplomat avoiding world war. Beside her, Lady Silence smiles beneficently.

"What's wrong with her?" I ask.

"She's been shooting up tranq, and she's about to lose her arm. You can see the two bones in her right arm - these ones, here - you can actually look through them. Between them. Trouble is, she can't stop picking at it..."

I wonder what Lady Stability sees through the gap in her bones. Hell? God? The future?

"Please tell her that I think she's special, too," I respond.

Two days later, I bring a card that wishes peace and healing for Lady Stability. "Get Well Soon" would've seemed blithe under the circumstances.

None of us are well, and few of us will ever get there again.

I leave the card with Lady Sunshine, who nods approvingly.

***

I know, somehow, that Lady Stability's arm will heal, that the magic of her sisters will protect her.

No one lives forever, but I know, too, that these wise women won't succumb to infection or overdose or just plain tiring out.

When magic animates you, you are lifted above the quotidian struggles. Your timeline becomes truly your own.

Still, it must end someday.

I like to envision the Three Sisters shooting up together in Centro Clinic's parking lot.

There's something wrong with the dope. Perhaps it's cut with a T-Rex tranquilizer like carfentanil. Or maybe the evil dealer who Lady Si banished has visited a witch doctor, cooked up a brew to exact his revenge.

The Three Sisters inject simultaneously, or nearly so. They find each other's eyes as they feel the poison flood their systems.

Lady Silence says something short and eternal, which no one else can hear.

Lady Sunshine produces a sharp, surprised smile; she has been laughing through hurt her whole life.

Lady Stability leans her head against Lady Sunshine. Lady Silence grabs one hand from each of her sisters.

Slowly, not by seconds but by minutes, perhaps even hours, they turn to stone.

Their expressions show the loving resignation of Mary in the Pietà: It was always meant to end this way.

"Whatever you do to the least of these" is one possible inscription for the plaque that should proclaim their service to the Clinic. To all of us.

"Be good or be good at it" is another.

They watch us and they watch over us; they are with us still.

***

Thanks for reading!

Going forward, I'll be publishing a new blog post every other week. On most alternate weeks, I'll be releasing a YouTube video (The Neuromancer - YouTube if you're interested).

In other news, I'm visiting Jay, my fiancé, in England for the New Year! We haven't been physically together since I left China two and a half years ago due to the pandemic lockdown. Needless to say, our reunion is long overdue, and I am pumped.

We're planning to keep it chill / cozy, but we have a New Year's Eve fireworks cruise down the Thames planned as well as a weekend excursion to Bath and a West End showing of The Devil Wears Prada (the musical).

I'll be sure to post about my Brit'sh adventures!

Take care of yourselves, please -

Brian