CRACK AGENT

PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT AS A YOUNG MAN - A Memoir - By Bill Clegg, 222
pp. Little, Brown & Company. $23.99

Car crashes happen in different ways, but they all end the same, with
the rest of us looking on in sympathy and prurience: I hope they're
O.K., but I'd like to get a look if they're not.

Rear-end collisions, multicar pileups and head-on highway nightmares -
they all merit our drive-by attention. Then there's the single car
rollover. A lone vehicle, propelled by physics and social conventions,
is supposed to hew to its path when suddenly, through human
intervention or lack of it, it tumbles in self-contained violence.
Even before the wheels stop spinning in the air, we wonder about the
driver's role. Did he fall asleep, take his eyes off the road,
intentionally point his destiny toward the ditch?

Unfortunately, the answers are rarely as remarkable as the spectacle
itself. One thing, it generally follows, led to another. Things went
wrong. And so it is with "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man," a
memoir by Bill Clegg, a young literary agent in New York who rose
quickly in a crowded field and then almost as quickly yanked the wheel
hard into the abyss of addiction. For gawkers, it will provide
reliable thrills because the cliff Clegg went off was so high, the
fall so steep. But at bottom, why the addict does what he does is
necessarily reductive: because he is an addict.

In the taxonomy of crack addiction, Clegg would be considered a
binger. But describing his typical foray into smokable cocaine as a
binge is a bit like describing God-zilla as a gecko. After dallying
with drugs in college, and building a very successful practice with
some bright literary lights, Clegg turned on a dime and stuffed tens
of thousands of dollars, a nascent career and his most significant
relationships into the end of a glass tube, then put a lighter to it.
He did this over and over, until it was all gone, in many of the
pricier hotels in Manhattan, in bathroom stalls, in porn stalls, and
in and behind Dumpsters.

If that sounds far-fetched, Clegg is equal to accounting, providing an
endless tick-tock of the bags of crack, the rent boys, the A.T.M.
withdrawals and hotel lobbies that served as a portal to the temporary
crack dens he set up, with many, many bottles of room-service vodka to
take the edge off.

Addicts tend to dwell in the ecstasy of ignition, that moment when
endorphins are first beckoned and the show begins, but in a more
sober, retrospective light, the fact remains that addiction's primary
aspect is boredom - the getting and using of the same substance over
and over until death, jail or recovery intervenes. The chronic nature
of any activity, even one involving powerful narcotics, renders it
prosaic over time.

As the author of my own memoir about crack addiction, I don't pretend
to know how to avoid the numbing narrative aspects of drug use. But
certainly a numerical autopsy is not sufficient. Even the most
sweeping tale of debauchery - and Clegg lived through a doozy - has to
find texture and resonance in other matters. As his book progresses,
Clegg himself seems bored by even the most piquant episodes.

After barely getting through an important business lunch at La
Grenouille, he finds a running buddy simply by asking a guy on the
street "if he parties." Trying to hail a cab, the ad hoc pair end up
in the van of another stranger, who takes them to the hotel where
Clegg is staying.

Then it's on. "The afternoon and night play out. We don't have sex,
though I want to. Rico comes at 10 with more, and it is all gone by 4
in the morning. My pal gets restless and disappears. He asks for $50
for a cab up to Harlem and I give him $40. Alone, I smoke down the few
crumbs I'd hidden. Alone, I scrape the broken stem for the last resin
and burn the pipe black as charcoal trying to suck the last drop of
venom out of it. Alone, I look at the window and wonder if I am high
enough up to die if I crawl through and jump into the air shaft.
Fourth floor. Not even close."

Clegg's trek from one fancy New York hotel to another, fleeing his
apartment and his steady boyfriend so he can drown himself in
self-seeking, is a persistent motif here, as is his wish that death
will stop what he cannot. He is up against the math that cannot be
solved - "just one more" is never enough - but his crisis arrives
rather oddly when he becomes so disheveled and paranoid that he can no
longer check into the Gansevoort Hotel or 60 Thompson, the W or the
Maritime. He tries the Mercer and is turned away.

"I have somehow, without seeing it happen, tripped over some boundary,
from the place where one can't tell that I'm a crack addict to the
place where it is sufficiently obvious to turn me away," he writes in
what passes for a moment of clarity. Of course, there are many rungs
on the ladder below failing to pass muster with the clerk at a fancy
hotel, but for Clegg this qualifies as a kind of bottom.

As might be expected, Clegg gradually loses weight living on vodka and
crack; his belt is constantly in need of new holes, and serves as a
metaphor for the noose around his neck. He also loses his mind, with a
drug-induced paranoia that has him seeing plainclothes police officers
- - "Penneys," as he calls them, because they seem to dress from the
department store - everywhere he goes. It sounds like a horror movie,
except that it's the kind of horror movie where something is always
about to happen and never does.

While Clegg's operatic madness is vividly rendered, it may or may not
bear any resemblance to external reality. Active addiction crabs the
senses to the point where important actual events - the blackout of
2003, his mother's breast cancer, the death of an associate - become
less important than the prismatic account of copping and using. The
attacks of Sept. 11 arrive in the middle of one particularly abject
run, and Clegg's response is to get a haircut.

Addicts, active or otherwise, are narcissistic as a matter of course,
stuck on the holy music of the self to the exclusion of almost
everything else. While egocentrism is baked into the genre of memoir,
Clegg is singularly engaged in his own story. Other characters are
remote or so minimally drawn that we get no sense of the collateral
damage around him. Throughout the book, his family and friends seem to
come swinging out of the trees to cajole him into serial treatments,
but they too disappear in the puffs of smoke that always return. His
boyfriend, Noah (the book sticks to first names and pseudonyms), an
attentive, apparently talented filmmaker, is rendered as a simpering
chump before he finally and resolutely walks away. By this time, Clegg
is near the end of the line, strapped to a bed at Lenox Hill Hospital.

What context the book attempts comes from an origins story, with Clegg
recounting his childhood in the third person. As the interspersed
chapters relate, there was an enormous amount of trauma around
urinating - a condition that is difficult to untangle, but that the
author seems to think determined a great deal of what happened
afterward. The vengeful father, a staple of memoir, lands here with
both feet, as does a mother who seemed unwilling or unable to protect
her son.

Still, it's not as if Clegg ginned up the elements of his life to fit
some literary motif. "Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man," however
pretentiously titled, rings true in brutal, blunt strokes. We can all
take some measure of happiness that Clegg's durability and his talents
have left him as a literary agent with big-name authors at a big-name
agency.

As millions of people who sit in church basements and meeting rooms
hearing what it was like for other addicts and alcoholics understand,
there is a certain, very practical value in everyone's story. When
that story is pressed between the covers of a book, some in the
culture at large can identify while others can resolve to never become
that person. But the genre is built on far more carnal imperatives.
People want to drive slowly by and see the blood and abasement. Once
they get a good, hard look, they can thank their lucky stars they
aren't the ones upside down in a ditch with the wheels spinning above
them.