Memories of Drug Addiction

It was July. The air was hot and dry and luminous, but I couldn’t feel it, not with the heroin in my veins. I held a piece of foil with a glob of smack on it and heated it from below with a Bic lighter.

The dope bubbled and smoked. A Bic pen, reduced to a straw, hung from my lips, siphoning smoke to my lungs. Bic was making a killing off me. A lighter was only good for a week with the amount of heroin and crack I was smoking. And being the functional, “high-class” junkie I was, I used only the best. Bic products hold up to the abuse of a drug addict. But if they weren’t available, a ninety-nine-cent lighter and a Slurpee straw from 7-Eleven would do. I kept a stockpile in the glovebox, just in case.

I savored the pungent, sour flavor of smoke as I held my breath. The world relaxed and my body sank comfortably into the black leather seats of my Bimmer. I enjoyed the seclusion. I sat in the dark space of my car and watched the world of normal, happy creatures go by, oblivious to my presence. Heroin, in effect, separated me from not only the terrible, but the beautiful too. I was in a place so richly alone, so infinitely cut off, that the thing I wanted by way of using heroin in the first place got further and further away. In that aloneness I found solace for a time, and it was gorgeous. But then, like a blanket being yanked from a nap, I went from being warm to cold. The effort to avoid suffering entailed a suffocation of self and a detachment from god.

I continued to smoke, tilting the foil back and forth so as to move the sticky ball of heroin to a clean spot of foil for optimal burning and flavor. It looked and flowed like molasses and left a snail-trail of burnt residue. All my bodily functions moved like molasses, too. Hence the bloody asshole I constantly sported. Smoking dope results in incessant constipation. Taking a shit is like being anally raped. It’s dope’s cruel way of saying, “I own you, bitch.” Makes sense now, that putting black tar in my body should result in my moving like mud and feeling just as dirty. Heroin, like a merry-go-round, makes you giddy then sick.

It wasn’t noon yet and I had consumed a gram of cocaine, some heroin, and 300 milligrams of methadone I had saved from the “treatment center” I was frequenting. It didn’t matter how early it was. I couldn’t wait. I wanted to feel everything the drugs offered and nothing that they didn’t. I took another dose of methadone after smoking my heroin. The bitter, cough-syrup-like liquid had grown on me much like the burn of whiskey grows on the alcoholic. My tongue was not parched though. It was my body and brain that screamed for the chemicals. I was the dying desert cactus; it was the rain. I took yet another dose.

Two hours later I began to feel a sickness. Then I felt fear. I was accustomed to fear – fear of the police, being caught in my lies, fear of withdrawal. On this day though, I was afraid of overdose. Death is an unfortunate possibility when you have an insatiable desire for a killing agent.

I decided to hit the road home. I started my car, not noticing the growl of its German-tuned, handcrafted inline six that once gave me so much pleasure. I had been hiding behind the dark tint of its windows in the parking lot at work. This was my job, my work, my ritual. My employment was my leisure, my excuse for leaving the house, my means of two hundred grand a year which supported my habit. Hiding in dark places was my real skill. My habitat was just as often the stench-filled stall of a gas station bathroom as it was my east side home with a view.

I began driving, feeling weaker with each passing milepost. I was struggling to stay alert and I knew the methadone I just drank had yet to deliver its potent punch. I also knew that when opiate addicts pass out, they often die. Methadone is supremely powerful in inducing sleep and shallow breathing. I had nodded off several times before, though always to wake up gasping for breath. When lack of oxygen doesn’t wake you up, you die. And as much as my life seemed worthless, I wasn’t ready to die. At least not today.

While driving home I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small orange prescription bottle with the label eroded from extensive handling. In it was a mixture of benzos, muscle relaxers, sleeping pills, speed, anti-psychotics—depending on my needs, of course. I dumped a small, tan pill into my hand. It was naltrexone. I had got it from a friend in rehab. Naltrexone is used to pull people out of a heroin overdose in emergency rooms. It blocks and flushes opioids from brain receptors. In other words, it flushes the heroin from your system and wakes you the fuck up when it has rendered you unconscious and not breathing. But it comes with a side-effect: it sends you into instant and terrible withdrawal. When I purchased the pills I was thinking of my wallet and my safety. Instead of that expensive trip to the emergency room, I’ll just take these when I know I’m about to go down, I thought. Leave it to an addict to have the remedy. Take too much of one drug, just counteract with another. Usually cocaine was the antidote to too much heroin—it keeps you alert. But coke wasn’t going to save me today. I swallowed the naltrexone.

Ten minutes later I was home. I told my pregnant wife that the clinic mistakenly gave me too much methadone and that I was about to pass out. She knew I was full of shit, but she also knew there was no point in arguing with a liar. I laid my dirty body on the white bedspread so perfectly made by her hands and asked her to keep an eye on me. She consented. Addicts have a way of spreading the symptoms of their disease. For the addict, the symptoms are lying, manipulation, health problems, emergency room visits, jail cells, and empty bank accounts. The symptoms for loved ones are depression, denial, enabling, and feigning ignorance. I lay down as my wife flipped on the TV.

Suddenly, I woke up. An hour had passed. Wow, I thought. That naltrexone saved my life. I feel sober. I should have been asleep for hours, potentially in the emergency room. Then I sat up. As I raised myself from the bed I felt a grimace. “I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, almost unconscious of my wife sitting in the rocking chair next to the bed—the one we’d bought for rocking the coming baby to sleep at night. I got up, walked ten feet to the toilet, and a freight train of pain hit me. It hit so hard I cried. I cried not like a baby, but like the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that supposedly pervades hell. If there was hell, this was it. I sat on the toilet hunched. Tears and puke filled the bowl my wife had rushed to me. Shit filled the porcelain bowl under my ass. Withdrawal is a sort of reversal of things, a chaotic unwinding and unraveling of body and soul. When you’re on dope you can’t shit, can’t feel, and sleep like a baby. Come off and you shit yourself, feel everything, and can’t sleep for weeks. Every nerve ending seems over responsive, like each one has a tooth and every tooth is infected. Withdrawal, though usually lasting a few weeks, is worst during the first four days or so, and comes on somewhat gradually. Naltrexone had effectively condensed what normally is drawn out over a few days into minutes.

I shivered profusely. A smattering of sweat droplets formed around the base of the toilet on the tile floor. My pores had become a shower of cold sweat. I felt like a dirty rag. I was the rag that had been used to soak up the filth of lies in my day-to-day living. But I wasn’t to be washed on the “gentle cycle.” I was to be purged of my filth, to be wrung out. I had to be rolled up like the dirty rag I was and twisted so that blackness spewed from both ends and liquid drained from every pore. The process was not subtle. It was 30 minutes of vacating pounds and pounds of filth from my body. In going through withdrawals naturally, this would normally take four to seven days. The naltrexone had condensed those days into minutes. I attempted to drink more methadone only to vomit it up seconds later. And I had no more heroin. I was fucked.

The quick evacuation of filth left a vacuum. I was not suffocating from dope anymore. I was starving for it, gasping for it like a scuba diver for air whose tank just ran thin. I was not surrounded by blackness. I was a black hole ready to swallow light. I had the determination to score my fix at the expense of any soul. All people and things were a means to an end. People became the excrement of my manipulation. In my day-to-day affairs, I left a trail of slime consisting of the lies I constructed to get my drugs and use them. Not soon enough, a trail of black-tar heroin would be burning across foil with the smoke filling my lungs.

I saw my wife. I didn’t care that she thought I deserved this, or that she had some pipe dream that I would ride this out and get clean. Despite my body screaming for dope I faintly sensed her hopes, because I could actually “sense” again. It didn’t matter though. I ran past my wife, grabbed my keys and ran for the door. She yelled, trying to stop me. I was already accelerating away in the Bimmer.

As I pulled out of the neighborhood I noticed green leaves on trees swaying gently in the summer breeze. The sky was magnificent blue. The world felt strange. It was alive and flowing. I hadn’t felt this in years. At one time, I would let the beauty of a moment like that envelope me wholly. Today it did not. To an addict, everything is dead, just as he is dead. I vaguely recognized that feeling of being connected to the earth, the universe, god, but I had not felt it in years. And though the feeling was sweet, my concentration was a slave to my pain and hunger for smack. To my brain, dope was necessary for survival, so I didn’t ponder beauty. I drove the line between two points: that of my house and my dealer.

I moaned out loud while I drove. I hunched and curled in my seat. I drove with my elbows, my knees, even my feet because I twisted and wrenched. I threw up again—in a cup—and then again. There wasn’t much left to come out now, except bile, thick like an egg yolk. I had the heater on full blast, but I was shivering. The 95-degree heat outside beating on my black car in combination with the heater blowing was just enough to keep me warm. I should have passed-out, but it made the ride more bearable. Even so, the 30-minute drive to the city seemed like a week. I cried, I twitched, I screamed and slapped myself. I even laughed deliriously for the thought of scoring soon. If it weren’t for my tinted windows I’m certain neighboring drivers would have called 911 to report an escaped insane asylum patient.

I finally scored—two grams of sticky, dirty, Mexican heroin. My fingers fumbled and shook to light that dope like a frostbitten man lighting a fire with his last match. The effects were not immediate. The naltrexone was still blocking my brain from receiving any pleasure from the drug. It took me an hour to smoke a gram and a half by a garbage dumpster in the parking lot of a dingy apartment complex. I finally felt the Comfort, and everything was right in the world again. I noticed nothing but myself.

The drive home was slow and relaxed. I had the slight sensation that one does after coming down from an adrenaline rush, that weak-in-the-knees, grateful-to-come-out-on-the-other-side-of-trauma feeling. Hell, I didn’t drive back home. I rolled. You know when you pass a mirrored building and the reflection of your car looks like a magic carpet rolling unfurled over asphalt? That was me for the hour drive back to Suburbia, America. Back to where everyone lives life for display. Back to that place where, on the surface, my life seemed to fit into that tiny box of accepted social behavior.

When I walked in the front door of my 3500 square-foot all-brick rambler, the proof of my personal worth to others, I pretended that nothing had happened. Sometimes nonchalance is more effective at manipulating than lying is. I calmly justified my actions to my wife reminding her how much hell she would have gone through to take care of me in such a state of withdrawal. I left out the part about the future hell she was going to endure to continue to live with me. The issue was dropped and suddenly that Saturday evening became like any other. We decided to head to my parents to visit and hang out for the evening.

The sun was hanging low in the sky casting an orange glow over the world. We were sitting on the front porch of my parents’ home when my wife’s labor pains started. I was still physically weak from being wrung out but I was numb with the heroin I had consumed. I escaped to the bathroom to use some more and then returned to the porch 10 minutes later. Being as this was our second child, my wife knew the baby was coming. We stayed a couple hours longer as the contractions grew closer then drove to the hospital.

It was about five hours later when my second daughter entered the world. It was July 30th, 2006. She was of course perfect and beautiful and had tons of gorgeous black hair. Her absolutely flawless little being reminded me of just how imperfect and full of flaws I was. I tried to make the moment real. I tried to comfort my wife during labor. I tried to appear as the close-knit, loving family to the visiting friends and family members. I tried but I failed. To myself I failed. To life I failed. To love I failed. There was no loving others when I couldn’t love myself. So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I got high to numb the shame and guilt, then publicly pretended to be the person that I thought I should be, or that everyone else thought I should be.

Two days later my wife and I and our two beautiful children returned to our whited-sepulcher life. We wanted a life of love and success, and on the outside it appeared we had this. But inside we lived with the death and decay and depression of drug addiction.