Drugs & Me: (Pt 4): Powerless...

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I was told by a doctor the next day that I had suffered alcohol poisoning, and I was lucky that it had not been fatal. My blood alcohol content had been 0.41; a 0.40 is typically when people slip into comas or, as the doctor had said, death.

                That night I went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It wasn’t my first time attending AA, but it was the first time I had entered the rooms with the realization that I might be, probably was, alcoholic. It’s funny, I’m able to remember that meeting now, even after five years and hundreds of subsequent meetings. I was slightly hungover, and the topic was something pertaining to “Life on Life’s Terms.” When it was my turn to share, I spouted off some nonsensical meanderings about my past trials & tribulations, but nothing really pertaining to the topic at hand. I wanted to rattle off all the bad shit that had happened to me. But I believe that’s a common happenstance among most newcomers: a kind of quasi- competition in the Top 10 Charts of Personal Suffering and Misery; who has the worst horror story involving drugs or alcohol; everyone trying to subtly one-up the last man’s sorrow. Well, that was me.

                It was when I got a sponsor and began working the 12 steps that I understood there were appropriate times to share my experience, and other times that were not so appropriate.

                I procured eight months of continuous abstinence from both drugs and alcohol, and it was a glorious eight months. I went to AA Conferences, I was the secretary for my home group, and I had a social life with sober people. Things at home were just as grand, too. I had slowly begun to regain the trust of my family. I actually had money in my pockets and in the bank. Though I was still living at my mom’s, she helped me to save for when I moved out again.

                I was in the middle of Step 4 when my balanced program began to falter. The fourth step is a searching and fearless, personal moral inventory. In layman’s terms, what that looks like is a person creates a list of people, institutions and principles they feel have wronged them, and record how and why they’re pissed off at said person or place, then those beliefs get flipped inside out, and put under a microscope and analyzed with a sponsor, to see where YOU were wrong in each of those situations. It’s not an especially jovial task, and it’s even more tedious to examine these instances and find out all the faults you have. Add to this my problem finishing things I start, and halfway through, I lost my steam. When it came to me sitting down and actually writing the damned thing, suddenly everything else needed taken care of first: the kitchen needed cleaned, the laundry needed done, the dogs needed bathed, etc. and so on.

                While I busied myself not busying myself working on my inventory, I was asked to be the chairperson for my home group meeting the next month. Before I could really think about it, I exclaimed, Yes! I’d chair it!

                I had the entire month to stew in my nerves over chairing that meeting. All my internal fears over my low self-esteem, my sense of inadequacy, came rushing back to me in torrents.

                The day I was to chair my first meeting, I was so pent up with dread I couldn’t stand it, and finally I asked a coworker if he had anything to help me. He went on a lunchbreak and brought me back two extra-strength Vicodin. So that night, right before I was to act as chairperson for not just any AA meeting, but my home group AA meeting, I threw eight months of sobriety down the proverbial tubes, and ate both of the Vicodin. Most people would say that was when my relapse happened, but in all actuality, my relapse started some time before the physical moment I took those pills. My program slipped when I stalled finishing my fourth step, and at the moment I was asked to lead the meeting a month prior, I had 30 days to lay the bricks for relapse.

                I took Vicodin four times that month, each time being moments before I sat at the head table of Southside Club to chair my home group Big Book study. When my month of chairing was over, however, I continued buying painkillers. At the house, I was even pleased to find several bottles of Vicodin in drawers and medicine cabinets.

                For a couple months, I had the opiate use under control. But because at that point I still had a conscience, I eventually came clean about it all. I started back at Step One, with a different sponsor this go round, and went to a private, inpatient treatment facility for a few weeks. I had some success staying clean for a short while, but the call from opioids was a persistent one that I could not keep ignoring.

                Though I tried to avoid those cravings, I succumbed, and for quite some time, I secretly consumed hundreds and hundreds of painkillers a month. There I was, back at square one, hiding my usage behind a metaphorical smokescreen. I even kept a faux sober date to make the act all the more convincing.

                It came tumbling down, the smokescreen evaporating, on a Superbowl Sunday. For breakfast that morning before church, I had downed a handful of Klonopin, after church for lunch I enjoyed a large handful of Vicodin. I told my mom I was going to a meeting, and she asked me if I’d stop at the market to pick up items for the game that night. I replied that I would of course do that for her. Instead of going to a meeting, though, I went to a buddy’s condo, where I smoked lots and lots of marijuana.

                When I arrived back at home, my mom gave me an odd look and asked where the cookie cake and other snacks were. I remember feeling slightly confused at the question; cookie cake? What the hell was she talking about? Then it came rushing back to me: the food for the Superbowl! I was told to pick some up, but all the benzos had made me forget 100-percent about going to the store. I made to spat out some quick excuse to try and assuage the words that I just knew were going to come from my mother, but I was not fast enough. My thoughts were panicky and felt caught in the muck & mire of my Klonopin-sloshed brain. Four words crept out of my mom’s mouth:

                “You’re high, aren’t you?” All I could do was nod in agreement.

                She had told me myriad times that if I messed up again, after the many, many times she had given me second chances, that if I came home again under the influence, I would have to leave. I didn’t even wait for her to say as much. I told her I would leave the next day.

*****

For a short time I lived with my father. He and I have a history that could fill encyclopedia’s A-Z, with special influence on volumes “B” (for betrayal), “G” (for grudge), and back to “A” (for asshole). But we looked past our past. He had his own personal demons, and I mine, and we didn’t allow them to clash. I didn’t stay with him long, and soon moved in with a friend from high school, and her boyfriend.

                Because I had no one to hide my drug usage from (in fact, my roommates, Janis & Larry, were quite the burnouts themselves), my addiction flourished under the watchful eyes of no one but myself. I didn’t have to sneak around or hide anything from anybody, and if my mom asked how I was doing, I would lie and say I was just peachy.

                The truth, however, was far grimmer. A depression more bleak and cancerous than I had ever dealt with before, swept over, and obliterated me. There is no exaggeration when I say I would cry myself to sleep every single night. I made a nightly ritual of getting drunk and putting on headphones to listen to a playlist on my iPod I had titled, “The Sads,” (consisting mostly of Cat Power songs (thanks Monte, ha)). Lyrics about broken hearts, drugs and sadness shot through the earbuds and echoed around my head while I would convulse in bed from weeping so deeply. I would piss in empty booze bottles because I didn’t want to leave my bedroom. I would continue to go out with Janis and Larry every so often, so they wouldn’t think anything was wrong, but I’d go to the bathrooms of the bars we frequented, and just break down. I would think of my family, of my mom mostly, I would think of past relationships. I’d think of everything I lost.

                But then an old coworker from a previous job opened up a whole new world to me, and I was sorely, sorely mistaken if I believed I had lost everything already, because I was about to learn what it truly meant, to lose it all...

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Drugs & Me: (Pt 3): My Own, Personal Friday the 13th...

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I grew out of crystal meth like a toddler grows out of his Oshkosh. “Uppers” were substances I found I could walk away from semi-easily. I didn’t like the comedown, the strabismus that seemed to plague me each time (I’d nearly always have to cover, or keep one eye closed whenever I would try to read anything while on tina), and I plainly grew tired of it.

                I went back to getting stoned off weed and drinking alcohol every night. At 22, I had still not had major run-ins with the law, or participated in criminal activities besides illicit drug use, but what was about to happen to me, set me up for the introduction to the love of my life: opioids. 
                I had finally moved out of my mom’s house into an apartment with a roommate named Vaughn. It was a fantastic setup, and I enjoyed being on my own. Vaughn worked as a bartender at a very, very classy joint, making more in one night shift than I would make in an entire week at my regular, full time retail job. We lived behind the Greene, going to happy hours often, and because Vaughn made so much more than me, he typically footed the bill.
                I had a routine schedule for how I drank. I worked first shift, and when I would come home to the apartment, and if Vaughn & I had no happy hour plans, I timed how much I drank, or I would make sure I had consumed X amount of beer in X amount of time, to ensure I had the proper buzz I wanted to feel. Usually this was one beer every 15 minutes for the first 60 minutes, and then two beers every 15 minutes for the next hour. By doing this, I steered clear of any hangovers, but maintained just the right level of inebriation. My taste was not discriminatory, and I savored quantity over quality: Milwaukee’s Best was my beer of choice; cheap and effective. After I finished with the beer every night, I’d retire to my bedroom and smoke pot until I passed out. I did this every single week night, and most certainly was always alone.
                Weekends, that ritual went out the window, and normally I’d be with friends. And on Thursday, March 12, 2009, my friend Lillian & I went out drinking at a local bar in Kettering called the Shroyer Inn. I gravitated towards low-key bars instead of the fancy lights and throbbing dance music of the clubs I went to as a teenager. I traded Top 40 Pop played by a DJ, for Guns & Ruses from a jukebox; places where moonshiners lurked in the shadows, and your friends were liquor bottles on the shelves behind the bar. 
                My drink was Long Island Iced Tea, and the Shroyer Inn made them strong. I was well on my way to double digits when I came up with the brilliant idea to buy some heroin. The twisted thinking I had told me, Hey! It’s not meth, so it’s cool!
                Lillian knew somebody, who knew somebody, who knew someone else, and I had syringes from my meth days, and a short while later, I was back at the apartment, alone in my bedroom, the syringe full of dope in my palm.
                I was incredibly, incredibly drunk, and I am unaware how I was even able to take the shot, and in fact it would have been so much better if I would have missed, or flat passed out first. But I didn’t miss, and while I did go unconscious, it was not because of the Long Islands.
                When I next opened my eyes, it was morning, and I could not move my body. My heart beat an allegro in my ears, and while I was thoroughly confused, I knew something was definitely wrong. I could barely breathe. It was labored, and it felt like trying to suck in oxygen from a tiny straw. And the only way I can describe how my body felt, was that it felt like the circulation was cut off everywhere. Imagine laying on your arm and it “falls asleep,” and you have to shake it to get the blood flowing again. Now apply that to every appendage, down to the tips of your phalanges, except when I tried to “wake” my body up, it was not working.
                Vaughn came into my room. He had heard my strained breathing and was concerned. I’ll never forget the look on his face; he was in shock because I was laying there in a mangled mess of limbs, contorted into a pile that human beings should now be contorted into. 
                He came over and helped me untangle my body, but I still had yet to gather the strength to lift my arms or legs on my own. Vaughn asked me what happened, but all I could muster between gasps of air was that I desperately needed water, and when he brought a red Solo cup to my lips, I almost couldn’t drink it. I saw his eyes look to the ground beside the bed, and then he asked me, “What drugs did you do last night?”
                I traced his line of sight, and saw what he had seen, what made him ask that question of me, and that cloudy confusion parted to let in a brief moment of clarity. It came rushing back to me as I looked at the syringe on the floor, a touch of blood at the base of the point. I had shot up heroin.
                I was taken by ambulance to the hospital on Friday, March 13. I remember telling the nurse when I first arrived that I needed to get well in a couple days, that I had to work on Sunday and I could not miss. Her answer was simple enough, and I quote her verbatim. Her words are ingrained in my memory: “You are very sick, Christopher. You are going to be here awhile.”
                I stayed in the hospital until I was discharged on April 10. I had never done heroin before, and because I was opiate naive, when I shot the dope, with all that alcohol in my system, it caused me to pass out. I had fallen onto my bed, with one of my legs tucked up and bent underneath my body. This cut off blood flow, causing my muscles to break down and release toxins into my blood stream. These toxins were too much for my kidneys, and they had shut down. The official diagnosis was Acute renal failure due to rhabdomyolysis.
                I was put through medical tests every single day. I was so swollen that I could barely even bend my arm to feed myself; my mother or a nurse often had to spoon-feed me like an infant. I felt like a sausage casing injected with too much meat. I was put on a liquid restriction, and only allowed a very small amount of water to drink per day. I don’t know if I can accurately convey how wretched it is to be thirsty, and denied anything to quench that impregnable thirst. My dreams were filled with images of waterfalls and swimming pools.

                And the dialysis was the worst of it. As silly as it may seem, all I knew of dialysis was that the character Shelby from Steel Magnolias was put on it, and her arms looked like hell. My catheter was not put in my arm, however, but ran directly into my heart. Three times per week, for four hours per session, my blood was siphoned out of me like a gas tank, and filtered through a machine to be cleansed, then pumped back into my chest. It was a nightmare.

                When I left the hospital, and my kidneys had—thank God—started back up again, I had to return multiple times a week to participate in physical therapy, to basically learn how to walk again. The foot I had passed out and was laying on had severe nerve damage.
                I was on so many medications, it looked like I was eating a handful of PEZ each morning, afternoon and night. I had my first taste of narcotic painkillers those few months, as I was prescribed 120 Percocet per month.
                When I was taken off the Percocet, I reverted back to drinking alcohol, but this time around, I did it in secret. I had moved back home with my family after my stint in the hospital, and even though my kidneys had restarted and I was off dialysis, I knew it was stupid to put another drop of booze in my system. The key idea here is that I knew it was insane to drink again. I had nearly died, had to file bankruptcy due to $188,000 in medical bills, and I was now drinking alone, and in clandestine. I had every reason and then some NOT to drink, but knowledge alone will not keep me sober.
                I drank at work, gulping wine from a thermos starting after my lunch hour, and chewing dozens of pieces of gum to cover up the smell. I drank at home alone in my bedroom. And one time, when my sister & I went to the movie theater to see The Lovely Bones, I had been drinking during the day as was usual, but then kept sneaking off “to the bathroom,” instead going to the bar to order double shots of vodka. I remember thinking, I don’t know who had the bright idea to put a bar in a movie theater, but praise Jesus they did!
                At that point I blacked out, and the events that followed are snapshots of what I can recall. I was belligerent in the theater; I scared my sister out of her wits. She didn’t know what was wrong with me, and after calling 911, I was carried kicking & screaming out of the theater to a waiting ambulance. In the ER I regained partial coherence. Surrounding me on all sides were doctors and nurses. The bright examination light above me shone like a beacon and stung my eyes. I had to squint to make out my mother standing beside me as well.
                Streams of salty tears ran down her cheeks from the islands of her eyes, and I thought of the song “Islands in the Stream.” She mouthed words I could not hear; the wetness on her face spoke enough.
                I shouted over and over that they should just “let me die,” that I “didn’t want to live!” My mom muttered more silent words. My hearing was closed off to all but my own sobs.
                And then... I vomited everywhere...


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Drugs & Me (Pt 2): The Crystal and Monte Years

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At a nightclub, I met a man. A man with whom I hit it off pretty well. His name was Monte, and without going into extraneous detail, I will just say we hit it off exceedingly well. When I think back to that particular moment, I sometimes want to slap myself in the face for not realizing what I subconsciously knew I was getting into: the taste of lighter fluid & industrial chemicals on his breath, masked by a scant trace of butterscotch, betrayed a habit he would reveal to me the next weekend. He lived in Columbus at the time, and invited me to come to his loft that coming weekend.
                Seeing as how it was Saturday night, I had the entire weekend to ruminate over how spending the night with Monte was going to go. He was 35 then, 17 years my senior, and he was absolutely beautiful. He had sleeves of tattoos on his arms, and a Bohemian style that I could totally dig. With brown hair & brown eyes, he was the dark-featured rebel cowboy, right down to the snakeskin boots he wore on his feet. His whole essence screamed urban hipster chic, long before the days being hipster was hip.
                And his place in Columbus was just as keen. He lived in an area called the Short North, on High Street. The irony of this is not lost on me. When I arrived, he was not home yet, and when he called to let me know he was picking up some beer for us, I thought, Good, that will go perfectly with the weed I brought.
                Monte pulled up in a jeep. He was even more handsome than I had remembered, wearing a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing the artwork I had admired when we first met. Nine Inch Nails blared through the speakers, and when he opened the car door to step out, Trent Reznor sang in his not-forgettable but not-spectacular voice, “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” I could see Monte smirking.
                You could be wondering how I remember minute details like this, down to what Monte wore ten years ago, and the songs playing in the background. My answer to that would be, it’s hard to forget the first person you really, really become enamored with. Also, I am painfully observant to begin with, and I saturate myself in my surroundings, and give life to my memories though words. A more relative reason would be that my meeting Monte led me down much darker pathways than meeting people at smoothie bars, and it affected my future in many ways.
                I fell in love with Monte’s loft at first sight. It spanned from the front of the building to the rear, and you could see all the way from one end to the other; there were no doors except to the bathroom and entryway. Remember, I disliked doors, especially closed ones? Here at Monte’s on High Street, there could be no closed doors, literally. I didn’t bother to think that a closed off mind could be hundreds of times more hurtful than a simple piece of wood.
                Monte didn’t have a television, he preferred music only, and when he turned on Tori Amos’ “Blood Roses,” my heart leapt. Tori Amos was, and still is, my favorite artist, and to hear the baroque notes of the harpsichord bounce off the walls of that high-ceilinged place, to get chills listening to Tori sing about “when chickens get a taste of your meat,” I longed more & more to find out all about this man. I could feel that the stratification of his soul ran deep, and I wanted to excavate each layer, one by glorious one.
                We drank and shot the shit, and I pulled out the pot I had. He told me he hadn’t smoked reefer in years, and I gained a little pride knowing I was the one to get him to do it again. But things turned a tad more serious.
                “Do you mind if I mix things up a bit?” he asked me. How could I deny him anything? He could have asked me to join him on a dive into an active volcano, and I would have said, When & where? So after I told him I didn’t mind, he went to the bedroom area of the loft and brought back a metal lockbox, smaller than a shoebox, but of the same general shape.
                When he opened the box, I saw there were a few stray tablets strewn about, a baggie containing something of a shard like substance, and a pipe, the likes of which I had never seen before. I was accustomed to bowls for marijuana, bongs, steamrollers; this was a basic looking object, with a long stem and a bulbous end resembling a gumball. The first thought I had was, Ohmygod, its crack! And if it had been crack, I was going to pounce out the door like grease popping in a frying pan.
                But when I asked him what it was, and he replied, “crystal meth,” I untensed dramatically. Pretty stupid, right? Why run from crack, but not meth? Truthfully, I knew very little about meth, but enough about crack to avoid it.
                I’d be lying if I said my interest was not piqued, and my eyes watched in rapt attention as he loaded the pipe with the tiny crystalline shards using the cap of a pen. He used a butane torch and let the pipe hover in the space just about the flame. He took a hit, and when he exhaled, the plume of thick smoke rushed out of his mouth like steam out of a locomotive.
                It was my turn. He handed me the pipe, but not the torch. “Here,” he said, “I’ll light it. It’s very easy to overheat and burn it all up. Just put your lips on the stem, and when I say so, gently inhale, and twirl the pipe in your fingertips.”
                I nodded in acknowledgment and, trying not to shake too much, I waited while he heated up the drug, until he indicated with a quick arch of his eyebrows, it was time for me to breathe in. The feeling was instantaneous. It was an absolute envelopment of seemed relaxation that overcame me entirely. As I let the vapor escape my mouth, that wondrous sense of peace continued to caress my whole body, and as I sat back on the sofa we were on, which now felt like a magic carpet from a fucking Disney movie (!), I noticed the poster hanging on the wall. It was a vintage looking diagram of the anatomy of a silkworm. I remember this, because that’s what everything was for me just then: silken.
                I smiled at Monte. We smoked much more of the meth together. We shot gunned it into each other’s mouths, and again I was reminded of how he tasted when we first met. Ah… so that’s what it was, that almost bittersweet flavor. It felt like we were reading each other’s souls over those hours. It’s arduous to try and explain the intense emotions I had for him. Imagine everything you ever desired, everything you ever believed would ideally complement you, and make you whole, all rolled up into a perfect package of physical form.
                We decided to go dancing, and before we left for an insanely busy and popular club, he gave me one of the tablets I had seen in his box of treasures: ecstasy.
                It was an evening of sweaty gyrations and more drug using, and I was experiencing a high that every drug I had done before could not begin to touch. When our night out had drawn to a close, our night in was just beginning, and since I did not set out to make this my Autobiography of Depravity, I will leave to the imagination what took place between those two satyrs that early, early morning, ten years ago.
                                                                                 *****
                The feelings I had for Monte were a one-way street: they were not reciprocated. It was heartbreaking to read an email from him several days later, after I had written him asking him when we could see each other again; in his message, he told me he was not available for anything, that he was addicted to crystal meth, and was basically, a big, hot mess.
                This did not deter me, however. In fact, while it killed me to find this out, I was determined to get close to him. This manifested itself into two entire years of abusing crystal meth. It may be a bit confusing, because it is just as taxing trying to explain it, but in my mind, how I was going to get to Monte again was by partying. I believed by venturing into his world, eventually serendipity would bump us together at some P&P gathering, and I could make him fall in love with me. Any shrink would tell you, I was just using Monte as my excuse to get high.
                P&P stands for “party & play,” the key letter in “party” being t and t standing for “tina,” which is slang for meth. I would log onto adult chatrooms, find men in Columbus who partied, and they’d come to pick me up in Dayton. Total strangers would scoop me up and we’d head back north, where I’d participate in raucous orgies of sex & drugs, with even more strangers. Some of the acts would make Bacchus blush. Inhibitions were nonexistent as the meth was smoked, the GHB was drunk, and the ecstasy was swallowed.     
                At bathhouses I reveled in the attention being a young buck brought me. There were free drugs everywhere, and there was nothing—and no one—I would not do. I remember one time when Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” came over the PA system, and I strutted down the hallways, wearing only a black jockstrap, high out of my damned mind, and completely loving every single second of it.
                Mind you, though, I still wondered about Monte incessantly. His image was never far from reach in my thoughts. He became a sort of sapient constellation that fueled my fervor, and my efforts to get closer to him were not totally fruitless. I found out about him in tidbits through others, gathering information like so many grains of sand. Everybody I encountered who knew him found him to be beautiful as well. His eccentricities did not end with banning television, no, I was told by one man that he once went to Monte’s loft and found that Monte had painted a picture using his own blood on a section of his wall. I was told I should forget about him; he was unreachable.
                The deeds I did while in my “meth years” are likely unspeakable to most. I hopped, skipped & jumped from house to house until the drugs ran dry, then hopped, skipped & jumped to the next. When I first injected meth, it felt like a ghost had passed through my body. It took my breath away, and at first I thought something had gone wrong. But no, that diminished quickly, and the buzz went straight for my groin. I would leave my house for weeks at a time, blitzing myself beyond recognition, then return to my mother’s accusatory questions: What were you doing up there for so long? Have you lost weight? I’d answer that the shirt I’d be wearing was just too big.
                I saw Monte two more times after the night we spent together. I will sometimes talk to him on Facebook. The exchanges are few and far between, and certainly always brief, but often they are poignant. Sometimes I think he may realize the profound effect he had one me, other times I believe I was just a blip on his radar. He lives in Georgia now, and is partnered with a man he’s been with for many years now. I have thoughts where I wonder where I’d be if I had never met Monte, or if I had told him I was not interested in him “mixing it up a bit”…
But these thoughts are  not lasting, for I know that the paths we walk are destined well before we are even aware we are travelling on them. If there had been no Monte, there would certainly have been an Austin, a Blake, a Mario, somebody there with the butterscotch breath and the crystalline looking-glass.


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