by Amy Dresner
I had yet another dealer who was a skinny homeless kid who sold both meth and his body on Hollywood Boulevard. No car, got around on Rollerblades.
I got ripped off numerous times. I’d stupidly give someone money to go get drugs, and they would never come back. Or I’d accidentally fall asleep when a dealer was at my house, and I’d wake up and whaddayaknow? My money and my drugs were gone. I was really naïve and out of my league. I pretended to be a tough girl, but I was anything but. One time, Spider and Joker, my Mexican gangster dealers, came over to my apartment to sell me some meth.
“It’s good shit. This batch is strong, homes,” Spider said.
“Cool,” I answered excitedly as I put a chunk in my glass pipe and fired up my mini blowtorch.
Then one of them pulled out a silvery black pipe.
“Hey, guera, do you know anybody who’d want to buy this?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” I said, exhaling white smoke like a dragon.
“It’s a silencer. A gun silencer.”
“Ummm… yeah. I’ll ask around, but nobody springs immediately to mind.” I tried to act cool, but inside I thought, I’m gonna die!
I would dumpster-dive and find old furniture and stay up all frenzied night refinishing it. Sometimes the depravity and degradation of my life would seep below the high of the meth, and I would lie in the bathtub for hours, crying, smoking speed off tinfoil, Nirvana on loop.
After I’d been smoking speed for a while, I noticed that most of my dealers shot it. Why? It must be better. I wanted to try, but they all discouraged me.
“It ruins life for you. You won’t be able to enjoy anything ever again,” one said. “Not puppies or sunsets or flowers. You won’t feel pleasure anymore.”
I wanted to say I wasn’t that fond of puppies or sunsets or flowers, anyway. And I was already a depressive. Pleasure wasn’t that big a force in my life. But I didn’t say shit.
The O.J. trial was happening at this time, and lucky me, my phone number was one digit off from Johnnie Cochran’s office number. This was pre–cell phones, so I’d come home and there’d be multiple messages on my answering machine for Mr. Cochran: “Johnnie, how dare you use Hitler in your closing argument!” or “Mr. Cochran, I want to thank you for the incredible job you are doing defending our brother, O.J. This case is a racist travesty…”
I was letting some actor kid, Pete, crash with me. He was mid twenties, like me, probably good-looking, but it was hard to tell because he was so strung out on meth. He looked perpetually dirty, hair unkempt, pants falling down. He would stay awake for so long that he’d fall asleep sitting up. He made money by sneaking into old buildings that were abandoned or being renovated and stealing copper and old glass doorknobs and then selling the stuff. He had a shitty old white pickup, and the truck bed was filled with junk—junk he’d found in the trash, junk he was trying to peddle, junk he’d stolen from other drug addicts. Eventually, he started getting small royalty checks—$8.24 or whatever for reruns of shows that he’d acted on. I never asked him when he’d started having his mail forwarded to my place, nor about his prior acting career. Tweakers never ask each other what their life was like before. Life before tweak is like an alternate universe, a taboo time capsule that, essentially, ceases to exist. It is too depressing to think about what your life had been like or could be like if you hadn’t fallen down into the black hole that is meth.
One day somebody called for “Johnnie’s office,” and Pete took the call and pretended to be Cochran. The woman on the other end of the phone was so thrilled to be talking to the famous attorney that Pete made a plan with her to go bowling or golfing or something… I was too busy smoking speed out of my glass pipe and laughing to know for sure. I just remember him saying, “Thank you, thank you” a lot. Eventually, Pete met a woman, an older mother of three—also a tweaker—and they moved into his Orange County storage unit together. Ain’t love grand?
On more than one occasion, I was convinced I had bugs in my skin, which can be a side effect of meth. But one of the gutter punks in S.F. had had scabies, so the idea that I actually had bugs in my flesh wasn’t that far-fetched. I would feel things crawling on me, like the lightest invisible feather, and I would scratch ferociously, and black spots would appear on my skin. I collected the black flecks that I dug out of my arms and belly and put them on a napkin and went to see a dermatologist. He concluded that it was just “debris.”
“What the fuck? I never had ‘debris’ coming out of my skin before,” I said. I failed to mention that I never had been a raging drug addict before, either.
I saw a psychiatrist and tried to swindle a prescription out of her for some pharmaceutical speed. I figured it would be stronger and definitely cleaner than the crank I’d been scoring. I told her I was lethargic, had ADD, possibly narcolepsy, anything I had read in the Physicians’ Desk Reference that should or could be treated with amphetamines. She was suspicious but gave me some slow-release tablets and sent me on my way. The slow-release tablets were useless. You couldn’t get a rush. I went back for a second round. She quickly saw me for what I was and suggested I go to AA. I suggested she go fuck herself.
I recounted the experience with the shrink to my father. I was twenty-five at the time, and I had not been to AA yet. I told my father, “I’d rather die a junkie than go to those creepy meetings.” So, desperate and running out of options, my dad made an appointment for me to see an “addiction specialist.” This “specialist” interviewed me for about an hour and deemed me an “atypical addict.” Hah. Fooled some “professional” again. I was high in the session and talked circles around the man. I rationalized my drug use to him as self-medication for an innate mood disorder. I came in prepared with loads of studies citing amphetamine use for medicating severe depression and borderline personality disorder. He bought it.
This entire time, I was seeing an expensive Brentwood therapist once or twice a week, paid for by my dad. My dad had chosen him specifically because he was known among the L.A. therapeutic community to be “very tough” on addiction. I was high the whole year I was in therapy with him. I’d usually snort speed in the bathroom in his office building right before my session. Not only did I never get better, but he never noticed I was on drugs. Or, if he did, he didn’t confront me about it. We talked about my depression. And, sure, I was depressed. But how much of it was due to the fact I was smoking a teener of crystal meth every thirty-six hours, we will never know.
I was absolutely mesmerized by the drugs. You know those tiny little tins of Tylenol you can get at 7-Eleven or the airport? Well, I had taken one of those and removed the red and white paint with paint thinner. I lined the inside with holographic sticky paper and glued a small tin skull on the front. I knew I was addicted to poison, to death, but why not make it a little stylish?
My drug habit was expensive… at least $170 every two days. My “sorry, I misbudgeted” wasn’t flying with my dad anymore, so I started selling speed. I bought a tiny scale and some plastic bags. Meth is cheaper in bulk, so I’d buy a teener (one-sixteenth of an ounce) or an eight ball (one-eighth of an ounce), sell enough quarters (quarter-of-a-gram bags) to break even, and then have the rest of the drugs for myself. I did have a stream of weird raver kids knocking on my door 24/7, but it was a small price to pay to get high for free. I was always up anyway.
As my parents sensed me deteriorating both physically and mentally, they each called me daily to urge me to go into rehab. I always refused, but I could feel the ride was ending. I’d heard an old druggie adage: You know why there are no old speed freaks? Because they’re all dead.
My mother came to visit, but I knew she was really on a recon mission. The day she arrived, I hadn’t gotten high in two days, and I was bedbound and gray. My mother stocked my refrigerator and cleaned my little studio apartment, which I gather was beyond disgusting. Tweakers are notorious for getting high and cleaning things or tinkering with electronics. A few lines in, they’re taking apart st
ereos or feverishly scrubbing the grout in the bathroom with a toothbrush. I’ve never been into cleaning, and that didn’t change when I got high. It turns out that being raised by maids, as I was, doesn’t make you grateful and neat. It makes you spoiled and messy. So I was the dirtiest speed freak around.
As soon as my mother flew home to Santa Fe, I was right back on the pipe. One afternoon, I was in the market a few blocks from my place. I had been up for about five days straight. I grabbed my dietary staples—a large bottle of Mountain Dew and a Caramello bar—and headed toward the register. That was the last thing I remember. Next I knew, I was on a gurney in an ambulance.
“What the fuck?” I tried to sit up, but I was strapped down.
“Calm down, miss,” the paramedic said.
“Can you tell me what day it is?” another paramedic asked me.
“What?” I felt confused, foggy.
“Can you tell me who the president is?”
“Of course,” I snorted.
“Who is it?”
I drew a blank.
“Have you done any drugs tonight?”
“Yeah… obviously some really shitty ones, because here I am!” I said defiantly. And with that, we were off to the hospital.
Doctor’s guess: a massive seizure. They did a head CT scan, made me choke down some charcoal for a possible overdose, and released me.
When you are a drug addict, you know that you will eventually have to pay the piper. You can run for a while, but there will be a point when you have pushed things too far. You can’t really fuck with Mother Nature for that long. Eventually, she’ll take your head and slam it to the ground and remind you who’s boss in this game called life.
Back in my apartment, I called my dad and quietly said, “I’m ready to go into rehab.”
“I know. I’m already on my way down.” He’d had a paternal premonition.
I agreed to rehab, sober living, everything. Whatever it was, yes.
My father was so frightened by my speed addiction and so disgusted with me that we couldn’t be in the same room together for ten minutes without getting into a heated argument. So my stepmother, at the time, flew into town. (I think it was wife number three. There would be a fourth marriage, which would also end badly.) She and I checked into a tiny hotel on La Cienega. I kicked in that hotel for a week, sweating profusely, too weak to get out of bed, completely delirious. Most of the time, I just slept. I was so tired. Almost two years of staying awake had taken a toll on me.
Once I was physically off the stuff, the mental detox began. That was the hardest part. Speed sucks you into this weird netherworld of hyperactivity and perceived synchronicity, which is very magical, inviting, and hard to shake. When you’re on speed for days at a time, you start to see “signs” everywhere, hidden messages about what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go. You feel like you’re really plugged in, wise to some mystical secret, in line with the universe. Of course, it’s all just delusion, the beginnings of psychosis, really. Even knowing this, life without methamphetamine seemed dull and pedestrian and exhausting.
I was sent to a “dual diagnosis” treatment center for two grueling months. “Dual diagnosis” is the clinical term for unlucky fucks who, like me, are double trouble because they have mental illness (or a personality disorder) as well as substance abuse issues. The place was very institutional, with linoleum floors, pale blue walls, heavy metal doors, and fluorescent lighting. There were some other drug addicts there, but the majority were seriously and chronically mentally ill. During my time, a variety of people checked in and then checked themselves out: a depressed woman with lupus; a twenty-something Swedish heroin addict who wore a really bad wig; a teenage Iranian crackhead from Tennessee who was already brain-damaged from the drugs he’d done; a skinny manic-depressive kid who didn’t think he needed medication; a young, pretty-boy rich kid from Brentwood with anger management issues; a quiet depressive girl with a big moon face who trembled and had had multiple sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. She ran away from the center almost weekly. She and I instinctively avoided each other.
The depression and rage that descended upon me once I got clean were monumental. I had screaming matches with my therapist, a megalomaniacal, short, bald Jew. I kicked chairs across the room and threw frightening tantrums. Bizarrely, he seemed to delight in goading me during group therapy. I was by far the most melodramatic of the patients (the others were too shy or too medicated), and I always provided a provocative starting point for discussions.
This therapist’s big thing was cognitive behavioral therapy: Don’t wait for the feelings to change. Act and then the feelings will change. The way he saw it, the key to everything was knowing who you were, because then nobody could have any power over you. He explained it this way: “I mean, I’m a short guy—five foot six. If somebody calls me a ‘midget,’ I’m not hurt, because I know I’m not a midget. If I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t a midget, then I’d get upset.” He had a point. We really only get triggered by things we know (or fear) are true. I was afraid people would see that I was irreparably broken, ugly, unlovable. I don’t remember much else of what he said, but I do remember that.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Terry and I drive to the small park in the valley where Brendan’s memorial is being held. Despite my twenty-plus years in and out of the program, I have not been to many memorials. I’ve been lucky that most of the people I’m close with are still alive, despite doing their damnedest to kill themselves. And I feel weird being at this memorial: not just because I fucked somebody who’s dead now, but because I fucked somebody who’s dead now and we didn’t end on the best terms. Would he even want me here?
I see Amanda, my hooker roomie from treatment. We hug.
“This must be so weird for you,” she says.
“It’s pretty surreal. I’m not going to lie… You still in treatment since your relapse?”
“Yep. So lame.”
“How’s your roommate this time?”
“Not as cool as you.”
“Good answer.” I smile.
The memorial was organized by Brendan’s men’s AA stag meeting so it’s 98 percent men. To be fair, Brendan had a “problem” with hookers. I was really the only woman he’d been sleeping with who wasn’t a pro, and from the look of the crowd, pros don’t go to johns’ memorials.
There was a big picture of Brendan on a stand—an acting headshot, no less. It is L.A. And for some reason, they are videotaping the whole service for his parents.
Various people get up and speak. More than one says, “He died struggling to ‘get’ this thing.” I have on big eighties Playboy sunglasses—very funeral appropriate—but I’m wearing them so nobody can see my eyes rolling. I get that this is an AA memorial, but does the entire focus have to be on this guy’s inability to get sober? Okay, so he died of alcoholism, but at no other memorial do people harp on why the person died. Imagine a similar service for a person who died of, say, lung cancer: “Well, he tried hypnosis and Chantix and the patch, but fuck, man, he just could not quit smoking.” Or how about AIDS? “I warned him to use protection, stay out of those bathhouses, get off Grindr, and not share needles, but he wouldn’t listen. He hated condoms and just loved to fuck.” Of course that would be atrocious and in very bad taste. And I feel the same way about this.
His myriad of sponsors from his many different twelve-step programs—GA (Gamblers Anonymous), SAA (Sex Addicts Anonymous), SLAA, AA—mention that he “didn’t want to do the work” and, especially, how “he couldn’t be honest.” One even mentions his love of hookers. Really?
I turn to Terry. “You gotta be kidding me! His parents are from the Bible Belt!”
I get up and walk away from the crowd to smoke, muttering to myself, “Outrageous. Pompous AA fuckers…”
I come back just in time to hear the kicker—when one friend says, “I’m glad it wasn’t me.” Nice! Sorry, but I have never heard of anybody coming back from Afghani
stan after watching their buddy be blown to smithereens and saying, “Better him than me.” If anything, they have survivor guilt.
Terry and I get into the car, and I am absolutely fucking livid.
“That was so fucked up. That memorial should have been about what he did right in his life: his enthusiasm, how alive he was, his passion, his humor, his wit—not how he liked to gamble, bone, and drink.”
I rummage around in my purse for my stupid vape juice to fill up my even stupider vape contraption. I notice my hands are shaking from rage.
“And that one asshole reading from the Big Book?” I continue. “Oh, my God. I really thought I was going to hurt him.”
“Why didn’t you get up and say something?” Terry asks.
“What was I going to say? Oh, yeah…‘Brendan and I were both comics and sex addicts and we fucked each other senseless. It’s nice to be here’?”
The next morning, I’m doing community service, and I’m sweeping a corner near a taco stand when I spot a syringe. We are specifically instructed that if we see a syringe not to pick it up. The crew boss must come take a picture of it, document it, and dispose of it.
Before going to find the supervisor, I bat the thing around on the sidewalk with my broom. The syringe looks old. The markings are worn off. But there’s residue in it. I get a weird rush: nausea and longing.
I flash back to ten years ago, being alone in my quaint deco apartment after my second stint in rehab. I was doing coke to a sound track of the Twilight Singers, wondering who I could get high with. I cracked open my rehab-supplied Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book. In the front, like a high school yearbook, were sweet inscriptions from fellow clients along with their phone numbers. I used my deductive reasoning to decide which among them would already have dropped the ball and be down to party. I picked a handsome rich-kid junkie—a chronic relapser—and picked up the phone. Bingo. Within a few hours, he was at my house with cocaine, heroin, and syringes.