My Fair Junkie

by Amy Dresner

  As he shot speedballs, I snorted long, thick lines of coke off my big mirrored coffee table.

  “Why aren’t you shooting?” he asked me. “It’s so much better, and you use so much less.”

  Why wasn’t I shooting? That was a very good question, and I didn’t have a very good answer. Because… because I didn’t? Because I was afraid? Because it was taboo? All of these responses seemed weak in the face of this new, exciting prospective experience. Why not? I thought. Why not? Possibly the worst reason to do anything.

  “Okay,” I said quietly.

  He mixed up a concoction of cocaine and water in a spoon and drew it up in a syringe. He took the belt of my pink velour robe and tied it tightly around my upper arm. My veins bulged. He inserted the needle and then drew back. Blood shot into the barrel, and then he slowly pushed the plunger in. I watched in fascination and horror. My heart was pounding furiously. And then the coke hit me. The feeling was overwhelming. It was a strong rising flush, like you were about to have the biggest orgasm of your life while riding a terrifying roller coaster. Oh, my God. I get it now. And from that moment, I was a true junkie.

  For the next few weeks, this guy and I shot coke, drank milk shakes, and scored dope together while camping out at his place. My pants got looser and looser. He got sweatier and more paranoid. I would wake up to find him in his backyard armed with a gun and a flashlight, waiting for the cops to come arrest him. Cops who weren’t there, and, moreover, weren’t coming.

  I never shot heroin (though I smoked it once and promptly fell asleep) because I’m an upper girl at heart. Plus, I wasn’t ready for the commitment. I knew that with coke, you just slept it off for a few days. There was none of that kicking sickness. Though with the epilepsy I developed in 2001 from my meth abuse (I now have what numerous neurologists have described as “hyperactive lesions on my frontal lobe”), shooting heroin probably would have been a smarter bet. Shooting coke, with or without a seizure disorder, is dicey. That shit is dangerous: seizures, heart attacks, strokes, and that’s if you’re normal and healthy. Even people without epilepsy overshoot the mark and have convulsions. But I was deep in it now, and I felt invincible. Or maybe I just didn’t care anymore. Whatever, the result was the same: confident recklessness.

  The rich-kid junkie had been shooting me up this whole time. I was still the novice. He marked my syringe with Wite-Out on the tip so we wouldn’t share needles. This guy had been doing this for years. He knew all the tricks.

  One night, we scored some coke off a new dealer, and right after he shot himself up, he darted outside.

  “Hey. Wait. Hit me!” I demanded.

  “Wait a second!” he barked.

  I didn’t want to wait. We drug addicts aren’t good at deferring gratification.

  “Aw, fuck it. I’ll do it myself,” I said.

  I drew up the syringe and plunged it into my arm. Immediately, I slid off the chair and went into violent convulsions. Miraculously, I didn’t totally lose consciousness. As I thrashed about on the floor, I kept muttering, “I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.” I came to, and the rich-kid junkie was nowhere to be found. Turns out he was in the yard, throwing up and having a moderate heart attack. Yeah, this coke was no good.

  I wish I could tell you that I got clean after that terrifying episode. But I didn’t. The odd thing about being a drug addict is that if you overdose, you just chalk it up to experience and try to be more careful the next time. It doesn’t scare you into getting clean. If shooting coke was going to give me seizures, well, I’d just have to practice some harm reduction. A seizure, if you come out of it, will not generally kill you. What can kill you is if you go into status epilepticus, which is basically back-to-back seizures with no breather. Or if you seize in the shower, you could face-plant and drown in just a few inches of water. Or if you seize and hit your head, you could get a subdural hematoma and die. So head injury was my primary concern. Hey, I could shoot up while lying in a pit of pillows! But that limited me to the bedroom or the living room, and I really preferred shooting up in the kitchen. Hmmm… Wait! If shooting coke was a high-impact sport, I needed to wear protective gear! I remembered a red bike helmet that an AA friend who also had epilepsy had given me. It had a Grateful Dead sticker on the front. I hate the Dead almost as much as I hate bike riding, but whenever I felt seizurey or had been up for days getting high, I’d put the thing on. Yes, just skinny blond me in a long seventies polyester nightgown and a red bike helmet. Looking back now, it seems ridiculous and deadly, and it was. It was passive, nonchalant suicide.

  I really liked drugs. Let me correct myself: I loved drugs. I just didn’t like the consequences. Any drug addict who says they hate drugs is a liar. As the line goes, you know what I liked about drugs? Everything. With drugs, you can circumvent all the productive work and fulfilling relationships that you’d normally need in order to have a feeling of wholeness in your life. Drugs let you be bored and lonely, broke and homeless, and still plug right into feeling good. I’m lazy. I liked that.

  Now that I was officially a junkie, it was a whole new hell. You don’t just become addicted to the drug. You become addicted to the entire ritual of shooting up. There is something soothing about a repetitive series of events, especially one that you know is the route to the high. I used to feel high just waiting to meet the dealer. Your brain knows what’s coming. It’s no dummy.

  One of my most frightening memories is me crouched in the bathroom sink, the belt of my robe tied around my throat like a tight scarf. I was leaning into the mirror, poking a needle into a swelling neck vein. Spray marks of blood went onto the ceiling. There were already brownish-red splatters on the wall. I tried to wipe them off with a wet rag. I was noticeably trembling, fumbling, in a hurry to shoot myself up again. When you shoot coke, you get an immediate rush, but it’s gone within minutes, so you have to shoot up again and again and again. Feed the monkey. Every twenty minutes. I had become a human pincushion. I had track marks everywhere. I tried to shoot up in my feet, breasts, groin. Nowhere was sacred.

  Shooting up is a loner activity. It is not social. You can’t show up at a party with a six-pack of beer and some syringes. I did, however, have one guy, this young Southern kid who was a self-proclaimed drunk and crackhead, that I’d get loaded with. I’d haul over to his apartment, and we’d get high together and have mediocre sex. However, even he was tripped out by my new routine of shooting up, which I found both odd and hypocritical.

  “I can’t watch you do that,” he said one night.

  “You’re a fucking alcoholic and a crackhead and you’re tripping about this. Really?”

  “It’s just kind of scary.”

  “Well, this is what I’m into now. So either you’re cool with it or…” I moved toward the door.

  “Nah, nah… it’s cool.” There was an awkward silence. He looked at me and said, “Wanna fuck?”

  “Sure. Let me just shoot up first.”

  I was sitting on his bed in a black bra and jeans, tying off. He stood over me in his boxers, shirtless, drink in hand, watching. I injected the coke and lay backward as the intense feeling rushed through me. Every time you shoot coke, you feel like you just might die. But then you’re dragged back from the brink, just in the nick of time. And that’s half of the fun: taunting death. Every junkie will tell you that.

  A few months later, I was shooting coke in my kitchen. By myself. Party of one. Spoons with white residue and used syringes littered the canary-yellow countertop.

  There were blood splatters everywhere.

  I’d been up for three days. I was shaking. I took the pink tie of my robe and wrapped it tightly around my slender upper arm. Veins bulged. Most were purple and swollen from overuse. I tried to hit a vein in my forearm but, as usual, it “rolled,” meaning it moved from side to side, so I went back to “Old Faithful.” This was the one fat vein in the crook of my elbow. I shook as I pushed the needle into it. My nerves were shot, and I promptly pierced r
ight through the vein and scratched the bone.

  I shuddered, attempting to shake off the feeling. Then I tried a bit higher up, got in, registered, and shot. My legs immediately wobbled beneath me. I was having a seizure. I crouched down to steady myself, yelling at the seizure to go away. I’d read somewhere that you could scare a convulsion away, like a ghost. I kept repeating the mantra, “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay.” My whole body quaked, but I did not lose consciousness. And because of that, I considered it a win. I mean it wasn’t a “real” (AKA grand mal) seizure. But the convulsion had fucked up my rush. I figured it was just too strong of a shot. I mixed another dose with more water, shot up again, and promptly had a second seizure. When I came out of that convulsion, I had my “moment of clarity.” I saw my future. This was going to end badly for me. I was going to die or, worse, end up zipping around in a wheelchair like Eli. I just knew it. I had to get clean. This “thing” that I thought I needed to be able to live on the planet was going to kill me. I wasn’t going to be one of those old junkies. I was going to be that thirty-eight-year-old woman who died alone in her kitchen because she couldn’t stop getting high. Fuck. That.

  Just then, I heard somebody calling my name from a ways off. Great timing for a visitor. But then I remembered that I had called a sober guy to please come help me right before I had done those last two shots. I’d seen him around the rooms for the past twenty years. I heard my name again, and I went and looked out the window, and there he was.

  “Why didn’t you buzz the doorbell?” I asked.

  “I did. For twenty minutes. I was about to leave.”

  “Oh. I didn’t hear. I just had a seizure.”

  “Let me in,” he demanded without a beat.

  He entered, all black ski cap, big leather jacket, calm.

  “Hi,” I said sheepishly.

  “This house smells like death,” he announced.

  “Ewww. Really?”

  He looked at me and said, “You know, this was one of the moments where it could have gone either way: you could have lived or I could have left as I was about to and you could have had another seizure and died. I can just hear it now: ‘Remember that girl, Amy? Well, she overdosed and died yesterday.’”

  I just stood there, nodding, filled with shame.

  “Do you want my help?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “You have more shit?”

  “Yes, it’s in the kitchen.” He followed me into the kitchen, and I reluctantly handed him four small bags of coke—about $200 worth.

  “We’re gonna flush it.”

  “Dude, that’s a couple hundred bucks’ worth. Can’t we sell it?”

  He flashed me a reprimanding look and walked into the bathroom, and I heard the toilet flush. The sound alone pained me. I couldn’t watch. It would be like watching a bonfire of money and pleasure.

  “I think your kitty would appreciate it if you cleaned his box,” he said, returning to the kitchen.

  I nodded. “Does it smell? I can’t smell. I’m congested because—”

  “You could have more shit and not be telling me,” he said.

  “I don’t. That’s all. I swear… Can’t I do one last shot?” I pleaded again.

  He raised an eyebrow at me, and I sighed, and then we poured out the last spoonful of my water-cocaine mixture.

  “Okay… now… You got more rigs than these?” he asked.

  “Yep.” I showed him my stash, and we filled up a bag with more than thirty used and unused syringes. He took the bag out to his truck.

  When he came back in, he said softly, “Let’s clean up your kitchen a little bit.”

  We wiped down the counters in silence.

  “Let’s see your arms. Whaddya do?” he asked as he gently grabbed my forearms to inspect the damage. “You suck at this, you know that? What a fucking mess.”

  I was quiet, with big, penitent eyes.

  “Well, it doesn’t look too too bad. We’ll know in a day or two if you’ve got blood poisoning or staph,” he continued.

  I kept my head bowed down, like a little girl who has been naughty.

  “No more getting high tonight, right? Can you sleep? Just try. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said mechanically. I was coming down from my high. My head was throbbing from the seizures. I was hungry. My mouth was like cotton.

  “Call me in the morning.”

  A hug and he was out the door. I closed the door behind him and locked it. He became my sponsor for the next two years.

  The following day I wrapped my purple-spotted arms in Ace bandages and went to an AA meeting. It was in the lower bar of a big cheesy metal club on the Sunset Strip. There, hipsters talked about the joys of sobriety while staring at rows of pretty colored bottles behind a low bar. I was skinny and trembling, wearing a parka in the summer and shivering from the snow still coursing through my veins.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I’m sweeping the Santa Monica Boulevard route today with some young Mexican kid named Carlos. I brush the leaves and cigarette butts into a big dustpan, and he trails behind me with a huge trash bag that I dump these gutter treasures into.

  I’m happy today. I’ve had an epiphany about my community labor. Last night, I was watching some documentary on Netflix, and this black preacher from Georgia said something like, “The trial that you’re experiencing has nothing to do with what you’ve done. But it has everything to do with who you’re going to become.” Boom. Yes. That was it. Holy shit. I realized at that moment that community labor could be the best thing that ever happened to me. It could be the best thing or the worst thing, and it was my choice. This court-ordered 240 hours had to be done, so I could be miserable about it or I could find something good and worthwhile about it… aside from not going to jail.

  When I was seven, my mom asked me why I didn’t put the dishes in the dishwasher, and my answer was “That’s what maids are for.” She was horrified. But I got away with that attitude and much more as the years went by. When you grow up spoiled, everything is given to you, so you never learn to do things for yourself. And after years of that, you actually can’t. It’s like muscles. If you don’t use them, they atrophy and die. Your learned ineptitude becomes crippling. On top of that, it’s impossible to have pride in something that you didn’t earn. So here I am at forty-two and I have nothing to show for it and no idea how to achieve anything. All I have is years of dependence and empty blowhard entitlement. I thought the rules didn’t apply to me. I thought I was special, exempt.

  Evidently the Beverly Hills court system and fate had colluded to make sure those days were over and that I would meet my destiny on the road I had taken to avoid it. Dodging hard work? Here you go, girl. Having trouble completing things you start? Complete this or go to jail. Need humility? Welcome to a month of being scorned and ignored by everybody except for shit-faced hobos.

  This is fucking great. I’d finally develop a work ethic. I had always known that anything worthwhile took time and effort. But I had been afraid to do things I wasn’t immediately good at. I didn’t want to look foolish. I didn’t have the faith that I would or could get better. And as I’ve said before, I was lazy. I had always taken the easy way out. My addiction was a symptom of that. I didn’t want to feel bad. I didn’t want to do the work to make myself happy. I wanted to feel numb or good 24/7, and drugs let me do that.

  I would expunge the guilt I had for being a bad wife. I would shed my entitlement. I’d meet new people. I’d get the lean, sun-kissed castaway look everybody in L.A. is vying for. This is like Barry’s Bootcamp and a Tony Robbins seminar all rolled into one.

  So I’m sweeping up cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and condom packets on Santa Monica Boulevard, just in the zone, singing Steve Winwood’s “The Finer Things”: “The finer things I feel in me. The golden dance life could be…”

  To an outsider, I must seem insane—or even high—so happily crooning away as I sweep trash and leaves from the gutter. I
just pay attention to the way my hands feel gripping the broom, the sun beaming down on my face, the muscles in my arms aching, the layered smell of the city streets. There is nothing to figure out right now. Just sweep. Sweep the leaves, Amy. For somebody who lives in their head and is essentially terrorized by their thoughts, this is a sweet reprieve. Just to be in your body, mindless. And when I get home tonight, I’ll be so tired that I won’t have the energy to go on my usual mental jaunt—the “greatest hits” tour of my worst fuck-ups and missed opportunities of the last few years.

  I have a dustpan full to the brim of trash and leaves. I have no Carlos.

  “Carlos? Come on, man! Keep up.”

  “Hold on, girl. This man needs directions.”

  I look a few feet behind me, and he’s talking to some guy in a suit. He’s trying to help the guy find an address on the street. I drop my broom on the ground and mop my sweaty face with my forearm, as my hands are covered by cheap plastic gloves. Fuck, it’s hot. I look over at Carlos and the guy he’s talking to. Wait… he looks familiar. I squint and wrack my brain. Oh, my God! It’s Michael. He’s in AA. I fucked him! Like, eight years ago.

  I turn my back and look down. I’m mortified. I jokingly think about going up to him and saying, “Hey, it’s Amy. Remember me? I just got out of a bad marriage, jail, and rehab. Aren’t you bummed you didn’t stay on this ride?” But of course I don’t. I just wonder what it must be like to be able to stay on track for any length of time. If I had, where would I be now?

  I met Michael in 2005. I had been sober for almost nine months, but my epilepsy had become rebelliously active again. I had just had another grand mal seizure after going on a new depression medication. For an epileptic with major depression, getting the dosage right is a real balancing act, because antidepressants can lower an epileptic’s seizure threshold. You don’t want to be undepressed but seizing, or seizure-free but suicidal. Medicating is an art, not a science. There’s a lot of trial and error involved—which is not exactly reassuring when your life’s at stake.