Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict

by Joshua Lyon

  Zoe’s crowd wasn’t so into painkillers. They liked pot and sometimes cocaine, and what they discovered was that the ever-present drug dealers at their school would trade their wares for the Vicodin the kids could steal from their parents. A bottle of Vicodin was good for a quarter ounce of weed in trade.

  “The kids who actually did the pharm drugs were the really fucking annoying popular kids who didn’t want anyone to think they were stoners,” Zoe remembers. “The guys who did them were the jock guys, and the girls, well, they were the girls who were stealing their moms’ diet pills in junior high.”

  Zoe wasn’t exactly part of the popular crowd (she had become enemies with a classmate who was the daughter of a famous rock star), but when the movie Clueless came out, she thought it was a fairly decent representation of her Beverly Hills high school and the rules of its drug hierarchy. “The movie is obviously exaggerated,” she says, “but there’s this part in it where they say something about how it’s okay to smoke a doobie once in a while, but if you do it every day you should go hang out on the grassy lawn area with the kids playing hacky-sack. But the fucked-up thing is, the girls who felt that way, the Gucci-wearing bitches who would skip school to go to a Fred Segal sale, felt it was fine to steal Daddy’s prescription pain pills. And that’s because those drugs didn’t have the same stigma attached to them. We all saw our parents taking them.”

  Zoe’s own parents were divorced, and when she was seventeen, her stepfather died from a blood clot during a routine surgical procedure. On the day of the funeral, Zoe’s mother was having a melt-down and sent her to pick up her Valium prescription from the drugstore. On her way back home, Zoe was hit from behind by another car. Her car was totaled. An ambulance came, but Zoe refused to get in it because she needed to get her mom’s Valium back to her and make it to the funeral.

  When Zoe woke up the next day, she was in severe pain. She stopped by her dad’s house and mentioned it to him. He handed her a Vicodin, but she waited to take it until she got back to her mom’s house. Her body didn’t react well to it, and twenty minutes later Zoe was passed out cold on her mother’s kitchen floor.

  It was the last time she had taken Vicodin before being diagnosed with cancer. She had just turned twenty-three and had what she thought was the flu, but after she got better, her lymph nodes remained swollen. After a few months and several misdiagnoses, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her disease had progressed to stage 2, which means that the cancer is no longer confined to a single group of lymph nodes, such as those in the spleen, but has invaded two or more sites on one side of the diaphragm, the major muscle used for breathing.

  Her first surgery involved cutting open her left shoulder above the clavicle to biopsy the lymph nodes. When the pathologist’s report confirmed that cancer was present, she began five months of chemotherapy.

  “The chemo was the worst for me,” she says. “The nausea wasn’t bad because they give you a ton of pills, but my sense of smell became so heightened, I could only eat really bland things that had no scent. My hair fell out almost immediately, but I took control over that myself and had a friend shave my head. What was horrible for me was this thing called a Port-a-Cath. It’s this device that they have to surgically insert inside you to deliver the chemo. The chemo needle is incredibly thick, and I started having major panic attacks every time. I’d have to sit there with this giant needle sticking out of my chest for three hours. And then the last time I had chemo, the needle didn’t go in far enough. It leaked and burned a hole through my chest.”

  Zoe didn’t realize it had happened until she got home and took a shower. She had noticed that the area where the catheter had been was looking red and swollen, and after her morning shower, as she was drying herself off, a chunk of skin the size of a silver dollar came off in the towel, revealing the catheter underneath.

  After that, Zoe switched to radiation treatments and eventually covered up the catheter scar on her chest with an orchid tattoo. You can barely see the chemo mark now.

  Over the course of Zoe’s cancer treatment she had several different surgeries. Besides the initial tumor removal and the insertion and removal of her catheter, she had to get part of her cervix removed because her doctors had discovered more cancerous cells there. She also had to have a bone marrow biopsy.

  With all of these surgeries happening in a relatively short amount of time, Zoe racked up a big Vicodin and hydrocodone supply. Her body didn’t react any better to the medicine than it did when her father gave her one as a teenager. She’d take extra-strength Tylenol instead, until one of her doctors finally gave her codeine instead of Vicodin.

  “That was the one drug I got where I thought, ‘Oh, I like this one,’” she says. “I definitely started taking it out of necessity, but I prolonged the prescription past the point of needing it. I had a pill form and a liquid form. But I still had tons and tons of Vicodin just sitting around. And everyone knew I had it. It was like, ‘Oh, Zoe has cancer,’ so my friends would ask me for it. And I would just give it away.”

  Zoe didn’t mind giving out her pills to friends who she thought were just using them recreationally occasionally or needed one or two to treat cramps or a migraine. “But there was one person who kept asking me for it that I felt uncomfortable about,” she says. “I knew he was having addiction problems—with heroin, I think. He seemed to be nodding off a lot at the time, and I knew he was having trouble at work because of it. I gave a few to him at first but cut him off pretty quickly. I think he might have been taking OxyContin too, and for some reason, Oxy scares me. I associate it with street drugs, like heroin. If I’d been given Oxy for my surgeries, I never would have just handed it out to people. Vicodin just seems more controlled somehow. When I’d give it out to people I’d assume they were responsible enough not to take it all at once and OD. But I guess that’s a pretty dumb assumption.”

  Her fear of OxyContin may also stem from her father. When Zoe was nineteen, she and her brother had to take him off life support after he had succumbed completely to cancer and slipped into a coma. “This is a man who was addicted to cocaine for twenty-five years,” Zoe says. “He had a very high tolerance for drugs. When we took him off life support, the nurse had been pumping him full of morphine, and before he died, she said she’d never seen someone have that much morphine in his system and not die from a drug overdose. She said he’d been given enough to kill an elephant. When my brother and I were cleaning out his house, we discovered a huge supply of OxyContin, about $15,000 worth, street value. We considered trying to sell it, but I threw it away because I could never live with myself if someone OD’d and died from something I’d given them.”

  I didn’t have to deal with that fear, because I almost never shared my painkiller stash. Pot, coke, beer, even benzos, all those were meant for consuming with friends. But painkillers were mine, and initially Emily was the only one who knew when I was holding, since she was my original supplier after moving back to New York. But even when she ran out of her own stash early, and would call and ask if she could borrow some, I always lied and said I was out, too.

  I hid my bottles in the bottom of my underwear drawer, and kept my daily dose in a small gold pillbox that I’d bought for ten cents at a garage sale in Tennessee when I was in the third grade. As a kid, I’d fill with it with tiny fake diamonds pulled off my sisters’ costume jewelry and pretend it was my private fortune. For some reason I’d always kept the box, maybe anticipating its future use.

  The top of the small box is layered in wood, with a gold four-leaf clover set in the center of it. For luck, I guess, that its user wouldn’t mix the wrong pills and OD. I’d unimaginatively named it Clover. I could fit a lot of Norco inside, along with generous doses of the generic Valium I’d started buying online again. Whenever I came across hydrocodone from a friend or someone who was selling at a party, I’d have to swap a lot of Norco out of the box, since the hydrocodone pills were so much larger. Clover was small enough to slip into
my pocket and go unnoticed anywhere I went. And I quickly realized that no one ever asks you questions if you pop open a pillbox and swallow something directly in front of them. When I’d been taking lots of Vicodin at Jane, I’d always go into the bathroom to swallow them, but my tiny box had an air of authority and old-world sophistication that made people, even family members, politely look away as I’d snap it shut with one hand and reach for a glass of water.

  There was no one monitoring me at V Life. When I first started the job, I’d hoped I’d get to meet some of the Variety reporters. I’d always loved their film reviews and usually agreed with what they had to say. But they sat in high walled cubicles one row over and pretty much ignored me. The row of cubes I sat in was completely empty except for a lone sales rep. Since no one ever arrived at the LA office until at least 1:00 P.M. New York time, I could come in whenever I wanted.

  At first it was a dream job. I reconnected with all of my old film publicity contacts from Jane and spent my afternoons going to screenings and my evenings covering parties and film premieres. And I was functionally high out of my mind.

  My first month on the job, I flew out to LA to meet the rest of the magazine’s staff. It was a sterile cubicle environment, and the vibe was completely different from what I had been used to at Jane. We’d had cubes as well, but they were always overflowing with free CDs, books, DVDs, and weird personal items like a giant stuffed Yeti or Post-it notes attached to computer monitors with random messages like, “This world is uninhabitable.” At V Life, there were no thirty-minute gossip sessions on the floor outside the editor in chief’s office, no group lunch breaks to McDonald’s, no yelling questions across the office floor at someone when you needed to remember the name of some random person Paris Hilton had been sleeping with two months ago, and having four different people yell back four different names.

  But the LA staff was nice to me. I was too nervous to take any pills while I was actually in the office there, so I’d wait until I got into the parking garage at the end of the day before popping anything. I’d only learned to drive a year earlier, when I was living up in Hudson. I’d always lived in small towns or large cities, and no one had ever taught me how: I’d always gotten by on public transportation and rides from friends. After work I’d get in my rental car, take three Norcos, leave the Variety offices, and drive the Pacific Coast highway to Malibu. I’d find parking lots that said they were closed, but no one ever seemed to be watching them, so I’d pull up as close to the sand as possible and sit on the beach by myself until it got dark. The ocean always smelled rank and rotting, nothing like the clean salty air of the Atlantic. I’d walk along the beach until it got too cold and then head back to my car and just drive around for hours, turning down side street after side street, trying to imagine the lives of the people who lived inside these suburban homes. I’d always accidentally run a few red lights or stop signs because I was too high and distracted by the houses that I thought might have been the filming location for the exterior shots of Buffy’s house on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. None of them ever were, but luck was always with me as far as my driving indiscretions—there were never any cops around. Maybe it was Clover looking out for me.

  It was lonely, but at that point in my life I’d come to embrace loneliness. It was all I knew after a year away from the city. And as long as I had pills, I had a friend. The only time I ever really cared was at night, when I’d want someone to hold while I was falling asleep.

  V Life was putting me up at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, a midcentury modern building where all the rooms surrounded a swimming pool that was always empty. After I’d get back from my drive, I’d order a cocktail and lounge by the pool, with its flickering underwater lights, hoping someone would talk to me.

  I’d finally go up to my room, fall asleep, wake up, and start the same day over again. I was becoming aware that the pills that had initially lowered my social inhibitions were now building a bubble of isolation around me. I was all right with that, though. As much as I craved human contact, I now craved someone who could share the isolation with me. I wanted someone to take pills with so that we could be alone together.

  Emily and I started going out on Friday nights to Hot Pink, a party on Avenue B that was pretty much the exact same group of people I’d always seen out before I left New York, only in a new location. Everything was the same, right down to the shitty coke, the Joy Division songs followed by 1980s metal, and twenty-five-minute-long bathroom lines. At a certain point we gave up and just did bumps off the backs of our hands in the corner, rather then wait for the privacy of a stall.

  Cocaine and Norco made for a nice, low-grade speedball. Emily and I would usually just lean against a wall and watch people. You could smoke in the basement, and we’d chain.

  One night Emily had invited another one of her shaggy-haired musician guys. As soon as he mentioned something about a song he’d written in his journal that day I tuned out and scanned the crowd. It was more packed than usual, but the stairway was temporarily empty, so when a guy appeared on the landing and paused to survey the crowd, a spotlight shone down on him and only him. He had shaggy blond hair, bright blue eyes, and he was wearing some sort of shawl thing wrapped around his neck over a coat that looked as if it had been drawn onto his body. He stood there for a minute, just sort of staring out into space.

  We were leaning against the poles near the bar instead of the wall that night, and I watched him head over to the bar and order a drink. He turned and saw me staring, and to my total shock he smiled at me.

  Norco making me brave, I walked right over to him and said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” and it was really just that easy. His name was Everett and he was just coming back from some party for the insanely expensive fashion label he worked for, and, weirdly, one that I had recently become obsessed with.

  We shot the shit for a while about fashion. I’d always worn T-shirts and jeans exclusively, but when I’d been in Hudson I’d found an old leather Members Only coat with fur trim around the hood at a used-clothing store. I was really proud of it. I told Everett it was coyote, and he got this disgusted look on his face as he fingered the fur near my neck.

  “You’re wearing dog,” he said.

  “No, no, the label says it’s made out of coyote!” I said. “I mean, I would never wear fur, but I felt like this poor coyote was trapped inside this coat, and I wanted to bring him back out into the world, so his spirit could, you know, see it…and stuff.”

  These sorts of ideas make perfect sense to me, but I realize I should keep them to myself.

  “I wear fur,” Everett said, shrugging. “Who gives a shit? We just made a bunch of coats out of Finnish raccoon. But this,” he said, rolling my hood cuff through his fingers again, “is dog. I can tell.”

  I was mortified. So I ordered a shot of tequila. He paid for it.

  “I’m going to choose to believe that this is a coyote,” I told him after I put my glass back down on the bar. “And he is living around my neck and getting a second chance to see the world.”

  Everett gave me this weird smile that I couldn’t read as pity or interest until he asked, “Want to come home with me?”

  I shrugged and said sure.

  We caught a cab outside, and as we were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge I suddenly remembered Emily and texted her that I’d left. The cab stopped at the Lorimer Street subway stop. Everett lived a few blocks away from it.

  His place was empty of everything except clothes. There were four boxes in the living room and nothing else. His bedroom was tiny and faced the street, the walls were bare but there were piles of clothes everywhere and a big walk-in closet stuffed full of suits, sweaters, shirts, belts, shoes, boots, coats, bags. I’d never seen anything like it. In a guy’s room, I mean.

  We smoked in silence for a while, tossed the cigarettes out the window, and he leaned in and kissed me. Clothes came off.

  “Wait,” I said. “Do you have any condoms I can use?”
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br />   He rolled out of bed and rummaged around in his closet before coming back with some ancient-looking Lifestyles. I tried using one but it broke almost immediately.

  “Are you clean?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I just got tested as soon as I moved back here,” I said. “What about you?”

  “It’s been a while, but I’m clean. I haven’t been with anyone that way for a while. Just go for it,” he said.

  And so I did. The great and awful thing about opiates is that they make me stay hard forever, but it’s usually nearly impossible to come. So I can go forever but eventually it just gets boring and I have to make sure the other guy gets off before I pull a muscle.

  Looking back, I try to think what was going through my mind about not using a condom. I was drunk, obviously, but there was something more going on. This guy was from a world foreign to me, a glamorous fashion world I’d always pretended not to give a shit about but maybe secretly wanted to be a part of. Despite entering puberty at the late dawn of the AIDS epidemic and having condom use drilled into my brain since elementary school, I didn’t want to disappoint him. The only answer I can come up with is that in some sick way I thought it would make us closer, and for some reason I badly wanted to impress him.

  Eventually he came and we both passed out. I woke up at dawn as he was getting dressed. “I have a meeting with a buyer, but I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. I nodded and dozed off again for a while but woke up when he sat back down on the bed to say good-bye.

  He put his hand on my face and gently stroked my cheek.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you leave before I get back, and decide to steal my clothes, just don’t take any of the stuff from the spring collection. They’re samples, and the only ones we’ve got.”