Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict

by Joshua Lyon

  CHAPTER 13

  Hunting and Shutting Down

  ONCE I RETURNED FROM Tennessee, I slipped fast and easy back into living inside my protective bubble of pills. Like Jared, I’d gone through withdrawal and come back out of it fine. I saw no reason to put myself through that torture again. If I ever had to go through withdrawal again, I knew I could deal with it. But I was also still reeling from my experience in Oak Ridge. I couldn’t handle seeing someone so strong become so weak. And to be perfectly honest, I also just really missed being high. But my methods of obtaining the pills I needed were becoming stranger and stranger, and none of them had anything to do with doctors.

  My older sister Erica invited me over to her house in Brooklyn for a party. She runs a childbirth education center called RealBirth, where expecting parents can take all sorts of different classes on childbirth preparation. Her business had been growing fast—she had just opened a new location—and she’d just signed a book contract. She dedicates her life to helping women find ways to cope with pain, but I just popped pills for mine.

  When I got to her house I found that her kids were with their father at his place, but her friend Lana was there, a woman with long, straight dark hair and sparkling eyes. I’d always liked Lana a lot because of the way she doted on me. She always wanted to know who I was dating and fussed that I was too skinny. She was breaking open a bottle of wine. We toasted Erica’s success and assuaged her feelings of nervousness about getting her book done on time.

  Lana had recently been in a nasty car accident and messed up her knee pretty badly. Someone had run a stop sign and slammed into the side of her car, twisting her leg around. “They gave me Percocet,” she told us, “but I can’t stand the way it makes me feel, so hazy and out of it. I’m just taking Tylenol now.”

  My entire body grew stiff and attentive. This was my game of chess, and I had to make the right move. If she was holding and not using pills, they needed to be mine.

  “Ugh, I know,” Erica said. “Remember that time I threw my back out and they gave me Vicodin?” she asked me. “It made me so sick, I stopped taking it after the first day.”

  I remembered it well. I’d spent the night at her house while she was stretched out flat on the floor. We watched old movies, and I was high out of my mind from the pills I’d snuck when I’d given her the first dose upon returning from the hospital. I’d stolen the entire bottle from her the following week. She’d never even noticed, because she had disliked the effect so much that she just switched to over-the-counter pain relievers and acupuncture.

  As I racked my brain about how to get my hands on Lana’s Percocets, the conversation turned to my recent stay at Bobby’s in Tennessee. Lana was shaking her head. “She was very lucky to have survived that. My parents had long, drawn-out illnesses. I never want that to happen to me. I want an exit plan.”

  Erica nodded. “Me too,” she said. “I just want to figure out a way to make it painless and not messy so that it doesn’t affect the person who finds me.”

  “I just got a screener of a documentary about this exact same subject sent to me at work,” I said. “I’ll bring it over next time so you guys can watch it.”

  We were on our second bottle of wine by now. “So what don’t you like about Percocet?” I asked Lana. “I have to admit, I kind of like them.” I kept my voice even, nonchalant. “A friend of mine gives me one every now and then, and it calms me down if I’m having a stressful day.”

  “You can have them,” she said flippantly.

  “Really?” I asked. But it was too eager. Wrong move. She looked at me over her glasses. These were educated adult women, not dumb kids from MySpace who I could just give money to for pills. This transaction required more finesse. I filled up everyone’s wineglass again.

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that. It’s illegal.”

  I changed the subject, went back to talking about the idea of exit plans. “I want one too,” I said. “I’m just not sure how I’d do it. Maybe the old car-running-parked-in-a-garage thing. I like the idea of just being able to fall asleep.”

  Lana shook her head. “I just want some sort of pill I could always have on me. No mess, no fuss, just pop it when it’s time. I know they must exist out there somewhere.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “I’ll use all of the research tools available to me at the magazine and our library to find out the easiest, cleanest way to go, in exchange for the rest of your Percocets.”

  Lana was happily buzzed on wine now. “Deal,” she said. “Just remember, I don’t want it to be a mess.”

  I spent every free moment at work that week researching ways to commit suicide. The sooner I could find the right method, the sooner I could get my hands on the Percocets. I knew Lana wasn’t looking for any sort of immediate answer, but I was having fun with my research. I cracked up a little too loudly and drew looks from coworkers when I read that one of the entries on how to commit suicide on Wikipedia was beheading yourself. Clearly not right for Lana. It seemed to me that the easiest and most painless way to go was to OD on the very pills she already had mixed with some benzos. But many times these suicide attempts aren’t fatal and the person is stuck with severe liver damage. Although it helped if you wrapped a plastic bag over your head right after taking them. Cyanide pills just didn’t seem pleasant (convulsions, foaming at the mouth) and impossible to get one’s hands on.

  After lots of research, it seemed the easiest way to go was a heroin overdose. I knew where to get heroin, but couldn’t imagine letting Lana know that: she was far too straight. We were meeting again for a dinner party at Erica’s house that weekend, so I brought all my findings along with a copy of the documentary I’d told them about.

  I cornered Lana and told her everything I’d found out. She wasn’t pleased with any of the options, especially the heroin. “That’s just seedy,” she said.

  “You should become a member of the Hemlock Society,” I said. “They have counselors you could talk to.”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Already a member,” she said. “Not a fan of any of their methods.”

  I was crushed. No free Percocets for me.

  I spent the rest of the night playing board games with my niece and nephew. Eventually I saw Lana getting ready to leave and I got up to say good-bye. As we were hugging, she slipped a plastic sandwich baggie full of pills into my hand.

  “Just be careful with them,” she whispered. “I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you.”

  “Please,” I scoffed, “These will last me about a year. Thank you so much!” I gave her a big kiss on the lips.

  The pills were gone in five days.

  The next large haul that came in was from Emily’s new boyfriend, yet another mop-haired boy. Only this time he was an artist instead of a musician. I guess that was a step up. He always wore short ties and suits, with no underwear, leading me to quickly discover why she liked him. He worked at a gallery owned by a man who was dying of some hideous form of cancer.

  Emily called me up one night. “Johnny’s boss is really sick,” she said. “The cancer is just getting worse.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know the guy; it just seemed the polite thing to say.

  “Yeah, it’s horrible,” she said hurriedly, “but the point is, the pain has gotten so bad that they’ve moved him off OxyContin and onto Dilaudid. The gallery can’t make its rent this month, and he wants to sell off all of his Oxy to pay for it.”

  I ran to my computer to check my bank balance. I’d been storing money from my Jane paycheck in a savings account in an attempt to get myself out of debt once and for all, but, well, fuck that.

  “How much does he have?” I asked. “And for how much?”

  “Tons. Sixty milligrams each. And he doesn’t even know how much they are worth, he’s selling them for $10 apiece.”

  I almost dropped the phone. On the street they were worth $60 a pil
l.

  “Send Johnny over with everything he has left,” I said. “I want the entire lot.”

  I felt good about this deal. Not only was I getting what I wanted for a ridiculously good rate, I could fool myself into thinking that I was also helping to support the arts. I bought everything he had left, around seventy pills in all.

  By this time my subletters had moved out and I had my old apartment back on the Lower East Side. It was a two-bedroom and I needed to find a roommate fast, so I’d found one on Craigslist, a Goth girl from southern California who immediately painted her bedroom red with alternating black vertical stripes. I kept mostly to myself, hiding out in my bedroom, high, watching movies. Since she was essentially a stranger I was paranoid that she was looking through my room whenever I was at work. I was now keeping my pill stash in a fireproof safety lockbox under my bed. I’d open it every other day and refill Clover. The problem was, I didn’t know what to do with the key. I needed an excellent hiding place for it. I didn’t want to keep it with my house keys, because what if I lost them one night when I was out drunk? I’d have been fucked, since this lockbox was the real deal: it weighed a ton. For a while I was moving the key to different hiding places in my room every day. First it was inside the medicine cabinet (we each had our own bathroom), but then I got scared she would borrow contact lens solution or something. For a while it stayed tucked between two books on my bookshelf, but then I became convinced she’d want to read one of my books. I finally found the perfect hiding spot. I had a Donnie Darko toy, a fourteen-inch model of Frank the Bunny that had a button on the back you could press and it would repeat quotes from the movie. It came with an interchangeable head of James Duvall with his eye gouged out and a platform stand that had a model of the mailbox where Donnie leaves his letter to Roberta Sparrow. The mailbox even opened up, and there was a tiny letter addressed to Roberta inside. My lockbox key fit perfectly inside the mailbox, and when the door was closed you’d never even think that it would open. The toy and its stand sat on my windowsill with the two Gelflings from The Dark Crystal and a poseable model of Cutter from the ElfQuest comic series. It was the perfect hiding place.

  My father was planning on coming to stay with Erica for Memorial Day weekend, and he was bringing his other children, my twin half-sisters and half-brother, so they could see New York City. They were the same age as my niece and nephew, so the kids usually all played together the one or two times a year we saw them.

  When they arrived, we spent the day at the American Museum of Natural History and wandering through Central Park. I took them to the ferris wheel in Toys R Us in Times Square and bought them loads of candy. One of the editors at the magazine had let me fill up a shopping bag of products they no longer needed from the beauty closet. When we got back to Erica’s house I dumped the bag out on the living room floor. The twins and my niece dove in, dividing everything up, but I think maybe I was a bit more excited about the loot than they were. Afterward I felt guilty for assuming that just because they were all little girls, they would be excited by free shampoo and lipstick. One of the twins was a chess champion in her state, and she barely took anything from the pile. I wanted so badly to make a good impression on these girls, since I saw them so rarely. I barely knew them, but felt so much love for them anyway. They were both rail-thin, with long dark hair and enormous doe eyes, and I couldn’t help but feel protective of them.

  Throughout the day I had watched my father interact with them, saw the way he doted on them. It was uncanny how he had created a new family that was almost an exact replica of the one he had originally left behind. My half-brother was five years older than his twin sisters, the same age difference between Erica and my younger sister and me, Nyssa. Nyssa and I were a year apart, and had always pretended to be twins when we were little. She still has friends who believe we’re twins—we look exactly alike, which helped keep the lie alive. When we were in third and fourth grades, she had really short hair and I had really long hair. When we met strangers we would tell them that I was the girl and she was the boy, and our neighbors would constantly get us mixed up.

  It was hard not to be jealous of my half-siblings for having my father when we hadn’t. But it wasn’t a malicious jealousy at all, just a sad one. I made a point that first day of keeping my distance from my father. He was working as a truck driver now, and I knew he could barely support his new family. It was only a matter of time before his second wife would divorce him.

  I knew he could tell I was avoiding him, and he let me. I’d been popping pills all day and my vision was starting to blur as I watched my sister and him cook dinner in the kitchen. I tried to play a game of chess with the champion twin, but she checkmated me after something like six moves. I knew I was rusty from not playing for a while, but damn, she was good. And I knew it wasn’t just because I was high.

  I went into the kitchen and saw that a bottle of wine had been opened. My sister’s new boyfriend was there too, which helped take the pressure off me having to speak to my dad. The three of them were laughing and chopping vegetables for a salad. My sister opened a window because the kitchen was getting hot from all the pots bubbling on the stove and whatever was baking in the oven. The sun was starting to set over Carroll Gardens. I took a seat at the kitchen table and stared out the open window at the row of brownstones. I poured myself a glass of wine.

  “How’s work?” my father asked me.

  “Fun,” I answered. “I just went to LA to interview Hilary Duff for the cover.”

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “It’s your granddaughter’s current favorite pop star,” my sister told him. “Which goes against everything I’ve tried to teach her.”

  It was strange to think of my dad as a grandfather when he was raising children of his own. I watched him add a large amount of pasta to boiling water as he and Erica talked about kids and parenting. Their voices faded away into the steam rolling off the top of the oven. The scene was intimately familiar; when I was younger there were always huge dinner parties at my grandparents’ house. My sisters and I would play in the basement or the living room while the adults and their friends drank and cooked in the kitchen. I looked out at the kids all playing together in the living room and shivered. History had repeated itself.

  My wineglass was empty, but it was being refilled by someone. I tried to remember more about the dinner parties from when I was young. I must have been five or six. The kids would eat in the living room, while loud bursts of laughter would come from the dining room. There was a large open passthrough separating the dining room from the living room. The adults could easily check in on us but it was usually us spying on the adults. We could see them reflected in the glass picture window that stretched along the back of Bobby’s house. We almost always stayed overnight after these parties, but it would take a while to fall asleep because of the swearing and roaring coming from downstairs. My younger sister and I would share the sinister room with the slanted ceiling.

  Erica called her kids in to set the dinner table, and my father quickly told his kids to help out. I stood up and took my glass of wine with me to make room for them. The children swarmed around the table, dropping plates and napkins haphazardly, eager to get back to their game. I stumbled a little while leaning against the wall. I knew I needed to eat something soon.

  We finally all sat down. Plates were heaped and wine was poured. The kids were done almost as soon as they started and rushed off again, this time to play on the patio on my sister’s roof. Politics were being discussed at the table, so I got up with my wine and went into the living room to check my messages. I don’t discuss politics at the table. I think it’s gauche.

  “Come on, we’re going to the roof,” my sister called out, so I followed them upstairs. The view from her roof is stunning; you can see the whole downtown Manhattan skyline. The night was clear, so we could see every window in every building. They’d brought more wine upstairs and we all
sat around the patio table while the kids played tag on the roof.

  “We’re going to take the kids to Coney Island tomorrow,” Dad told me. “Want to come?”

  “Sure,” I said. There was a light from the stairs shining directly behind him so all I could see was an outline of his head. I squinted my eyes, trying to take in more of his features. Everyone said I looked like him. I didn’t think so, but I tried to view him impartially to see what I might look like when I got older. All I could make out was his soft, quiet voice, talking about the plans for tomorrow.

  I was drunk. The roof swirled for a minute, and I clutched the table to steady myself. Erica and her boyfriend went downstairs, dragging the kids kicking and yelling behind them to put them to bed. They said they were going to clean the kitchen and retire too, and my dad told him he would be down in a few minutes to help.

  We sat there quietly for a minute or two, neither of us saying anything.

  “I think,” I said, “that there is something wrong with me.”

  “Well, yes,” he said.

  I looked at the city and it looked back at me. “There are a lot of things I don’t remember,” I said. “About Oak Ridge.”

  “You’ve always had that ability, ever since you were a little kid, to just block out whatever you didn’t want to know,” he said.

  I could feel a weird feeling coming on, naked and ashamed, even through my drunken pill fog. “Like with what?” I asked.