I had two roommates at Mesa Vista. They didn’t really care about me, and I didn’t care about them. I was a lot more involved with drugs than most of the people around me; they all seemed to have their heads on straighter than I did.
We were allowed one phone call every two days and I used mine to talk to Brittany every time. She would tell me about the fun things she was doing or some party she’d just gone to. I wanted to be there with her. It seemed like all my friends were having fun without me, and knowing that made me cry.
I needed to get out of there. I tried to prove to the counselor that I was better so I could leave, but she started being a bitch so I lost my cool and cursed at her.
Mesa Vista was not helping me. I didn’t think I needed to be there, and they couldn’t help me—mainly because I wasn’t ready to be helped. All I wanted was one line of coke. I wasn’t addicted. I swear I wasn’t. I didn’t need coke, I just wanted it. I just wanted anything to make me better.
I wanted to escape life. I wanted to just run as far as I could run. I would’ve run to China, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go anywhere. I felt like I was in prison, like I was trapped—not only at Mesa Vista, but in a pool of my own problems.
I heard somewhere that you could overdose on toothpaste, so one night I tried to eat an entire tube of toothpaste. It didn’t work.
Nothing can describe my pain during that time more than the fact that I tried to overdose on toothpaste. That’s as low as it gets.
Maybe I actually was an addict. Maybe I couldn’t control myself. I don’t know. Either way, I had a serious problem.
CHAPTER 7
Hitting Bottom
After two weeks of hell I left Mesa Vista and returned home pretty much the same as when I’d left. Being out in the real world was nice, though, and I started to feel a little better about myself and stopped having suicidal thoughts. I stopped cutting, too, which was good, but I was not ready to give up drugs.
I could see that my mom was still very worried about me. She looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. I felt terrible that I was putting her through so much, but that didn’t stop me.
As soon as I got home I went right out to see my friends. Two weeks in Mesa Vista felt like a lifetime away from the apartment complex and all the parties. I missed being around my people and all the social aspects that go along with doing drugs—I needed to get right back into the swing of things. Almost everyone I hung out with was a druggie. Most of my friends didn’t go to school. A lot of them had jobs making more than minimum wage. They didn’t seem to have responsibilities or stress in their lives. Instead, every day was one big party.
My mom saw that I wasn’t ready to grow up from that life just yet, so shortly after I returned from Mesa Vista she enrolled me in Sunset High School in Encinitas, which was a continuation school for kids who were on drugs or named Kendra. It had all the classes a regular school would have, but the day was also packed with hours of counseling.
These types of schools are really only good for kids who want to be there. At the end of the day, someone has to make the decision to get better on his or her own. I wasn’t ready for that. Instead of taking it as an opportunity to get better I took it as a challenge to get more drugs. As it turned out, finding drugs wasn’t hard at all. I was surrounded by druggies. Pretty much everyone had something on him or her at all times, and if they were afraid of getting caught they hid the drugs in the ceiling at the school. When the teacher left the room, we’d pop out the tiles of the drop ceiling and smoke weed or do lines of coke. Sometimes during lunch we would sneak out through a window when the teachers turned their backs, or go upstairs to the bathrooms to get high.
The whole day was dedicated to this game of seeing what we could get away with. Every conversation I had with the kids there was about drugs and how we were going to do them that day. There was a thrill to being bad and trying not to get caught.
The downside was that we were doing coke almost every day, which wasn’t exactly what my mom had in mind when she sent me there.
We got drug-tested but we also took pills that flushed out our systems. It only worked some of the time, and I did get caught on a few occasions, but we never really got in trouble when we got busted. After all, we were already in reform school. Where else could they send us?
I knew the place was bad for me. I was doing drugs as often as possible and I could feel myself going crazy again. I told my mom that I wanted to go back to Clairemont. I told her that there were more drugs at this school than there were at my regular school. I begged her for another chance. She agreed and somehow convinced Clairemont High to take me back for my sophomore year.
Back in my old school, I almost immediately fell back into my old habits.
I started hanging out at the apartment complex where most of my troubles began. Some of the characters were still the same, but during my sophomore year I met a new guy. His name was Mario. He was Puerto Rican and very romantic. He had that Rico Suave thing going on but, more important, he always had drugs, so he immediately became part of our crew.
I was always just friends with the guys who hung out at the apartment complex. It was just a place to chill and get high; nothing romantic ever developed with any of them, and it was probably better that way. With Mario, though, things would be different.
I’m not sure exactly how it got started, but I think we were on acid that day. We hooked up and immediately began a relationship that would ultimately change my life. I started spending every day after school with Mario. Sometimes I would skip school, and all day long we’d do coke and have sex. Looking back I wouldn’t call him my boyfriend. I never loved him. We just had a lot of sex and did a lot of coke.
Mario would give coke away to anyone and everyone who wanted it. It was pretty nuts. His parents were great people who lived in San Juan, but Mario had some local friends who definitely weren’t so great.
At the time I wasn’t concerned with any of that. I just loved hanging out with him. But since I was living at home I had to sneak around to make it happen.
Luckily my mom had a regular routine back then. She’s still a creature of habit, but during that time especially you could keep time by her daily rituals. Every night at exactly nine o’clock she would go into the bathroom and brush her teeth, take off her makeup, and get ready for bed. From there she would crawl directly under the covers and call it a night.
Each night when I saw the bathroom light flick on I would sneak out of the house. I couldn’t go out the front door because it made too much noise and it would have to stay locked, but we had a sliding glass door in the back that I could open quietly and sneak out, leaving it just a little bit open for when I came home. I would slowly creep out the back, hop over a big wall, and fall to the ground on the other side where a road led me to freedom—and to Mario. My legs would get all scraped up but I didn’t care. I’d stay out all night, doing lots of coke and spending time with Mario.
Like clockwork, my mom was always up at six A.M., and five minutes later she would be in the shower. I’d sneak back through the sliding door while she was showering, put on my pajamas, crawl into bed, and pretend to be asleep. A few minutes later she’d get out of the shower and wake me up for school.
It worked every time.
I’d be a mess at school, of course, because I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and was coming down off a night of heavy drug use. I would fall asleep in class and pass out on a bench during study hall or on the soccer field during PE. I was clearly in bad shape, but most people at school had already given up on me by that point so no one really cared.
One night, about a month into my routine, I snuck out at nine P.M. on the dot and spent the night getting messed up, as usual. But when I returned, the sliding glass door was locked.
My heart dropped. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t face my mom and the consequences that would follow, so I just went back to Mario’s place and stayed there for a couple of days while I tried to figu
re things out.
The plan we eventually put together was terrible. I didn’t have any clothes or money to buy new stuff, so I needed to go home and get my things. Even though I was only three or four months into my sophomore year of high school, I felt like I was an adult and ready to move out of my house.
Together, Mario and I marched over to my mom’s house, knocked on the door, and told her I was moving out. I wasn’t running away this time; I was packing my bags and leaving her, right in front of her face.
I could see the disappointment in her eyes. A part of her didn’t believe it was happening, but another part of her knew there was nothing she could do to stop me. I felt bad, but I also felt like I was doing the right thing by leaving. It was time for me to be on my own.
We walked out the front door—no need to sneak out the back anymore—and I turned and said good-bye. She just let me go, and I really thought that was good-bye for good. I was starting a new life.
Moving in with Mario was not a good idea, to say the least. Deep down I knew that from the beginning, but I was never going to admit it.
I quit soccer and softball, then quit school altogether. Instead of going to high school like a normal fifteen-year-old, I sat in an apartment and did coke all day long.
Most days I didn’t shower. I just rolled out of bed, went to the living room, and did a few lines. The coke mixed with a lack of funds led to me not eating very much, and I got really thin and became a scary-looking, smelly mess of a person.
Meanwhile, Mario was always talking about getting out of town and running away together to some luxurious place where we would be happy. But he was full of shit. He was never going anywhere. How could he?
During the day Mario worked in construction, but that didn’t bring in enough money. Most of his funds came from selling drugs. At all hours of the day people would come in, usually without even knocking, to buy bags of coke from him. If Mario was at work it became my job to handle the drug sales.
Some really fucked up people would show up at the apartment, and each purchase was different. Some would want a gram; others would want an eight ball, which is about three and a half grams. I’d measure it out, put in a Baggie, and make the sale. Everyone paid and no one messed with me because people knew Mario was a tough guy and was not fucking around. It was like our life was straight out of a mafia movie: we were the reigning mafia couple and everyone knew to be afraid of us.
Whenever we were out of coke, we had to go see a guy who was high up the food chain in the drug-sales industry. He lived about fifteen miles away in the more upscale town of La Jolla, and his house was a real drug den, with lots of guns and scary people everywhere.
At one point Mario and I were in trouble because we weren’t making enough money selling coke (probably because we were snorting all of the merchandise). We didn’t have a TV and we were out of food so we had to go to the dealer and try to return the little bit of drugs we had in exchange for cash so we could live. Both of us were nervous, but we felt like we had no choice. We were like two crackheads heading over there, begging for a few dollars back. I don’t remember if we ended up getting our money, but I lived to tell the story and at that point I guess that was good enough.
Just staying alive was a top priority during my time with Mario. I knew my limits with coke so usually I did a few lines and that was it. As much as I loved getting high, I was not trying to hurt myself. I was past my depressed and suicidal days and I wasn’t going to go back to that dark place. However, I felt like I was alone in this new world, so I had to take care of myself. No one was going to jump in and save me. The whole time I was with Mario, I assumed my mom had given up on me, that she wasn’t going to be there for me anymore. Years later I found out that she was at home worrying every second. She found out that Mario was selling drugs and she desperately wanted to get me out of there but she didn’t know how. Worrying consumed her life, and she didn’t eat or sleep pretty much the entire time.
She even reached out to my dad for help, and at one point he got Mario’s number from my mom and called me at his house to tell me he missed me. He said he wanted to meet and catch up. It had been years since we had seen each other and I was suspicious, but for some reason I agreed to see him. I guess I was still hoping there was some way I could save our relationship and have a dad again.
We agreed to meet at the Pacific Beach Block Party, a huge street fair in San Diego where adults go to listen to music and get drunk and kids go to play games and eat street-fair food. Everyone went.
When the day arrived, Mario and I went to the street fair to meet my dad. We had decided to meet in front of a specific bar on a specific street at a specific time. Everything was all set up for the big reunion.
I was nervous because I didn’t know what I would think of him or what he would think of me. I knew even the slightest inappropriate remark or action on his part would set me off, and I sort of felt like I was setting myself up for disappointment. But I went through with it anyway.
Mario and I got to the meeting spot and waited. At about ten minutes past when we were supposed to meet, my dad still wasn’t there. I started to get mad, but I continued to wait it out.
A few minutes later I saw him walking toward me. My heart was racing. I started to think about what I would say to him, and how I would react to whatever it was he was going to say to me.
He had told me he missed me over the phone, so maybe he had a whole big speech planned about how he wanted to be part of my life. Maybe he was going to try to be a good father.
He got closer, and I began shaking.
Then, just as he got within a few feet of us and I opened my mouth to say hello, he looked at me, walked right past, and headed down the street toward a friend of his. The bastard didn’t even recognize his own daughter.
We might as well have been miles apart. We weren’t father and daughter, we were two strangers.
I was pretty upset after that, so Mario got me drunk and tried to help me forget about everything. I survived. I always did. But my drug habit was turning into a nightmare pretty quickly, and one night soon after, I almost didn’t survive.
Mario had a bunch of people over to his house and we were all doing lots of coke. Line after line, I just kept going. Like I said, I usually knew my limit and stopped myself when I hit it because even though I was a druggie I was still fearful of anything bad happening. But that night, for no real reason other than the fact that I just stopped caring about life, I threw caution to the wind and kept doing more and more.
Brittany was there, and she and some of our other friends were telling me to stop. I didn’t want to listen. My nose started bleeding, but I just wiped the blood away and did another line. I was out of control. My eyes started rolling back in my head and everyone started freaking out.
Brittany screamed, “Oh my God!” but she was the only one who really cared about me.
I was shaking and choking on the blood that was dripping down the back of my throat. The group took me to the bathroom, put me in the tub, and ran the water, and I kept yelling, “I’m fine!”
I wasn’t fine. I was in serious trouble. Everyone thought I was dying, but no one wanted to get in trouble so they didn’t call an ambulance or take me to the hospital. Mario didn’t even do anything to help me. He just left me in the tub.
Eventually I worked my way from the tub to the bedroom, where I recovered on my own. I still felt terrible, but the shaking and the bleeding stopped and my eyes were back where they were supposed to be. At one point, Mario walked in with a CD topped with a pile of coke.
“Feeling better?” he asked.
“Yeah, a little,” I replied in a sick little girl’s voice.
“Want some?” he asked, shoving the CD in my face.
I was so pissed that I slapped the CD out of his hand and sent the coke flying everywhere.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he yelled.
I was thinking the same thing.
After a day or tw
o, when the drugs had completely worn off and I was able to think straight, I decided that I had had enough. All the rehabs and different schools never made a difference, but that night I’d almost had an out-of-body experience. I saw myself falling apart, nearing the end, and it wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t going to live like that anymore.
Something hit me and I sat in bed and screamed at the top of my lungs, releasing all the negative energy inside of me. I was done—for real this time. I knew I had to change my life.
Mario was already at work, so I put all of my stuff in a trash bag and on the way out I wrote on the little chalkboard that hung by the door, “Sorry I had to leave you. I will always love you.”
That wasn’t true—I never loved him. He represented a terrible time in my life, and I always remember him as being a part of that. But writing that I loved him seemed like the nice thing to do. As it turned out, Mario ended up getting married, starting a family, and getting his life together in a way that made even my mom happy for him when she heard the news. I guess once he found true love, Mario was able to put a stop to some nasty habits.
Even though I did a lot of drugs and stretched myself to the limit, I never felt like I couldn’t stop at any time. I never felt like I needed drugs; I just really, really liked how I felt when I was high. There’s a difference.
I was able to make the decision to stop using and actually follow through, and almost instantly I was a new person.
I felt so good about myself. The hard part would be convincing the rest of the world that I was turning things around.
I left with my garbage bag of crap, nervous to face my mom again. I had lied to her and promised to change so many times, but I’d never come through. How could I ask her for forgiveness again?
I decided to try a few other options first.
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