A couple of months into therapy, Iris deemed it necessary to have a family session with both herself and the psychiatrist present. I looked forward to having my parents and brother there with me so we could finally talk about things that we never talked about as a family. We rarely spoke about my therapy or the fact that I was on medication other than when my parents would ask how things were going. “Fine,” I would tell them, and that was that. Being the identified patient, I felt separate - apart from the rest of them. It seemed like everything was fine in our family except for me because I was depressed. So, one bright sunny afternoon my family and I met with my therapist and psychiatrist.
No one said a thing. There were a couple of questions asked but the overall tone of the session was, “We’re fine, we don’t know why we’re here, Kim’s depressed and we don’t know what to do.”
Afterward, in the car on the way home, they laughed and joked about being there. “What a waste of time,” they said. “No need for that again.” I felt ashamed and humiliated for the hope I’d had of the session as a metamorphosis for our family. I’d envisioned us emerging from the cocoon of Iris’s office united in a journey toward truth and healing. When they laughed and made fun, I knew I was definitely in this alone, whatever this was.
This, it turned out, was major depression. Over the years, my diagnosis has evolved, along with the DSM, now known as the DSM-IV: Clinical depression, major depression, chemical depression and finally, bi-polar disorder type II. That’s my diagnosis, although my tendencies run to the depressive side of the pole.
Mental illness. I’m forty-four now and it’s still a delicate subject for me. As an adolescent, it was horrifying. I’m not sure which would have been worse: the other kids finding out about my “condition,” or starting my period at school in a pair of white jeans with no hygiene products.
Imagine you’re in an enormous vat of peanut butter. You’re immersed, though somehow, still able to breathe. Try to walk. Try to move your head or blink. Try moving your arms and hands. You can do it, but it will take forever and everything you try to do is exhausting. The peanut butter fills your mouth and ears. Talking is a chore and aural sensory, dim.
Oh dear. You just dropped your car keys, and you’re late for class/meeting/work/whatever. All that peanut butter is heavy, pressing against you from all sides. By the time you pick up those keys, it will be too late even to try to keep your commitments. So tired. So fatigued and frustrated.
Fuck the keys. Leave them on the floor. Who cares now? Lie down. Even that requires herculean effort and when you’re finally lying there, it’s too much effort to move so you lay there like a lump. With the pressure of the peanut butter against your body, it feels like it’s all you can do to breathe.
Now imagine there’s another giant vat right next to yours, except that one is filled with cool, clear water. Your friends and family are in it. You can see them and they can see you, but they can’t see the peanut butter.
What the hell is wrong with you? They ask. You missed your class/meeting/work/whatever because of what? They do not understand why you are lying there like a lump, barely able to blink, in the middle of the day, having blown off your responsibilities. Snap out of it. What the hell’s the matter with you? You know, if you exercised more/ate right/got out of the house more often/cheered up/looked at the bright side of life/took the right pills, you might...
Take the right pills. The right medication. Yes, indeed. The right combinations of chemicals that will make me feel “normal.” The magic formula to wash all this peanut butter away so I wouldn’t have to try and explain it to people.
So when people asked:
What? You live in big vat of invisible peanut butter?
I could respond:
Whaddaya, think I’m crazy? No, I was just joking about that. Hey, pass me the bottle/joint/straw/pipe, would you, please? Because I know my doctor said I’d feel better soon, when we get the medications adjusted, but I need to feel better right now.
When I wasn’t abusing substances, I was manically chasing my feelings away using other methods. Like overloading my life taking care of other people.
After three years, I decided to stop fostering children. It was too stressful both emotionally and physically, and I wanted my former life back with just Andy and myself. So when my last child left for his new adoptive family, I closed my foster home.
I was fine for a while, working and taking care of Andy, but my parents suggested going back to school. What a splendid idea! With the foster children gone, I now had oodles of time on my hands, what with working full time and raising Andy. To be fair, the decision was mine. I really did feel abruptly empty with too much space, both inside and out, to fill.
I was in my late twenties at the time and I know I shouldn’t have cared as much as I did about what they thought, but I craved their approval. More than anything, I wanted them to be proud of me, and I figured that maybe if I finished my degree in psychology, I would finally win their hearts and become the daughter they’d always wanted.
So I dove in. I took classes during the day while Andy was at school, and I had him with me at night when I worked at a hospital daycare from three to midnight. A van service would drop him off after his therapy, and we would go home when I was done with my shift. Then we would get up at six-thirty in the morning and start all over again.
I started feeling angry. I thought I was angry with my parents for always pushing me and never letting me just be. I was perfectly fine working and raising Andy. I didn’t care about finishing my degree. When I was working on it the first few years after Andy was born, I was an honors student doing research and planning on going to graduate school. But I started falling apart. I had flashbacks during class of when Andy was a baby - of performing CPR on my son, of that time in the hospital when they called code blue on him (the first code blue ever called on the pediatric floor at that time) and all the times I called the ambulance to the house. I kept picturing him dead. I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t tell anyone what was happening because I was ashamed. I was mortified that these thoughts and images were so dominant in my mind all the time. What kind of mother fantasizes about her child dying? Especially in the middle of an American Lit class. I was worried it might be a sign that deep down I wanted to hurt him. How could I possibly tell anyone that I was having such sick thoughts?
Finally, I reached the point that I stopped going to classes because the flashbacks came so often and I couldn’t keep myself from falling apart in front of everyone. Embarrassed as I was, I was more worried about the connotations for Andy. I was terrified there might be a dark part of me that wanted to hurt him. Why else would I be having these horrible thoughts and images? Finally, I was in such agony that I talked to a professor I’d done independent study with in the area of adolescent psychology. I sobbed into my hands as I explained what was going on, and told her how worried I was about what it all might mean. She recommended I talk to someone who had experience treating post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Huh?
PTSD is something soldiers have when they’ve seen heavy combat, right? Men and women who were in the Vietnam War or Desert Storm. PTSD is a serious condition that stems from having witnessed trauma and death and man’s inhumanity to man. I’m a middle class white chick from Boise, Idaho whose son was born with a few problems. What the hell do I have to complain about? There are millions of people in the world in significantly worse situations. I don’t deserve a diagnosis like PTSD, I told the therapist I’d started seeing.
I did go through a major trauma with Andy, she pointed out. At one time, his medical situation was so bad that I started thinking about what I would do for his funeral. How big would the casket be? Would I rather have him cremated? What would I do with the ashes? But that’s not what caused me to have all the flashbacks and other problems. The post-traumatic stress occurred years later because I didn’t deal with my feelings when I was having them. I never stopped to allo
w myself to feel scared, angry, sad or helpless. Anytime I came close, the people around me were there to tell me that I was overreacting. “You’re strong. You can do this. Andy needs you, Kimbo. You can’t fall apart. You can’t get upset every time the doctor talks to you. You can’t get mad at the doctors. I’m worried about you. You’re crying too much. Cheer up, things could always be worse.” It’s the same message I’ve heard since I was a little girl. I feel too much, I cry too much, I need too much, there’s no reason for me to feel the way I do.
So I stuff my feelings as far down as I can rather than dealing with them as they come, because I’m afraid of them. I don’t want to be an oversensitive mess of a woman. I want to be like other people, and when I look around, everyone else seems to have it all together.
I dropped out of school when Andy was little because, in light of everything that was happening, working toward something I wasn’t sure I wanted in the first place didn’t make sense. Leaving seemed the right decision for me.
When I decided to stop fostering children, I did go back to school, but I was angry. I thought I was angry with my parents, but that wasn’t true. I was mad at myself for doing something that I didn’t really want to do. And I was doing it because I was still seeking validation. Mostly I was mad because I was aware how pathetic it was that, as an adult, I was still such a child. Pathetic or not, though, that was how I came to enroll in school for the third time.
I was exhausted. A psychology degree is useless unless you intend to go to graduate school, and since I knew I didn’t want to do that, the only goal I had was to obtain a piece of paper that said I’d graduated: Tangible proof that I’d finally done something worthwhile. Even so, I obsessed about my grades. I studied every chance I got, but uninterrupted study time was next to impossible. When first semester finals loomed, I started to panic, and on a Saturday afternoon, I made a phone call to my brother that changed my life forever.
Chapter 4
Chuck, who’s two years younger than I am, lived a somewhat bohemian lifestyle. My brother spent most of his twenties wandering the streets of San Francisco and following the Grateful Dead around in his weathered VW van. Just before Andy was born, he lived on a beach in Hawaii.
By the time I decided to go back to school again, he’d settled back in Boise and lived with a woman and their two small children just around the corner from Andy and me. He delivered pizza and still led a hippie lifestyle, so when I decided I needed something to keep me going during finals, I figured he’d be able to help me. We’d partied together in the past, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to ask him to get me some crank. “I just need to get through finals,” I told him.
He got me a quarter of a gram and it lasted me the whole week. I would snort a line or two after Andy was in bed, study all night and take a nap during the day between classes and work. Things went along swimmingly. I aced all my finals and felt like Wonder Woman. I’ve always loved the rush of speed. I had plenty of energy to clean my house and I could get more done at work. I also lost a few pounds, and I don’t know of a woman alive, no matter how thin or fat, who wouldn’t count that as a huge bonus.
Weight loss. For women especially, that’s one of the biggest draws to meth. Whether it’s the reason they try it in the first place, or if it’s a welcome side effect, losing weight becomes powerful reinforcement to continue using. It seems so easy at first: no appetite, tons of energy. You’re a Goddess. You can do everything: take care of your family, run errands, cook and clean, work, shop for groceries, take the kids to practice and lessons. Until it’s too late, and too late comes too quick. For some people, it only takes one time. Others may use for a few days or a week before it turns on them, but it always does. And the result is always the same. One hundred percent of the time. Meth will rip you apart and destroy you, no matter who you are, and by then it won’t matter how thin you are or how clean your house is because the whole picture is uglier than anything you can possibly imagine. But right then, it worked for me. I got exactly what I thought I wanted that first week. Then the week was over and the crank was gone.
And I crashed.
Although I slept every day while I was doing it, for at least a few hours, when I ran out of drugs, I became lethargic. All I wanted to do was sleep. I couldn’t stay awake at work. Driving was scary because my eyelids were like lead. I started wearing rubber bands on my wrist, snapping them to stay alert. I couldn’t stay awake to play with Andy and had no energy to do anything around the house. I felt awful, and I didn’t want to feel awful, I wanted to feel good again. I wanted my super powers back so I could do all the things I’d been doing when I had the drug. I wanted to be a Goddess.
So I called my brother again.
“It’s different this time,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s called meth. It’s just like crank, only better. Much cleaner and a way bigger high.”
A better high for the same price. Who would turn down that?
Again, I bought a quarter of a gram, the smallest amount you can buy, that cost twenty-five dollars. He was right. I fell in love with the first line I snorted, and that was the end for me. The end of everything I knew and cherished for a long time to come.
The only reason I never started using needles is because I knew I would never go back. Shooting up is the end of the line, and since I didn’t shoot up, it was easier to convince myself that I wasn’t really an addict.
I loved meth, and I loved the ritual of snorting lines: chopping it, crushing it, making intricate patterns. But the day someone showed me how to smoke it, I never went back to snorting. When that rush hit my brain, a single tear dropped. I was finally home. The exact words I said when I called my brother were, “I want to do this drug in this way for the rest of my life.” Those words will haunt me to my grave.
Meth, in the form of an opaque, white cloud of smoke, entered my brain and my soul at the same time, filling the emptiness inside me. It was as if I’d finally found what I’d been searching for my whole life. All my insecurities evaporated, and I was finally the woman I wanted to be. I was funnier, smarter, more confident and enormously productive. Every addict I know says the same thing, in one way or another: their drug of choice filled that empty space in their soul that nothing else could touch. It’s the same thing as the creepy man in the van offering candy to a child. Who doesn’t want candy? When you take it, though, it’s too late and everything you knew and loved will vanish in the back of that dark van. The man with the pretty candy that tasted so good only wants you for his own dark, sinister pleasure, and just as the sweetness starts to melt in your mouth, it’s too late.
For me, the man with the candy was meth. The day I smoked my first bowl was the day I climbed in the back of the van, and it took me years to find my way home again.
Within a week, getting high became a daily habit. I started buying in larger quantities. Meth is a commodity like any other product, and the more you purchase, the lower the price.
I would pool my money with my brother or someone else, and split the meth between us.
That’s how most people start dealing. If enough people contribute to the buy, you get your drugs free, and that’s how it started for me. Chuck didn’t want to be involved with buying larger quantities, and eventually introduced me to his dealer, Garnett.
Garnett was a lanky man with horn-rimmed glasses and a mess of loose curls that fell to his shoulders. He was soft spoken when I first met him, ducking his head beneath his hair when he wasn’t wearing a battered Fedora. He seemed almost fragile. We met in May, and when spring melted into summer, his knobby knees and pointy elbows occasionally peeked from beneath his Bermudas or short-sleeved shirts. He was bright, interesting and funny, and we became friends immediately, spending more and more time together over the next couple of months. There was nothing about him, initially, that indicated the destructive malevolence behind the meek façade. Nothing that indicated the true Garnett. The one I would, unfortun
ately, become well acquainted with in the near future.
He was a drug dealer. That was his full time job. Prior to that, he and his friends from high school worked at the same pizza parlor as Chuck. They were all close friends with my brother, playing poker, Ultimate and Frisbee golf in their free time. Garnett started spending more time with me and before long, I met all the guys, occasionally joining in the card games, or hosting all night bull sessions. Among them, I felt like a queen. I was one of the guys, separated only by sex, and therefore treated like both a lady and a pal. I was elite in an exclusive club whose books were closed. I felt special.
Meanwhile, I started buying meth more often. People I knew who used preferred the quality I could get as well as the lower prices I offered. I wasn’t out to make money; I just wanted to get high. As long as my share was paid for, I didn’t charge any more than I had to in order to get the lower price. Word got out, people I knew started buying for their friends, and I began buying larger quantities. By the end of summer, I was making a couple hundred extra dollars per month on top of what I was using myself. As a single mom always struggling to makes ends meet, it felt good to be able to afford extra things for Andy. I paid the bills on time and in full. We could buy name brand food and fresh produce. There was extra money so we could go to the movies occasionally and have our picture taken together at a studio for Christmas presents for Grandma and Papa. I had the money Andy needed for field trips at school, so he never had to miss out on activities with his peers. I also had the energy and stamina to do everything I needed to do. That’s how I started seriously dealing meth. It wasn’t as much a conscious decision as it was an evolution.
Crystal Clean Page 3