So although I didn’t wield this power, I felt it and it fed me. It made me feel important. I had control then, where I had lacked control so often in my past, and it felt almost as good as the drug itself. And I had money. Enough money that when I was fired from bartending for, you guessed it, excessive lateness, it didn’t even faze me. After that, I don’t remember much except for flashes, like brief scenes in a movie.
Here’s what I remember.
I remember what my apartment looked like. I remember Andy’s bathroom because it was huge, and I decorated it with brightly colored fish. I remember cooking chicken nuggets and green beans for him for dinner. I remember drug runs to Boise and back. I remember picking Andy up sometimes an hour and a half late from school because of those runs. I remember meeting with his teacher and realizing that the school wasn’t the right place for him because he was basically shut away with two other kids, who were severely disabled. I remember feeling nauseated with guilt because of that. I remember sitting in my dark bedroom at night after he’d gone to sleep, getting high, smoking all night until it was time to get him up in the morning.
Here’s what I don’t remember.
I don’t remember playing with him. I don’t remember feeding him those chicken nuggets and green beans. I don’t remember tucking him in at night, and I don’t remember what we did on the weekends.
What kind of a mother doesn’t remember those things?
I have little snippets of holding his little square hand and walking him to school, of a school program I went to and of eating lunch with him once in the school cafeteria, though I don’t remember why. He didn’t have any friends and I don’t think he was happy there. I don’t remember if he was happy at home. It was my love of and my addiction to meth that robbed Andy of a mother who was present for him, and on some very deep level, I knew that. My meth use caused me to do, or not do, things I felt guilty about, and the only thing that eased that guilt was smoking meth.
I paid a high price for my addiction. I continue to pay, and I accept that. Whatever the reasons for my addiction may be, I’m the one who picked up the pipe, and I’m responsible for everything I’ve done. My son didn’t have a choice, and he’s the one who suffered. I could smoke away my guilt, but he couldn’t do anything about the way he was feeling and what I was putting us through.
He spent Thanksgiving break with my parents in Boise. I told them I couldn’t get time off from work. As far as they knew, I was still a bartender. When Christmas rolled around, I used the same excuse, so Andy went to stay with Grandma and Papa for the two-week winter vacation from school. Except for Christmas day, I spent those weeks making drug runs. I celebrated Christmas by staying in my apartment and getting high all day.
I tried to sleep at least a little every night, but time slips away like smoke from the pipe, and I would sometimes realize it had been two or three days since I’d had any sleep at all. Driving became dangerous. I found myself nodding off and started using rubber bands on my wrists again and ice cubes down my shirt - anything to try and stay awake on that lonely stretch of road between Jackpot and Boise.
It was early morning, about 2:00 am on the first day of 2001 and I was making a run from Boise to Jackpot. The freeway was covered in ice and everything around it shone eerily white in the cold night. I’d been up for few days and was exhausted, but I had to get to Jackpot to pick up money. As always, when I traveled, my loaded pipe was my only passenger. I set the cruise control at seventy-five, took three long hits, filling my lungs each time, then opened all the windows and cranked the radio to keep myself awake. When I couldn’t stand the cold, I closed the windows.
The rumble tracks on the side of the road woke me and I panicked when I realized I was only partly on the freeway and headed toward an embankment. I grabbed the steering wheel and over-corrected to the left, nearly rolling the car. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t slowing down when I remembered the car was still on cruise. I cranked the steering wheel back to the right and stepped on the brake, which sent the car spinning. When the tires caught the edge of the road, the car flipped into the air. Everything went into slow motion as the car tumbled through the still night. I was upside-down at least twice while thinking this was exactly like a recurring dream I’d had of rolling my car into a field. The only difference was, in the dream, it was day and the field was green rather than the middle of the night headed into a sea of snow. I had a second to think about that when WHAM! The car landed right side up, down the embankment a few yards from the freeway.
I blacked out for a couple of minutes and when I came to, I thought heavy rain was beating down on the car until I felt the snow and dirt on the back of my neck. It wasn’t raining. The back windshield had shattered and the dirt and snow I had displaced with the car was filling the backseat. The engine was still running and the radio blaring. My seat was crooked but the seatbelt was still strapped across my chest. “Why didn’t the air-bag deploy?” I thought, and then, “Where the hell is my pipe?”
All I could think was, “I have to get back on the road and keep going.” I would worry about the damage when I got to Jackpot. When I tried to drive up the embankment, the tires just spun in the snow. I turned the steering wheel both ways trying to find the traction I needed to get the car moving again. The last thing I needed was for someone to stop, especially a cop, since I still hadn’t located my pipe. A single-car accident would mean investigation, sobriety tests and a detailed search of the scene.
The wheels only spun, digging deeper into the snow. I dug through the mess in the backseat and grabbed the blanket I always carried. My mother always said, “You never know when there might be an emergency and a blanket could come in handy.” She was right. I got out and went to the front of the car. Christ, what a mess. The hood was buckled and the left front tire had popped but I figured I would take care of that later. Maybe at the next town I could drive the car to a gas station and have some friendly local change my tire for me at three in the morning.
I crammed the blanket between the ground and the good tire, half-buried in snow thinking this would give me enough traction to get going. It didn’t work. The tire wouldn’t grab the material and wet with snow, the blanket froze to the ground.
I started looking frantically for the pipe, knowing that when a passing car happened to notice me, the police wouldn’t be far behind. I-84 was always desolate at night except for the big rigs, but that morning I hadn’t seen anyone since shortly after leaving Boise. I knew my luck wouldn’t hold out and I had to find that damn pipe, quick.
About twenty minutes later, I saw the first headlights. In the dark, there was no sign of the accident, and with all the lights off in the car, I crouched there trying to buy more time. I had no coat and the blanket was stuck to the snow. I was freezing cold and the only thing I could think of was finding the evidence before the police arrived. Two more cars passed and I still hadn’t found it. Shivering and teeth rattling, I knew I had to get out of the cold. I was in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t get a signal on my phone. I prayed the pipe had shattered or was buried. I’d looked everywhere using the dim light of my phone with no luck.
Someone in a truck finally noticed my car and pulled over. I plowed through the snow up the embankment and a man opened the passenger door for me. “Thank you so much!” I said, climbing up into the cab.
“You must be freezing,” he said, turning up the heat. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I think I caught a patch of ice and slid off the road.” My teeth wouldn’t stop rattling.
He used his C.B. to call the state police and give them our location.
“Thanks so much for stopping. I can’t get a signal on my phone.”
“They’ll be here in a minute. They’re coming from Mountain Home. You can wait in here for them.” He seemed so nice – and straight. Sitting there in the cab of that truck, I felt dirty. Not from the wreck but from the chemicals in my body. I couldn’t look at the man who had possibly saved
my life because I didn’t want him to see me. I felt ashamed - as if my presence would somehow taint him.
A single police car came and I thanked my rescuer as the lone cop escorted me to the front seat of his cruiser. I was scared shitless. This was it: The beginning of the big investigation leading to my arrest and incarceration in a small town jail on the first day of the new year.
He asked me what happened and I told him I had fallen asleep while driving, rolling my car. “That happens a lot out here. This stretch of road is so long and there aren’t many rest stops. Hell,” he said, “I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel dozens of times. Best thing to do is pull over to the side and take a nap if you need to.”
I was stunned. He was acting as if this was no big deal – like he was going to help me because he understood that, hey, shit happens. Bummer way to start out the new year. He called for a tow truck and asked me where I wanted the car towed.
“I guess back to Mountain Home. I’ll figure out what to do from there.”
“Alright. As soon as we get your car on its way, I’ll drive you back into town. You have someone to come get you?”
I couldn’t believe this was happening. Not only would there be no investigation and no sobriety tests but he wasn’t even going to cite me. And he was going to chauffer me back to town in the front of his cop car. What the hell was going on here?
“I can drop you off at the all night diner for you to wait for someone, but I can’t take you all the way to Boise. Sorry.”
Sorry? He was sorry he couldn’t be of more service to me. This was crazy.
“I’m sure I can find someone to come get me. This is so nice of you. Thank you.”
“Sure. It’s my job. It’s just sad how many people die on this stretch of road every year. We get reports of probably thirty or forty people a month falling asleep at the wheel out here. I’m just glad you’re not hurt – or worse. You ever notice all those markers on the both sides of the freeway? Those are memorials put there by families of people who have died in accidents out here.”
I knew what he was talking about. Little makeshift crosses, sometimes covered with flowers, dotted both side of the freeway. I saw them all the time, but never realized, until he said that, how many there actually were. I wondered how many had died from road fatigue and how many had died from being too wasted to drive.
The edges of the sky were just starting to turn from black to purplish-blue when the officer dropped me off at the all-night diner.
“You gonna be okay? You sure you got someone coming?”
“I’m sure, and thank you so much for all your help.”
Garnett came and drove me back to Boise. A few days later, I went back to Mountain Home to sign the totaled car over to the wrecking yard, and I found the pipe - still loaded and intact on the floor beneath the back passenger seat.
If I hadn’t been so loaded, I might have seen the whole incident as a giant red light. Then again, if I weren’t loaded, the whole thing never would have happened. It scared me, but more than that, it added to my sense of invulnerability. I earned a kind of folk hero status for having gone through such an incredible ordeal. By all rights, I should have been dead or at least in jail, but I wasn’t. I remember praying, to some unidentified something, that if I could just get out of this, I wouldn’t drive when I knew I was too tired ever again. Every addict I know has been there. You’re in a bad situation or a close call so you pray to whatever or whoever you pray to, saying, “If you’ll just get me out of (fill in the blank), I’ll never (fill in the blank) again.” Then, when you get through whatever it was, you think, “We didn’t shake on that, did we?”
I knew I was tired. I knew I shouldn’t have been driving. That was my mistake. Addiction is a disease of denial, though, and it honestly didn’t occur to me that I had a problem with drugs. I didn’t see it for the hazard sign it was. I viewed it as a driving problem. I drove when I lacked sleep. Simple as that. The only drug related thoughts were the fear of getting caught with drugs or paraphernalia and, more importantly, being scared that I’d lost my pipe. It was my best pipe and it was loaded with really good shit. That was how my mind worked at the time, if you can call that working.
Coming through the accident unscathed, other than losing my car, confirmed my belief that I didn’t have a problem. A little sleepy, but as the cop said, it happens to lots of people on that stretch of road. It really had nothing to do with me. It’s that kind of denial that kept me trapped for so long.
Chapter 7
In a town with a population of less than 2,000, a person who doesn’t work may as well be wearing a sign that says, “Shady character. Please investigate further.” Since I no longer had transportation anyway, it was time for us to leave. I rented a storage unit for my belongings, and Andy and I moved back to Boise and in with my parents. I enrolled Andy in school and set about the task of pretending to find a job.
I did half-heartedly look. I sent out resumes on the Internet and circled help wanted ads in the classified section of the newspaper every morning. I went through the motions, but I couldn’t picture myself working a nine to five. I told myself it was because I didn’t work well with people, that I’d lost faith in humanity. That was a favorite saying of mine. I saw myself as a victim. I was fired from the last two jobs I’d had for being chronic lateness. In my drug-addled mind, though, I was convinced that people just didn’t understand my special circumstances. I was, after all, a single mother of a child with a disability. Shouldn’t that afford me extra privileges? No one understood me and of course, this provided the perfect excuse for my drug use, as well.
I honestly don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I was in no hurry to find a job. All I cared about was spending time with Andy when he was home, and getting high the rest of the time. As generous as they were about taking us in, I resented my parents. I felt stifled by their sterile home and rigid routine, which was much different from when I was growing up.
When I was younger, my parents drank. Canadian Mist and 7-Up was the beverage of choice, especially when we were with Mom’s side of the family. My family and I would sometimes spend the weekend with my two uncles - Mom’s brothers - and their wives, at my grandparents’ house in Hailey or Fairfield, little rural towns in southern Idaho. They would play cards, or watch a football game on TV, but drinking was always the backdrop for family get-togethers.
At home, Mom and Dad would have an occasional cocktail after work, but there was less restraint on the weekends, especially when my grandparents would visit. The four of them would drink all evening and if they went to dinner or a football game, they drank there too. Drinking was part of spending time with family. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was common to bring a half gallon of booze to the celebration. That being the custom and with the size of our family, it was normal to have three or four half-gallon bottles and plenty of beer.
My parents both drank back then, but with Dad it was different. Sometimes he would get falling-down drunk. He wasn’t a mean drunk, at least not around the extended family; he was a happy, silly drunk. To me, it seemed that he was the clown, the buffoon that everyone laughed at. I hated him for letting himself be treated that way. Once, when my parents and grandparents came home from a ball game, Dad attempted to take the babysitter home, but he passed out behind the wheel in our driveway. We never saw that babysitter again.
When I was in junior high, my father’s drinking got worse, or at least that’s when I started to notice what was happening. Sometimes he would go for a drink with a friend after work on a Friday afternoon and we wouldn’t see or hear from him for two or three days. Mom was very quiet on those weekends, sitting at the dining room table by the phone, chain smoking. To this day, I have no idea where my father was during his AWOLs. I do remember one weekend he called on a Sunday and my mother spoke with him briefly. She told us he woke up three hundred miles away in Winnemucca, Nevada alone and had no idea how he got there. That was all we were told. Other than that
, all I knew is that he sometimes just didn’t come home.
Children of alcoholics tend to abuse alcohol, just as children raised in violent households tend to become abusers themselves. You would think that seeing the effects of alcohol on my father would prevent me from ever touching a drop, but aside from the outrageous, I learned something else about alcohol. It relieves stress and it’s required for socializing. Those are two reasons I drank and did drugs, at least in the beginning.
There was another side to my dad, a thing that lived inside him. It was never directed at anyone but Chuck and me. He never did it to Mom and he’s never been that way with his grandchildren. I saw it a lot growing up. Maybe it had something to do with his drinking, although he didn’t have to be drunk for us to see it. I haven’t seen it for five years now, but I remember it vividly and the recollection provokes intense memories.
I hated the thing and I hated my father when it consumed him. His face would change and he would almost snarl. His eyes would flood with hatred. He was threatening and gruesome when he was like that and to this day, even thinking about it - that thing - causes rage to boil up in my throat and makes me want to scream and rip out my hair. When he would get that way, I hated the fucking prick. I hated my father with everything I was. He wasn’t my dad when he was that way. My brother and I refer to it as The Thing That Lives Inside of Dad. I wonder sometimes if that Thing was his internal rage. The sum total of his own demons from his life that he tried so hard to suppress and only came out when, for whatever reason, he felt rage toward Chuck or me.
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