by J. R. Helton
rouse me to a sufficient degree to change my own behavior! Rat chooses pleasure I guess! Goddamn it! Aren’t we at least capable of self-preservation! Your demise however is disturbing to me and you’ve definitely got to off the regular meds. All roads lead to rehab my friend . . . You best start hiking. I got a real kick out of your X-ing phone call. It was a great break from my harsh chain gang reality. You opened up with “I want you to know that I value our friendship!” That’s funny but it’s true. I have often entertained the passing thought of gratitude at our friendship. It’s really pretty trippy how we have come to stay such good friends. I know I called you out of the blue a couple of times but I don’t think we actually got together much post high school until I came out to visit The Farm. Anyway, I have roamed this vast land in sack cloth and ashes for countless moons and have found so few who even share our honest curiosity. So don’t fuck up and die! I need friends like you who I feel like really know me! As I’ve told before . . . I am, in fact, an Alien . . . I am not of this earth. However I do have one or two cherished beliefs that I’m still clinging
to. One of them is that sometime in the future, I will meet some girl that I honestly like enough to put up with, and that you and Patricia, and me and what’s her name will retreat to our own forest compound and live out our lives in relative happiness . . .
Later brother . . .
I looked out across my classroom and realized he was right. As hard and sarcastic as I was, I did still believe, and it wasn’t just the drug that made it so. That said, I was relieved when the class ended, happy at the thought of not having to see anyone else now for almost a month of free time, when I would be able to drop my public mask for an extended period, returning to my solitary and personal existence, with my books and my little family, away from this world, in the comfort of my home.
-24-
Drugs for insomnia, impotence, allergies, high cholesterol, more impotence, pain relief, and even toe fungus are all now pushed on American television as regularly as alcohol is. The government, the FDA, has allowed these companies to do this with minimal regulation. I’m sure the drug companies would prefer, for example, not to have to list “anal leakage” or “suicide” or “head explosions” as possible side effects on their high-dollar TV commercials, but some vague semblance of the law that still remains in relation to the common good forces them to at least warn you that if you take the antidepressant they are pushing on you, you could maybe kill yourself. All of these new drug ads encourage us to “ask your doctor” and, ever the good consumers, we obviously do if you look at the billions we generate in drug profits.
I have always had trouble sleeping. To me, sometimes it is like dying, every night, and I can’t help but hang onto my drifting waking consciousness. Or my mind gets in a thought rut, an idea like a song being replayed as accompaniment ad infinitum, over and over. Only two things ever really help my insomnia: substantial exercise earlier in the day, (the very best sleep is from physical exhaustion when sober) or taking Xanax or Valium to sleep. I began to see all of the ads for these sleep aids on television, and two years ago, I decided to indeed ask my doctor about one of these new drugs for sleep. My mother-in-law, Eve, was taking Ambien at the time. She swore by its effectiveness and had experimented with several different combos before she got the right dosage: 6.5 mg, rather than the 5 or 10 mg pills. She didn’t drink with it or mix it with any other drug, and it worked exactly as promised, giving her a full seven to eight hours sleep every night.
I decided to ask Dr. Jacobs about them on my next visit to the pain clinic, but first I asked him to write me a script for Xanax instead as I knew it worked well for me as a sleep aid. I rarely took it during the day, as I got no real high or any special feeling of being anxiety free from the drug; it just made me drowsy and put me to sleep. Dr. Jacobs said no, though. He didn’t like prescribing Xanax, didn’t like any of the benzos at all. He did write me a script for Ambien, though, at full strength, which at the time was 10 mg. I asked him if there would be any drug interaction problems with the hydrocodone and Flexeril, and he said there shouldn’t be, as I was on such small amounts and had developed a tolerance to the opiates. He did advise me not to drink at all though.
But I did drink, my daily vodka crans and tequila. Combined with the 60 mg of HC, the 30 mg of muscle relaxants, Xanax, and Cannabis sativa, it did seem to bring out the worst side effects of the drug Ambien. The main problems I had were loss of memory and sleepwalking, both of which worried me. I was getting sleep on the drug, but it was more of a complete black out. I no longer remembered my dreams—which in some ways, was a blessing. I still had powerful nightmares on occasion, usually finding myself on a dark beach with brown tidal waves coming at me, or on open plains with nowhere to run as the entire sky blackened with an advancing wall of purple and blue tornadoes. Most often, I find myself trapped in an endless black sea in the middle of the night in a torrential rain, gigantic black waves towering over me as I try to stay above water . . . but then the true fear begins as I realize that there is something else there with me, there is something under the water, something so black and dark and incredibly huge that to face it, to contemplate it, would destroy you, and I feel this great immensity rising toward me, just brushing my treading legs, the whole ocean rising with its incomprehensible mass, coming for me, and an overwhelming sadness then overtakes me as I realize fully and completely that this is indeed Death, that there is no escape, this is the moment I’d been waiting for . . . Even more often, I found myself on bridges, my car stalling in the middle of the bridge over a peaceful green river. I notice then that it is raining, that the river is rising, and the water is now muddy and covering my feet, and then it returns, that feeling from the black ocean, and I am suddenly so sad because I know it is over, it is too late, as my car fills with water and I am pulled off the bridge into a raging brown torrent, slowly sinking into the swirling mud . . . These dreams came to me less frequently than in my past, but one still emerged in the night on occasion, and the complete blackout from Ambien was a relief.
I had to be in bed within forty-five minutes or so after taking 10 mg of Ambien because when it hit, I went down immediately. Problem was, like many men, as I went further past forty, my prostate came to make itself known and every evening I was up at least twice a night to take a piss. The bathroom was right next to our big bed, but when I took Ambien, instead of waking up fully to walk to the toilet, I didn’t wake up until I was just about ready to urinate. That first week of taking the drug, two nights in a row, I was woken up by Patricia saying, “Jake? What are you doing? Jake! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes then to see that I was in my usual stance, one hand on the wall to use gravity, only I was standing in the far corner of our bedroom getting ready to piss on the wall and carpet. On another night, Patricia stopped me just in time as I stood there, completely asleep and oblivious, my dick in hand about to urinate on top of the plugged in and running air purifier we had humming in the other corner of the room. In my defense, it was large, round, and white, so it looked like a toilet. Had Patricia not woken me up, I would have shocked the hell out of myself pissing on a plugged in appliance. Both episodes bothered me, so I cut out the vodka cranberries to see if that was what did it.
I then, for some reason, had another weird side effect where I would sleepwalk all the way downstairs, only to wake up before an open refrigerator to find myself shoving another giant bite of a cheesecake or two cookies, or slabs of ham and cheese, basically as much immediate sugar or salt as I could get into my mouth at one time. This happened even when I hadn’t smoked any pot so it wasn’t that. Plus, with pot, unlike with Ambien, one was fully cognizant of the fact that the cannabis had stimulated your appetite, given you the munchies, and you could make a decision to fight it or go with it. Personally, I always went all the way with the marijuana munchies as the drug heightened your sense of taste so well that when they came on, discovering a half g
allon of ice cream or chocolate brownies in the kitchen was like finding a pound of gold, and neither sweet ever tasted as good as they did when high on pot. But with Ambien, this wasn’t a choice. I just woke up and was binge eating anything, a loss of control that again worried me.
I called Jacobs office and told them of the side effects and they said to stop taking the Ambien immediately. I did, but I kept the bottle, and should note that in subsequent attempts with the drug when I was not taking as much hydrocodone or muscle relaxant, had smoked no weed, and had not had any alcohol to drink, the Ambien did work without the side effects. It still wiped out all memory of the night before and killed all of my dreams, but I went down for about six hours for sure. Even so, I still didn’t like the way Ambien made my rest feel like an artificial and not-at-all refreshing manufactured sleep. I woke up groggily and reluctantly from Ambien, no matter what I had mixed it with so I gave my mother-in-law the rest of my pills to break in half if she ever needed them.
Jacobs was an excellent physician and had his PA, Ms. Portales, immediately call in a few small scripts for me of a variety of sleep aids so that we could see what would work best, but to no avail. I tried Lunestra, Rozerem, most of the ones advertised now. None of them worked. They actually seemed to fuck with my sleep, instead of causing it. My dreams came back, only now they were accompanied by more nightmares than usual, ones that the insomnia drugs amplified even more. I had some of the weirdest most violent dreams of my life on these sleep aids, horrific tortures, humans flayed alive, bodies cut in half, with the upper torso still alive, crawling, pulling the bloody body along the sand in agony, trailing blood and guts. Old dogs, long dead, I had cared for deeply, appeared in my dreams so real I woke up with tears in my eyes realizing they were gone. At one point, my strong, paternal grandmother came to me in the night and grabbed my chin as I looked up at her, a little boy again. She gave me that harsh stern look of hers and admonished me for wasting my talents as an artist, insisting that I get down to work before my life was over. The woman had just died only weeks before but the dream had seemed so real that I woke up rattled and sweating. I could see then how people felt they had been visited by ghosts as I was shaken for days.
Patricia was growing worried. She said that I was sleeping so deeply on this mix of insomnia drugs, which I was combining with alcohol and HC again, that she was worried I was dead one night; she found herself touching me thereafter, making me stir in the night to check on my breathing. On other nights, she said I was whimpering so loudly in fear that she was forced to wake me up. Whenever she did, I was more relieved to be awake than asleep, transported back to my comfortable bed and my sweet, beautiful wife, away from the nightmare landscape or scenario in which I’d been enmeshed. I finally ditched all of these sleep aids and decided to either stay awake until exhausted or try to get some more Xanax or Valium, which was all that worked.
I went online first but couldn’t bring myself to pay 200 bucks for an online doctor consultation when I had only had a ten dollar co-pay, if that, when Dr. Garza had prescribed the drug for me. I could understand both Garza and now Dr. Jacobs’s reluctance to prescribe Xanax in combo with hydrocodone, but was frustrated that their main objection was that people abused the drug and that one could also become dependent on it. I was not going to do either; I just wanted it for the three nights a week when I absolutely had to get up very early for my job. Or, now that I used MDMA on occasion, to take the teeth grinding edge off the drug with maybe 1 mg of alprazolam. I did know from reading as well as experience that many people did abuse alprazolam and took “ladders” for fun. “Ladders” were 2 mg sections of Xanax that one could break off into 0.5 mg doses, which was what I wanted to do. Others just took the whole 2 mg and mixed them with alcohol for a kick, high school and college kids at parties.
Unwilling to pay such high prices and tired of going through all the bullshit of faxing records or going to another doctor besides Jacobs for a script, Dean and I finally just drove down to the Mexican border—Nuevo Laredo was just three hours from SA—to buy some Valium (diazepam) and Xanax (alprazolam) over the counter. I also wanted to stock up on a few bottles of Mexican Tylex which contained 30 mg of codeine and 500 mg of acetaminophen. The opiate codeine was much weaker than hydrocodone and had barely any effect on me. Even if I tried to chew it up like I did my Lortabs and Vicodins to get them quickly into my bloodstream (which was difficult, as Tylex codeine came in powder form in a capsule) the codeine took too long to hit me, and when it did it was a dull, barely perceptible high. It also did little to kill any back or muscle pain, compared to my HC.
The only reason I even kept a couple of bottles of the Tylex horse pills around was to help me get off the hydrocodone in case I ever ran out of my supply. I had once used Tylex to cut down to two Vicodin a day from eight or ten a day. I had used the taper down method of counting out my pills each day, slowly reducing them in number each weekend to lessen the withdrawal symptoms. The Tylex helped some, but I still had the shits and cramps and felt lethargic and sore for days. They were no substitute either; even when most of the HC was out of my system, the 30 mg of codeine was a weak attempt to reach opiate receptors in my brain I’d long ago blown out.
The taper down method was still the best way for me to cut down, but I never used it to completely quit my HC dependency. I still have calendars in my desk running back to 2003 with mad scribbles in two inch squares for each day of the month that read: ten p.m., 20 mg HC, 1 F (flex), two p.m., 5 mg, HC, six p.m. 5 mg HC, 10 mg Val (valium), nine p.m. 10 mg HC (40 total/ 24 hours) 1 mg Xanax, 2 oz. vodka, four hits MJ (mary jane) slept four hours, jimmy legs bad, three a.m., 600 mg Ibuprofen, slept downstairs 1 hr, S&S at school eight a.m. (shakes and shits in the morning at work before my first lecture). The next day, I had notes of either going down in my HC amounts and up in ibuprofen, or up in HC and down in everything else I was taking to mask its loss. I have years of these scribbles, up and down with Vicodin and Lortab, notes on every single day’s intake, with the occasional mostly blank entry that only read “80 mg HC, feel good again, fuck me . . .”
Dean had brought his new girlfriend and fiancé Veronica into town on this trip to Mexico but neither she nor Patricia wanted to cross the border with us. Though both had been deep into Mexico before, neither woman liked the sharp, sleazy edge of the immediate Mexican border with the US. They did ask us to pick them up some Retin-A, some type of miracle, cortisone-like, wrinkle cream they couldn’t get in the US. They were worried about our safety a bit also as there were many real warnings at the time for Americans to be careful in all Mexican border towns from Nuevo Laredo to Tijuana. The border drug war had heated up with local Mexican police officers and federal law enforcement (the federales) and local drug cartels all competing for the highly lucrative illegal drug profits gleaned from the massive use of marijuana and cocaine in the United States, the world’s biggest drug customer state.
This was nothing different than Prohibition back in the ’20s in America. Even an eighth grade idiot could figure out the basic business supply and demand equation of the illegal drug trade. Because marijuana and coke are illegal, and demand is still high, it is sold at a high price in the huge global black market for illicit drugs. My own great grandfather and namesake, Victor Stewart, made himself a millionaire on the same business model with illegal alcohol back in the 1920s. Victor was a cowboy from Texas who’d become a rancher and farmer south of San Diego from years of hard work. It was also Victor’s job to monitor for the US government the flimsy border that ran along hundreds of acres of his ranch.
My young grandfather and his many cowboy brothers in California rode horses up and down that border, which was only a five-wire fence in the 1920s. They pulled wagons to drop highly refined flour over the fence for the Mexican families from Tijuana with whom they were doing business. These families and businesses needed and wanted the more highly refined American flour for certain pastries and sweets. In turn,
they dropped five-gallon metal cans of pure alcohol on the US side of the border. The boys brought the alcohol back to the barn, and my great grandfather added in and cooked the sugar alcohol mix to make very strong whiskey. He had an old model T with a false extra gas tank under the front seat that he then filled with the whiskey.
Victor drove the car into San Diego several times a week with its extra load to personally take his many sons to a Catholic school there. He came back on those afternoons with the boys and a suitcase of cash. Before he died at 100, I remember the old man bragging in the 1970s that no man in the country was making the kind of money he was making on the Mexican border in the 1920s, thousands of dollars a month. He didn’t drink much himself—just one shot of whiskey every morning at breakfast—but he was sad to see Prohibition repealed, along with the immense profits from the illegal drug trade.
Eighty years later, Dean Brown and I left Patricia and Veronica drinking at a nice hotel in Laredo to walk across the border and buy cheap drugs that were even stronger than the illegal ones that people were fighting over so violently right in front of us. I had students in my classes who were from Laredo, who had family in Nuevo Laredo, telling me that they were even worried themselves about the border drug war. It wasn’t so much that you yourself would be a target of violence, but rather that you might get caught in the crossfire of the state government’s drug cartels and the private business drug cartels. In some Mexican towns, the private drug cartels were more respected than the federales who were famously corrupt.