“You don’t know what he’s like,” Carolina said. Her brown eyes scanned the room then settled on the carpet. She and the drug dealer ex-boyfriend she was discussing had abused cocaine to the point of psychosis. They would snort coke mostly, but sometimes freebase. Then she’d undo the screws on the electrical outlet covers to search for the cameras and microphones she insisted were recording her. She blamed the police but sometimes “the government,” as if they needed audio archives of her talking for hours about invisible surveillance. Ted, the support group leader, usually said, “Did you find any cameras or microphones, Carolina?” She admitted she had not. But on certain days she still assumed, even fourteen, thirty, sixty days sober, that it was only because she hadn’t looked deep enough inside her walls.
“They have technologies,” she said, “high tech thingies you don’t even know are there.” None of the group members challenged her. We nodded, stared at our shoes. She removed the electrical covers so frequently that her ex eventually stopped screwing them back on. When he refused to quit coke, she left him to get clean. Now she existed in a state of terrified anticipation, telling us how she expected him to break down her apartment door and beat her for her abandonment, how she owned a gun, frequently peered through the curtains looking for his car and had nightmares about their inevitable confrontation. She was strong. I envied her resolve. I also felt horrible for her. No person should have to live with those fears, especially after making the wise decision to get clean. Her stories also made me grateful that I hadn’t gotten strung out on hard drugs. I kept that to myself.
During my first weeks in group, a routine “Hi, my name is Aaron” was about all I offered. I’d never been in a clinical environment before, never confessed my sins to priests or a shrink, and I didn’t want to. I assumed I could do this on my own. I couldn’t imagine how the presence of out-of-control strangers would bolster the willpower I believed necessary to resist temptation. Sobriety to me depended on a person’s level of self-control, not talking about our feelings or whatever people did in these bullshit settings. So I mostly just sat there, listening.
The bitter prep cook usually kicked off our sessions by inventorying his previous week’s woes: he slipped and drank a beer when he woke up the other day; he drank a Near Beer before that and it made him want a real one; his boss didn’t appreciate his work or his efforts to get clean, and his coworkers snorting coke in the refrigerator made him want to drink.
Ted would ask, “How’s the sleeping issues? Getting more solid rest through the night?”
Bitter would shake his head. “Not good,” he’d say, squeezing his crossed-arms tighter. If tallying our grievances was all group was about, I told myself I wouldn’t stick around. Ben talked about gaining weight after giving up the opiates, how the added pounds made breathing difficult. One night he talked for ten minutes about gout. When my parents called about my progress, I told them these people were the reason support groups were useless: just a bunch of sad sacks who needed coddling and thrived on other peoples’ pity. It had only been two weeks.
When Bitter talked, he rarely looked up from the floor. He’d relapsed numerous times over his decade-plus of abuse, ruined his marriage, lost jobs, then ended up back in group half-expecting to relapse again. As much as I tried not to, I thought that, as the group’s youngest member, I was stronger than him, stronger than Ben and the executive, too. Having lived that sad cycle for so long, those three seemed unlikely to ever clean up for good.
Carolina was their opposite. She didn’t discuss her headaches or stubbed toe, didn’t complain about various restaurants’ rip-off lunch prices or the frustration of finding a good paying job with large gaps in her résumé. She told and retold her cocaine horror stories as if to remind herself why she needed to stay straight, and I listened with a twisted fascination. She described how she’d pulled the electrical wires from one apartment’s walls, even tugging them through the cheap dry wall of a motel room. She followed the white trench with her dry, bugged-out eyes as it moved toward the ceiling, the crumbling material dusting the carpet and her arms powder white. Fearing someone who knew their address might rob them, she and her ex frequently rented motel rooms to binge. She’d spend large portions of those days in a chair in the room’s corner, legs pressed against her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, peeking beneath the curtains for cops and federal agents. She thought the military aircraft that flew over town—jets and bombers from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base—were some sort of urban reconnaissance involved with the war on drugs. She misidentified other motel patrons as possible assailants, and sat ready for them to knock on the door all night.
To get me more engaged in group, Ted asked me a series of questions one night: “Does your family have a history of addiction?” “How old were you when you first used?” “How did you get into marijuana?” “What made you decide to quit now?” I told the short version:
No one on either side of my family had been a hardcore addict. My dad’s youngest brother was a pianist who smoked cigarettes and might have dabbled with coke when he toured with Waylon Jennings, but I heard nothing of the road seeping into his regular life, or at least he’d been too broke to support a habit. Two of my dad’s other brothers had spent many years smoking dope. Wake-and-bakers like me, they’d smoke from the time they woke up to the time they went to sleep; age and heart problems had put an end to that, though. My folks weren’t drinkers. They didn’t frequent bars, never took acid in the sixties. My mom had smoked pot exactly three times, and my dad never developed a taste for it either. So minute was marijuana’s presence in my parents’ lives that they hadn’t even thought to tell me about my uncles or their own scant history until I was in my late-twenties. Between these regular Joe, straight-and-narrow parents, somehow I ended up the wild one.
I first got drunk when I was thirteen. After guzzling a bunch of my parent’s gin on a school night for no reason, I called a girl I had a crush on and babbled for a while, then fell face-first down our carpeted stairs and woke up the next morning in a bed covered in what I thought were crumbs but turned out to be vomit. I started drinking beer with friends on weekends at age sixteen, but for some reason, a year passed before I smoked dope. Chris, JT, and Jason—those guys were my brothers. We’d known each other for nearly a decade, went to movies, parties, concerts, camping, traveling, spent all our free time and reached various milestones together. Initially we smoked a little here, a little there, always on the weekends, usually at night. After a year of casual toking we were getting stoned together—and also alone—every night, seven days a week, in one to ten sessions a day. On weekends we’d also get drunk. Then we’d stay up late getting rowdy, sleep late the next day, load the bong upon waking, eat a very stoned lunch, then go back to sleep. By the time night hit, it was time to get stoned again and open the first of many beers. It seemed amusing at first. Being perpetually baked became our new comic character: Laughy, Dopey, Mumbly, and Forgetful, the Four Stooges of Fun in our own imagined Cheech and Chong movie. Lunch time? Load some bong hits. Seeing a movie? Roll a joint. Doing a shift at work or getting ready for bed? One quick toke.
Before JT and Jason got their own apartment, our loitering centered around Chris’ place. He lived in a cinder block addition on the side of his mother’s house. Spent Coke cans, flattened Ben & Jerry’s containers, and Reese’s Peanut Butter cup wrappers covered the floor. Every weekend, Jason and JT and I swept the trash aside and cleared enough carpet space on which to spend the night. We awoke next to overflowing ashtrays, and spray-painted cryptic messages on the walls such as “our friends the ants,” referring to a brief infestation. Clothes both dirty and clean mixed with the trash; only Chris could tell them apart, though when selecting an outfit the distinction hardly mattered. He’d come in from the laundry room holding a plastic bin and there, feet from his dresser, dump the laundry on the floor. The dresser was for weed.
We were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. By the time I turned twenty, my brain s
tarted to misfire. I couldn’t remember things: what commercial had just played on TV, the dates of doctors’ appointments, points that professors made in class. I couldn’t concentrate on conversations and had trouble staying engaged in groups, preferring to slouch in a chair and grin into space while the socializing occurred without me. Three years of this passed and all I had to show for it was an increasingly blank stare and a memory so badly failing that I hardly remembered a time when I had the energy to pursue my goals. That and, two and a half years into college, I needed to pick a major.
I tried to control myself but never could for long. I kept that foot-long plastic bong in my car when I drove to the university. I took it everywhere. I’d slip into the parking garage after classes—a parking spot that my parents paid exorbitant prices to get me—and smoke a little before going for a solo hike, or before driving to Chris’ to smoke more with him and whoever else was there. I smoked before going to work at a dull office job on campus, and to my other job at a sandwich shop. My friends and I packed bowls while driving city streets and learned to smoke pinch-hitters in crowded shopping centers without getting caught. We took bong hits around campfires and in the backyard at parties. I also started ditching class more frequently to hike and smoke alone. No matter what I did, I couldn’t resist getting high. I had no will power, and I hadn’t yet learned that it wasn’t will power that got you sober.
As much as I tried not to, the urge frequently proved overwhelming and I smoked before school. One morning while driving stoned over the Rural Road bridge, I slammed into the back of a pickup truck at fifteen miles-per-hour. I’d been going forty, looking east at the morning light illuminating the Superstition Mountains. When I returned my attention to the road, all three lanes of traffic had stopped. I hit the brakes and skid into the truck. It stood so high off the ground that the rear bumper cut right across my VW Bug’s hood, bending the flimsy metal outwards and upwards in an aluminum tulip. The truck didn’t suffer a scratch, but my forehead bled from banging against the windshield, which now had a vast spider web of fractures stretching across it. The driver stepped from his truck and glared at me through my open passenger window. He said, “What the fuck are you doing, dummy?” I apologized, dabbing a rag on my forehead. I suggested we swap information on the nearby side street where there was a bus pullout. He called me a few other names before the cop arrived. I agreed with them all.
Another time I hit an old man on a bike at five miles-per-hour. I’d just smoked an enormous bowl in a lot behind a grocery store at about seven a.m. While I coasted toward the exit, the man darted from the right, where a bike path exited a park and entered the lot. My lids hung heavy and low but still open enough to see his eyes bulge and mouth expand in a pitiful O as he tipped over sideways, disappearing over my now-fixed hood like a paper target at a shooting range.
I jumped out, muttering apologies and asking if he was okay. He grabbed his left thigh and dragged it across the blacktop toward the curb. I was terrified. Had I broken his leg or damaged his spine?
“Sir,” I said as I approached, “let me—”
He held up his hand. “Get away from me!” he yelled. “Murderer, get away!” My heart thudded so violently that I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. I had better hope he could walk again, he said, or he was suing me, yet he refused my offers to call an ambulance, preferring to rock on the curb and moan like a wailing widow at an Italian funeral. Bodies might get frail in their early sixties, but I’d tapped him at most. He didn’t seem hurt, though maybe I was too high to tell. As he clutched his thigh and said he might never walk again, I took it as a warning. What if I hit a pedestrian at fifteen miles an hour, or forty? Then what? After countless apologies, I told him he was a horrible actor and drove off. I moved to Tucson four months later.
My friends thought that what I was doing was laughable. When I told Chris on the phone that I attended group he said, “That’s kind of extreme.” I’d heard other stoners echo that sentiment. “Find me one documented case of weed killing anyone,” they said. Marijuana was just a plant, like mint or basil, a fragrant, resinous mass of tiny flowers. “What’s the worst that can happen if you smoke too much? You eat a lot and fall asleep.” Countless armchair-advocates declared pot’s harmlessness. They said “science” had never established THC—aka, ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol, Cannabis sativa’s major psychoactive compound—as an addictive substance, instead characterizing weed as medicine, the healing herb that increased appetite in chemo patients and made many artists more creative under its influence. I agreed when they said the war on drugs was a flawed approach, because the core issue was one of demand not supply. But it felt overly simplistic to call the concept of marijuana dependence another phony condition whose treatment was “big business.” These stoners pointed fingers at Washington’s hypocrisy conferring legal status on certain profitable drugs like tobacco and alcohol, while big pharmaceutical companies—or “Big Pharma,” as they referred to it—got our citizenry addicted to prescriptions. Then they’d mention the 12,000 or so Americans who died in alcohol-related car accidents every year and conclude, “Which is worse for you: cigarettes, pills, coffee, or weed?”
To these people I wasn’t addicted to marijuana, only “habituated,” psychologically dependent on not so much the drug as the routine. Because if cannabis didn’t cause agonizing physical withdrawals the way heroin and alcohol did, and people couldn’t overdose on it, what else could I be?
My route to school ran between University Boulevard and 1st Street. Four east-west alleys divided that section of what was blandly called the West University neighborhood. Three times a week I shuffled east along 2nd Street from my ugly, cinder-block apartment, past the Craftsman and other bungalows that dominated the area. Built between 1900 and the 1940s, some of these houses were restored, painted tan or bright pastels. Others featured second and third room additions rented as apartments. At this point, there were three interesting alleys to choose from. I preferred the southern route, though none were boring. Something new always presented itself, not simply a pile of antique bricks recently dumped there, or a taxidermied trout set for a few days atop a fence, or the words “Whistle Stop Snitches” newly spray painted on a trash bin, but details revealing the pulse of local life, an aspect of the community’s character that required patience and repeat visits to notice.
I met a friendly stray cat with no left ear who lived near a certain aluminum shed. He was gray-and white with clean fur and no tag. Unlike the other feral cats who scattered at my approach, this one rushed from the shadows to get pet, affectionately nibbling on my fingers as he turned to brush his cheek against them. I started feeding him. Through a wire fence I saw an elderly man sweeping the packed dirt of his small backyard. He wore a tan cowboy hat, brown polyester trousers and an off-white pearl button shirt. The broom was a ragged, permanently bent arc of bristles, and the dirt he swept only drifted to settle on another part of the yard. I saw a young man painting a portrait of his house on a large canvas, saw a Hispanic woman whose tiny, backyard guest house doubled as a hair salon. I didn’t know people re-tarred their swamp coolers until I spotted a man doing it on the side of a house. I awoke every morning excited for my next stroll, invigorated in a way I hadn’t been in years. Beyond Googie, I’d rarely taken an interest in my urban surroundings or the lives of city residents.
During my free time, I started exploring other alleys on my bike. Historic central Tucson was threaded with them. Often fortified with motion-sensitive security lights and “Beware of Dog” signs, they ran north-south or east-west on every block, often both directions, packed two or three to a block. As in other cities, Tucson’s alleys provided garbage trucks access to bins and residents to rear garages. But here, tall candelabras of prickly pear cactus grew against fences, their plump green pads thrust into the air. Native creosote bushes released a clean, medicinal fragrance during winter rains. Hummingbirds perched in mesquite branches. Most of the city’s primary building blocks were visible
as well: adobe, red brick, corrugated aluminum, sheets of tin, stucco, cement, ocotillo fence posts, large volcanic rocks, rotting wooden boards, and barbed wire. One wrought iron security door had been shaped into the silhouette of a saguaro cactus.
As if the city actively denied their existence, many of these routes didn’t have names, and the anonymity imparted a comforting, otherworldly atmosphere that felt far off the urban grid. Many weren’t paved either, or they had been until the old asphalt returned to dirt.
Some of the artists and college students who rented these units accessed them through the alley. I sometimes passed them: hipsters on bikes; a hippie with died pink hair in a flowing tie-dyed dress. Yet the people I encountered most were just passing through. The Union Pacific railroad tracks ran a few blocks from my apartment, lined with the sorts of vacant warehouses and boarded up buildings where transients spent their days in the shifting shade. Leathery-skinned men walked past me lugging heavy backpacks and drank beer by dumpsters. Native Americans from various Southwestern reservations traveled the alleys to and from the parks where they sat in little covens. Filthy train-hopping kids with full face-tattoos strolled by on the way to the spots they busked for change. I wanted to say hello to them all, or at least nod, but I kept my head down, eyes shielded by the bill of my hat.
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