How to Grow an Addict

by J. A. Wright

  I took a quick shower, just to get the blood off my face and out of my hair, and I tried to cover the bleeding bites, but it was hard to reach them and the bandages wouldn’t stay on. I gave up after trying a few times and used a few paper towels from the kitchen instead. I found my purse and car keys in the kitchen sink, and even though I didn’t know whose clothes were on the chair in the bathroom, I put them on anyway.

  As I walked toward the front door, I thought about cleaning up the blood and flushing the condoms down the toilet, but I didn’t plan on ever seeing Nick again, so I left everything as it was. I grabbed the two pharmacy-size bottles of Valium and Darvocet, and a small bottle of an antibiotic, and put them in my purse on my way out.

  I was scheduled to work that day at 3 p.m., but there was no way I was going into Nick’s store ever again. Besides, I could barely walk the three blocks from Nick’s condo to the mall parking lot to get my car. I found a note on my windshield when I arrived and figured it must be from Nick, so I didn’t open it. I drove home, took a long shower, and spent the afternoon trying to cover my bite marks with some big bandages I found in Mom’s bathroom.

  Just as I was heating up a frozen burrito, Mom walked in the front door. “What’s with you not coming home and not calling, are you trying to drive me crazy?” she yelled.

  “What?” I replied.

  “Did you get the note I left on your car? I’ve been worried sick. I was gonna call the police.”

  “I didn’t see your note. I’m sorry. I stayed with a friend last night and forgot to call. I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “When are you ever going to grow up?” she asked just before she went to her room and slammed the door behind her.

  I took a Valium and a Darvocet from the bottles Nick had left for me and slept for fourteen hours. The next morning my entire butt and thighs ached so much that I decided the bites were infected and took a couple of the antibiotics and a couple more Darvocets and went back to bed. I did the same thing every day for three days.

  Mom thought I had the flu, so she left me alone, and I didn’t bother calling the store to tell the floor manager I was never coming back because I figured I was fired anyway.

  Mom came into my room a few nights later and asked me about my job and when she could expect the fifty dollars for my rent. “How is it that your boss is okay about you taking time off when you just started the job?” she asked.

  “Because I’m contagious and she doesn’t want me to infect the others. I’m going back tomorrow, so I’ll pay you this week when I get my check,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes and told me to clean up my room and pick up the wet towels I’d left on the bathroom floor as she walked out.

  After a wine cooler and a Valium the next morning, I got the nerve to call the store and ask about my paycheck. Nick answered the phone. “Good to hear from you, Sexy Bird, how are you feeling?”

  I couldn’t respond. All I could do was cry, and I thought he would say sorry, but instead he said, “It’s your fault, ya know. You’ve got a sweet ass and a way of walking that makes me hard.”

  I choked back the tears and said, “You hurt me.”

  “Hey, I left you some stuff. Just be happy I wore a condom, because it’s not my policy,” he replied.

  He also said if I came back to work he’d give me my paycheck (without deducting the five days I’d missed) and let me have a few things from the store’s pharmacy. “No charge, if you get what I mean.”

  I really needed my check, and I didn’t have any other job prospects. And Mom was so pissed off with me that she could barely look at me. So I went back to work that afternoon and told the checkout manager that Nick had given me my old job back. “Oh yeah, we’ll see about that,” she barked.

  She called Nick down from his office, and I listened as he sweet-talked her until she agreed to put me back on the work roster. He winked at me as he walked by, and for some reason I liked it. I also liked the card he stapled to the dry-cleaner bag he handed to me on my way out of the store after my shift. The bag contained the clothes that I hadn’t been able to find after I woke up on his kitchen floor, and the card had my check in it and said something like, “I’m sorry we got off to a bad start, let’s try again.” It was sweet, and I wondered how he could be so nice after what he’d done to me.

  The next day, when Nick asked me to come to his office, I told him I was still mad and my butt still hurt.

  “I’ll never hurt you again, sweetheart, it was just fluke. I don’t know what got into me—besides you!” he said. “If it’ll make you feel better and mend this fence, you can have something from the pharmacy—just name it and it’s yours,” he said.

  I left the store that night with about six hundred pills, and from then on I met Nick at the condo whenever he wanted me to—for sex, mostly, because that’s what he liked to do. After a few weeks of being tied to the bed while he did whatever he wanted, I kind of got used to it, and I think I even fell in love with him.

  If it came as a surprise that Nick and I would be sleeping together, it came as more of a surprise that I’d fallen in love with him. I knew there were lots of reasons I shouldn’t be with him. I thought about them all the time: he was my boss; I was eighteen and he was forty-eight; he hurt me; he was married; but the biggest of all was that I was pretty sure if Mom found out I was dating him, she’d disown me.

  I met Nick’s wife, Sharon, two months after I started working at the store, at the company Christmas party. She walked up to me and started telling me about her new house and how she was busy with her two little girls, ages three and six months. I was surprised, and also a little bit bummed out, that she was so friendly. I thought she might have noticed the look and the wink Nick threw my way when I walked into the room and was coming over to slap me around for flirting with her husband. Instead, she took a wallet of photos out of her purse and showed me pictures of her kids.

  “Do you ever babysit?” she asked.

  “Only once, for a neighbor, but the kids were asleep when I arrived,” I replied.

  “Great, we’re always looking for a good babysitter. Can I call you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Sharon called me at the store a few days later to see if I had plans for New Year’s Eve. When I said I didn’t, she asked if I would babysit. She and Nick were going out for the first time since she’d had her second baby, and she couldn’t find a sitter. “You’re our only hope, can you do it?”

  I could hear the desperation in her voice, so I said yes.

  Sharon was nice, and we became friends, but not good enough friends for me to stop sleeping with her husband. By February I was babysitting for her at least twice a week.

  But the more involved I got with Nick, the harder it was for me to see Sharon. So on my nineteenth birthday, after five months of helping her out, I told her I couldn’t work for her anymore. She almost cried, and I felt bad, but I didn’t change my mind.

  Being with Nick also made living at home weird. I felt like Mom and I didn’t like each other. She was keeping busy with work and a new man she’d met at the singles club, so we didn’t see each other much—and when we did she was always drilling me about what I was doing with my life: “Are there opportunities for advancement at the call center? Are you seeing anyone? Where do you go after work? How come you stay out so late?”

  I made up lies just to keep her off my back, and after a while I found myself lying to her all the time about everything.

  I thought I could manage without the money Sharon paid me each week for watching her little girls, doing her laundry, and running errands, but I couldn’t. After a couple of weeks I was broke, and I still hadn’t paid Mom any rent for August.

  I had to get more hours at the store or a find another job, so I asked my floor manager for another shift, but she couldn’t give me any extra hours. When I asked the store supervisor about another position, all he had was cleaning the store after it closed, and I wasn’t interested in that.

/>   I put a card up on the mall notice board offering my (expert) babysitting services on Fridays and weekends for eight dollars an hour. Within a week I had two babysitting jobs, and each had just one kid. It was easy money, and I didn’t mind working on the weekends because Nick didn’t come around then, and I was lonely if I didn’t have anything to do.

  Nick and I celebrated our one-year anniversary on September 30th. He gave me a gift certificate to a department store in the mall, and I made him a spaghetti dinner at his condo. I was happy and everything was going well until the state carried out an audit on Nick’s pharmacy just after Thanksgiving. From then on, it was hard for Nick to give me pills. He sent me to a doctor friend of his who was willing to write prescriptions for me, and that worked okay for a couple of months, but it cost me thirty-five dollars for every appointment, and I needed more pills than the doctor would write a prescription for.

  On Valentine’s Day, after we’d been out to dinner at the very same cocktail lounge Nick used to take my mom to, Nick went into my purse to get a pen and pulled out four prescriptions bottles, all with different names on them.

  “Two of those are empty,” I said as I grabbed the bottles and shoved them back into my bag.

  “I was just checking it out. Seeing what my old doctor friend is supplying you with. Who the fuck is Vera Slider?” Nick laughed as he read the labels on the bottles.

  “She’s someone I babysit for once in a while,” I said. “And your friend isn’t supplying me with much. He’s not worth the thirty-five dollars he charges to write a prescription for forty pills.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t take so many.”

  “And maybe you should go fuck yourself!” I snapped.

  I was angry that Nick had discovered I’d stolen pills from Vera Slider, the mother of the four-year-old I’d been watching on Saturdays. I was especially angry after he made fun of me because it was a bottle of phenobarbital. “It’s an old lady drug, ya know. Not worth the effort of helping yourself to.” He laughed.

  He teased me about it all the way to his car, and I got so mad I slapped him. And then I did it again and again. I must have hit him ten times before he grabbed my hands and held them behind my back. I could tell he wanted to hit me back, but there were people standing by the lounge back door watching us, so he didn’t.

  It only took two weeks of me ignoring Nick before he met me at my car after my shift with a bottle of Darvon. “How about I make a trip down to Mexico and get you a barrel full of whatever you want? Then will you move into the condo?”

  I moved into Nick’s condo March 20th, a year and a half after I started working at his store, mainly because I didn’t have to pay any rent and he promised to get me pills, but also because Mom’s new boyfriend was just like my dad and was getting on my case all the time. Mom was, too, just like she used to when Dad was alive. One night she yelled at me about my shoes stinking up the living room and then looked right into my face and said, “I think I saw you and Nick walking out of his store together yesterday. Was it Nick?” she demanded.

  “No, that was my friend Cory; he works at Nick’s store, and I met him there after I got off work at the call center. We went out for pizza.” I grabbed my shoes and headed for my room.

  I wasn’t making Cory up. He was a guy who stocked shelves at the store, and I knew he liked me, and I knew he liked pizza, too, because he often brought a pizza with him to work and he often tried to share it with me.

  I didn’t know if Mom believed my story, but it was clear that she was still hung up on Nick and driving by his store to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. I told her I was moving out soon after that. “My friend at work is going to New Jersey for a while and I’m going to housesit and take care of her cat for a few months,” I said.

  Mom seemed relieved.

  Moving into Nick’s condo wasn’t such a good idea. He had keys and came and went whenever he wanted, and he got exceptionally mean once I was living there. After two months of being treated like a sex slave, just before my twentieth birthday, I made a plan to move back home with Mom.

  When Nick found me packing my stuff and I confessed I was leaving because I didn’t like the way he was using me, he said, “I’m not so sure I’ll be going to visit my friend in Mexico if you’re not at the condo when I need you to be. So think about that before you decide to leave, Sexy Bird.”

  So I stayed, hoping things would change and Nick would stop treating me like shit. He didn’t, of course, and it seemed that I was making plans to move out every other month, until, before I knew it, a year had gone by and I was almost twenty-one.

  I guess I just didn’t care enough. And sometimes Nick was nice and gentle with me and I felt okay about being his mistress. Other times he was a crazy animal and I hated him. But I could never tell what he was going to be like from one day to the next, and maybe that’s why I stayed with him—because it was exciting.

  I felt stuck most of the time, and I continued to get high because it was the only thing that made me feel okay about my boring life and situation. I mostly took pills that Nick got from his friend in Mexico, but sometimes I used other drugs I bought from people I’d met at the mall.

  After watching an episode of Oprah one afternoon a few weeks after my twenty-first birthday, I decided I’d try to get healthy and have better relationships. I wrote a list of things I would learn to cook and promised myself I would go visit my mom more often. I also figured out that sleeping pills were my biggest problem, because I couldn’t fall asleep without them. So I flushed the four pills I had left down the toilet and bought a CD with gentle music on it. It didn’t work, though, and after being awake almost all night for three nights I decided to buy some hash from a kid at work and smoke a little each night before I went to bed.

  Smoking hash worked pretty well, and I was proud of myself for getting off the sleeping pills, but Nick wasn’t. “Smoking hash and then eating a half gallon of ice cream isn’t doing much for your figure,” he told me.

  I ignored him and kept doing it. In the first two months of my smoke-hash-to-sleep approach, I gained twenty pounds. Nick was pretty pissed about it. “When ya gonna stop eating everything in sight?” he asked me when he stopped by the condo on Labor Day morning to have sex and to give me a present before he left for New York with Sharon and his kids for a vacation. In addition to the bottle of Xanax I’d asked for, Nick gave me a bottle of Ritalin. “They might help you lose weight,” he said, smirking, before he closed the front door.

  I took the Ritalin and spent the rest of the week eating ice cream and wondering if Nick would ever take me to New York with him, or if I’d just be the fat girl he fucked in his condo on his way to work every morning.

  By Christmastime that year I’d lost a few pounds. Not enough for Nick to notice, but enough to make me feel better about myself. I spent Christmas Day with Mom because she’d broken up with her boyfriend and Robbie wasn’t coming home. It felt good to be at home with her. She made a ham, mashed potatoes, a green bean casserole, and deviled eggs, and after we’d eaten, I took a big plate of everything over to Mrs. Benson.

  “Well, well, a miracle on my porch,” she said, smiling as she opened the screen door to let me in.

  I told her about my job at the store and my babysitting jobs while she ate her dinner. Afterward, we watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie without saying a word to each other. Before I left she said, “Thank you for the dinner. It was good to see you. I was thinking you weren’t coming around ’cause you didn’t want to talk about that bad situation you got yourself into a couple of years back. Come to find out, you just haven’t thought about me,” she said, chuckling.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just been busy,” I lied. I stepped down off her porch feeling shattered and ashamed. Mrs. Benson had always been nice to me and I liked her. I guessed I’d been avoiding her because I didn’t want her to know that I hadn’t done much with my life.

  “Don’t be a stranger!” she called out as I step
ped onto the road.

  I turned around, waved good-bye, and waited for her to go back into her house before I ran home to Mom.

  The next few months were filled with sleepless nights and various diets as I tried to stay off the sleeping pills and the ice cream. I was miserable, and on my twenty-second birthday, after mean and nasty sex with Nick, I told him he was treating me like a whore and that I didn’t want him to come over anymore without asking me first. He grabbed my face, looked right into my eyes, and stared at me like I was nothing. Later on, when he was getting dressed to go home to his wife, he said, “I’ll come over whenever I feel like it. If you don’t like it, tough shit.”

  I wanted to punch him but he just laughed at me and told me to follow him out to his car if I was interested in the birthday present he had for me in his glove box. I followed, and even as I watched him get into his car and start the engine I thought I’d be able to resist, but when he rolled down the passenger window and held two prescription bottles up for me to take from his hand I only hesitated for a second before I reached out to grab them. When I did, he held on to the bottles for just long enough to let me know I could never leave.

  CHAPTER 17

  Nick went to a conference in Detroit in mid-June, a couple of weeks after I turned twenty-two. I was really happy about the idea of him being gone at first, but after two nights of hitting the local Hangout Bar alone, I started to miss him, and that confused me. I thought I’d be glad about being alone and not worrying about him or what mood he’d be in when he arrived to have sex with me in the morning, but I wasn’t. I was sad and lonely and found myself taking more pills than usual, which hadn’t been part of my original plan, as I needed to ration the pills I’d gotten from Nick for my birthday.

  One particularly bad night, about ten days after Nick left, when I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t have any hash or pot and I didn’t want to use any more of my pill supply, I drank almost an entire bottle of Nyquil. The next morning I was still pretty out of it, and I nodded off a few times on my short drive to work. The gritty high from the Nyquil stayed with me all day, and I vowed never to use that shit again.