Addicted Like Me (16 page)

When my mother's choices forced me to admit I was an addict, I just lied to the counselors she tried to bring in to help me and said I wanted to change, or just flat-out told them I refused to quit. Ryan and I were kicked out of school often in those days, so it became easy to party every day at our house, no matter how many boundaries my mom tried to set down. She had to go to work, so we would wait, and after she left our friends would show up to get
high. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that my friends were at school and I got to stay home and do nothing all day. The only thing that sometimes dragged me down was a huge knot in my gut. I knew I was hurting my family. I felt like the only way I could make my mother happy was to quit using drugs and alcohol altogether; however, I had come to the point that I could not picture my life without them anymore. It was clear that all my wrong behavior was breaking her down. She was a single parent just trying to do the best she could, and I was taking complete advantage of her.

The drug parties at our house stopped when Ryan and I were admitted into our first drug rehab, as another consequence of my mother's Tough Love techniques. It was another hospital, with all the same crazies I had seen before, but at least they had been assigned to a separate floor. The doctor I was assigned was an identical match to good old Santa Claus, a fact about him that I took for a joke. I was fifteen years old; I took nothing seriously at the time, and I made sure it stayed that way by getting high every morning before the recovery program began and every day after, when I would return home. I was sent into a panic when I learned that Santa Claus planned to drug-test me a couple of times a week. How was I going to get away with using now? He mentioned that for a while my drug tests would come up dirty. Ah, I thought, a loophole. I could still get high. I just had to keep decreasing my use to make it seem like the drugs were slowly leaving my system.

Each test began to come back, showing that I had less and less drugs in my system, until one test came back showing very high levels of marijuana. I was busted and had to admit to myself that my
plan had failed. There was no way around this one, because I had to face the evidence this time. But I still figured I could work around the problem. I thought if I was just more honest with Santa Claus, it would get him off my back, and he would feel like the job he was doing was paying off. The next week I carelessly kept getting high. Trying to pass the test by drinking tons of water and quitting for a bit, a few days before, didn't help. My test came back positive again, and I was drilled about my drug use. I made all these attempts to get around the system because I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to stop using drugs. In fact, being addicted was all I felt I was good at. I feared that if I didn't have the drugs and alcohol anymore, I would have absolutely no identity at all.

In times of desperation, my need to protect this identity always got more extreme. I knew that I couldn't fail one more drug test with Santa Claus, but quitting wasn't an option either. I thought long and hard about ways I could work around this dilemma, and I came to the conclusion that I would focus on the kinds of drugs I heard did not stay in a person's system for long. I had heard LSD did not stay in the system, and because I had access to acid it seemed like a logical solution. This is how my addiction always advanced. I would try a new drug because it was available, or because it solved a problem I had that threatened the life I had created. Soon after taking LSD, everything in my life revolved around a little tiny paper square. I took using acid to the extreme. At this time I was sleeping down in the basement of our house, where black lights and black light posters surrounded me. Rainbows of colors decorated my walls, sheets, blankets, and even my Slinky. It gave me extreme visual
effects and made everyone who dropped acid in my room feel like we had landed on a different planet.

Acid didn't show up in my drug tests, so I took it one step further after hearing that good news. I began to smuggle LSD into the recovery program, to sell hits to other patients for more than I bought the drugs for. The money I made went to paying for me to continue using. By this time my mom had cut off the money. She knew that it would have been spent on drugs. This was also when my alcohol consumption increased. I had heard that alcohol left the system very fast, so it became something for me to always fall back on. Liquor was easy to find and very affordable. The only thing that was necessary to manage at this point was selecting the right drug for my schedule. A normal LSD trip lasts twelve to eighteen hours. That had to be saved for days that Ryan and I did not have to attend our recovery program. The better option was to smoke pot before or after our program at the hospital, which we did. I found comfort in the fact that my brother was going through all this with me. We were two peas in a pod. If I had drugs I got Ryan high, and if he had drugs he got me high, and one of us was always bound to have something.

The approach to addiction at our recovery program was to try and scare the addictions out of us by using statistical charts and graphs and a bunch of useless facts that we cared nothing about. We were even asked to climb poles with the help of others and scale walls, like rock climbers, as a way to learn trust for others, as if trust were the key to getting us off drugs. A fear of experiencing pain or the inability to know how to feel real emotions and then
work through difficult things keeps a person addicted. All the rehab program ended up becoming to me was a place where I was able to sit around and try to top the war stories I heard from other addicts.

I didn't know or care that after our move to Arizona my addiction would go from bad to worse. I just knew that I wasn't done making a life for myself in Colorado when my mom announced that we were moving back to Phoenix. I had made so many friends by that time that I did not want to leave. Everyone I knew helped me focus on my addictions. To make sure my life would remain the same after I moved, I quickly made a couple of phone calls to friends in Arizona. I had kept in touch with a few people who had access to anything that I might want or need after I got to town.

UPON ARRIVING IN ARIZONA, I moved in with my godmother, Mary, while my mother handled the move and looked for a house to buy. I was not opposed to this because my godmother was very lenient concerning what I did, where I went, and what time I returned home. Her big mistake was to have trusted me. After I moved in I completely took advantage of the fact that she gave me plenty of freedom to do as I wished. She wanted to believe so badly that I was a good kid. I wanted to believe that, too, but I wasn't ready to make that step. I called her nephew, Steve, who had been my best friend since the age of three. As soon as I met up with him, my life became a 24-7 party because
he was using and had an entire circle of friends and family that also used. We grew up together but had still kept in touch when I lived in Colorado. We would chat here and there on the phone about the types of drugs we had experimented with. It was only natural that I contact him as soon as I got to Arizona because he offered me friendship I didn't have anywhere else right after the move and shared a lifestyle in which it wasn't a problem to make addiction the most important thing.

At first he would sneak us his mother's alcohol by pouring it into closed containers so that no one would be the wiser that he was stealing it. We would sit in his room getting drunk on that and smoking weed. Many nights I would be too drunk to go home, so I would just call Mary and let her know I would be staying the night at her nephew's house. It was the perfect situation to party all night long and have absolutely no consequences except a hangover. Quickly, I became very happy in this situation because I was able to stay intoxicated around the clock and couldn't feel much else besides the high. I bragged to Ryan about it. I told my brother he was missing out on so much because he had chosen to live with our dad, way out in Cottonwood. I may not have landed at Mary's without Ryan living with my dad instead of my mom. She desperately wanted us both away from the drugs in Colorado, so she had let him go as soon as he wanted to leave for Cottonwood. I ended up at Mary's house because my mom had to finish up her last week of work and wanted me out of Colorado, too. Ryan would come down to Phoenix for weekend visits. When he did we headed over to Steve's house to party, so Ryan could see what I had been telling
him. He couldn't believe we were able to party, right there in the house, with Steve's mother home and just down the hall.

Steve lived in a family of people who partied. They didn't have a problem with the way we partied because they partied, too. His mom and aunt were very heavy drinkers, and because of that there was a constant supply of beer and hard liquor at Steve's house. It was normal to see his mother with a beer in her hand. There never needed to be a special occasion to celebrate with a drink because it was just an everyday occurrence. On a weekend visit to Steve's with Ryan, he mentioned he had brought money with him to the house and wanted to know if Steve could find him a bag of weed. Easily done, and to our surprise we were able to buy the pot from one of Steve's family members, his older cousin, Bert. This guy seemed very skeptical about supplying us with the weed at first, so Steve had to convince him Ryan and I weren't new to pot, and that we knew what we were doing. In the end Bert wound up being very generous with the drugs.

If it wasn't enough for Ryan to believe we could buy drugs from Steve's family members, we went to the back yard with our weed to get high after our buy. I can remember freaking out because Steve's whole family was over for a barbeque on that day. There we were, standing in the back yard, out in the open in front of all these strangers, smoking a bowl. But Steve kept assuring me that it was okay, and the next thing I knew Steve's mother came walking up behind us like it wasn't. My stomach curled up into knots when she called Steve over. Instantly my brain started working in overtime to find a way out if we were busted. My paranoia always had me rehearsing what I would say, or thinking about what excuses I could
come up with. I felt sick as the adrenaline was pumping through my veins. I said to myself,
Here we go again
. How had I ended up in a situation where I was about to get busted for drugs? The answer was that I hadn't ended up in a situation like that. Steve's mom walked over to us and asked if she could take a hit.

I was in complete shock, yet relieved at the same time, when this occurred. This was a major discovery about the way life could be for me from then on, and I knew it was going to take some time for my brain to work the entire situation out. It really couldn't get any better for a fifteen-year-old drug addict. A world of opportunity had opened up for me, and I continued to be a regular guest at Steve's house. A normal day would consist of watching TV and getting high with Steve, his mother, and his aunt. This was just their way of life, but to me it was a dream. Any time I wanted to get high I just went to his house, and if I partied too hard, I didn't have to go home. I learned how the system at Steve's worked after sticking around awhile. His aunt bought a quarter pound of weed weekly, just for home use. If we ran out early, we would just scrape all the bongs and paraphernalia in the house for residue, which would produce mounds of pot residue as big as a paper plate. If the platefuls weren't an option, there was always my good old friend alcohol. It was always there at Steve's house and always free.

By my sixteenth birthday, this is the list of drugs I used constantly: massive amounts of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, PCP, cocaine, and alcohol. A couple of days after my sixteenth birthday, I tried crystal meth for the first time. The night I did, I didn't have much else to do. I can't recall why I wasn't at Steve's house that
night, but it didn't stop me from my search for the next high. Bored, fidgety, and sober at Mary's, I decided to go for a walk up to the corner store. Mind you the neighborhood surrounding her house wasn't the best. I felt absolutely invincible when I started in on a plan to get high, so I didn't care about that. When I began walking home I heard someone calling for me. There were a couple of guys standing behind the store who had yelled. They were obviously selling some kind of drugs and were waving me over to them. At first I wasn't going to stop, but a voice inside my head reminded me I hadn't found my high yet and I was still sober. I figured these guys might just be my chance to change that.

Before I knew it I was with three strange men on the stairs at their apartment building, sitting outside their apartment door. I knew it was a matter of time before they were going to let me get high. It was a game to watch them, as each guy tried to stake his claim on me. None of them had any chance. I just wanted the guys for their drugs. It was finally the oldest guy who invited me into the apartment and quickly pulled out a bag. It was full of white powder. I assumed it was cocaine in the sack until I sniffed my first line. It was instantly obvious that I had snorted something different. I asked the guy what it was I had taken, and before he told me, he just looked at me as if I were kidding, so I had to sit there and wait for his response, secretly freaking out. I didn't know what I had just inhaled into my nose. He finally blared, “Crystal meth!”

At the point I discovered I had just done crystal meth, I wanted to disappear forever. It was as if I could hear my heart breaking inside of me. Any self-worth that I did have left at that
point just faded away. I had never thought that I could stoop so low. Meth was always the one thing that I said I never wanted to get into. I had known people that had gotten caught up in it, and I saw them begin to deteriorate with my very own eyes. It was like watching someone slowly die in front of you, to watch an addict on crystal meth, but the person would continue to act like nothing had changed. Seeing that had made me think that I was always going to be smarter than those people were, and I was never going to get hooked on meth. Now I know my mother made deals in a similar way with the drugs she allowed herself to use. I can relate to the feeling of believing you are smarter than a different addict. My mom felt smarter than my dad and the users he brought around their house because she believed she had more self-control than they did, and she didn't stoop to the level of using IV drugs when that became their thing.