Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (12 page)

I looked into his eyes. I wanted so badly to believe that he had never cheated, that his “exhibitionist” story was true. In a way I did believe him. But I knew that the relationship was over, regardless. Even if he wasn’t lying, the image of him online had cast too large a shadow on us.

“I can’t be your boyfriend,” I told him. “But I won’t leave your side.”

“Do you have any pills?” he asked.

I got up and picked Clover up off my dresser, handed him two hydrocodones, took three for myself.

“We need to find you a doctor,” I said. I knew he didn’t have health insurance, since he was technically a freelancer at his company.

“Laura told me Callen-Lorde has free services I can use,” he said, referring to a GLBT community health center in Chelsea.

“Are you going to have to start on medications already?” I asked.

“No, no. My T-cell count is still high enough that I don’t have to start on any cocktails yet. I just need to stay healthy.”

I immediately regretted giving him the pills. “My old doctor from when I had insurance is an HIV expert,” I said. “You should go see him. He’ll take care of you. We’ll figure out the money.”

We drifted off to sleep, holding each other tight.

The next few days were a continuous cycle of sleep, pills, television, and tears. Everett didn’t take any time off work. We didn’t talk about HIV or health care or therapy or any of the things one should in that situation. I didn’t spend any time on the computer, researching what new drugs were available for him. I avoided all the normal caretaking duties that should come with a situation like this. All I wanted was to stay inside my pill bubble, where nothing could get to me.

Then, Brandon Holley called to tell me I’d gotten a senior editor job at
Jane
. I was ecstatic. I’d get my old life back, and I’d be working with all the same people I loved. Even better, I’d now have health insurance, so I wouldn’t have to continue my HIV tests at the public health office. I’d be in the hands of my old doctor, an expert who I knew would take care of me in case the virus showed up at a later test.

I took Everett out to celebrate that night. He was happy for me but seemed sad too. “Everything is working out for you,” he said. “Things like that don’t happen to me. I’ve always had bad luck.”

I didn’t know what to say. Of course I was happy I’d tested negative so far. But that happiness was completely overshadowed by my sadness for him. Things had basically returned to normal for us. He was sleeping over every night; we talked or texted multiple times throughout the day. The only difference was, we weren’t having any kind of sex.

I threw myself into work. I was so grateful to have my old job back, but with a better title and a much higher salary. As soon as my health benefits kicked in I made an appointment with my old doctor, whom I loved. He is one of those rare New York City doctors who actually genuinely cares about his patients and remembers their history on sight.

We caught up on everything in his office, and I explained the Everett situation. He was sympathetic yet stern about always using condoms. “It’s sad,” he told me, “but you really can’t ever be too safe.” I knew it was true, but it depressed the hell out of me. Was there really
no one
I could trust?

He did an RNA viral load test on me, explaining that it was a more intensive kind of HIV test than the kind the community health centers used. “If there is
any
trace of HIV in you right now, it should show up on this test,” he said.

“We’ll have the results back in a week.” He also tested for every other STD known to exist. I wondered if he would find opiates in my system, too. I kept my mouth shut about that part of my life.

It was a torturous week, waiting for the results, but luckily we were closing an issue, so I was swamped at work. It felt so good to be back in the game. I stayed until at least eleven o’clock every night, grateful for the distraction. And I was having fun. It was definitely a cleaner version of the magazine I used to work for now that there was a new editor in chief; I could no longer use the word
fuck
in my text, but it was a minuscule price to pay for the job security.

The ultimate perk was reconnecting with my old friends from the magazine, in particular Stephanie. We’d been best friends when I’d worked at the magazine before, but during the time I’d been gone her career had been on the fast track and we didn’t have as much time to talk. She was now executive editor at
Jane
and had her own office, which became my safe haven whenever I started to freak about my potential HIV status. There is no better job in the world than one where you can go into your boss’s office, have a good cry in front of her, and then hand in an edited story about how female porn stars were finally starting to grow their pubic hair back in.

The following week I went back to my doctor’s office, preparing
for the worst. Everything came back negative. “At this point I think you’re in the clear,” he said. “Enough time has passed that something would have shown up on these tests. You should still come in every few months for another test, but I don’t think you need to get tested once a month for the next five months. It might be a bit too much for you to handle, psychologically. Just
always
use a condom.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m never having sex again.”

I kept my pill
use down to evenings now that I was working full-time again. I’d take enough at night that I wouldn’t feel any strong withdrawal symptoms until late afternoon. I’d usually take some as I was leaving work, so they’d be kicking in just as I hit the subway station in Grand Central. It made the rush-hour commute a gentle hub of dreamy yet determined activity. There was no stress among the masses. I’d bump from person to person like a slow-motion pinball. I’d study people’s faces with no anxiety about staring boldly at them. Humans at the end of the workday are so beaten down, but I wasn’t one of them.

Everett had started spending more nights at his own house. I knew he still hadn’t told his family. “It would break my brother’s heart and my mom would just think, ‘I told you so’ or something,” he said.

“But you have to tell them eventually,” I said. “You’re going to need financial help when you do have to go on medications. They’re expensive.”

He just got irritated with me and told me he didn’t want to talk about it. Our relationship was in limbo, I think he felt I no longer had the right to say things like that to him. One night, over sushi, he finally told me that he needed to move on.

“I’m not going to sit around waiting for you, hoping you will take me back,” he said. By the time dinner was over he’d given me the day he wanted to come get the rest of his stuff out of my house.

Emily and I used
my HIV-negative status as an excuse to embrace our new celibacy. Weekend nights, we’d curl up in her bed, take
celebratory pills, drink champagne, and cement the dark times. I’d go to the movies with Stephanie after work or spend time with friends from college I hadn’t seen in years, but I’d never let on that I was high. The short-term memory loss that had taken over my brain because of the pills was a positive side effect as I waited out the months, with regular tests to make absolutely sure I was negative. The relief one would expect never came though. I felt a certain amount of freedom now that Everett was no longer in my life, but I didn’t quite believe that the virus wasn’t still hiding somewhere deep inside me, waiting to reveal itself at some unexpected moment. I recognized this as paranoia and decided that it was time for me to enter into therapy. I didn’t want to see a psychiatrist, because I wanted to avoid being put on antidepressants: What if they interacted badly with my painkillers? I just needed someone with experience to talk to, someone who would help me get the inside of my brain to match the enthusiasm I threw into my work at the magazine. Emily had been in therapy for years. Her doctor referred me to a man who practiced in the same office. He was ridiculously attractive, with a boyish face and a soft southern accent. We clicked immediately, but his soothing tone was the same balm that my pills provided me. He never challenged me; instead, once a week I would fall into his couch, open my mouth, and just spill out words. He’d nod, agree, and laugh softly. I could say anything I wanted with no consequences, and meeting with him became as addictive as my opiates. But I didn’t tell him about those, instead choosing to just process what had happened with Everett. There were never any breakthroughs, but I depended on this therapist and his nonjudg-mental way with me.

HEATHER WAS FAR FROM
realizing she needed any sort of therapy. She was still ordering her combo of hydrocodone and Xanax online, even after she’d lost her job at Nars. “The painkillers prevented me from eating, which I loved,” she says. She never strayed from her perfect combo.

Like me, Heather also never got into snorting her pills. “It’s not like I’d never snorted anything in my life,” she says. “I’d definitely done my share of cocaine and K, but it just never occurred to me to crush them up and snort them. I’d just put them under my tongue and let them dissolve. That was my ritual. It tasted awful, very metallic and bitter, and I’d get this sensation very similar to coke drip.”

Heather was oblivious to the fact that her marriage was falling apart. Her husband’s father had been a heroin addict when he was growing up, so watching Heather spiral out of control brought up all of Derek’s childhood issues. “He was upset all the time,” Heather remembers. “He was crying constantly, having to leave work early to come take care of me because I was such a mess, physically. He had to become such a caretaker that he didn’t even have time to get pissed off at me.”

But Heather’s own rage was starting to spiral out of control. “I’ve
never been an angry person,” she says. “I was the oldest child, and our house was always so chaotic. My needs were pushed to the side. I never felt like my emotions were that important, so I always stuffed them inside. And now, for the first time in my life, all that anger was finally coming out. All my anxiety in life stemmed from the fact that I was molested when I was five and never told anyone about it.”

Heather blurted this fact out to her mother during an intense phone conversation. “She was saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re so fucked up,’ and I was, like, ‘Here’s why! You left me with
X
and he molested me. Take it and deal with it.’ And I hung up on her and proceeded to take out all my anger on her. I knew her Social Security number, and I went to Barneys and opened up a line of credit in her name and spent a massive amount of money. I also decided I wanted porcelain veneers on my teeth, so I opened up another credit account in her name and headed off to the dentist. I didn’t really want any of that shit, it was just a ‘fuck you.’ I’d never dealt with that much rage, but even at the time there was a voice inside me wondering if this was real emotion or just a by-product of the chemicals being moved around in my brain. Or maybe the pills were just the catalyst I needed to finally get that rage out of me. I still don’t know.”

Heather’s final personal low took place when her pills were accidentally delivered to the wrong address, and she held her neighbor’s mail ransom.

“I was out of pills and had been waiting desperately for my delivery and they hadn’t arrived. I finally got the tracking number and called FedEx. It turns out they had delivered them to a house two blocks away, and some Arabic guy who lived there had signed for them. I went absolutely crazy.”

Heather made Derek drive her to the neighbor’s house. She climbed up his front steps and started banging on his door, but there was no answer. “So I took all of
his
mail,” she says, “including another package he had waiting for him, and brought it all back to the car. Derek started freaking out, he was, like, ‘You can’t steal someone’s mail! That’s illegal!’ He tried to get me to put it all back. But I didn’t care. I went home, Googled the guy’s address, and was able to
get his telephone number. I kept calling until I finally got him on the phone.”

Heather told him that if he didn’t come over to her house immediately she was going to call the police. “Which is just crazy,” she sighs. “I’d already stolen his mail, and what was I going to say? ‘Police, he’s got my drugs that I ordered through the mail!’

“The whole experience was hitting rock bottom for me. I ended up hearing much worse stories when I finally went to rehab, but that was bad enough for me. This was a perfectly nice neighbor who I had to sit next to on the train every day.”

At this point Heather was unemployable. Derek wasn’t making much money. “It became clear to me that I had to do something or we were going to end up in a homeless shelter,” she says.

So she called her grandmother, the former addict. She’d been a bartender in the 1960s and had gotten hooked on Black Beauties (a popular form of trucker speed from that time period, a mix of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, one of the ingredients found in Adderall), but had been sober now for over twenty years. She told Heather she had no choice but to go to detox and start a twelve-step program.

“I was like, there is no way I’m going to a twelve-step program,” Heather says. “It’s God-centered and I don’t believe in any of that shit.”

But she knew she had to at least go to detox. “It was that addict mentality of all or nothing,” she says. Just like Jared’s first attempt at getting clean. “I told myself I was going to get clean tomorrow and everything is going to be taken care of.”

Heather spent the night before she went into rehab taking every single last one of her pills. They were still too precious to her to just flush them away. The next morning Derek drove her to the closest hospital. Since he knew he couldn’t have contact with her while she was detoxing, he gave her a little notebook in which he’d written down all the things he missed about the old Heather and everything that she’d be getting back in her life. He included a picture of her taken when she was five and wrote, “Take care of this girl and love her.”

“It broke my heart,” she says. “I knew I had to do it for Derek, even if I couldn’t do it for myself.”

Derek took her to a hospital in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “It’s a great trauma center,” she says. “It’s where anyone in Brooklyn who gets their arm chopped off would go. But the neighborhood has its share of prostitution and drug trafficking. And the detox center admission process was a joke. It’s basically like a lotto system. There are only a certain number of beds, so if you show up and they are all taken, you have to come back the next day and try all over again. When I spoke to them on the phone before coming in, the woman on the line told me to show up really early. I had to sign a ton of papers and then give them a urine sample so they could assess how many meds I was going to need. You could go in there and say, ‘I take sixty milligrams of Xanax a day,’ but if you only have a certain level in your urine, they base your cocktail on that.”

Heather was admitted and given a drug cocktail that included an antiseizure medication and sleeping pills. There was no treatment aspect to her detox except medication.

Every four hours everyone would shuffle up to the front desk and get their pills, just like in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Heather found it cold and impersonal. It had nothing to do with her emotional health and well-being; it was strictly about flushing out her system. And some people weren’t even taking that seriously. There was one girl in detox at the same time as Heather who was seven months pregnant, and her boyfriend checked himself in and smuggled dope in for her so she could shoot up. There was another kid there who Heather thought was a really sweet, innocent guy. Turned out he was a pimp with a twenty-girl roster. He’d only checked himself into rehab because heat from the cops had been really intense that week and he needed to get off the street.

“Honestly,” Heather said, “I was probably the only person in there who had even set foot in a college. The education level was appalling. But I felt like I could identify with these people, even if they felt there was no way in hell I could identify with them.”

The detox program really pushed the twelve steps. By day 7, Heather’s time was up and she was sent home. “I still didn’t want to
do the twelve steps, so I came up with this whole plan how I was going to do yoga and start chanting. And for the first three days home, I felt awesome. I was in the ‘pink cloud,’ which is a rehab term for how you feel when you first get out, and everything seems brand-new again. I could hear birds chirping and food tasted incredible and everything smelled better. And then I hit a wall.”

Heather later learned she was experiencing post-acute withdrawal symptoms, which is a series of withdrawal symptoms that can still manifest even after you’ve cleared the drugs from your system. For Heather, one of these symptoms was panic attacks—the very reason she’d gotten into pills in the first place.

She went back to her original doctor and explained her symptoms, and he wrote her another prescription for Xanax, even though she admitted to him that she had just gotten out of detox.

After that bottle ran out, she went to her friend Jen, who was working as a stripper at one of New York City’s most popular strip clubs.

“Apparently there’s a massive pill culture in strip clubs,” Heather says. “Just huge. There are a lot of doctors who frequent them and keep the girls amply supplied, so Jen always had some. She hated seeing me go through any sort of withdrawal and would share what she had with me. After a while she started to resist, so I’d just tell her that I thought I was about to have a seizure. I’d whip that line out and manipulate her into giving me more. She was one of my oldest childhood friends.”

One evening, Derek watched as she discreetly tried to put something in her mouth. She claimed it was an aspirin, that she had a headache, but he forced her to open her mouth and saw several pills under her tongue. Heather broke down, saying, “I have to stay on it.”

Derek had no clue how to help her and felt like he was starting to go crazy himself. He felt terrible about getting in her face and being angry, because he could see just how bad it was for her. She was shitting and vomiting constantly, and sometimes not making it to the bathroom in time for either. “I’d be hot, then cold, then hot again, coupled with the blackest depression I’d ever had, times a thousand. I felt like I’d be better off dead, that killing myself would be easier
than going through it. More than anything, it made me understand why people stay drug addicts.”

Derek started doing research online about real rehabilitation facilities, and checking with his work insurance to see if it would cover any of the costs. Luckily it did, except for the copay.

Six weeks had gone by since Heather had gotten out of detox. They went to Derek’s family’s home in Long Island for Thanksgiving dinner; by noon Heather was sleeping while Derek was in the kitchen talking with his family.

“My sister was pregnant at the time,” he says, “and my mother was asking me why I hadn’t been around much to support her when the rest of the family was so excited. I just started crying and saying, ‘You have no idea what’s going on in my life.’”

But Derek had forgotten that his mother had spent years watching her husband suffer as a heroin addict. She recognized a lot of the same symptoms in Heather and told him, “I think I have an idea.”

Derek told his parents about the different rehab centers he’d looked up online and how much money he had to come up with, and his father simply said, “I’ll pay for it.”

Derek and Heather selected a facility in Miami, Florida, because of their emphasis on a painless detox. “When I spoke to them on the phone, they really catered to my fear of withdrawal. They promised that I would have a cocktail of drugs to slowly wean me off, and that I would feel no pain whatsoever. And the pictures on their website showed a beautiful beach. I was so excited, I thought I was going to a yoga spa retreat. I brought all of my yoga clothes, chanting
CD
s, Saki bath soak and perfume.”

Except for the yoga clothes, it was all immediately confiscated upon her arrival. “The center was actually located in a strip mall that sat on a canal filled with Budweiser cans and alligators,” Heather sighs. “There was one enormous room with a huge television and about eighty zombies in various states of withdrawal. There was a back patio overlooking the canal. It was the social nexus of the place. People who were starting to get their feistiness back would sit out there smoking from 8:00
A.M.
until 1:00
A.M.
”

Heather’s cocktail consisted of various painkillers, the muscle
relaxant Soma, sleeping aids, but no benzodiazepines. “There was a lot more pill addiction in this detox center than what I had experienced in Brooklyn. In fact almost everyone there had some sort of pill issue, even if they were mainly there for something else, like alcohol or heroin. There was one nurse who was coming off an insane amount of morphine. She was doing a
six-month
detox program in order to get off it.”

In fact, Heather quickly discovered that there were a lot of nurses in her detox program, most of whom had become addicted to painkillers they were stealing from the hospitals they worked in. And through them, Heather learned how to manipulate the system to get more painkillers.

“There was one who was going through her tenth detox program. She told me to tell the nurse on duty that my foot hurt, and specifically that it was a shooting pain up my leg,” she says. And it worked, she got additional handouts. Heather quickly came up with her own stories, such as migraines and her tried-and-true sciatica that worked to get her more painkillers.

“I think I was able to get away with so much because I was the only one who seemed normal there,” she says. Unlike some programs, “there was no scheduled time to get up in the morning, because a lot of people were on meds that made them sleep a lot. There were some people there who I never once saw open their eyes. I was one of the only people who got up early every morning, showered, dressed, and put on makeup, instead of walking around in my pajamas with a blanket, screaming and wailing.”

Heather was the good girl, and because of that none of the staff suspected her of abusing the system. But even though Heather was putting on a brave face, she was still tortured inside. “My body was just demented,” she says. “I’d gone from shitting constantly to not being able to poop for three days because of all the painkillers I was on and additionally scamming. I just remember lying on the bathroom floor and thinking to myself, ‘I’m in Miami, trying to shove a suppository up my butt. What the hell am I doing here?’”