Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (20 page)

“Help me figure this out,” he said, fiddling with the knobs. I knelt down beside him and flicked the On switch. The room was flooded with the sound of Lawrence Welk. Joey made a face and went to change it, but I grabbed his hand.

“I kind of like this,” I said.

He indulged me for about thirty seconds before rolling the dial. The bursts of static were horrific. I was rolling on the sofa, turning onto my stomach, and smashing my face in the fabric until he passed a 1970s station that was playing “Amie” by Pure Prairie League.

“Stop!” I yelled. I jumped up and started spinning wildly around the living room. Joey stood in one place and did his shuffling little jig while the song played on. I felt myself topple near a table full of framed photos and empty candy dishes but caught myself against the wall. Joey grabbed me and we fell into the shag carpeting, rolling around hugging and shivering. The Ecstasy was really dopey, not speedy at all.
Melting, melting, melting
I kept thinking, but then I realized I was saying it out loud.

I wriggled out of my clothes until I was only in my underwear and jumped up and headed out the front door toward the lawn.

“Wait,” Joey called. “Someone’s gonna call the cops!”

I jumped back inside and turned the front porch light off so the neighbors couldn’t see me. There was a soft drizzle of rain coming down, but the cool air caressed my skin. Joey came up behind me, and we stood there on the front porch for a long time, staring out at suburbia, not talking. All of the houses around us were dark. I thought I saw a slug moving toward my foot, but when I bent down it was just a curled-up wet leaf. I’d been hoping it really was a slug. I used to keep them as pets when I was a kid, in empty Miracle Whip bottles with air holes punched through the top lid with an ice pick.

“Let’s go inside,” Joey said, “I don’t like it out here.”

We went back in, up the stairs, into the guest bedroom. As in most suburban homes, it was being used as a giant storage closet. Boxes of old clothes waiting to be donated to the Salvation Army were scattered across the floor like boulders. A large basket of dusty yarn sat on top of one of the two dressers cluttered with porcelain animals, stacks of old lace, and frameless prints of ships and plants. It had a canopy bed. Do they even make canopy beds anymore? They were everywhere when I was a kid—my own mother had even slept in one. Infantilism personified.

We had sex for hours. I was so blitzed that half the time I didn’t even know what I was doing. At one point there was a body part in front of my face I was pretty sure I had never seen before on anyone.

We got up strangely
early the next day. Joey packed us into the car. It was still wet and miserable and foggy outside, and depression took hold of me like a body bag. I took two Dilaudid, and that seemed to help a little. We drove two hours to the Edward Gorey museum, located inside the actual home of my childhood idol. My grandmother Bobby had introduced me to Gorey, inscribing my first copy of
Amphigorey
with the words, “To Joshua, who has a keen sense of worth.” No one had ever used that sort of language with me before, and I’d always equated my love of Gorey’s drawings and words with that first feeling of recognition from someone.

After the tour, and after spending way too much money at the gift shop, we drove around Massachusetts aimlessly in the rain,
trying to find a decent place to eat. Joey wanted Olive Garden; I was resisting.

His digital camera was sitting between us, and I picked it up and scrolled through photos from the night before. The scene quickly changed to pictures of strangers from different bars Joey would go to late at night without me. Hot guy after hot guy, shirtless, arms around each other. I could feel my jealousy rising but kept it in check until I came across one of Joey with his arms draped all over a ridiculously good-looking guy (by my standards at least—long dirty hair, facial scruff, a T-shirt with holes in it).

I put the camera down and stared out the window. I knew what I had been getting myself into with Joey. He was a charmer. Even when I was out with him and it was obvious we were together, he’d never think twice about taking some cute young boy into the bathroom to give him drugs. And the problem with cute, young guys is that there is a never-ending supply of them. I suddenly felt impossibly old. I was wasting my life pretending I could still party like a twenty-two-year-old and, worse, reacting to insecurities so deep they’d grown roots into every organ in my body. I pressed my cheek against the window, tried to get the coolness to reach my brain, tried to stop the jealousy spiral I could feel coming on and keep it contained inside my opiate bubble so that I would never let it out.

I wanted to believe I would never be able to live the life Joey lived. I loved my drugs, but I’d rather have done them on the sofa, watching a movie and cuddling with someone, than out at some gay bar with the constant threat of someone stealing what was mine. I didn’t have Joey’s heart, I just felt like one of a long string of guys he used to make himself feel better about his world. His own cocaine use had slowed down substantially lately, but he constantly had one or more full vials on him to give out bumps to boys, to get himself inside that locked bathroom stall with them. And I suddenly realized that what had started out as pure escapism for me had turned into something much more confusing and clichéd. I didn’t know whether I was in love with Joey or just addicted to him.

As weeks went by
I got progressively crazier and crazier. I started staying in alone most nights while Joey was out partying. I would eat myself up inside, imagining him stumbling home with a different stranger each time. I was obsessed with two things—my painkillers and my fear of Joey cheating. Every time I started to emerge from the warm bubble, the pain of not being able to trust anyone in this world swept over me, so I’d swallow more and escape back into the mist.

I begged Joey to concentrate on his photography. He’d gone to school at Rhode Island School of Design, and I thought that if I could get him excited about work again he’d stop partying so much. But I knew my efforts were half-assed. I wanted him to stop partying during the week, when I had to be at work, but on the weekends I fully expected him to be his normal party self, to keep me supplied with drugs and drinks, and we’d recover together the next day under the blankets, holding onto each other for life while the pain of the night before rippled through our bodies. Drug love is so powerful: it’s the one time you know exactly what the other person in your life is feeling physically, and it unites you.

The end came abruptly. After a week or two of his promising to show up at my house “after just one more drink” and then never showing, I gave up. I was getting more and more responsibility at work, and it empowered me. I took a bunch of Dilaudid, went to his house, and told him I couldn’t do this anymore.

He just nodded. “I’m not ready to change yet,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

And that was that. I stopped doing coke and stopped drinking to excess—but I kept my pills. They got me through the day, through the subway ride home, through the loneliness of eating a frozen pizza for dinner every night. They were as natural a part of my routine as showering or feeding the cat. I wasn’t interested in dating. Kelly kept me fully stocked, making sure to call me whenever she placed an order with Candyman. I’d also made friends with an editor named Maria at another magazine in the building who shared my love for pills. We’d recognized each other one night at a bar when I was still with Joey, and I had traded her some Valium for her hydrocodone. We each preferred the other.

One day at work I realized Clover was empty, and I started to feel nervous and sweaty. I knew I had more pills at home, but I wasn’t sure I could wait that long. I texted Maria to see what she was holding. She wrote back that she had already left for the day, but she had a few Percocets in a baggie in her bottom desk drawer that I could help myself to.

I went to her floor and, ignoring the glances from her coworkers, went straight to her desk and began rummaging around. I couldn’t find the pills. I checked every drawer, but there was nothing. I even started going through her files, wondering if she had accidentally slipped them inside one of folders. Nothing.

I called her from the elevator bank. “There’s nothing in there,” I said.

I could hear a lot of loud voices behind her.

“Fuck, maybe I grabbed them and put them in my purse,” she said. “Hang on.”

I listened to her fumbling around. I was getting more and more anxious. I didn’t even really like Percocet that much compared to other opiates, but now that I thought it was near and within my grasp, I wasn’t going to give up. “Oh, shit, here they are,” she said, getting back on the phone. “I took them after all. Sorry. You can come get them if you want.”

“Where are you?” I asked. I still had some work left to do, but it could wait until tomorrow morning. I was out of there.

“I’m one of the guest speakers at an ed2010.com meeting,” she said, referring to a social network website for junior-level editors. “It’s kind of informal, like a speed dating thing. Just come down.” She named a bar just above 14th Street on the East Side.

When I arrived, I was led to a back room in the bar filled with hungry young journalism school graduates and editorial assistants, desperate to get ahead in the field. I stood in the doorway and surveyed the crowd. They were mostly women, dressed in fashion business casual, resumés in hand and rotating from table to table. There were about ten senior-level editors from different magazines sitting at the head of each table, doling out advice and listening to story pitch ideas. I recognized maybe half of the senior editors, waved to
the ones I was friendlier with, and wondered why the hell no one had ever asked me to sit in and speak at one of these.

I finally made out Maria sitting to one side, talking animatedly to two girls who were hanging on her every word. I considered waiting for the break when everyone would switch tables, but all those eager young faces were making me uncomfortable. I marched over to Maria’s table.

She looked up at me, surprised. “That was fast,” she said. And ever so smoothly she reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. “Everyone, this is Joshua Lyon. He’s a senior editor at
Jane
magazine.”

I felt myself blush and mumbled a “Hi, everyone.”

“Josh left his ID card on my desk by mistake,” she said, handing me the envelope.

“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one. Good luck, everyone.” I turned and got the hell out of there as fast as I could, having to walk down the entire aisle with tons of eyes on me. I got outside, hailed a cab, tore open the envelope, and swallowed the pills.

I WAS CURLED UP
in the corner of my bed, trying to concentrate on an episode of
Heroes
and failing, when the pain started. It was sharp, insistent, and constant, located in a three-inch line just beneath my belly button. I was confused. I thought by this point I wasn’t supposed to ever feel any pain. I ate a frozen pizza, thinking I was just hungry, but it didn’t go away.

I had a date that night, my first since I had ended things with Joey. I had been really excited about getting back out there, because I knew my isolation was starting to become a real problem. I had little patience for anyone outside the office or for anything that didn’t have to do with the magazine. I felt totally isolated, even in rooms full of people.

The pain was getting so bad that I texted my date and canceled. I crawled under the covers and fell asleep with my knees hugging my chest.

I woke up two hours later, shaking, covered in a cold sweat.
Something’s wrong,
I thought to myself, then said it out loud, to Ollie, who was on the pillow next to my head. I sat up and turned on the bedside light, and the room swirled. The sharp pain in my belly made me double over, and I gasped. I knew I had to get to a hospital.

I put on jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie, bent over the entire time. It was around 1:00
A.M.
, and I clung to the banister all the way downstairs and out into the street, where people were still spilling out of bars, screaming and laughing and stumbling.
This is what it is like to be truly alone,
I thought. I was invisible, in excruciating pain, in a crowd full of blind eyes.

I hugged the sides of buildings and made it to the corner, and got a cab almost immediately.

“Beth Israel, Emergency Room,” I said.

The city was alive as we drove up First Avenue, huge groups of drunk people, screaming, wandering into the street against the light so that my driver kept having to slam on the brakes, tossing me forward. I groaned and clung to the door handle.

We were there in under ten minutes. I limped into the ER, sitting down in the first chair I could find. I explained my symptoms to the admitting nurse, showed them my insurance card, and was told to wait, but was called in almost immediately.

I was taken to a small plastic chair near the main nurse station inside the ER. A woman who looked absurdly like a weathered version of Daisy Duke but in a blue smock took my temperature and I explained how I was feeling. She pushed against the painful area under my belly button and I winced backward. Then she stuck her fingers lower down and to the right, and pain exploded throughout my entire body.

“FUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKK!!!!!”
I screamed. “Oh, god, sorry,” I said quickly.

“Hon, it looks like you’ve got appendicitis,” she said, kneeling in front of me. “We’ve got to do some blood tests, but I’m betting that’s what it is. And we’ve got to get that thing out of you.”

I hated myself for it, but I started to cry. Appendicitis is so lame—it’s about the most common ailment imaginable. But still, there was no one there to hold my hand.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “We’re going to get you hooked up to some morphine so you won’t be in pain.”

I stopped crying immediately.
Sweet
.

The nurse took blood and another nurse wheeled over an IV drip and plugged it into my arm. She attached a bag of morphine. “You ready?” she asked. “You’re going to feel fine in a second.”

I nodded and she released the valve that shot the morphine directly into my bloodstream.

Nothing.

I waited. After a minute or two the nurse came back and gave me a knowing smile. “You feeling better?” she asked.

“Um, I don’t feel a thing,” I said. “My stomach is killing me.”

“That’s weird,” she said, and fiddled with the tube. “It’s definitely in there.”

“I, um, might have a kind of high tolerance for medication,” I said.

“Well, we’ll give you another dose then,” she said. She attached a new bag to my IV and let it rip. This time I felt the morphine rush into my body. But it went straight into my head, causing everything to go white and hazy for a minute. I was instantly high. But the pain in my belly stabbed right through the morphine, and the feeling didn’t abate an ounce.

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what was going on. My tolerance for opiates was through the roof, and no amount of morphine was going to help.

The nurse helped me up and led me down a hallway. I passed a bed with an old woman lying on it who looked like she had a fist bulging out of the inside of her neck, as if there was a person inside her trying to rip through her skin. She was alone, her head pushed back, eyes closed, mouth open. Tiny stick legs poked out from under her dressing gown.

The nurse brought me to a bed near hers. There was no private room, just an open area with curtains you could pull around yourself. She tossed me a hospital gown and told me to put it on. I waved my arm catheter at her. “You’re gonna have to take this out first,” I slurred.

She unhooked it and stood behind the curtain while I pulled my clothes off. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to leave my underwear on
but it felt too tight against my skin, so I pulled it off and slipped into the robe, my bare ass hanging out behind. I sat on the bed and told the nurse I was done.

She pulled the curtain and hooked my arm back up to the tube. I was doubled over in pain. “I’m gonna need more of that,” I said, pointing up toward the bag of morphine.

“Wait until that bag is empty and we’ll give you a new one with a higher dosage,” she said. She frowned. “It should be working though.”

“It’s not,” I said. She left and I pulled my cell phone out of the plastic bag they had given me to keep my clothes in. I curled up and stared at it. I had no idea who to call; no one was going to be awake. I tried calling Emily, Stephanie, even Joey. Nothing. I knew I couldn’t call my sister. Her boyfriend was out of town and there would be no one to watch the kids.

Another stab of pain shot through my belly as a doctor told me I had to get x-rayed. I got out of bed, leaning on my IV pole for support. It had wheels, so I let it pull me forward as I followed the doctor down the hall, my ass still bare. A nurse rushed over to tie my robe for me. As I waited outside a door for the x-ray technician to finish up with another patient I saw someone being admitted, a guy my age covered with tattoos, unconscious on a stretcher. A girl dressed in a hoodie covering most of her face stood by him, holding his hand, talking urgently with a doctor. An overdose.

Amateur,
I thought.

It took two separate x-rays to get my entire torso. Apparently I have abnormally long lungs. I found this new fact comforting. Since so many opiate overdoses are caused by respiratory failure I figured the extra room in there couldn’t hurt.

By the time I got back to my bed my morphine bag was empty, so I buzzed the nurse and asked for more. I got a new bag and felt the delicious warmth surge through my veins, hitting every spot except the one it was supposed to hit inside my belly.

My head was swimming as the overdose kid got rolled into the room across from me. I watched a nurse pull his clothes off and put a robe on him. They kept his underwear on. As I was watching them,
I suddenly noticed a large, grinning clown sitting on a shelf above him, hiding in the middle of all the medical equipment.

I made some sort of gagging noise and tried to sit up, terrified. The clown dissolved back into a mess of heart monitors and wires. I kept my eye on it, and every so often the equipment would shimmer and the clown would appear again. It looked just like the one from
Poltergeist
that hid under the kid’s bed. I knew he wasn’t real, but the hallucination was so vivid, so clear, that I felt like I had to keep an eye on him anyway, just in case he tried to climb down from the shelf and slither across the floor toward me.

A doctor finally came and confirmed that it was definitely appendicitis, but I’d have to wait a few more hours for an operating room to free up.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make sure you’re comfortable.” He patted the morphine bag and saw it was almost empty. “We’ll get that filled back up,” he promised.

I couldn’t sleep, so I sat on the bed for hours, eating the pain while my head swam in frothy white waves. I’d curl up, move my head to the foot of the bed, try to half sit up with my head between my knees—anything to stop the stabbing pain. Nothing worked.

At 7:00
A.M.
I called Erica, knowing she would be up and getting the kids ready for school. I explained what was going on, and she got a little hysterical and promised she would be there by the time I woke up from surgery. I felt a little better after that. Emily also called around 8:00
A.M.
and promised she would be there as soon as possible.

I was wheeled up to surgery around 11:00
A.M.
A nurse shaved my pubic hair, since they were going to do a laparoscopic procedure. A doctor stood over her while she shaved me and explained that they would only make three small holes—one on my left side, one where my pubes used to be, and then they’d go in through my belly button to pull my poisoned appendix out.

“Can I keep it?” I asked.

“It’s considered hazardous material,” the doctor said.

“When you seal up my belly button after, can you make it look a
little nicer than it does now?” I asked. “There’s this weird bump in there.”

I was babbling. “We’ll see what we can do,” the doctor said. I was wheeled through corridor after corridor, and I watched the ceiling glide by, thinking
This is what dying people see
. And then I wondered how many other people had thought the exact same thing.

Suddenly we were in the operating room. I was lifted onto a table. A new tube was put inside my arm catheter and I blacked out, just like Joey on a coke bender.

Erica was standing beside
me when I woke up.

“They went like this!” I said, waving my arms around in the air in front of me, trying to show her how they had performed the surgery, and passed back out.

When I opened my eyes again a fat nurse was standing at the foot of my bed. “Keep your eyes open!” she barked, but I passed back out again.

The third time I came to, I tried to force my eyelids to stay open, but they were made of stone. Erica was wringing her hands. “I have to go, the kids are home alone,” she said.

“S’fine,” I slurred. I looked around and saw I was in a recovery room, with about fifteen other people who were coming out of surgery too.

“You have some friends waiting for you outside. I’ll send them in.”

She left and was replaced by Emily and Stephanie, who stood on either side of me, fussing with the sheets and pillows. The fat nurse returned.

“We need your bed, we’re moving you to a chair,” she said. Stephanie lifted me with one arm and Emily grabbed the other, and they slowly walked me over to a reclining armchair and eased me down. Every step was a knife wound in my torso.

“I want to go home,” I said, but suddenly Joey was striding across the floor of the room, with a huge bouquet of flowers and a giant shopping bag.

“Hey, Tiger,” he said softly and rubbed my head. “Here,” and he
pulled out a new pair of pale blue American Apparel underwear and some knee socks. “I thought you might need some fresh underthings,” he said.

The nurse came over and told me I just had to wait for a doctor to come check on me, and that I could go home after. I just had to pee for her first, because they’d put a tube up inside my penis while I was out and needed to make sure everything was working right again. That explained the stinging pain.

“Want to try and go?” Joey asked. I nodded, and he half carried me over to the bathroom. I brought my IV stand in with me and leaned on it while I tried to pee. I felt like I had to, but nothing happened.

I came back out and Joey walked me back to my chair.

“I have to go, I’m deejaying tonight,” he said, “but call me if you need anything.”

I watched him walk away, wishing he would stay, wishing that he would carry me home, put me to bed, stay with me all night.

Emily nudged me. “Dude, you’re gonna get Vicodin!” she said.

For some reason Erica
had taken my cell phone home with her. She explained later that it made sense at the time because she thought that this way she could keep in touch with my friends if they called for me. I called her from Stephanie’s phone and asked her if she could bring it back to the city. I didn’t have a land line at home, and the thought of being alone post-surgery with no way to contact anyone just seemed like a bad idea. But I could hear in her voice that it was late and she didn’t want to leave the kids alone in the house. If they woke up and found her gone they would have freaked. So I told her just to bring it to me the next day.

I was finally discharged around midnight, with my first-ever legal prescription for Vicodin. Stephanie filled the prescription for me at a CVS next to the hospital while I waited, doubled over on a chair inside a Chinese takeout joint. I’d tried to make it the one extra block to the drugstore but whatever heavy-duty pain drugs they had me on were wearing off and I could barely move. I watched people rush by
the window. The smell of greasy noodles and duck sauce made me want to vomit.

Stephanie finally came back. “I’m so sorry that took so long, there was a huge line. At midnight! So weird.” She handed me the bottle, and I asked her to get me some water so I could take them right then.

She helped me into a cab, rode with me, brought me upstairs to my apartment. The Goth roommate wasn’t home and Steph was worried. “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” she asked.

I told her no, that I was fine. I just wanted to sleep. She tucked me in and I promised to call her in the morning as soon as I got my phone back from Erica.

I passed out quickly, the anesthesia still working its way out of my system. I woke back up a few hours later though, and couldn’t move. My entire body was on fire with pain and if I tried to move even an inch, every single nerve ending in my body would explode. I tried to reach for the bottle of Vicodin on the nightstand but couldn’t grasp it. I called out for my roommate a few times, but there was no answer. As I lay there, unable to move and alone in my bed, I finally felt the full weight of my mistakes and my addiction. I’d fucked everything up and I was alone because of it. I deserved to be lying there in the dark in agony. I’d abused the safety bubble and it was nowhere to be found now. I’d never experienced loneliness that deep before, in the dark, unable to move, no one to hear me or help me. There was no sleep anymore. So I focused on the pain. I experienced it, embracing it for what it was for the first time ever in my life, as a warning system that my own body was using to tell me that something was very, very wrong.