Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (5 page)

We were leaning against the poles near the bar instead of the wall that night, and I watched him head over to the bar and order a drink. He turned and saw me staring, and to my total shock he smiled at me.

Norco making me brave, I walked right over to him and said, “Hi,” and he said, “Hi,” and it was really just that easy. His name was Everett and he was just coming back from some party for the
insanely expensive fashion label he worked for, and, weirdly, one that I had recently become obsessed with.

We shot the shit for a while about fashion. I’d always worn T-shirts and jeans exclusively, but when I’d been in Hudson I’d found an old leather Members Only coat with fur trim around the hood at a used-clothing store. I was really proud of it. I told Everett it was coyote, and he got this disgusted look on his face as he fingered the fur near my neck.

“You’re wearing dog,” he said.

“No, no, the label says it’s made out of coyote!” I said. “I mean, I would never wear fur, but I felt like this poor coyote was trapped inside this coat, and I wanted to bring him back out into the world, so his spirit could, you know, see it…and stuff.”

These sorts of ideas make perfect sense to me, but I realize I should keep them to myself.

“I wear fur,” Everett said, shrugging. “Who gives a shit? We just made a bunch of coats out of Finnish raccoon. But this,” he said, rolling my hood cuff through his fingers again, “is dog. I can tell.”

I was mortified. So I ordered a shot of tequila. He paid for it.

“I’m going to choose to believe that this is a coyote,” I told him after I put my glass back down on the bar. “And he is living around my neck and getting a second chance to see the world.”

Everett gave me this weird smile that I couldn’t read as pity or interest until he asked, “Want to come home with me?”

I shrugged and said sure.

We caught a cab outside, and as we were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge I suddenly remembered Emily and texted her that I’d left. The cab stopped at the Lorimer Street subway stop. Everett lived a few blocks away from it.

His place was empty of everything except clothes. There were four boxes in the living room and nothing else. His bedroom was tiny and faced the street, the walls were bare but there were piles of clothes everywhere and a big walk-in closet stuffed full of suits, sweaters, shirts, belts, shoes, boots, coats, bags. I’d never seen anything like it. In a guy’s room, I mean.

We smoked in silence for a while, tossed the cigarettes out the window, and he leaned in and kissed me. Clothes came off.

“Wait,” I said. “Do you have any condoms I can use?”

He rolled out of bed and rummaged around in his closet before coming back with some ancient-looking Lifestyles. I tried using one but it broke almost immediately.

“Are you clean?” he asked.

“Yeah, I just got tested as soon as I moved back here,” I said. “What about you?”

“It’s been a while, but I’m clean. I haven’t been with anyone that way for a while. Just go for it,” he said.

And so I did. The great and awful thing about opiates is that they make me stay hard forever, but it’s usually nearly impossible to come. So I can go forever but eventually it just gets boring and I have to make sure the other guy gets off before I pull a muscle.

Looking back, I try to think what was going through my mind about not using a condom. I was drunk, obviously, but there was something more going on. This guy was from a world foreign to me, a glamorous fashion world I’d always pretended not to give a shit about but maybe secretly wanted to be a part of. Despite entering puberty at the late dawn of the AIDS epidemic and having condom use drilled into my brain since elementary school, I didn’t want to disappoint him. The only answer I can come up with is that in some sick way I thought it would make us closer, and for some reason I badly wanted to impress him.

Eventually he came and we both passed out. I woke up at dawn as he was getting dressed. “I have a meeting with a buyer, but I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. I nodded and dozed off again for a while but woke up when he sat back down on the bed to say good-bye.

He put his hand on my face and gently stroked my cheek.

“Listen,” he said. “If you leave before I get back, and decide to steal my clothes, just don’t take any of the stuff from the spring collection. They’re samples, and the only ones we’ve got.”

I nodded. It was a fair request. As soon as he left I got out of bed and wandered around his room. I couldn’t remember his name until I found a stack of mail near the window. I sat cross-legged on his
bed, smoked a cigarette, and looked around at the blank white walls. It looked like an asylum. The broken condom was still lying on the floor. I left it there. I looked at the pile of shopping bags and plastic-wrapped suits that made up much of his company’s spring collection. I briefly considered grabbing it and running but told myself no, that’s something I would have done years ago, when I was younger. This was my new life in New York City and I wasn’t going to fuck it up by making enemies right out the door. I ground out my cigarette, dug Clover out of my pants pocket, popped a Norco to help with my hangover, and fell back asleep.

I woke up when Everett slid into bed beside me a few hours later.

“I can’t believe you’re still here,” he said.

“How’d the meeting go?” I asked.

“They were late,” he fumed.

I wrapped my arms around him and we fell back asleep.

When I woke up later he was still lying next to me, staring at my face.

“Want to get brunch?” he asked.

What I wanted was a shower and my own bedroom. I declined the offer, we swapped numbers, and I took off.

“Thanks for not stealing anything,” he yelled down the stairs after me.

I decided to walk
home instead of taking the subway. When I’d lived in New York before, I’d refused to ever come over to Williamsburg. I’d called it the Williamsburg Curse, because cab drivers never knew how to get to where I needed to go and the L train was constantly getting shut down, so I’d end up stuck in the freezing cold, waiting an hour for an overbooked car service to come pick me up. Or I’d wake up in some guy’s house and drunkenly try to navigate my way back home to Manhattan without knowing where the nearest coffee shop or subway was.

But I was getting to know the neighborhood better. It was maybe a twenty-minute walk from Everett’s place to mine. I still didn’t know
what to make of him, and as I walked home I tried to remember more details from the night before. He seemed to have the arrogance that I usually went for, but there was an underlying spite to it that went beyond the normal “I’m a badass who secretly has a heart of gold” type that I usually fixate on. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why I felt that way about him, though. A tiny residual pill wave rolled through my hangover and I forgot all about it. Pills could make me forgive and forget a lot of things. And if it hadn’t been for that blind willingness to overlook what my instincts told me, Everett might have just remained a one-night stand.

AS A DRUG LOVER,
I could (and frankly, still can) justify a million different reasons to start using. But I think a spontaneous lung collapse is up there with the best of them.

Heather grew up in a working-class family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and has the accent to prove it. Her mother was fifteen when she had her and often Heather’s needs would get pushed to the side. Heather came from a long line of addicts and alcoholics, and her grandmother was both an addict
and
bipolar. Heather was used to seeing psychotropic drugs lying around the house.

Because there was such a long history of drug abuse in Heather’s family, her mom was reticent to even let her take NyQuil for severe colds. When Heather finally went off to college, she did her own share of drinking and partying, but, knowing her family’s history, she never really got into the harder drugs. Heather had always suffered from panic attacks severe enough to make her vomit, but her mother just thought it was normal teenage adjustment. Heather’s friends came up with the more creative excuse that she was possessed and had devils in her, like
The Exorcist
, because of the constant mood swings and vomiting.

After Heather graduated from college, she moved back to Bay
Ridge, with no job prospects in sight. Two weeks later, while she was taking a shower, her lung collapsed.

“It’s called spontaneous pneumothorax,” she says. “It was so random and weird. I couldn’t breathe out. My solution was to just smoke another Newport.”

Her mom, now a registered nurse, passed her breathing troubles off as allergies. But later, a friend of Heather’s convinced her to go to the hospital, where she discovered that her lung was 80 percent collapsed.

“I had no insurance, and was just like, ‘Fuck, I can’t afford this,’” she says. “They had to put a chest tube in. They couldn’t give me anything during that procedure because you need to tell them that you can feel it so they know it’s in properly, but afterward they gave me a morphine drip. Look, basically, a collapsed lung isn’t that big of a deal. It happens to a lot of people. But because I’d always been so anxiety-ridden, I was convinced I was dying. And once that morphine drip was in, for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t feel any of that anxiety. It was a release. The colors were so bright, everything was prettier and more manageable. I watched a lot of TV, and
Seinfeld
had never seemed funnier to me. Obviously, I needed more right away.”

The one unpleasant side effect of the morphine was that it made Heather nauseated, so the hospital began administering Demerol shots. Demerol is another narcotic drug that’s similar to morphine. “Chemically or whatever, it just worked better for me,” she says.

Every time the doctors tried to take Heather’s chest tube out, her lung would collapse again. She remained in the hospital, high on her painkillers, for almost a month.

“The other nice side effect of the painkillers is that I lost a massive amount of weight,” she says. “I had no appetite because of them and I lost about fifty pounds. For the first time in my entire life, I was skinny.”

When Heather’s lung was finally able to function properly on its own without the chest tube, she was psyched to get home and show off her new body. She also wanted to know what she was going to get to bring home with her. “It was the first time in my life when I had
this fear that my drugs were being taken away from me, but I didn’t recognize that I needed them. My mother had been tripping out that I’d been on so many painkillers to begin with, what with our family’s history. Once I was home she said I could have Tylenol or Advil, but that was it. And I just knew that wasn’t going to do it.”

After Heather got home from the hospital, she fell into a deep depression. “I was detoxing from all the medicine I’d been given and I still had no job. I had quit smoking because I was terrified my lung was going to collapse again. I felt awful. Plus my anxiety came back, which really sucked because all the drugs in the hospital had quelled it while I was in there. So I started going out and drinking every night.”

This self-medicating solution got Heather through the next few years, but in 2003, her panic attacks returned worse than ever, despite (or because of) getting engaged and scoring a great job as the national sales manager at Fresh, a major, high-end skin and body care company. “I was responsible for four hundred employees in thirty states and trying to plan my wedding at the same time, and I started having a nervous breakdown.”

Heather, who now finally had great health insurance through her job, had been on Celexa, an antidepressant, for some time, but felt it did nothing for her panic attacks. A childhood friend named Tracy had the answer. “Go see my doctor,” she said. “He’s Dr. Feelgood. He’ll give you whatever you want. Ask for Xanax. It’ll calm you down and you’ll feel so much better.”

Xanax (alprazolam) is a benzodiazepine prescribed for the management of generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety associated with depression, short-term relief of symptoms of anxiety, and panic disorder. It can also be very addictive. Some people respond really well to it for panic attacks.

At first Heather avoided calling Tracy’s doctor. “I was freaked out by the idea. For some reason I was a little scared of him.” But a week before her wedding she put her back out. “I was literally walking like a hunchback and I had an event the next day that I had to look great and feel great for. So I went to see Dr. Feelgood. He gave me Xanax for stress and Vicodin for pain, and the combination was
just magic. My anxiety was gone, the pain was gone, and everything felt awesome. I felt like I could do everything. I needed less sleep, I didn’t need to eat, which was great for helping me get into my wedding dress. And I had more personality. Normally, I’m kind of a shy person. I’d think to myself, ‘That person wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway. I’m not going to bother.’ Suddenly, I didn’t care. I felt cuter, smarter, and funnier and I could talk to anyone. The night before my wedding, I had all my girls and my gays in a hotel room, and I just handed out Xanax and Vicodin left and right along with the champagne. It was a total pill-popping party.”

At that point, Heather still had enough self-control not to take any pills on the actual day of her wedding. “I remember thinking, ‘It’s my wedding day and I want to be clearheaded.’”

After the wedding, Heather continued on her normally prescribed dosages, but after only a month or two she noticed that one of each pill wasn’t working, so she began to take more. “That freaked me out a little. I hadn’t really ever been abusing the pills before, except maybe the night before my wedding. So I let my prescriptions run out. And I woke up feeling like I had the flu. These were totally normal withdrawal symptoms at the time, but I didn’t know it. I started having these emotional seizures. My body would be gripped by total anxiety and panic, followed by hysterical crying jags.”

Heather called her husband home from work to take care of her. “He didn’t know what was wrong with me. He was, like, ‘I just married a mental patient.’ I was crying nonstop, couldn’t eat, but was vomiting, shitting…on myself at some points. I can’t believe I didn’t connect the dots at the time. That I had stopped taking all those pills too suddenly.”

She finally called her grandmother, who had managed to stabilize her own bipolar disorder for years. She sent Heather to another psychiatrist, who prescribed more Xanax, but at
four times
the dosage. Heather’s original Dr. Feelgood had given her 0.5 milligram pills to take as needed, but her new doctor put her on 2 milligram pills, three times a day. She didn’t question a thing, figuring the doctor knew what was best for her.

But from there, everything started spiraling out of control. She
had an unlimited supply of bricks (the 2 milligram tablets of Xanax come in little bars, commonly called “bricks,” which can be broken into two 1 milligram segments or four 0.5 milligram segments). But Heather missed the combination of painkillers with her Xanax, so she began to doctor-shop.

Unfortunately for legitimate physicians, doctor shopping is incredibly easy now, thanks to the Internet. Before, crafty addicts had to rely on a hard copy of the
Physicians Desk Reference
to look up different pills and prescription info so they would know what to ask for. Now all they have to do is look up a pill online, see which symptoms match, and go to as many different doctors as they can until they find one who will prescribe what they want.

One of the biggest problems with dispensing pain medication is that there is no concrete way to measure pain in a patient. The closest thing doctors have now is the faces pain scale, an assessment tool originally designed for use with preverbal patients (that is, young children) and later used with non-English-speaking patients, the elderly, and just about everyone else. It’s a chart of six simply drawn faces that range from happy to crying hysterically. You’re supposed to tell your doctor which one best represents the intensity of the pain you are experiencing. Sometimes the doctor then correlates the face you choose with a number ranging from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “no pain” and 10 meaning “the worst pain you can imagine” or “the worst pain you’ve ever had.” It’s an absurd practice, and one that is extremely easy to manipulate if you have even the most rudimentary acting skills. Heather, for example, used to walk into a doctor’s office hunched over and use sciatica as an excuse to get painkillers. Some experts believe that such fakery is usually easy to spot. But pain is also an entirely subjective experience. Some people, especially men, may be feeling a lot of pain but downplay it in order to look tough, while someone who is really only in moderate pain may claim a higher number to get more drugs. Additionally, researchers at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine studied the density of nerve fibers in women and men to investigate whether enhanced pain perception in some women has psychological, cultural, social, or anatomical roots. They found that women may have up to twice as many nerve fibers in the
skin as men, so they feel some types of pain more intensely than men. Before I’d discovered pills, I’d always used pain as a secret, personal badge of honor. If I had cut myself on something or was sore from swimming, I just sucked it up. It made me feel strong, like I could get through anything.

Heather’s doctor shopping went like this: she’d go onto her insurance company’s website and go through the entire alphabet of doctors in New York that accepted her health coverage. “I didn’t want to pay any more money out of pocket for pills because I needed to save money to buy pills online if I hit a dry spell,” she says. “In worst-case scenarios, I would walk into an emergency room and say I’m on whatever drug, but I left my prescription in a hotel room in Boston on a business trip. But hospitals are the stingiest. They’ll either give you one pill there or write you a prescription for, like, three pills. But I used the Boston excuse a lot in between prescriptions.”

After a while, Heather’s doctors started to get wise to her. “They weren’t coming right out and saying, ‘You’re fucking addicted and you’re sucking up all your pills,’ but they were pretty much letting me know the jig was up and they weren’t going to write me any more scrips.”

That’s when she started stealing prescription pads.

Unlike Heather, twenty-seven-year-old Jared
fell into his painkiller addiction through nothing more serious than suburban ennui.

“I never like to trace my addiction to anything that was family-related,” he says. “I had a normal upbringing, there was no abuse, no something where I could be, like, ‘That’s why I felt the need to do it!’ The reason why I started snorting Percocet is because I just fucking loved it.”

Jared grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb in Massachusetts, near Boston. He’s tall and broad-shouldered with short, ever so slightly mussed brown hair. He looks like your standard handsome boy next door, maybe the one who played lacrosse and was always willing to pump the keg for you. High school was normal for him
(beer blasts, Friday night dates, homework), up until his senior year when a close friend began working at a local mom-and-pop pharmacy. The owners had a few high school kids working there, illegally, since they had access to controlled substances in the back of the pharmacy and only licensed pharmacists are supposed to fill prescriptions.

“My friend started stealing all sorts of pills,” Jared remembers. “At first it was just Xanax and stuff like that, which we would snort. I don’t even know how we first thought to snort it, it just seemed like the thing to do. But one day he stole some Percocets. Snorting a Percocet is a lot of work. There’s a lot of powder, a lot of acetaminophen, and it took forever to crush. There were three of us doing it together, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to us. It was almost like going back into the womb. I felt like I was in total control. I felt like all cylinders were pumping. It was a warm sensation where you felt like you could do whatever you wanted. I felt like I could talk to anyone, and I’d always been a little bit shy, socially. I’d even been to see psychiatrists about it, but this gave me more confidence than any shrink session. On Percocet, I thought this was how I was supposed to feel all the time, and the way I felt regularly wasn’t right.”

Jared would spend the whole night just hanging out at his friend’s house. He had a huge place and his parents never came upstairs to his room. They could smoke cigarettes up there. Do whatever they wanted. Jared estimates that 95 percent of his high school pill snorting was done in that bedroom. They had a band and would play music, but they never actually wrote a song. After that first night on Percocet, his friend stopped stealing almost every other kind of pill besides Percocet. Whenever he’d fill a prescription or do inventory, he’d just grab handfuls of Percocets. “It was like the Wild West back then,” Jared remembers. “No one noticed.”

If I’d been as daring as Jared’s friend, I’d probably be dead by now. When I was in high school, my best friend Amy’s parents owned one of the town’s drugstores, where she worked. She too had access to the back of the store where all the meds were kept, but we never even thought to steal pills. In the early 1990s the only pills you heard
about were antidepressants like Prozac. We used Amy’s access to the drugstore for more practical purposes, like scoring pregnancy tests for worried friends. Our town was so small that no kid dared just walk in and buy something like that under the watchful eyes of Amy’s parents, who were prominent members of the community. So whenever someone needed something illicit, like condoms, they’d turn to us. We developed a strong nicotine addiction because the drugstore sold cigarettes, which Amy was able to buy for us when her parents weren’t looking. But the best part had to be the access afforded us by the drugstore’s computer. We could illegally find out who in our high school was on birth control, who was taking antibiotics for an STD, and who was on antidepressants, which back then, in our backwoods location, still carried a social stigma. Information like this about our classmates was crucial in a tiny high school, where petty rivalries between friends and cliques took on mythological qualities because of the sheer lack of anything else to do. It gave me a sense of power I’d never experienced, and even though I never did anything with the secrets we discovered, it was enough to know that I had ammunition should I ever need it.