Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (9 page)

“But we got through it. A week later I was beginning to feel a little bit better, but still crazy. So I went back to work. And even after that week of pure hell, my whole mentality was, ‘That didn’t kill me, so whatever. I can start right back up again now. I got through it, and it will never be any worse than that. So I might as well just go back to snorting my pills.’”

Jared’s friend went right back to pills again, too. The pills had become such an integral part of their lives that they had no idea what else to do with their time. All they knew was work, the hunt for pills, and the high. “What the fuck was I going to do if I didn’t do pills?” Jared says. “It was a completely empty existence without them. I thought that at least the first time I did them again after going clean for a week they would be amazing, I’d be able to get a good high, like when I’d first started using. But no, it went right back to that level of general bodily maintenance.”

This is why most long-term drug abusers eventually just stop getting high from whatever they are hooked on and are only using to stave off withdrawal symptoms. In someone who is not physically dependent, when the body experiences some form of stress, such as vigorous exercise, epinephrine is released to transmit signals of pain or discomfort to the brain. To keep this response in check, naturally produced endorphins kick in and bind to the neurons responsible for pain transmission, thereby limiting the amount of norepinephrine released in the brain. Think of endorphins as the body’s own morphine.

Since opioid drugs like Percocet fool the body by attaching to these same endorphin receptors, flooding them with an artificial sur
plus first causes not just pain relief, but euphoria as well. But over time, the body produces fewer and fewer endorphins. If the drug is then withdrawn, the body has neither its own painkillers nor an external supply of artificial ones to occupy the receptors. Thus, the horrors of withdrawal.

EVERETT CAME OVER TO
watch movies the night after we first hooked up. I went and met him at the subway stop so he didn’t have to find the place alone. I was high, wearing a sleeveless shirt, loose jeans, and flip-flops. It was already October but warm out that day. I leaned over the railing at the top of the subway stairs, waiting for him to come out, but he exited across the street and came up behind me instead.

We eyed each other in that way that you do after you see someone you’ve drunkenly hooked up with, trying to figure out if he is actually cute or if you were just wasted. He acted a little gayer than I remembered, but other than that he seemed cool. We walked back to my place, stopping to get sodas.

“What the fuck,” he said when we got to the Tunnel of Terror.

“Ignore it,” I said.

We got upstairs and into my room and flopped down on the bed.

“Um, I have to tell you something,” I said.

He got this scared look in his eyes.

“No, nothing bad, it’s just that I took a bunch of pills today, so if I act kind of spacey, that’s all it is.”

“Oh,” he said, sounding relieved. “What kind?” he asked.

“Vicodin,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining the difference between Vicodin and Norco, and figured Vicodin sounded safer, less drug addict-ish.

“Got any more?” he asked.

Yessssss!
I thought to myself. My selfishness about hoarding pills had some flexibility when it came to cute guys draped across my bed.

“Sure,” I said. I got up and picked Clover up off my dresser.

“How many do you want?” I asked.

“How many did
you
take?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“That doesn’t count,” I said. “I’ve got a tolerance. Start with one, you can have more later if you want.”

He swallowed his pill, and we curled up against each other and turned on the movie. I think it was some blockbuster action film I’d gotten from Netflix. I can’t remember which one because we made out for most of it.

After that night, Everett pretty much moved into my room. The relationship developed fast; we decided to become boyfriends within two weeks. I didn’t know much about him, except that he grew up wealthy in the South and had gone to private school. He could be very arrogant and bitchy, and one night at dinner I told him that if that was the real him, I really wasn’t interested in getting to know him better. Almost overnight he softened up whenever he was around me.

I was so psyched to have what seemed like a normal life. Normal, I guess, as far as bourgeois New York City life goes. He would come over to my house every night after work, we’d order food, watch TV, fall asleep. I took pills every night. He’d join me occasionally and never said anything to me about my intake. On the weekends we’d go out, do coke, come home, and stay up all night talking and fucking. He told me he’d had to go to rehab when he was in high school for coke use, and I was too high on pills to think that the fact that he was doing coke again was a problem.

At the time, I had a really, really bad tattoo on my left arm. It was a cover-up of an even worse tattoo. I’d gotten the original one when I was seventeen, fresh out of the closet, out and proud and going to ACT UP protests. One hungover morning my friends and I went to
a strip mall outside of Syracuse, and I got two male symbols intertwined at the top of my inner forearm. The tattoo artist was this huge, burly, homophobic biker guy who was clearly disgusted, but happy to take my $50. I’m pretty sure it was out of spite that he dug the needle deep, deep into my skin, so the tattoo, when healed, was raised up as if it was in 3-D. I was happy with it for about a month before I realized how incredibly lame it was. For the next seven summers I wore Band-Aids on my arm whenever I went out in short sleeves. The skin around it was always red and irritated from bandage glue. When I graduated from college and got my first job at
Interview
magazine, I finally had enough money to get it removed. I went through three rounds of laser zapping, but all that managed to do was lower the ink content so that the tattoo was finally flush with my skin. The procedures were insanely expensive, so I decided that I would just get a new one over it now that the tattoo was flat.

Tattoo number two was done in 1997, which is way too late in that decade to excuse its tribal, Lollapalooza-esque design. I’d tried for years to come up with a design to cover up the second one, but now that I was making real money at
V Life
, I decided to just go to a professional. I found the best tattoo artist I could, a Russian woman who worked out of a boutique store in Williamsburg. I knew I wanted a raven, and when I told her, she laughed and showed me her card. It had a huge raven on it. Fate! She designed a new one for me, with large spread wings, that covered the old tattoos up entirely.

Everett came with me to hold my hand during the first round. I didn’t take any pills, I wanted to feel this pain—maybe as punishment for having such bad tattoo judgment in the past. The pain was unreal; the flesh inside the crook of your arm is incredibly tender. I went someplace dark in my head. It took four hours, and Everett stayed and held my hand the whole time. By the end I was a quivering mess. I felt like I was in first grade and the world was new and raw and scary all over again. I know it sounds like I was being a total wuss, but damn it, it
hurt
. It was worth it, though. The raven looked wise and incredibly strong. I felt like it was my protector against the world: it would keep me from harm.

Everett got me in a cab and took me home and we fell asleep
early, my arm wrapped in plastic wrap, slippery with vitamin E gel. That night, Everett had a nightmare that woke us both up early in the morning when he kicked me, thrashing around.

“Fuck,” he said, after opening his eyes. “I just dreamt that your raven came up out of your body and attacked me. It was trying to peck my eyes out and its wings were beating all over my face.” He looked scared.

“I told you,” I said. “He’s my protector. Are you secretly evil?”

“No,” he said, tickling me.

But for the next few days he kept bringing the dream up, and he looked nervous every time he did.

I had to go
back to the tattoo parlor a few weeks later for some retouching. This time, Emily came with me and we were adequately prepared with pills. I was too embarrassed to ask her to hold my hand, and she kept wandering out into the store section to look at clothes, or out onto the sidewalk to smoke. The pills helped the pain this time, but it was still there. The combo of pain
and
being high felt exquisite. Emily had told me once about having to have a colonos-copy when she was twenty-one because her family had a history of early colon cancer. She had been awake for the procedure and had been given an IV drip of Demerol. “It was so strange,” she had told me. “It was like I knew that
someone
was in pain, but I didn’t know who it was.”

The feeling was similar, but slightly different for me. The pain was there, but far away, removed. As if I’d floated out of my body but was tethered by a few last nerve endings, just to keep me rooted to the flesh I’d come wrapped in.

When it was over we walked down the street to a nearby café we loved. The trees were changing color and we were wrapped in scarves. We walked slowly, taking in the silence that was rare for this part of Brooklyn. Every time we walked past a particularly beautifully hued tree we’d stop in front of it, my one good arm wrapped around hers, and stare up at it in silence until she’d get impatient and say, “This is gay.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon at the café, sipping coffee, discreetly taking more pills, sitting mostly in silence and listening to the music playing. It was a steady stream of music like American Analog Set and José González—all mellow, relaxing stuff that replaced any need for conversation. At the time, we thought that was what was so great about pills. We never needed to talk. Emily and I could sit for hours on end and not say a word except for the occasional “Pass the sugar,” and yet we’d feel so connected to each other through the shared physical sensations. We felt sorry for the overcaffeinated patrons around us, who couldn’t feel the steady, slow warmth coursing through our veins. Pills made it hard to swallow, so we’d order small things, like toast with jam and lots of butter to lubricate our throats.

Eventually, inevitably, I ran
into Joey, the guy I had broken up with right before I left New York to move upstate. Everett was out of town visiting his family, and I was at Hot Pink getting drunk by myself when he walked in. Joey froze when he saw me.

“Hey, Tiger,” he said. “When did you get back in town?”

There were multiple chills coursing through my body, but I forced my face to stay steady.

“A while ago,” I told him. He looked terrified.

“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked. “I thought you had disappeared forever.”

“I tried to, but I got bored,” I said. “Why would I have called you?”

“I feel terrible about what happened,” he started, but I cut him off.

“I don’t care. I’m over it now. We can be friends. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

On stage, some girl had taken off her shirt and was shaking her breasts all over the place while the MC poured a beer over them.

“I feel really weird,” Joey said.

“Don’t,” I said.

“No, I treated you like shit. And I’m really sorry, I mean it.”

We leaned against the bar in silence, watching the antics onstage.
He kept buying me beers and repeating the phrase, “I feel really weird.”

I told him that he shouldn’t because I was dating Everett now and I was happy.

“I know Everett,” he said.

“I know,” I said back.

“He’s really sweet. And cute.”

“I know,” I said again.

He just frowned and made a sort of “Hmph” sound.

I don’t know why I stood there with him for so long. It felt like we were both waiting for something. I had sworn off Joey forever, and yet the pill and booze combination dissolved all of my former convictions.

I eventually got drunk, which is hard for me to do on pills. For me, the opiate high usually cuts a swath through the haze of alcohol, much like coke wakes your ass back up when you start getting too sloppy. “I gotta go,” I finally said after Joey’s fifteenth “I feel really weird.”

“Can we hang out sometime?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. My number is still the same.”

Joey texted me the
next day, and despite my hesitations I agreed to go see a horror movie with him later that week. That had been our thing when we were dating. We’d sneak a bottle of champagne and some cocaine into the movie theater at Kips Bay and get trashed while watching horror movies, then troll from bar to bar and eventually end up back at my house.

I didn’t tell Everett I was meeting Joey. I told him I had to work late. It wasn’t because I thought I was going to cheat on Everett—there was no way I was going to hook back up with Joey—I just wanted to see how it went. Joey had held such fascination for me for so long, and I wanted to rid myself of that. I needed to make him human. In a way I think it was an effort to make me feel better about myself. I needed to prove my feelings were really over.

I saw him waiting outside the theater. He’d grown more of a
beard and was wearing a huge coat with giant fur trim. When he saw me coming he did a funny little tap dance and waved. I laughed, relaxed. The pills probably helped, but I didn’t feel anything romantic for him the whole time we were in the movie. I can’t remember which one we saw—I think it was either the remake of
The Fog
or
Slither
. There was a little bit of sexual tension during the jumpy parts, when we’d grab each other’s arms, but other than that he was a gentleman. He had bought the tickets, he bought soda and popcorn, and he was on his best behavior. Afterward he asked me if I wanted to go get drunk.

“No, I’ve got to get home to Everett,” I said.

He looked sad and we hugged good-bye. I jumped in a taxi, elated. The Joey I’d just spent time with wasn’t the Joey I had known. He had grown up some, and the sleazy, bad-boy thing about him that I had been so attracted to before seemed to have dissipated. Besides, Everett was such a safe harbor, and he represented everything I’d never had in a boyfriend before. He was stable, had a great job, and was seemingly deeply in love with me. There were warning signs, though. I found out four months into our relationship that he had been lying to me about his age. He had always told me he was twenty-eight, but it turned out he was twenty-four. He casually yelled this fact out to me on the dance floor at Misshapes one night when we were both high on coke. I freaked out; he didn’t see what the big deal was. The next day I cut my hangover short by taking extra pills and had to explain to him through my haze just why this was so wrong. “I’m trying to build a real relationship with you,” I told him. “And you can’t lie to me.”

He was still an unrepentant snob. He definitely toned it down when he was around me, but he was one of those people who would openly make fun of other people’s style or looks. I’ve never had patience for this; it’s one of my biggest pet peeves. It’s such a transparent form of insecurity. He’d turn the tables on me when we’d fight about him being too caustic, telling me that I was overly sensitive—which is true. I know this about myself. I’m abnormally sentient. Every time I heard Everett making fun of people I put myself in their place, imagining how they would feel if they overheard him. Which happened, a
lot. It’s another big reason why pills were such a crutch for me. They dulled my overly sensitive feelings to a point where they were manageable.

My own weakness for drugs began at such a young age. It makes me even more certain that I’m just genetically programmed for addiction. Back when I was fourteen, I found myself driving around one night with some punk kids I’d recently met. I was sitting in the backseat, and the guy in front of me was freaking out because he was scared that he was doing too much cocaine and it was taking over his life. It was a really heartfelt conversation. The driver was trying to calm him down and telling him that he was going to help him get clean. The other kid was near tears. He suddenly reached into his pocket, rolled down his window, and said, “I’m throwing this shit out right now.”