A.
Before I go into this part of the story, I want to lay out two caveats. The first one is this: the other main character in this entry is in no way a pusher or a dealer or any other kind of villain; he was just the person most conveniently available to facilitate a decision I had already made: that I was going to take a lot of drugs in college. I made this decision for a lot of reasons, but mainly it was because taking drugs sounded fun. In the tales of woe spun out by addicts, it should never be forgotten that at the root for many of us is that we were chasing pleasure, once upon a time, and many of us continue to pursue pleasure until it kills us. The question of why we do that is probably as varied as our physical appearances are. The second caveat is this: I’ve disguised the identity of that person, largely because we’re not in contact anymore, and so there’s no way for him to represent himself in the story. If you went to Pomona with me, I encourage you not to try to guess who he is, for the following reasons: (1) the character represented here is a bit of a composite, and (2) you’d probably be wrong, anyway. Please keep your guesses to yourselves.
On that note: The first person to get me into any drug stronger than your standard college kid regimen of bad beer and overpriced marijuana was a friend of mine who was also, kind of, my boyfriend. I say “kind of” because the entire time our arrangement went on, we were both pursuing other people, he actively (including other straight-ish guys, I suppose egged on by his success with me), and me somewhat-less-actively (as was my wont). But we only ever had sex with each other, in part because our teenaged awkwardness made it hard for us to make other connections. It was very much an any-port-in-a-storm situation for both of us, and though I’d long found myself attracted to the occasional person of the male persuasion, I continued to think of myself as straight even after I’d formed a relationship with another boy. (And let’s be clear here, though we were legally men, we were boys, both of us.) This sort of thing — mostly sex, little companionship or mutual understanding — has been typical of my relationships ever since, and almost all of those have been with women. Just for the record.
This boy and I simulated intimacy through the use, mostly, of ecstasy, though we also took mushrooms, acid, speed, and just about anything else we could lay our hands on. I found I loved them all, but especially the uppers, because they had the quality of taking my scattered, unfocussed depressive’s personality and turning it into something finely honed and outgoing; coked up, I could chat up girls endlessly, dance to house music endlessly, write endlessly — I loved writing on stimulants, and still kind of do —, drink endlessly, fuck endlessly. The only problem was the crash, the scraped-out, heart-whamming, too-tired-to-sleep bottom that one inevitably reached after a couple of days of this kind of thing. Well, that, and being broke and in college, it wasn’t always easy to lay your hands on the stuff. I can remember buying candy with my flex account, then re-selling it to other people at a discount, just so I could scrape together enough cash to buy a couple of E’s (in Southern California, ecstasy was known, not as X, but as E).
Eventually, perhaps not surprisingly, the boy disappeared, wandered off into the land of true eccentrics and druggies, and I have no idea where he is today. I didn’t miss him that much, once I got over the absence of regular sexual stimulation. He left behind mostly a real taste for uppers. The other stuff — the hallucinogens, even the ecstasy — I found I could take or leave. No, what I really loved was the rush of blood in my veins, my heart beating so hard that my wrists, neck, feet, and eardrums thumped with it. I loved the feats of concentration I could pull, reading 300 pages of original-source history material in a day or two, firing off a five page essay about Jews in Medieval Spain in a night, the focus and false brilliance that comes along with amphetamines. I loved smoking my throat raw while I wrote bad poetry in emulation of Paul Celan and other terribly serious literary figures. If I could have found a way to live permanently in that state, I would have done it.
At a place like Pomona, where most people worked themselves to the bone four days a week and partied till they dropped the rest of the time, it was easy to feel that a lot of my behavior was normal. Almost all of my friends drank to excess a few times a week, a lot of them were stoned nearly every waking hour, and many people’s study habits consisted of hoarding the adderall and ritalin that doctors used to hand out like candy to any kid who got bored in school, and then binging on the stuff when tests and papers came up. Because school was easy for me, I was able to go harder for longer than most people, and sometimes did an entire semester’s worth of work in the final week of term — especially in economics classes, which had no attendance policy and were often laughably simple. I felt camouflaged, invincible. I wasn’t even aware, really, that there was a problem, though I can now remember friends expressing concern that I was getting stoned in my room alone. We took pride in our tolerance for booze and drugs and thought of ourselves, for the most part, as sowing our oats: Pomona was full of the future bankers, lawyers, screenwriters, VC speculators, and professors of America; we had worked hard in high school, scored well on tests, and did more reading and writing in a semester than a lot of college students do in four years. We deserved to cut loose. But we — or I, anyway — was trained that the only true pleasure came from the systematic derangement of the senses, and work was something you mostly did so you could reward yourself by taking drugs. Though I didn’t know it, I came out of Pomona an addict, ready to plunge into a life of randomness, denial, shallow relationships, and failure.
B.
I recently read a book by a journalist named Sam Quinones called Dreamland, in which he lays out in detail — sometimes too much detail, for my tastes — the way in which the opiate epidemic snuck into the backwaters of America, when for years heroin use had been confined to big cities, where gangs were willing to hazard the risks involved in distributing it. I read it with a shudder of recognition, especially when he reported something I realized I already knew: oxycontin reached Portland in late 2003 and took up residence among the young and feckless of the city’s middle- and upper-middle-classes.
I’m going to skip most of my mid-20s in this accounting, because the most important person involved in that part of the story has made it clear that she doesn’t want me writing about her anymore, and is uncomfortable with the amount I’ve already shared about her in the past. But in 2003 we hadn’t yet met, and I was living in a crappy little ranch house with three other people, in a part of Portland charmingly known as Felony Flats. (I think its actual, official name is Brentwood-Darlington, and it has proven to be one of the few parts of the city immune to gentrification, at least so far.) All four of us were unhappy with the lives we were leading, which consisted mostly of watching television, overeating, smoking pot, drinking, and masturbating. Only one of us had a job; none of us had a romantic partner of any kind; three of us had serious chemical imbalances for which we were not medicated. The dishwasher backed up into the bathtub sometimes. The clothes dryer dried nothing and if you forgot your clothes in there they sat, warm and damp, a breeding ground for fungi. Flies infested the living room. We were in pretty dire straits when one of our number (not me) reconnected with an old childhood friend who ran a sideline in peddling vicodin and other opiate-laden pills.
Unlike my ex-boyfriend, this old friend was a pusher and a bit of a villain; I was never clear on where he got his gear, but I suspect he stole a lot of it from elderly relatives. By the time we got rid of him he’d reinvented himself as a petty con man and extortioneer, the kind of guy who was always moving from city to city because he kept wearing out his welcome by burning the people he got to know there. Under normal circumstances I’m sure we all would have shunned him. But he had drugs. In addition to vicodin, he had a connect for cocaine, he could lay hands on tabs of LSD, and he introduced us to oxycontin, the powerful opiate that is sometimes called “Hillbilly Heroin” because bored teenagers in the countryside could get it easily from quasi-legal pill mills in neglected small towns, and use it to tune out their stultified lives. In fact, it basically was synthetic heroin. It was dangerous stuff. I liked it a lot.
For a kid who had been trying to distract himself from a world he felt totally alienated from basically since the day he was old enough to think, oxy was the real solution. Pop a pill, or grind it up and snort it, and your whole being melts into something warm and fuzzy. It’s impossible to worry about anything on oxy; your every concern boils down to the simple pleasures of the body: it is immensely fun to scratch yourself when high on oxy, or to manipulate your testicles in a non-sexual way (I can’t imagine giving enough of a shit to have sex on opiates), or to feel the bright tingle of soda washing down your gullet. Who gives a shit if you’re sixty pounds overweight, unemployed, and you haven’t read a book in a year? Rub your feet on the carpet and nod out.
We did dumb shit to get opiates. One of the roommates had sciatica, and we figured out that emergency clinics handed out vicodin for sciatica almost as though it were no more harmful than cough drops; we would drive from clinic to clinic, scamming drugs off bored and incurious doctors who wrote the scripts without hardly checking our charts. Once, when I had a root canal, I made sure to combine the percoset they proscribed me with beer, so I could get a real kick out of it; vicodin or percoset and beer, a dangerous combo, left one pleasantly swimmy in the head and warm in the body. I was fortunate never to have over-done that one.
I believed, or at least I thought I did, that the combination of opiates and alcohol was allowing me to tolerate the world with some measure of enjoyment. But right here I have a song I wrote in that time, called “Opiates”, in which the bridge goes: “You don’t believe me / you can’t relieve me / so why do you seek me / through my haze? / My drunken days / poppy-eyed, dissipate / into opiate.” There are other, more pointed lyrics, mostly about pain, but these are the only ones that aren’t so bad that I’d rather curl up and die than let anybody ever see them. Clearly, whatever I was doing with drugs and booze was not actually making me feel better.
I believe a few things saved me from turning into one of America’s now-countless number of middle-class heroin addicts. One was that the opiates were very hard to come by in our corner of the world; if, like so many of the kids in Quinones’ book, I had sustained a serious injury and been proscribed oxycontin for the pain, I have little doubt that I would have been hooked by the time I finished the first bottle. Another one is one that stops a lot of people, or so I’ve been told by recovering heroin addicts I’ve met — fear of the needle. I just couldn’t imagine sticking myself with something on purpose, especially given everything I’d heard about the dangers of dirty needles and the constant assault of AIDS news I’d endured during my adolescence. The last was an impulsive lunge I took across the country to try to rejoin my old life with my friends from college, who were all living in Washington, DC, trying to change the world. Despite that I’m often quite cynical about politics, and possessed even then a Foucaultian skepticism that change is really possible, I was young enough that I still wanted to make the world a better place. And, really, I think that part of me was a little worried about what I was getting into. It was the last gasp of the self-preservative instinct that had kept me from drinking and drugging a lot in high school.
My track record with opiates since then is mixed. I am aware that I like them rather too much, meaning that I’m careful not to go on long binges, and I’ve said no both times I’ve been offered heroin to sniff, aware that what life I have could easily disappear down that particular rabbit hole in a matter of months. But if I have dental work or minor surgery, you can bet I’m going to maximize the pleasure I get out of those little pills. Because, remember, drugs are fun. At least they are until they hollow you out, and wear you down to a little nib, like a raw bone exposed from a severed leg.
