Larry Had a Face

At times in my life I look back and see signs I missed. Glaring messages later written in the nightmares of mothers, memories of survivors, they were there whispering to me or screaming, I can’t know. I missed them all the same. In brief unwelcome moments, I can see a face looking at me differently than I saw at the time, silently begging me to turn back or wishing they could explode upon me the wealth of pain they knew better than themselves, the same which would soon barrel down upon my back. These faces, I think, saw warnings of their own and missed them the same, or saw them too late to disown the path. They left clues in their wake, tokens of the demons they couldn’t shed, littering my own path.

Larry was my friend. Larry had a face and occasionally the thought of it paralyzes me. When he died, junkies raided his knapsack and left him to rot on a couch. That isn’t what hurts me, though. People die and I’ve become accustomed to the occurrence. Larry had a face and sometimes I’m sure no one saw it but me. Now, I wish I could go back and explore his eyes for everything he never said. Where did it all go so wrong?

I woke up to find a package of syringes on my kitchen table. I was an addict but not a storied one — yet, and I didn’t ask the right questions. I didn’t know the questions. No one claimed it and I dismissed the entire event. I don’t remember Larry’s face that day, but if I did, I suspect I would see something tragic. Something dead.

We met in a hole in the wall country bar and despite years of flooding my brain with damaging substances, I will never shed this memory. My girlfriend lifted up her skirt to show him all of her fancy girl parts under the table. Obviously, he came home with us that night. How could he have known that she was a raging Xanax junkie with deep rooted insecurities and tendencies towards manic outbursts of violence and destruction? We locked her out of the bedroom and spent the night talking. Larry had a face. When we woke, she had slung thousands of sewing needles across my apartment and left with my car keys. The needles were embedded in the carpet and we played hopscotch to get to the door. After her mother returned my keys, I let him drive me and my Volkswagon Cabrio convertible at 100mph over 30 miles down country roads and highways so he could make it to his nephew’s high school graduation. This was our friendship, 12 hours in.

He was shorter than me, nearly as wide as he was tall, his muscles well defined if not imposing. His dusty blonde hair and cherub face belied his recent release from Prison. Sometimes I imagined how difficult that must have been for him with his stature, fending off perverts and psychopaths with his thumbs or a bed post. I never asked. He had the obligatory tattoos, I might recall a swastika, and that deep, thick Carolina drawl that made me feel safe from God and man. I’m not painting a pretty picture, but this is reality, not a fucking Hallmark card. Generations of poverty and drug addiction had shaped him into a stereotype, but he had a face with eyes that saw and had seen and testified, which is more than I could say for most.

Larry and I never had sex, although this would become a topic of dispute after his death. We spent time spending each others time, in movies or talking about life or just lying in the bed listening to each others breathing. He would hold me while I slept, his own sleep elusive. At the time, I quietly questioned myself as to why our relationship was so severely platonic, yet surprisingly intimate. It would be years before I fully understood his sexless, needy state. Larry had a face and somehow I missed it, the sadness, the hole in his sky. I missed his addiction, I missed that he was nearly dead as he lay beside me. I missed that he was grieving his own departure and gripping me as a last farewell. I only knew we needed each other.

That year, Larry died. They brought him back and he suffered for it. He spent weeks in the ICU, his lungs filled with blood clots. He couldn’t blink without the threat of death. Bound up by tubes and wires of all sadistic medical variety, they kept him alive. Every life saving measure lengthened his sentence, chained to the black hole that was devouring him from the inside. I looked down at his face and desperately wanted to save him, too. I didn’t know I was looking at a man who wished to cease, at a portent of my future self. He was frail and gentle and broken in the ways a man only breaks beneath the weight of his own ghost. When I saw him next, he was ancient. All life had left him and he carried a bag of grapes and looked at the floor. I hid under my steps and cried. Larry and his face and his spirit, they were leaving me.

That day, under the steps, I saw something I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. I learned what death felt like when it stood at the door and there was nothing I could do to stop it from walking inside. I watched him ascend the stairs and exit my life.

It wasn’t long before I walked up those stairs myself for the last time and walked away from that part of my life. A few weeks after I learned I was pregnant with my first child, Larry died. They didn’t bring him back to his black hole this time and I didn’t go to see them put him in the ground. He died alone, like he had lived. His mother called and asked if my child was his. I wanted desperately to be able to tell her it was, to give her a piece of him to hold on to, but it wasn’t his child. That week, Larry’s demon jumped from his corpse and on to my back. I took up where he left off, addicted to heroin, desperate, destitute and on a collision course with my own death. In my memories, I like to tell myself that he tried to tell me not to follow him. If I’m being honest, I don’t think he did. I don’t think he ever tried to say a thing, but it feels better to remember it wrong, to remember him like I saw he wanted to be.

I don’t want to romanticize him. He was a fucked up mess of a person who had, at times, done some pretty terrible things to other fucked up people. Once, I watched from the car as Larry called a meth junkie and convinced him there were people surrounding the house. We were the people. The guy ran out into the woods and hid in a tree. While tree guy was doing tree guy stuff, Larry walked in the guy’s house and stole his meth. After the guy came down from the tree and his high, Larry sold him his own dope back (minus a little). Oddly, that is the only night I recall doing drugs with him. Maybe I’ve revised that history as well, but I like it better this way.

What makes him compelling? What makes me think of him over someone more deserving? He is, was, an over-exaggerated version of all of us. His life and death were the product of so many external inputs, his fucked up parents, poverty, the shitty little town he came from, people who sought to teach him and others how to be as sick as they were. He was born for prison, born for death, born to be written into my blog and my memory and as a phantom in the mind of some young boy out there who will never know his father. Larry has a son, he isn’t mine and he isn’t Larry’s because Larry and his face are dead. What makes him compelling? That his condition was greater than me, that I couldn’t save him, that is the draw. That I can see and yet remain impotent. That these matters rest with God and the Larrys of the world, hashed out without my consult. And when I sat beneath the steps and grieved the man and his grapes, God didn’t rally for me. I’m not angry, I just wanted a vote.

I just wanted to be a good friend

I just wanted to save Larry

I just want to write him into existence, even if only for a moment.

Larry had one album he listened to habitually. One song, specifically, and I would watch him as he listened, investigating his eyes for answers to his condition. It doesn’t fit the tone of what I have written, but I can’t refuse it, as it is permanently imbedded with the image I have of him. When I hear this song I am overcome by tears as the moments all flood back. It’s not beautiful, it’s just everything. Larry’s face had a song and I want to scream it.

I Forgive You, Seventeen

If I said it was surreal to be here, I’d be understating it. I never thought I’d make it to thirty-four and I certainly never thought I’d have survived a long war, a thousand battles, a handful of converging and confounding lives to enjoy the awe of my own existence. I have to remind myself constantly that when people meet my awkward irreverence, they don’t have the context of the first few books. They don’t know that I’ve cried bathtubs of tears over the loss of time, opportunities, dear friends and loves. They weren’t there when, blood staining my neck, craze gripping my eyes, I crouched in the mirror and worked to wrench my own tooth out with pliers. Anything to stop the pain. They didn’t see the concessions I made for a moment of peace, the submission to a devil who couldn’t be satisfied. Most days I forget my past, but it never forgets me. I am the product of this conflagration and it seeps into all aspects of my life.

Yesterday I was seventeen years old. I had no anchor, no compass, just the want and wander that led me to strange new places. If I close my eyes I am still her, gasping for air and grasping for someone to pull me above myself. If I wanted a good thing, I certainly didn’t know what it looked like. I stopped writing and gave myself over to a man who didn’t know what to do with me but to abuse. Systematically he destroyed, masterfully like all thieves. He pulled the switch, first stealing my heart, then my joy and lastly my sanity. His brain was sharp, dangerous and uncommon. He could have done anything, he could have had it all.

Ed had an unmatched confidence, but I wouldn’t say it was unearned. He had survived 1000 doses of LSD intravenously administered, being a drug runner for John Gotti Jr. and most extraordinarily, a family full of fruitcakes. A few years before we met, he had been pistol whipped in a gang initiation and left for dead. He had total amnesia and when his mother came to visit him in the hospital, his head swollen to the size of a healthy melon, he demanded to see her ID. Unappeased, he threatened to turn her in to the FBI for impersonation. The most remarkable part of this experience was that, according to his sister, as he relearned how to walk and talk, he turned back in to the same fucker he was before. Even amnesia couldn’t set him back right.

Sometime around 2001 (who can remember?) the course of my life changed. It changed and I wasn’t even remotely aware. Ed, being the entertaining moron he was, jumped off the roof of his house during a party and landed on a cement slab, breaking his back in multiple places. When he fell his phone auto-dialed his mom. I like to think she heard his moaning and the chaos of the party and just hung up, because that’s the type of heinous bitch I knew her to be (later). Ed’s friends gave him ecstasy, propped him in a La-Z-Boy and left to lick their own drug induced wounds.

While Ed was suffering a back brace, I was just being seventeen. I had dropped out of high school, enrolled in college early and was working a crap job at a packaging store. I also had the most amazing dog, who I had rescued from death not long before. She could open our front door and let herself out. I had no way of knowing she was making her way around the neighborhood everyday, jumping fences and playing with other dogs. Then our new neighbor’s mom (heinous bitch) hit her with her car, and my life changed. That was the moment I met Amy, Ed’s sister. We met the same day I was fired from my job and it wasn’t long before she was asking me if I’d like to fill in at Ed’s business, since he had stupidly leapt from his roof and couldn’t walk. Looking back, it seems impossible that the dominos fell as they did by mistake.

Ed hated me. He hated that his sister had hired me on his behalf. He hated that he was in pain and in a back brace. He hated that he didn’t choose me, that I was whatever I was, that he needed the help and that he wasn’t mobile enough to get trashed at the Men’s Club. He took to giving me the worst possible duties at his jewelry store. This meant I stuffed the batteries, cleaned people’s disgusting gold grills, got cussed at by customers and occasionally he bested me with a Greco-Roman wrestling move, right there on the store floor. Obviously I fell in love, or the closest thing I knew to it. He told me about his girlfriend and how she was run over by a dump truck, got fat and withheld sex. It only makes sense that I would fall for that, right? But he was and still is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and looking back, I can’t blame my seventeen year old self for being so easily groomed.

We eventually bought a home on the lake, a sports car, a jet ski and another business, and by we I mean he bought them and put the car on my credit because he had too many DUIs. It took me years to realize that my existence depended on him, and by the time I knew I was too far in. Thousands of dollars every week went up our noses or walked out the door in a thief’s hand. Our commingled drug problem was just a symptom of our converging mental issues. My dad had left me, his was a drunk with tons of money who’s affections couldn’t be earned. My mom had found a new life that didn’t include me and his was a cold, heartless bitch. Together we dragged what they had created, us, straight into the mire. Sucking on fentanyl pops, I shivered in the cold of our house as I crafted little bows for our Christmas tree and he sorted through mounds of dusty DVDS, all the while we died. Every day runs together as something wholly unworthy of remembering, but still I do. Dog hair on the couch, the floor littered in lottery tickets, oxycontin dust on the bathroom counter, splices of hose clamps scattered about, the sounds of asian porn and there’s a fiend at the door.

One day, somewhere along the way, I left him. Then I came back, somewhere along there also. One day, somewhere along the way, he told me he had cheated on me, was getting married, his mistress was pregnant and oh, I was fired. Somewhere along that path she had lied and I went back to him and to find her pants in my bedroom. Somewhere along the way I took the wrong medicine and tried to drown myself for three days of hallucinations as my sister held my hand and my mom prayed and the doctor said I was a junkie and sent me home. Somewhere in that time my friend murdered a man and dumped his body under a bush and ran from the police on live TV and sometime this month he comes home. Sometime back then, near the end of the chapter, Ed’s hands around my throat, my head slamming against the wall, I can recall his mother calling me a bitch. Bitch.

Somewhere along the way the years slipped by me and when I awoke, I found that I only knew how to live this way. Seventeen was a broken girl.

When I left that house, I thought I’d seen the worst. I thought the dysfunction was his and I had been lucky to walk away unscathed. I was wrong and I wasn’t unscathed. It was only preparation. The death and dying and demons waited for me. If I said it is surreal to think this time in my life was only the precursor to hell, I’d be understating it. Had I known that a few years later I’d be a far greater monster than Ed could have ever dreamed to be, I would have finished what I started in that bathtub. There is mercy in not knowing the future. Today, when I laugh at things that ought disturb or hope for people seemingly beyond redemption or try for better than I deserve or talk to you like you are more than what your words pretend, reference this book and the one you’ve lived and haven’t told. Because I’m reading it without your consent. You can thank Seventeen.

Eyes in the Embers

Take a deep breath and repeat after me, “It’s all just shit and I will survive.”

Nobody was there to tell me that the first time I lost it all. To be clear, I’ve lost it all five times and each time, I had less items, yet more to lose. I promise, it gets easier.

The first time is always the worst. I woke up with fists being pounded into my face and I knew that I had to let go of all of it. In that moment I gave up my relationship, my home, my job, the supplier for my dope habit, all means of financial support, the illusion that I was a functioning drug addict, many of my possessions and my good credit score.

The second time I gave up an apartment that I had meticulously painted and designed, any semblance of self-sufficiency and my recently acquired sobriety.

The third time I gave up my record as a good tenant, my granny’s bible, furniture my mother had beautiful upholstered, hand-made Christmas stockings, medical equipment from my daughter’s time in the NICU and both of my children.

The fourth time, I gave up my freedom. I gave up all management of my life and entered a rehab facility.

The fifth time, I gave up the father to my children and the man I had prayed, wept and fought for. He left with a demon on his back and I left with my children, my faith and all of the ‘stuff’ that meant nothing to me.

It is astounding how we can adjust to continually deteriorating conditions. At one point in my life, I was a princess. I wore gold wedding bands as toe-rings, spent far too much on lottery tickets, ate take-out nightly and had pills hidden throughout the house. And then, as if suddenly, I was living in an 8 x 5 ramshackle shed, woken up by competing roosters each morning, shitting with the chickens and selling dope to Richie Rich.

The more of our space we fill with things and people, the less room we have for God. Others might fill their space with gadgets, nights at the club, PTA meetings or a career. I had chosen to fill my space with dope and dope seekers. When I went to rehab in 2011, every creature comfort was taken from me. Phone calls and interaction with family were eliminated, there was no TV in my room or friend to complain to. I had no cigarettes, chocolate chunk brownies, internet news, video games or Facebook. I was given a single room which contained myself, my two children and a few necessary possessions. Outside of my room existed an institution of women who had been abused, neglected, forgotten and discarded, each of whom would have rather run me down with a dump truck than see me succeed.

It hurt at first, the separation from my things, from my enablers and cheerleaders. And then, as if suddenly, I learned to do without. And in the without I found God waiting.

It’s all dust. All of it but the people.

Until 2017 I worked in a jewelry store. Can you imagine how difficult it was to sell luxury items when you have no attachment to ‘stuff’? Everything in me wanted to scream out, “Go love someone! Save your money!” My coworkers would get emotional about particular items, feel a sentimental attachment, but all I saw was glass. The love, the memories, they didn’t exist in a ring or brooch. They couldn’t live or die in metal and stone. Memories, feelings, joy and attachment exist in the perfect preservation of our hearts, but when we turn our joy over to things, it is given an expiration date. All will fall.

I amended this piece, as it was written well before I lost it all for the fifth time. I suppose I held on to it, knowing I was likely on the precipice of another. It is all dust. The home, the sconces, the albums and letters. I’d gladly pitch it all into a fire for the people I’ve lost, if only it worked that way.

Un-Dying is Hard

Some losses are so big that you can’t even cry. Or you cry and you can’t feel. Or you feel but you can’t compute. If you compute you wish you were too daft to see the thousands of connecting consequences. Some losses are so big that they defy the logical steps of grieving and you jump straight from shock to insanity. In the past eleven years – seven years – six months – three weeks, all of the above, I have vacillated between all states of grieving. I held what I cherished, or the idea of it at least, in my hands and watched in slowly leak between my fingers until all that remained were the sticky remnants a death I couldn’t delay. Talking about it fixes nothing. Neither does spending money, but lately I’ve chosen the latter. I’ve given up on a human who failed me and taken to things that can’t.

I can afford to do that these days, medicate myself with mustard tunics and television stands. I can level this back-country carnival of emotions out on my credit cards, and watch me. My creditors thank me for it, actually. Every day a new credit card offer arrives in the mail. I am beginning to wonder if they know something I don’t. Can they see that there are more spiral cut french fried roads in my future? If I load my wagon down with enough crap, I might just stay on the road, eh? I’d buy an anvil, but I already have one.

Maybe that’s it, an epiphany in the midst of my meandering thoughts. I have carried someone’s baggage, since I was a teenager, before maybe. Every man I’ve ever dated loaded down my wagon with so much that I never had a void to inspect. Before those men it was my dad and before my dad I lived without care. Now that I am loosed of their things, their sufferings, the constant gut-punching of their acrid existences, I am left feeling like I’ve lost something integral. An arm? Can you buy an arm on Amazon?

I’m in a type of neither-world. This is not the place you go after death, nor is it the place you go in life. It’s the place where you sit quietly on the porch, your PTSD slowly inching away but still well within biting distance. This is the place you go for neither joy nor sadness. I just accidentally inhaled cinnamon, but in this place, your senses are just a hair above mute. Mace me and I may blink. People have tried to join me here, but the door isn’t well defined. You can be a foot away, but you cannot sit with me in the neither-world. It takes years of sifting through garbage days, finding things less redeemable by the minute, for you to reach the bottom where your hopes and dreams have withered into some perverse monument of what will never be. You find your joy, a mangled twisted mess of corrosion. You toss it aside, you lift your dead dreams away, cast to the heap, and then suddenly you have found the floor and in it a door to the neither-world. It takes all remaining strength to wrench the door loose. You claw at it, the beds of your nails bleed, hands crack, face contorts and it is not until your tears have swept away the seal of dirt that the door gives way and with it, your ability to feel anything.

I don’t really know what to do here, though I’ve been here before. Every face looks strange, every word seems empty. I am perched high above my life, now seeing how small it all really is. Someone out there is looking for me, but I can’t be found. Someone is calling me, but my voice has taken leave. I suppose I am the undead, and it feels dangerous.

Some people don’t know what they want, so they spend years wandering down every alley looking for a thing they might not recognize. Some people want what they aren’t willing to work for, others what they don’t understand and couldn’t appreciate. For me, it’s so simple. All I wanted was to have, as an adult, the family, the home, the type of secure cloaking that I didn’t have as a child. I wanted a quiet study, a neatly decorated hearth, warm sweaters, a man who would grow with me, or better yet, a man who would inspire me to grow with him. I wanted that for my children too, to avoid instilling within them a sense that everyone in the world is unreliable. I guess I want magic, but the kind found in cozy low lit corners instead of well choreographed movies. And even as the undead, I still believe.

I don’t know the way out of this place. I’m feeling blindly for the door, calling out silently to all things for a way, a psychic embrace, a tether to the outside. To my hearth.

Long Departure

I was born a ship, island, salt
I was born to be the whip, bear and halt
I came intent to wear a thing to its least
I am the winter without a feast

There’s an unraveling hem that is undoing the thing that was born within
Learn where the blood travels
Go where the blood pools
This is the cry of a dull tool cutting into things that won’t be mend

Discard me now
All my love is spent
Wondering where you go when my ship is moored
And patience lent
On God

By day I’m a desert, by night a well
Unwell, well you see
The looters grasp upon me
Bough bent
Adrift tilt
The seas of lover’s hilt

The anchor draws me
And no one forbids
My departure

Lament, lament, lament

The Day My Engine Stopped

I used to think that saving my own life was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and would ever have to do. That’s what I get for thinking. I’ve since learned that watching someone else destroy their life is much harder. However out of control I felt to stop my own suffering was illusory, but the inability to stop another’s suffering is soul-crushingly concrete. When you are the conductor, you can stop the train at any point. Yes, you can, lying brain. But have you tried to stand on the tracks and stop a train? I’ve smiled at that train, wagged my finger, reasoned with it, prayed for it, screamed at it, greased it’s gears, held it in a loving embrace. Every time it went off the tracks, I used my might to set it right, saying “Now, you go slow this time.” I supplied diesel, new paint, sign posts, warning signals, and always a push off when need be. “Good train! Good train. You go be good now, OK?”, ignoring the reality of the man at the controls. I’ve gone weeks with no sleep, worrying that it would run me over at any point, all the while spending precious resources to build more means for destruction. Then I would lay down on the tracks and wait, as only the most hopefully stupid person could. The conductor is a madman, but the psychopathy is mine.

I’ve had years to think about these things, to put them in pictures and forms that I can understand. In my experience, everything is much simpler than we estimate and the more we complicate, the farther we get from the solution. It may be comforting in some sense to determine that a solution is so complex that it is nearly unattainable. There is an absolving element to that belief. The truth is, people make choices and we don’t always get a say in those choices. The truth is, our control is limited to our own being. Anything beyond ourselves requires either an act of force or an act of agreement. We can limit ourselves, we can limit our participation, we can limit our resources, but barring force, the final say is out of our control. If you are as willful and determined as I am, this will be a hard reality to accept. As I write this, part of me still believes I can stop a train, if I try hard enough, if I devise the right plan, if I change my approach and hold my tongue just right. I don’t like to lose. I fucking hate to lose. But some games have no winners.

So what do you do? This is the question I’ve asked myself a thousand times over. I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, and the irony that I am Dagny is not lost on me. I’ve been using the train analogy for so long that Dagny’s focus was almost a foregone conclusion. One of my greatest takeaways was that existing within a destructive society and existing with a destructive individual requires the same approach; total removal of one’s participation. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it, but if you have, you will know that Dagny fought to maintain productivity and normality despite insurmountable obstacles, and she did so until there was absolutely nothing left for her to save. This is what I’ve done, like so many other enablers. I’ve repaired the tracks more times than I can count, forgoing my own well being for the well being of the system which was designed for good but has been used for evil. But a tool is only as good as what it produces, therefore I have produced evil. I have enabled it in every way. Swallow that pill.

I think our primary failure, as enablers, is that we seek to make people into what we need them to be. Sometimes we need them financially, sometimes we need them emotionally. Maybe we just need them to be what they used to be, to restore our faith or sense of security. Maybe we assume they are a reflection of us, of our choices, abilities, devotions. Maybe their failures open up a wound within our ego, causing us to reflect on our own failures, which we don’t want to acknowledge. Regardless, our reliance on these people, on these trains, is our Achilles heel. It is the need to bring about change by which we are held captive. Suffer another analogy. Two men are held captive in an unlocked, unguarded prison. Neither are handcuffed or restricted in any manner, save for their own willingness. One wants to leave, but will not leave without the second. He cannot imagine his life without the other. The second will not leave for reasons which cannot be explained. Both will remain captive, neither will have life. This is not martyrdom, this is submission to death.

I realized recently that my prayers have, for some time, been completely contradictory. I have asked God to protect the conductor, but simultaneously I asked him to make him a better conductor. Assuming God behaved like Dumbledore, this might seem like a reasonable request. He could just wave his wand, fix everything and soon we’d be dancing through the tulips. “Enabler, The musical.” Disney worthy wishes. God isn’t a fairy godmother, though. He can protect you from your choices and simultaneously protect you from growing through experience, or He can allow you to face consequences, thus allowing you the opportunity to improve yourself. I italicize opportunity because it is just that, a chance, not a guarantee. Remember, there is force or there is agreement. Force removes freewill and won’t lead to growth. The other day I mentioned to a friend of mine that miracles happen when willingness meets opportunity. I fully believe this two-part recipe is what separates successes from failures. My willingness only matters if it’s my opportunity, but no matter how willing I am on behalf of another, I cannot accept their opportunity for them, nor can I force it upon them. I don’t like these truths. In fact, I hate them. I want to be so strong that I am strong enough for anyone whom I choose, willing enough for them also. I want to be able to give my hard earned gifts to people who don’t even want them, but desperately need them. This doesn’t work, of course. Something is only worth what it costs to attain it. Attaining it without cost doesn’t give you it’s worth, it only gives you the illusion of the worth. The worth is in the sacrifice, the resources used, the hours spent, the tears cried and knowledge gained. For this reason, I’ve amended my prayers, removing a plea for protection and focusing solely on growth. Hard won growth. You can’t utter this prayer without feeling deep pangs of sadness. What could be harder than to ask that the world come crashing down upon someone you love?

I, like Dagny, have spent my resources down to the last. I have exhausted all options, waited out all of the others, made ways when there were none and suffered to see one more day, knowing that even one more day was a gift that I would pay dearly for. The lights are out, the world is in ruins and now I retreat, removing my participation. I will not replace one more track, hammer one more nail. I will not waive the lantern or signal the approach. I will not be used to bring about my own destruction. This is the one place where I do have a choice. This is my opportunity to say no, this is my willingness to be unwilling. Welcome to Galt’s Gulch, Rachel.

The Life of a Thought Without (pictures)

I’m a little neurotic, but only in the most amusing ways. I’m chaos reordering chaos, dizzyingly destroying unseen boundaries only to redraw the line with dots and hyphens, hanging chads and discarded vowels. Step over. I’m an eternal optimist until you are and then I’m assured of your impending failure. I can do a wrong thing right as well as a right thing wrong but you can’t make a right on red without breaking your stride, can you? Look, you broke it. I use words that flatten your banana and inflate your ingrate. I’m the CEO of no, head mother of kill your thunder. I pocket facts for arsenal, I table feelings for the upper hand, I take the stand for the guilty man. I’ve eaten plenty of regrettable meals but never uttered a regrettable word. I’m a fool for kicking things that might be dead just to check with the hopes they are, or aren’t, which one requires less work? I like run on sentences but not the kind made by people who make them naturally. I planned to leave and never come back, then I found drugs, children, the Constitution, in that order. Here I am.

I dated a guy who was straight edge. Late 90’s, coffee shops, Daria diarrhea dispositions, combat boots and how depressing is this story? Straight edge was the precursor to my belly flop into the underground. No drugs here, no meat, no leather, no alcohol, no CHEESE! Not me, that weird pre-emo kid with the VW bug and gaping earlobes. One day he drove past a McDonald’s, smelled a filet of fish and that was it! The next week he was a meth addict. Never saw him again. That was fun, wasn’t it? He’s probably your senator now.

Only recently did I realize that everyone didn’t freebase hydrocodone in high school, have dates in the graveyard, find Iranian boyfriends on the internet that were clear across the country to bring home to dad, perform interpretive dance during the movie introduction or pay (literally & figuratively) dirty men to let you bathe them. Nope, I swear, there are people who went to school and came home. I shit you not! They did homework, chores and never once received compromising photos from their local rock DJ. Mind blowing stuff right there.

When I was twelve I could hold my own with a forty year old. I know this because I was prepared to marry an old man I met on Compuserve. Do you remember Compuserve? If you do, you are old too. Also, if you had a phone relationship with a man named Chris Cox from Iceland, you should probably see a therapist yesterday. Not me. I count it as proper preparation for things to come.

One time, which was many more than one time, I did enough ecstasy to completely deplete my natural resources of dopamine and serotonin. One day, which was more than one day, I screamed and ran out of 12th grade 20th century history class. One time which was only one time, I enrolled in college and the screaming stopped. There I learned absolutely nothing except that you don’t shower your hopeful boyfriend with bongs because he will just break them and then pawn you off on his friend with the same name. Daniel, Dan. Who can remember which one I destroyed private property with during that ice storm? The ugly one. Nice ugly Dan. They are always nice, aren’t they?

I am on or I am off. I am inserting myself in a dog pile of violent car salesmen or I am asleep. I am arguing my point or I am silently arguing it and letting you run off unawares. I am completely befuddled until the moment I master it all instantaneously. I am stockpiling pieces for sudden synergy. I demand justice, I decry your version. I laud morality bathed in reality, detest formality sheltering depravity. I see the value in a lab rat, the entry level, one’s long-suffering, yet grieve their necessity. I can’t create a character I hate or hate a thing I’ve done or do a thing I can’t justify or justify a thing another did which I wouldn’t do in like circumstance.

Once I thought I’d write a book. I put all of the people who wrecked me on to the page and learned God is the greater story teller.

This is the life of a thought without

Wilson, the Low Leaper

I was built for a post-apocalyptic world, but most people haven’t gotten there yet and I hate to wait.

Trauma has isolated me from much of the world. Maybe this is what it feels like to come home from war. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a war, or at least not in the traditional sense, and I suppose like me, folks who have are isolated as well. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a quantum physicist at a Tupperware party. Maybe this is what it’s like to be an English professor on planet Xenu or a Thomas Sowell ever. They’ve never told me, but I feel like we may all be living within our own unique habitations, rolling around in big plastic balls of experience all over this planet. Everyone is smiling, chatting about obscure foods and the ambience of their stunted emotions, vibrant vacancy, assaulting flatness. “I love dogs. Like, I love them,” someone says and then someone else produces a photo of their corgi, Wilson. Wilson loves to watch birds through the windows and chased a shadow once. They all chuckle and that guy on the left straightens his tie. And here we are, me, Thomas, the teacher on Xenu, General Survivor, rolling around in our awkward plastic balls as we eye these strange creatures. They like anime. Ok? What do I say to that?

I like dogs. I don’t dislike them. I don’t really care, honestly. If a dog was suffering I would help it. I like piercings and cobb salad also, but who wants to talk about that? Who even thinks about that? In 2009 I pulled a man’s false teeth from his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow them as he had a seizure from a heroin overdose. He had just come back in town after spending a year living under a bridge in New Orleans. When he left for New Orleans he persuaded a friend to sell his truck and come with him so he could fund their trip. They both lived under a bridge and every morning they sat at the day labor temp agency hoping to get enough work to fund their habit. Sometimes they would call and ask someone from North Carolina to ship them syringes or buy gift cards. Did you know that Louisiana doesn’t allow the purchase of syringes without a prescription and gift cards are highly devalued? Hepatitis. I don’t want to talk about dogs.

I’ve done my best over the past years to reintegrate back into society, but honestly, I was never very good at it even before I experienced trauma. When situations were dry, awkward or emotionally perilous, I had a habit of commandeering the narrative into my own arena, often to my own detriment. I was arrested for passing a stopped school bus when I was sixteen years old and I plead diarrhea to the judge. “Your honor, I had sudden diarrhea. I’m sorry.” I said in open court. That time it worked to my advantage. That time. Last week I told my coworker that she looked like the type who would be a bridezilla and I was surprised that she wasn’t. I thought it was a compliment. It didn’t land as I expected. I was built for a post-apocalyptic world, but most people haven’t gotten there yet and I hate to wait.

I find it so difficult to entertain mundane conversation about weekend plans and mild illness. I want to change things! I want to be that person I knew from my first recalled memory that I was created to be. I want to shake it up, stir it around, juggle it behind my back and throw it triumphantly to the next. People are dying, I’ve seen them. People are hurting, I’ve been one. Neglected children are on their way to being destructive adults and we love dogs. We love sushi, too and that commute was terrible and Sailor Moon is my favorite. I don’t begrudge you, I just can’t take part. I can’t understand. I can’t form a response. My friends are dead, in prison dying, in the streets dying, clinging to what is left of their souls. My friends are ghosts. I have none. I have what I cling to desperately. I have faith, I have a family, I have proven endurance. I have a wall that is higher than my eyes can see and your dog doesn’t even come close to clearing it.

“You think weird,” I was told. I think like a sane person who was locked in a mental institution for decades only to come out and learn that the world has become the haunting ground for spiritual zombies. I think like a person who has embodied a corpse. I think like a person who has seen beyond the veil. I think like a person who is perpetually trapped in two worlds. I can’t tell most people what I’ve seen. They need safe zones and ice-cream socials. Everyday I want to scream, “You don’t know! You have it so good!” but instead I turn my head and hate Wilson silently. I don’t want a support group, I want a world where people are honest about their experiences. I want a world where we can communicate openly about what we have endured, witnessed — and then get over it. Half of me already lives in this world and if you choose to visit, we don’t require a passport. The other half of me begrudgingly pulls a paycheck.

I know who’s dying and why. I know the status of their wasting and I know how it feels to be left behind. I know how it feels to know things no one wants to know or hear or think about or even believe exists because it makes them culpable. I know how it feels to tell the heinous truth and be shunned for the stun of it. I know what happens when the curtain is drawn and the soul stabbing pain of finality which is so great it makes death seem delightful. I’ve seen centuries of consequences pass before me, I’ve seen the waste of a different kind of war and I’m a better person for it. Those things made me worthy of knowing. Maybe you know a different loss, a different stab and if you do, I want to know it too. I want to know how you got the dirt under your nails and why you have that eye twitch and that thing you swore no one would ever understand because I swear too, I will try.

I want to tell it all true, hear it all true and never, ever have to pretend to care about a single thing that can’t clear the fence.

Open Letter to the Shadows

You are soft bacon, marinading in the fats of your mistakes. This is a recipe for a lifetime of suffering, but you came here to get high, so get high.

♠

You are too skinny. Your skin looks bad. You are sitting on the floor of a filthy hotel room. Your friends are hookers. Your boyfriend is in jail. You are wanted in four counties. Your girlfriend steals from her parents. Your kids have forgotten your name. Worse, they know your name and they’ve said it desperately as you lay in a heap on the bathroom floor. You haven’t had a job in years, or a bank account, or a car without cigarette burns and a falling headliner. You have a burner phone. You trade your food stamps for cash, your body for dope. You smoke two packs a day. You could be anywhere at anytime, you have no home base. You sleep late into the day. Your clothes are baggy and filthy. Your clothes aren’t yours. You wear a hoodie in the summer. Your spoons aren’t for eating. You do your cooking in a bathroom stall, you stopped dreaming after the first hit . You’ve got schemes and you are good. You know the courtroom well, the highway better, the trap house best. You’ve forgotten smells, sounds and hobbies. You think God is dead. You died sometime, you can’t place it. I see you.

I see your photographs on my feed and I hear you calling. I feel your pain as you walk past, a shadow of something that used to be. I understand as you struggle to pretend you aren’t dying. I would like to call you out for all that you have become, but I know the smell of defeat. I know uncooked meat. I know when it is time to turn a simmer to a sizzle and just how counterintuitive that seems.

The best thing that can happen for you, my filthy, lost friends, is to embrace total devastation. You are soft bacon, marinading in the fats of your mistakes. This is a recipe for a lifetime of suffering, but you came here to get high, so get high. Get high and crispy. Get burnt. Get as close to dead as anyone can, but not so far as we all will. I am rooting for you & I hope to see you on the cooling rack someday, sun-kissed, smiling and unscathed, save for the torment of memories that will serve as your updraft.

♠

These are the things I wish daily I could communicate to people who are still living in addiction. There isn’t much hope that any of them will read this blog post, but if only one…

Crossing the Rubicon on a Syringe

It represents just how close I came to crossing the rubicon. Not sort of close, not toes in the water close. This is a story of the time I leapt into the river and bounced back out.

Warning:

If you are easily disturbed by graphic depictions and bodily functions, do not read any further. This post is about addiction, which by nature is often gruesome and unpalatable. If this will bother you, I would suggest a different subject of interest altogether. But if you genuinely care about those struggling with addiction, please read on.

I once killed someone I love very much. Almost. Very, very close, I’d say. Close enough that I could smell my prison cell. He was as good as dead for a few minutes and those minutes felt like years. And those years felt like hell. And there is no greater hell than that which you designed yourself. I don’t tell this story much. It’s one of the few that I guard. In general I am happy to tell you the intimate details of my darkest moments, but this story is somehow different. It represents just how close I came to crossing the rubicon. Not sort of close, not toes in the water close. This is a story of the time I leapt into the river and bounced back out. The idea that my future hinged upon this one decision, it is too much. I had plenty of close calls, times where I pushed the boundaries of my freedom, sanity or my very existence on this planet, but none so close as this. For the sake of those who have yet to understand the risks, for the sake of those who are one decision from altering their course for all of eternity, I will tell you. If you are addicted to drugs right now and remain in the game, it is all but guaranteed that you will see someone die. You may even be complicit in someone’s death and eventually, in your own.

In this story, there are three primary characters, one of whom is now dead. Consider that as you read. Out of respect for the families of those involved, I will not use real names.

I had lost my children. I had lost my home. I had lost welcome with my family. I had a car I bought from a crackhead, a partner in crime and a league of associates as equally moribund as I. During this period, my partner Russ & I found refuge wherever we could. I took in at a shelter one night only to be humiliated by the house mother or whatever you might call her (monster). We slept in our car, on couches, in tool sheds and eventually landed in an abandoned trailer located behind the house owned by the mother of one of our cohorts.

If you’ve never lived in an abandoned trailer, well, you probably don’t know how to steal electricity (butter knives). Once the power was restored, which we had to do daily to avoid detection, we contended with the antiquated air conditioner. That old piece of junk would cover with ice almost hourly. We would turn it off, sweat it out for a few hours and then kick it back on. We slept on a rotting mattress that had no sheets and plenty of questionable stains. There was no plumbing, so guess where we used the bathroom. Not in a bathroom. Those poor neighbors, I still feel for them to this day. But, for all of its morbidity, to us, the trailer was a luxury. It offered four walls, a roof, occasional relief from the sweltering Southern sun and a place we could seek death without disruption.

We survived by selling dope. We bought, we used, we sold and we started over again. We drove to the closest city, three, four, six times a day to meet with cartel runners who seemed like the type you would more likely find schlepping lumber than stashing heroin in their cheeks. Like any business, you must maintain inventory. Most days, Russ & I split a single item from the McDonald’s menu. Food was at the very bottom of our priorities, unlike today where I will run down a granny for a ripe watermelon.

We stayed in the trailer with our friend, Cally. It was a symbiotic relationship, which often exist in the underground. She was able to get a constant supply of drugs through our connections and we had a place to stay. I actually liked her a lot, despite her inclination to manipulate and lie, which shouldn’t have been shocking in this lifestyle. Oddly, there is an unspoken code among many addicts that dictates your behavior with other addicts. You may have to lie, cheat and steal to fund your habit, but you don’t do those things to your companions. Or at least, you don’t until circumstances demand it.

By this point in my addiction, my body was already failing me. I had blown all of the veins in my arms, fingers, toes, behind my knees, around my ankles and even some in my breasts. I had experienced plenty of infections brought on by unsterile injections or missed veins. I had contracted MRSA in my finger, which I performed an unsuccessful home surgery on. I had even hit arteries a few times, causing half of my face to balloon, my hearing and vision to go out and my equilibrium to be completely thrown off. Sometimes it took days or even weeks to heal from my injuries. Still, I persisted. I became so acquainted with my body that I could find a blood supply anywhere. I had the skills of a phlebotomist working in the NICU, tapping into even the most inaccessible veins. Many IV drug addicts, given enough time, become highly skilled in this regard. Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, education. Unfortunately, these skills also cause an addict to feel that they are somehow in control of their fate. They feel informed enough to avoid catastrophe.

I had been injecting directly into my jugular vein, the largest vein in the neck, for sometime, which is significantly more dangerous than the typical method. By this point in time, I knew how to discern the difference between an artery and a vein — you know, higher education. Some other users envied this method because it had a faster delivery, but I did it out of sheer necessity. In fact, it was a miserable process. I would put a tie-off around my neck, maybe a shoe string or a belt. Then I would hold my breath and puff out my cheeks while sitting in front of the mirror, hoping I could locate my vein before I passed out. I am not painting a pretty picture, am I?

Occasionally another user would ask me to inject them this way, but I always declined. Not only was it more dangerous but it was also more difficult to inject someone other than yourself. I was very acquainted with my own body, but to be this precise on another person is an entirely different story. And then, of course, you are responsible for their fate as well.

I don’t know why, but on this day I relented. Myself, Cally and Russ were all in the trailer that day, prepping our syringes. Russ asked me to inject him in his neck and after much back and forth, I agreed. Standing in the kitchen, he tied off his neck with a belt. I inserted the syringe and pulled back blood. I remember vividly that the blood looked too bright. I felt myself clinched with doubt, feeling this was a mistake, but Russ began yelling for me to push the plunger. “Push it! Just push it!”. His urgency overrode my better judgment and I pushed for just a moment and then stopped. I instinctively knew I had just made a fatal mistake. I pulled the syringe out, having only delivered a quarter of its contents into his blood stream. As I was flooded with fear, Russ swiveled in place, awkwardly angling to remove the belt from his neck. Just as the belt slipped from his head, his feet lifted off the ground. As I remember it, his feet lifted about three feet from the floor, though that seems impossible. It appeared as if he had been sucker punched beneath his chin by some unseen force. He lifted violently and was thrown backwards, where the base of his skull met with the corner of a side table, before collapsing on the kitchen floor.

These are the moments where time stands still and speeds forward simultaneously. Thoughts are rapid fire. There is no time for fear, only action and prayer. There is no time for paralysis. Looking down upon Russ, his neck and face had already begun to swell. He couldn’t speak or move, but in his eyes was a world of information, ascertained within a fraction of a second. His eyes pleaded with me for help. I could hear his voice in my head, I knew every word, every thought he intended to express. I knew his fear, I knew his pain, I knew his regret. His throat swelled and his breathing stopped. I sat on the floor, cradled his head in my lap and prayed. There was no Narcan that could solve this. There was no time for an ambulance. CPR was of no use. He began to seize. I heard his last plea just as his eyes rolled into his skull and then he seized. His body shook violently and incessantly. Tears streamed from my eyes as I spoke to him of my love. I begged him to hang on as I caressed his face and prayed that God would have mercy on us both.

I can vividly recall looking up to see Cally standing above Russ’s body, tears flowing down her face. She was paralyzed with fear. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t act. She was absolutely terrified and in that moment, I felt for her. She was, in that instant, woken up to the reality of drug addiction, which had eluded her to this point. I had witnessed many overdoses, performed CPR more than a few times. She, however, had gone to bed the night before playing checkers and woke up playing Russian roulette.

I didn’t think about prison, though that could have been my future. I didn’t think about anything but the delicate life that I cradled in my hands. In that moment, I would have accepted any personal consequence in exchange for his life. I prayed with more fervor and earnestness than ever before in my life. I, we, had never needed God more.

I can’t tell you how long Russ went without breathing. It felt like years, but quite possibly was three for four minutes. The swelling in his neck slowly receded, at first only enough to take in the most labored and shallow irregular breaths. I continued to hold him for the next half hour or so, and over that time he began to breath more easily. The only sound I could hear was my own internal thanks to God on repeat. The room was silent and serious. Cally had retreated to somewhere within her own mind and I was all alone with the mess I had created.

I didn’t know what type of long term damage I had done. I suppose I still don’t. When he regained consciousness, he was completely deranged. He tried repeatedly to step off the side of the building where there were no stairs. His speech was incoherent and his movements confounding. His behavior was similar to that of Frankenstein’s monster when he is first awoke. He was incredibly hot and had to sit in front of a fan for the next few hours. To this day, he has no memory of the event. For that, I’m grateful.

That day, I still went out and scored dope. THAT is how powerful addiction is. THAT is the fight we are in right now to save lives. We fight a monster that defies all reason and to win, we must be educated, vigilant and honest. There is no room to be paralyzed. There is no room for fear. There is no room to assume that someone will outgrow their habit. This is war.

A few months after I completed rehab, Cally overdosed on heroin. She died alone on her kitchen floor with a needle in her arm. Of all of the friends I have lost, this one hit me the hardest. I think of her often and I am flooded by questions I may never have answers to.

In this game, the players can’t know who will survive and who will die. Had I guessed between the three of us, I would have definitely thought I would have been the one to die. Never would I have thought that we would lose Cally, or that I would be here today to speak to you on this subject.

I have spent much time pondering why I survived when others, far nicer, far more talented or with more to contribute, were lost. I have wondered why I am not in a prison cell, why Russ is alive. I haven’t found an answer. I only know that you can’t lose if you don’t play. If you are already in the game, get out. Lay down your cards and start living. Survive the withdrawals, suffer the consequences, put in the work and live. Live for yourself, live for your children, live for your family, live for all of those who can’t. Live because it’s a gift that can be rescinded at anytime. Live because you are wanted and needed. Live because you can and when you do, give back, because somewhere there is someone just like you used to be.

Footnote: I didn’t know until after I had written most of this that today (August 31st) was International Overdose Awareness Day. I feel sure that God has plans for this piece. Please share this post so that those in need may be inspired to seek help. Your support is greatly needed and appreciated.