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  To stay high all day, every day, I opened myself up to dabbling in anything and everything I could get my hands on. I was failing all my classes at school because I had missed so many days. When I would show up at all, it was just to get my mom off my back. She yelled at me sometimes. She didn’t know what else to do but get mad about the changes she could see in me. Going to school was something I could do that made it seem normal for both of us, so I did it sometimes to make her feel okay, but then the drugs would consume me again and crumble this facade I was trying to manage for my mom and me. One particular day that I went to school, the group of girls that I hung out with decided to fight a girl we didn’t like. I took such pleasure in the power we had to terrify this girl. Because of my threats, the school had called my house, and the police followed Christy and I home to make sure this girl would be safe from us. I wasn’t doing a good job at making anything normal by doing things like that. I decided that I wouldn’t go home that night and that it was better if I just ran away. Christy and I were going to leave together. We wanted to be free to party and have no one around to tell us that we had to stop.

  We had no money to make it on our own. It was Christy’s idea to steal money from her parents for us to get started with our plan, but her parents kept their bedroom door locked. They knew Christy could not be trusted. Money and valuables had already come up missing from their home. There were obvious indications all around us that people distrusted us and that we weren’t welcome. Christy decided that it didn’t matter. She was going to break in no matter what it took to steal her parents’ money, so I waited down at the end of the street for her to show up. I wasn’t sure if she would, but sure enough Christy came running, carrying a big tin full of coins. Once I saw that we had only a few dollars’ worth of change, I started to rethink our running away idea. Quarters weren’t going to get us very far. Christy explained to me though that to get the loot she had to beat the door with a bathroom plunger, that the door was destroyed, and that she wasn’t going back no matter what. To hang in there with my friend, I had to keep on with our plan.

  We spent the next couple of days getting high on anything we could get our hands on. A close friend of ours, Carrie, invited us to her brother’s place to party and stay the night. The whole time I was there I had knots in my stomach. I just wanted to consume as much alcohol and drugs as I could so that I wouldn’t have to feel so horrible anymore. I knew that my family was worried sick about me, but I just wanted to keep getting high, even if hurting them was the cost. This was when Ryan told me that if my mom found me I was headed for inpatient, because she had been searching for me frantically with Christy’s mom. Things were really starting to get scary at this point. I wondered where I was going to go if I really couldn’t go home anymore. I had always been able to figure a way out of bad situations that my addictions led me into. My mom outsmarted me on this one, tracked me down at Carrie’s brother’s house, and put me in her car. I was on my way to the mental hospital after that, and she wouldn’t stop for anything, no matter how much I tried to lie about needing to use the restroom or manipulate her into stopping to buy cigarettes to calm me down.

  I felt completely beaten. My mom was acting different. She was very bold, and it seemed like I was becoming weak. What had happened to me could not be dealt with inside my head, or with drugs, and I was too out of control to even think of other options. At the hospital after my mom had checked me in I felt like my world came crashing down. I was told I couldn’t go home. I was searched. A staff member took away my shoelaces, even, for fear that I would try to hang myself with them. I was put in a cold room that had only one window covered by bars, which made me feel like a prisoner in a scary place. It was no vacation, I realized, sitting there alone without my drugs or my friends or even my mom. The other patients were all kids around my age, but they were different from me. Many were violent on occasion, and some didn’t talk at all as a result of being mentally ill. All I could think was that this hospital was not a safe place to make friends. I was stuck with a bunch of weirdos and freaks.

  The staff didn’t know what to do with me, or how to help. The people around me weren’t there for drugs, like I was, so I got the impression the doctors didn’t understand me, and if they couldn’t understand me I didn’t believe they could reach me. I told my doctor what he wanted to hear, just so he would let me go home. I figured that if I followed the rules and did everything my doctor said, I would get out pretty fast. While I was lying to gain my freedom, all the other patients were being given doses of medication. The nurse would attentively watch these patients, one by one, to make sure they actually took the pills. The kids were so doped up that some couldn’t even talk, and when they did talk, they would drool all over as if they had no control. One of the girls even had to have Vaseline put on her face because the medication she was given had made her skin peel off.

  I lived watching scenes like that for nine days before I was allowed to check out. All I could think of was the fact that I didn’t belong in that hospital. But then I had to ask how I had ended up there and couldn’t come up with an answer. I was in total denial. I was healthy compared to the other patients, but I had lost any ability to notice the fact that my family’s beast had totally consumed me and taken over my life. I had no control of my addictions. After I was released from the hospital, I was sent to stay with my grandparents in Montana, where the lifestyle I had known was unavailable. I didn’t meet any friends that used, so I had nothing better to do than watch TV. That became an addiction, too. I obsessively and continuously watched MTV all day long. The celebrities and the clothes in the music videos made me feel surer than ever there was something wrong with me without my drugs. The fact was, I felt inadequate in life. My mom thought I looked happy in the pictures she saw of me during this time. If only she had known.

  I’d have thought that after feeling so low in Montana I could have figured out the emotions I had experienced were signs that things in my life needed to change. But the fact is that as soon as I got back to my old stomping grounds, I started up where I had left off and got high. I realized after I returned that I had missed out on so much partying. I wanted to start making up for lost time, so I met up with old friends immediately and resumed my old behavior. I justified my using with the conclusion that I didn’t want to look stupid anymore. Montana had been enough. I wanted to feel better than I had watching MTV, and as good as people on that channel looked on the outside. By then I had plenty of justifications for using alcohol and drugs. It was easy to use one or another of them to deny the downward spiral I was in, which wasn’t letting up emotionally. I had no idea how to deal with real pain or feelings. I didn’t know how to deal with fear. Using became so important to me because it seemed to dissolve all the fear I had. It’s an emotional exchange for an addict, because getting high will take you from complete and total despair to greatness in a matter of minutes. I had given drugs and alcohol the responsibility to fill all my voids by this time in my life.

  Christy and I took off again after I returned home, and this time we stayed gone for a five-day, constant high. I’d had plenty of time to think about things while I was locked up in the hospital. I realized that what I needed was to get better about hiding my drugs so that I could continue with my addictions. I was going to have to make everything look good on the outside, which included staying home more often, acting like I was interested in family activities, returning to school, actually going to my classes, and doing my homework. I kept this up for the first two months of my sophomore year before I was thrown out of school, big surprise, for having drugs.

  The reason my disease is a disease is that it tells me it is not a disease, which is why I continued to believe I could follow through with plans to seem normal while living the life of an addict. My mom would always find my stash eventually. I would be so careful to hide my using, but then I would end up leaving evidence lying around because I didn’t think straight while I was high. I couldn’t follow throu
gh or remember plans. There were also times when my mom sneaked behind my back. She and I were locked in a battle of lies against Tough Love techniques. I would search for hours in our house if I believed I had misplaced my drugs. The fact was, she had flushed them down the toilet and decided not to tell me. By the time I heard the news I would have completely torn my room apart in panic, paranoia, and fear.

  When my mother’s choices forced me to admit I was an addict, I just lied to the counselors she tried to bring in to help me and said I wanted to change, or just flat-out told them I refused to quit. Ryan and I were kicked out of school often in those days, so it became easy to party every day at our house, no matter how many boundaries my mom tried to set down. She had to go to work, so we would wait, and after she left our friends would show up to get high. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that my friends were at school and I got to stay home and do nothing all day. The only thing that sometimes dragged me down was a huge knot in my gut. I knew I was hurting my family. I felt like the only way I could make my mother happy was to quit using drugs and alcohol altogether; however, I had come to the point that I could not picture my life without them anymore. It was clear that all my wrong behavior was breaking her down. She was a single parent just trying to do the best she could, and I was taking complete advantage of her.

  The drug parties at our house stopped when Ryan and I were admitted into our first drug rehab, as another consequence of my mother’s Tough Love techniques. It was another hospital, with all the same crazies I had seen before, but at least they had been assigned to a separate floor. The doctor I was assigned was an identical match to good old Santa Claus, a fact about him that I took for a joke. I was fifteen years old; I took nothing seriously at the time, and I made sure it stayed that way by getting high every morning before the recovery program began and every day after, when I would return home. I was sent into a panic when I learned that Santa Claus planned to drug-test me a couple of times a week. How was I going to get away with using now? He mentioned that for a while my drug tests would come up dirty. Ah, I thought, a loophole. I could still get high. I just had to keep decreasing my use to make it seem like the drugs were slowly leaving my system.

  Each test began to come back, showing that I had less and less drugs in my system, until one test came back showing very high levels of marijuana. I was busted and had to admit to myself that my plan had failed. There was no way around this one, because I had to face the evidence this time. But I still figured I could work around the problem. I thought if I was just more honest with Santa Claus, it would get him off my back, and he would feel like the job he was doing was paying off. The next week I carelessly kept getting high. Trying to pass the test by drinking tons of water and quitting for a bit, a few days before, didn’t help. My test came back positive again, and I was drilled about my drug use. I made all these attempts to get around the system because I couldn’t even fathom what it would be like to stop using drugs. In fact, being addicted was all I felt I was good at. I feared that if I didn’t have the drugs and alcohol anymore, I would have absolutely no identity at all.

  In times of desperation, my need to protect this identity always got more extreme. I knew that I couldn’t fail one more drug test with Santa Claus, but quitting wasn’t an option either. I thought long and hard about ways I could work around this dilemma, and I came to the conclusion that I would focus on the kinds of drugs I heard did not stay in a person’s system for long. I had heard LSD did not stay in the system, and because I had access to acid it seemed like a logical solution. This is how my addiction always advanced. I would try a new drug because it was available, or because it solved a problem I had that threatened the life I had created. Soon after taking LSD, everything in my life revolved around a little tiny paper square. I took using acid to the extreme. At this time I was sleeping down in the basement of our house, where black lights and black light posters surrounded me. Rainbows of colors decorated my walls, sheets, blankets, and even my Slinky. It gave me extreme visual effects and made everyone who dropped acid in my room feel like we had landed on a different planet.

  Acid didn’t show up in my drug tests, so I took it one step further after hearing that good news. I began to smuggle LSD into the recovery program, to sell hits to other patients for more than I bought the drugs for. The money I made went to paying for me to continue using. By this time my mom had cut off the money. She knew that it would have been spent on drugs. This was also when my alcohol consumption increased. I had heard that alcohol left the system very fast, so it became something for me to always fall back on. Liquor was easy to find and very affordable. The only thing that was necessary to manage at this point was selecting the right drug for my schedule. A normal LSD trip lasts twelve to eighteen hours. That had to be saved for days that Ryan and I did not have to attend our recovery program. The better option was to smoke pot before or after our program at the hospital, which we did. I found comfort in the fact that my brother was going through all this with me. We were two peas in a pod. If I had drugs I got Ryan high, and if he had drugs he got me high, and one of us was always bound to have something.

  The approach to addiction at our recovery program was to try and scare the addictions out of us by using statistical charts and graphs and a bunch of useless facts that we cared nothing about. We were even asked to climb poles with the help of others and scale walls, like rock climbers, as a way to learn trust for others, as if trust were the key to getting us off drugs. A fear of experiencing pain or the inability to know how to feel real emotions and then work through difficult things keeps a person addicted. All the rehab program ended up becoming to me was a place where I was able to sit around and try to top the war stories I heard from other addicts.

  I didn’t know or care that after our move to Arizona my addiction would go from bad to worse. I just knew that I wasn’t done making a life for myself in Colorado when my mom announced that we were moving back to Phoenix. I had made so many friends by that time that I did not want to leave. Everyone I knew helped me focus on my addictions. To make sure my life would remain the same after I moved, I quickly made a couple of phone calls to friends in Arizona. I had kept in touch with a few people who had access to anything that I might want or need after I got to town.

  CHAPTER 9

  FROM BAD TO WORSE

  UPON ARRIVING IN ARIZONA, I moved in with my godmother, Mary, while my mother handled the move and looked for a house to buy. I was not opposed to this because my godmother was very lenient concerning what I did, where I went, and what time I returned home. Her big mistake was to have trusted me. After I moved in I completely took advantage of the fact that she gave me plenty of freedom to do as I wished. She wanted to believe so badly that I was a good kid. I wanted to believe that, too, but I wasn’t ready to make that step. I called her nephew, Steve, who had been my best friend since the age of three. As soon as I met up with him, my life became a 24-7 party because he was using and had an entire circle of friends and family that also used. We grew up together but had still kept in touch when I lived in Colorado. We would chat here and there on the phone about the types of drugs we had experimented with. It was only natural that I contact him as soon as I got to Arizona because he offered me friendship I didn’t have anywhere else right after the move and shared a lifestyle in which it wasn’t a problem to make addiction the most important thing.

  At first he would sneak us his mother’s alcohol by pouring it into closed containers so that no one would be the wiser that he was stealing it. We would sit in his room getting drunk on that and smoking weed. Many nights I would be too drunk to go home, so I would just call Mary and let her know I would be staying the night at her nephew’s house. It was the perfect situation to party all night long and have absolutely no consequences except a hangover. Quickly, I became very happy in this situation because I was able to stay intoxicated around the clock and couldn’t feel much else besides the high. I bragged to Ryan about it. I told my brother he was
missing out on so much because he had chosen to live with our dad, way out in Cottonwood. I may not have landed at Mary’s without Ryan living with my dad instead of my mom. She desperately wanted us both away from the drugs in Colorado, so she had let him go as soon as he wanted to leave for Cottonwood. I ended up at Mary’s house because my mom had to finish up her last week of work and wanted me out of Colorado, too. Ryan would come down to Phoenix for weekend visits. When he did we headed over to Steve’s house to party, so Ryan could see what I had been telling him. He couldn’t believe we were able to party, right there in the house, with Steve’s mother home and just down the hall.

  Steve lived in a family of people who partied. They didn’t have a problem with the way we partied because they partied, too. His mom and aunt were very heavy drinkers, and because of that there was a constant supply of beer and hard liquor at Steve’s house. It was normal to see his mother with a beer in her hand. There never needed to be a special occasion to celebrate with a drink because it was just an everyday occurrence. On a weekend visit to Steve’s with Ryan, he mentioned he had brought money with him to the house and wanted to know if Steve could find him a bag of weed. Easily done, and to our surprise we were able to buy the pot from one of Steve’s family members, his older cousin, Bert. This guy seemed very skeptical about supplying us with the weed at first, so Steve had to convince him Ryan and I weren’t new to pot, and that we knew what we were doing. In the end Bert wound up being very generous with the drugs.