Addicted Like Me Read online

If it wasn’t enough for Ryan to believe we could buy drugs from Steve’s family members, we went to the back yard with our weed to get high after our buy. I can remember freaking out because Steve’s whole family was over for a barbeque on that day. There we were, standing in the back yard, out in the open in front of all these strangers, smoking a bowl. But Steve kept assuring me that it was okay, and the next thing I knew Steve’s mother came walking up behind us like it wasn’t. My stomach curled up into knots when she called Steve over. Instantly my brain started working in overtime to find a way out if we were busted. My paranoia always had me rehearsing what I would say, or thinking about what excuses I could come up with. I felt sick as the adrenaline was pumping through my veins. I said to myself, Here we go again. How had I ended up in a situation where I was about to get busted for drugs? The answer was that I hadn’t ended up in a situation like that. Steve’s mom walked over to us and asked if she could take a hit.

  I was in complete shock, yet relieved at the same time, when this occurred. This was a major discovery about the way life could be for me from then on, and I knew it was going to take some time for my brain to work the entire situation out. It really couldn’t get any better for a fifteen-year-old drug addict. A world of opportunity had opened up for me, and I continued to be a regular guest at Steve’s house. A normal day would consist of watching TV and getting high with Steve, his mother, and his aunt. This was just their way of life, but to me it was a dream. Any time I wanted to get high I just went to his house, and if I partied too hard, I didn’t have to go home. I learned how the system at Steve’s worked after sticking around awhile. His aunt bought a quarter pound of weed weekly, just for home use. If we ran out early, we would just scrape all the bongs and paraphernalia in the house for residue, which would produce mounds of pot residue as big as a paper plate. If the platefuls weren’t an option, there was always my good old friend alcohol. It was always there at Steve’s house and always free.

  By my sixteenth birthday, this is the list of drugs I used constantly: massive amounts of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, PCP, cocaine, and alcohol. A couple of days after my sixteenth birthday, I tried crystal meth for the first time. The night I did, I didn’t have much else to do. I can’t recall why I wasn’t at Steve’s house that night, but it didn’t stop me from my search for the next high. Bored, fidgety, and sober at Mary’s, I decided to go for a walk up to the corner store. Mind you the neighborhood surrounding her house wasn’t the best. I felt absolutely invincible when I started in on a plan to get high, so I didn’t care about that. When I began walking home I heard someone calling for me. There were a couple of guys standing behind the store who had yelled. They were obviously selling some kind of drugs and were waving me over to them. At first I wasn’t going to stop, but a voice inside my head reminded me I hadn’t found my high yet and I was still sober. I figured these guys might just be my chance to change that.

  Before I knew it I was with three strange men on the stairs at their apartment building, sitting outside their apartment door. I knew it was a matter of time before they were going to let me get high. It was a game to watch them, as each guy tried to stake his claim on me. None of them had any chance. I just wanted the guys for their drugs. It was finally the oldest guy who invited me into the apartment and quickly pulled out a bag. It was full of white powder. I assumed it was cocaine in the sack until I sniffed my first line. It was instantly obvious that I had snorted something different. I asked the guy what it was I had taken, and before he told me, he just looked at me as if I were kidding, so I had to sit there and wait for his response, secretly freaking out. I didn’t know what I had just inhaled into my nose. He finally blared, “Crystal meth!”

  At the point I discovered I had just done crystal meth, I wanted to disappear forever. It was as if I could hear my heart breaking inside of me. Any self-worth that I did have left at that point just faded away. I had never thought that I could stoop so low. Meth was always the one thing that I said I never wanted to get into. I had known people that had gotten caught up in it, and I saw them begin to deteriorate with my very own eyes. It was like watching someone slowly die in front of you, to watch an addict on crystal meth, but the person would continue to act like nothing had changed. Seeing that had made me think that I was always going to be smarter than those people were, and I was never going to get hooked on meth. Now I know my mother made deals in a similar way with the drugs she allowed herself to use. I can relate to the feeling of believing you are smarter than a different addict. My mom felt smarter than my dad and the users he brought around their house because she believed she had more self-control than they did, and she didn’t stoop to the level of using IV drugs when that became their thing.

  I didn’t stick around the apartment very long after discovering what I had done to myself. The guys could tell I was anxious to leave and let me know that if I decided that I wanted more meth, no problem. They told me I could come back anytime and get high for free or have the drugs at an extremely generous rate. I scurried out of the place as fast as I could, but the meth had kicked in extremely fast. Before I knew it I was higher than I had ever been, so by the time I got back to my godmother’s house, I felt my heart racing and my eyes pushing hard to jump out of my head. I sat on the couch and could not stop tapping my foot on the floor. I became worried that Mary was going to notice all of this. I decided to tell her good night and headed off to my room. Little did I know that meth makes it impossible to sleep. I just lay there in bed tossing and turning. I stared at the ceiling for eight straight hours.

  Each minute that passed felt like an hour that night. In the dark room by myself, my head continued to spin. I could not stop my brain from going a mile a minute. Crystal meth is an amphetamine, a drug that speeds up your head to make energy and euphoria explode in bursts. I loved this sensation more than anything that I had ever known in my whole existence. That compromise I had made with myself to never stoop so low as to try meth had all but disappeared, and so did any worry that I couldn’t stop my toes from tapping uncontrollably or find a way to get any sleep. That next morning I got ready for my day in record time, the meth still cheering me on. I had so much energy, and I could accomplish so much high on it. The first thing I did was call Steve. I told him about my night, and it just seemed to make his day when I told him that I knew where to score more of it for very cheap. Within hours we were sitting in his room getting high. I couldn’t believe how high I had gotten in just a matter of minutes. It confirmed I had found my miracle drug.

  I was dating Robert when I began using meth. It was an on-again, off-again relationship with him. I was attracted to him not for his looks, but for his reputation within the drug dealing community. He had that attention I realized people got when they were the go-to guys or girls. I liked Robert’s ability to get me high on a regular basis, and he made me feel taken care of. He always made sure to save just enough for me of anything he had on hand. Back then I found that to be romantic. He was a big guy who made me feel safe and protected. My beast was a scary, controlling thing that led me into many scary situations with many scary people, so I found great comfort in the fact that I could call Robert anytime and know he’d be there for me.

  I visited him after school on a regular basis. He was nineteen or twenty at the time we dated. He rarely held a regular job because he ran with gangs and brought in the money he needed by selling drugs. I was often with him in the car when he would rob mini marts for beer. It was all pretty convenient for me until I found out that he was the superjealous type. Robert didn’t care about Steve, but he didn’t like the fact that I became friends with Sean, a guy from my school. Sean frequently gave me a ride home, or we would just hang out and get high. Robert didn’t like it at all. He constantly grilled me, and he was always checking to see if I was staying faithful. It was mentally taxing to have a person put so little trust in me because I was obviously devoted to Robert. He was the one with the drugs, besides. So after a while all the accusations ju
st made me frustrated. I didn’t want to fight about things or talk about our emotions. I just wanted to get high.

  It became apparent after a while with Sean that he had developed feelings for me. He tried to convince me to stop seeing Robert, but that wasn’t an option because I needed Robert too much. I was wrapped around his little finger. For me to keep using, Robert knew he could put himself in front of me and dangle his advantage as if dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit. It didn’t take long for Robert to let Sean know this directly. Robert came down the driveway with his chest all puffed up one day when Sean had dropped me off. Robert started screaming he would kill Sean if he didn’t let me be. It was seconds later that Robert almost put me through a brick wall while we stood outside his house. This was followed by bouts of crying and Robert begging for my forgiveness. The contrast was confusing and scary. The behavior he was displaying was all too reminiscent of my relationships with my stepmothers. It turned me back into that frightened little girl that I hated to be.

  That day distanced me from Robert. I stopped answering his calls and stopped going to his house every day. I shifted to hanging out with his uncle Lenny instead. He lived right across the street from Steve’s house anyway, and although Lenny was considerably older than me, I made my way into his circle. I was sixteen and he was thirty. I wasn’t naive about who Lenny was. I knew about his reputation as a big-time meth user, so if Robert was going to be violent to me, I decided I could go to Lenny instead to get high. The first night I really partied with him I had been at Steve’s place first. We decided that we wanted to score meth, and the one thing you could count on with Lenny was the fact that he had it. He was always spun out. It wasn’t odd to see him out in front of his house at odd hours of the morning just standing there watering his lawn. Steve and I walked over and approached Lenny, who told us we could get high around back, where he kept a shed.

  The shed was out of sight. Lenny had to show us what to do that day, because he had meth for Steve and me, but we had to learn how to smoke it instead of snort it. If snorting meth was stooping low, smoking it out of a glass pipe was even lower. I knew when I was smoking it that my drug use was out of control. Every time I took a hit, it was chiseling away at who I was. I could feel my brain cells disappearing, but I didn’t care. I was in love with smoking crystal meth, and just like every other first time I had with any drug, I was hooked the first time I smoked meth from the pipe. Every other drug became secondary, and I quickly learned I could also drink endless amounts of alcohol and never get sick when I used in this way. I stayed up all night, drank with everyone else, and didn’t pass out or have to throw up. At that pace I actually needed the speed of meth just to keep up. Everything had to revolve around how I was going to obtain more.

  At first I could buy it for myself because my mom had returned to paying me for housework. I was keeping as much as I could of my “normal routine” together for her benefit. I’d asked her to enroll me at a charter school in Phoenix when we moved back and went to class for a while and got okay grades. She didn’t mind Robert but never did like him. I still saw him sometimes and used him to get free drugs when he had some meth on hand, but his uncle Lenny was always easier to find and closer to Steve’s house. My mom had no problem with Steve. While I would be at Lenny’s house, he would offer to get me spun out quite often. At first Steve stuck by my side when I went to Lenny’s house, but later Lenny started inviting only me. I thought, Hey, more for me, so I didn’t care. People at Steve’s house started noticing I had begun disappearing. In fact, Steve’s mom didn’t like it too much because she knew what was going on.

  Rationalizing where to draw a boundary is a way that a user can feel good about staying addicted. Somebody is always “worse off,” or “past the line,” but it is not you. Although I got high with Steve’s mom on a regular basis, we never did meth together. That’s not to say that she never used it herself, just that when she did it I was never involved. Why she set her boundary there I will never know, because everything else seemed to be acceptable in her house. The fact that she wouldn’t do meth with a sixteen-year-old kid probably made her feel like she was doing a good thing for me. I didn’t feel sixteen. I was used to flirting with grown men like Lenny to get a lot of free drugs when I was an addict. I learned I could get what I wanted out of them by acting a certain way. I used flirting to my advantage in Lenny’s case. I milked him for as much as I could get of his meth. He delivered as much as I wanted whenever I wanted, but of course manipulation was involved. He was the one who had the upper hand, in reality, because Lenny was the one who had the drugs.

  The charter school where my mom had enrolled me made my daily trips to Lenny’s house, and staying high, easy to do. My school day was only four hours long, which left me the rest of the day to do as I pleased. Most of the time I would take the bus over to Lenny’s after school and get a pick-me-up high before going home. Later in the night he would ride his bike the eight miles from his house over to mine, and I would sneak him in my window. I moved out of Mary’s house when my mom bought a house near Shirley, the friend of hers who was encouraging my mom to keep learning Tough Love techniques and enforcing consequences against me. I’m sure I would have had more consequences if my mother knew that Lenny would usually hang out all night in my bedroom while she slept down the hall. He stayed until just before her alarm would go off. I kept a close eye on the clock because I knew when my mother would wake up for work. Spun out on meth, I didn’t have to sleep; therefore, I would just start getting ready for the day like I usually would do without my mom being any wiser.

  My mom was completely oblivious of my crystal meth use, except to notice that I got really into cleaning or a different kind of late night task sometimes. She would have had no reason just from seeing that to get up and check on me in the night to be sure a guy like Lenny wasn’t staying in my bedroom. My normal routine for her was going great. To her, I looked successful when I was on meth. I was able to concentrate better and get so much more work done than I had when I was stoned or drunk. It became routine for me to attend school without sleeping for days. If I started coming down, I would just go to the restroom and do a line on the top of the toilet lid to make it through the rest of the day, until I could get back over to Lenny’s house. Like Robert, Lenny always kept enough drugs around to keep me high. He would always leave me with enough to make it through the day, or enough to make it until the next time that I would see him again. Eventually I cut him out of the picture, though, when I realized there would be more drugs for me if I didn’t have to share with him. Things took a step further toward my bottom when I chose to start getting high by myself, but I still couldn’t stop, and I didn’t care.

  An addict knows the behavior is destructive. I started becoming absolutely disgusted with myself each time I realized how low I would stoop for a high. This self-consciousness didn’t escape me, even when the beast was at its worst. I can remember standing in front of my bathroom mirror looking at myself as I made my lines to snort and noticing that I could see my skeleton through my skin. My mother had taken the door off my room in one of her Tough Love stands, so I had been left to get high in the bathroom. I was disgusting to look at, my skin was pale and gray and I had black circles under my eyes. I was saddened by the mess I had become. I couldn’t stand to watch myself do one more line in the mirror, so I decided to put the rest in my pipe and smoke it with the lights off, because at least then I wouldn’t have to look at myself. As I sat in the dark smoking my meth, the tears just streamed down my face. I knew I was licked, I knew I was sick, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next.

  Shirley’s daughter, Lindsey, came over to party after that. She had recently been turned on to meth as well but was nowhere near the depths of my use. To my surprise, she began to tell me that she was worried about me and about how much I was using. I was shocked to be treated like such a junkie, despite what I had just seen in the mirror the night before she came over. I quickly turned the tables
on Lindsey, telling her that she had no room to talk because she was also using meth. Maybe she was just jealous, I thought, because I had more dope than she did. I couldn’t figure out a different reason she would be turning against me because there was no way I was ready to believe Lindsey really thought I was going to die. I didn’t believe that yet, or if I did, I wasn’t ready to consider it. I made plans to meet up with Lenny after I saw Lindsey. It was absolutely necessary for me to get high because I had already started coming down, Lindsey had riled me up, and I was out of my own stash.

  All night I waited and waited for Lenny, looking out my blinds every three seconds for him to arrive on his bike. I was freaking out and felt sick. When he never showed, I began to make phone calls to find out where he had been. I wasn’t speaking to Robert any longer, but because he was Lenny’s nephew I figured I could make an exception to find out if he knew where Lenny had gone. I was devastated when I found out the police had picked him up while he was on his way over to my house. Robert let me know that Lenny would be in prison for a very long time. Apparently he had been searched and the police found a sawed-off shotgun on him and a large amount of crystal meth along with different forms of drug paraphernalia. What Lenny was doing with a sawed-off shotgun I will never know, and that is probably for the best. In fact, it was for the best, because I was forced to come down from my high that night when Lenny never showed. For the first time in a long time, I was able to feel something. I hit my bottom and had to experience how uncomfortable it was to be there.

  The next few days after Lenny was arrested were absolute hell. I had no more drugs. I was terribly sick. It caused me to experience the shakes that come with drug withdrawal, and I couldn’t stop dry heaving and could barely get out of bed. I slept hour upon hour. When I finally had enough strength to come out of my room, I made my way to the couch just in time to have my mom come home and confront me about my meth use. Lindsey hadn’t just come over and talked to me. She had ratted me out to my mom, and I just couldn’t believe it. At first I tried to convince myself that Lindsey would never do that to me. It was an unspoken rule between drug users that you just don’t rat out your friends. Apparently, though, my using had scared her so much she thought I was going to die. She told her mother, who hadn’t wasted any time telling my mother, who then wasted no time at all before she confronted me.