Addicted Like Me Read online

  I don’t know how I got the brilliant idea to try his morphine pills, but I did. He had several bottles of them, and I started passing the pills out to my friends. Some days I would swallow a handful before I went to school. I felt dizzy afterward, like I might pass out and never come up to life again. At the parochial school I attended, the nun who taught my homeroom class noticed instantly that something was wrong. She took me to the convent after school one day and started to probe me for reasons. I broke down crying and told her everything about my home life. I told her it was unbearable and gave her details about what was happening between my father and me. Of course, I never mentioned the painkillers. Covering your tracks is a skill of an addict, and I was learning.

  The next day my teacher met with my dad. I have no idea what she said to him, but when he came home he brought us pizza for dinner and tried to have a conversation with me, which was definitely not typical. It felt weird to have his attention, so I just played along. My father and I had so little communication outside of his screaming at me that I had no idea what to say to him. I felt so exposed. I just wanted the dinner to be over so I could go back into my bedroom and close the door to isolate and protect myself. My father and I were sinking deeper into our addictions, he into his liquor and me into my pills. We had both become reclusive when we were in our house, and the pattern that was being set would never be broken.

  I grew into an addict during the 1970s, when the hippie movement was established, so drugs were flowing freely around me and rebellion was in the air. It all seemed seductive and glamorous. I was an impressionable teen, and I thought anyone drinking or doing drugs was cool. To be caught up in this high was the opposite of all the emotional pain I had locked inside. Feelings of depression, fear, and shame permeated my entire being, and I was desperate to be seen as normal. The drugs gave me the power to achieve this goal. Instantly I could numb out my distressed emotions and gain the acceptance I craved to lift my self-esteem.

  During my ninth-grade year, one of my girlfriends started dating a boy who was eighteen and part of the glamorous crowd I craved to join. He and his friends were into smoking pot, and I remember it felt so special to be hanging out with really important older people, like them, who had access to drugs. After the death of my mother, I had felt only loneliness and a sense of disconnection from everyone. I missed her terribly, and I grieved the life I knew before her death. I knew my place in the world when she was alive. I felt secure. As part of this older, inner circle, I was considered cool and got that feeling back.

  The first time I tried marijuana, I felt nothing. I couldn’t understand what the big deal was. The second time I tried it, I felt the effect and loved it. It took the pain of life away, and I craved that release. It took the edge off, and I became a daily pot smoker, though it didn’t take long before I experimented with other drugs, too. I continued stealing from my dad to fund my habit. I took money from him instead of painkillers. I would sneak into his bedroom and steal out of his wallet after he had passed out following a night at the bar. I would have risked anything to get my high at that point. I was scared to death of my father, but I would creep into his room anyway, every time I needed money. Even in broad daylight I would steal what I needed to get my fix. Sometimes I had to tiptoe inches from his slumbering body to rifle through the pockets of his pants hanging next to him on the bedpost.

  I don’t know if he ever knew I was doing this, but I never got caught. I never got into trouble with my father over drugs, but he did find out that I was using alcohol because I got caught drinking at a school function. This was the only time he ever hit me. I was sitting in the school cafeteria when my name was called over the intercom, which blared out the news that I was to report to the office. When I arrived I had to stand before the principal and admit everything. That’s when my dad got brought into the picture. The principal said I needed to go home and tell my father about the incident because I was being suspended. I needed to bring my dad with me when I returned to school.

  I knew that I couldn’t tell my father what had happened. He would blow up in his usual way and maybe even more. I was unwilling to find out how much more anger I might unleash in him. For the next three days I got up and got dressed for school as if I weren’t suspended, but instead of walking to school I sneaked down to the basement and hid. I sat there quietly until I heard my father leave for work. When I went back to school, the principal asked where my father was because I hadn’t brought him with me. I admitted that I hadn’t told my dad and just stood there waiting to see what the principal would do. I figured anything that came was better than dealing with my father’s ferocity, but my hopes were dashed when I observed a sad look of resignation on the principal’s face, just before he told me there was no getting around my father’s anger. He was going to call my dad himself and tell him the news I hadn’t.

  That night I was scared to death. I waited for my father to come home, but he didn’t show up until two in the morning. I heard him come in, then he opened the door to my bedroom and walked up to me. He slapped me in the face, said nothing, and walked out of my room. My cheek stung at first, but then it just felt numb. It was dark around me, and in that horror I felt completely violated at what my father had done, but soon feelings of shame and humiliation flooded over me. I turned the pain inward because I was sure it was my fault. I cried silently into my pillow, rocking myself to sleep in shame. Those were the last soundless sobs of protest I would ever make against my father.

  The next time he yelled at me, I snapped. I told him I couldn’t take it anymore, and that I felt like I was losing my mind. A look of fear came over his face when I finally exploded. The only time I had seen him look so fearful was when my mother lay dying. He began to sob, and then he grabbed me. My father hugged me, said he loved me, and told me he would get me some help. He said, “I love you.” It’s the only time I remember those words leaving my father’s lips. He promised to take me for an appointment with a psychologist, but I didn’t think I was crazy. I needed something to deal with the pain we caused each other, sure, because I couldn’t take the emotional battering anymore, but I didn’t need a hospital. Still, he made an appointment at a mental hospital in a nearby town. My father found the hospital on a recommendation from his boss, because he also had a daughter in need of “help.” As we drove up to the hospital, I noticed bars were on all the windows of the building. I was petrified that the hospital staff would keep me there and lock me up.

  My father and I met with a psychologist at the hospital, together and then individually. I was taken back there several more times, and I remember the psychologist telling me that our situation was not my fault. This was well and good, but it didn’t change anything at home. I don’t even know if I ever really believed her when she said that the problems with my dad were not my fault. I felt ashamed and humiliated after every one of his rages at me. Maybe some of the shameful things he said about me were true. It was hard for me to differentiate fact from fiction. Even though I knew in my mind that most of the things my father said to me were not true, his hurtful words penetrated my heart and trapped themselves forever into my very being.

  Eventually we stopped the hospital appointments. I never knew why, but years later my sister told me that the visits were stopped because my father must have decided he didn’t want to take me there anymore. The vice principal at my high school had called my sister, in Florida, because the hospital contacted him with concerns about me after my father and I stopped our appointments. The hospital had tried to contact my father, but he never returned the calls.

  This was when my father remarried. I was in high school when he and Nora wed. She was a hard woman who was unkind to me. She could drink my father under the table, but the good news was that after my dad met Nora, he stopped his drunken rages in the night. This didn’t stop all the chaos, though, because Nora and I did not get along. Sometimes out of nowhere she would accuse me of things I hadn’t done, like the time she accused me of stealing
her car and going joyriding. I didn’t even know how to drive. When I tried to defend myself against her wild stories, Nora would tell me she “had my number,” and not to mess with her. Some nights when she and my father came home from the bar, I could hear Nora asking my dad if he loved her more than me.

  I overheard a lot of what my father and Nora talked about. Over the years I heard some pretty hurtful things. I felt so alone and unloved. I remember hiding in the corner of my closet in the dark with the door shut so they couldn’t hear me sobbing. If I could hear them, I knew they could hear me, and I didn’t want to appear weak. If Nora were to know how devastated I felt over the things that were said, I knew it would please her, and I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Somehow it felt like she was jealous of me, but I had no idea why. Maybe it was because everyone said how much I resembled my mother. I never knew.

  I moved out of my father’s home the day after high school graduation. After that, life was a constant party for me. A girl I worked with had a brother who had connections. We used to get crystal meth, which is a potent form of speed. I had tried speed in the form of amphetamines before that and had kind of liked the effects, but I fell madly in love with crystal meth. It gave me energy. I felt great. I could drink all night and never get drunk, I had amazing self-confidence, and I could talk for hours, feeling like I was the most interesting person in the world.

  By that time I had lost interest in pot because it no longer made me feel good. I later learned that marijuana is a depressant. It slows the nervous system to a hazy halt. My switch to meth was a chemical solution to the level of addiction I had to pot, which no longer gave me the high it had at first. I just felt kind of depressed when I used pot, and I craved the same high I knew when I first experienced life on drugs. On meth it came back in spades. I was superhuman and would sometimes go for days with no sleep at all. The drawback was coming down off the high. My brain could only function so long without sleep. I felt extremely sick, depressed, and paranoid on the way down, but the high was worth the agony of coming down, so I kept using meth whenever I had the opportunity.

  One weekend, my roommates and I pooled our money to purchase meth and did the drug together, staying up all night to snort lines of the stuff. We decided to attend the county fair high on meth and had a blast. We stayed high through an entire Saturday, but by Saturday night, my roommates had lost interest in the remaining stash. I stayed home alone and finished it off. I had no shutoff valve when it came to meth. As long as there were good drugs around, I would use them up until they were gone.

  I never feared overdosing or any other of the potential consequences of my behavior during that time. I couldn’t even fathom how someone could just walk away and say they didn’t want to do any more. It wasn’t in my DNA to say no, but I wasn’t as superhuman as I felt. The weekend of the meth binge and the fair, I hadn’t slept since the Thursday before I started doing meth with my friends. After I hit the remaining stash by myself, I began to feel sharp pains in my chest. I felt like my heart was going to burst out of my body and knew I was in trouble. It was one of those moments that are rare, when for a flashing second it became very clear that the consequences of my actions could mean life or death. I had to do something drastic to save my life, which meant possibly revealing my addictions, and yet I was able to understand that the only alternative was death. I realized I wanted to live. I told my roommate what was happening as soon as she came home, and she immediately called an ambulance, saving my life.

  I spent the night in the hospital on an IV to counteract the drugs. The embarrassment of getting caught did not seem nearly so important by then. I worried that soon my father would appear and find me in this collapsed state, but a blessing only an addict can appreciate occurred in the hospital. I learned it was illegal to inform my dad about my condition because I was over the age of eighteen, which meant my secret was safe from him, and from the hatred of Nora, because I was a legal adult. He never found out. Still, the shock of what had almost happened to me did curb my drug use after that time. I was scared and decided to compromise with myself. I made a vow to stick with alcohol and milder drugs only, like marijuana or painkillers, because I was afraid of what drugs had done to me but not scared enough to quit.

  I had only been out of my father’s home and in my own apartment for a few months when I decided that maybe what I needed was a change of scenery, so I got on a plane and went to Florida, where my sister lived. Things didn’t go well there. As soon as I had an opportunity to leave, I did. I was offered a position as a baby sitter for a family that was relocating, and I jumped at the chance, landing in a town in Montana, where I decided to stay. I found a job and rented an apartment there, and I made the kind of friends I thought were normal people, people that went to bars, got drunk, and did drugs. It was lonely in Montana at first. But soon I met tons of people that lived like I did. In Montana I met Rick, my first husband. He was my drug dealer. We met because I bought drugs from him at a bar. He was one of a string of many people I began meeting to score my highs.

  Rick and I were both barely twenty years old when we met. We were both into the party scene. I thought that after we were married, our habits would change and things would settle down for us. I started to slow down some, but Rick was just warming up. His drinking and drug use escalated as the years went on. I couldn’t stand the fact that he had to drink constantly, and also do drugs, and we fought often about it. I justified the criticisms I had against him by believing that I had the self-control to curb my behaviors when I wanted to. Rick did not. He smoked pot and drank every day. On the weekends we partied together, because in those days I allowed myself to binge, though I no longer smoked marijuana and sensed that I was considered uncool because of this choice. It brought back all the feelings of embarrassment I had always feared. I believed that not smoking made me look weak to other people and thought they were beginning to write me off as a lightweight.

  What had changed was my tolerance for the environment around Rick and me. In the early days of our marriage, we lived with addicted friends, and our house turned into a community pot smoking den. I chose not to be part of this party because I’d become a binge addict who used only on weekends, while Rick and the others at our house were feeding their daily needs. I rationalized the exclusion I felt by telling myself I wasn’t an addict, like the people I knew. Addicts were people like Rick and his friends, people that had to use every day and couldn’t live without their drugs. The irony of my feeling excluded was that I couldn’t live without my drugs either. I was exactly the same as the people I knew. If I could have lived without drugs, I wouldn’t have needed my binges.

  But I did need them, so I ignored the fact that I had fallen out of the cool crowd at our house. I concentrated on the idea that my cycle of addiction was a type of intelligence other people I knew didn’t have. I told myself I wasn’t quite as bad off as Rick and his friends were. He and the drug users that came and went in our home, and even my father before them, they were the ones who were screwed up. Pot had never regained the first effect it had on my life, and by this time alcohol would give me bad hangovers, so I picked and chose when I was going to party to do the hard drugs that gave me the high I wanted, and only those. This habit left me isolated from the normal routine in our house of casual pot and liquor but made me feel smarter than everyone else.

  I had never heard of a binge alcoholic, or addict, at that time. It was the summer I turned twenty-one. Of course I know better now. If I had known about binge behaviors, I might have been able to respond better to the news I received that my father had a stroke, but because I thought I was better than him because I wasn’t an addict, I thought I could handle watching him die. After I arrived at his bedside, I was told he most likely would not live beyond a few days. The doctor had been telling him for years that if he didn’t quit drinking, it was eventually going to kill him. It did. I saw my father alive and unconscious one last time in a hospital. I buried my dad back home, in
a plot right next to my mom, and returned to my life with Rick. When I returned, I was just as addicted as ever to binge behaviors and lies. I didn’t have a lot of emotion regarding my father’s death at the time. We were never close and barely had any kind of relationship. But one sensation I remember is feeling numb about my dad. I have learned that there are several stages of grief, and the first stage is usually denial. I believe denial was the cause of the episodes in my life when I just felt numb about my dad, because I would never admit how similar I was to him. The death of my father became another grief-moment buried deep down inside of me. It was one more reason to stay addicted to my illness, to suppress my emotions the way I always had.

  Pressures were mounting around Rick and me, aside from our addictions. Rick had invited a transient, who had gray hair and a beard, to live with us. Rick let him into our life because the transient was “cool” and smoked pot. I thought the man smelled like he hadn’t taken a bath in a year. There was also a drug dealer in Montana who lived down the street from Rick and me. His name was Joey. He and Rick became fast friends, using our house to do IV drugs, which in my mind were for hardcore addicts only, and were as low as one could go. That wasn’t me, or us. I had tolerated Rick’s daily pot smoking and the constant beer drinking, but even for his level of behavior, IV drug use was where I had to draw the line for us both. In addition, Rick didn’t work when we were first married. After I lost the job that had been supporting us, he flipped. He screamed at me to go get another job, but I refused until he got one first. This was about the time I found out that I was pregnant with our first child, Jason. Rick’s dad had a serious talk with his son after learning this news, and it didn’t take long before Rick was working at a good job.