Pickled Slug: Final Draft
Releasing chapter 3 for free in anticipation for the release of Crooked Smile in 13 days
Chapter 3: Pickled Slug
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a sister school to UCLA and UC Berkeley, but it’s more like an adopted sister with a learning disability than an actual blood relative. It’s a strange place partly because of its position within the state, and I’d come to learn that it was a major stop on the drug-trafficking route from Mexico up to Northern California. Despite being littered with insufferable aging hippies and Arc’teryx-wearing tech millionaires, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The campus may be unrivaled in its redwood-studded splendor.
I hated it, but then again, I would have hated anything. It just wasn’t my kind of place, I convinced myself, as I struggled the whole time that I was there trying to artificially adjust who I was to make more sense of it. I have no desire to ever return, out of fear of replayed tragedies and beach-themed meth flashbacks, but nevertheless, Santa Cruz is charming to those who have not experienced its gruesome underbelly.
Nineteen kids from my high school went to UC Santa Cruz, which was a school of about seventeen thousand undergrads. I didn’t like my roommates—or to put it honestly, I was too socially inept to accept people I refused to get to know before I judged them. Within the first month, I purchased an air mattress and moved into a dorm room occupied by a couple of high school friends, Kevin and Peter. Being too anxious to handle any amount of social discomfort, I embedded myself within the lives of people I already knew. My other friends, Alex and Mark, were in the dorm building next door, making my non-sanctioned move even more justified. I knew it would be easier to hang out with people who were already accustomed to my transgressions than to figure out how to not be an asshole.
UC Santa Cruz was known as a stoner school in a stoner town, and it was, but within a few months of my freshman year, kids in my dorm were smoking black tar heroin. Sure, weed was a big part of the local culture, but we’d come to find out that the whole town was saturated with any drug you could name, and that beneath the pasture of hippies and beach bums was a bedrock composed of heroin and crystal meth. The town was flooded with high-quality tar directly from the cartel, causing an epidemic that preceded other parts of the country by a few years. While places like Florida and the Midwest were still plagued by Oxycontin, Santa Cruz, and the West Coast in general, spearheaded the transition from prescription opiates to heroin in the late aughts.
Unlike a substantial amount of my social circle, I didn’t touch heroin my freshman year. After all, as a child I saw firsthand its capacity for destruction. I knew heroin was something to stay away from, but I had no fucking clue what Oxycontin was. Like I stated earlier, Oxycontin was already losing popularity in California at this time, but access to the overly prescribed painkiller was still plentiful in those days. Upon seeing other kids taking it at college parties, I grew very curious. It was a pill—it was medicine, like an aspirin or Tylenol or a blood thinner. That might be a stretch, but we can all agree that Oxycontin looks more like aspirin than a needle full of dope. Using this thought process, I concluded that oxy was one of the safest drugs I could possibly take, given that it was approved by the FDA. If you research the purpose of Oxycontin’s creation, you’ll find out that it was marketed as a non-habit-forming replacement for traditional opiate-based painkillers. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect recreational drug? All the high that an opiate can offer without the horrific physical addiction. A literal miracle. Unfortunately, like millions of other Americans over the past few decades, I would come to find out that this wasn’t exactly accurate.
After nearly a year of watching my classmates intermittently smoke heroin, I caved the summer before sophomore year. For some it had become a problem already that they were good at hiding, and others successfully got high here and there without forming a habit. My friend Adam offered me some in the living room of our off-campus housing, and like all the other times it was offered to me, I pictured my mother’s dead body collapsed in my childhood bedroom. For some reason that day, I finally tried it. I figured I’d squash the hype and cross it off the checklist. I was strong enough to handle it, I thought, which was odd because I was scared of literally everything else in life: what I looked like, what I sounded like, what people thought of me, what people didn’t think about me, you name it. The inner workings of my mind were defined by self-centered fear. Heroin, I would come to learn, negated all of this.
Like some first-time experiences with other drugs, I didn’t feel much from the couple of hits that Adam gave me. Maybe I smoked it wrong or maybe it wasn’t very good shit, but either way, I didn’t have an immediate attraction to the drug upon trying it. I pretty much stayed away from it for a few months after that. I preferred oxy, simply because the first time I tried it, it worked perfectly. Oxy was simple, socially acceptable, and you didn’t have to smoke it off aluminum foil like some “strung-out junkie.” You just swallowed a pill like a law-abiding citizen and all your problems drifted away.
As my recreational oxy use started to gain steam, I managed to acquire my first girlfriend. Through a Craigslist ad that Kevin and I had posted sophomore year looking for a third roommate, a fellow student named Melissa responded, and after meeting one another, she agreed to move in. I liked her right away, but dating a roommate was out of the question, so I proceeded to be myself around her as opposed to pretending to be someone I thought she’d be attracted to. This, for the first time in my life, invoked a genuine romantic connection (by accident). We began dating within a few months of her moving in, and for once I felt like I was skimming the membrane of normality. I was nearly a typical young man with the ability to establish a relationship beyond a drunken one-night stand. This was all I needed to convince myself I had a shot at life. If I could get a nice girl like Melissa to love me, then I was worth something. I then based my self-worth entirely upon this fact, which although unhealthy in the long run, worked in the moment. Things were on the up-and-up, I was happy, and my mangled relationship with Aunt Betty even saw some progress.
I started to get dull pains in my gums before my twentieth birthday and was told that I would need to get my wisdom teeth surgically removed. The operation occurred some weeks later, and I was given a bottle of ten-milligram Percocet for the pain. I lied to my aunt and uncle and told them I had only been prescribed ibuprofen from the doctor. Uncle Tim, sympathetic to how swollen my face was, wrote me a prescription for Vicodin.
Despite the nearly non-existent relationship between my uncle and me (entirely due to my stubbornness), from that day forth I thought he was pretty damn cool. I took both the Percocet and Vicodin, along with a few oxys I’d acquired through other means, for about three weeks straight. When I started running low, I panicked—both mentally and physically—and this is when the forbidden line had been crossed. I was pickled.
I had never taken painkillers daily for that length of time before, and when I finally ran out, I felt the symptoms of minor physical withdrawal: insomnia, restlessness, and mild anxiety. More debilitating was the fact that I was no longer high. Being exposed to this experience—a prolonged daily intake of opiates—I now knew that I never wanted to live a day in which opiates weren’t in my bloodstream. They were the true panacea that surpassed any of my prior cures.
Of what, you ask? Name anything you want, any problem in the world, and I’ll tell you that opiates can cure it. You have a cramp in your neck? Opiates will cure that. Your mother died when you were fourteen and you never processed it in a healthy manner? Opiates will cure that too. There’s nothing they wouldn’t fix for me, and there was nothing that was going to change my mind about the necessity of having them.
Melissa knew something was wrong, but she had no clue that it had anything to do with the pills. The two of us (along with Kevin) had been dabbling with oxys since the beginning of the school year. However, after my surgery I was no longer dabbling. I was needing.
I made some phone calls to pill-heads I knew and learned about a connection for thirty-milligram Roxicodone (generic Oxycontin) up in Oakland, from my high school friend’s sister, Maggie. Maggie lived by the West Oakland BART station with her mom, who had gotten shot earlier in the year as an innocent bystander in a gang-related incident. As tragic as this was, a lifetime prescription for Roxys was the goldmine she needed to make a decent living while permanently disabled.
Nowadays you couldn’t find an authentic thirty-milligram Roxicodone if you hired a private detective. However, if you threw a rock in San Francisco, you could hit someone selling or smoking a fake one. Although it would have the markings of a real Roxy, these deadly pills are nothing more than lactose powder and fentanyl. Back in 2008 it was a different story. This was the golden era, when the skies were still practically raining down opioids on unsuspecting victims of the pharmaceutical industry, and Maggie would sell me individual Roxys for ten dollars each. I eventually got Maggie to sell me a hundred Roxys at a time for four hundred bucks, and then would go back down to Santa Cruz where I could sell them for fifteen or twenty dollars apiece. I wasn’t a big-time drug dealer by any measure—nor did I desire to become one—I was simply trying to get my medicine for free.
This worked for several months. Until it didn’t. Maggie could no longer meet my demand, and I had to find larger, more dangerous connections.
For those that are not familiar with the early days of Oxycontin—meaning the drug’s entire existence up until about 2012—the following information should be helpful. Oxycontin is a medication produced by an American pharmaceutical company called Purdue Pharma. Although marketed as a safer alternative than mainstay narcotics for pain management, Oxycontin can just as easily be snorted, smoked, or injected as it can be swallowed in its intended fashion. Oxycontin is a brand name, and the active ingredient of this pain killer is called oxycodone. Chemically speaking, oxycodone is nothing less than a more refined form of heroin. An oxycodone user’s tolerance will skyrocket in comparison to that of a heroin user, and the withdrawals from oxy are typically just as bad, if not worse. Regardless of the immense dangers of oxycodone abuse, there was no attempt to create a “tamper-proof” version of the drug until tens of thousands had already died, and many more had spiraled into utter despair. It’s one of the largest crimes ever committed against the American people by a corporation with the blessing of the government—namely the FDA. To date, no one involved has been held criminally accountable. Like most crimes against humanity committed by a corporation or our own government, no one actually went to jail, but we did get a few decent mini-series about it years later. This seems to be the truest form of American justice. Hundreds of thousands of lives ruined, but at least we got to witness a killer performance by Michael Keaton.
Kevin and I used to split one Roxy and be obliterated until we fell asleep. Within a few months of daily use, the two of us were each smoking or snorting twenty of them a day. This had gotten out of control in every possible way, but what irked us most was the financial component. As our forefathers had done before us, we knew exactly what we had to do. No, not quit.
We needed heroin. It was common knowledge that heroin was cheaper, got you higher, and in some places like Santa Cruz, it was easier to find than any pill.
I knew that my friend Molly—one of the people that this book is dedicated to—would be able to help us out. Molly had already gotten deep into heroin use the previous year and had ended up getting kicked out of school. She was living with her parents in Southern California, running the streets of LA and wasting away, so she would have to help us find dope remotely.
I called Molly and gave her the spiel. Because Molly’s a decent human being, she was reluctant to offer help. Like a good junkie, I hit her in the weak spot, by describing my exaggerated withdrawal symptoms. I told her that I was hopeless, dopesick, and had scoured the streets looking for oxy to no avail. Every junkie—whether in active addiction or recovery—is sympathetic to one of their own in withdrawals, so with the right amount of manipulation, I got her to budge. I was expecting her to give me a phone number to call, but instead she asked me to grab a pen and paper to take down directions.
Around dusk Kevin and I drove up Highway Nine to the two-mile marker, just like Molly had dictated. She said there would be a shoulder in the road about a hundred feet past the marker, and that there was a dirt path that formed into the wooded area from the center of the clearing. We pulled up to the shoulder, parked the car, and spotted a path. It led up an ivy-covered hill, and after hiking for a few minutes, the path fed out to a train track. We took a right, heading north alongside the tracks, and started to blink our flashlight on and off, like Molly had instructed. According to her, a small Mexican man would either pop out of the trees or message us back with his flashlight if he was further north than usual. It was like we were in a fairy tale, tracking down a goblin to barter for treasure—except instead of treasure it was heroin, and instead of a goblin it was a guy named Pedro. We finally saw a blinking light about thirty feet ahead of us, which completely expunged our anxiety.
“Holy shit, this actually worked. I can’t fucking believe it!” I was overjoyed. Not just because we found the connect, but because of the adventure that came with it. Frankly, early addiction can be quite fun, and some of the situations you get yourself in are a high in themselves. It’s naughty. It’s mischievous and still has some romance. It’s a dark secret that you can only cherish with a select few. Deep down you know you’re hurtling towards absolute tragedy, but you can’t help but relish in the prospect of hazard during initial launch.
Pedro yelled out to us, and we assured him that we came in peace. He sold us a gram of heroin, gave us his number, and told us to call him next time we planned on making the hike back to give him forewarning.
When you picture someone doing heroin, you might think of a homeless man covered in sores with a needle in his arm. All my life I assumed this was the inevitable fate of a heroin injector, and naturally I was turned off by the thought of ever sticking anything in my vein. It was depraved. When I found out in college that you could smoke heroin off aluminum foil, this changed my perception. Heroin, when consumed any way other than with a needle, seemed on par with snorting a few lines of cocaine. Not entirely innocent, but at the same time, not earth-shattering.
Although the same drug is entering your system, lies must be told to oneself when trying to soften the blow of reality. A drug addict sets boundaries for themself, and when the necessity to cross those boundaries arrives due to the worsening of their addiction, they will fabricate any delusion to convince themself that the boundary needs to be broken. Heroin was generally verboten in my eyes, but when that boundary was infringing on my need to get high the way I wanted to get high, I convinced myself that using needles was the real issue at hand. This phenomenon repeats itself until you find yourself using the side mirror of a parked car to shoot a speedball into your neck.
A year went by of nonstop use. Kevin couldn’t handle the spiral and transferred to NYU for his junior year. Melissa and I were still in love, I guess, but the relationship was contaminated. We became a junkie couple. We didn’t shower much, wash our clothes, or eat anything close to a normal diet. We sat in our room, chain-smoked cigarettes, nodded out, had awful, anti-climactic sex, and rotted away. We only left the apartment to occasionally attend class or buy dope.
After the cash from selling all our possessions ran out, I got a job at 7-Eleven just to help support both of our habits. Middlemanning coke to fellow students brought in some cash, but Melissa also shoplifted and babysat to keep us high. Our relationship had a foundation in innocence, but now we had come to associate everything about one another with heroin, similarly to my parents. I obsessed over this fact as if it were inherently bestowed upon me. We tried to stop numerous times, but you can’t just quit heroin while you’re a full-time student, unless you intend on taking a leave of absence. Doing so would sound the alarms and raise suspicion from our families. You need a good two weeks of bed rest to really get through the withdrawals, and that wasn’t possible during the school year without failing our classes. This is assuming we could actually go two weeks without getting high, which even if given the opportunity, we couldn’t.
The truth was that it wouldn’t be possible for me to quit on my own accord no matter what the circumstances were for many years. Back in my college days, however, I was still fully convinced that I was merely physically addicted. If only I could be locked in a room for a few weeks and complete the withdrawal process, I’d never touch the stuff again, but despite the many golden opportunities I would eventually have—including medical detox—I would find myself voluntarily jumping back to the same old hell. So fast do we forget. Sure, the physical addiction to opiates is vicious, but the mental obsession that lingers once it’s been eradicated from your system is what’s truly sinister. This is what makes us—when temporarily sober—pick up a bag of dope and think that somehow this time might be different.
***
When Melissa’s father finally came down to rescue her a few months before graduation, she left to attend a residential rehab program. She had finished her school credits a semester early by attending summer courses, so she was able to leave with no scholastic consequences. She also left her ’92 Acura Integra behind, and after making me return my key to her before she left, it was expected that it would sit safely in our driveway. Being the well prepared, yet absolute piece of shit that I was, I had foreseen something like this eventually happening and made a copy of my key months prior. Hugo—my cartel-affiliated drug dealer at the time—had repeatedly offered me a job, and with Melissa out of the picture, it seemed about time to take him up on the opportunity. The gig was driving around Santa Cruz and dropping off heroin to waiting customers, which was just as easy as it was dangerous. Melissa had been opposed to this because she had an ounce of sense, but more specifically, she was the rightful owner of the vehicle and didn’t want to lose it.
My shift was from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, and my job duties were simple: customers would call Hugo and tell him where they were, and then he would tell me where to meet them over a walkie-talkie. I was given $120 per six-hour shift, along with a thirty-minute lunch break and money for gas. I could take my pay in cash or the equivalency in heroin—one and a half grams. Absolutely stellar gig for a junkie.
Easiness aside, this job had one crucial stipulation. Hugo knew I was a junkie, and he knew that junkies had the tendency to fall asleep behind the wheel, so he could only trust me if he could assure that I’d stay alert. To prevent this issue, he required his drivers to snort a line of meth at the beginning of every shift. I would have to get to his house right before 9:00 AM every morning to pick up the product—which was rationed out into forty-dollar half-gram bags—and after snorting a line of meth, I would then be allowed to start the workday. I had never done meth prior to working for Hugo; in fact, I was wholeheartedly against using a drug like that, but I needed this opportunity for steady income. Once again, a boundary would have to be crossed, and like every prior boundary and every boundary to come, my new justification would be accepted rather quickly.
At the time, crystal meth was considered the lowest of the low in my opinion. To me, there was no drug that was more dangerous or repulsive. Basing my opinion solely on what I’d seen from anti-drug commercials, I knew nothing factual about meth to back this up. As it turned out, those commercials were pretty spot on. The only positive review I’d ever heard was from a cousin a few years back, however, this may have been because he was broke at the time, and was trying to convince me to buy us some. Not a solid source.
I always heard awful things about people smoking meth; I’d seen the horrific pictures of meth users with dirty pipes twirling between their lips. I shared my concerns with Hugo, and he emphasized the lack of harm when snorting crystal meth. Hugo wasn’t a doctor, nor was he a pharmacist, but after that brief conversation, I was compelled to believe him. Snorting was the manageable way to get high on crystal meth. No different than popping an Adderall before a midterm, I convinced myself.
At the beginning of my first shift, Hugo—a five-foot-nothing man shaped like a kiwi—chopped me up my first line. I noticed instantly that snorting meth was very painful, and as the seconds passed, the pain only worsened—the opposite of cocaine. There was absolutely no numbing sensation as it dripped from my sinus cavities to the back of my throat, which allowed me to interpret its entire palette of flavors. Ajax dissolved in lemon juice, along with other treats found under the kitchen sink, immediately came to mind.
The uncompromising pain in my face dissipated after a long sixty seconds, making way for an angelic hum that crawled down my temples and landed in my gut. After a lifetime of persistent lag, my nervous system felt like it was finally operating at full capacity—ultimate tranquility combined with an updated processor. A crystal meth high doesn’t begin at a hundred miles an hour, it savors the acceleration. It’s a smooth and refined ride that leaves your brain feeling like it was sautéed in oil as opposed to boiled in water. A class act straight out of the gate, meth can retain its elegance for hours, sometimes even days. It’s not until you’ve been awake for a week that the swanky fellow you thought you’d become is chased off by a mumbling lunatic, set on crippling your reality until it resembles a windowless prison cell; no sound can be heard other than that of a broken record repeating fragments of various schizophrenic delusions. In simpler terms, it’s much more complex than your standard rendezvous with cocaine.
I took a real liking to meth right off the bat. It was the inverse of heroin; the hasty yin to heroin’s lethargic yang. Heroin addiction a la carte had grown far too tedious, and meth appeared to be the perfect ingredient to spice things up. With heroin alone, the same tape plays over and over until months flash by without leaving a single footprint of stimulation. When you throw crystal meth into the mix, every moment has potential for memory-making. I’ve had certain weeks on meth that could be turned into an entire series of graphic novels. The stories just end up writing themselves when you put yourself in a near-death situation on a daily basis. I’m not saying that heroin doesn’t get you into some deadly predicaments, but a junkie will only risk his life to obtain more heroin. A tweaker, on the other hand, could risk his life over a cool stick that he found. Meth just seems to attract death like a magnet.
The job was going great, I was keeping my heroin habit afloat, and Hugo was giving me free meth every morning. Although under the impression that I’d never do crystal in my life before I took the job, I began requesting part of my take-home pay in speed before the end of the week. A few days after that, I broke Hugo’s cardinal rule by acquiring my first meth pipe, and with that first hit I passed the point of no return.
Unsurprisingly, there were issues with me graduating. Sure, I turned in my fifty-page senior thesis of meth gibberish, but even if I hadn’t gotten an F on it, it still wouldn’t have been enough to get a passing grade after not showing up the entire semester. Despite not completing my major and failing all my other classes, UC Santa Cruz allowed me to walk with my graduating class. This was under an agreement that I would stay for summer school and fall quarter to make up my required credits, which was a kind gesture, but I would, of course, not uphold my end of the bargain.
Aunt Betty drove down to Santa Cruz for my graduation, as well as my Uncle Neal, who drove up from Los Angeles. I was a wreck, and my family had their suspicions, but after some devious convincing on my part, they chalked it up to stress from my “breakup” with Melissa. Somewhere inside I was heartbroken, but my new cocktail of drugs was distracting me entirely from my feelings about it. Still, the breakup was the perfect excuse to explain my erratic behavior, weight loss, and scholastic troubles.
Melissa was also back in town to attend graduation, and unfortunately for me, she needed her car back. Her parents wouldn’t even let me see her, which I thought was ruthless at the time, but now understand that they did the right thing. In fact, I’d end up never seeing her again, and she would end up getting off heroin forever and living a prosperous life. I commend her parents for protecting her from me.
They requested that I not be at the house when they came by to pick up the car. I obeyed but found myself in quite the quandary. Not having a car was going to put a damper on my career aspirations with Hugo, so I needed to convince my aunt to let me borrow hers for the summer.
She knew that I would need to stay in Santa Cruz for the summer session to make up missing credits, which she was disappointed about, but knew that there was no other solution if I were to graduate in a timely fashion. I manufactured a lie about the limited summer bus schedule and eventually got her to agree to lend me her second car. She took me back to Piedmont where she gave me money for June’s rent and the keys to her ’91 Toyota Corolla station wagon. None of that money would end up being spent on rent, the Corolla would not be used even once to get to class, and unbeknownst to either of us, that would be the last we spoke in person for twelve years. I was an absolute bastard that summer.
Hugo got wise to my erratic behavior on meth and gave me my first verbal warning. I assured him that I wasn’t smoking the stuff—only snorting it like company policy stated—but he was no amateur. My paranoid rants over the walkie-talkie started to become more frequent, and when I accused him of cutting the dope he was paying me with, he kindly asked me to “clock out” for the last time. To this day, this was the only job that I’ve ever been fired from. Usually, I have a knack for quitting just before the hammer drops, but Hugo was too on the ball. Plus, I had become completely delusional at that point and was much more concerned with the imagined people following me than retaining steady employment. I wasn’t happy about losing the job, but in my shattered mind, there were bigger issues at play.
When you get high on meth and stay awake for days on end, you start hearing voices. In my case, the voices that I always heard were realistic. They were the voices of my roommates, my neighbors, and sure, the occasional conversation with “God,” but most of what I heard was people that I cared about saying negative things about me: my friends saying that they didn’t like me anymore, my neighbor telling his wife that he was going to call the police on me, or my roommates plotting to kick me out of the house. Although this sounds rather tame for your typical drug hallucination, it thoroughly distressed all my (remaining) personal relationships and magnified my sense of alienation. My neighbor, who I used to chat with regularly, now avoided me at all costs due to my new habit of dementedly staring at him through my rumpled blinds. My close friends, who I now texted daily accusing them of spying on me through my window, couldn’t deal with my madness anymore. Meth was what caused me to lose what little sense I had left of belonging anywhere.
My already short list of acquaintances dwindled down to zero, so I started a quest to find new friends—friends that shared the same hobbies as me, like smoking meth. Due to my falling out with Hugo, I started buying drugs from a new dealer that went by the name of G, and we hit it off from the start. We met through a junkie friend at a Taco Bell parking lot, where G rolled up to my vehicle on a Mongoose BMX. He was without a car, and I was without a friend, so naturally we formed a semi-professional relationship almost immediately.
After hanging out a bit, mostly just helping G run errands in exchange for dope, I discovered that he was quite enlightened for a crystal meth dealer. We liked some of the same movies, books, and music and could hold a higher level of conversation than what was possible with Hugo. I found out that G was temporarily living in another customer’s garage, so I offered to let him stay with me in my bedroom. I was still living with college housemates, some of which had been close friends of mine since freshman year, but everyone was in the process of moving out. It was already mid-June, so with our lease ending at the end of the month, I figured nobody would mind a short-term visitor.
Despite their initial protest, my roommates failed in their attempt to stop me. They knew that the lease was up in a matter of weeks, and frankly, they probably felt uncomfortable arguing with me about anything. Between my meth psychosis and lack of hygiene, interacting with me on any level was not for the faint of heart. G, who shared my lack of empathy and meth-induced repugnance, set up shop in my room and introduced me to his circle of customers and colleagues.
In the days leading up to July, I came up with what I thought was a wonderful idea: not moving out once the lease was up. Given that my portion of June’s rent was already nearly a month late, this would be an exceptionally ballsy move. Some tweaker the night prior was yammering about squatters’ rights and how in California it’s the law that you don’t have to move out of your house once your lease is up. Now this particular tweaker didn’t strike me as a law student, but I figured that he might have had a history of actually getting away with this. Instead of verifying, I made the assumption and committed to the plan. Up until the second week of July, it worked flawlessly.
Then the police came. My landlord had been calling me nonstop, but I assumed he would stop by in person before he called the authorities. I hadn’t slept since June, so my judgment wasn’t quite up to par. After getting formally evicted, I packed my car—or to be more accurate, Aunt Betty’s car—with my essential belongings and left everything else behind. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew that wherever it was, I probably wasn’t going to need a dresser.
On that glorious day, my extensive career of homelessness had sprung. Not yet would I experience true homelessness—the literal absence of all shelter—but rather I started my journey with training wheels. You can’t learn to walk before you crawl, and in this metaphor, by crawling I mean living in a water-tight vehicle. Houseless is really the correct term for such a predicament, for one is not truly homeless unless one fears when it rains, in my opinion. That’s the graduate school of destitution, whereas having a car to sleep in is still kindergarten.
I continued to tag around with G and help him sell dope, in exchange for getting free drugs and companionship. When one is completely broken, they’ll latch onto anyone willing to associate. We had nowhere to sleep comfortably anymore, but then again, we hadn’t slept much since we’d met each other. Roaming the streets of Santa Cruz at all hours of the night, G introduced me to most staples of tweakerdom: breaking into cars, picking through dumpsters, stealing bikes, and falsely suspecting one another of plotting murder.
During this early period of my love affair with meth, I developed the adverse habit of fictive speculation. No matter who I was with or what we were doing, I always ended up thinking that someone was trying to kill me. This didn’t always sit well with G and his cohorts, but my value as someone with a vehicle encouraged them to accept it. After all, they were guilty of the same thing on occasion. However, I was the most novice and, therefore, was still adjusting to a life of constant hallucination.
One specific example that sticks out is when G played the song “Guilty Conscience” on his phone through my car stereo. Despite being extremely familiar with the song, every lyric that I heard coming through the speakers didn’t match up with my memory. Giving it a closer listen, I discovered that every line was a specific reference to my own personal murder. I accused G and the others of downloading the instrumental track of the song, and then using a production program to record their own verses over the track, rapping as if they were Eminem about how they were going to torture me until I died. This was impossible, given that none of us had access to electricity, let alone a music studio, but still, I couldn’t deny what I was hearing.
I slammed the brakes in the middle of an intersection and ripped the auxiliary cord out of the tape deck. After pulling over and having a mental breakdown for a few minutes, G and his friends were able to calm me down and bring me back to Earth. It’s not easy accepting that what you hear with your own ears may only be a product of your own imagination, and for some, this revelation never comes. Fortunately, after months of training, I would eventually be able to free myself from these auditory hallucinations. In the course of time they couldn’t trick me anymore, and once I saw through the façade of my own fabricated reality, they faded into obscurity. The visual and mental hallucinations would persist, however, no matter how hard I tried to overcome them. What can I say, you’d be a fool to think you could tame meth outright. Many who have tried are living under a freeway overpass at this very moment, screaming in horror at things that don’t even exist.
About a week after the “Guilty Conscience” event, G confessed his love for me. Alone in the car, he shed several tears while explaining that our friendship had inspired strong sexual and emotional feelings. This was extremely unexpected. G not only had the persona of a machismo thug, but he always made an effort, uncomfortably so, to express interest in his female customers. However, none of these expressions were ever acted upon to my knowledge, and looking back, I realized that his uber-heterosexuality had always felt a bit forced. He was perhaps a closeted man, who felt that he needed to hide his orientation in order to maintain a tough persona. To this day I’m still not sure, nor would I ever judge him for being gay. The issue was that he had fallen in love with me (for some reason), and the feeling wasn’t mutual. Despite being the kind of guy that could move past something like this, I wasn’t sure if G was. I was correct. In a fit of anger, he told me I’d have to “get on my knees and work for it” if I ever wanted a bag of dope from him again, which I didn’t take kindly to. We parted ways, never to see each other again, but I’d find out years later that he got clean in prison and lives a normal life today.
Without G by my side, I’d learn quickly that being alone while homeless made the whole ordeal much more tangible. When in a painful situation, we drug addicts seek to numb, not only by way of chemicals but also through any remnant of a human connection. Sometimes this is expressed through screaming at strangers on the sidewalk, but for the more fortunate who haven’t completely lost their marbles yet, we seek anyone willing to accompany us on a shared downward spiral.
Ben—a sociopath that I’d met through G—liked to get high the way I liked to get high and seemed like a good candidate to become my new junkie partner. I sought him out, moved him into my car, and we teamed up to tackle our common goal of suppressing our tragic realities. He even let me tag along on a few home invasions—which felt a bit above my pay grade. I knew breaking into houses was not exactly petty theft, but I wasn’t aware that it could be a fifteen-year prison sentence if you got caught. I’m beyond blessed that I never got arrested during that brief crime spree, or else I’d be writing this in a prison cell. Perhaps that’s what I deserve.
One time we had been awake for nearly five days when we got our hands on some very potent heroin. I, still being a smoker, brought the lighter to the foil and inhaled a plume of smoke that tasted like red wine and dirt. Never had I tasted heroin so earthy, as if it had come straight off the poppy from the soils of Afghanistan. As wonderful as this sounds, it wasn’t a great combination with not having slept for many a day, and I ended up getting higher than I intended to.
Normally there’s no such thing as “higher than I intended to,” but in this case I was driving a car that I wished to keep from ending up wrapped around a tree. My heroin nod crept slowly until it caused me to fall out of consciousness (Hugo’s caution was valid), and I slipped into a state of sleep while traveling thirty miles per hour. Deep in slumber, my mind stayed vacant only for a moment until I was awoken by my collision with a parked Lexus.
Lucky for Ben and me—two men that had no value for their own lives—we had our seatbelts buckled for some odd reason. Both cars were totaled, but our worthless lives were not. My car was filled to the brim with drug paraphernalia, so I had no desire to interact with the police, although this would become unavoidable if I didn’t disappear immediately. Despite being smashed to hell and no longer able to make much of a left turn, this wasn’t enough to hold me back from fleeing the scene. After all, I wasn’t about to have my house impounded. We continued on for several weeks, only able to make right turns, until an event would cause us to lose the car and we’d both graduate to true homelessness.
***
We used to occasionally buy heroin from this guy named Steve. That’s what he said his name was, but it definitely wasn’t his real name. He only spoke Spanish, and you never had to call him. You just had to drive about a mile and a half up the Pacific Coast Highway and park across the road from a strawberry stand. There you would find a sand path that led down to the beach, and if the sun was still up, Steve would always be standing in a rocky alcove about fifty feet from the water.
If he recognized you, you would tell him how much heroin you wanted to buy, then he would walk over to a rock in the sand where he kept a box full of dope buried underneath. It wasn’t very good dope, but everyone else was out and he was our only option. As a heroin addict, you always have to keep two or three dealers at a time, because sometimes one runs out and the other won’t answer the phone. That’s when you need a Steve.
Ben and I were on our way to meet him when cop lights appeared in my rear-view mirror. I was being pulled over for the first time in my life. Relieved that we were merely on our way to purchase heroin and not in possession of it yet, I steered my way over to the breakdown lane and waited for the officer to approach the thrashed vehicle.
“What happened to your car?” the cop asked as I cranked my window down.
“Oh, you mean the front? Um, the damage in the front, yeah, I hit a telephone pole, Officer. She still drives fine, though,” I replied.
“Alright, we’ll get to that, but first—you’re Jared Klickstein?” He asked, somehow knowing my name before seeing my ID. Unless you’re a celebrity, that’s never a good sign.
“Wait, what? That’s crazy!” Befuddled, I looked over to Ben, who looked like he’d seen a ghost. “I mean, yes, that’s me, but what’s going on? How do you know that?”
“Is this your vehicle, Jared?”
“What, this…this vehicle, yes, well, no, not technically, but…my aunt, she—”
“Because it’s been reported stolen by its owner, and she’s standing by my cruiser. Can you look in your rear-view mirror and tell me if that’s your aunt?”
I was in shock. I gazed up at the mirror and saw Aunt Betty visibly upset, even from thirty feet away.
“Yeah….” I took a moment to absorb the gravity of the situation. “That’s her. I don’t know how the hell, what the hell is goin’ on, but you gotta… Officer, you gotta listen to me because I didn’t steal this car, she let me borrow it. And yes, I forgot to return it, or respond to my aunt’s messages, but life gets pretty complicated sometimes and—”
“Alright, this is what’s gonna happen. You and your friend are gonna vacate the vehicle and empty it of all your belongings. Then you’re gonna walk about a hundred feet up the road, and not make eye contact with your aunt while she gets in the car and drives away. And by the looks of it, she’s probably gonna have to take it straight to a garage. You’re lucky, though, she said as long as she gets the car back with no fuss, she won’t press charges. You follow all that?”
“Yeah, but…can I just talk to her for a minute? I really need to talk to her, man, can I just—”
“No. She made it very clear she doesn’t want to talk, or even make eye contact with you.” I was speechless as he continued, “So start gettin’ your shit out of the car. And maybe think about gettin’ off the dope too. You’ve got your aunt worried sick.”
Ben and I emptied the car of our few belongings, hiked a minute on foot up the road, and watched from a distance as Aunt Betty made a lopsided U-turn in the burgundy station wagon. Deep down I did love my aunt, despite never showing it once, and this made for an anguished relationship from day one. I had been a rotten, untamed animal of a child, thrown into her arms out of nowhere, and this final act of desecration really put the nail in the coffin. I was never a good nephew. Not once. Nor did I ever show a drop of gratitude for the sacrifice she made by taking me in. She wasn’t perfect, but who could be in a situation like that? With years of mental torture under her belt from my attitude and behavior, this final event would be the conclusion of our relationship; my biggest regret until the day I die. There’s no bigger crime I’ve ever committed than the way I treated the woman that saved my life.
I felt awful about what I had put her through just then, yet my concern for getting dope outweighed any feelings of remorse. I was starting to feel dopesick, and we were still a good half mile away from the beach where Steve was, so the reality of destroying my relationship with Aunt Betty was unable to be absorbed. When you need heroin, nothing else can permeate.
We trekked down PCH until we reached Steve, bought our dope, and got high—all before we had a single concern about the fact that we no longer had a vehicle. My Santa Cruz run had tuckered out. Ben and I walked back to town and parted ways for good.
After a week or so of stealing bikes to finance my habit and sleeping by the river, I’d grown too lonely in my homelessness and got ahold of Uncle Neal. Having expressed his suspicions of my drug use at my graduation ceremony a few months back, I figured I could come clean to him and ask for some help. I told him that I had a drug problem—although I downplayed it by saying I was only using Vicodin—and that I needed to go to rehab. Did I want to go to rehab? Certainly not, but I also didn’t want to be homeless in Santa Cruz anymore. I was far from mastering the twenty-four seven hustle of a street junkie and had simply ran out of gas for the time being.
Neal loved me deeply, and although he hadn’t adopted me like my dad’s sister after shit hit the fan in Boston, he was my main father figure throughout my time in California. He and his wife (Aunt Suzanne) had me stay with them every few months in LA for a long weekend, as well as every summer since I’d moved in with Aunt Betty and Uncle Tim. We were extremely close, and when I explained my dire situation, he couldn’t help but weep over the phone. I was the offspring of his sister—his sibling who was no longer alive due to the very affliction I now had. And like his sister, I manipulated my family members to do what I wanted them to do—and in this case, I wanted my uncle to provide me an opportunity that I would undoubtedly squander. He purchased me a bus ticket and told me he’d give me one chance.
***
Most people have not smoked crystal meth in the bathroom of a moving Greyhound bus, but it’s safe to say that most bathrooms on Greyhound buses have had crystal meth smoked in them. The bathroom on the bus that I took that night to Los Angeles was no exception to this rule. In fact, I probably wasn’t the only person that smoked meth in the bathroom during that very ride. This is the nature of long-distance bus travel. If you prefer to use a bathroom during your travels that doesn’t smell like meth smoke, I would advise you to stick to airplanes—but even then, no form of transportation is guaranteed to be free of such behavior.
The Los Angeles Greyhound station is on East Seventh Street and Alameda, right on the border of downtown and Skid Row. It would become a familiar neighborhood a few weeks after my arrival. I called Uncle Neal and asked him to pick me up, but he was at work and told me that I would have to take the city bus to his office. “How dare he!” I thought. I in no way recognized, let alone cared about, how this was affecting him, and couldn’t let go of the fact that I wasn’t being catered to.
Blinded by my youthful impotence, I believed none of this was my fault, specifically because I was the victim of a troubled childhood and bad genetics. “How dare they!”—this would be my battle cry for many a troubled year to come. A battle with no one other than the voice in my own head. “This is not how you treat a wounded animal” and other such nonsense. I would eventually come to find out that this attitude would only get me deeper in the hole of degeneracy, but by then I’d already have dug myself to the other side of the earth. Obsessing over my own so-called victimhood had always been on my “greatest hits” of selfish thought patterns, and until it alienated me from every single person that ever loved me, I ran around that maze until I had exhausted every path. Maybe I had a predisposition to addiction. And maybe I didn’t have the greatest childhood. Maybe my mom wasn’t supposed to die and I wasn’t supposed to get prescribed Percocet after my wisdom teeth were pulled. None of it matters now. Self-pity and what-ifs never got anyone out of a coffin.
My uncle was expecting his slightly disheveled “Vicodin”-addicted nephew, and therefore felt comfortable with me showing up at his place of work. He was a lawyer at a reputable law firm in West LA who had trusted me when I told him that I was in a presentable condition. I wasn’t lying when I told him this; I really believed I looked just one notch below normal. Being thirty pounds underweight and not having showered or washed my clothes in many weeks, however, I was closer to one notch above dead. Clothing and stench aside, my grooming was also not up to par. My hair was lacquered in a summer’s worth of meth sweat, which was accompanied by a strip of pubic hair above my upper lip. I had shaved at the Greyhound station and on a whim decided to keep my premature mustache to look more orderly. It didn’t work.
Upon my embarrassing arrival at his office, he dragged me to his car immediately, somehow avoided homicide, and drove me directly to his house. The first thing he said to me in the car was that I looked just like my mother, followed by several minutes of tears. What may have been the saddest thing anyone had ever said to me flew right over my head. The falsity of the Vicodin story was immediate, so I explained my version of reality—which only heightened my resemblance to Mom.
Completely absent was my recognition of the magnitude of my problem, and therefore my plan of detoxing myself on my uncle’s couch was not met with enthusiasm. I told him that I had brought a bag of methadone pills with me, and that this would all be over in a week if he would just let me sweat it out in his living room.
“Jared…I don’t even want to let you into my house, let alone have you kick drugs in front of my children. Are you fucking insane? One of my kids could get ahold of the methadone and die, this is ridiculous!”
“Neal, come on. You’re not going to let me into your house? What am I, some kind of animal?” I snarled. “What the fuck did I even come down here for, I mean, I know you have a family—they’re my family too! I love them and would never put them in danger. Besides, this could be a good opportunity for me to get to know my little cousins better.”
“Jared, your cousins are old enough now that they ask questions. You wouldn’t know; you’ve put zero effort into visiting them the past few years. They aren’t babies anymore…. What do you think I’m gonna do, let their long-lost, meth-addicted cousin babysit? You’re out of your fuckin’ mind.”
Who wants a junkie in their house, let alone around their children? He knew that I was around junkies when I was growing up, and look how the fuck I turned out. I attempted several more times to convince him he was blowing this out of proportion, but my attempt at manipulation was no match for his instinct to protect his family.
We agreed that he would take me to his house under the agreement that I would have a plan within twenty-four hours. Once there, we verified that my university health insurance was active for a few more months. I found a detox in Pasadena, and the plan was that while I was there, Aunt Suzanne and Uncle Neal would find an inpatient rehab that my insurance would cover as well.
Everyone was satisfied—especially me, who honestly believed that I would soon wake from this nightmare. All I would have to do was detox, go to rehab, get cured, never use heroin or meth again, and go back to the normal life of a college student. Simple. The physical addiction to heroin was my only issue, I believed. Once busted free from that ball and chain, this horrific chapter in my life would finally come to an end. Addiction will always weaponize the naïveté of those it holds captive.
I would later find out, repeatedly, that breaking the physical addiction to heroin was actually the easiest part of the whole deal. That’s not to downplay the most brutal discomfort and pain I’ve ever gone through (many a time), but at least you know that the physical pain eventually ends. It will always go away with time. However, the mind that continually gets you into this mess is the true menace. Short of a lobotomy, there isn’t a simple solution to this aspect of addiction. The fix, often spiritual in some capacity, requires daily maintenance, and most don’t become willing until after immense repercussions.
The “coming to” after a few weeks of physical misery is what really hurts; waking up and realizing you’re still…you. That’s the real gripe about cleaning up: you figure out that using drugs didn’t turn you into a fucked-up person; it’s that you used the drugs to shield yourself from the fact that you’re so fucked up.
Too bad it would take me a decade of increasing consequences to iron that wrinkle out. Sometimes the weight of reality has to be sitting on your sternum before you can get a proper look at it.
I entered my first medial detox with a bag of methadone, a few dozen Ritalin, and a little bit of weed carefully tucked under my scrotum in case they searched me. They didn’t. This was what I would later find out to be one of the “fancy” places. Health insurance is a hell of a thing. Unlike every future state-run detox I would attempt to beg myself into, this place cost (my insurance) about five grand a day. They want that sweet insurance cash, so why would they risk having to kick you out by searching you for illegal drugs? This is a major problem with private rehabilitation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in competition and profit-motive driving innovation in nearly all sectors, but drug treatment isn’t one of them. Unless a facility doesn’t get paid until the patient is successfully clean for a segment of time after completion, there’s little drive to deliver a successful product. They get paid astronomical rates inflated by insurance without having to deliver any results. That’s a broken system. And with a new private rehab popping up every day in places like California and Florida, they begin competing to retain clientele by way of leniency and amenities as opposed to therapeutic services that work. The government doesn’t seem to do anything better than the private sector, except lose money. But for this one thing and one thing only, that might actually be an asset.
The detox had great food, semi-private rooms, cable TV, loads of Valium, and nurses that were essentially servants. They offered me sixteen milligrams of Subutex my first day and would “step me down” one milligram a day until I hit eight. Then they’d keep me on eight milligrams for the remaining six days until they cut me loose with essentially zero detoxification having occurred. Sure, I would have fourteen days of not using heroin under my belt, but taking that much Subutex for two weeks would just replace one physically addictive drug for the other. For those not well versed in opiate detox protocol, this was not a viable solution, but it does keep people doped up enough to stay for the entire two weeks. This way detox facilities ensure that they can get every dollar out of your insurance. If they detoxed you properly and made you feel the inevitable pain, most patients would leave early and thus not “pay” for the whole stay. Another major flaw in the private detox industry.
Contrary to my initial reaction, detox was turning out to be rather fun. Everyone that I befriended had snuck some amount of drugs in, making it feel more like a supervised dope house than an actual medical facility. One girl was even having her friend come at night and throw bags of heroin over the fence of the outside smoking area. Lucky for me I had plenty of Ritalin to trade.
Ashley, the girl who was getting heroin delivered, was a mildly attractive broken pixie type. Short hair, skinny frame, and skin the color of spoiled cream, Ashley was the epitome of suburban junkie trash. Nevertheless, I thought she was cute, and when she told me that her dad was a wealthy pushover, I “fell in love.”
At the end of my two-week stint, the doctor told me I was ready to move on to my next step of the scam. Given that I hadn’t experienced a single withdrawal symptom during my entire stay, I certainly wasn’t ready for residential rehab, but I’d have to make do. Unbeknownst to him, I had either used heroin or methadone on each day I was there, but even if I had followed his protocol, I wouldn’t have been much better off. The real pain hadn’t even started yet—this, I was somewhat aware of—but I had nowhere else to go. Aunt Suzanne found a rehab through my insurance where I would have to kick cold turkey.
The rehab arranged for my transportation from the detox, but I was adamant about handling this myself. The slim chance that I could find a way to get high one last time was enough for me to pass up a free ride and make the ten-mile trek on my own.
Minutes before I was to be released from detox, I went through an exit interview conducted by a doctor. He brought me into a private room, sat me down, and joined me after he placed his wallet and car keys on the table. He asked me several questions regarding my symptoms, went through the motions, and concluded that I was fit for release. I would still need to sign some paperwork—which he forgot at the nurse’s station—so he left the room and told me that he would be back shortly.
Once he was gone, my sticky fingers made their way over to his wallet, which had four crisp twenty-dollar bills. I put forty in my pocket and forty back in the wallet, just in case he gave it a quick scan after he walked back in. When he returned, he actually made a comment about leaving his wallet and car keys behind, implying sarcastically that he was lucky that I didn’t run off with his car. I chuckled nervously, and then urged him to expedite my discharge so I could move on to my “next chapter in recovery.”
When the security guard opened the door to release me, Ashley came out of the woodwork and sprinted past the both of us. I didn’t know if she liked me, or if she was just excited about the forty dollars I told her I had stolen, but either way, I guess we were an item now. That’s just how junkie love works.
I didn’t want to show up too late to the rehab, not out of fear of them caring—I knew they wouldn’t give a shit as long as they could bill my insurance for the day, but out of fear that word would get back to my aunt and uncle. Because of the time constraint, Ashley suggested we take the subway to Skid Row. She assured me that we would be guaranteed to find dope immediately, which I took with a grain of salt, but I wound up being proven wrong upon our arrival.
Many cities across the nation claim to have their own “Skid Row” section of town, but I’m confident in saying that there’s no slum in America that compares to that of Downtown Los Angeles[AS1] . It’s a futuristic time capsule of a post-apocalyptic city crammed into ten square blocks. Imagine what the Great Depression might have looked like in the middle of a metropolitan area, and then add monthly Social Security checks and grade A narcotics. This was Skid Row. All the characters looked similar to those of Mad Max if only they had been fighting over crack cocaine instead of gasoline. An estimated ten thousand people lived in this tiny, unmanaged sector, which was validated by the clusters of half-dead human traffic, streams of sewage, and the persistent stench of crowded death.
It was absolutely terrifying seeing it all for the first time, but despite the hysteria and several threats of violence we received, it turned out to be the most reliable place to buy drugs that I’d ever seen. Acquiring heroin is not easy in most cities; you usually need to know people and establish a solid connection if you want consistent access to good product. Cold copping in most cities can result in getting robbed, sold fake dope, or even getting arrested, before ever actually getting your hands on some decent heroin.
Not on LA’s Skid Row. The quality isn’t the best, but it’s good enough, and dealers often argue with each other and fight for your business. It was an open-air free market where you could buy dope, a syringe, crack cocaine, a pipe, lighter, cigarette, and even a Shasta Cola, all from the same person. It was junkie heaven.
Ashley and I got high, took the train back to Pasadena, and we said our goodbyes. She was off to do God knows what on her father’s dime, and I was to begin my lackluster attempt at recovery. The rehab where I was going to spend the next fourteen days was at a palatial Victorian house close to Downtown Pasadena in the San Gabriel Valley. This was an upscale place, complete with yoga classes, trips to the beach, and a personal chef that cooked for the forty or so men that lived there. The staff meant well, but business was business, and when there’s millions to be milked from insurance companies, lines get blurry. Can you blame them? It’s not like the rehabs are directly robbing their clients—only the few that pay out of pocket—they’re only robbing the insurance companies blind, who are no less guilty of the same crime against their own policy holders. Most of the time, unfortunately, it’s just one big game of fuckery. A lot of rehabs have good intentions, but good intentions are hard to maintain when there’s that much money on the line. Do they save lives? Yes. Have some of them been guilty of enabling addicts all the way to their deathbeds? Yes. Is addiction a nearly incomprehensible human condition that we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding how to treat? Yes. All three things can be true at the same time.
The most important thing that rehabs do are separate you from drugs for a period of time and provide you with some human connection. Like I stated before, drugs can obviously infiltrate rehabs just like they do jails, but typically, they’re much more difficult to obtain in both places than on the streets. If you’re in treatment long enough and remain close after you depart, they can sometimes provide clients with a sense of community—another key factor in fighting addiction. Rehabs also introduce clientele to the lifelong communities of twelve-step programs, which are free, but aren’t always easy to get involved in on your own without a rehab to essentially force you at first. Are these services worth thousands of dollars a day? Of course not. And do a lot of private rehabs employ nefarious doctors that overdiagnose and overmedicate? Yes. But even so, plenty of people do turn their lives around at private rehabs, even the fancy ones like the one I went to.
My university insurance would only cover fourteen days of inpatient rehab, as opposed to the typical twenty-eight, and subsidized this with covering up to three months of “intensive outpatient care.” This meant that I would be on lockdown at the rehab for two weeks, then be transferred to the sober living section of the facility, where I would be free to come and go as I pleased as long as I attended my “treatment” sessions. What this meant to me was that I was going to stay completely sober for two weeks, and then be able to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do as long as I showed face and kept up appearances. I lasted about a month before getting kicked out for my fifth dirty urine test.
I was drifting nowhere, not staying sober, and knew that this day was going to eventually come. Uncle Neal had already gotten word that I had tested dirty several times, so he had written me off for good. Apparently when he said I had one chance, he meant it, and rightfully so. Leeching off my family any further was out of the cards, so I had to come up with a plan.
Several of my rehab brethren pitched in and gave me a couple packs of cigarettes and about sixty dollars to help with whatever bad decisions were in my immediate future.
We were all caught up on the news cycle—there’s a lot of watching TV at rehab, which had been dominated by the budding civil unrest occurring across the country. What I’m referring to was the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was an organized reaction towards the 2009 bank bailouts and the widening gap between the rich and poor. New York City was obviously where this movement kicked off, but other cities—most notably Los Angeles—followed shortly after. One of my rehab friends suggested that I take the train downtown and live at the Occupy LA protest until I managed to figure out a better long-term plan. My first stop was obviously going to get high, so a “better long-term plan” wasn’t in the cards. Still, showing up to this protest seemed like the most logical step for me. It also didn’t hurt that Occupy LA was only about ten blocks west from Skid Row, where I planned on immediately spending that sixty dollars on drugs.
Watching you on Jesse Watters. It’s nice to see you again. Thank you for your words.