Lived Through This
I Didn’t Want to Get High. I Wanted to Get to Zero.
Mastering the art of self-medication
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It was a Wednesday, it was hot, and we were high.
I never learned his real name, because I didn’t need to know his real name. All I knew was he had very real drugs, that got us very real high, in a very small midtown apartment.
At some point in the three days preceding that one, the idea of getting high with an interview subject began to sound less and less like a bad idea. The more I thought about it, in fact, the better I became at rationalizing it. A quick little bump of coke to snap me out of the funk I was in, no harm no foul, right? After all, my subject was a drug dealer on the dark web, and I owed it to my readers to find out if his shit was any good.
He’d already offered me a sample during the interview, but I’d declined. This time however, as I walked toward his front door to leave, the temptation to snort the little white line of powder sitting on his coffee table proved too great. I put my bag down next to a decoy baby carriage, filled with drugs ready for transport, and took a seat on his couch.
“Here you go,” he said, handing me a rolled up 20 dollar bill. “You can do the honors.”
I was never really into coke; it never gave me that euphoric high it seemed to give everyone else. But I was a guest in his home, ya know? I didn’t want to be rude.
“Thanks man,” I muttered. The line seemed big. “Are we splitting this, or…”
“Nope, that’s all you,” he shot back.
My mouth started watering in anticipation, the way it does whenever drugs are around. I’m like Pavlov’s dog’s fucked up cousin. Leaning forward, I placed one end of the rolled up bill to the far right of the line, the other end up my right nostril, and hoovered it up.
.ffinS
My eyes closed and my eyebrows shot toward the ceiling. I immediately felt a burn somewhere between my nose and the back of my throat.
“Ooooohhhhhh fuuuuuuuuck,” I managed to say without moving my jaw. “That’ssssss not cocaine.” It felt like I’d snorted a line of glass.
“Oh, I’m sorry, bro. I thought you knew what that was,” he said, sounding genuinely apologetic. “You couldn’t tell before you did it? That was Criss.”
Stage name: Crystal Methamphetamine.
There were a few things on my itinerary when I got dressed that morning. Dry cleaner. Interview. DMV. Sniffing a line of crystal meth didn’t make the cut.
“You’re a cocaine dealer,” I said, my jaw still unwilling to open. “Why would I think that was anything but cocaine?”
“Oh, bro, don’t you know? Biggie’s ‘Ten Crack Commandments’? Rule number four: Never get high on your — ”
“I know the fucking song.”
Then I sat there. The pain in my sinuses felt like an excruciatingly cold electric shock. It moved from my nose to the back of my throat, floating upward to my eyes, to my frontal lobe, until it finally bounced off the back of my head. The subsequent drip in my throat tasted disgusting.
“SHIT,” I said. “That burns. BAD.”
“My bad, bro, I, fuckin, didn’t even think of that.”
He stood up and I lay down on the couch with my forearms on my forehead, staring at his ceiling fan that wasn’t doing a damn thing to combat the miserable, sweltering Sacramento heat. As I lay there, I had the thought:
How did I end up back here?
A few years earlier, I had what some might consider a “relapse” after being prescribed Adderall by a doctor. Although I kept far away from my beloved opiates and benzos, I went a little crazy with the amphetamine salts. But this? This felt like a whole new level. This was a whole new adventure. This time I was on a drug dealer’s couch, sweating and snorting methamphetamine, while writing a story about drugs on the dark web for the Sacramento News & Review. I won’t say it was a new low, because it wasn’t. But it didn’t feel good.
I felt guilt. I felt shame. Then I felt the drugs, and I didn’t feel any of it.
I’ve since come to learn that I was experiencing the lows of an undiagnosed type-2 bipolar cycle that summer. But at the time? I just thought I felt bad because that’s how life felt.
Bad.
I didn’t know the signs of depression.
I isolated because fuck you, that’s why.
Family? Friends? I didn’t wanna see them, and they didn’t wanna see me, and most importantly — I didn’t want them to see me. No, no — not like this. Not when I hadn’t showered in two weeks.
And no, I told myself, this isn’t my depression talking, and fuck you for saying that. I always feel this way. ALWAYS. And I always will. It’ll never change, because it never has. This is how I feel and how I’ve always felt. All those times before, when I looked happy? In pictures, when I was smiling? I was faking it. I really felt like this. I just stuffed it down to pose for pictures, but this was always in there. So wrap that around your little fucking happy family memories.
And while we’re on the subject, I’m gonna be blowing off my friends and my family’s birthdays, graduations, and get-togethers from here on out. You see, these occasions require both effort and energy, and we all know that ain’t happening. So I’m just gonna no-show until they collectively stop inviting me places. And fuck them for doing that.
I’m a fuck up. My family knows it. My friends know it. I know it. And forget writing, forget working, forget money, fuck the system, can I please lay back down? I was watching House.
These were the cold, dark musings of a man going mad. One day I felt alive; the next I did not. It wasn’t gradual, and there was no notice. It was really that simple, and really that unfair.
I wasn’t suicidal but I did start taking a razor blade to my left arm, which I’d start slicing in all directions, between my elbow and shoulder. It didn’t feel good, but at least it felt like something, ya know? I didn’t want to die, but I was upset that I had to live.
If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about.
The aforementioned first relapse occurred after I’d secured some Adderall from a doctor who didn’t know better. He asked me what I write about, and I didn’t know what to say. Drugs? While I was trying to get him to give me drugs? No.
No, no, no. That’d be super awkward. Like the time my drug dealer asked me to sign my book.
“Oh, you know… This ’n’ that,” I said, before quickly changing the subject.
He wrote the prescription.
I promised myself I’d take my medication as prescribed. Take it as prescribed, Jason. Take it as prescribed, take it as prescribed.
I began severely abusing my medication in the time it took to order and eat a Sourdough Cheeseburger from Jack in the Box.
Before you judge, consider a few things. I’d never gone to therapy or seen a psychiatrist in my life. As a kid, I watched a man die right in front of me and didn’t so much as get handed a fucking self-help book.“Mental health” was a term I didn’t learn until college. Like, literally, I’d never heard it.
So where do you think I went for help instead?
To a world I did know. To a world I did understand. Back to a world where I spoke the language and knew the dealers’ numbers by heart. Where I knew how to get it and how much and who sold what, where.
And goddamn it, I needed some energy. I needed a pick-me-up. I needed out of my depression. I needed it.
During that depression cycle, I was about 3/4 the way through a story I was writing called “Kingpins” — which I suddenly couldn’t do. The publisher of that piece grew extremely frustrated, and I didn’t know what to tell him because I didn’t know what was wrong with me.
I just wanted to get to start at the same place each morning as the rest of the world. It wasn’t that I wanted to get high so much as I wanted to get to zero. I wanted to wake up each day and feel normal, like everyone else. It felt like there was a race, and I was starting way farther back than the rest of them. All I wanted was to reach the starting line.
It was textbook self-medicating.
And the depression eventually lifted, like it always does.
But it also returned, four years later, like it always does.
And that’s when I found myself lying on my back. On a dark web drug dealer’s couch. High on crystal meth. With my forearms on my forehead. Staring at a ceiling fan. Wondering where I went wrong.
