The Art of Ruin

Being a junkie is a lot harder than people think. Most picture junkies as lazy beggars who don't do anything more than sit around and ask for handouts. It's not like that at all. Maintaining an addiction is a full-time job. There was a time in my life when I knew just what it was like.

Every morning, from the second I woke up, was dedicated to one thing. It was all-consuming, and everything else would be put on the back burner for it. I had to get high, no matter what. Usually, I was broke. I had enough to get myself to work and keep the internet going so I could do school online, but everything else was fair game. More often than not, the only way that I could possibly come up with the scratch that I needed, was to make my pilgrimage to junkie mecca: the pawnshop.

That's when the cycle would start. Phase one was one was always the worst. I needed to figure out what I could safely get rid of. Usually electronics went first. I can't even tell you how many Playstations, cell phones and other gadgets that I went through. I always told myself that I would get them back before the contract was up, but I always knew that it was a lie. In the year that I made my near-daily trip to one of the local pawnshops, I maybe ended up getting my stuff back three or four times. Hell, I even went without a cellphone for the better part of it because I could never hold onto them. I would find a free plan somewhere that would let me get the newest Iphone or Galaxy on credit and take it to the pawnshop within a week.

Once the final decision on what to sell was made, it was time to make the trip. This is where the anticipation phase begins. I would go through all the possibilities in my mind as I drove to the pawnshop, thinking about how I would bargain my way to the minimum that I needed to pick up. Unfortunately, as the heroin and meth markets started becoming monopolized in my hometown, the prices would constantly go up. The first time I smoked H, they charged me 10 dollars for a point (.1 grams), and that was the 'friend discount'. Within a few months I was paying 35 or more for a point of that awful, vinegar-tasting goo, and the quality was constantly dipping as it got more and more cut. Somehow, some way, I would always manage to make the cut and get what I needed.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. What happened when I ran out of things to pawn? Surely then I would have to kick the habit. Unfortunately, most junkies are resourceful in all the wrong ways. I would usually make a trip to my parent's house when they weren't home and see if I could pilfer anything of my stepdad's from the garage, knowing that it wouldn't be missed in the mess. Or, if that didn't work, I would prey on the good graces of the few charitable people that I knew to get what I needed. No matter what, there was always a way.

Then, once I had the cash in hand, the anticipation phase kicked into high-gear. Within minutes I was getting ahold of someone who could hook me up, and once a deal was set, I was stuck in the seemingly-infinite limbo that junkies like to refer to as 'tweaker-time'. Let me tell you a little something about drug dealers, especially those that used their own products. They don't give a fuck about what you want. They'll come through only when they're good-and-goddamned ready and not a second less. Sometimes this meant fifteen minutes, most of the time it meant three to five hours of waiting on some dickhead in an empty parking lot, chain smoking cigarettes and constantly swiveling my head from side to side, checking for police that I was sure were on the way.

Of course they weren't, though. For a town with more police per capita than NYC, they never seemed to actually be able to catch anyone. We thought we were clever, but we definitely weren't. I've gotten to the point now where I can spot a drug deal from 100 yards with pinpoint accuracy. Maybe I should have been a cop.

Anyway, once the dealer finally showed up, usually with a half-assed apology about having errands to run or some nonsense like that, it was go time. I never liked smoking at home. I was too paranoid to risk someone identifying that terrible vinegar smell for what it really was and having someone kick down my door and find me nodding out, surrounded by piles of used up tinfoil and old pens. We would always try and find a spot, usually a parking space in an apartment complex or somewhere up in the mountains outside of town.

Then, finally, I started to feel alright. Sometimes just the knowledge that the high was about to be had was enough to keep me level, but in those final moments, with the bindle in hand, my patience was at its end. It was time to get it going.

The tools of the trade were always the same. I never fucked around with needles, well at least not until the very end. I have small veins in my arms and if I wanted to shoot I had to find one in my foot. Plus, you can't OD from smoking (or so we all thought), so it was usually the best option. With my foil in hand and the pen and lighter ready, I slowly positioned my little lump of black gold.

Smoking tar is tricky. It burns fast and if you aren't holding the foil at the right angle then you're either going to melt it and lose the goo, or the smoke will go up in a plume instead of straight into the straw and you'll lose most of it. Either way, you're going to end up wasting everything that you've spent the whole day getting ready for. I've gotten into fights with people more than once over whose fault it was when the angle got cocked over and the stuff was wasted.

Then, finally, we enter the phase where you actually get high. One time someone who had never done any hard drugs asked me why I liked opiates so much and if I could describe what the high was like. I thought about It for a while, and I ended up coming up with a nice little analogy. Picture a sober life being a 90-degree angle. The edge is always sharp. Stress is high, times are tough, and everything just feels like it sucks. Then, when you finally get that sweet black smoke into your lungs, that terribly sharp angle turns itself into a nice, smooth semi-circle. It literally takes the edge out of life. It's like an apathetic state, but one that you actually feel good about. The world could be burning around you for all you care. None of it would matter, the edge is gone. All of your problems, no matter how terrible they might be, slip away for a little while, and you find peace. Unless, of course, you're already deeply addicted, then it's all it takes just to feel normal again.

That glorious high doesn't last for long. Nothing that wonderful ever does. Within a half-hour, the edge slowly snaps back into place. This is the instant-regret phase. I was sober. I had no drugs, no money and now, since I just took all my shit to the pawnshop, no possessions either.

Then, the anxiety would start again, and the mounting problem of what was needed to get back to grace would start again. Every time it was a little worse. I was running out of things to sell, and I knew that someday it would all end. This was the last phase before the cycle would begin again, like a snake eating its own tail forever.

At the time, I figured that end would be with me destitute or dead, but then I had an epiphany: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Why should I have to bust my ass selling all my stuff just to give some jerk-off all my money? I needed to step my game up. I needed to be the one making money off all the other chumps like me.

Then, through the magic of the internet, I made a nice little connection out in Seattle, where the market was flooded and the prices were dirt cheap. Two of my best friends and I decided to take the four-hour trip across the state and see what we could make of it. We followed the road to the Emerald City and ended up leaving with some bricks of our own. It was one of the worst decisions I ever made in my life.

I figured that with the price we were getting it for, we could make a mint and get high all day, every day. I was right about the second part, but the first part never materialized. We started buying by the ounce, and my addiction grew tenfold almost over-night. We were making money hand-over-fist, but only on paper. Most of the cash went to the re-up, and the profits went straight into the air. I wasn't technically spending all of my money on it, but it wasn't much different than before, except I needed more just to meet my daily threshold not to feel sick, which was something that I hadn't experienced before then.

It was around that time when I realized that things were starting to go in an irreversible direction. It was one of my biggest fears growing up. I shared my proclivity for illicit substances with my own father, who died from an intentional overdose in 2004 after struggling with his addiction for years. I never reached the level that he was on. The company he worked for was the first to sell cars over the internet in the mid-90's. He, along with the two owners of the dealership, became millionaires almost overnight. By the time he died, he had two unsuccessful rehab trips under his belt and was spending over a thousand dollars a day on cocaine and MDMA. The stress of that, along with a potential federal investigation into some packages that may have been coming up from Mexico with the trucks proved to be too much for him to take.

I needed an exit strategy of my own before it was too late. My only immediate option was to try and just give it all up. I didn't have enough money to put myself through rehab, and to be honest, I didn't want to go. It would have been another step in the direction of becoming my father. I needed another option, and through sheer chance, I got one.

My uncle had left the country in 2006. He moved around the world with his wife and two kids before finally settling in China. His wife ended up leaving him and taking the kids back to the states a few years later, but he stayed and ended up starting his own family. He had some issues with substance abuse when he was younger and extended an olive branch to me. He gave me an opportunity to come out and stay with him. He would support me until I could get myself a job and my own place. The only issue was money. Plane tickets were expensive, so were Chinese visas. I didn't even have a passport.

I thought about taking a loan, but my credit had already been ruined by then from all of the payday loans that I never paid back. That, plus my lack of a job or literally anything that I could use for collateral made getting any money from an outside source impossible. I had nothing to my name, and nothing left to pawn, and all of the money that I was making from dealing was going straight into getting more or getting high. Even at the cost of potentially saving my life, I couldn't prioritize getting high below any of my other needs.

So, in the end, I bit the bullet and broke down to my mother about what I'd been doing. She knew that something had been going on, but I kept her in the dark about most of it. She was one of the only people in the world whose opinion I valued, and going through everything that she had with my father almost killed her. She ended up basically abandoning my brother and I for over a year to get a relationship going with the man who would become my stepdad. It was one of the reasons why I started doing drugs in the first place. I hated her for abandoning us and always taking his side against us when he would go on his mini-tyrannical plots in our household. I left at 17 and didn't look back.

I knew she felt guilty about it all, and I knew that if I needed to, I could use it against her to get what I wanted. I know, I'm a horrible son, but we all do what we think we need to in the moment. It's a fundamental tenant of human psychology. If you can convince yourself that you absolutely must do something for the sake of your continued existence, you'll do it, no matter how horrible it will seem in retrospect. None of that matters in the moment. It's an instant response.

The breakdown itself was genuine, if not a little played-up for emphasis. The one thing that actually got to me a little bit was when she told me that heroin was the one drug that my dad was smart enough to stay away from. She was mortified, as any mother would be, but she also was accepting, which so many aren't. She offered to let me use the airline miles that she'd been saving up for years to cover my trip. Her dad offered to cover my passport fees. All I had to do was take care of the visa.

I basically bought myself out of the partnership that I'd had with my other friends, which while providing me enough for the visa, cut me off from my supply. Thankfully they were good enough friends to keep me from getting sick until I left just over a month later.

I don't think I'll ever be able to forget the last time I used. It was easily the worst, and probably the closest that I've ever come to overdosing. They asked me to help make the weekly trip to Seattle. All I had to do was drive and they'd hook me up with enough H to keep me well for the last three days that I was in town. One of the downsides to being high on opiates all the time is a tendency to constantly be passing out, or 'nodding out' as they say. It's one thing to nod-out when sitting on a couch somewhere, but another to do it while driving across mountain ranges in the middle of the winter.

The solution of choice for us was meth. It's the only thing that can bring you up after being down so low. Just one little puff of those sweet shards is enough to kick anyone into high-gear for at least a few hours, no matter how down they were before. So, I spent the better part of the day smoking meth when I felt too tired and smoking more heroin to bring myself back down from the edginess that the meth gave me. Much like my experiences with pawnshops, it was a brutal cycle without a beginning or end.

Eventually, we finally made it back to our little hotel in Coeur d' Alene in the early hours of the morning. We had all been up the previous day, and all had things to do that day, so sleeping wasn't an option. This time, for whatever reason, we decided that speedballs would be our best bet. For those who don't know, a speedball is an opiate and a stimulant (usually cocaine or meth) mixed together in the same needle. It's supposedly one of the best highs in the world, and it's also notorious for killing a lot of famous people, most notably comedians John Belushi and Chris Farley.

Despite knowing the dangers, we did it anyway. I remember sitting in the bathroom, with this girl who I was hooking up with loading the needle for me. She found the vein in my foot and poked it in. As soon as the plunger pushed home, I blacked out. I woke up maybe fifteen seconds later with all of them staring at me. They thought I was dead. My first reaction came straight from the gut, and I threw up all over the bathroom floor.

The next seventeen hours were a small ritual that played out over and over. I would try and sit down, but as soon as my body got into a resting position, it was time to throw up again. I ran out of things to toss up after about two hours. The rest of the time was spent with terrible dry-heaves or trying to force enough water down my throat that I would at least have something to bring back up. It didn't work. It was almost appropriate that my last time was enough to scar me for life on the possibilities of what could be.

Then the journey to the rest of my life started. Those first two weeks after I made the big trip across the Pacific were easily the worst. I could probably write hundreds of pages on withdrawals and how they're the best form of karma for someone like me, but let's just try and get the key points out of it. Sweating, diarrhea, nausea, hot and cold tremors, suicidal thoughts, terrible nightmares; I went through it all and came out on the other side. I would say I came out as a different person, but that came with time.

Living that life taught me a lot, and the entire experience left me with enough stories to fill a series of novels. I don't have a lot of regrets, if I'm totally honest. Moving to China gave me a real chance to make something out of myself, and I ended up with opportunities that I never would have when I was back in the states. I made a life for myself. I started writing again to help me make sense of everything, and I even ended up getting married.

I'll have five years in March. I never thought I would be able to say that. It doesn't seem like that long, but it feels like more than a lifetime ago. I look back at who I was with disgust and honest curiosity. I think maybe everyone, at some point in their lives, reflects on their younger years and wonders just what they fuck they were doing. Thankfully I've gotten most of it out of my system.

Some of it never left me though, and there are still plenty of nights where my nightmares have me waking up, still a junkie and back in the states, wasting my life away and waiting for death. One of the things that I would always ask myself is how I managed to get out. What was so special about me over all of my friends? Survivor's guilt doesn't necessarily have to come from someone's death, although there have been a few since I left. Nate got himself killed in a robbery; Dustin, Brandy and James all overdosed, and Jesse is locked up for the next 25 years. Why was my life worth so much more than theirs? I was no better than them, but, for whatever reason, I was the one who got out.

Of course, it was really just a once-in-a-lifetime combination of coincidence and luck. The world is filled with them. It was the fuckin' golden ticket, and I promised to never let it go to waste. I want to make something of myself. I want to be able to give something back to everyone I took from, and everyone who gave to me. I want to show everyone who said that I would never make it that I was better than they thought. And, maybe most of all, I don't ever want to be what my father was.