Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict Read online

  “Um, don’t tell any of my friends I did this,” I told her.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I don’t even know those guys that well.”

  “So you don’t mind if we do this again?” I asked.

  “Anytime,” she said, swallowing a Dilaudid and washing it down with one of the Coronas I’d brought.

  Access to Candyman changed everything. I never had to worry about where my next haul was coming from. I kept it a secret from Joey. I had barely spoken to Emily that summer. I’d been too busy with Joey, and she was dating some semifamous artist from the Midwest and was always traveling out there to see him. I knew he kept her in pills, so I didn’t feel like I needed to tell her about my new connection.

  As fall started, I could no longer deny the effects the drugs were having on me, no matter how hard I tried. I was growing increasingly paranoid, and became convinced I was having signs and visions. Joey is an avid collector of taxidermy specimens. One night, after we had gone back to his house almost blackout wasted, I felt something fall off the wall and hit me on the head while we were having sex. I just shoved it to the side and kept going until Joey suddenly stopped, a look of horror crossing his face. He jumped out of the bed. “Don’t look at your face,” he demanded.

  It felt wet suddenly, and I reached up to feel it. I pulled my hand back and it was covered with blood. I leapt up and looked in the mirror. My face was soaked red.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, terrified.

  Joey didn’t answer. He had picked up his camera and was eagerly taking pictures of the scene.

  “What the fuck?” I screamed, scared out of my mind. I couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. I looked down at the side of the bed to see what had hit me. It was a cloven hoof from a deer or an antelope or some other animal.

  I ran into the bathroom and Joey followed me with the camera. I splashed water on my face, but it just made the blood run more, creating a bigger mess. Joey finally put the camera down and and started wiping my face and head clean with a washcloth. We discovered the source, a nasty split directly between my eyes. Half an inch in either direction and I’d have been blind in one eye, the cut was that deep.

  I sat there shivering on the toilet in just a towel while Joey kept cleaning me up. All of a sudden his roommate and some guy she had brought home were standing in the doorway.

  “Holy shit,” she said. She was topless and leaned in to get a closer look. “That looks mean.”

  The guy who was with her moved her away and leaned in. “I used to be an EMT,” he said. “You’re going to need stitches.”

  “I’m not going to the hospital,” I said, trying to angle the towel so nothing was hanging out.

  “Do you have any medical tape?” he asked Joey, who nodded and got some out of the medicine cabinet.

  “We can try to just pull the skin together with the medical tape,” the stranger said. Joey pinched my wound shut while the guy made an X with the medical tape over it. It stung, badly, and I could feel my skin tighten in the center of my face as the glue from the tape affixed itself to the inside of my wound. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I looked gaunt, haunted.

  “Thanks,” I said and shuffled off to Joey’s bedroom. A massive bloodstain was smeared into the wall above his bed. I pulled a sheet partially over me, lay down on the bloodstained pillow, and passed out to the sounds of Joey’s camera clicking away.

  Since it was a legitimate, painful head wound I felt justified taking extra pills over the next few days. But I was disturbed—not so much by Joey’s glee with the incident, because, to be perfectly honest, I’m glad now that there’s photographic evidence out there of what happened, but, come on, how much more of a clue from the universe did I need? I’d been sleeping with someone I shouldn’t, high on drugs, and a fucking cloven hoof falls from the sky and clocks me between the eyes! I’m not religious in any way, but I like to pay attention to signs and patterns, provided I’m sober enough to recognize them for what they are.

  But in the end, it wasn’t anything so dramatic that made me end things with Joey. It was old-fashioned jealousy. I didn’t trust him at all. And while a lot of that was most likely a side effect from the pills, there was still the fact that for every night I spent out with him, there were four or five others during the week where I had to work and he was out partying with his crew without me at bar after bar. He could never tell me what he’d been up to the night before; he always, always blacked out. Anytime he wanted to show me a photograph on his camera, he would quickly scroll through the ones that showed a crew of young guys in his living room, partying shirtless after the bars got out. Sometimes I’d freak out, scream at him, or cry, demanding to know what had happened, and he’d never give me a straight answer. I hated what I’d become—a shrill, rage-driven addict consumed with fear that he was cheating on me. But I couldn’t stop.

  Everything came to a head after we took a trip to his grandmother’s house in Massachusetts. She was in the hospital for some sort of surgery. We brought Ecstasy.

  The inside of the woman’s house looked exactly like Laura Palmer’s home from Twin Peaks. Everything had been frozen in time. Outside, it was cold, gray, and rainy. As it got darker we sat down at the kitchen table and Joey handed me my tablet. I’d found an old puzzle of tropical birds in his basement and started working on it while I waited for the Ecstasy to kick in. He helped with the puzzle, but after about twenty minutes we both got up from the table and silently wandered off to different parts of the house. He headed to the parlor; I headed to the TV room with all the old photographs of his family.

  There was only one of him, one I’d seen before. He was around five, dressed in a sailor outfit, a devilish but innocent grin on his face. My heart ached. I knew the reason I was really so drawn to Joey. His past was eerily similar to mine. He too had a father who’d left when he was really young, and he’d also been mostly raised by an older sibling who had left at the first opportunity. He’d once told me that he had shut down so completely that he hadn’t even known how to have an emotion until he was nineteen. He’d been overweight in high school and hadn’t had any friends, but once he graduated he starved himself, eating only one meal every other day, and suddenly he became skinny. With that, came friends.

  “Josh?” I heard him call from somewhere in the house. I went through the kitchen, which was impossibly yellow. Everything was yellow. The toaster, the refrigerator, the plates, the calendar. I got out of that room quickly.

  In the dining room, everything was blue, even the chandelier and placemats. I whimpered a little under my breath.

  “Josh?” Joey’s voice was closer now. I found him sitting in the front parlor, standing over a massive old-timey radio housed inside a wooden box the size of my dresser.

  “Help me figure this out,” he said, fiddling with the knobs. I knelt down beside him and flicked the On switch. The room was flooded with the sound of Lawrence Welk. Joey made a face and went to change it, but I grabbed his hand.

  “I kind of like this,” I said.

  He indulged me for about thirty seconds before rolling the dial. The bursts of static were horrific. I was rolling on the sofa, turning onto my stomach, and smashing my face in the fabric until he passed a 1970s station that was playing “Amie” by Pure Prairie League.

  “Stop!” I yelled. I jumped up and started spinning wildly around the living room. Joey stood in one place and did his shuffling little jig while the song played on. I felt myself topple near a table full of framed photos and empty candy dishes but caught myself against the wall. Joey grabbed me and we fell into the shag carpeting, rolling around hugging and shivering. The Ecstasy was really dopey, not speedy at all. Melting, melting, melting I kept thinking, but then I realized I was saying it out loud.

  I wriggled out of my clothes until I was only in my underwear and jumped up and headed out the front door toward the lawn.

  “Wait,” Joey called. “Someone’s gonna call the cops!”
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  I jumped back inside and turned the front porch light off so the neighbors couldn’t see me. There was a soft drizzle of rain coming down, but the cool air caressed my skin. Joey came up behind me, and we stood there on the front porch for a long time, staring out at suburbia, not talking. All of the houses around us were dark. I thought I saw a slug moving toward my foot, but when I bent down it was just a curled-up wet leaf. I’d been hoping it really was a slug. I used to keep them as pets when I was a kid, in empty Miracle Whip bottles with air holes punched through the top lid with an ice pick.

  “Let’s go inside,” Joey said, “I don’t like it out here.”

  We went back in, up the stairs, into the guest bedroom. As in most suburban homes, it was being used as a giant storage closet. Boxes of old clothes waiting to be donated to the Salvation Army were scattered across the floor like boulders. A large basket of dusty yarn sat on top of one of the two dressers cluttered with porcelain animals, stacks of old lace, and frameless prints of ships and plants. It had a canopy bed. Do they even make canopy beds anymore? They were everywhere when I was a kid—my own mother had even slept in one. Infantilism personified.

  We had sex for hours. I was so blitzed that half the time I didn’t even know what I was doing. At one point there was a body part in front of my face I was pretty sure I had never seen before on anyone.

  We got up strangely early the next day. Joey packed us into the car. It was still wet and miserable and foggy outside, and depression took hold of me like a body bag. I took two Dilaudid, and that seemed to help a little. We drove two hours to the Edward Gorey museum, located inside the actual home of my childhood idol. My grandmother Bobby had introduced me to Gorey, inscribing my first copy of Amphigorey with the words, “To Joshua, who has a keen sense of worth.” No one had ever used that sort of language with me before, and I’d always equated my love of Gorey’s drawings and words with that first feeling of recognition from someone.

  After the tour, and after spending way too much money at the gift shop, we drove around Massachusetts aimlessly in the rain, trying to find a decent place to eat. Joey wanted Olive Garden; I was resisting.

  His digital camera was sitting between us, and I picked it up and scrolled through photos from the night before. The scene quickly changed to pictures of strangers from different bars Joey would go to late at night without me. Hot guy after hot guy, shirtless, arms around each other. I could feel my jealousy rising but kept it in check until I came across one of Joey with his arms draped all over a ridiculously good-looking guy (by my standards at least—long dirty hair, facial scruff, a T-shirt with holes in it).

  I put the camera down and stared out the window. I knew what I had been getting myself into with Joey. He was a charmer. Even when I was out with him and it was obvious we were together, he’d never think twice about taking some cute young boy into the bathroom to give him drugs. And the problem with cute, young guys is that there is a never-ending supply of them. I suddenly felt impossibly old. I was wasting my life pretending I could still party like a twenty-two-year-old and, worse, reacting to insecurities so deep they’d grown roots into every organ in my body. I pressed my cheek against the window, tried to get the coolness to reach my brain, tried to stop the jealousy spiral I could feel coming on and keep it contained inside my opiate bubble so that I would never let it out.

  I wanted to believe I would never be able to live the life Joey lived. I loved my drugs, but I’d rather have done them on the sofa, watching a movie and cuddling with someone, than out at some gay bar with the constant threat of someone stealing what was mine. I didn’t have Joey’s heart, I just felt like one of a long string of guys he used to make himself feel better about his world. His own cocaine use had slowed down substantially lately, but he constantly had one or more full vials on him to give out bumps to boys, to get himself inside that locked bathroom stall with them. And I suddenly realized that what had started out as pure escapism for me had turned into something much more confusing and clichéd. I didn’t know whether I was in love with Joey or just addicted to him.

  As weeks went by I got progressively crazier and crazier. I started staying in alone most nights while Joey was out partying. I would eat myself up inside, imagining him stumbling home with a different stranger each time. I was obsessed with two things—my painkillers and my fear of Joey cheating. Every time I started to emerge from the warm bubble, the pain of not being able to trust anyone in this world swept over me, so I’d swallow more and escape back into the mist.

  I begged Joey to concentrate on his photography. He’d gone to school at Rhode Island School of Design, and I thought that if I could get him excited about work again he’d stop partying so much. But I knew my efforts were half-assed. I wanted him to stop partying during the week, when I had to be at work, but on the weekends I fully expected him to be his normal party self, to keep me supplied with drugs and drinks, and we’d recover together the next day under the blankets, holding onto each other for life while the pain of the night before rippled through our bodies. Drug love is so powerful: it’s the one time you know exactly what the other person in your life is feeling physically, and it unites you.

  The end came abruptly. After a week or two of his promising to show up at my house “after just one more drink” and then never showing, I gave up. I was getting more and more responsibility at work, and it empowered me. I took a bunch of Dilaudid, went to his house, and told him I couldn’t do this anymore.

  He just nodded. “I’m not ready to change yet,” he said. “I don’t want to.”

  And that was that. I stopped doing coke and stopped drinking to excess—but I kept my pills. They got me through the day, through the subway ride home, through the loneliness of eating a frozen pizza for dinner every night. They were as natural a part of my routine as showering or feeding the cat. I wasn’t interested in dating. Kelly kept me fully stocked, making sure to call me whenever she placed an order with Candyman. I’d also made friends with an editor named Maria at another magazine in the building who shared my love for pills. We’d recognized each other one night at a bar when I was still with Joey, and I had traded her some Valium for her hydrocodone. We each preferred the other.

  One day at work I realized Clover was empty, and I started to feel nervous and sweaty. I knew I had more pills at home, but I wasn’t sure I could wait that long. I texted Maria to see what she was holding. She wrote back that she had already left for the day, but she had a few Percocets in a baggie in her bottom desk drawer that I could help myself to.

  I went to her floor and, ignoring the glances from her coworkers, went straight to her desk and began rummaging around. I couldn’t find the pills. I checked every drawer, but there was nothing. I even started going through her files, wondering if she had accidentally slipped them inside one of folders. Nothing.

  I called her from the elevator bank. “There’s nothing in there,” I said.

  I could hear a lot of loud voices behind her.

  “Fuck, maybe I grabbed them and put them in my purse,” she said. “Hang on.”

  I listened to her fumbling around. I was getting more and more anxious. I didn’t even really like Percocet that much compared to other opiates, but now that I thought it was near and within my grasp, I wasn’t going to give up. “Oh, shit, here they are,” she said, getting back on the phone. “I took them after all. Sorry. You can come get them if you want.”

  “Where are you?” I asked. I still had some work left to do, but it could wait until tomorrow morning. I was out of there.

  “I’m one of the guest speakers at an ed2010.com meeting,” she said, referring to a social network website for junior-level editors. “It’s kind of informal, like a speed dating thing. Just come down.” She named a bar just above 14th Street on the East Side.

  When I arrived, I was led to a back room in the bar filled with hungry young journalism school graduates and editorial assistants, desperate to get ahead in the field. I stood in the doorway and su
rveyed the crowd. They were mostly women, dressed in fashion business casual, resumés in hand and rotating from table to table. There were about ten senior-level editors from different magazines sitting at the head of each table, doling out advice and listening to story pitch ideas. I recognized maybe half of the senior editors, waved to the ones I was friendlier with, and wondered why the hell no one had ever asked me to sit in and speak at one of these.

  I finally made out Maria sitting to one side, talking animatedly to two girls who were hanging on her every word. I considered waiting for the break when everyone would switch tables, but all those eager young faces were making me uncomfortable. I marched over to Maria’s table.

  She looked up at me, surprised. “That was fast,” she said. And ever so smoothly she reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. “Everyone, this is Joshua Lyon. He’s a senior editor at Jane magazine.”

  I felt myself blush and mumbled a “Hi, everyone.”

  “Josh left his ID card on my desk by mistake,” she said, handing me the envelope.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I owe you one. Good luck, everyone.” I turned and got the hell out of there as fast as I could, having to walk down the entire aisle with tons of eyes on me. I got outside, hailed a cab, tore open the envelope, and swallowed the pills.

  CHAPTER 14

  Horror Hospital

  I WAS CURLED UP in the corner of my bed, trying to concentrate on an episode of Heroes and failing, when the pain started. It was sharp, insistent, and constant, located in a three-inch line just beneath my belly button. I was confused. I thought by this point I wasn’t supposed to ever feel any pain. I ate a frozen pizza, thinking I was just hungry, but it didn’t go away.