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

  “My shrink likes to say that people who take drugs are hypercreative and hyperaware—they have no patience for the slow grinding work of joy,” Emily says. “But they’re searching for something that they have intuited must exist. Like how people are always saying that true love takes time and work and it’s not always fireworks and unicorns. For me it has to be everything at once. I want to get there yesterday. I want to jump in with everything and worry about the consequences later. With Jess, it was a rush and now it’s over and done and he doesn’t love me and I’m out of pills.”

  Emily and I went to our first NA meeting together, in a mammoth community center located off of Houston Street. She got more out of it than I did. I was restless and couldn’t concentrate, but she interpreted the experience in a way that worked for her. “The twelve steps are supposed to be about helping an addict slow the fuck down,” she explained to me after that first meeting. “To feel what we’re supposed to feel and experience it all, even if it’s painful, or worse, boring. We’re supposed to get to joy. But to get to it authentically, the way you’re meant to over the course of a life. And for me, that experience is the ‘higher power’ of the program. Boredom is God. And if I can get through that, I can turn that god into love.”

  The problem for me with this theory is that when I was a child, I made a promise to myself. I was ten, a year after I’d signed Nancy Reagan’s card. I was already supposed to be in bed, my lights were out, but I was crouched by my front window, which faced the street. I could see Erica, who was sixteen, sitting on the steps below me. Soon a white van with no windows screeched to a halt in front of our house and the side door of the vehicle slid open. I could see it was packed with other teenagers, and a Duran Duran song poured out into the street. Erica ran down the front steps and leapt inside. The door slammed shut and the van sped off until the street was silent once more. I wanted to be in that van, sitting in the back, surrounded by friends, doing God knows what and driving to nowhere. All I had was the dark bedroom behind me, a silent house, and a gaping and waiting bed that I didn’t want to go anywhere near. I wanted an escape and I swore an oath to myself with such conviction that it has been forever burned into my brain: I will never lead a boring life.

  Emily has managed to stay off pills, but she is now a regular pot smoker. She refuses to give that one last drug up. “I’m too conscious now,” she says. “I’m too hungry. Pot takes off the edge, but not with the same sense of isolation that pills gave me. I really do want to be happy, and I really do want to feel loved. If I’m absolutely honest with myself, I spend as much time thinking about pills as I do romanticizing my time with Jess. That’s just what life is. I miss them. I miss them. I miss them.”

  It was a new psychiatrist who started to get me back on my feet. Ever since my last psychiatrist had moved to San Francisco, I’d avoided therapy. But after staying in bed for three straight days, curled up in the fetal position, unable to move, eat, or shower, I finally went to my general practitioner and asked for help. I told him that I thought I was suffering from severe depression but I left out the pill-popping part. I had lost seven pounds, and he was concerned enough about the way I looked to get me an immediate appointment with the psychiatrist who worked down the hall. I came clean to the shrink about the pills.

  “Opiate addicts tend to be suffering from the most severe forms of depression—they feel totally empty inside,” he told me. “The pills act as a security blanket, a protective bubble from all that hurts.”

  He’d nailed me in two sentences, even using my mental language about the bubble. We started out on antidepressants—Wellbutrin and Lexapro, and a prescription for Klonopin for when my anxiety got particularly bad. We had a long discussion about the Klonopin and whether I could be trusted with it, given my history. The antidepressants changed everything, though. I no longer wanted to hide in my room, watching movies alone. I wanted to go out again, be social and rediscover my friends. But most important of all, this new doctor challenged me. He didn’t let me sit and babble away like my last one, he forced me to examine the words that came out of my mouth, to uncover the reasons why I say and do the things I do. He didn’t tell me anything; he made me discover what’s going on inside my head. It’s an ongoing process, and one that has nowhere near run its course.

  I still don’t go to NA meetings for support. I appreciate their existence but I think that more than my discomfort with the higher power stuff, my resistance comes from an unwillingness to tell a room full of strangers what’s really going on inside my head. Which is ironic, since here I am writing a book about exactly that. But I don’t have to look at you, or have you slap me on the shoulder and say, “Good work, man,” while stacking up a pile of metal folding chairs in some church basement after I’ve given a qualification. That would make me feel ten times more vulnerable. I’m still slowly climbing out of the bubble.

  And Clover is still never far away.

  CHAPTER 19

  One Year Later

  AN OLD FRIEND, Kate, had a new, younger girlfriend whose father is a politician. The girlfriend decided she wanted a massive blowout for her twenty-fifth birthday. Her parents rented her a farmhouse compound upstate with ten bedrooms, a barn that contained a pool table, darts, Ping-Pong, a full basketball court, and a massive field with a fire pit on top of a hill that overlooked rolling green hills. A bluegrass band from Bard College (excuse me, an “old-timey music” band—they insisted on being referred to as this) was hired to play. They also rented a giant Moon Bounce.

  I discreetly popped the hydrocodone I’d bought from a friend on a whim the week before. The pills had become like Advil to me. I had to take five before I even felt the slightest wave of relief, but I figured that even with my continued access to Candyman, I should always buy pills whenever they were offered, just in case anything ever happened to him. By the time we arrived at the farmhouse, I was ten pills deep and felt only vaguely nauseated. They must have been pretty old. But I still had six Dilaudids inside Clover.

  It was dark when we pulled into the driveway, but the house and nearby barn were flooded with light, and people poured out the front door to see who the new arrivals were. I was immediately accosted by two blonde acquaintances who rushed me upstairs, showed me my bedroom, and popped chocolate hearts stuffed with ’shrooms into my mouth. From that point on the weekend dissolved into forty-eight hours of continuous ingestion. The mushrooms never ran out. There was a never-ending supply of keg beer and tequila. I snorted coke, Dilaudid, Adderall, and Xanax. I smoked pot and kept eating my supply of shitty hydrocodone pills. I hurled myself around inside the Moon Bounce, daring the mesh sides to give way and send me flying out into the field, but they held strong. During the old-timey music band’s set, the guitar player somehow lost all of his clothes except his baseball hat. His penis was shriveled tight up to his body against the chill night air. I was surrounded by kids ten years younger than me and I consumed ten times as many chemicals as any of them. I avoided my face anytime I passed a mirror inside the house because my eyes seemed to have retracted a good inch deeper inside my skull. I kept a hood draped over my face as much as possible. I was sharing a bedroom with slanted ceilings and two twin beds in the back of the house. My roommate was a girl with a mess of long wavy brown hair and a never-ending supply of cocaine. We’d usually try to go to sleep at the same time, staring up at the sharp angles above us and pretending that we were living in an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

  I spent the weekend avoiding my hosts, Kate and her girlfriend. I knew they could tell I had been separating myself with the kids who held the hard drugs, and I felt their disapproval. They had wanted this to be a chill, relaxed weekend of friends. I wanted to obliterate my mind, because a twenty-three-year-old painter had just dumped me after I’d asked him to get an HIV test with me. We’d gotten messed up on blow and had unprotected sex a few times, but he couldn’t handle the thought of getting tested and told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. I knew this mean
t I had to get tested again, and was furious with myself for ending up back in the same place I was after Everett.

  The truth was I’d been using again in secret for almost two months. There had been no major catalyst—I’d just floated right back into the bubble one day.

  By Sunday, as everyone was packing up to leave, my body was shaking uncontrollably. I only had two of my hydrocodones left. I’d left the rest of my Dilaudid at home, figuring they’d be wasted up here since I knew there would be so many other drugs available. Now I was panicking. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to make the trip home with just these two lame pills, and I barely did. I shook the entire time and kept up a steady stream of nervous babble to keep my mind off my body.

  We made it home and I hit the lockbox immediately. My back was killing me—I’d had a small cyst removed from it right before I’d left for the party. It had been located right in that center spot on your back that’s impossible to see from any angle in a mirror. I could feel the area with my hands, but it felt weird, just a small mass of stitches that stung when I touched them. I ate Dilaudid. The pain left. I forgot.

  It took me three days to recover from the weekend. I stayed on the couch eating pills, still shaking, under blankets. I watched television until it just became nonsensical light and sound before my eyes. I drifted in and out of sleep, my dreams influenced by whatever was on, to the point where I had no idea if I’d actually watched a program or made it up entirely in my sleep.

  I had an appointment to get my stitches removed on the following Wednesday, so I forced myself into the shower, into some clothes, into a cab. When I got to the dermatologist’s office she told me to remove my shirt.

  She was silent for a second.

  “You ripped all your stitches out,” she finally said. “I told you not to do any heavy lifting or exercise!”

  “I didn’t!” I said. I thought for a moment, rolling time backward in my mind.

  “Oh wait,” I said. “I jumped around a lot in a Moon Bounce.”

  She sighed. “I guess I never told you not to do that. I’ll have to add that to my list of things I tell my patients not to do.” I felt her run a gloved finger gently across the spot where the cyst had been.

  “Well, it’s a wet, red and white mess now. It’ll definitely scar. I’ll take out the stitches, but you need to make sure you keep it clean and bandaged and put this ointment on it twice a day,” she said, passing me a handful of hospital-style antibacterial packs. I felt the stitches slide out of my back, pulling on scabbed-over skin. It was a gentle tug but I could feel my skin resisting, trying to hold on to the threads it had grown around.

  I promised to call if anything weird happened to it and left, climbing into a cab, careful to lean forward so my back wouldn’t hit the seat on the bumpy ride home.

  That night I managed to pull the bandage off by myself, but I couldn’t reach the spot to apply the antibacterial gel and reapply a bandage. Frustrated, I called the painter I’d just broken up with. Despite his weirdness about getting an HIV test I’d stayed friendly with him, and we’d met for coffee a few times since he only lived three blocks away from me.

  “I can’t deal with open wounds,” he said. “They just really gross me out. Sorry.”

  The only other person I could think of was Joey. He had started dating someone new, and I almost preferred the idea of having an infected abscess on my back than asking him for help. But he came right over to clean my wound and dress the small gash.

  “Why did we break up again?” he asked.

  “Drugs,” I sighed.

  He kissed me before he left, careful to avoid the center of my back when he hugged me good-bye.

  The next day I got an email from Kate. She called me out for keeping to myself during the party and doing too many drugs. I was pissed. My immediate response was, Fuck you, it was a party, we were all there to have fun. But one phrase in her email stuck out.

  “More than anything in the world,” she wrote, “I wish that you would finally just say good-bye to pills. You are such an amazing, beautiful person with a uniquely tender soul, and you have so much awesome shit going on in your head and in your heart. It’s utterly heartbreaking to see all that beauty and life get smothered and squashed by drugs. But that’s exactly what happens. They take the light out of your eyes, Joshua, and that is the biggest tragedy.”

  I knew she was right.

  The light was going out of my eyes. For some time now, every time I’d looked in the mirror, I’d seen a dead person staring back at me. There was nothing behind the glassy, viscous surface of my eyes. They were strictly a functional body part now, incapable of conveying an ounce of feeling except maybe during a hysterical, manic laughing bout whenever something struck me as funny while I was fucked up.

  I was high again on Dilaudid, but because of Kate’s letter I had an overwhelming urge to go to a meeting. I’d been to a few more after my first one with Emily, as support for friends or research for this book, but never as someone willing to take any of it seriously. I looked online, found one in the West Village that started in the next fifteen minutes, walked out the door, and grabbed a cab. Every ounce of my body was fighting this decision, but as the cab made a sharp turn onto Houston, my body whipped a little to the left and I noticed a printed card stuck in the door handle on the opposite side of the backseat. It was a cream-colored card with brown lettering on it and it read: “If I can do what I ought to do, why don’t I?” There was one week of a calendar year printed at the top—October 17 through October 23, no year. That was it.

  I picked the card up and turned it over. There was nothing on the back. The message spooked me. It was as if the city gods had left this specific card here for me in this exact cab, knowing I’d find it.

  The meeting itself was uneventful. It was packed, so I was shoved way in the back and could barely hear the speaker talk about his homelessness before finding sobriety. I was more interested in looking around me, surveying the crowd, seeing what sort of people actually came to these things. I felt a warm, loving feeling coming from everyone, but I wasn’t sure if it was just the drugs I was on.

  As soon as the meeting was over I saw people start making a bee-line toward me, noticing that I was a newcomer, so I ran. People dole out their phone numbers as freely as coffee at these things, and I wanted none of that. If I was going to do this, it would be on my terms.

  I went cold turkey the next day. I was residually high until the early afternoon, when I started to feel a nervousness creep around my skin and the inside of my brain. By late afternoon the nervousness was gearing up to a full-blown panic attack, so I took a Klonopin, which knocked me out for a little while. When I woke up I felt like I was coming down with the flu, so I took some NyQuil and slept in a fever state for the rest of the night. By the next morning I was full-on sick. I called Emily and told her I was going off pills, and she came over with juice and saltines. I writhed around on the couch across from her while she looked on with pity and I think not a small amount of fascination, or maybe just digust. My legs were kicking out uncontrollably from the sweat-soaked blanket on top of me. I tried to play it off like I was fine, just a little sick.

  “You look like shit,” she said. “And it kind of smells in here. Can I open a window?”

  I pointed toward the one near the radiator that stayed open without having to prop anything up underneath it.

  “How long is this going to last?” she asked.

  “How long did it last for you?” I asked.

  “I never got this bad,” she said. There was no judgment in her voice, but I chose to find it there anyway.

  “The last few times it was less than a week,” I said as I felt my insides start to roll over. “I think I need to go to sleep now,” I hinted and she left, telling me to call her if I needed anything at all. I barely made it to the bathroom in time after she left.

  Kate came over next. She brought bananas, more juice, and Epsom salts.

  “What am I suppos
ed to do with these?” I asked, shaking the milk carton–shaped container they came in. “Aren’t these for old people?”

  “Soak in them,” she told me. “It’ll help with the muscle and bone pain.”

  After she left, I did. A few undissolved salt granules scratched against my back and feet as I writhed against the porcelain, my muscles still twitching.

  This was hell, of my own making.

  I could no longer pretend that I could do it on my own.

  My sister Erica drove me to the airport. She was silent as we headed toward the Holland Tunnel. I’m pretty sure she could tell I was high. My head was slumped against the window. I couldn’t tell if her silence was disappointment at my state or a struggle to find some sort of comforting words. She was always so in control, always knew what to say, and the quiet was freaking me out. I should have had Emily drive me or just taken a cab so I could just finish up my last bag of Dilaudid in peace.

  Once we turned onto Varick Street and got stuck in tunnel traffic it became unbearable. I figured since I was going into rehab I’d better get used to just saying what was on my mind, so I turned to her and said, “I’m scared.”

  “Oh babe, I know,” she said, and I could tell she’d prepared a speech and had just been waiting for the right moment.

  “They’re going to fill you up with a lot of higher power and God stuff,” she said. “Don’t let it scare you off. That higher power can be anything you want it to be. It can be Ollie, it can be your family…well, maybe not all of us, but it can be a fucking stuffed animal or the sky or a plant. Just substitute whatever it is you come up with for God whenever they bring up the word. I’d hate for you to get scared off over a matter of semantics.”

  “But it isn’t just semantics,” I slurred. “They want you to actually believe something.”