Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict Page 27

  That last one made me nervous. I asked Chuck what it meant exactly.

  “You have to make a list, year by year, of every drug or drink you’ve ever taken, from the time you started using until the present,” he told me. “And add up how much it all ended up costing you.”

  “How the hell am I possibly supposed to remember all that?” I asked. “I got high for the first time when I was thirteen.”

  He shrugged. “Just estimate as best you can.”

  I decided to put off that assignment for as long as possible and work on the collages first. During a free period I went into the art room to check out the supplies, which consisted of ripped-up copies of Maxim, Newsweek, and Good Housekeeping, poster board, glue sticks, and pipe cleaners. A few other collages were spread out to dry. One had a photo of a ripped, shirtless guy from what must have been an Axe Body Spray ad plastered in the center, with the word Sex pasted above it. The rest of the poster just had smaller photos of magazine guys or bottles of liquor pasted at random angles with words like Love, Depressed, Power, Lost, and Alive cut out from headlines and posted above each one. One had the headline, “Taking things for granted” pasted right above a close-up shot of four hot dogs in buns.

  I was horrified and cracking up at the same time. I decided to collect as many of these as I possibly could and curate some sort of exhibition on bad rehab art as soon as I got out. I rifled through the stacks of magazines to see if there was anything at all to work with for my own, but the best I could come up with was a three-year-old copy of National Geographic that looked like it had been attacked by Freddy Krueger. I made a mental note to ask my friends to send me some decent magazines, and to show the ridiculous collages to my new friend, Richard.

  I’d made friends with Richard right after he’d checked in, which was a few days after me. He was a marketing executive from New York, and was inside for cocaine addiction. We became immediate friends, initially because of the other friends we quickly discovered we had in common. But it became more than that. He was wise and funny and bearishly cute. He always had something insightful to say during any of our large-group sessions, and he made me feel guilty for not taking this experience that seriously. Richard really wanted to create a change in his life, whereas I was starting to feel as though my friend Kate had bullied me into this situation. Yes, I knew I had a pill problem. But I’d also had my fair share of late-night coke benders with Kate over the years. There’s an unspoken hypocrisy among many drug users—casual ones and addicts alike. People who love pot look down on cokeheads. Cokeheads think heroin users are insane. And heroin users just don’t give a shit about any of it.

  I was still being given Suboxone, and was still palming halves of it regularly and hiding it inside an envelope in a box of stationery I’d brought with me. After a week I had completely weaned myself off it, but they were still doling it out, and by the time ten days had passed I had a pretty huge stash. I saved it for outings.

  Once a week, we’d get to go on some sort of field trip, either to a movie or bowling or some sort of park. It always included a stop at Wal-Mart or Target to pick up essentials. We also had several trips during the week to off-site locations like other NA or AA meetings, or church, but only if you wanted to go. I saved my Suboxone for those trips, so I could enjoy being high in a different atmosphere than the depressing institute I was trapped in. I didn’t question my abuse of the system at all. After I had stopped feeling so sick from withdrawal, I was beyond feeling pissed at my friends and was now just flat-out furious that I had agreed to check myself into this place

  I didn’t need it.

  The staff was insane.

  My BlackBerry had been confiscated.

  None of this was helping my anti-authority complex. I began to look for ways to break the rules, just to satisfy what felt like an incurable itch inside my brain. We weren’t supposed to smoke during breaks in small-group sessions, so I always snuck out behind the gym and lit up during our five-minute session release. The dress code said we weren’t supposed to wear hats or hoodies—I guess because they hid our faces. I wore both together whenever possible. We weren’t allowed to have energy drinks, so I’d buy one whenever we were on an outing and quickly pound it before a tech could see me. My roommates were even more brazen: they would hop out the window and run across the street to the gas station to bring us back cigarettes and Red Bull. (The energy-drink rule especially made no sense, seeing as how the soda machine on the premises was filled with a never-ending supply of Mountain Dew.)

  I was constantly stopping by the administrative office to get my BlackBerry out of the safe and check for messages. Richard told me he had done it a few times for work and it was no big deal, so I made friends with the people in the office and they always let me grab my phone after lunch. My BlackBerry was inside a large paper envelope in a locked file cabinet, and after the first few times, they’d just let me open it myself and pull it out, since the key to the file cabinet was always still in the lock. I’d check my messages, reply to the important ones, turn it off, and put it back away.

  One day I got an email from the editor in chief of Spin magazine, asking me if I’d like to come in and interview for a senior editor position. I was psyched and trying to figure out the best way to reply (definitely interested, on vacation overseas, back in a few weeks?) when the clinical services director, a woman named Susan who had curly gray hair and always wore brightly colored vests with floral, floor-length skirts, walked by. She had a total shit-fit.

  “Who gave you permission to use your phone?” she shrieked.

  “Ummm…” I said, looking helplessly at the staff cowering behind their desks. I didn’t want to rat any of them out. “I just thought I was allowed to.”

  “You’re not,” she snapped. “You need to get a pass from your adviser.”

  I was fourteen days into the program at this point and had yet to meet with any sort of adviser one on one. Everyone kept pushing it off, saying, “Keep working on your assignments.”

  “Sorry.” I shrugged, turning the phone off, slipping it back into its envelope, and shutting the file cabinet door.

  “And take your hat off,” she snapped.

  I glared at her, pulled my cap off, and stuck it in my back pocket.

  The next morning, after daily affirmations, where we had to go around the room and say three things we liked about ourselves (I usually said, I have friends who care, I’m a good person, and I’m resilient), Susan, who was wearing another one of her hideous skirt-vest combos, made an announcement. She was carrying a silver stick with a star on the top and metallic blue streamers hanging down from it.

  “I think I need to remind you all of a few of our rules,” she said sweetly, patting the magic wand in her lap to emphasize each word. “If you have a phone in our safe, you must get a written pass from your adviser in order to check your messages. Also, hats are not allowed. It says this clearly in our rule book.”

  About half the people in the room were wearing hats. I raised my hand.

  “That same rule book says that we are allowed up to fifteen minutes a day on the computer to check our email,” I said evenly. “There is no computer here.”

  “Um, yes, it’s broken,” she said. “I’ll check on the status of that. In the meantime, no hats.”

  Maybe a third of the people in the room sighed and removed their baseball caps and hoods. I wasn’t one of them. Susan and I stared at each other in silence for a few seconds before she said, “Are any more of you going to comply?”

  The room was silent. Susan and I kept up our steady gaze.

  “All right, then,” she said and walked out of the room. Everyone immediately put their caps back on, pulled their hoodies back up, and filed out of the room to go to small group. Susan was seriously starting to piss me off, but she was the least of my problems. I had to figure out a way to reply to Spin. I went to my counselor, who I still hadn’t met with one on one for a session, and explained what happened with my phone.<
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  “Yeah, you’re not supposed to do that,” she said, tssking a little.

  “Well, can I have a pass?” I asked.

  “Let’s wait a few days until Susan has calmed down,” she told me.

  I was furious, but I let it slide because that afternoon I had an outing. I celebrated in my usual style by popping a Suboxone right before we left. The outing group I had been assigned to was made up of about ten people, and we had all voted earlier to go to the Sex and the City movie. One of the techs, Amy, who was taking us out in the big white rehab van, had to clear any chosen activity with Susan first. Amy came back looking dejected.

  “Susan rejected Sex and the City as an appropriate activity,” she said.

  “You’re fucking kidding me,” I said. “Why?”

  “Um, she didn’t even know what it was, but she didn’t like that it had the word ‘sex’ in the title. She thought it might be a trigger for some of you.”

  I looked at the group of people around me—a bunch of older, methed-out gay dudes, one bearded guy who was still trembling so bad from alcohol withdrawal that he looked like he was having a permanent seizure, and my buddy Richard. There was no way any kind of sex portrayed in that film would have been a trigger for any of us. I would have understood if Susan had said something about the fact that there would probably be drinking in the movie, but even that was a lame excuse, since my first night there, Susan had shown us that movie about alcoholic, pill-popping drag queens.

  Luckily the Suboxone started to kick in and I relaxed and agreed to go see the new Indiana Jones movie instead. But I was becoming pretty sure that Susan had it in for me.

  We drove to the mall where the movie was playing and had about forty minutes to kill before it began, so we went to Barnes & Noble, where I picked up copies of every nature, photography, and art magazine I could find for my collages.

  I don’t remember much of the movie, I was too busy enjoying my high and thinking how Cate Blanchett looked perfect and how awful it would be to be eaten alive by ants. I remembered poking spiderwebs with my Star Wars figures when I was a kid to see if I could get a spider to attack, and then I remembered how obsessed I’d been with my He-Man Evil-lyn toy and how I’d even made her a cloth cape cut from an old blue T-shirt and how her magic crystal ball wand glowed in the dark, and then suddenly the movie was over.

  We stopped at Target on the way home. I wandered the store aisles, high, my favorite activity ever since day one on Vicodin, so many years ago. I bought a T-shirt with a lion on it, some linen spray for my sheets to get rid of the hospital smell. I also bought two Red Bulls that I pounded in succession a foot away from the cash register after purchase.

  When we got back to the rehab I started leafing through my magazines, cutting out pictures for my posters. It was kind of fun. I felt like a kid working on a junior high art project, and I really wanted to impress the teacher.

  I spent all my free periods during the weekend working on my posters, and was embarrassingly proud of the end results. You couldn’t see a single white spot of the poster board on either of them. The one that was supposed to be about how I felt about being gay was centered around a blurry photograph of a guy lying shirtless in a pile of leaves next to a tree, surrounded by other images of drawings and photographs of people with animal masks on or bags tied around their heads landscapes by Gustave Courbet, 1970s photos of drunk parents, and a large shot of a car that had crashed into a McDonald’s restaurant. The collage was awful and beyond pretentious. I loved it.

  The higher power one was harder. I still had no idea what my higher power was. I considered leaving it blank, as an homage to the phrase “God is boredom” that Emily had uttered so long ago, but instead found large photos of a raven and an ancient skull, and stuck them in the center of tons of landscape shots. The earth, animals, and death all seemed like things I could concretely believe in.

  I was two assignments down. I raced through my reading homework, wrote journal entries about my responses to them, writing exactly what I knew the therapists wanted to hear. I had pretend “breakthroughs” about discovering my addictive behavior, things I already knew about myself, but faked that they were revelations.

  The only thing I wasn’t faking at this point were my feelings for my fellow patients. I felt strongly for almost all of them, which I learned is typical for most people entering rehab for the first time. It’s much easier to focus on other people’s problems than your own. But I think my feelings for them went beyond just that. I’d never been exposed to so much raw pain at once. I wanted to heal everyone. During group sessions, when someone would reveal something particularly horrifying or ask for advice about situations back at home, I would offer up honest suggestions and support. As much as I was resisting the program, I badly wanted it to work for these other people. I just didn’t trust that rehab could work for me, because I knew I couldn’t trust myself. I was fighting it every step of the way.

  I started working on my chemical-use history. I traveled back in time, deciding to break it up into sections: high school, college, and then graduation to the present. I found it was pretty easy to come up with estimations. I remembered when I’d tried different drugs for the first time, my frequency of use. The monetary values were pretty easy to calculate too, although I started growing increasingly uncomfortable as the numbers kept rising and rising, hitting six figures, then, shockingly, seven, since I was told I was supposed to include expense account drinks for work over the years too.

  I took another one of my hidden Suboxones that night.

  I knew that I needed to get back to the guy from Spin, and missed being able to text Emily and Steph whenever I wanted. I hated the idea of having to ask for a pass to use a phone that belonged to me, loathed the authority being lorded over me. So I formulated a plan.

  I don’t remember how I first learned that I could pick locks—it’s just something I discovered how to do at a very early age. And the locks in this particular facility were the easiest kind of all, the ones that only required a driver’s license to slip into the slit on the inside of the door, find the curve of the lock, and push it back into the door itself, thus releasing it. I examined all the door handles in the building and they seemed to all operate by this same mechanism. One night during our evening group I slipped out, pretending I needed to use the bathroom, and went downstairs to the art room, which I knew had already been locked for the day. I slid my license in and the door popped open with barely any resistance. I popped the lock on the door handle back in from the inside and gently closed it. The lock stayed firm.

  The next day was family visiting hours, and even better, the weather had just turned beautiful, so I knew most people would be outside. Those of us who didn’t have visitors were just supposed to use the free time to work on our assignments, but nobody monitored our exact location in the building.

  The administrative office was located in a hallway that ended with the cafeteria on one end, and looked directly into the large meeting room on the other. If you turned right at the end that looked into the meeting room, you hit the main entrance and the offices of all the therapists.

  My only chance to get in the office was during these visiting hours, when everyone would be outside. Coincidentally, the therapists had scheduled an internal meeting in their main office, directly around the corner from the room I needed to break into.

  I knew I needed a lookout, and Richard was game.

  “All you have to do is stand at that corner, pretend to be reading, and knock on my side of the hallway if anyone starts coming,” I told him. “Make the knocking sound like you’re just doing something casual and rhythmic, like you have a song in your head and you’re tapping out the notes.”

  “No problem,” he shrugged.

  “Do you want me to get yours too?” I offered. But he declined, not wanting to break the rules. His loss, I thought, but his will and determination to stick to the program suddenly made me feel uneasy. I buried the thoughts quickly.
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  The right time finally arrived. I had been pretending to read the bulletin board outside the cafeteria but was secretly waiting for the cook to finish cleaning up and head home. The lights finally went out, and I whistled to Richard, who was sitting in my sightline in the main room. Everyone was outside except for one mother and son who were sitting in the main room, but they were out of sight from the hallway. I could hear the therapists’ distant voices coming from around the corner.

  Richard took his place at the end of the hallway, leaning casually in a way that he could see if anyone was coming and easily reach around and knock on my side. I pulled out my driver’s license and went to work. But nothing happened. I tried three, then four times, but each time I could feel my license bending with resistance. It was starting to tear. I kept digging away at it anyway, until I heard a faint rap to my left. I looked up and saw Richard walking back into the main room. I quickly tried to pull my license out of the door but it was stuck. My body flooded with panic as I kept wiggling it around until it finally slipped out. I followed him in and sat next to him on a couch.

  “They must use a stronger lock on the offices,” I said under my breath. “I can’t get in. Fuck.”

  “That sucks,” he said. “False alarm anyway, she turned the other direction and went into the bathroom.”

  I felt like I was disappointing him, especially after I’d bragged about being able to get in and playing secret agent by setting him up as my lookout.