Authors: Joe Putignano
Acrobaddict (16 page)
T
HE LIVER IS THE LARGEST ORGAN INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY AND WEIGHS ABOUT THREE POUNDS
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T IS ALSO AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT ORGANS, AS IT WORKS WITH THE GALLBLADDER AND PANCREAS TO HELP DIGEST, ABSORB, AND PROCESS FOOD
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HE LIVER BREAKS DOWN TOXIC SUBSTANCES AND METABOLIZES DRUGS
. T
HE LIVER IS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL; THERE IS CURRENTLY NO WAY TO COMPENSATE FOR THE ABSENCE OF LIVER FUNCTION
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Summer arrived, my freshman year was finished, and I was headed back home. Darren graduated and moved off campus, deeper into the gloom of the city, looking for a better job than answering the campus pizza phone. I moved back in with my mother and got shifts waiting tables at the restaurant. She was happy for me. It appeared I was doing well, back in gymnastics and working hard at college.
I found some new “friends” who shared my new interests in Southie. From there we drove to Axis, a club in downtown Boston. We did lines of coke while listening to hip-hop and rap music in a parking garage, and then we would go inside the club for more of the same. The new thing was prescription pills such as Valium, Klonopin, and Xanax. All I knew of Valium was that it helped with falling asleep, and I didn’t get where the high was in sleeping. My new friends explained that they were benzodiazepines that brought euphoria, relaxation, and a sensation beyond drunk, a sensation known as “pilled out.” The next lesson in that crash course was how to get pilled out. It was simple: take ten pills.
I chewed up all ten, washed them down with a beer, and waited for the unknown to arrive. First I experienced a huge sense of relief and relaxation, like with ecstasy, and felt like somehow everything would be okay. It hit me harder than alcohol, filling all those spaces alcohol missed. Suddenly those pills blotted everything emotional out of me. The muscles in my body relaxed, making it difficult to walk. In my entire life I had never felt that calm—awake but dreaming, in euphoria, everything slowed down to a state of perpetual peace and tranquility, under a giant palm tree on a deserted island soaking in the sun’s gentle rays. There was a complete sense of safety with the world around me, and I didn’t care what I said or did because I knew nothing bad would happen.
I knew the Southie kids would have kicked my ass if they knew I was gay, but the Valium made me careless and care less. Every other moment in life I’d been afraid to talk to people, even though I wanted to, but in that moment I talked to everyone and anyone. My words slurred and my sentences fell into one another, but the burden of life washed away in a halcyon wave, leaving a calm grin on my face. This was a miracle drug. Why didn’t someone prescribe this for me in high school? Maybe I could have coped with the people around me. Maybe I would have slept at night.
Valium was much cheaper and lasted longer than ecstasy. If I ate a handful of them and drank a lot, I could still be pilled out the next day, extending my high into tomorrow. But the greatest effect was blacking out. I would have complete amnesia, with no recollection of the hour, day, or string of days previously lived. Intended to combat serious stress, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorders, Valium helps patients forget their troubles, and that was exactly what I needed. It made me unafraid of the world I was afraid of.
It was one of the greatest summers I ever had. Waiting on tables was easy and gave me enough money to get blasted. Every night was the same: go home from work, open a beer, chug it in the shower, have two more on the drive to Southie, arrive at Axis, and take a handful of pills with a few lines of coke to straighten my head. Gradually, I
found the more pilled out and drunk I was, the less I needed coke to stay up. Raves were on the weekends, and I started sniffing crystal meth. On the bleachers at the party, I saw people checking their pulses like self-appointed doctors and learned that if my heart thumped faster than the dance music, I was in trouble. I became one of them, always checking my heart against the music and wondering how far I could crank the speed without stopping my internal beat.
One summer night of too many pills, security kicked me out of the club for walking crooked and slamming into walls. The Valium really messed me up. I needed to get some coke or speed to wake me up and override the drowsiness. We all left and packed into my mother’s car to try to find some. My friends saw I couldn’t stand up straight and tried to keep me from driving, but high or not, I was convinced that as a gymnast I could control every muscle and movement. I had tested and proven that ability through random drunken handstands or tumbling while on angel dust. The more messed up I got, the more I believed I was just operating a giant physical machine, and I was usually right.
I also believed I could beat an overdose through the years of physical training, able to stay alive and handle bodily demands beyond what simple civilians could take; but that night the pills were winning. I pulled out of the parking slot, slammed into a parked car, pulled out in the other direction, and hit another one. We were in the parking garage with no witnesses, so I gunned it again toward the exit and ran into a car passing by. I didn’t hit them hard, so I kept driving, too high to stop, and forgot about it until a summons arrived in the mail. They had seen the license plate and, of course, when my mother asked me about it, I barely remembered a thing. I had scratched the side of the other person’s car; no one was injured, and the case was dismissed. That sort of thing continued all summer long. Whenever I took a pill I knew trouble would follow, and I loved it.
When the pills ran dry, and they often did, I snorted coke in my room until the sun came up. I cried about everything: commercials on TV, old memories of gymnastics, songs on the radio, or certain words;
it didn’t matter what it was. I would crash down so low, I couldn’t tolerate the depth of my sadness. I was so confused. Every time I told myself, “I’m never gonna do that again,” I would do it again and again.
Darren came to visit me and could see that I had changed dramatically within just a few weeks. I considered myself an expert on prescription pills, and even bought a nurse’s pill manual that helped me to identify each pill and its effect. Prescription bottles with yellow warning labels were my favorites. Any label that warned not to drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery was the best. My new favorite hobby was going to friends’ houses and looking through their medicine cabinets.
On a particularly bad night of recklessness, Darren and I bought enough Xanax to kill a small family, and we ate as many as we could. Cops woke me up from my blackout as I drove the wrong way down a one-way street. They thought we had stolen the car, and after checking the plates realized we hadn’t, and let us go. I had twenty hits of acid and a couple of bags of cocaine on me. I could barely stand up, and we laughed the whole way back to my mother’s house. When we arrived home, she asked where I had been for the last few days and why I wasn’t ready for work. I told her, “Mom, what are you talking about? It’s Tuesday.” She slammed the door on her way out to work and said, “It’s fucking Thursday.” I had no idea where I had been for the past two days. I went to work that night, but my father saw that I couldn’t walk a straight line and told me to get my ass home.
I was barely treading water, but I didn’t care; I was having too much fun and didn’t want to stop. It was anti-gymnastics, the complete opposite of discipline, loyalty, and strength, and I loved it. My mother noticed how my behavior was changing. I fell asleep at the dinner table, slept fifteen hours at a time, and sometimes two days in a row, from taking so many Valium, Xanax, and Klonopin.
After a huge pill binge and while I was dead asleep, she came barging into my room and screamed at me to pack my bags and get out of her house or she’d call the police. In a rage, I called Darren and asked if he would come pick me up. He always cleaned up my messes and got
me out of bad situations. Our plan was for me to stay at his place for a few weeks until my sophomore semester started, and then I would head back to my dormitory. I hung up the phone and, in complete pill-detox anger, trashed my room and everything in it. Whenever I came down from pills I would be filled with an inhuman urge to destroy things, and the only way I could release that monster inside me was through demolition.
During the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Holyoke, Darren and I began eating all the Valium I was supposed to sell. I didn’t have any money, and needed to sell those pills to have some cash for school. I had no money for food; I had bought the dorm meal plan, which didn’t start for two weeks. We would be screwed for food if we didn’t sell those pills, but once I started eating them I couldn’t stop, and the more pilled out I became, the more I ate. We arrived at Darren’s new broken-down apartment as slurring, falling-down, staggering messes, barely making it out of the car. I had no idea how we survived the Massachusetts Turnpike.
He warned me about his new place—it was as poor, run-down, and broken as we were. The first thing I did was ask a man walking by where we could buy some coke; the pills were making me too sleepy and I needed an upper to enjoy them. The guy shot us a look of steel, told me to fuck off, and kept walking. In an absolute state of calm, we walked down another street and asked someone else. All boundaries were removed by the pills, and things that one should never do, like asking strangers for cocaine, felt perfectly normal.
The neighborhood was perfect for us because others were partaking in the same activities, and after several attempts we found a man who could take us to nirvana. We got into this guy’s car and he drove us to the place. Suddenly cops came bolting out from behind us, sirens wailing, and pulled us over. They got us out and forced us to put our hands on the roof of the car. A cop kept kicking my feet, trying to spread them apart, but I just kept laughing. I was so relaxed in my stupor that I continued to talk as he thrust me against the car door. From my pocket he pulled out an empty bag that at one point contained my pills. Apparently the man driving had been arrested a
number of times and the cops knew him, but with no drugs on us we were free to go. The guy shrugged it off, left us in the car, ran down a dark, shadowed street, and then came back.
We were supposed to share the coke we bought with him; however, it wasn’t coke, it was crack, and I had no desire to smoke crack. Holyoke was full of crackheads, and I saw what smoking rock did to them. I was pissed, but still I needed the high. I asked if we could crush it up and sniff it, and the man looked at me as if I were crazy, like it would be an abomination to crush the buttery rock. Crack seemed like a dirty drug, and a gateway to Loserville. I briefly thought about the consequences, but I couldn’t turn down a high.
I pulled the thick smoke into my lungs and held it as long as I could. A surge erupted from Mayan temples, from mythological Atlantis, and all the cosmic divine places came together to create a new power centered in the middle of my brain. In a single breath I became everything—the sun, moon, and all the elements of life, more gorgeous than every spring’s blossom. An endless power was mine. But the feeling didn’t last long, and I needed another hit to keep it going.
I don’t know how the night ended, and I don’t know how I survived. Pilled out, I wandered Holyoke’s rough streets alone after Darren and I got into a huge fight. I felt terrible from all the drugs I had taken and resented and hated him for not saving me from myself. I gave my power to Darren and wanted him to get me high and fix me, take me from me, and remove all my pain and discomfort. When he couldn’t do those things for me, I blamed him, throwing harsh words of hate and frustration at him.
I woke up from my blackout unable to remember leaving my mother’s house or how I got over to Darren’s new apartment. I reached into my jeans pocket for another pill, but they were all gone. I couldn’t believe it, and could feel the anxiety mounting. I checked my wallet and there was no money. Darren had a jar of loose change, and we lived for two weeks on twenty-five-cent ice cream sandwiches.
I called my sister, along with everyone else I knew, and admitted my problem. They were relieved, and I swore never to touch drugs again.
I was hungry, scared, and broken. I went to the emergency room a few times complaining of pain, trying to get pills. If I got pills, then I wouldn’t be hungry. I knew I was at a horrible place and had to stop. This was a new form of pain and one with which I could not continue living. I wanted to get help. I knew I needed help. I went back to Darren’s place and sat in that decrepit one-bedroom apartment on a dirty mattress and said a single prayer: “God, please help me!”
