Acrobaddict (43 page)
Authors: Joe Putignano
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ALTREXONE IS AN OPIOID RECEPTOR ANTAGONIST USED PRIMARILY IN THE MANAGEMENT OF ALCOHOL AND OPIATE DEPENDENCE
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T WORKS BY BLOCKING THE “PLEASURE” EFFECTS
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HE ORAL FORMULATION MUST BE TAKEN DAILY
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DDICTS WHOSE CRAVINGS BECOME OVERWHELMING CAN OBTAIN THEIR OPIATE EUPHORIA BY SKIPPING A DOSE BEFORE RESUMING ABUSE OF THEIR DRUG OF CHOICE
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NALTREXONE IMPLANT, SURGICALLY INSERTED UNDER THE SKIN, IS AN ALTERNATIVE
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HE IMPLANT PROVIDES A SUSTAINED DOSE OF NALTREXONE TO THE PATIENT, PREVENTING THE POSSIBILITY OF SKIPPED DOSES, AND MUST BE REPLACED EVERY THREE MONTHS
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ASES HAVE BEEN DOCUMENTED OF HEROIN ADDICTS CARVING OUT THEIR IMPLANTS AS A RESULT OF CRAVINGS
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The psychic’s words resonated in my head like a church bell: “If you pick up again, you will suffer a fate worse than death.” What was she talking about? I’d already been through the four corners of hell and slept with the Devil, but her words haunted me. I continued using on and off, and kept a steady eye out for anything abnormal approaching in the distance.
I trained exceptionally hard for months and was in my best physical condition since quitting gymnastics. I was becoming more flexible and could perform some of the same skills as Jonathan. I took pictures of him contorting and tried to mimic the postures he created with his body. With stretching and contorting it takes years to achieve
excellence, but in my mind I didn’t have years. I had to destroy the physical restraints that kept me from my goal. I started a precarious training regimen, unaware of the actual physical effects of what I called “muscle stretching,” presuming that tearing muscles would bring results faster.
I complained to Jonathan of how much my body hurt, and he repeatedly told me I was training incorrectly; but, like a mindless idiot, I continued doing the things that pained me and not connecting breath with my body. I would slide into a split with a twenty-five-pound plate on my leg and aggressively bounce, not following Jonathan’s recommendations of slow pulses and gradual stretching. Whether training or trying to kick my addiction, I was constantly in a rushed plight of agony, and both left me stuck in the same place: pain. High, abstinent, or in withdrawals, I still trained—tumbling, lifting, doing handstands, and stretching like a crazed maniac.
I was rehired at the Met for
Samson & Delilah
. I was to be practically naked, painted bright orange, and dance onstage in the third act for the bacchanalia. I had to start my junkie preproduction regimen of methadone detox to get through the impending withdrawals and try for recovery. I had done that so many times, it was becoming habitual. Acclimated as I was to pain through my sport, the physical turmoil of detox became just another event I had to endure. Gymnastics had trained me to become a great addict—capable of enduring, surviving, and striving toward the most uncomfortable and painful body moments.
My roommates were doing renovations to the apartment, and I had to stay with Jonathan for a little while. Staying with him was going to be problematic—it would be impossible to keep my secret in a one-bedroom apartment. The first morning I realized I left my “cooking spoon” at my old place, so I lurked into Jonathan’s kitchen, snuck a spoon into my pocket, and tiptoed to the toilet. I bent his shiny new IKEA spoon, cooked my breakfast, washed off the bottom burnt by the flame, and incanted, “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say! One—two—why then ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky.” I tweaked it back close to its original position, slipped back into the kitchen, and replaced
it with the others. As I learned from my sisters years ago, if nothing changed, then nothing happened. Moments later I saw Jonathan smiling and eating his cereal in the living room. Was he holding my truth in his hand? Unknowingly feeding himself through the same tool that fed my veins? The spoon came back to haunt me that night, as the three of us shared Ben & Jerry’s from the carton.
Those situations increasingly complicated my daily existence, as my syringe affair started flaunting itself at the junctures of our “family” life. A few times I cooked up too much and had to save the surplus in an unused syringe for later. With its plunger pulled back, if my needle full of heroin got bumped or pushed, my gold would escape, squeezing out my life force; I somehow had to escape the bathroom and get it into my backpack undetected by Jonathan. I cradled the needle in the pocket of my cargo pants—the ideal wardrobe item for all types of drug using—cautious not to strike the plunger. But during the mission I ran into Jonathan, who approached, wanting to hug me goodbye. I always pulled back from contact, but this time I was terrified to be touched too tightly, fearing he would rub up against the plunger. My addiction became an awkward lover, and the longer I stayed at Jonathan’s apartment, the more she showed up.
Unknown to me, Jonathan knew I was using the whole time. Any sane person would know that. It was so obvious—I woke up with one personality, left the bathroom with another, and hours later turned into yet someone else. I was financially defective, vexed, cynical, and always sleeping late. Jonathan knew my history with rehabs and twelve-step meetings, and I promised him I would return to a life of recovery; but I knew this time I needed more help. The up-and-down cycle was obliterating me, and my methadone concoction wouldn’t be enough this time around.
I decided to try a new drug: Suboxone. Yet with all my good intentions, I quickly discovered the loopholes in that medication. There was always a back door in addiction, and junkies were notoriously the first to bust it down. It took me a week’s trial and error, but I found a dose I could take every day that wouldn’t leave me in withdrawal while still feeling the effects of heroin when I shot up. What made this
even greater was that when Jonathan would ask me if I was using, I could tell him it was only the effects of the Suboxone—I had it all.
An agent called for me to play a bartender on a popular soap opera. In my mind I thought I would be so exceptional that they would cast me as a new character on the show. What it actually meant was that they needed an extra to serve drinks in the background.
The night before the shoot I laid out everything I would need—organized to control an uncontrollable event. I washed my face twice to magnetize the camera to me; they would be powerless over my good looks and unable to resist hiring me. The next day I showed up at the job and was petrified. What if I was bad and they didn’t like the way I looked? They sent me to wardrobe to fit me for a tuxedo, and a woman guided me to a dressing room. I couldn’t believe I had my own dressing room. She told me I would hear my call over the intercom, but it could take hours. My room was essentially a closet with a large mirror that I gazed into, making sure my hair was immaculate and trying not to move in fear of messing it up. I waited and waited, but the intercom remained silent.
The more time passed, the more I desired personal obliteration, and, like a good junkie, I had come prepared. I cooked up, shot up, and fell into oblivion, slumped into my own arms as pillows on the little desk, waiting for my call. A violent sound blared repeatedly into my brain, startling me from my bliss. I remembered the woman whose aggravated voice was rumbling through the intercom. I looked in the mirror at my disarrayed hair and drippy skin, wiped the drool from my mouth, and tried to erase the lines in my face made by the sleeves of my tuxedo. I looked like death, and it was time to shoot; I must have missed the first call, and now I was late.
All I had to do was to impersonate a bartender, which was not difficult, but I wanted more. I wanted someone to notice me, give me a line, but nothing happened. I tried getting in front of the camera as much as possible, but in the end I appeared only as a big, black-and-white blur passing through the frame.
My dissatisfaction dumbfounded me. I had everything I wanted—an endless trip into my underworld without physical consequences—and
yet I remained wholeheartedly dispirited. Had I suffocated my soul in this overly medicated physical confinement? Was my spirit crying to reunite with my body and experience life as it was intended? Had I taken myself prisoner and become incapable of personal liberation? If only I could live my life without emotions, then I could truly be at peace. For years I had prayed to God to remove my traumatic emotions, and now I was living in a heartless, dreadful paralysis. I had received what I had hungered for, and now I was disconsolate, praying to God to grant me back the ability to feel anything.
Even the rapturous feelings of ecstasy had become anesthetized, and I could no longer experience any form of joy or connection to the natural world. A sunny day might as well have been cloudy, and all laughter might as well have been screams. My fundamental ambition had been to attain the greatest high possible, and there I was, experiencing my dream, and I’d never been so spiritually broken—a godless heaven is no heaven at all. I lived like a solitary and soulless, medicated old man, a breathing cadaver wanting and waiting for the nightmare to end. I prayed for the return of every old delicious feeling I’d ever owned. I reached the point of a terrifying admission: my drugs no longer worked. In a final attempt to preserve my nirvana, I threw cocaine into the mix, but only the vicious side effects emerged—something was clearly malfunctioning within my drug-laden body and soul.
I finally resolved to give Suboxone an opportunity to heal me as professionally prescribed and not as a crutch for withdrawals. I returned to the clinic and told the doctor what I had done, and learned I wasn’t the first. He raised the dosage to close the opiate receptors and prevent the heroin from breaking through. I started a new, month-long, honest regime of the bitter orange pills.
The first week of taking the recommended dosage I felt peculiar, not exactly high but not myself. Jonathan thought I was using, but I wasn’t. The next week I maintained the same dose, but still my personality was bizarre; I was feeling the raving madness of a deranged entity brewing inside me.
I was becoming a Suboxone lifer, becoming addicted to “the cure.” I had unwillingly become shackled like the prisoners in the methadone line, the hopeless army of the damned, the Devil’s henchmen. I could handle many atrocious results from heroin, but addiction to Suboxone or methadone would forever destroy me.
I submerged myself in the Suboxone blogosphere, seeking an escape from the impending dependence. People on the treatment were detoxing with promising futures, but quickly fell into the same orange pill nightmare, with similar personality shifts to my own. Hopeless addicts blindly walked into the promised lands of a new solution, believing in the possibility of one month of detox, but many of us remained on the medication for years. Was that my fate? My Prozac generation hooked on a new methadone? In desperation, I tried detoxing from Suboxone, and fell into the same “dope sickness” of chills, vomiting, and excruciating body aches.
I told Jonathan what was happening, and he began to understand how truly ill and messed up I was. He saw me ambitiously train as an athlete, but I lived my life inside a war zone. I knew what I had to do to mend the situation, and told him my plan: return to heroin to get off Suboxone, then detox from heroin with my old-school potion of methadone and Xanax. My plans always involved other people’s money, since I rarely had any of my own. I needed to borrow money from Jonathan to shoot up, which seemed bizarre, but I thought my idea for escape was foolproof.
I let a few days pass until I could feel the withdrawal effects from the Suboxone, and then took a big, brown shot, hoping to scour my system of one evil with another. I prayed the heroin would form a raging river, tearing apart the chemical dam from my brain cells and overriding my ingested Agent Orange. I was careful not to do too much and drown myself in heroin—wanting to get clean, not die. Within seconds of shooting it into my vein, I felt it: “Oh yes, there you are.” I tried not to fall in love again, but I did. Once again I felt good, whole, and complete, the way life or the afterlife should be. I quickly fell into the sweet, silent euphoria. “Oh god, how I missed you.”
I used every day for two weeks and didn’t want to separate from the Devil, but the moment came when Jonathan’s tolerance ended. We met one afternoon in Bryant Park, surrounded by giant trees dismantling the skyline. He was distant as we ate lunch and finally said, “I can’t do this anymore. You’ve promised for so long that you would get clean, and I know you’ve tried, but this is too much for me. You keep doing the same thing over and over again.”
I had heard many times in twelve-step meetings that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yes, I was insane. The sadness in his eyes reflected my own, and I was again faced with the choice: hell or humanity. I saw what I was doing to yet another trusting person, but wasn’t ready to disappear from that relationship. This was my last shot, and I was ready to fire my final bullet. I said with complete truth and sincerity, “If you could meet the man I really am, the man I’m supposed to be, I know you would really like him.” I wasn’t trying to manipulate him. Unsure, he said, “Okay, I’m giving you one last chance.” I had to quit using or I would lose him.
I began recounting my fall from grace to identify a recovery time and determine a path toward reclamation. It was like watching old gymnastics routines, repeatedly inspecting and dissecting my mistakes. Twelve-step meetings and naltrexone brought me the most time in recovery, but when the urge to use surfaced, I stopped taking the pill. I needed something that lasted longer than a few days in the system and disabled my power of choice, something to stop me from using for months. I found a doctor who created and was administering a non-FDA-approved method in New Jersey: the naltrexone implant. He would make a small slit in the arm and insert the implant subcutaneously and then staple it back up, and the capsule would slowly dissolve over time, releasing small amounts of medication into the bloodstream for up to three months. While it was a little expensive, it was a new solution I had yet to try. After the first implant wore off, most addicts returned—or, more often, were dragged back by family and loved ones—for another. This seemed like a solution, but I faced the same problem as before. I needed fourteen days off opiates so I wouldn’t go into immediate withdrawal.