Crystal Clean (5 page)

I’m five years clean now and I know that some of those boys did grow up to have daughters, and some of those daughters are the age now that I was then. What I think now is this: I hope that those little girls have people in their lives that are looking out for them, because every little girl is worth protecting. Even the daughters of douche bags.

So it was in the sixth grade that I learned two important lessons. A) When a boy/man shows interest, beware, and never believe anything they tell you, and B) Boys/men hold the power in the world.

To this day, I have no idea when a man is flirting with me. I assume it never happens, although people tell me otherwise. If I do
happen to notice when a man shows interest in me, I go straight into bullshit mode. I immediately establish myself as “one of the guys,” which gives me instant protection from rejection with the “friend” label, and diminishes my sexuality. “No, of course I’m not interested in you, we’re friends, and that’s why you’re not interested in me.” No mess, no fuss, no chance of heartache. This is the way my mind works.

I never said I didn’t have issues.

So with Garnett, I felt fabulous. We were close friends, but he treated me like a lady rather than just a buddy. I’d never had a relationship with a man that was so intense and didn’t include sex. I knew he respected me and was interested in what I thought. I felt special.

Until the
night
I saw Ron Jeremy suck his own dick.

Chapter
5

Garnett was moody. Sometimes he was funny, bright and a joy to be with. Other times, he would get agitated for no apparent reason, pacing back and forth beneath the beams of the basement’s ceiling and mumbling to himself. At those times, he would leave me alone while he went to meet someone to sell them drugs. Fifteen minutes, he’d say. Two and a half hours later, he’d come back with no explanation. Sometimes he was extremely calm and gentle. Other times he’d be amped up, pacing the basement floor and talking to himself again. I never knew what to do when that happened because he was between the staircase and me, blocking my exit, and something told me that it was in my best interest to be as invisible as possible while he worked through whatever was haunting him. Usually, I just quietly wrote in my journal and got high, waiting for him to calm down.

Occasionally, he’d return with a surprise for me: Imported chocolate, some trinket I’d had my eye on, or a video for us to watch.

“Miss Kim,” he would say. “I hope you haven’t seen this one already.” Then he’d slide in the tape, arrange the table with our chairs on either side, turn off all but the Christmas lights and begin the movie.

Then, one evening, he called to tell me he would be home soon. A couple of minutes later, he walked down the stairs with a tape in his hand. He stood next to the TV, looked at me, opened and closed his mouth twice, popped the video in and sat down in his usual spot across the table from me. No formalities, no lights, just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. I had no idea why he was acting so strange, but figured a ninety-minute break from talking wasn’t a bad idea.

I sat there, calmly getting high and staring at the infamous porn star, Ron Jeremy in his Penishead costume. I was raging inside. Same shit, different day. Garnett was just another man playing games.

I could never quite figure out what his objective was. He never made any advances toward me, and our relationship was platonic, but he was obsessed with pornography. We never talked about it, but he would occasionally show me a movie or give me a
book of erotic stories and have me read a particular one to myself. I think he just liked to watch me. I have no other explanation.

He started taking me with him to certain places to meet people. He would introduce me as his lady friend, and would give me a rock of meth to smoke while I waited for him to take care of his customer in another room. After a few visits, he was more comfortable about conducting business with me in the room, speaking in hushed tones and he weighed and packaged the product. People trusted me. I never looked anyone in the eye until they spoke to me, and I smoked meth in great, huge hits that impressed even the most seasoned tweaker. Garnett and I knew a man who blew glass and would make beautiful, sturdy, long lasting pipes and innovative bongs for smoking. People were envious and looked forward to our visits. Most people who smoked did so using light bulbs or tiny glass tubes sold at the counter in convenience stores.

We were rock stars. He only took me to two places, and neither of them was too bad. I’d heard of places akin to meth dens that were filthy: families whose children went unattended and unfed, apartments and trailers with a rotating cast of seedy characters, covered in open sores, crouched in corners shooting up or nodding off on sofas and dirty mattresses. I heard about these places from Garnett and his friends, and from some of the people I sold to. I suspect some of them dwelled in places like those, but I never saw it, so it was easy to dismiss. They were the great unwashed. The addicts. The tweakers. They were the ones who couldn’t handle their drugs. Poor, poor pathetic creatures. As long as I never sank to those depths, I didn’t have a problem. I was different. I could handle my high. I told myself that for years, and it was the belief in that lie that played a huge part in not only the duration, but the depth of my addiction. Appearance is everything. I’d learned that growing up. As long as everything looks okay on the outside, what’s going on underneath doesn’t matter.

Garnett’s dealer, Kilo, was like some exotic myth to me. All I knew was that he was Asian, younger than we were and that he drove a Lexus. I also knew that Garnett was in awe of him. I would listen to him talking on the phone in the basement, arranging a meeting to which I was specifically excluded. Garnett would gather his things, eager to get to the rendezvous. He was usually in a good mood when he returned, and we’d sample the new batch: bright,
shiny crystals of meth the size of a piece of Chiclets gum. We would test it using bleach, even though we knew the product was excellent. When you’ve seen the best, worst and everything in between hundreds of times, you know good product when you see it. Like an appraiser of diamonds, only you don’t need a monocle.

We always did the bleach test because it was fun. Fill a glass halfway with bleach and drop a little meth into it. It doesn’t have to be much, just a pinch. If it’s good, it will fizz. Pure stuff will “dance,” or spin around on the surface of the liquid. Anything that’s not meth will sink to the bottom of the glass.

So we’d do the bleach test and ooh and aah while we smoked bowl after bowl, and he would weigh the amount I was picking up from him and we would smoke some more. The nights he came back from seeing Kilo were always a celebration, like Christmas or your birthday. We’d talk and laugh and joke about the people we sold to who were spun – the ones who had gone over the edge. We joked about the losers who couldn’t handle the drug, and congratulated each other because we could. Then he’d whip out the porn. And I would sit there, getting high, watching the movie, while he watched me. And I would think to myself how good it was that I didn’t have a problem, and how lucky I was to have all the meth I wanted, and that it was a small thing
-
probably not a big deal
-
that the tradeoff was hanging out with this weird fetishist, who I was beginning to not like very much.

The other tradeoff was that I was spending less time with Andy. I was asking my parents to watch him for the night or have him spend the night with them, more often. I rationalized by telling myself that I had to take care of business, keep making money, and I didn’t want him anywhere near the drug or the people involved in the meth world. I told myself I was a good mother, and that I was sacrificing time I would rather be spending with him was for his own good.

The truth is I began to choose meth over my son.

I look at those words on the page, and they nauseate me. To come to terms with that, to be able to admit it, has been far and away the most difficult part of my recovery. Andy. My bug in a boy suit. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me and the best thing I’ve ever done with my life, and I chose methamphetamine over spending time with him.

I knew, somewhere deep inside, that something was happening to me; that I was changing into someone I didn’t want to
be. I could feel myself being sucked into Garnett’s world, and it didn’t so much frighten me as it did disgust me. I was trading my soul
-
the very essence of who I am
-
for meth, and the more I sold out, the more I tried to smoke away my guilt and shame. The guilt was all about my son. The shame was about spending all the time I could in a basement either watching dirty movies or tip-toeing around a man whose behavior was becoming more erratic each day. His mood swings and “pace and mumble” sessions increased, and they scared me, but I tolerated them. I tolerated it all so that I could have my precious drug.

It was also getting harder to lie to my parents about where the money was coming from when I wasn’t working. The house that Andy and I rented belonged to them, and they were worried that I wouldn’t be able to pay the rent if I didn’t find work soon.

Then, my brother called.

When he disappeared, he’d hopped in his VW and, like Kerouac and Cassady, hit the road with no destination other than away from the responsibilities he decided he’d had enough of. The van broke down in Nevada, about 40 miles south of the Idaho border, in a speck of a town called Jackpot. Population: 1,500.

The town sits, surrounded by desert, at the base of a hill that rises up out of dull, dead sagebrush, at the end of a lonely stretch of a two-lane highway. From the top of that dirt mound, just before swooping down on the town like a vulture, you can see that the gambling oasis is less than two miles long. Jackpot may be a speck in the middle of nowhere, but it’s also collectively the biggest employer in southern Idaho. People commute from nearby rural towns to work at one of the five casinos. There’s also a post office, general store, gas station, school and liquor store. One of each.

It was in this gambling Mecca, at one of the casinos, that my brother was working as a cook and living with the woman who was his supervisor. He was even considering seeing his children again. Life was good for Chuck, as it usually was. He has a habit of breezing from one situation to the next with little effort on his part, simply ignoring whatever or whomever he leaves in his wake.

As pissed off as I was at him for leaving his family in Boise, let alone me, without a word of explanation or goodbye, I was relieved to hear from him. I was worried about him, of course, but the other reason, the main reason, was because of Garnett.

Garnett’s behavior was becoming even more erratic. He wasn’t showing me movies anymore. Instead, he started giving me
books with stories in them about bondage and sado-masochism. He would talk about how his ultimate fantasy was to be dominated and that so far, he hadn’t found anyone willing to indulge him.

He was also becoming more agitated and secretive about his increasing trips when he’d leave me in the basement alone, getting high.

Since Garnett was the only person I spent time with, it was easy to forgive and forget with Chuck, if only to have a confidant who could perhaps shed some light on what was going on in the Gentlemen’s Club.

I drove down and spent a weekend in Jackpot, mostly staying in my hotel room with the curtains drawn, sitting on the bed getting high, but also seeing and talking to my brother. He seemed content, and more than that, he seemed peaceful. I stayed for two days and at the end of those two days, with my head in a cloud of meth smoke, my brain steeped in chemicals and an overwhelming desire to get away from Garnett, I went home, sold half of everything I owned and moved Andy and myself to Jackpot, Nevada. Population: 1,502.

Chapter
6

I told my parents and Garnett that I just had to get away from the craziness of the city, that I was disillusioned with people, that I’d lost faith in humanity. I needed a simpler life and I needed my brother. I’d lost my job through no fault of my own, I told them, and I simply didn’t know what to do. Moving my son and myself to a desert town where there’s nothing to do except gamble 24/7 was just what I needed to rejuvenate myself and get a fresh start.

I got a job tending bar, though I’d never done more than pour beer at the local race track. Chuck watched Andy for me, and from midnight to seven am, I worked solo in the only bar in town that had no gambling. Not even machines. It was the bartender’s bar. The place all the other bartenders came after their shifts were over to play pool or darts, listen to the jukebox and drink. No out-of-towners ever went there, because there was no gambling, so it was their own. The place they could unwind, untuck and let loose. A few of them were born and raised in that speck of a town, the most current generation of bartenders and craps dealers. Almost all of them were alcoholics, and most of them liked drugs. In a 24/7 town with nothing to do but gamble and drink, there was a bottomless well of desire for drugs.

Busses shuttled workers back and forth from surrounding areas. Cars were uncommon in Jackpot. Residents could take the shuttle into Twin Falls, the closest town, to shop just to get the hell out of Dodge, but they were stuck in the middle of the desert. Escape, in whatever form, was a commodity.

When I say that many of the residents of Jackpot were alcoholics, particularly the ones born and raised there, I’m not exaggerating. I met Chris my first night on the job. He was sloshed, acting like a complete ass. I had to ask some of the guys to escort him out of the bar because he was so disruptive. I only stayed in Jackpot for four months, but in that time, I got to know Chris and saw him try to quit drinking three times. I also heard from his friends about his previous attempts. He worked doing hard count, collecting all the coins from the machines, at the graveyard shift at one of the casinos. More than once, he tried to quit drinking cold turkey. He would show up to work with DT’s, his skin and eyes
yellow with jaundice, sweating and throwing up, but he never missed a night, and was a hard working son-of-a-bitch. When he was drinking, though, he was so bad, he would pour whiskey on his corn flakes in the morning.

I got to know and love Chris. He was tough and my heart shattered every time he fell off the wagon. He was in such late stages of alcoholism that one drink would turn him into a raging drunk. He was Nicholas Cage in
Leaving Las Vegas
. He was Jim Morrison in his last days in Paris. The last time I saw him was shortly before I left Jackpot. I was at his apartment and he was trying to get sober again, taking Antabuse but still unable to quit drinking. He showed me pictures of him and his friends, many of whom I served shots and beer to after midnight, when they were in high school. He gave me some of those pictures, smiling, saying he wanted me to remember him the way he was in happier times.

About a year after I moved back to Boise, I went back to Jackpot for a weekend. His long-time girlfriend told me Chris was dead. He died alone in his apartment of acute liver failure. He was twenty-six years old.

Living in the middle of the desert was akin to living on an island. The people there counted on outsiders to bring drugs into town, and were at the mercy of the dealers who determined price, quality and frequency. The first time someone offered to get me high, I accepted even though I had my own with me. I was curious to see what the people in Jackpot had access to. I was stunned. They were being overcharged for a product that was light in weight and cut with who knew what. It didn’t get me high and I couldn’t understand how they put up with paying good money for so little in return. They had no choice, they told me. One main guy came regularly and made his rounds. It was a take or leave it situation.

Ka-ching.

I began making runs between Boise and Jackpot two or three times a week, during the day while Andy was in school. Before long it was almost every day and sometimes twice in one day. I mainly sold meth out of the bar where I worked. I collected cigarette packs, the box kind, and specified a brand for different weights. A Marlboro light was a half gram. A Camel was a gram. A Marlboro red was an eight ball, and so on. I was the only employee in the only bar in town where there were no cameras (because there was no gambling) and the cigarette packs flew. I brought them in a
bag that I kept behind the counter and as people came up to order their drinks, they’d tell me what they wanted and tip me accordingly. Then I’d either slide them a pack
-
Here you go. There’s only a couple left. You can keep the pack
-
or I’d leave one on the table as I cleared the empty bottles and dumped the ashtrays. I sold to five guys, Chris being one of them, and they took care of everyone else. I was in heaven. I didn’t have to deal with Garnett anymore, other than brief visits to pick up meth and deliver cash, and the cash flow was infinite.

The casinos own everything in town, with the exception of the post office and school. When you work for the casino, your living expenses, rent and utilities, are withheld from your paycheck. You keep the remainder. The hefty amounts of excess cash came from tips. The bartenders and games dealers I knew made between fifty and three hundred dollars in tips each night, and a lot of that money made its way to me.

Once again, I was special. I was a queen and I had a huge amount of power and control. I could make an entire town happy, or an entire town miserable. Meth affects the lives of everyone connected to the user. If someone is used to getting high every day before work, then suddenly can’t, job performance suffers, if the employee even bothers to show up. Spouses and children can’t understand why the user is sleeping all the time, and is irritable and depressed. Children of meth addicts may go to school hungry because mom or dad couldn’t wake up to fix them lunch or even to go shopping. Drug and alcohol abuse always affect more than just the user, but meth is especially destructive because of the extremes: The energy and desire to do everything, or nothing at all, from stellar employee to a waste of space. It’s the difference between having a living, breathing human in the home, or a corpse.

So although I didn’t wield this power, I felt it and it fed me. It made me feel important. I had control then, where I had lacked control so often in my past, and it felt almost as good as the drug itself. And I had money. Enough money that when I was fired from bartending for, you guessed it, excessive lateness, it didn’t even faze me. After that, I don’t remember much except for flashes, like brief scenes in a movie.

Here’s what I remember.

I remember what my apartment looked like. I remember Andy’s bathroom because it was huge, and I decorated it with brightly colored fish. I remember cooking chicken nuggets and
green beans for him for dinner. I remember drug runs to Boise and back. I remember picking Andy up sometimes an hour and a half late from school because of those runs. I remember meeting with his teacher and realizing that the school wasn’t the right place for him because he was basically shut away with two other kids, who were severely disabled. I remember feeling nauseated with guilt because of that. I remember sitting in my dark bedroom at night after he’d gone to sleep, getting high, smoking all night until it was time to get him up in the morning.

Here’s what I don’t remember.

I don’t remember playing with him. I don’t remember feeding him those chicken nuggets and green beans. I don’t remember tucking him in at night, and I don’t remember what we did on the weekends.

What kind of a mother doesn’t remember those things?

I have little snippets of holding his little square hand and walking him to school, of a school program I went to and of eating lunch with him once in the school cafeteria, though I don’t remember why. He didn’t have any friends and I don’t think he was happy there. I don’t remember if he was happy at home. It was my love of and my addiction to meth that robbed Andy of a mother who was present for him, and on some very deep level, I knew that. My meth use caused me to do, or not do, things I felt guilty about, and the only thing that eased that guilt was smoking meth.

I paid a high price for my addiction. I continue to pay, and I accept that. Whatever the reasons for my addiction may be, I’m the one who picked up the pipe, and I’m responsible for everything I’ve done. My son didn’t have a choice, and he’s the one who suffered. I could smoke away my guilt, but he couldn’t do anything about the way he was feeling and what I was putting us through.

He spent Thanksgiving break with my parents in Boise. I told them I couldn’t get time off from work. As far as they knew, I was still a bartender. When Christmas rolled around, I used the same excuse, so Andy went to stay with Grandma and Papa for the two-week winter vacation from school. Except for Christmas day, I spent those weeks making drug runs. I celebrated Christmas by staying in my apartment and getting high all day.

I tried to sleep at least a little every night, but time slips away like smoke from the pipe, and I would sometimes realize it had been two or three days since I’d had any sleep at all. Driving became dangerous. I found myself nodding
off and started using
rubber bands on my wrists again
and ice cubes down my shirt
-
anything to try and stay awake on that lonely stretch of road between Jackpot and Boise.

It was early morning, about 2:00 am on the first day of 2001 and I was making a run from Boise to Jackpot. The freeway was covered in ice and everything around it shone eerily white in the cold night. I’d been up for few days and was exhausted, but I had to get to Jackpot to pick up money. As always, when I traveled, my loaded pipe was my only passenger. I set the cruise control at seventy-five, took three long hits, filling my lungs each time, then opened all the windows and cranked the radio to keep myself awake. When I couldn’t stand the cold, I closed the windows.

The rumble tracks on the side of the road woke me and I panicked when I realized I was only partly on the freeway and headed toward an embankment. I grabbed the steering wheel and over-corrected to the left, nearly rolling the car. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t slowing down when I remembered the car was still on cruise. I cranked the steering wheel back to the right and stepped on the brake, which sent the car spinning. When the tires caught the edge of the road, the car flipped into the air. Everything went into slow motion as the car tumbled through the still night. I was upside-down at least twice while thinking this was exactly like a recurring dream I’d had of rolling my car into a field. The only difference was, in the dream, it was day and the field was green rather than the middle of the night headed into a sea of snow. I had a second to think about that when WHAM! The car landed right side up, down the embankment a few yards from the freeway.

I blacked out for a couple of minutes and when I came to, I thought heavy rain was beating down on the car until I felt the snow and dirt on the back of my neck. It wasn’t raining. The back windshield had shattered and the dirt and snow I had displaced with the car was filling the backseat. The engine was still running and the radio blaring. My seat was crooked but the seatbelt was still strapped across my chest. “Why didn’t the air-bag deploy?” I thought, and then, “Where the hell is my pipe?”

All I could think was, “I have to get back on the road and keep going.” I would worry about the damage when I got to Jackpot. When I tried to drive up the embankment, the tires just spun in the snow. I turned the steering wheel both ways trying to find the traction I needed to get the car moving again. The last
thing I needed was for someone to stop, especially a cop, since I still hadn’t located my pipe. A single-car accident would mean investigation, sobriety tests and a detailed search of the scene.

The wheels only spun, digging deeper into the snow. I dug through the mess in the backseat and grabbed the blanket I always carried. My mother always said, “You never know when there might be an emergency and a blanket could come in handy.” She was right. I got out and went to the front of the car. Christ, what a mess. The hood was buckled and the left front tire had popped but I figured I would take care of that later. Maybe at the next town I could drive the car to a gas station and have some friendly local change my tire for me at three in the morning.

I crammed the blanket between the ground and the good tire, half-buried in snow thinking this would give me enough traction to get going. It didn’t work. The tire wouldn’t grab the material and wet with snow, the blanket froze to the ground.

I started looking frantically for the pipe, knowing that when a passing car happened to notice me, the police wouldn’t be far behind. I-84 was always desolate at night except for the big rigs, but that morning I hadn’t seen anyone since shortly after leaving
Boise
. I knew my luck wouldn’t hold out and I had to find that damn pipe, quick.

About twenty minutes later, I saw the first headlights. In the dark, there was no sign of the accident, and with all the lights off in the car, I crouched there trying to buy more time. I had no coat and the blanket was stuck to the snow. I was freezing cold and the only thing I could think of was finding the evidence before the police arrived. Two more cars passed and I still hadn’t found it. Shivering and teeth rattling, I knew I had to get out of the cold. I was in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t get a signal on my phone. I prayed the pipe had shattered or was buried. I’d looked everywhere using the dim light of my phone with no luck.