Descent

Scott Spackey: Chapter 19 A Stone's Throw Memoir of a Dope-Fiend It's late. trying to walk the line. Well, it's way past midnight and there's some people all around. Some on their way up, some on their way down. Can't wait. Bob Dylan by Scott A. Spackey A stone's throw, Memoir of a Dope Fiend has won five awards including the Benjamin Franklin Silver from IBPA. It is available in print, ebook and audio. Everywhere books are sold throughout the US and Europe. to hear more and for free downloads, visit scottspackey.com slash books. I do not think about or plan ways to get high. I don't have to. They just happen. I don't mean to run into Gage or Johnny or Dana each time I'm in the valley. It just happens. I don't know if they will have dope and rigs and get me spun. It just seems to happen that way. I never planned to go out and stay away for days at a time, slamming dope into my arm, 30, 40, 60 cc's at a time. A Gram were two over a couple days, hanging out with whores in motel rooms all over the valley, our arms bleeding and bruised, sharing the bond of being fiends together. A dark world to share, shutting out the rest until daylight, and then slamming another hit home to change the day to night. It just happens that way. The needle scares the shit out of me every time it goes in. The rush is so extreme I never know if this is the one that is going to put me on the floor, flopping like a fish foaming at the mouth. I go out and meet up with Dana. We spend 48 hours doing dope, 5 or 6 hits each day and through the night. We do a lot of dope. When we run out, we go to Johnny. Johnny has not seen me in a long time. He's high as fuck living in a friend's garage. He's so glad to see me he showers me with attention. He offers me a hit, so I do it. 65cc's, almost a half gram at once. My brain hits the fucking wall. 10 minutes later he offers another, so I accept. Johnny doesn't offer Dana hit at all. He sees Dana pretty regularly and is not enamored or impressed he's there. I know Dana needs dope too, but I say nothing to help him out. It feels shitty, but I would not expect him to risk a hit by opening his big mouth for me either. I'm still rushing off the first one, my blood and pulse pumping over time from two days of dope. Another 50cc's and I'm over the edge of the world. Johnny and I are so fucking spun, we're on another plane of existence. Ten minutes later, he offers me another. Fuck it, yeah I say. Let's see if this is the one that kills us both. We laugh our asses off. gallows humor and gets spun a third time and then a fourth. Inside an hour I have almost a gram of dope slammed into my veins. No wonder I feel indestructible. I don't feel real. No one could survive that so I must not be real. The come downs are the truly vicious part of using and the severity of a come down after doing the hits like I did with Johnny are of psychotic proportions. With every binge I go despairingly headlong into them again and again trying each time to handle it a little better making every effort to accept it as part of the high. What goes up I use all sorts of psychology to get me through the come downs. I don't know if I am better or worse at it than other tweaks. We all suffer like lame mutts when the dope begins to make its exit and the body and mind fight like titans to get more. Every Sunday, or Tuesday or Thursday, whatever day of the week I run out of everything and finally admit defeat and turn toward home, I pull the denial trigger and tell myself, I'm in deep shit, but I'll be fine. I've been more fucked up than this and stayed up longer too. I can deal with it. I can deal with it because I have to. Since I have no choice, it is simply a mind over matter proposition. And it is true. I have almost habitual practice at getting up after a binge and going to work and actually performing. I don't perform right or well, but I scrape through. Some days are worse than others though, and my paranoid mind does cartwheels on the job. I wonder if anyone can tell. I bet I smell like dope. Fuck, I don't think I can keep going. I'm so wiped out. Son of a bitch, did I piss my pants? It's funny, I don't spend much thought on whether getting strung out and trying to work a construction job is somehow wrong in the first place. It is merely a condition and circumstance, like work and rent, pissing when you drink beer, or women and heartache. I do dope and I freak out about work. Hours before I freak about work, I freak about going home. When I get home, I need to appear as normal as possible. But since being fucked up is virtually my normal state, it is easy to disguise. On most occasions, I come in the door the same way, greeting Jill warmly but not too much so as not to make her suspicious. She is usually so grateful to have me home, she doesn't risk the time together for a lecture session. There is nothing to win if she nags, just time lost. She knows I will only agree, sob, get intense, and apologize, depriving her of her fight to be right. Approaching come down. My opinion of myself is low and hopeless. I am aware of the needless, selfish pain I causing. I do not feel there are words that can justify my neglect or where I have been, so I passive and agreeable. Jill and I have adopted a don't ask, don't tell policy. She doesn't ask where I've been or what I've been doing, and I don't offer up the terrifying and disgusting truth. If I come in late, Jill might be in bed, reading and watching TV. We lightly chat, and she'll maybe tease me about being away, and being buzzed, with just an edge of cruelty, to subtly let me know she is seriously hurt and angry. I go into the bathroom to shower, the bright light stripping away any anonymity I have, putting my shame under a spotlight that is impossible to hide from. My many reflections in the mirrors give me real images back. my nakedness, accentuated by how lean my body is, not quite emaciated, but unhealthy and withdrawn. The most prominent features are the three or four red marks in the crook of my arm, which is tender and sore when I extend it, like a bruise. It makes me shiver and I have to look away, not really able to accept it, keeping my arm slightly bent in an attempt to nurture the bruise and also to try to deny it all. I shower, get into bed with Jill. If the lights are off already, it lets me know in advance what not to expect. I brush up against her, surprised to feel her naked flesh, which sends a different signal, making me hopeful I might seduce her. If she is in flannel, I am forced straight to the paranoid and anxiety portion of the come down. But tonight, she is mostly nude, and I want, now need, the closeness and affection. I try to touch her and she pulls away, but slightly. I confess a few minor sins to show I care, to bond and to seem vulnerable. I make small apologies, wishing I could do more for her, come clean about what is really in my head and what I really know about myself and how far I might go and often do. But I never tell, because then she would know the truth, that I disappear for days at a time to push needles full of dope into my arm. Begging death and illness to spoil everything and if she knew she might try to keep me from my vices or worse try to save me and fail I never tell, no matter how desperate and terrified I secretly am. She may try to save me, and succeed. She can never win, and neither can I. So I lie next to her and say nothing but a few easy but sincere promises, to try to do better, and take her with me the next time I go out, so she can keep an eye on me. She still tries to refuse me sex, but I am persistent, and Jill wants me as badly as I want her, just for different reasons. She misses me. My want is searing, but blended with a need for the acceptance into her flesh, something that might redeem me and allow me to be real and something more than what I am. Fucking her might do that. Make me a god for a brief while and steam away the past 48 or 54 or 72 hours, allowing me to feel immortal when all I feel at the moment is the harshness of my mortality as the drug slips into my tissues. becoming less prevalent and therefore less potent in keeping me alive. She can resurrect me, so I plunge into her flesh like it is Xanadu, splendid and saving. Her form is a hypnotic paradox of firmness and soft curves. I paw, caress, and grope. Her arousing tension is haven to my hands and mouth. My touches have power from a lust, and my rigid cock swells just being near her. rigid as it tries to make contact with any part of her just to merge with the contact. Our skin is literally heated, our sensual parts swelling and wetting. I take mouths full of her, everywhere and every part. I want to swallow her inside so I can fuck her outside of me and within me. A slow and intense climb up to eroticism where we both come, loud and sweating into each other. When it is over, me all too alert, awake and acutely alone, Jill passes into contented sleep. My thoughts turn to the imminent lack of sleep I'm about to endure, and how infinite a night it is to be if I am to sit in the dark feeling every minute the way I am now, experiencing every move on of it passing like a history, almost never ending, just sort of becoming the next one, exactly like the last one, and so on, and so on. All the while the anxiety over the last few days, failures and excesses are turning into a hopeless tunnel, swirling deeper into something that seems to have no bottom, making me pray it does, even if that bottom is the end of me. Anxiety soon gives way to paranoia as night turns into wee hours and the wee hours turn into the isolated fact that the rest of the world is silent and sleeping and I am alone, completely alone. surrounded by the kind of quiet that feels like I'm smothered inside a pillow. Quiet that is dense but clear. Insomnia is like fighting a fever. You struggle through it and it makes the night uncomfortable and long. Insomnia is anxiety and nervousness and is too many thoughts to control. Worry, anticipation, despair, all happening at once. Come downs have all those insomnia thoughts and the thick pasty dose of panic coating. As the rest of the world becomes quieter, my thoughts and paranoia grow louder and begin to take shape, becoming audible. So audible, I think I could hear a worm if it crawled along a stick outside, and I start to wonder at the sounds the world makes when no one is there to make them. Small creaks and chirps and whirs at first, a floorboard, the refrigerator. I hear shares wind chimes on the balcony, tapping tinkly into each other, making their sudden, then fading music. The chimes sound again. By the third time, I'm trying to hear the sounds I hear beyond the chimes. I detect sounds that are occurring at the same time. Sounds the chimes are covering up with their own noise. Are the creaks still there? The chirps and whirs? Do they run in the background behind the chimes? I listen intently and feel the quietness of Newport outside my window as though I'm the only sentry between these invader sounds and the citizens within our townhome. Soon I can actually hear the behind the chimes sounds, elusive as they are. Outside, something is moving, but only when the chimes tinkle the covered sounds, something I cannot hear when the chimes are silent. I continue to listen but cannot get a bead on the noise. It ceases when the chimes do, only a short residual sound is left over when the chimes finally get quiet. Like trying to hear the footfalls of someone behind you if they stop when you stop. The chimes sound every few minutes and around the 20th time I have it figured out. There are three bandits who have scaled the back bay hillside, crept in through the balcony, and are now hoisting all of our furniture out the sliding patio door, over the balcony, and down the brushy and bushy overgrown hillside they climbed up while using the sounds of the chimes to cover their betraying noises. It makes perfect sense to me. We will all wake up to no furniture, but I am too afraid and curious to stop them. I try to listen closer. It is hard to hear and I cannot assess whether an investigative trip down the stairs is sensible or if I'm imagining things. Several times I have my covers peeled back and I'm poised to go and save the day. But then I think of the possibilities. If I am right, I could get hurt. Only three fucking maniacs would climb up a hill and move a 200 pound couch over a balcony. Maniacs I do not want to run into. If I'm wrong, I'll feel really dumbass and it'll be proof I'm delusional. I don't want to be delusional. If I stay put, I won't run the risk of Jill or Cher waking and being alarmed by me. I now feel my mission on Earth is to preserve their slumber, or at least my mission in our townhome. Thwarting the balcony bandits is eclipsed by protecting my roommates from being woken and disturbed by my investigations. The very real, at least to me, distraction of the suspicion that these crimes are taking place right under the floorboards... Wait! There it is again! the chimes and the noise. I lie emotionless, afraid my body brushing into the covers is creating too much noise for me to hear. So I listen, listening, listening, listening for hours and hours. When the sun comes up, I am still listening and have been for over four hours. I'm lying stiff as a board, my eyes wide and staring, my head slightly cocked to one side to give me a better angle toward the sounds of theft in our living room. The alarm goes off at 6.30 and I do my best impression of a schizophrenic paranoid, trying to act like I just woke from a restful sleep to keep Jill's suspicions and judgments at a safe level. Jill usually wakes cheerfully, showering, dressing and fully accepting my lie. not having to work until later. Only half day. The moment Jill joins me in the waking world, I know what a delusion the bandits downstairs, the DEA helicopter landing on the roof, or the musketeers fighting in the bathroom were. As if she switches on an incandescent bulb in my face and screams, what are you fucking crazy? I drive her to work, large fragments of dope still ping-ponging through my body like a nervous tick but fading fast. And I'm heading toward complete collapse. When I get home, I might be relieved to find that Cher has gone to work instead of having her day off when I'll be dying. I'll head straight for the couch and fall on my face into the cushion. So grateful last night's bandits have replaced my stolen couch with one that looks exactly like it. My body feels hollow and the night before is erasing itself from my memory as its ludicrousness gives way to intense fatigue. My mind, still very awake like a rogue pinball, careening like the Energizer Bunny through a ghost machine, while my body begins to feel weaker and weaker, beyond a point of weakness and onto a level of negative energy, a void of energy, as if it were being sucked out of me via a straw on the top of my head from someplace core and vital within. making me question if I have ever been animated tissue at all I can sense the energy leaving my body and spirit leaving me like a mushy mess sprawled like liquid on the cushions of the couch I'm fucking dying that shit killed me it's just taking a long time to do it there is something very fucking strange about this I've done a lot of dope before and I never felt like this there's something freaky about it I feel like the guy in the Metallica song 1 conscious but immobile paralyzed. I think I'm fucking paralyzed. What was in that shit? I wonder if this is how an extreme and accelerated condition of hepatitis feels. I must have AIDS. I lie immobilized through the morning and on until noon, unable to understand anything being this severe without actually killing someone. As the rest of me slowly writes itself, the dope passing from an effectual state to an ineffectual one. My appetite returns, but there's nothing I can do about it since I am now paralyzed. Maybe I should just open my mouth and start chewing this cushion my face is smashed into. My mind begins to clear from the dope, returning me to a rational state, prompting me to make a few calls about work and other odds and ends that need air and attention. But I cannot move to the phone or even see it since I am still on my face. I can't move. Can't. Slowly, I regain movement of limbs and manage to turn over at around 3 in the afternoon. By 4, my hunger gains the final word and I make it to the kitchen for leftover mac and cheese and milk. Milk, cheese, my god, ice cream, anything dairy to replace the calcium the meth destroys by the barrel, making tweaks toothless far before their time. By five, I am out the door and on my way to pick up Jill from work. The beautiful Newport sunset and freshness of the evening surrounding me like a spring day, free and perfect. The world waiting on me to be reborn. Jill and I might share a quiet evening at home and by bedtime, the binge's aftermath is a memory that loses more of its power each time I think about it, eventually slipping away altogether. Leaving me ready to do it all over again. This has become my life. There is nothing good left in me. I cannot stand naked to the world and have anything to offer. I'm a dope fiend. A tweak. I care nothing for myself or anyone else. I don't care enough to make an effort to stop myself, not for me or anyone. I feel absorbed by everyone's problems and consumed by their need for me to be the one who has it all together and make their dreams reality. I have no dreams of my own, only temporary challenges which I accomplish with ease just to keep the fakery of my life going on just a little longer. A little longer. The future seems a luxury beyond me. Always. I'm now 23. I have matured in ways I cannot fight and regress in others that compound my confusion to a madness inside. No one knows me anymore. My happiness is buried beneath layers of angst, resentments and contempt. I am a shell for everyone else to look at and love and admire. Good looking cute boy, he's so confident, he gets shit done. He's so smart, smarter than any of us. He always makes me feel better, helps me reason my problems out. He about God and Spirit, Karma, Life and Consciousness. He can do anything. I help everyone around me go forward, stay on track, and keep perspective. I try to make it feel enlightening and special to know me. It's easy because their problems are shit. Their lives trifles. Their minds simple. And their situations too easy to define and redefine. No one asks me to save them, not out loud, but it is their quiet desperation and subtle hints left like crumbs on a trail that cry out from them and make me incapable of turning away. There is always some sort of sixth sense, a second sight, which I alone seem to possess, that allows me to see what is hurting an alien and others, what they are missing, and so they turn to me for insights. Me. Of all people. Me. It's more than advice they seek, it's wellness and understanding. Now I am the hermit holding the light and they all climb to seek me out, ask for my wisdom and mystical answers. But my angst and inner pain come from their unwillingness to do anything with the knowledge and insights that channel through me for them to hear. They do nothing with it, ever. Cher still laments over her kids, Jill over her father, everyone over something, but they do nothing to change it. Long talks, close and private stories and confessions spill like blood on the tracks. Then my soul is offered up like a ritual, digging so deep into myself and the God inside me to get them the answers they need for them to say, my God, how did you know? To cry afterward, it's so true, I see it now, I understand, thank you, thank you. And turn around the next day as though God had never come and sat with us and opened heaven and hell just so we could have a moment of clarity. I am the reluctant sage for my misfits, the blind leading the blind. And I cannot fix my own pain, the unrelenting void in me that makes me always crave for more and need some evidence that I am actually a living thing, breathing and heart beating. I search and wait for someone to help me, to share in my pain, to understand it and empathize. I am through with sympathy. Who will empathize with me? Who will talk to me? Who will counsel me? Who the fuck is going to help me out of this prison? A prison that drugs is a side effect of, not the cause. I am untouchable, too smart for anyone to even approach or even suggest I am destroying my life. What possible answers can they give to me that I cannot give to myself? The only person that can save me is me, and me is dying faster inside and out than anyone can get a beat on. The trap of a strong mind is a solid one. Every addict can convince himself that getting high is a good idea, but I walk the line like a fucking high wire act. Bullshitting my way through everyone's heart and life each day while I spiral into dope lie fuck drink consume beat off smoke never sleep never eat never smile on the inside I Watch my pain in my life going by I get some movie and someone else must be the main character because otherwise I'd be feeling some of this shit I'm beginning to suspect a pattern to my dysfunction. If there are things above and beyond making me feel alive and connected, I don't need dope. I'm addicted to anything outside the parameters of normal life. Interest in a new girl, traveling someplace new and unseen, emotional conflict, good food, a new book, sex that's real and intense, anything to keep me feeling alive and breathing. Dope is the easiest, most accessible, extreme path I know of to elevate me from life's mediocrity. Whenever I go out, I'm open to anything intense, but dope always finds me first. And it delivers like a motherfucking rocket ship, like a stairway to heaven. How am I ever going to stop? For Jill? No fucking way! She never says anything exciting to me anymore. And even though our sex is still good, it is rare that it's mind-blowing. And since we're capable of mind-blowing sex, mind-blowing is all that can satisfy me. For Cher? No fucking way! She's gotten what she wanted from me. I've saved her ass yet again, and now she wants to be left alone and not risk any of it. Not for me, not for anybody. For my family? No fucking way! The last people on earth I feel any obligation toward my family. For myself? No fucking way. I'm my own worst enemy. I'm the only person who truly interests me. My life is rife with cosmic coincidences, controversial behavior, and deep insights. My dope fiend people are just that, dope fiends. And my working regular friends are just that, regular. I equal contempt for all of them. I'm the only one walking in the twilight and I haven't found anything I give a shit about. That is not to say I loathe myself, as I say, I'm the only interesting person I even know. I look at myself as an indestructible lab experiment. I didn't do all this shit, the pot, that first shot of whiskey in San Jose, fucking every girl I could, letting a guy suck me off for money, speed balls and needles full of meth because I was insecure, confused, or had been traumatized. I was fucking bored. to absolute catastrophic proportions, which created a living hell inside me and a pain inside my tortured skull. was totally fearless and could not believe anything, even death being worse than the pain of living. I destroy myself out of curiosity because I am there.