I am a drug addict. I am one of those that flirted with death and didn’t know why. I still don’t know why, but I’m learning more and more daily. My story is one that took me from the gilded rooms of the Seelbach Hotel, where I sipped expensive bourbon, smoked rare cigars, and snorted expensive narcotics, to the wretched streets of Portland where I injected heroin and drank Steel Reserve. I’ve seen death in a hundred forms. My own was impending. I’m the survivor of six overdoses and I made it out of the trenches of this disease; trenches laden with those fallen, healthy and with a sound mind. I’m one of the lucky ones. Well, not lucky really. I’m one of the blessed ones.
I was a kid in the eighties, which was awesome, but I really came into my own, for better or worse, in the nineties. I was part of that whole narcotic analgesic pain pill wave that swept the nation, leaving a swath of destruction in its insidious wake. I remember when it all started for me clear as a bell. The day my life changed and brought me to where I am today.
On that day, several of us were looking to buy pot. We were young and this was before we knew any actual dealer, so naturally, we couldn’t find any. We were at someone’s grandmothers house, and finally, after all avenues were exhausted, the friend that lived there told us that he had something we could do instead. He said that it was some of his grandmother’s pain medication, and I remember thinking what a joke that was. This was before I knew what oxycodone or methadone were. This was before anything, really. I was sixteen years old. I remember thinking how I just wanted to get high, and no old lady pills were as good as some sweet, green marijuana. I was wrong.
When he gave me the blue hydrocodone 10/500, I washed it down with an ice-cold Coke and was on my way home when it began to hit me. The butterflies began to flutter in my belly. My face began to warm, my nose began to itch and that was it. I was home. I remember thinking that this was simply the best feeling in the world and I pursued it right up to the day I almost died on the floor of a mall bathroom. When I came to that day, all sweaty and hot from the electric shock of the defibrillator; a wide-eyed mall security guard looking down on me in disbelief, a needle dangling from my arm and a dried red stripe of blood running down into the palm of my hand and creating a crusty pond there, I didn’t reflect on that day. The only thing on my mind was getting to my kit and putting the spike and the rest of the high-grade heroin somewhere where I could retrieve it and take another ride. Insanity. The dance with death.
Now that I’ve been separated from substances for a while, I’m beginning to see how wonderful life can be. The simple joy I get from just conversing with my fellow man. or helping those around me. Or the simple gift of spending time with my young niece and nephew as they gaze, innocent, unknowing and in awe, from eyes yet to see the horrors I have, at a world rife with possibility. I see God in the hearts and actions of those around me. I look in wonder upon a world I don’t really know, as I’ve only glimpsed it from the darkest of perspectives, yet eager to learn more about.
Cynicism, lust, power, the lust for power, money and the lust for that; sometimes these things seem to reign supreme, but in the face of that I plug along in my simple little life and today, I’m grateful for every single moment. For, it’s in the hearts of men and women, that God resides, and it’s in our actions that we find peace and redemption. It’s been that way for me anyway. The rest is just noise.
BlackTree Journal 