Authors: Joe Putignano
“T
HE MOUTH OF THE GODLY PERSON GIVES WISE ADVICE, BUT THE TONGUE THAT DECEIVES WILL BE CUT OFF”
(P
ROVERBS
10:31). E
VEN TODAY IN CERTAIN CULTURES, THE REMOVAL OR ALTERATION OF THE TONGUE IS USED AS A METHOD OF PUNISHMENT OR TORTURE
.
My sophomore year began in September of 1997, and my perfect rave world became infected with immature college students and other kids jumping on the bandwagon to take their first hit of ecstasy. The pure vibe, originality, and passion we had brought to the scene were ruined. We dressed in bright hip-hop Ralph Lauren and Polo Sport; Men in Black and Puff Daddy dominated; and I continued my death spiral with cocaine. Cloud didn’t return to Staunton College, and I was devastated. She decided to transfer to a design school near her home in Oregon. It was up to Darren and me to find some new friends who enjoyed the same recreational habits as us.
I tried to move beyond the negative memories of my summer of destruction, forget the bridges I had blown to pieces, and only remember the wonderful highs. I kicked off my sophomore year with no intentions of going to any classes or even buying a textbook. I set my sights on partying.
One night, Darren got a large amount of cocaine, more than we had ever seen, and decided to cut it and then sell it. Cutting the cocaine allowed us to add powder to it to increase the quantity, which gave us more coke to sell. We dumped all of it onto a mirror like they do
in the movies, wrote our names in the white powder, and sniffed until morning. After that night, I began to think I could no longer exist without it.
During a long, sleepless weekend of doing coke all night and seeing daylight only twice, I came crashing down. My body was numb and my heart raced as I stared out my window at students drinking coffee, walking to class, and talking to each other. I hid from the light in my cave and tried to snort my way to salvation. The sight of humans being human brought small breakdowns; however, those breakdowns were rare, since the drugs elevated my emotions to points beyond my ability to reason. I was high, guarded, untouchable, safe, loved, and beautiful, but as the drugs wore off all of those feelings weakened and cracked, and then reality gushed in, flooding my spirit with anxiety and depression of biblical proportions.
I used more coke to erase those feelings, which just left a giant emptiness in my heart. I prayed to a God I no longer believed in, and begged him to remove my emotions and pain and return me to that place to which cocaine first took me. Darren didn’t have meltdowns. Sure, he felt like shit after a sleepless weekend of doing coke and pills, but he didn’t self-destruct like me, and I hated him for that. Maybe I wasn’t using the right combination of pills and coke. Maybe I just needed to drink a little more on top of all that I took. After experiencing so many of my breakdowns, Darren suggested that I talk to a counselor at school.
That same day, in desperation, I made an appointment with a student counselor. I liked the sound of her voice on the phone. She sounded welcoming and trustworthy, but I was afraid I’d get kicked out of school if I told her exactly what I had been doing. The week before my appointment I had done so much coke that I thought I was going into cardiac arrest. My pulse beat faster than the dance music we were listening to, and I tried to conceal my fear with a smile. I made my way to the dorm bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. The coke was too strong, and I did too much. Sweat poured from my forehead and my skin looked pale and greenish. A friend from the
gymnastics team walked in while I stood at the sink, trying to find my vision in the mirror. He looked terrified and asked, “Joey, are you okay?”
“Seriously?” I looked at him with pure conviction and said, “I feel awesome.”
I met with the school counselor a few days later and liked what she had to say. She was taller than me, with long, blonde hair that sat perfectly on her shoulders. She was clearly educated in her field, and pulled me in with her good bedside manner. I felt I could trust her and believed she would honor the confidence between counselor and patient. I revealed my drug use, the raves, and many things a student should probably not expose to a college therapist—after all, this was a university, not a mental institution. I wanted and expected her to take away my pain and exorcise my emotional mania. But I wasn’t going to stop using drugs.
After weeks of therapy I noticed the only things really changing were the dying leaves on increasingly bare trees. My counselor suggested that I start attending twelve-step meetings, which I thought was a ludicrous suggestion. She told me about gay meetings, which made me even more embarrassed and doubly ashamed. I was not an addict and didn’t need to go to twelve-step meetings. I was only nineteen; how could I be an addict?
Through all this I still trained and competed on the gymnastics team, though my skills were fading into a cocaine haze. I still took competitions seriously, indulging in the beautiful dreamscapes gymnastics provided. There was still one rule I hadn’t broken: I never used drugs the night before a competition. The most important meet was coming up, the NCAA, and Staunton was hosting the competition. Colleges throughout the country would be coming to compete at our school.
The night before, I prepared my grip bag obsessively with the same bizarre ritual I had engaged in as a young boy. This was my only connection to him, the only tie to that child warrior and my past. Without acting out this obsession my memories would crumble,
leaving me alone with my reflection in the mirror—a depressed college student with a severe cocaine problem. While I rechecked my bag there was a loud knock on my door. It was Ginny, a girl I sometimes smoked weed with and generally found annoying. Her badly dreadlocked black hair looked like it was fighting itself as her youthful eyes desperately screamed, “Love me! Love me! I am nothing without your approval!” That voiceless plea made us kindred spirits.
She danced into my room with ease and asked what I was doing. Already irritated, I told her, and then she chimed, “Well, you will never believe what I got tonight.” My ears perked up, and instantly she turned into my best friend. I loved her, asked what she had, and she smiled. “I have mushrooms!” Mushrooms were a rarity on our campus. Acid and coke were easy, but mushrooms were like winning the lottery.
“Awesome. Can we take them tomorrow after my competition?”
“No way,” she replied. “I want to trip now!”
I knew what it was like to want to trip, and didn’t even bother trying to convince her otherwise. She would take them with someone else if I didn’t step up. It just wasn’t negotiable. “All right, let’s do it.”
It was still early in the night. Maybe it would wear off before morning, and I could get an hour or two of sleep and be okay for the competition. I checked my uniform one more time, making sure it didn’t grow legs and walk out of my gym bag. She opened the clear plastic sandwich baggie with pieces of dried mushrooms inside. She gave me the bigger pieces and divided the broken ones equally between us. I immediately chewed them up and drank some water. They tasted bad, but not as bad as ecstasy. I continued to prepare for my competition, and tried to control the upcoming trip. Ginny looked at me like I was crazy, but most people had been doing that lately.
A half-hour later I was lost in my clothes, folding laundry, when the mushrooms hit. I couldn’t remember how to fold a shirt. Did the left go to the right, the right to the left? What if I did it wrong? I instantly burst out laughing and fell in love with the shirt covering my hands.
It was now a part of me, forever, and I put it on over the shirt I was already wearing. We became best friends, and we would never leave each other. When I was on acid I connected with the peace and oneness of all things, but on mushrooms I gained the ability to speak to those things without making a sound. Even synthetic objects took on a pure nature, and everything sparkled with magnificent glory. Ginny and I walked together through a beautiful, enchanting dream down the hallways of our dorm, seeing everything for the very first time. Everything had its own life force; this was
real
magic.
I forgot about my competition as we fell deeper into the spiritual realm of ourselves and our surroundings. The auditory hallucinations were as powerful as the visual ones, and the Earth’s core whispered, “Walk to me, find me.” Every time I laughed, it embraced me. I could not contain this cosmic laughter, and all the colors that made up our lives were released in sound. Then, I saw sound. I ran to my CD player and put on as many different bands as I could think of and sat on the floor between the speakers. Glorious chords pulled me from myself, and in that moment I knew there was an afterlife, that when we die we’ll leave our bodies on Earth and become a vapor cloud, breathing with the universe. Each note became its own separate being as the music intensified. I saw the birth of sound, the first bell that was rung and the first explosion of laughter. The thickness of sound swallowed me whole, deeper and deeper, until I was no longer alive, but only perpetual vibration. It was mentally orgasmic.
Morning came fast, as it always seemed to when I was having a good time, and I was still tripping hard. All the love and appreciation for sound and music had to go, since I was competing in six events in a few hours; however, I couldn’t even see in front of me without a whirlwind of color blinding my eyes. How was I going to do this? How could I stand with composure on the floor exercise without bursting out in laugher? I had to get un-high and get there quickly. I called Darren, hoping he would come up with a solution.
In the past when I was tripping hard I would do some coke and it usually brought me down. Darren came over with a few leftover lines from his own partying that night. I did the lines, but they didn’t help.
Now I was tripping with a thirst for more speed. We crushed up some Ritalin and started making big, long, yellow lines. I sniffed them, hoping it would eradicate the mushrooms’ effects, but it just sped up my hallucinatory dreamland. The situation had lost its humor. I would need a good explanation for my coach and teammates. I knew I couldn’t compete in that condition.
I needed to figure it out, and in my beautiful hallucinatory state I found a moment of honesty. This honesty seemed to glow from within. I said to Darren, “I’m just gonna tell coach the truth.” He burst out laughing, but I knew I had to. In the blizzard of my mistakes I saw that coming clean would bring me peace. It seemed like the best solution. I continued sniffing Ritalin until it was time to go into the huge stadium.
Wanting to be alert and responsive, I did as much speed as possible before talking to the coach. Everything sparkled. The sounds of my sneakers made me giggle, and I was afraid that when I admitted to my coach that I was tripping, I’d break down in a fit of laughter. My fear grew as I got closer to his office door. I knocked and heard regret bounce off my fists. He said in a kind voice, “Come in.” I opened the door, and he looked comfortable in his office chair. His wife and son were sitting in chairs around his desk. I couldn’t believe I was in this situation. I was soaring through the clouds, and here in front of me were good, normal people having a nice Sunday morning together. I was about to drop a bomb.
Shame and regret washed through my veins as I remembered how he had helped me get into this school, how he had recommended me, and how he had given me money so that I could continue attending college. How could I tell him the truth? I was a grinning mess in dirty jeans, full of prescription and psychoactive drugs. I don’t know how it happened, but a voice came from my center and said, “Coach, I need to talk to you . . . alone . . . if you have a moment.” He looked perplexed, but still had a gleam in his eye as he said to his family, “I’ll see you guys in a bit. I just have to talk to Joe.”
I had four seconds to figure out if I was really going to ring that bell. I tried to speak my truth, but the Ritalin started dripping down my
nasal cavity, into the back of my throat, and onto to my tongue. Gagging on my chemistry experiment, I needed to spit.
“Coach, I’m tripping!”
“What? You tripped? Are you okay?”
“No, Coach. I’m
tripping
!”
He looked confused, so I blurted, “Mushrooms, acid, I’m tripping.”
All the beautiful sounds froze in his stare as I was no longer able to suppress the growing monster glob in my throat. I spat a huge loogie of yellow pills onto his trash, already filled to the top with paper. He saw the blob of yellow spit, which had an uncanny resemblance to bile, and I said, “It’s just speed, Coach.” Oh god, here I go. I’ve really done it now.
Just keep talking, Joe, just keep fucking talking
.
It was the only truth, the only thing actually real about me that I had announced out loud in a very long time. In a small, quiet moment of grace I said with subtle conviction, “I think . . . I think . . . I have a drug problem.” I wasn’t even sure if I believed it, but I was already circling in a drain I never intended to fall into.
His anger turned to compassion, and he talked to me for a long time and asked what I wanted to do about it. I told him I needed help and needed to come clean with everything. I thought to myself,
Maybe I do have a drug problem
. I was struggling to live without cocaine, and the small bouts of not using crippled me. I hated being in my skin, and had to be medicated or high to feel normal. I didn’t know how I would be able to live without drugs.
After we talked for a while, he told me to put on my uniform and go cheer for the team. I don’t think he understood what I meant by tripping—there was no way on Earth I could see my teammates’ faces. I was still high as a kite and needed to stay aloft. “Coach, I’ve been up all night. I really need to go home and sleep,” I said right before my tongue forked. “I’m also going to tell my parents I have a drug problem.” He commended me for my lie-laden honesty.