Acrobaddict (20 page)

One night a friend of Nick’s came into the room and told us he was driving up to Maine, and invited us to come along. In my pilled-out state I grabbed this invitation and, like a harpy, convinced Nick that we should go. He was powerless under my spell. We grabbed a case of beer and my beautiful pill bottle, and headed for Maine.

They were going snowboarding, but not us. I wasn’t going to waste precious drug money to play in the snow. I just wanted something
to do, and, maybe in my own insanity, I thought this would be a romantic trip. Even in hell they decorate, right? Even in my dirty, grungy life and demented thoughts I wanted romance and love. We were two demons moving closer to the candle flame. After all, for me this was romance: beer, pills, cold Maine air, and the man I was deeply in love with but who would never admit his true feelings for me. It didn’t matter to me if he didn’t love me back, just as long as he was there by my side. He could wear any disguise he wanted, but I knew at night, in the darkness as the rest of the world slept, he was snuggled in close to me.

We partied, drank, and talked all night, and Nick woke me up in the morning to drive back. In our mutual delusion I convinced him that we had taken too many pills, and without coke we would fall asleep at the wheel and die on our way back to campus. We had to find
real
Maine snow. We woke up a guy who was from there and asked him if he knew anyone. “I don’t know . . . maybe someone at the high school knows somebody.” He rolled over and went back to sleep. My fucked-up mind translated that as “Someone at the high school has coke on them and we just have to go there and find them.” When I tried to stand up, I almost fell over. Nick could barely walk either, but I knew a few more pills would straighten us out and get us thinking clearly. It didn’t. On a spectacular Monday morning in a small Maine town, Nick and I were completely fucked up. It was pure romance.

We got into his old pickup truck and started swerving through the little curved lanes. We had no idea where we were going, and somewhere inside me I knew we were playing with fire. The walls between my sanity and my true self were getting thinner. I started to have a complete psychotic breakdown on those pills. I started to believe my own lies. We drove until we found a school, which wasn’t difficult in a small town, then pulled into the parking lot and watched teenagers file inside. I knew this was crazy, but I couldn’t stop it. If there was a glimmer of hope to score, then it would be worth it.

As the teenagers marched in with their book bags, we got out of the truck and walked in with them. Nick and I still looked young, so nobody would think anything of it as long as we just kept walking in
alongside the other students. I decided to just ask a random student if he knew where I could find some cocaine. We both started asking a few teenagers, and they seemed completely scared of us. I found that confusing, since we weren’t monsters or doing anything wrong—we were just inquiring about a certain something. I continued creeping up to groups of kids and interrupting them, asking, “Hey guys, do you know anybody selling coke around here?” I couldn’t understand their awkwardness and fear. We continued deeper and deeper into the school, until ten minutes into the search two teachers ran down the hallway toward us. We started running and pushed through a few students in our way, and then ran through the doors and into Nick’s truck.

We peeled out of the parking lot and gunned it down the street toward the highway, afraid the cops would soon be chasing us with that obnoxious siren. As we drove faster along the curved streets, arguing about what a stupid idea that was, we took a tight turn on a dangerous curve and saw a car coming straight at us. Nick’s reaction time was in slow motion, and nothing could be done. A huge bang slammed my head hard into the dashboard, which blocked me from shooting through the windshield. Nick’s side of the car was smashed in, but he was similarly saved by the steering wheel. The woman driving the other car was okay and came to my side to see if we were injured.

The impact of the crash furthered the loss of my senses; I opened my door and started swearing at her. “What the fuck were you doing driving into us!” She looked confused, since we clearly had hit her. Even though we totaled her car, she seemed all right and more concerned about us. But I was not all right. I continued cursing her at the top of my lungs at eight in the morning in the cold streets of a city in Maine. The police and fire department arrived with the expected sirens. When the firefighters asked my name, I replied, “Reese’s Pieces,” convinced that was truly my name. They asked me what town I was in, and I said, “Holyoke.” My usual conniving brain had really been knocked around, and everything was confusing. Normally I’d be lying about my medical situation to get some painkillers out of these guys.

We watched them tow away the wreck that was Nick’s old truck. Still majorly fucked up on pills, I got into the back of the ambulance. All I remember after that is a room with bright lights and being diagnosed with a concussion. A guy from the party picked us up at the hospital and we went back to the apartment we had partied at the previous night. We had no way to get back to Holyoke. Nick’s truck was never leaving Maine again unless it got recycled into beer cans. The doctors told Nick not to let me sleep because of the concussion, but I was so tired from all the pills, there was no way I could stay awake. So we decided to take the rest of the day easy, and took the remainder of my pills and drank.

Nick’s uncle came all the way from Brooklyn to pick us up and drove us back to Holyoke. I can’t imagine how awkward and awful it must have been for him to see his nephew hanging out with his dirty, drunk, pilled-out, face-pierced friend, Joe. The drive back to Staunton College was the longest silent drive of my life, as Nick’s uncle punished us with slow, deep, concentrated breathing.

Back at school I felt horrible about Nick’s truck, but worse than that was coming down from taking so many pills over such a short span of time. I had taken an entire month’s worth over the weekend. I was so scared. For some reason the transition from being high to being sober affected me more this time than it did the others, and I would do whatever it took to ease the comedown. The goal became to never come down at all, no matter what. I would beg, steal, or lie to stay on the cloud of calm, because the Klonopin withdrawal was unbearable.

That week was awful. I went to the pharmacy to refill my prescription, but the pharmacist wouldn’t budge, so I devised a plan. I would call my psychiatrist and tell her someone had stolen my prescription. Since I felt a true state of anxiety coming off the pills, it would be easy for the phone call to sound like a real state of emergency, complete with tears. I told her some kids came into my room pretending to be my friends, and then stole my pills. As a drug of choice producing euphoria, this situation could certainly occur. When I had used every weapon I had in my manipulation arsenal, she finally believed me, sounded terribly concerned, and called the pharmacy immediately to
refill my prescription. The next problem I had was that I didn’t have the twenty-seven dollars to pay for the script, and no one would lend me money. They all knew I’d spend the money on drugs and would never repay them.

In my desperation I went into one of my teammates’ rooms, started up a conversation, and surveyed the place for something valuable and easy to steal. A portable CD player caught my eye, easy to stick down my pants and walk out with. I sat down near it and talked to him about how well my recovery was going and how happy I was to have the team’s support. I waited until he turned his head and stuffed the CD player in my huge, baggy jeans. I knew he didn’t see me take it and quickly said, “Shit, man, I gotta go. I’m late for something,” and ran to call Nick.

We borrowed a friend’s car and I promised to give him a pill for the drive. I pawned the CD player for forty dollars and picked up my prescription. I didn’t even wait to get back in the car; I tore open the stapled prescription bag right in front of the pharmacist, took two pills, and chewed them up waterless. I knew these pills would keep me safe in my own head for another twenty hours.

I had been missing gymnastics practice, and the coach would tell the counselor, and then I would have to go in and meet with her. I went back to practice, telling them I had been out for mental health issues, which they knew about and honored from my previous leave for rehab. I wasn’t competing that season, which allowed me a semester to get my head and skills back together enough for the competition level.

I warmed up on the vault, going through the basics, back to that moment of flying through the air, untouchable, beautiful, and free. I was doing a layout Yurchenko, a round-off entry to the vault, back handspring onto the horse, and pushoff to another elongated flip. The old-style men’s vault faced lengthwise, and I ran toward it as fast as I could and did my round-off back handspring onto the horse, but my hand slipped off the side. I must have taken off crooked from the board. I knew in midair that I didn’t have the muscle strength to pull it around, and the force of gravity took me crashing down,
digging my ankle into the mat. My landing sounded like I had just stepped on a brittle branch, and the bone screamed its very first word: “Snap!” Everyone heard it, and I immediately curled into a position of physical pain, wiggly and writhing. I knew it was broken. And I knew a broken bone meant Percocet—an opioid painkiller.

I knew I had broken my ankle as a direct result of all the pills I had taken. My mind and muscle synapses were all out of sync. Even though I wanted my body to pull the flip around, the message came too late, dulled by residual Klonopin.

Our physical therapist brought me to the campus medical center, and they transferred me to the emergency room. The X-ray came back showing the broken bone, and I was given a prescription, with a refill, for Endocet, Percocet’s cousin. The doctor seemed sympathetic to me as a gymnast with an ankle injury, so I decided to see how far I could push my luck. I told him my back hurt from a car accident the weekend before, and he added carisoprodol (Soma), a mellow muscle relaxant. Doctors always seemed to treat athletes differently from civilians, aware of the great pains we put our bodies through. As a gymnast on the team I consistently received more time, care, and desired meds, and I took full advantage of that. It was raining pills, and I would be in oblivion for the next month.

Nick and I didn’t leave my room for a week. We took so many downers that I decided we needed some cocaine. I thought the downers would be more enjoyable while we were awake, but we had no money and no car, just a lot of pills. I managed to find a good source of mushrooms that I planned to sell off, so I went around campus taking orders and collecting money from students. Now that I had money, I had to get to Southie, a long two-hour drive away. I also had to find a new cocaine dealer because I had burned my bridges with my old guy. On top of that, for my fundraising I went around campus selling fake ecstasy to kids who had no idea what it was, telling them they had to drink a lot with it to feel the effects. I took regular pills like Advil and ex-lax, rubbed the print off, and gave it a new name like cinnamon or sunshine for thirty dollars a pill. Ex-lax was the easiest, since all I had to do was scratch off the print
except for the letter X, standing for ecstasy. That unquestionably clinched my place in hell.

The money was sorted out; now all we needed was a ride. We asked one of my friends from the team who sometimes lent us his car. He said emphatically, “No way. You guys are too fucked up right now!” I changed the approach by offering a joint and a pill, which he took immediately. He relaxed and passed out by his computer. While he was fast asleep, Nick and I grabbed the car keys and left for the parking lot. We had taken so many pills that we were falling asleep ourselves by the time we found the car. I felt like I was in quicksand with my feet made out of rubber, unable to stand. My vision blurred and my heavy eyelids were pulled toward the ground. None of that mattered; we had the keys and the car, and it was now time to go get the coke.

We started our run onto the highway, a swerving metal death box powered by zombies, a steel-encased, ticking bomb. Nick was driving and I was the watchdog, making sure we stayed between the straight yellow lines and on the lookout for state police. About twenty minutes into the drive I lost the fight to not shut my eyes, and finally they succumbed. A blaring horn from a car we almost hit jolted me back awake. Nick was dead asleep at the wheel, swerving into another car beside us. I screamed his name and cursed him out to stay awake. I had taken double the amount of pills as Nick, so if he was swerving I wouldn’t stand a chance driving the car.

Within minutes I fell asleep again, but was shaken awake by the horrid sound of the tires hitting the side of the highway speed bumps, suddenly going right off the road toward the guardrail. Again, I shook Nick to wake him up, but he was slipping into unconsciousness. How we weren’t wrapped around the guardrail already is still a mystery to me. We were only forty-five minutes into the drive, and we had already nearly crashed twice. I had to take control of the situation. We pulled over; both of us stumbled out of the car, and then I harnessed all the muscle memory I had within my body so that I could drive. Every gymnastics practice was channeled into that drive. I swerved in response to a few honking horns, but luckily none of them were cops.

Miraculously, we arrived in Southie. I looked forward to doing the biggest line of cocaine ever to wake myself up. I found a girl to buy from who had been witness to my progressively quick decline. She handed me the bag of coke and I instantly said, “No, I need to get a little more, there isn’t enough in here.” She looked pissed but concerned. “Joe, I think you better slow down.”
What the fuck . . . a drug dealer telling me to slow down?
Insulted, I told her it was for the long drive back and I didn’t want to crash, so she threw in a free line.