Authors: Joe Putignano
I took the pills and went outside into the dirty madness of the city. I found a building to lean against, frightened among all those people on the streets. I slid down the concrete wall into a ball and watched the city’s busy flow, always changing, never the same. People filled the street corners, sometimes in arguments, sometimes in laughter, and it reminded me of PBS’s deep-sea documentaries about dazzling fish in coral reefs. The big fish always ate the smaller fish and so on, and the different fish were born with different mechanisms of defense. I was the smallest, weakest fish hiding between two buildings on a pavement full of broken glass, the soundtrack of chaos pulling me toward sleep.
When you have no place to live, nature mocks you. A dandelion tried to rip through a crack in the sidewalk, its bent stem repeatedly trampled on, but still trying to thrive. I tried to embrace its beauty there among the filth, crime, and noise, but its simple charm began to wrestle with my humanity and it was no longer a flower, but rather all I had lost—desensitized and destroyed. The pills hit me hard and the destructive soundscape turned enchanting, freeing, and comforting. All I hated and feared became strength and desire. I was now a fish with power. I lay on the city street, confused and alone, thrown in with the graffiti and the sirens. I fell in and out of sleep to those soothing sounds. I missed my curfew and a bed, clutching my things in my hand, and slept like a dog whose eyes pop open at the slightest sound.
The next day I thought hard about my life and knew I needed to change, but still didn’t know how. I had failed so many times, and always returned to the drugs. I didn’t know what happened to Nick, if he was alive or dead. Did the charcoal work? Did it save him? I couldn’t remember the hospital we were at, so I had no way of getting any information. My heart was broken and all the soft poetry we had made crumpled—smoldering against the fire of our lives. I prayed he was okay.
I saw a pay phone spray-painted black and white across the street. Hoping it still worked, I approached it and picked up the broken handle. There was a dial tone, and, remembering a commercial from when I was younger about teenage runaways, I pressed zero. I was finally the star of my own show. The operator answered and I told her I was a teenage runaway who wanted to let my parents know that I was okay. The operator was kind and concerned; I could have talked to her for hours. She connected me to my mother, who hung up as soon as she heard my voice. I slammed the phone and disconnected inside, fighting back tears so as not to draw attention to my weakness. Crying at that pay phone would have been like holding a neon sign: “I’m weak! Come beat me up and steal my clothes. Please.” I didn’t think I could hate her any more, but I did.
I looked around the street corner next to the homeless shelter, behind a dilapidated church, in a neighborhood full of ghosts, horrified at the contrast between my past and the present, with no concept of a future. How had I fallen from standing on the first-place podium in gymnastics to sitting in the gutter of that trash-piled street? The dirty pavement was my podium now. I was the newest piece of shit, and the sewer welcomed me with open arms. At least I was loved and cared for somewhere.
One day, after I got used to the place—even hell gets comfortable and normalized—I walked into my bunker and there was Nick, looking sober and handsome. My heart stopped, and all breath escaped my body. There he was, an angel out of heaven, with that old spark back in his smile.
My eyes watered in disbelief and he said, “Hey man, my mom’s outside, she’s going to drive you to the bus station so you can go home to your mom.”
I started crying and said, “Nick, I thought you were dead, I didn’t know what happened to you.”
Nick, now abstinent and unable to communicate his real love in the world without the illusions that had held him up, said, “It’s okay; don’t cry. I’m all right. Just get your stuff and let’s go.”
I knew he wanted me to stop crying in front of the other homeless guys in the room. We couldn’t show our true feelings for each other. I couldn’t believe he was alive. I just wanted to jump into his arms and hug him and give him the heart-warming welcome of my fantasy. I said, “I can’t go home, my mother hung up on me. How did you find me?”
“You know my mom, she’s resourceful. She found you and talked to your mother who said you could go home.”
I didn’t want to go home, but I didn’t want to stay at the shelter either. And, if it meant a chance to see Nick again while we continued our relationship, secretly or in whatever bizarre way he wanted, then I would do it.
He said, “Come on, my mom’s gonna take us for lunch before you leave,” which seemed very strange.
Was this my chance to make amends? Could I somehow rectify the situation and at least explain my inability to stay sober to this woman who saw me as pure evil?
I went to the front desk and told them I was going home. The woman behind the window handed me a brown paper bag. I asked, “What’s this?”
She said, “Your medication. You’re going to need it.”
“You’re damn right I will,” I said, grinning from ear to ear. Jackpot! I hadn’t even considered that. I figured they would keep it there, but they would be responsible if I had a seizure without my pills. After all, I wasn’t there for addiction, I was there for homelessness.
Nick and I went into the bathroom and we both took a handful of pills. I grabbed my book bag and made it downstairs to the car. By the time we sat down for lunch I was a mess. I had been restricted to two pills a day while in the shelter, and now I was back to my natural super self. We went to a small Chinese restaurant, and in my comfortable, bordering-on-comatose state, I slurred my colorful past over moo goo gai pan and spring rolls. I secured myself in his mom’s eyes as the most dangerous, destructive, and ill human being she would ever meet, as her face contorted with shock and disgust. Eager to rid herself of my presence, she made it clear that Nick and I would never see or speak to each other again. But I had something over her—I knew Nick’s true feelings for me. Whether he was gay, straight, or bisexual, I owned his heart, and I wasn’t going to let it out of my filthy claws.
On the way to the bus station, Nick and I sat in the backseat trying to figure out how we would see each other again while keeping our teary emotions under his mom’s radar. They walked me down to the bus, making sure I got on, and I grabbed Nick’s mother and hugged her, crying and thanking her. I didn’t know if I was crying for her or for Nick, but every now and then a shred of humanity burst through my darkness, and I said to myself, “I’m still here, Joe.” I hadn’t yet turned into stone. I hugged Nick one more time as I tried mentally to stop what was happening once again.
I got on the bus and my mind wandered to the pills in my bag. Someone in my family was picking me up at Boston’s South Station, but once home I had no place to hide them from my mom. I did the only thing an addict can do: I opened the huge bottle of Klonopin and gazed at all those pills. I would never take them all at once; there were too many. But my mother would trash them if she discovered them, not understanding I would die without them—but I could die taking all of them. I looked at the bottle and started eating them. I ate them all, no water, just chewed and swallowed them all down, wondering if I’d be found overdosed upon arrival. As they took effect, I no longer cared if the pills killed me. I was back on my throne, once again reigning over my Klonopin Kingdom.
I don’t remember getting home or seeing my mother. I remember smoking a cigarette in front of her, which I would normally never give her the pleasure of seeing. I considered cigarettes the ultimate weakness, and blamed her smoking for my asthma, but here we were, joined in vice.
I remember the scream. “Where are the pills, Joe?! They said they gave you your medication when you left. Where is it?”
I smiled and fell back into my kingdom. I woke up two days later in my old room. The holes in the walls were patched and the carpet was still a matted mess, still stained in the corner from the night I had tried tattooing my foot. Holes and stains personified me. Once again the pills served their function, erasing my memory of the past weeks: the homeless shelter, Nick’s overdose, and even the trip to Greg’s. My brain was rattled and blurry.
I walked out of my room feeling shaky and sick. My mom was on the couch smoking a cigarette, and pretended not to notice me standing there. I was already starting to have withdrawals—heart racing like a grandfather clock ticking out of control in my chest, louder and louder. It was coming on fast, and I needed to intervene. I needed to take something, anything, but the only thing that could stop this was a new prescription.
I told my mom I needed to see a doctor, and with a confidence I’d never seen before, she said flatly, “You aren’t going to any doctor or anything. In fact, you aren’t leaving this house.”
The oxygen in the house disappeared, the air in my lungs evaporated, and I freaked out. I would die without those pills. The detox would be too much for my body; seizures were on their way. I pleaded with her. I cried my heart out, begged her to get me to a doctor, yet she sat there motionless, reading the news as a blue smoke trail floated by her face. Just a normal day at home with a son detoxing and tearing at his skin. Oh, how I loved Sundays with the family. She was dead-set in her decision. Dammit, she must have read a pamphlet on tough love while I was away setting the country on fire.
I went to my room, in fear, and cried myself to sleep, bracing for the storm. I could feel the strong tide of emotions rolling in, raw and exposed to the world. I lived a horrible detox for the next few days: shaking in my skin, flesh crawling under the shock of recovery as evil wafted through my room, poking and picking at me. Sweating in bed as my drug body slowly died, I faded in and out of hallucinations: chanting, scratching, clawing, and being dragged into a torturous underworld. Small demons encircled me, tying my body to a pole as a hot, sweaty fire grew beneath me and danced to the rumbling of a drum.
The next day I cried and pleaded with my mother, but she remained adamant. She was going to detox me in my room. My monster had grown in strength, and I swore, cursed, and hated her with all my might. This was my mother’s test of unconditional love, as she saw the eyes of the beast peering through mine, knowing I couldn’t defeat it myself. The withdrawals worsened at night as the demons paid me a visit and brought with them a new entity—tall and cloaked in shadow, its face concealed as it crouched at the foot of my bed and guarded the door. Death said, “I warned you I would be back.”
Those moments lasted for days, alternating between calm and turbulence, starting in again when it seemed like it was done, beyond all previously experienced physical and mental anguish. A month went by, and I was only a fraction of the human I used to be. I felt a hundred years old, dizzy and feeble. Speaking with Nick on the phone once a week helped me continue on, determined to start over in a sober life. He cut out the hard drugs, but kept smoking pot and drinking—I had no idea how he could pick and choose his drug use.
A few more weeks of abstinence passed, and my mother told me it was time to get a job, time to slowly piece things back together. I applied for a job with Johnson & Johnson, and to everyone’s amazement (especially mine), they accepted my application. I was offered a high salary and insurance with 401k benefits—not bad for a college dropout. All I had to do was pass the drug test. I couldn’t wait to tell Nick, proud to have an opportunity to be the man I always thought I
could be. That gave me an even greater desire to stay abstinent, and all I had to do was pass my drug test on Monday morning.
Nick arrived on Thursday. I was so happy to see him. We both swore to remain abstinent while together. As we watched TV in my room and talked about how much better our bodies felt without taking those damn pills, Nick asked if I wanted a drink. I thought,
Well, one drink couldn’t hurt
. My mother’s house had booze all over, and stockpiled in the basement from when the restaurant closed. We went down, grabbed a bottle of Grand Marnier, and started drinking. Nobody would know if I had a little drink, and it would help with my anxiety and depression. While I was mostly a beer drinker and rarely drank hard liquor, I made an exception.
I chugged the orange liqueur and instantly remembered a refill left for Klonopin at the pharmacy near my father’s house, an hour away. I called the pharmacy to ask if they could transfer it to one near my mom’s, and they agreed to do it. Now we just needed money and a car. Just like old times. I asked my mom to borrow her car, and since I appeared to be sober and trustworthy, combined with her already being tanked, she said okay. We didn’t have enough money, but the pharmacist gave me four white pills to tide me over until I had cash to fill the rest. I think she realized I could have a seizure without them, so she was really doing this out of pure kindness. And man, was I appreciative. Two pills wouldn’t be enough to screw up my drug test on Monday, and I had a prescription making it legal—I had that relapse all figured out. I had been so convinced I would never use those damn pills again after that detox hell. I couldn’t believe it was happening again.
The pills, combined with alcohol, were amazing, and I was instantly a god, wanting everyone around me to feel good. Nick was fucked up too, and we went home and drank everything in sight. Apparently we went to my brother Michael’s house, slurred words, fell down, and woke up back in my room with a hangover tearing apart my brain.
After we struggled to open our eyes around two in the afternoon, I heard the familiar alarm of my mom and sister screaming that the downstairs smelled like pot; smoking would have been nice, but we
actually had no pot. The weed accusations escalated, and so did my temper. Still buzzed from the night before, I jumped in the ring ready for a fight. I launched a verbal assault on my sister that quickly progressed to physical violence, which resulted in me once again getting kicked out of my mom’s house as she threatened to call the police. Nick and I grabbed a bag of stuff and left.