Acrobaddict (26 page)

I decided we should beg for money, and then walk to the pharmacy when we had enough for the whole prescription. There were pills waiting for us that would help me cope with sleeping on the street—homelessness is easier in a lubricated state.

We headed toward the pharmacy, which was far away, but oblivion is a great incentive. We passed a health clinic and made a quick manipulation stop for more pills. Lingering gymnastics injuries that looked bad on X-rays, mixed with my extensive medical vocabulary and puppy-dog eyes, always resulted in painkillers and muscle relaxants. I told Nick to use some old sports injuries, and between the two of us we should be able to leave well stocked.

I got Ultram and Soma, the same muscle relaxants I got after the car accident. I was hoping for Percocet, but we could still get completely messed up on those.

It was a warm summer day and I was happy; as soon as we got money and made it to the pharmacy, all our problems would dissolve. After a nice pill lunch, the beasts within would direct our next course of action. On a whim, Nick checked his bank account and there was a surprise hundred dollars in there—we think Nick’s mother deposited it in case he needed a quick escape bus ticket from me. Now we didn’t have to beg for change outside the local supermarket. That summer day turned to Christmas for the damned.

We filled up and feasted on our new windfall, relaxing into the calm sunset. With no place to go, we settled on a parking lot dumpster, cuddling together side by side under a flannel shirt blanket. We were deeply in love, at the ends of our Earth.

Something wet and cold startled me awake, landing on my face; I wiped it away, and then another drop followed. I opened my eyes to
a New England thunderstorm, and I knew within moments we’d be drenched. We sought shelter back in the pharmacy, reading Hallmark cards to each other as hunger started to peek through the pills’ haze, but most of the money was gone. My medical training taught me how to relieve the symptoms: get more pills, get more messed up, get less hungry. Little white stapled bags full of treats lined the counter behind the pharmacist, and, unlike at other pharmacies, the bags were close to the register, within an arm’s reach. With my great dexterity, when the pharmacist turned his back I would reach over, take a few, stuff them in my pants, and casually leave our friendly neighborhood pharmacy. Nick’s assignment was to steal Hershey bars for dinner, breakfast, or whenever we decided to eat something less chemically based.

I stalked the movements of the pharmacist like a cheetah preparing for a hunt. I learned his patterns. He turned around and went toward the back, and I lunged over the counter, reaching beyond my body with my Go Go Gadget arms, grabbed a bag, and stuffed it down my pants.

“Gotcha!” stopped me dead in my tracks. I was still calm but trapped and cornered, with no place to run.

He calmly said, “I’ve been watching you for twenty minutes. Let’s see what you almost got.” I could have gotten anything else, antibiotics, diuretics, or anything, but playing the addict’s pharmaceutical lottery was hoping for a higher payout like Valium or better. He ripped off the top of the bag and laughed, “Well, this is what you would have gotten. An old lady’s neck brace.”

I sunk inside myself with embarrassment, shocked that I actually felt an emotion. Stealing prescriptions is a federal offense; I couldn’t believe I did something so stupid, risking years in jail for a fucking neck brace. I waited for him to call the police, but a moment of grace intervened, a miracle that to this day I still have trouble believing actually happened.

The pharmacist looked me in the eyes and said, “You have to leave.” I don’t remember thanking him. I darted out of there and back into the pouring rain in absolute gratitude. Nick pulled out our breakfast,
lunch, and dinner of stolen chocolate bars. I told him the tale in the cold rain, a dim streetlight glowing across his face, the two of us shivering and laughing, eating chocolate, and me thinking to myself,
We are pure poetry
.

We slept in the nearby woods, and the sun rose with our idea of selling some pills to get cocaine. We called a cab service to go to the mall, where I had worked during high school at the music store. The driver seemed cool and, thinking we could barter, I reached my hand through the small, protective window and offered him some pills. He turned cold and instantly afraid, so we ate our pill offering.

I called Piper in Southie and offered her a great deal on pills for coke. She would meet us that night, so with time to kill we went into the mall. But first we mixed together huge handfuls of pills for breakfast—addicts’ granola first thing in the morning hits fast and hard. As we walked around the shops Nick kept falling asleep, passing out while standing up, right in front of moms and kids. I shouted at him and tried to keep him awake.

“Nick, you’re gonna fucking get us arrested, dude. Wake the fuck up!”

He tried but he couldn’t. I moved him against a wall and he slid down as his eyes rolled back in his head. I was pissed. He would get us caught. I dragged him outside onto a bench to sleep off some of the effects, and had to somehow hide all the prescription bottles we were walking around with. I left him to buy a can of Pringles.

I woke Nick up from his bench sleep—slumped over between his two legs, inches away from falling flat on his face. I dumped the chips out, poured all our pills in, and covered them up with chips. If the police stopped us they would never find the pills—I was the smartest pill popper ever.

We waited in the parking lot for nightfall, as Piper pulled up in a white van filled with Southie kids, alcohol, pills, and coke. We partied until the sun came up, clinging to that youthful mad paradise, praying it would last forever.

The next afternoon we woke up still in the mall parking lot. Piper must have left us there. A cop car approached us and asked, “Are you
Joseph Putignano?” Any fear in our bodies was medicated away; we were untouchable.

“Yeah, man, that’s me.”

“We’ve been looking for you.”

“Well, here I am.”

He got out of the car and said, “You have to come with me, you have a summons for your court appearance.”

“When?”

“Now!”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Very.”

Surprised, and slightly amused, I grabbed the Pringles can and Nick, and we got in the back. He seemed cool for a cop, and I asked how he found me. “We got a call reporting you missing and possibly in danger of hurting yourself. Then a cab driver called, telling us about two guys stumbling around in the streets. He was concerned because he said you two were really messed up, but seemed like good guys.”

“Good guys, huh?” I had no idea what he was talking about. We arrived at the courthouse and they walked us to the back. First my feet were shackled, and then my hands. I was enraged, yet curious to see what asshole had disrupted my day of tranquility. I was escorted into the courthouse and saw my sister Trish and her husband. Nick was there too, sitting on the pew-like bench, and then it went from strange to surreal. The judge spoke in his judicial lingo, but all I heard through any of this was that my sister wanted me detained and committed to Norton State—a mental institution. That place had been a local ongoing joke growing up: “Someday you’ll end up at Norton State!” I didn’t need another regional disgrace; junior college was enough. Pride and ego sobered me up as I planned my tale.

My sister stood up and told the judge her side of the story. As she spoke I looked deep into her eyes, my dark circles of vengeance cursing her with hate. After all she saw me go through, all my turmoil
with our mom and dad, now she was the one trying to commit me. Drugs had torn apart our once-close relationship. She was seven months pregnant and had gone in and out of labor from the stress of watching my downward spiral. She stood rows away from Nick, right in front of me, and sobbed, “My brother is sick; please help him. I can’t bear to lose him. Please. He doesn’t know what he’s doing; he’s a good kid. Please help him!” The pills’ residual effects put a haze over the experience for me, but she did highlight a few horrid details from the past two years.

Then the judge turned to me and said he would like to hear my side of the story. The shackles hurt; they were painful inside and out. I stood up and stared at my sister, centering all my anger in her direction.

“Trish, I cannot believe you are doing this to me.” My eyes filled with tears and I began to create the most convincing fable of victimization. I was the black sheep of my family, a successful gymnast whose parents’ alcoholism had pushed me out the door. I recounted to the judge the many times I had gotten kicked out of my mother’s and then my father’s homes, as I continued to look to my sister, begging her with my glares to release me.

The judgment was made: I would not go to Norton State. I was victorious. I was retained for twenty-four hours, most of which I slept through. At my release, the police officer at the front desk returned my belongings from a plastic container, handing me my sweatshirt and the Pringles can. I shook it and heard the beautiful holiday chimes of pills ringing inside. I couldn’t believe the court system returned my fully loaded handgun. I laughed to myself and thought,
What a bunch of idiots
. I was so proud of my clever, diabolical skills. I met up with Nick and popped open a celebratory breakfast of bitter pills and greasy chips.

The next week was spent in a pilled-out fog, and somehow we met up with an old gymnastics friend from the Staunton team. His father owned a popular gymnastics club attached to the back of their house.

I had known his entire family since childhood, and we went to his place.

I had competed and trained often at their gym when I was younger. Thomas, my old teammate, brought us in, and his older brothers were drinking beer. With our pills, I figured we’d be welcome in their home. We drank through the night and took more.

I had the great idea of going into their gym and flipping around. It was empty, silent, and challenging me. The stale chalk covering the equipment shimmered in the dim light, and I heard a low growl escape from the sprung floor: “You are no longer welcome here.” I stood my ground. I knew every apparatus better than my own body. This kind of precompetition silence could kill me a thousand times, and in my drunken, pilled-out bliss, I was home.

A voice from above called out my name. It was Thomas’s dad, Mr. Harris, and I was too high to feel remorse or embarrassment as I stood below the man I admired, in his gym, the boy champion he had watched grow. He knew Coach Dan well, and in that moment I was challenged, like God was towering over me in judgment. Somehow his appearance cracked through the chemicals. There I was, a dirty, pierced, staggering, pill-popping drunk in his gym, in his church, confronting my now-jealous addiction—two lovers battling over one heart. God above and I, the Devil, below, capable only of saying “Hello.” He just walked away. His sons, laughing like the little demons from my detox ritual, went to shoot pool as I walked over and lay down under the high bar, falling asleep as my memories of gymnastics bliss warmed my cold heart.

I woke the next day to the usual routine of not knowing where I was or how I got there, afraid of what I had done or said the night before. I still wasn’t used to that sensation. The sunlight beamed through the window like a laser, stinging my hung-over head. Hearing an argument from the next room, I got up off the couch, grabbed my jeans, and did a quick pat-down for drugs. I already needed something to calm my nerves; reality was setting in and I needed protection. As I chewed a Klonopin, Thomas rushed over to me, and before I could ask how he got in my room, he said, “My father wants you out right now.”

I was completely confused as to how I was in Thomas’s house. I looked around the room, full of people I didn’t know, put my clothes on, ate two more pills, grabbed Nick, and started walking toward a road. The sun was killing me, and I really needed some coke to cope with the exhaustion.

We realized parking lots were in our immediate sleep future, so it seemed logical to get as comfortable as possible—we had a lot of pills left. Nick and I split the pills, leaving a few of them, and then headed for the road. I needed to undo the memories that had surfaced between gymnastics and Mr. Harris, and I knew all those pills would eradicate any human qualities I had left.

What I remember after that are only fragments. I recall seeing old friends from high school, the backseat of a car, and moments at my mother’s house. I was on a medical table in a police station surrounded by scared cops, my body being pulled up a flight of stairs, with the back of my head hitting each step as it went up to the top. I remember my mother yelling, “Wake up! Wake up! He’s foaming at the mouth.”