Authors: Joe Putignano
And then, a wonderful feeling—looking down at my legs and thinking to myself,
I have never felt so good in my whole life
. I was so warm. There was no panic, no pain, just tender protection. I was complete, satisfied, and finished. Yes, I felt finished—as if God came down and told me to rake up all the leaves on the planet and I had just captured the very last one, adding it on to the biggest pile that ever existed. I was loved, held, and cradled, and as I sat in that warmth, bathed by the foundation of my soul, the timeless moment seemed to go on forever, but lasted only seconds as I drifted into a well of nothingness.
I realized that all along I was a spirit pretending to be human, and I heard the most pleasurable silence enveloped by a golden heat surrounded by what appeared to be stardust. It was perfection. And then an unwelcome sound came rushing in, an unwelcome sound that blew my pile of leaves across the planet by the mightiest wind. As my eyes opened, terror gripped me. I heard beeping sounds, saw lights; then heard machines and talking, and then nothing.
I was back between awful white hospital walls, not knowing what day it was, how I got there, or why I had been ripped from heaven. I got out of the bed. I was still wearing my favorite Ralph Lauren striped shirt, which was bloodstained. My piercings were gone,
all of them
, no nipple rings or labret. They were all gone. What the fuck? Medical suction cups covered my chest—were they monitoring my heart? My heart! Did it even beat anymore?
I walked out of the room, heard a nurse talking, and got the familiar sick feeling that I’d been here before, that once again I’d be treated like some asshole, some drug-addicted asshole. They would look at me like I was meaningless, awful trash.
I heard a voice devoid of any kindness or humanity. “Mr. Puttanyanoh,” she said, completely mispronouncing my name. Her fat fingers attached to fatter hands extended from her nurse’s uniform, hair overdone like a blonde biker helmet, and avoiding my eyes, she said, “You have an appointment with the doctor later today.”
I didn’t bother to ask any questions. I walked over to a chair by the nurse’s desk and tried to put together the pieces of what day, month, and year it was, the city and state, and who I had alienated. This one was big. I did something truly awful. My gut knew something life-altering had taken place, but I had no recollection of what it was—just faint memories of a white van, leaves, a doctor’s office, a mall, and an incomprehensible warmth, a happiness far away, at the other side of a tunnel. I hoped the doctor’s clipboard would give me some insight as I struggled to grasp what I had done. My bones felt different, altered, and I felt misplaced—like my soul just rode a roller coaster and now I had to pay for the ride.
A
CCORDING TO
H
INDU TEXT, THERE ARE SEVEN CHAKRAS, OR ENERGY VORTEXES, IN THE BODY
. T
HE SECOND CHAKRA, CALLED
Svadhisthana
,
MEANS “DWELLING PLACE OF THE SELF,” AND IS LOCATED IN THE LOWER ABDOMEN, BELOW THE NAVEL AND OVER THE PUBIC BONE
. I
T CONTROLS THE EMOTIONAL AND SENSUAL ASPECTS OF OUR LIVES
. E
XCESSIVENESS IN THIS CHAKRA ENERGY MAY LEAD TO FREQUENT EMOTIONAL DRAMA, POOR BOUNDARIES, AND SEXUAL ADDICTION
.
I walked into the doctor’s office expecting to find someone I could easily manipulate. A wall full of achievement plaques framed the large, black desk he sat behind, surrounded by paper-stuffed manila envelopes. He was old and stubborn-looking, and I could tell immediately he was beyond my controlling abilities. I was feeling too many emotions and needed something to calm my nerves. For some reason, being abstinent felt harder this time.
Right away I told the doctor I wasn’t feeling well, but he looked at me with disdain and said, “Shut your mouth and listen to me. Do you know why you’re here?”
“Not really,” I said, playing it cool and using my charm. I wanted to sweet-talk my way into his compassion. He was uninterested in me; his interest was in why I was there and how he could treat me. All my glorious gymnastics stories would have fallen dead in that office. He said sternly, “I’ll tell you what happened.”
He looked me in the eye and said, “You were clinically dead, twice.” I didn’t shudder. I wasn’t shocked. I felt a massive sense of accomplishment, like a hero dropping into the underworld, finding death, and then walking away, making me truly indestructible. That lifeless form had mocked me since I was a boy. Once again it had tried to steal my breath, and once again, it had lost.
I looked back at the doctor, doubting his information, and said, “I don’t believe you; you’re just trying to scare me into staying sober.”
But he repeated with perfect conviction, “YOU . . . WERE . . . DEAD! All the drugs you took stopped your heart. Not once, but twice, and you are lucky to be sitting here in front of me.”
Somehow that sentence hit me harder, and the comedy of the situation blew up in my face, as if someone had thrown a grenade at a clown instead of a whipped-cream pie. Maybe I did need to calm down and take this recovery thing seriously.
The doctor used barbiturates to detox me off the benzodiazepines. Good god, barbiturates—it would be like trying to heal cancer with chamomile tea. I’d have no euphoria. His message still didn’t quite penetrate my disease until he said, in a way only old people with years of life experiences behind their words can, “I am not going to change your medication, so don’t even ask.”
The next few days were a nightmare for me—a nice corner in hell would have been better than this place. I detoxed next to my filthy roommate and tried to call my mother collect, but she refused to accept the charges. I discovered I was in a mental ward in Rhode Island. I had destroyed every relationship in my life, with friends or family, and was crippled by loneliness.
I made an honest attempt to listen and learn while I was there. If a solution existed to stop me from ending up in places like this, I intended to find it. Adding to the humiliation of being in the crazy house, I had arrived with no shoes and had only hospital paper slippers to shuffle around in. My parents continued to reject my calls, making the mystery of the chain of events seem even more ominous.
What had I done?
Somewhere between heaven and here, my piercings had disappeared, so I returned to my finely honed skill of using the prongs of a plastic fork to reopen the holes in my skin. I wasn’t embarrassed about plastic prongs sticking out of my face since the place was swarming with falling-down drug addicts, alcoholics, and people with serious mental disorders—some spoke to shadows, some drooled endlessly onto their laps, some ate chess pieces, and some insisted on spinning in circles while shitting. I made friends with a few people, and during medication lineup we would swallow, show the nurse our tongues, remove the pill from under our tongues, spit it out, and switch pills later in desperate, unfulfilled hopes for a high. Once I got methadone from a girl who was on her fourth visit to that resort. Was being admitted to a psychiatric unit what my future held for me? As we made the pill switch, she warned me, “Don’t ever do heroin!” . . .
Why does everyone keep saying that?
I couldn’t wait to get out of there. They helped me create an outpatient plan to continue my recovery in the outside world, but recovery was not in my plans for the immediate future. That desire had burned out. Nick and Katherine came to pick me up and I ran out to meet them in my torn-toe, paper slippers. I was so happy; I couldn’t believe people I knew had actually shown up for me.
We planned to stop at my mother’s house to pick up some of my things before heading on to Katherine’s house. I thought my mother would be relieved and happy to see me, but a woman in a screaming rage welcomed me at the door. No longer mother and son, we were now the worst of enemies, and she told me if I didn’t leave fast she would call the cops. I ran to my room, got my things, and tried to remember where I had hidden that damned can of chips. She stood by the door and fired into my heart, “Oh, by the way, that huge amount of pills came in the mail. I called that bitch psychiatrist and told her to stop sending them here ’cause they’re fucking killing you.”
I froze. I had completely forgotten about those hundreds of free pills still being sent by the state. Fuck! How did I screw up that mother lode and not redirect the mail? I shot back, “Where are they? That’s my medication! You can’t do that! I fucking hate you!”
She threatened again to call the cops. Didn’t we do that exact dance just weeks earlier? We were in a perpetual cycle of hatred, debasement, and destruction. I grabbed my stuff and left, with the Pringles canister remaining lost in the shipwreck.
The plan was for us to live with Katherine’s parents. They were extremely kind and took us in, as if we were part of the family. Whatever details Katherine had created as our backstory, it worked. They gave us food and a place to live, and even drove me to my doctor’s appointments.
After two weeks, my addiction returned in the form of a panic attack. My first trip to the Delmar emergency room got me Xanax. Katherine’s parents began to see that something wasn’t quite right with the new family portrait. Their new pets had dark secrets—bloodthirsty, ravenous beasts would soon be at the doorstep, primed to destroy their family values. It began, as usual, with me stumbling around their house, scientifically exploring the balance between gravity and chemicals. I would overcompensate every movement, exaggerating the form of the human body—a man walking through a dry ocean, working against the force of invisible waves. As the alcohol on their shelves began to disappear, so did their trust in us, and the time came for us to leave. They kindly asked us to go, and, without confrontation, we understood.
When Angela let us stay in her attic, we entered the prostitute’s lair. My addiction was moving up in the world, becoming my medal of honor. Released of all worldly obligations, no bank account, no clean clothes, addiction was all mine, and it deepened every day. Even though my bones were tough as granite and my heart grew colder with each breath, my relationship with Nick flourished. We were falling desperately in love with each other—or with each other’s addictions. Our disease united us as our corruptions intertwined, staining and blurring our realities. To be without Nick was to be without breath; we were happy together, upstairs among the clutter and the cobwebs.
Life in Angela’s house was exactly what one would expect in the home of a prostitute and an addict. No real happiness lived there, just a
perpetual state of existing. We stopped asking ourselves how we got there or what had happened to our childhood dreams—the children in us were dead. We accepted our fates, nurtured our darkness, and displayed our black petals as we made the best of that horror. We were all trying to die. Well, at least I was.
I became angry at and jealous of Angela because of the power she held over us. Jobless and broke, we were at her mercy for drugs, and I hated her for that. I needed my own money to reclaim control of my cocaine. I realized that her prostitution gig paid well, and having lost my self-respect, I began to think her job wasn’t so bad: have sex with people, get money, get coke. Maybe I could do that.
When human hands touch a flower, it will often wilt. Would strangers touching my flesh absorb the last drops of my vitality, my humanity? Was I willing to wager that for drugs and peace? Would I hate myself even more and finally sell my soul? Those thoughts paled next to the luminous mountain of coke I envisioned on the other side of my plan—I could do it; it would be easy. Nick was completely against it until he entertained my vision of Mount Cocaine. I told Angela I was interested in selling my body and saw her face light up for the first time. She knew someone I could talk to the next day. I had already fallen so far from that first-place podium; I wondered, how much farther was there to actually fall?
A big street carnival was in the center of town and we were going to attend as a family outing, in celebration of nothing. I was happy; tomorrow might bring a new job and I would no longer be under Angela’s control. Some drug days hit quicker than others, and the pills today were hitting me hard.
Angela bought our first round of warm draft beers, and the carnival fun began. I spotted a group of raver-looking kids and started in with my usual bullshit. I asked if they had any K, which was out of character for me—I never liked ketamine. I blacked out for a few seconds, and, once conscious again, I was convinced I had already handed over the money, even though I had no money to hand over. Nick and I started yelling and screaming at this group of guys I’d just intruded on, and after I started pushing them around, the cops
arrived. I was sure that I had been wronged and that it was my right to fight for my drugs and money.
In the mix of breaking us up, I heard a cop call one of us a faggot, so I took a swing. After connecting somewhere on the cop’s body, I immediately flew into the air. Pain crashed through my chest and stomach when I landed on the street. My eyes filled with dust and tears of laughter as cops kicked me and dragged me, facedown, bleeding, and finally under control. They cuffed me and threw me into the back of the squad car, and still I couldn’t stop laughing. The golden thread with reality had been severed.
Nick and I were placed in cells next to each other. They stripped me down to my underwear and took my sneakers away because I threatened to hang myself with the laces. I told a cop I was having a seizure and needed to see a doctor fast; he came closer and, like a violent, untamed animal, I spat on him. I saw that once on TV, and, somewhere inside my fucked-up head, I believed all this was make-believe.