I’m Special (19 page)

My breakthrough/breakdown came in the winter of 2012 after I had spent the last nine months stabbing myself with the hot poker known as “life experiences.” If you stalked my Twitter or Facebook profile during that time, you'd probably think everything was going great. “Whoa,” you'd say to yourself. “Look at this mature, accomplished guy who's going places! Will you please excuse me while I drown my sorrows in some peanut butter and jealousy sandwiches?” Although I'd celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday unemployed with no job prospects, so much had changed. I was now writing full-time for
Thought Catalog
, producing viral articles left and right and landing some cushy freelance gigs at places like the
New York Times
. Things were going swimmingly, or at least it looked that way. Like the rest of my peers, I was painting my existence very carefully, only posting pictures of me having fun at medium-fancy parties and sharing links to my articles. My life offline was becoming a very different story.

When I first moved to New York, I used drugs the same way everyone else did: to take the edge off a stressful week and escape into a carefree land of cotton candy and rainbows. There were times I overdid it, like the terrifying story I just told you about taking Molly, but the experimentation was largely harmless—that is, until I started palling around with prescription painkillers. Then things quickly went from chic to bleak.

I tried Vicodin for the first time when I was nineteen. A friend had some leftover from a wisdom teeth removal and gave them to me because they made her sick. At home I gobbled down four pills and thought to myself, “Oh. This is what drugs are supposed to feel like. I get it now. Coke, Ecstasy, weed: you guys can go home.” It was love at first swallow, which is why I knew it'd be best for me to stay the hell away from them. Two years later, when I was hit by a car, I got put on a fabulous morphine drip for three weeks and was sent home from the hospital with a vat of painkillers. While it was tempting to say, “Fuck it. Life sucks so I'm going to spend the next year in a warm opiate cocoon of love,” I demonstrated some willpower and only used my prescriptions to treat the physical pain.

Smash cut to a few years later: I'm holding down a full-time job and achieving some modicum of success. With every professional milestone I achieved, the urge to self-sabotage grew stronger and stronger, even though I knew this was not the time to fuck up. I could've done that in college when my only job was to find myself and hook up with boys named River from my Gender and Sexuality class. Now I needed to be smart and spend my free time doing yoga or whatever else healthy young professionals do. But I couldn't bring myself to make the smart decision. So I became a pillhead loser instead.

The first time I was introduced to my drug dealer it was in a social setting. In fact, I didn't even know she was a dealer, because she was young, pretty, and came from a well-to-do family. Her name was Olivia, and I met her through a few new friends of mine on a sweltering day in May 2011. The inconvenient thing about doing a lot of drugs is that you have to get a whole new social life. None of my real friends would ever be okay with joining me on a downward spiral. They had to meet someone for brunch or go on a date with their boyfriend or read their horoscope. Melting on the couch after taking three Percocet in some stranger's apartment at three o'clock in the afternoon didn't fit into their agenda.

Luckily for me, this was New York and I was in my twenties. Finding kids who wanted to light the match and burn their lives to the ground was easy. I clapped my hands and there they were: my own posse of bad girls. Cassie, Maggie, Lily, and I had met in college. I'd watch them barrel through the quad wearing leopard-print pants and scuffed denim jackets, gossiping and chain-smoking cigarettes.
Who are these glamorous messes?
They were like modern-day Edie Sedgwicks, except they didn't carry themselves like little wounded birds. Their edges were sharp, and a single glance could draw blood. I had my first conversation with one of them in an elevator at the dorms. Cassie was wearing the same coat as me but in a different color, and she let out a half smile.

“Nice coat,” she growled. Her voice sounded like it was permanently coated in whiskey and Marlboro Reds.

“Uh, thanks,” I squeaked. “Got any plans tonight?”

She rolled her eyes. “There's this thing at Beatrice, but I don't really want to go. It's a snooze on Thursday.”

Beatrice Inn was New York's modern answer to Studio 54. It was a small nightclub flooded with celebrities and various It Girls that came as quickly as it went. I'd been twice, but only because I was with pretty girls and arrived early.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I chuckled. “It can be really dead.”

The elevator dinged open and Cassie said good-bye before disappearing like a vulture into the night. “Wow,” I sighed to myself. “She is, like, so awesome.”

There had been brief run-ins after that, but our friendship didn't begin until I started to become undone. After graduation, Cassie and Maggie started a punk band that was attracting some attention. In a half attempt to be their friend, I interviewed them for
Thought Catalog
. I arrived at their filthy loft in Bushwick, and we took painkillers and talked about their music. I was elated. Even at twenty-four, I still wanted the unaffected cool girls to like me. After that night, we started hanging out on the regular, but it was always within the context of doing drugs. The day I crossed paths with Olivia, I had just bought Percocet from this freak on a leash named Magic Bobby and was meeting the girls at a park nearby. When I arrived, they were dancing on the grass and tripping on mushrooms.

“Oh my Goddddddd, so glad you madeeeee ittttt,” said one of the girls, draping her wobbly limbs all over me. “Let's go get some alcohol and take it back to Lily's.”

I said hello to Olivia, who was not only tripping on mushrooms but also limping. Whenever I hung out with these girls, something would always be askew, but no one ever cared enough to acknowledge it. You could walk into their apartment with a black eye and a broken arm and they'd just be like, “Cute sling! Do you have any Adderall?”

We went to Lily's apartment, which looked like a crack house that had a baby with a
Nylon
magazine subscription. I wondered what would happen if these girls ever took home a guy who wasn't a derelict drug addict. Like, what if Lily brought a stockbroker named Chad back to her apartment? He'd see her room covered in tin foil, coke straws, and glass pipes and run screaming. Druggies can't interact with the Chads of this world. They speak a sad language only a few people understand.

The second the girls sat down on Lily's dilapidated couch, they started huffing whipped cream bottles. After those were drained, they all guzzled down beer, smoked some weed, took a few pills, and ordered coke from their dealer. I sat there stoned on Percocet, unable to process these tiny little blobs of white flesh in front of me. I popped another pill to help me not care to understand.

“Hey!” Olivia swatted me on the arm. “Where'd you get that?”

“Magic Bobby.”

All the girls started laughing maniacally. “No shit; you go to Bobby? He's the worst.”

Bobby
was
the worst. I had gotten his number from a friend of mine a few weeks earlier and was astounded by how bad he was at dealing drugs. He'd text you each day with what was on the menu: “Hello my little pockets of sunshine! I have my girls Mary Jane, Roxy, and Molly with me. Let me know if you want to link up!” I'd immediately text him back with, “Yes! Where are you?” but then I wouldn't hear back for two days. Or I would but it'd involve an all-day wild-goose chase across Brooklyn and Manhattan. Eventually I'd find him on some street corner, and we'd do the exchange right there in broad daylight. Sometimes I would be so desperate I would go to one of his rap shows and wait until he was finished performing to be like, “Great job. You really have star quality. Can I have ten Percocet now?”

“You should get my info,” Olivia said. “I've got Percs and all of that other shit. Plus, I'm not insane.”

“Oh my God, that would be amazing,” I squealed. “Thank you soooo much.” After I exchanged numbers with Olivia, I headed home. As I walked to the train, I looked at the clouds, which looked like scoops of ice cream dripping on an endless expanse of blue, and felt the last gasps of the Percocet making its way into my brain. I was almost sober by the time I reached my apartment and plopped my jelly bones down on my bed. I couldn't stop thinking about what I had just experienced. Any rational person would've looked at these girls' lives and thought, “Um, it's been fun but I'm going back to the land of boring normal people now!” but not me. This was only the beginning.

At twenty-four I was always one bad decision, one chance meeting, one pill away from being the worst version of myself. The opportunity to push the button and blow everything up in my life was always taunting me. When I made the decision to start going to a drug dealer and hang out with addicts, I was aware of the risk involved. I just didn't care. I had spent the last few years dipping my toes in the self-destruction pool, and now I wanted to go all the way and drown in it.

A few weeks after ditching Magic Bobby for Olivia, who was a much more reliable dealer, I decided to cut costs and go to a doctor for drugs. With my medical history, I figured I'd go in and say, “Cerebral palsy. Compartment syndrome. Ow,” and immediately be given a prescription for Vicodin or Percocet. A friend of mine had recommended a Dr. Feelgood in SoHo who specialized in handing out pills like they were multivitamins, so I made an appointment that day to see him.

When I walked into the doctor's office, I was expecting to see a waiting room full of twitching junkies, but instead I found myself surrounded by crabby white girls named Amy wearing Isabel Marant sneakers and Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume. These were the new faces of pillheads: wealthy, irritable PR divas who needed Adderall to function at their jobs and Ambien to go to sleep.

“Um, where's Dr. Kearns?” one Amy barked at the receptionist while I was filling out an intake form. “I'm going to Europe for two months and need my Vyvanse and Klonopin prescriptions!”

“He's running behind today,” the exhausted receptionist explained.

“He's always running fucking behind,” Amy hissed before huffing off to take a seat.

After waiting for an hour and a half, Dr. Kearns was finally ready to see me. I started sweating bullets. What if he saw right through my lies and called the police on me? Or worse—what if he was just like, “No”? My nervousness abated the second he entered the room. He appeared rushed and out of it, barely looking at me as he limply shook my hand. Something in my gut told me this man wasn't going to have an issue giving me drugs.

“Hi, hi, hi,” Dr. Kearns said, sitting down and examining my chart. “What brings you here, uh, Ryan?”

“Well, I've been experiencing a lot of pain lately . . .”

“Right, right.”

“Because I have cerebral palsy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And compartment syndrome.”

“Yep.”

“So I'm in, like, a lot of pain.”

“So you have night pains from your compartment syndrome,” Dr. Kearns said, scribbling in my chart, “and constant pain from your cerebral palsy. Okay, great.”

I had only met Dr. Kearns for two minutes before he prescribed me sixty Vicodin with a refill. I continued to see him every few months after that. Once I asked for Xanax, explaining that I needed it for flying, and he gave me ninety pills.

“No, no—that's too much!” I protested. “I really only need a little bit.”

“It's not like you're going to sell it on the black market!” He laughed, showing a rare display of emotion. “Plus, you can't overdose on this stuff. If you drink or take other drugs with it, sure, but by itself it's fine.”

Having a Dr. Feelgood isn't just for people with a “drug problem.” It's for all types of Millennials. While my parents were raised on weed and psychedelics, I'm part of the Rx generation. Many of my peers grew up raiding their parents' medicine cabinets to get high and discovered that pills are the perfect drug. Instead of buying them on the street, you can sit in a cozy office for thirty minutes and pick your drugs up at a Walgreens. Tell people you just took a Xanax because you were having anxiety and you'll hear a symphony of “Good call. That reminds me: I need to get a refill!” No one judges you. In fact, our culture practically demands that we medicate ourselves. We're on constant information overload, and the pressure to be “on” and perform at superhuman levels at work has never been higher. Using drugs to expand your mind and lie in a meadow all day is no longer relevant. We now do them to keep our heads above water.

In lieu of calming down with a glass of wine after a long day at work, I'd pop a pill, crawl into bed, and watch Netflix until I passed out. When you take painkillers, you go into this dream state where it feels like you're going in and out of consciousness. Your sheets feel like arms that are reaching out to hug you. It's lovely. You don't even mind not sleeping, because when you're asleep, you can't feel high and when you can't feel high, there's no point in feeling anything.

That summer, I began taking pills every day and thrived at work. At night I would attend some New York media party before rushing over to Olivia's shitbox apartment on the Lower East Side to take pills and watch some girl who was doped up on heroin do her makeup for five hours. I can recall that summer with a clarity that still makes me nauseated with giddiness. I remember sticking my legs out the window of my apartment on East Seventh Street, letting the hot summer air bathe my feet as I sucked on tangerine popsicles and listened to Charlie Parker. I remember taking Percocet in Sheep Meadow in Central Park and lying in the sun before walking the sixty blocks back downtown to my apartment. I remember being stoned out of my mind and making out with a dumb boy named Jake whose lips felt like a giant down comforter for my mouth to rest on. Life seemed perfect. Everything I had been taught about drugs seemed to be vicious propaganda. They didn't ruin your life. They enhanced it.