kitten and boo boo

I was a fucking horrible person in what I consider active addiction. I didn’t just drink to the point of blacking out every day and get high on whatever I could find- I used people too. Addicts do shitty things to those around them, and this morning going to the Shell to get bogies I had to check my cashapp account. I looked at my past transaction history and for the first time it really hit me that in my lowest moments I was shamelessly posting to Facebook asking for money from my FB friends for “food” “Uber rides” “Prescription co-pays”, you get the fucking picture. Sure I wasn’t on a street corner begging for spare change but is it really that different? I had to humble myself so much to get the money I needed and once I got it and got what I wanted I didn’t even think about how horrible I felt begging. Addicts do shitty things because we are broken people who have lost most of our humanity.

Another shitty thing I did in active addiction was emotionally use people. If I was highdrunk and bored and it was 4 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep I’d text and call whoever I could, bother random contacts I hadn’t talked to in too long. I used people to fill the void I was also using substances to fill. People were disposable to me- if you couldn’t give me something I needed I had no use for you. I didn’t care if you didn’t want to deal with me or if I was bothering you, I needed to not feel alone so you were supposed to accommodate me.

This is a piece of writing I intended to use as part of a memoir I wanted to try and start writing but I think it sums this whole idea up. Everything written below is mine, if you’d like to quote it please just reference me. It might be triggering but I think it actually gives insight into how fucking horrible addiction makes good people behave.

Let’s be honest-there are no other people in this story, not in a tangible way anyway. There is me, there is the bottles of gin and wine and vodka and there are bottles of pills and bags of dope and maybe a few rocks. There are shot glasses and needles and pipes, and all that good shit. And there is me, usually alone lying on a dirty mattress on a floor, all my worldly possessions crammed into a little room. There are of course the men who work at the liquor stores, the dealers and the pharmacy techs. But other people, they don’t come until much later. After everything had already fallen apart and I was left completely in a different kind of need. Being alone is much easier, no one to share with or ruin your high. Not having to worry about passing out and someone stealing your stash and your TV.

Why are there no other people? Because I am a feral animal and feral animals can not be domesticated. There is of course the perifrial family, the boyfriends and the people who had to back away for their own safety. Still though, this is a story of mostly being alone. Even in the crowded bars and frats, and waiting for the dealers in the cars in Holyoke. There was an ex-husband but he was a piece of work himself and not worth mentioning. I’ll leave it at this- no he did not enjoy being married to an addict. Yes, I took advantage of him in many ways, but so did he. And to finally summarize, I never fucking loved him, I loved the idea of not being alone and the possibility of rescue no matter how brief. There were some friends here or there, or at least those enigmatic people glistening in the bar light who are your best friend until last call and then you wonder who the fucks number you have saved in your phone as Peaches.

There are town and streets and cities. There are cars, mostly shitty unreliable ones with window tints and the stereo blasting horrible music you think is absolutely awesome while you’re fucked up. The towns are the exact same as the cities, places you roam through after sundown and before sunrise. There are buildings and bricks and roofs, all of which tend to look identical after a while. The streets are paved with fentanyl and the sky is often the color of a xanax bar.

There is extreme degradation, grand delusion, and a ridiculous amount of money to be wasted. The money comes from the western union kiosk or the debit machine withdrawn from your state funded government benefits card. Food stamps are sold and traded and cash is surprisingly easy to loose track of. The degradation is almost glamours- buying drugs footsteps away from Yale freshman taking their orientation tours. Delusions are staggeringly bizarre. We in this world are all beautiful and highly intelligent, when in truth we look puffy or strung out and our intelligence (what little we might have even had to begin with) has lapsed. The money is always fives and singles and torn or crumpled twenties. There are no hundred dollar bills sucking up lines of the finest cocaine in this story.

There is me, 38, female. 5’1 and very thick as the boys on the street put it- IE a big chest and ass. Dyed black hair almost down to my waist, big brown eyes that always seem to be bloodshot. Too many tattoos and scars, though the tattoos can still be counted while the scars can not. My hands are small and chubby like a child’s and my nails are kept short and painted, usually something dark and easy to fix if it chips with a permanent marker. My jeans are skinny cut, I wear mostly those horrible white men’s tanks in the summer and my glasses get broken on a regular basis. I was beautiful once, before all this. But that was a long time ago and now I have what I jokingly call my “meth tooth” which is a front tooth that has chipped and blackened at the root. Things often get stuck in it and I spent an inordinate amount of time picking those things out with my tongue.

Of course there are the psych units and rehabs and detoxes. The sober houses, and rented rooms that get smaller, shittier and more expensive every year. The hospitals are all publicly run or state funded institutions. The rehabs are not nice and do not offer acupuncture or equine therapy. And to think one time I actually dreamed of being able to be treated at McClean or Silver Hill. Instead these institutions are housed in mostly bad areas and the walls are all painted the same shade of greige.

There will be jobs, which come and go like water. There will be jewelry that I swore I’d never part with and body parts I never wanted explored.

There will be a man who comes after the ex-husband who I will fall deeply in love with and probably drive crazy to the point of having to get fucked up himself to stay with me. The other men, who come and go over time are nameless and I don’t bother to remember their faces. There are many “friends” who will become so put out by my constant asking for money or my constant state of inebriation that they have to distance themselves to save themselves. Then there are the friends that remain from college- the one or two who are are also part of the twenty year club. As for family of course there is one, everyone unfortunately has one. I will push them away too- disgust them beyond belief and leave them completely heart broken. There will be a mother who can not cope with this and a father trying his best and a brother who often tells me to just finally OD for good.

There are the inventive and numerous places to hide things- tea pots and under the couch. In cookie jars shaped like owls. The inside of your dogs box of ashes, pill bottles filled with pills that don’t belong there. In shampoo bottles protected in tapped up sandwich bags. In jewelry boxes and the toes of your first pair of pointe shoes. In your retainer case from middle school you manage to hold onto until freshman year of college when it will become the perfect container for carrying. In the bottom of your purse, the side pocket of your purse, the coin pouch of your wallet, where you also can keep a permanently rolled post it or bill taped and ready to blow lines on the go. In music boxes and empty cigarette packs, in the pockets of coats and the pockets of jeans which are forever not fitting right because you are always gaining or loosing weight depending on your substance of choice at the moment.

There will be near constant injuries, bruises, broken teeth, broken hearts and a nostril that was perpetually red and dripping for many years. There will be midnight ER visits because I fell down the stairs drunk and broke an ankle, fell down the stairs drunk and broke a rib. There will be visits to walk in clinics for muscle relaxer prescriptions because since the opiate crisis they are easier to get. A whole roster of clinical social workers, therapists and psychiatrists. ER nurses who get to know me on a first name basis and janitors who sweep the empty hospital hallways whose faces start to look more familiar than my families and who I greet in bad broken Spanish.

There will be brief moments of pure emotional ecstasy but mostly a constant not quite depression only numbed by getting more numb. There are about ten dvds that play on a constant rotating loop because streaming is too expensive when you’ve got shit to take care of daily. There will be books, a rare and precious thing that I will still allow myself. There are mirrors I look into as I apply my drawn on eyebrows and Amy Winehouse eyeliner that I’d like nothing more than to shatter to pieces.

There are things that are going to be described which are shocking or extreme, yet ultimately in this kind of life dull and mundane- the overdoses and bouts of alcohol withdrawal. There are psych hospital patient brawls and rehab tales of delinquency. Nights in bars and bathrooms and once an alley in Fair Haven smoking crack behind a storage facility with two beautiful black butch lesbians. Lost and replaced cell phones, an ever rotating number of smart TVs you can’t seem to hold onto because you always crash into the bookcase when you’re wasted.

There are the mornings (if you can call them that) when you hear the sirens at 4 am blaring outside your window while the summer sun begins to come up. There are nights walking cold snow laden streets in nothing more than fake Uggs, black leggings and a pleather moto jacket. There are afternoons, though the ones that are remembered are few an far between because afternoon is the hardest time of all. When I’m either too sober from not having what I need or too shit faced from starting the party at 7am. There are many years which will be condensed and some completely left out to protect those I love and those who don’t fucking deserve it.

There’s a host of swearing and bad language, meant to offend and illustrate the way I have come to talk after growing up a nice white girl in a small CT town who found herself here. There isn’t as much sex as you hoped for, and it probably wasn’t as good as you thought it’d be anyway. No one wants to fuck someone whose so dry because they’re so drunk that it hurts the guy. There is this and that, but mostly this.

And at the end of the night there is always me, alone and desperate for human interaction but afraid to stand on my front porch to have a smoke because you don’t know who the fuck is going to walk by and hit you up for a dollar or a drink or steal your house keys. There is me at the end of the night convulsing on my mattress on the floor, at intakes and AA meetings, the spots and the bodegas. There is New Haven and Holyoke and Amherst and Northampton and Bridgeport but they are essentially all the same, places to do what I did and try my best not to get arrested.

I guess when you boil it down there isn’t very much in this story besides what happened, what I was like and what I’m hoping to be now. There is still hope in all the madness. There is an in deniable will to survive for some stupid fucking reason. A will to survive that countless ODs don’t come close to killing me physically but completely destroy me mentally and emotionally. There is you dear reader who I hope to disgust and delight, but mostly hope to show what this life leads to when the party is long over and you’re too old to be drinking gin and juice out of a red Solo cup. There are my memories and my words, which at the end of the day are pretty much all I’ve got left. I pour them out for you like the stiffest drink you’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting, cutting and parsing the words like lines on the gold compact mirror I’ve been carrying for that very purpose since I was 18. There is loss, and madness and death. There is simply what I have to offer here, nothing more or less. And there is a warning, don’t do what I did, don’t mistake this piece of writing for soft core using porn. I’ll leave it at that- don’t fuck up like I did, most of us don’t come back.