Truth From the Stem: January 31, 2010

In the ‘90s I attended college and came close to obtaining an Associates’ Degree before drugs began taking center stage in my life. Upon obtaining a G.E.D. and registering for the fall quarter that first year, I remember saying, “Life is going to come no matter what you do. So I can put off the many years of college, and ten years down the road, I will just be ten years older. Or I can go back to school, and ten years down the road, not only will I definitely see ten years go by, but I will be somewhere.”

Had I stuck to that and stayed in college, I would now be where I wanted.

The same idea can be applied to kicking methamphetamine. Ten years, or five, or even just three, are going to come no matter what you do. And what you do today absolutely creates your future.

In this country, we make our own futures and are blessed with the freedom to live out our lives the way we want. But if you are still using in ten years, where is the gain?

A lot of good partying, you may think. But if you depend on meth, or any substance, to the degree that you can look ahead years into the future and see yourself holding that pipe or tin-foil or syringe or straw, you don’t get high like you use to. And pretty soon, you won’t be able to get high off any amount of meth you do.

Justify your desires any old way you see fit, that’s your choice. But that’s also my point.

Methamphetamine. The Worst Is Yet to Come.

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WARNING!!! THIS POST WILL MOST DEFINITELY CAUSE A RECOVERING METH ADDICT TO RELAPSE!!!!!!

He was down there, again, hustling, dealing, smoking, laughing . . . . I could hear him from where I sat in our bedroom, facing the computer. I knew he was plotting against me while he passed the pipe to one of the “legends” within the circles of drug dealing here in Alabama.

Though the “Legend” had come to me in the middle of the night hysterical, begging me to help him cover his track marks from banging Cocaine before he went home to his understandably angry wife, we clashed and stayed at odds for years. He was everything I didn’t want to become, and more like me than I ever realized then.

I had drilled a hole in the floor of our bedroom while my husband had been away one day, to better hear the planning and plotting that I was convinced was being carried out down there. On some days, it happened more than once or twice a day. “Just overdose her, Dude,” I heard one fiend whisper. Of course, when confronted with this revelation, my husband looked not only confused, but even fearful (which I instantly decided was due to the realization that he must have had then: “She knows!”). His attempts at an explanation had been immediately met with more suspicion. He had explained that the man’s mother-in-law had overdosed the previous night, and was unclear as to exactly which part of the conversation I had misunderstood, being that he had been counting and weighing, thus only half-listening to the man’s story.

That and other confusing instances of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that my husband wanted me dead so he could be with someone else (though we were together almost twenty-four hours a day) is what pulled me to the small hole. I had sliced the carpet and padding in an obscure area, so I carefully pulled this back and lay down, turning my ear to the floor.

I am of the belief that if one whispers something to someone else, they intend for only that person to hear what they have to say. Furthermore, they intend on others to not hear whatever it may be they have to say. Someone was whispering down there, and the frustration, anger, and hurt welled up in me, causing my eyes to water as my mind swept through the thousands of possible scenarios. For a split second, a shuffling was heard, a piece of paper moved about, or perhaps money sliding against other bills, and I had a clear, rational thought: maybe no one is whispering, after all. Maybe it’s the usual, covert sounds of a drug transaction. As quickly as that thought dawned on me, it was replaced by outlandish notions of pending death, a memorized inventory on signs of adultery, and the mental check notes I had been keeping. They contained memories of my husband’s actions and reactions, body language clues, and the all-too-famous mental list: “If He Thought This About Me, I Would React Differently Than He Does, In the Following Ways.”

Tearfully, I forced myself away from the hole in the floor, believing that whatever they were saying was definitely not going to be discovered that day. I needed to get high, anyway. On the desk lay a small, clear bag, a heavy duty torch-type lighter, and a glass pipe. I pulled the digital postal scales from a drawer and turned them on, the setting already on a “gram” measurement, hit the “tare” button to make sure the display read “0.00,” and dropped the baggie in the center of the holding tray. Had I really smoked that much? I remembered there being almost four grams! I picked up the baggie, replaced it with a nickel to test the accuracy of my scales, noted that the scales did not need to be calibrated, and weighed the dope again. 2.2? There was no way! Why was he taking from my bag?

Laughter erupted from the basement. The “Legend” had brought his newest fling with him, another “Chickenhead,” as we called them. She must have said something bland and stupid, but the guys laughed anyway because she was female . . . and because she was a “Chickenhead.”

I had seen her kind too many times at other people’s places of business, which was generally their homes. It was widely known that her kind was not allowed at our place, but this was the Chickenhead of a powerful man. She had looked willing to do anything for drugs, and probably had. I never understood that, though pain and the frustration of filling a void had been felt in my own life, as well. I had always said I would withdraw from a drug before doing anything for it. I guess that was easy to say when you hardly ever ran out of the drug, though.

I was certain the conversation was something about me, perhaps different ways my husband could have a secret affair and get it past me finding out, and the laughter created from it had betrayed my very soul. I loaded the bowl at the end of the clear, clean, glass pipe with enough uncut, imported Methamphetamine to jump-start five of Hitler’s largest Nazi soldiers. Igniting the torch-lighter and turning down the small wheel that controlled the valve allowing butane fuel to increase or decrease the amount of heat needed, I melted down the icy chunks and continued crying. Then all the world paused. Nothing else existed for the few moments that I concentrated on inhaling, heating, rolling the pipe in short, quick movements so the melted crystals would not get too hot in one place, feeling the door to my euphoric place of fulfillment opening, beckoning, always calling.

Through that door was everything wonderful and positive and peaceful that my life was not. Though the choices I had made were the only contributors to the hell I had endured and thus felt self-pity over, my euphoric place was an escape from the knowledge that I had made a mess of too many lives. I am a firm believer that guilt which is not dealt with appropriately can ultimately kill you, even without the selfish lure of suicide. Through that door was a world as I wanted it, where one could have it both ways, where a person, if they so fancied, could have their cake and eat it, too. There were no neglected grandparents who passed away while a person was too busy seeking out their drug of choice to be bothered with telling them goodbye on their deathbed. There were no forgotten spans of time where one missed their children’s school play, or forgot that the groceries were dwindling in the kitchen. In that world, there was no terrorist threats to the nation’s security, no plane-dropping on any towers, no threats of any kind. As well, there were no beloved pets who went unfed all day because one was too busy “tweaking” on some useless, insane project like finding the listening device that perhaps a narcotics agent had snuck in one day and planted in the family vacuum cleaner. No, this world was one where the laws of physics allowed for everything to just come about as having been completed already. It was one which allowed good intention to be enough for an appropriate action to follow without someone actually seeing to the task. It was a world without Chickenheads, as well, because no one had an unfilled void. No one had a life of abusive treatment, no one had endured emotional damage. No one hated, cried, hungered, or ever even frowned. No one judged me as being only a despicable drug addict and nothing more, the way I thought of myself every single hour in the real world.

I placed the glass pipe down in an ashtray to cool enough to be hidden in a drawer without causing anything to scar from a burn by the hot bowl. Thinking better of it, lest the police run in and see it sitting on the desk, I placed the ashtray itself in the drawer, pipe resting upon it, and closed the drawer carefully, so as not to knock the pipe around. I never allowed the thought to carry further and deal with the knowledge that if the police came running in, they would be legally and intelligently prepared to open a drawer or anything else they so desired, to find whatever they could. I never dealt with that question because there was no answer that allowed me to keep using and also keep paraphernalia away from my home. So the drawer was the solution for the time being, and I turned on the monitor to an outside camera which perched on the awning above our cars, giving a view of the driveway entrance to our home.

Knowing I could see them coming gave me satisfaction, and again the thought was not carried further into the knowledge of “so, if you see them coming, then what?” The world in which I decided to stay did not allow cops to gain entrance to any place I inhabited. So, listening to the sounds coming through the monitor’s speaker from the surveillance equipment’s microphone outside, I ascertained that there was momentarily no threat from the tri-county vice squad that hunted down suspected Methamphetamine dealers. I turned back to the desk and pushed the power button on my computer, satisfied with how my world seemed intelligently constructed, pompous and conceited that I was momentarily outsmarting the authority figures set against me.

Feeling inspired due to the high, I rolled the mouse’s pointer to the word-processing program and double-clicked the left mouse button. I adjusted the margin placement, my mind racing ahead of me into nonessential ramblings, and found myself continuing to stare at the blank, white screen before me.

The door leading from the basement to the den downstairs opened, and simultaneously, the door leading to the driveway area did, also. Voices flowed through the surveillance microphone and into my room upstairs, and I turned to see if the “Legend” and his Chickenhead were leaving. No, they merely retrieved something from their car and then returned to the basement as my husband could be heard climbing the stairs to our bedroom. I turned back to the computer quickly as he entered so as not to have him aware that I was listening to his adventures. The sliced carpet had been adjusted, my secret listening post safely obscured from his awareness.

“Whatcha doin’, Baby?” He was so very cunning, my husband. He was so very talented at covering up his real thoughts, his true actions and intentions. I answered with a mumbled “Nothing,” and he came over to the desk and leaned against it. I was immediately reminded of the great colossal of a man that he was to me, his cologne permeating my heart and aching it with a desire for the couple that existed before drug addiction. I had come back through the door from my euphoric place then, because in the other world, we had never changed and grown apart. But in this world, I yearned for him though he was always before me already.

“You want to come smoke a bowl with us?” His eyes were still captivating, had been so even during the strung-out periods. They were the bluest and brightest of anyone I had ever seen before, until our oldest daughter was born. She had acquired them and this had made his even more beautiful to me.

“I don’t know. I haven’t even had a shower, yet,” I answered, curtly. He saw that something was amiss, and I knew he realized I may have heard the secret whispers of evil plotting. I feigned a happy smile, apologized for my shortness with him, and hoped he bought the counterfeit emotion I displayed. If I had allowed him to see that I knew what was really going on, my little baggie would have disappeared entirely, perhaps. Or maybe he would have sped up the search for a wife-killing assassin. “Just tell them I said ‘Hey,’ and that I’m not being rude, I just have to write something for a little while.”

“Aww, Baby,” he said, his Southern drawl being music to my soul that then pierced my whole being with pain from knowledge of the betrayal, “why don’t you get dressed and come down?” I suppose my absent look and the shake of my head when I declined the invitation hurt his feelings. I didn’t know that then. He made his way back across the room to the doorway, and again asked “Baby, why don’t you get dressed and come down?” I didn’t answer.

Why Don't You Get Dressed and Come Down?

Picking up pieces of myself after crashing, becoming new, and
The indication you endlessly display leaves me with only one truth.
The dilemma I always allow me to face gives rise to obsolete excuse:
Your problem's not a lack of concern, but that aroma, that will confuse.

Why don't you get dressed and come down here,
With these adversaries, these rivals, these foes, these
Merciless creatures, come here to hunt, come here to wrinkle your nose?
I can't understand why I just don't want their patronizing time!

They're legends, like us, who've been through the game,
Who've stretched the austere, fucking limits of their mind.
You'd think we'd put as much into healing the world as we put into the find!
But sure as Satan sits upon a throne, I will come down, in time.

Under the hour glass of ice again, and I eagerly bury the awareness.
A single truth reiterates fear, just reminds me, more or less,
That I've been here before, a deja' voo, an overexposed picture in time–
A blurry representation of who I once was, outlined in murderous rhyme.

Oh, why won't I get dressed and go down there? Each time has been so cruel.
Hardhearted trolls searching for substance that they then swathe like fools.
I can't imagine why I don't want to go down there, drawn to what is untrue, and
This constant lust for your freezing touch though every puff splits me in two.

So I put on my most elegant falsetto, and beat myself inward with each step.
When and where will I find myself then, and were you asleep as I slept?
Every day leaves me breathless from voicing the questions that always remain.
Every time I go down there, I wind up here, still sitting, still the same.
-Jeanne Sparks-Carreker