My best friend, Matt, got me on it. Back then, Matt was a man with a huge sense of humor and a generous soul; the newest guy in our group of friends at the time. He’d gotten tired of weed and started bringing meth around, which caused problems in our tribe. Most of us, including me, didn’t do any drugs that weren’t “natural.” So no pills, no ecstasy, nothing you could inject. And definitely not meth. We’d all seen the tweakers – the guys who broke into people’s houses to steal their money, who stripped metal off of highway guard rails to sell as scrap, who would steal everything you owned if you gave them a chance so they could get their next fix. No way were we going to screw around with that stuff.
Back then, Matt wasn’t skinny, didn’t have acne and sores all over his face. Still had his life together. He would say things like, “If you do it with a strategy, you don’t get addicted.” Matt used for six months and nothing about him changed.
I started wondering: Is meth really that bad? Is it all Breaking Bad and horror stories? The tweakers I’ve seen–the messed-up ones–are they just people without strategies?
Matt was pretty good at hiding, but one night I caught him at a party. He would heat up the end of this glass tube, then snort a line of meth and exhale vapor through his mouth. I watched with a grim fascination until he saw me looking at him and offered me a bump. Every part of me knew I should say “no.” I don’t know why I said “yes.”
I felt sick watching him cut me a line with that little razorblade.
~*~
I started as a tweakend warrior like everybody else, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to do it more often. See, crystal gave me this restlessness, this wanderlust, this inextinguishable longing for anywhere else. In the beginning, I couldn’t smoke and still attend class, still show up for my shifts at Subway, still act like a normal person around my family. So I stayed sober during the week.
But tweakends became every couple days, became every day. A hit or two turned into ten.
I remember the first time I slept through one of my shifts. My boss, Moretti, texted me about fifteen times to see if I was all right, even after my shift was over. When I finally got back to him, I apologized and swore it would never happen again.
It happened the following Friday.
Moretti took me aside before my next shift and started asking personal questions. I was still buzzy from the night before, so I got paranoid. I shouted at him, and he burst into tears. He didn’t technically fire me, but I never went back. I already had something else going by then, anyway.
Matt was working on a plan; he knew a computer nerd who had phished a bunch of people’s credit card information. He bought these numbers from the nerd, then laundered the money using a combination of Starbucks gift cards, Craigslist, and yuppie soccer moms. Matt reasoned that the “victims” could just call their banks and get the charges taken off, so the money was coming out of the banks’ pockets. And screw the banks.
He let me work with him, and pretty soon we were making good money. Not a lot, but enough for Matt to buy a new Kia and for us to buy plenty of crystal.
~*~
After six months, we were splitting an eight ball every couple days. After a year, we were doing an eight ball each.
I stopped talking to my family and stopped returning texts from friends who didn’t gak out with me. I couldn’t stand to be around people who had a conniption when they found out I bit my cuticles until they bled. I resented people with non-tweaker complexions, their faces smooth and glowing, free of acne, scars and the holes torn and picked during intense geeking.
I only wanted to be around people that also swatted at phantom crawls on their skin. I needed other people who wanted to talk for hours and hours, even if it was about nothing, all through the night and the next day and the next night. I needed other souls that quaked when mine did, that broke into cold sweats when the shadows began to transform into espers after two nights without sleep.
~*~
Matt met this redhead named Tamara on OKCupid who had a two year-old son. They went on a few dates and discovered that they had a shared interest in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, gin cocktails and marathon meth-fueled screwing sessions that I had to put my headphones on to drown out.
They were inseparable for about two months, until Tamara told Matt that she heard voices in her head, and sometimes couldn’t tell whether her memories were real or made up. Matt called her crazy and broke up with her on the spot.
If she wasn’t crazy before, she was then. She came over but Matt wouldn’t let her in, so she tried to break down the door by bawling in hysterics on the step, issuing a pathetic series of kicks at the lock. When that didn’t work, she parked her car on our street and, with her toddler in the backseat, waited for Matt to leave so she could talk to him.
After an afternoon of this, Matt grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into the hood of her car three times.
I never saw Tamara again. I don’t know if this is true, but a friend told me that, three months after she quit coming around, she was in her apartment screaming so loud at “the voices” that her neighbors called the cops. When they showed up, she took her son hostage with a pair of rusty sewing scissors.
The cops eventually talked her into releasing the boy, but they didn’t get her into custody before she stabbed herself in the throat.
~*~
Matt got arrested first. I wasn’t at home when the cops came, because I was sitting exhausted at Easter brunch with my family, trying to explain why I’d lost so much weight, letting them make a dentist’s appointment for me, watching my Mom watch me. They all knew I was using, but no one was willing to ask me outright.
Anyway, Matt got too screwed up and got sloppy with the gift card operation. He forgot to block his IP address and didn’t rotate the e-mails he was using for Craigslist. They tracked his computer, raided our house, found our stash.
When they found me later that day, the cops said Matt didn’t even wait to get to jail before he threw me under the bus; I was the mastermind of the gift card operation, and he was an unwilling accomplice. He said I got him hooked on meth. He even told them about Tamara, that it was me who dated her, me who dumped her, me who smashed her head into the hood of the car.
~*~
I spent five days in jail, which went by quickly as I slept through most of it in the detox tank. I had it easier than another guy a few rooms down; he was coming off Oxycontin and drank his own piss to get some of the drug back into his system.
When I had to be awake for showers and meals and toilet breaks, I felt papery and insubstantial and crushingly depressed. Not that there’s much to feel happy about in jail.
My dad posted a $10,000 bail bond on the condition that I come home, stay with them and get clean. I agreed.
My brother picked me up. He didn’t say anything about drugs or jail or Matt or anything – he just bought me a burrito from 7-11 and kept telling me he loved me.
I loved him, too; we never became friends when we grew up like everyone promised we would. But he’s my brother. I knew I loved him, but I couldn’t feel anything, and I couldn’t make my mouth say the words back to him.
He dropped me off and, as soon as he was out of sight, I caught a bus across town, used my spare key to get into Matt’s Kia, and left town.
~*~
Some girl I partied with a couple times named Shawna had moved to Oregon about two months before. Shawna had yellow skin and deep, wicked track marks. She never talked much, and looked tired even when she was on gak. I texted her and asked if I could crash with her for a bit. I didn’t tell her I was on the run. She said she didn’t care, it was cool.
~*~
We sat on an egg crate in her living room across from each other. She didn’t have a pipe, but she offered me a needle. I was so desperate to feel right again, to feel something again, that I agreed even though I’d never done it before. She tied her arm off and plunged the needle into one of her jagged, purple veins. I couldn’t do it myself, so she injected me while I looked away.
I thought the high would be incredible – and it was; it was almost as good as the first time. For about fifteen minutes. After that, I just felt sick.
Later, when I was folding her laundry and she was trying to fix one of her broken DVD players, she asked me in this bland, toneless voice whether I wanted to have sex. She asked it like she might ask, “Where is the bathroom?” or “What movie do you want to see?” Like it was nothing. I didn’t have a condom, so I said no.
About a half hour later, she forgot she’d already asked me, and propositioned me again, calling out from the kitchen. I forgot I’d already said no, and let her take me to bed when she was finished scrubbing the cabinets.
~*~
I stayed with Shawna for about six months. I was indoors during the day to avoid cops, but went out scavenging for whatever I could find or steal to sell to junkers.
I had already lost nine teeth, and my hair was beginning to go. People started pointing and hissing at me, the way I used to when I saw a tweaker. I started wearing my hoodie everywhere so I could hide my face.
~*~
I was asleep when Shawna overdosed. She shot up, forgot she shot up, and shot up again. When I found her, fever had already cooked her brain and her heart had stopped.
I grabbed my money, my clothes, my stash and a few other things then loaded the Kia. I used her phone to call 9-1-1, then put a sheet over her and left. I think I loved her.
~*~
It’s tricky to get a needle going while you’re driving, but I’m an expert at it by now.
I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t go home. I can’t go anywhere that anyone knows me. I’m driving south. Maybe to Eugene, maybe to San Francisco.
I tear open a vein on my right arm with one of Shawna’s old needles.
This is the hurt that never quits, oozing from a secret source somewhere inside me. It’s a black, flapping shadow in my marrow. It’s a part of me; I am it, it is me. But it’s still getting closer.
Maybe it can’t stop now. It has to dissolve me from the inside out into a puddle of toxic blood and loose teeth and the finest of fine hairs.
I learned what I never wanted to know. I left Matt, I left my family, I left Shawna. I left everything.
The drug hits my blood and it feels like fluttering wings.
I leave myself. I watch the world from above, like I was a bird or a cloud, or a wisp of chemical vapor, aloft.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gabe Coeli lives in Portland, Oregon with his daughter, Livia. He spends his days writing, fighting, cooking, reading, loving and adventuring.