I have distinct memories of the first couple of times I got drunk. The first was on vacation with my mom and my brother. I'm not sure how old I was, maybe 16 or 17. Maybe a little older. We were staying in a hotel down by the beach, but I wasn't having a very good time. The beach was too far away, and when you got down there it was way too crowded. I was complaining that the vacation wasn't going very well, so my mom suggested I get drunk. There was a bottle of vodka in the freezer. I'm not sure where it came from; it was there when we checked in. I drank it over that weekend.
My early experiences with drinking were wonderful. When I was drunk, I felt relaxed, comfortable, at ease. Actually, that's not totally accurate. I didn't feel relaxed, comfortable and at ease, I was relaxed, comfortable and at ease. I don't remember any hangovers, or vomiting. All of that came later. That was the introduction of alcohol to my life, and it remained (in my perception), a force of good for quite a few years to come. I became a drug user, and alcohol was just my background noise, my security blanket for when I got done really partying. I never suspected it would end up destroying me worse than anything else I ever did (maybe... I had some pretty hard times on other things, too).
When I was 18 or so I went to Kentucky for a couple weeks. What I was doing there isn't really relevant to this topic, but the short answer is I went there to see a girl. I was staying with some friends of hers. At this point, I hadn't really done any drugs, not because I had an objection to them, but I was a very isolated individual. I had no friends and socialized with no one. The fact is I didn't leave the house for weeks at a time. So even if I had wanted to do drugs, I had no idea where to get them. Anyway, transplanted to this house in Kentucky, I did meth with these guys. It was just part of their daily routine. We were watching Money Train, and they'd periodically pause it, go down in the basement and snort and smoke meth. We did it both ways. In retrospect, it's disturbing how many kids were running around that house, but I was a deeply troubled person, I didn't care. This was the time when I had pictures of serial killers hung up all over the walls, conducted legitimate Satanic rituals, kept dead animals in jars, etc. I did something else on this trip that I'm not comfortable talking about (it needs to remain mine forever, I will never discuss it with anyone), but allow me to say a line was crossed, and when I came back, I had changed for the worse.
I had now been introduced to casual drug use, and I liked it, but I still had zero friends, nor even any acquaintances. My options for dulling my senses were limited to drinking, and whatever I could get from the store. I wouldn't go to the store, you understand, I'd just ask my mom to bring it home for me. She always supplied me with liquor or whatever else I wanted. I don't say that with any thought as to how it makes her look. Frankly, I just don't want to think about it. I say it because it happened. So I started sniffing glue. I huffed rubber cement a few times. You stick the jar under your nose and just breath it in, and eventually the jar is empty and there's just a little skin of rubber on the bottom. Where'd all the glue go? :( Thanks to the internet age, I actually have a document of me doing this. Here I am, posting while high on glue, in April 2003:
"So I was wondering whose eber sniffed glue here ont he board cause I was sniffing it earlier and oh my god it was tight. I mean never had I been so gfood. But relally I dont know, cause I dont know if its me ot the glur. it s cheaper to get the glue than thop get some other tpe so bad drug, its thw best."
I don't know what to say to that. No pride, or shame. A vague sadness, maybe, but it's just what happened. I remember being blown away while high on glue by what I perceived as the greatest song I had ever heard. I decided I had to write the lyrics down so I could look up what song it was later. When my head cleared, I saw that the paper I had written the lyrics on was covered with scribbles and I realized that the song had been "Take a Look Around" by Limp Bizkit, a song I both knew and hated.
Another time I had a very clear impression of floating through outer space, and entering a black hole. Reality started to shatter around me, and reassemble into a colorful tunnel I was rushing through. When I reached the end of the tunnel, I saw that its walls were actually the inside of the rubber cement bottle. I was sitting on my bed, holding the empty bottle up to my eye. "Oh, I've been in there the whole time."
For whatever reason, I fell into a way to get marijuana, and I just did that for a few years. It saved my life, I'm sure, because say what you will about marijuana, it's harmless compared to the lifestyle I was living. I see now that I really just didn't want to face reality. I didn't care what I was high on, as long as it was something. And, through providence alone, I fell into something as relatively harmless as weed. I'm sure it's why I'm alive today. Understand that I would still do absolutely anything offered to me. I had not a care for my own well being, I just didn't associate with anyone and so I didn't get offered stuff very often.
I got introduced to dextromethorphan. It's the active ingredient in Robitussin, and in high doses, it's an extremely powerful disassosiative. That means, briefly, that it separates your consciousness from your physical body. I doubt it would be legal, but there's actually very little than can suppress a cough. It's either that or opium, so I think it's a lesser of two evils situation. As an aside, my experiences with dextromethorphan are one reason Marilyn Manson will always be an artist close to my heart, because he also went through the ringer on disassociatives, and that's largely what Mechanical Animals is about. If you've experienced that sort of hell, that album takes on a whole new significance. I've always thought these lyrics expressed what it feels like very well:
"I can never get out of here
I don't want to just float in fear
A dead astronaut in space
The nervous system is down
The nervous system is down
I know..."
I started to do dex daily. I'd drink up to three bottles of Robitussin at a go, or sometimes take whole bottles of the liquigels. Strange things started to happen to me. The thing about DXM (as it's sometimes called) is that the effects can be cumulative. Once you're down from the high, it's still in your body, and if you do more before it's flushed out, it can actually give you a way higher dosage that you're anticipating. Again, I have documentation from the internet. After getting I don't know how much of that stuff into my system, this happened:
"I was in the living room watching tv when I did this, and when I finally came down I was in the bedroom, but I don't remember going in there. There was a lapse in my memory but I suddenly found myself in a state of what I could loosely describe as absolute consciousness. At first I had a definite sense of self, but it was like I was a spirit which had existed for eternity. I was an eternal, burning sun, and my life had been a small flare on the surface of my consciousness (words kind of fail this part). I saw every moment of my life with perfect clarity and knew they were all insignificant, ripples on the surface of oblivion.
I left behind my self and entered into a state of meditation. I saw many people (or rather, the consciousness of many people) and communed with them. I started to hear gunshots, but from a long way off and muffled, as if under a lot of water. They kept getting louder, and then I got a strong hallucination, which was visual and yet not visual, of rushing through a tunnel towards my body, except I was younger. I was back in high school, and I was running through the halls and when I slammed back into my body, it came into focus and I realized the gunshots were coming from me. People were running and I was chasing and shooting them, and fire was there.
It was my body, but it was seperate from my consciousness. I was looking through my eyes but I was an impartial observer. I realized that I had gone on a shooting rampage in high school, and my life past that point had been a dream. I had these swirling ideas of about which of the three selfs (school shooter, 22 year old drug experimenter, eternal sun of knowledge) was real and which were dreams that I can't really describe, but the gist was that eternal sun was real and the other two were just... cosmic hiccups.
Things kept getting fuzzier at this point and there a sort of... babbling stream of thought which I can't describe. This kept going on until I eventually realized who I was again. I was in the bedroom. My brother had come in and was playing my Xbox. He was playing GTA. I suspect that when I hallucinated the shooting I was floating down to a high third plateau and the game was entering my visions, reinterpreting the shooting in the game. He later told me I talked to him about things that happened years ago as if they were currently going on. I remember none of this. I knew who and where I was, but I didn't understand it. There was a vague idea that someone had done drugs, and the letters "D...X...M" kept floating through my head but I didn't know what they meant. I do remember asking my brother if someone in here had done drugs and he said "Yes, you did, you freak."
I was eventually able to begin walking around, in a daze as if through a swamp. I smoked, watched tv, and came down for several hours. I shook it off completely by the end of the day, and by the next evening was laughingly telling the story of the trip over dinner."
And after that, I still didn't stop doing it. I kept doing it every day. I can't even believe I'm typing these words, but it's true. Highs associated with DXM arrive in plateaus. You reach the next plateau and the effects change. The highest, which I've heard called 4th plateau or plateau sigma, is sometimes rumored to be a myth. It's called a suicide mission. I thought I had reached it with that story above, but I learned that I didn't. There was a level beyond that, which I experienced later. I also credit this experience with saving my life, because it scared me so badly that I completely changed the direction of my life, and vowed to never do drugs again (I did... but one thing at a time). It is legitimately beyond description, but I can briefly say that I became a different person. I looked at myself and I was looking at a stranger. I said "Oh my god, that guy is so fucked up. What's wrong with him? I feel so sorry for him." and eventually came to realize it was me. I wrote "This is not real. This will end." on my walls. I shaved my head and moved all the way across the country.
And then... and then I really lost myself to drinking. I was drinking probably a fifth of either bourbon or vodka every day, already, understand, the whole time I was on DXM. It just seemed so incidental compared to what else I was doing. But if I wasn't buzzed, my body was screaming for it. I arrived in California, and unfortunately the next couple of years are just kind of a blur. I started to drink so much that my life didn't have any linear progression anymore, it just became flashes between hangovers and blackouts. Could I deny my alcoholism? I don't remember if I tried. All I knew was that any option that involved not drinking was not worth it. I can remember, among other things, being stopped by the police while walking down the sidewalk and told I was too drunk to walk. Drunk driving, I'd heard of, but I didn't know you could be too drunk to walk. I was staying with my dad at the time, and I can remember sneaking out the window in the middle of the night to buy more vodka, then falling down a hill and lying in the mud for probably an hour before I could gather myself enough to even get back in the window.
I drove drunk every time I drove, because if I was awake, it meant I was drunk. I drank before work. I drank on my breaks at work. I threw up on the sidewalk outside work (pretty poorly managed company, I guess). Customers constantly complained that I smelled like whiskey. I would drink all of my roommates' alcohol in a blackout and have to buy them more. I always had scabs on my face and hands from constantly falling over. I would probably puke two or three times a day. Twice, I woke up thinking I was late for work, only to rush down there and realize it was 7:30 at night, not 7:30 in the morning. When I look back on it, I don't know how I subjected myself to that kind of torture for a week, much less years. But I did. I did eventually get busted for DUI. I woke up hungover with no alcohol and headed out to buy more. When I got to the store, I had drunkenly forgotten my wallet, so I had to go back home, and that was when I got pulled over. My BAC was .21 (and keep in mind, I had just woken up. I slept off a drunk and woke up at a .21). And I still didn't stop drinking.
When I met the woman who I would end up marrying, that was what finally enabled me to stop. It wasn't easy, and it didn't happen all at once. I don't think she ever really understood the depths of my addiction, but I was able, by spending time with her, to not drink for hours at a stretch. I still drank beer every day, but I slowly, slowly, weaned down my alcohol dependence, until I felt like a social drinker. What a joke. As soon as I was left alone, she'd come home and find me passed out, covered in vomit. It was a slow decline, but with her support I was finally able to stop, and I haven't had a drink since December 7th, 2010. Happy ending? Wrong.
The weed came back. I got high a lot, which probably wasn't the best idea, but nothing devastating ever came from it. That was all pretty benign, until I got wind of synthetic weed. After all that, just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in. It seemed like a good idea. This stuff feels almost like weed, except it's cheaper, it's legal, and it's easier to get. You can buy it over the counter. Sounds like a can't miss proposition, until I discovered that I just... couldn't... stop. It wasn't like weed. When I had to lie about how much I did it, it was the beginning of the end. I was right back in my old story. It blew up in my face, and while it's not the reason I'm divorced (something like that is too complex to be explained that way), I'd still be married if I hadn't tried it. It made me someone I'm not. What is it going to take? What is it going to take for me to learn? I would love to be able to have a drink with friends, or relax on the weekends with a little enhancement. It isn't in the cards. I'm just not wired that way. Sober living is so strange to me, being 100% sober almost feels like a drug to me. I forgot how good it feels. I really did. What can I say? Life goes on. Life most certainly goes on. And asking what's it going to take for me to change isn't a rhetorical question.
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