I could use my dad’s condition back then as an excuse for why I started smoking weed again, but the simple fact is that I put myself in a very vulnerable place at a very vulnerable time and screwed away an entire year of sobriety. The moment I put my recovery on the “backburner,” I made an unconscious decision to relapse. I justified my using by telling myself that as long as I didn’t use heroin, I was still technically clean, but we all know that’s bullshit. I was an addict. It didn’t matter if it was heroin or marijuana or speed. Eventually, they’d all take me to a bad place, because I had no self-control. I was immoderate in the worst way.
I didn’t tell anyone that I’d started smoking again—not even my mom or my counselors at my clinic knew. The only people who knew that I was getting high for sure were the people who sold me the stuff, but they didn’t know enough about my past to think that it was a problem, and I wasn’t about to tell them. They were just some guys I’d met at work who liked to smoke pot and sold a bit on the side as well. They’d asked me a bunch of times before to hang out, but it wasn’t until things got really bad with my old man that I finally gave in and went against my better judgment and decided it was time to get away. I needed a release.
I didn’t even make it ten minutes into my first outing with the guys before I put that first blunt up to my lips and shit away my sobriety like it was nothing. I felt a tremendous amount of guilt after the high wore off, but then I just got high again, and it went away like magic. It was a vicious cycle—guilt and remorse followed by an unrelenting high, guilt and remorse followed by an unrelenting high—and over and over again like a broken record.
But my downward spiral didn’t stop there. I took it a hundred steps deeper and began pinching pills—oxycontin and morphine mainly—outta my father’s medicine chest to keep up my inner demons at bay. My parents kept them outta sight in the beginning, but as time went by and things got more hectic around the house, they stopped caring as much about hiding pills and spent their time on more pressing issues, like medical bills and what to do with this and that in case my father did die. Taking my dad’s cancer pills was probably one of the more shameful things I ever did. I’d smile right in the old man’s face and then tiptoe behind him to where his pills were and shake a few into my mouth. Methadone took away most of the euphoric effects, but that wasn’t why I was taking them anyway. They numbed me. They murdered my thoughts and feelings and helped me sleep at night. They took away my anxiety and put the hair back on my face. They made me feel normal.
As the days went by, I began spending less and less time at home and more and more time with my work buddies, James and Trent and Tracy. They were all probably around my age, twenty or so, but dressed like they were still in high school—baggy jeans, and hoodies, and backwards hats, and such. Tracy, their self-proclaimed leader, reminded me a lot of a guy I used to know back in St. Louis—a guy I used to shoot up with. They had the same stupid permanent smirk plastered across their face, amongst other things—same chiseled-down nose, same boxed-up cheekbones, same mashed-up eyebrows, and the same cold, green eyes.
I smoked pot nonstop for a whole month before I started selling it. It started with a couple of dime bags here and there and progressed into halves and ounces pretty quick. Before I even had a chance to plant my feet and figure out what the hell I was doing, I was selling so much weed for Tracy that it was almost impossible to keep my day job. I don’t really know how it happened—it just did, ya know. We got to talking one day, and he asked me if I wanted to make some money, and I said yes—that was it.
I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into. Tracy might’ve seemed like a nice enough guy, but in reality, he was an unforgiving, self-serving wannabe thug with a chip on his shoulder and a thirst for power. He only worked to wash his money, and he washed his money because most of it came from drug sales—hence why he wanted me selling for him. The cops were on his ass big time, and it’d almost become impossible for him to move product anymore, so he had everyone else do it for him. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. It took months before I figured out that his real name wasn’t even Tracy—it was Boyd or something.
I sold Tracy’s pot around the clinic and at school, and within a week, I was selling quarter pounds for the kid and making a pretty penny doing it. I could feel myself slipping deeper and deeper back into my past. I just kept telling myself that I’d do things differently the next time around and then the next time around, but then the next time would come around and nothing would change. My dad was at home dying, but all I could think about were my needs and my wants and my desires. I was selfish. I was delusional. I was a wimp—an escape artist. The second I started feeling the least bit bad, I’d just pop another pill or smoke another bluntor increase my methadone dosage at the clinic to numb me even more. I guess I just hadn’t hit rock bottom yet—the point where you’re so low to the ground that you’d do anything to get back up and the very thought of using again seems like suicide. But maybe that’s exactly what I needed to get better. Maybe I deserved everything that was coming to me, and then some.