THE LONG ROAD
“The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
— RUSSELL BRAND
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night....”
—ALLEN GINSBERG, HOWL AND OTHER POEMS
W E DROVE NORTH in silence. Chor’s feisty attitude faded into a passive vacancy. We stopped at a Best Western after a few hours, both sleepy and sapped of life force.
Chor went into the bathroom. He tried several times to shut the door, and then fumbled with the lock. I walked in and examined the door. “Yeah, it’s broken.” He’d have to use the bathroom with the door cracked.
We swiftly slipped into bed. We were drawn into a vortex of desperate kisses, but I could not let him inside me again yet. “No. Go to sleep, love. Get better.”
In the morning, Chor went to the bathroom. I slipped in through the broken door to grab my toothbrush. He suddenly looked up from his seat on the toilet, his eyes as wide as saucers. His legs locked together. “Yeah? What?” he said, alarmed. He was up to something. I went over to him, suspicious.
“WHAT are you DOING in here?” I demanded.
“Nothing, Elizabeth. Nothing!” He sounded frantic.
I could see a swatch of fabric that didn’t match his shorts peeking out from deep between his legs. “WHAT do you have there? WHAT are you hiding?”
“Nothing! Nothing! Come ON, Elizabeth. Please!” he pleaded.
“Give it to me!” I held out my hand. “NOW!” I was a terrified commander.
“Please!” he tried once more.
“I’m leaving your ass here unless you show me what you have!”
He didn’t have the strength to fight or flee.
He sighed and handed me a Lycra sports cap. I opened it to reveal a capped needle and a prescription bottle filled with clear liquid.
“What IS this?” I demanded.
“It’s just methadone, Elizabeth! It will ease the withdrawals!”
My adrenaline pumped as fear and rage ravaged me from within. I ripped the top off the bottle and hastily poured the liquid down the drain. “Just methadone?” I repeated with an acrid taste in my mouth.
He flushed the fresh needle down the toilet. “I’m sorry. Fuck. I was just going to use the needle to squirt it in my mouth,” he said, as if that would somehow absolve the flagrant violation.
“Jesus, Chor! It’s still drugs! Besides, I don’t believe anything you say. You are LOST.” We paused, panting.
“Do you have anything else? You better hand it over now!” I wailed.
He’d already crossed the line I set, but I couldn’t really just leave him here in the middle of nowhere. Or could I?
“No, I don’t have anything else. That’s it.”
I reminded him what we had learned on the Iboga Sanctuary website. “You know about methadone, Chor! Methadone is even harder to detox than heroin. You wanna let this medicine work? You wanna heal? You HAVE to be as clean as possible upon arrival.”
I went through all his things, shaking and shocked, while I silently thanked the angel that had broken our bathroom door handle.
I gathered myself. I will do everything in my power to get him to Panama, I swore. And that’s where my part as his personal prison warden and nurse ends. It’s up to him after that.
I wasn’t even sure if our love would survive this, but I hoped that he would, at least.
Our drive back to San Francisco was charged with tension. The slightest spark might lead either of us to exploding. My every human limit had been shattered. I felt lost, except for the forward momentum of the car. Just keep heading north.
I played an audio book called The Brain That Changes Itself by Normal Doige, to fill up the silence, hoping that brain’s limitless capacity to heal itself would sink into Chor’s awareness as he faded in and out.
He devolved into the various stages of withdrawal, but it was worse this time. First he was empty, then irritable, then downright nasty. He cussed and grimaced. The demon had its claws around his neck; it was choking him out.
Once home, I nursed him through the torture all over again, but he was not so grateful for my care this round. He pouted contemptuously with every offering. The demon did not want my healing potions.
I was on guard 24/7. I jumped up and burst in every time he went to the bathroom. I rifled through his backpack and bathroom drawers every chance I could. I had never been a snoop before, but I had become obsessed. I fought for our life together—by digging through his stuff like a bare-knuckle boxer.
“Do you have anything else?” I asked him several times, with fire in my voice, despite my total lack of faith in his words. My interrogation was irrational. Each time he would say no, but ultimately it was up to me to observe him.
The next morning after we returned home, he actually handed me a couple pharmaceutical pills. “It’s called Norco. It helps with the withdrawals. Go ahead. Take it. I don’t want anything. There. You have everything.” My bitter hostility softened a bit with his offering, though I remained suspicious.
I canceled work that day. Again. Shit. Bills were staring at me.
He’d been stalling on his deposit for Iboga Sanctuary, too busy. Right.
“What’s more important than this? What good is anything if you’re dead? You wanna stay in this house? You do the deposit today. ” I pushed.
“OK!” he snapped. We drove to the bank. He was unshaven and shabby.
“I need to do a wire transfer to Panama,” Chor said to a banker with a frown as we sat down in his cubicle.
The man was robotically polite. “Ah, Costa Rrrrica. Pura Vida, eh? You know, ‘Pura Vida?’ Are you going on a nice vacation? You lucky folks!” The banker began typing on this computer.
Chor slumped over the desk and propped his head on his hand. He looked up at the banker with dark, distant eyes. He tapped a pen on the desk like he was sending a furious telegram. I sat next to him and silently screamed at him with my eyes. Normal. Please just act normal.
I worried whether he’d even make it through the transaction. He was acting so shady, I imagined they’d call the police.
“We are in a hurry. Thank you,” I said.
“And I need three thousand cash,” Chor told the banker. That was balance of the treatment cost that would be due upon our arrival.
“Chor, don’t you want to wait until a bit closer to our departure date?” I said softly to him, fretting. What would a jonesing heroin addict do with three grand cash and a couple weeks to kill?
“No. Let’s just get it now.” He said firmly.
“Right away. Just a moment.” The banker left his desk to fetch the cash.
“Then I’ll handle that cash. You understand?” I whispered. “Just hand it over to me for safekeeping. You won’t need it until we get there anyway.”
When the banker returned, he counted out 30 hundred-dollar bills on the desk, placed them neatly in an envelope, and handed the small fortune to Chor. “Thank you,” I said to the banker, on behalf of my terse lover.
We walked toward the car. Chor handed me the money. As soon as we got home, I promptly hid it where he’d never find it.
I remembered an important point on an email from Iboga Sanctuary. “Chor, they requested updates on drug usage so they could be properly prepared for the detox. You MUST tell them about this second relapse. It could affect their treatment protocol,” I emphasized.
Chor sighed and typed out his update. He relayed their response later that day. “They suggested staying a few extra days for an additional medicine journey—and an added $1,500. Plus we’d have to change our flights and miss more work to stay longer. There’s no way, Elizabeth. I can’t pay any more,” he said. And neither could I.
“Did you tell them that you can’t do it?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’ll do their best to work with the time we’d planned for.”
“No more, Chor. No more. ” I said through clenched jaws.
“I KNOW.” He grumbled.
Make-or-break time.
He settled in for a horror film. I did the dishes and the laundry, in between checking his bags again and again.