Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My son, the junkie
I finally had to let him save, or kill, himself.
By Wendy Mnookin
[08/27/99]

Emotional handicap
What do you do when your normally sweet, loving child wholeheartedly rejects his suddenly disabled, wheelchair-bound grandmother?
By Diane Lore
[08/26/99]

Wild Thing
Is hell satisfied?
In keeping with their authors' dark histories, "The Iron Giant" and other children's tales by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tell ominous fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.
By Polly Shulman
[08/25/99]

The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

True to form, within a week, I was using every day. First, it was just at night, and then, soon enough, it was as soon as I woke up. By January, less than a year since graduating college and three months from my first "score," I was regularly vomiting up cereal and orange juice as I walked the 20 or so blocks to work. No big deal. The vomiting was more than worth the dreamy, narcotic state that heroin induced. This, I thought the first time I truly went into a nod, is what drugs are supposed to be about. Total physical bliss. Thoughts a blur of pointillistic free-associations. Music that sounds as if it were being played straight from Orpheus' lyre.

The next three years are more or less a loss. At some point I moved out of Manhattan and back to Boston; once in Boston, I started shooting up because the heroin there was not as strong and I was running out of money. During this time, there were some incidents I tried to color as romantic, or at least exciting, like a trip to Mexico, paid for by a magazine that wanted me to undergo an experimental detox and then write up the experience. Or the furtive drug deals conducted at midnight in deserted downtowns.

But I knew that my life was not romantic, or exciting. It was filled with bloodstained public bathrooms and collapsed veins. For a couple of months one summer, I got into crack because I thought that would help me break my heroin addiction; instead, I ended up smoking pieces of linoleum I carved from my kitchen floor, hoping there were bits of crack stuck in the tiles, and shooting speedballs in my bed. And I stopped writing, save for an occasional freelance music review. Sometimes, in my fleeting moments of being high -- after being addicted to heroin for a while, it's impossible to ever really get high; instead, the best you can hope for is to get "straight," or un-sick -- I would imagine the books I would write, the sonnets I would spin, the flowing, expressive articles I would pen. But for the most part, I was not thinking about poetic expression, because when you are a heroin addict, the only frame of reference is heroin.

What time is it? Heroin. What are you doing tomorrow? Heroin. Why are you going to the hospital? Heroin. What are your plans when you get out? Heroin. Written anything lately? Heroin.

The apartment I lived in was littered with bloodstained rags that I collected to damp the flow of blood as it seeped out of my veins. I strategically hid needles around my apartment so I would never be without one, reminiscent of how I used to stash wooden pot pipes around my dorm room. Oftentimes, the tips of my works were so blunt they could barely break my skin. If I didn't use every six hours, I became violently ill, vomiting, shaking, with a horrible aching in my bones. Day and night, I wished I would die, or at least fall asleep for a very long time.

In October 1997, I checked into a local hospital for a short-term detox. It was the eighth time I had been hospitalized in less than a year. During that same time, I had held more than a dozen jobs. I worked at three bookstores, two cafes and a liquor store. I edited a book on Chinese history, worked with a biologist researching brain function and fed monkeys being used in psychological experiments. I was fired from all these jobs: for leaving syringes in the employee bathroom, for bleeding in the coffee, for forgetting to feed the monkeys.

When I checked into the hospital that last time, I didn't really think that I would get sober. Over the past year, a pattern had developed. I would go to a hospital when I was too sick to cop or too poor to buy food. After a couple of days of methadone and grilled-cheese sandwiches, I took a cab back to my dealer's house and started all over again. Still, at this point, in some recess of my mind, I knew I couldn't last much longer: A couple of months earlier, I had ended up in the emergency room after injecting myself with PCP I thought was heroin. I almost died. "I've never seen anyone come in here in this condition and live," the doctor told my parents, a fact that didn't make them feel any better. I bit a policeman that night, came home from the hospital with bruises across my torso and hallucinated for days afterward.

Next page | It is not OK, my mother said