Passing Through: Heroin & State Rehabs (Part II)

2014

I have a kitchen job at a fancy french restaurant. I get fired after a year of barely managing a habit. I'm told I can have my job back after I go to rehab.

With my last paycheck and a fraudulent ATM deposit & withdrawl cycle, I go on a wild run, down to New Jersey and back enough times to make your head spin. I'm spiraling slowly, wandering the streets like a zombie 'til I can't take it anymore. Every five hours I need a shot. I can't even sleep a full night without getting sick.

Like every decent drug-addict millenial and gen-z, I try a detox at my mom's house. It doesn't go well; relapses galore. I get on the state health plan and find a suboxone doctor. I spend nine months on that shit, working some dead-end job, stopping my doses once a week in order to get high on smack again. Guess I was missing the feeling.

I visit the doctor with someone else's clean piss, kept in a plastic bag while warmed inside a lidded coffee cup fulla hot water. My US is unsupervised, thank God, I think as the piss pours steaming into medical cup. I blow on the piss like a cup of soup 'til the temperature register strip reads accurate. I place the cup inside the tiny window and commence lying to my doctor.

I was trained for this kind of deception from the age of fourteen. My parents were piss-testing me for weed. I tried using bleach to pass the fail, learning that bleach and ammonia react (there's ammonia in urine). Somehow, I beat the at-home drug tests.

My flesh grows more & more pale as I begin using cocaine, amphetamine, benzos, and drinking with severe hangovers; God help my liver. Suboxone and alcohol does not mix well.

The doctor assigns a nurse to supervise my UA's. I pop dirty. This happens a few times more, so he tells me I've got two weeks to get into rehab, handing me a script of two weeks' suboxone on my way out the door.

I start shopping around for rehabs, selling half my script to have one last blowout. I nearly end up in jail for shoplifting ice cream, bags of heroin under the seat. The cop asks about the ice cream "I forgot to pay for". An angry loss-prevention manager had tailed me and was screaming at the cop,

"He's drunk! This guy was stumbling in the aisles! He stole from us! Arrest him!"

The cop lets me go. Call it grace, or white privelege, or a combination of superstitions. I knock on wood and take my ass to rehab.

-State Rehab-

The smell of disinfectant, the fluorescent lights, the aching restlessness in my legs, chills, anxiety, sneezing. I am full of fierce cravings while I surrender to bouts of excessive sleep; hypersomnia. Each moment is drenched in nightmare-juice as I writhe and sweat and struggle to keep from shitting myself. Just kill me, already.

Mixed within this deathwish is a confused instinct to live. I feel like a lemming who can't commit to the cliff, waltzing with the edge, holding hands in agony with a discomfortingly edgy oblivion.

Nostalgia comes haunting my dreams, or perhaps I'm awake: I'm in an old house and I have the bag and the spoon ready. A strong gust of wind comes to take it all away. Raked and raped by the winds. I wake in cold sweat, muscles spasming, jonesing hard. I fall asleep. I'm walking down a steep hill in the dark. Some plaid shirt villain chops me up with an axe. Dramatic reveal: it's me. Look closer: it's a stranger.

I wake. I fall asleep. There he is again. That man. Is he some ancestor? He strangles me. I wake and sleep again, eaten by cannibals while disembodied beings torment me. I'm on a rubber mattress, soaked. A nurse is prodding me to get my vitals. I ask her for a valium. She smiles nervously.

I waddle to the toilet, aching, running, limping, lights stinging my eyes, perpetually shivering, never warm. Diarrhea constantly. This must be what getting old feels like. This must be what losing immortality feels like. This must be what falling from grace feels like.

Waiting in the med line, asking for immodium. Lots of it.

You've already had your limit for 24hrs.

Let me see the doctor.

She nods,

Tomorrow.

I go through this routine several times a day before seeing this fucking doctor.

I try to rationalize pharmacology with the man,

Loperamide HCL is a fentanyl analogue that acts solely on the opioid receptors in the gut. Taking large doses of immodium takes the edge off a detox; this is fact. The dosage guidelines you're using are measured for people who are opiate naive! C'mon! Your dosing guidelines are too low and I'm shitting my brains out here!

The doctor doesn't care. He's heard a street pharmacist pitch before.

Got any tonic water, then? I mumble to myself... as an opioid potentiator, quinine can greatly increase the effect of loeperamide.

Thank God I had the good sense to come in here dirty for benzos. I massively upscaled my reporting on usage with my intake form. Coupled with a very dirty cup of piss, they've got me on a little benzo taper.

In the group meetings, I get haranged by a counselor for harassing the medical staff.

Jonny bitch-boy wants more immodium and valium. What are ya gonna do Jonny? Use humor to deflect the situation?

I crack jokes. I crack rhetorical bad jokes. You know how many Christians it takes to mindfuck a rehab? I crack dad jokes. You know why the scarecrow wins an award every year? For being out standing in his field.

The veteran counselors of recovery forget how soft they once were, like an adult trying to instill toughness into a newborn.

You don't need nothin' I tell ya. I got my root canals done with no drugs, just ibuprofin, as the Good Lord intended.

More subtle Bible study through the 12 steps. Fuck you Dr. Bob for all the dogma you injected into us desperate souls.

Still, I'm falling onto on my knees. Desperate. How many times have I been here?

My first time in rehab, I made it two weeks before I procured a four milligram hydromorphone and a syringe. That transition from fresh-off being dopesick to the intense euphoria of hydromorphone was enough to cause ejaculation. I walked back to group with soggy sweatpants.

The syringe came from a veteran patient who was there for a spin dry cycle: a quick tolerance reducer. He grew up in the streets of San Juan and had been stuck on smack for most of his life. His veins were tapped. He needed help hitting his jugular vein so I stepped in with steady hands. In exchange, he gave me a clean needle. It's easy to find drugs in rehab. I know I don't want to do it, but the animal in me doesn't know how to break the habit.

This time I hang on. White-knuckle it. Over five years of this shit. Remembering the bottles of hydrocodone cough syrup at fifteen, the doctor prescribing a fat bottle to our family for any cough. It was delightful, and it lead to that first spontaneous bag of heroin at nineteen to help me off a dexedrine high. Next came all the oxys and roxys from Florida. It was a great time until it wasn't.

In rehab, my CD player is the only refuge. That, and a carton of cowboy killers. Find refuge in coffee, or God, or cigarettes. I listen to Townes Van Zandt and Moby and A3 to help me release this Hell I've been stuffing into cottons.

I shit liquid for weeks. In my dreams, I am wandering through generations of unprocessed psychic debris like an overworked bag handler at the airport. In all of them, I am exhausted and just trying to get some rest. Trying to go to sleep. When I am awake, I am just trying to go to bed.

Papaver somniferum: sleep-bringing poppy. Morpheus into Morphine.

Did you know that morphine was the first alkaloid isolated from a plant? Named after Morpheus, the God of Dreams. Thus echoes the tradition of extracting and decontextualizing molecules from plants and traditions from cultures. The way the Catholics stole Pagan rituals and decontexualized them, keeping them for their own. Religion: the opiate of the masses.

Did you know that the soldiers who died in battle were symbolized by red opium poppies? Bloody red to remind of the brutality of warfare, the opium poppy to remember the relief from suffering. The abuse of it all; the war on drugs. We are veterans, here. We carry scars but no stars.

Hey Johnny, have you ever tried not thinking so much? Don't be anxious and depressed. Be happy! A state counselor gives me a bit of sage advice.

I watch the med line, analyzing patients for pinned eyes and fresh tracks. Walking funny. Maybe a babe cheeks her methadone and wants to offer some. Could be romantic, even.

A fix is never far.

The lick of the flame, the taste in the lungs as it hits the arteries, a flicker of vinegar followed by honey, stomach dropping in vertigo, muscles slackened in a shiny pale aura; a cold moon. I become a dripping stone, worn into sand by yawning tears. Deep breathy sobs awash in a sea of melancholic triggers.

A commercial on the dayroom tv sends me down a spiral of weeping.

This melancholy haunts me, courts me like a sad-eyed lady.

At night, when I've had it, I make a phone call to a friend,

I'm giving up. Bring me some joy.

My friend hides bags of dope inside a box of donuts during the visitor day. I am later ejected after I fail a supervised UA.

I go on a run. Get into another state rehab. State insurance is wild. Deferred sentence prisoners, wandering mendicants, products of nepotism, together in the mix.

My roommate finds an OC 80, smuggled in some deferred sentencer's ass,

Woah, you can't even find these anymore.

We pool our money.

It ends up being a shitty ecstasy pill mixed with research chemicals. Some dude carried this shit from prison in his ass. We sold our smokes to round up $120 to pay him and put it in our noses. Glad we couldn't wait to find needles.

It smells like a cat's ass.

A cosmic joke. I drink orange juice during morning group and get high as fuck, by accident. The counselors notice a shift in my behavior.

I pop dirty for another piss test. My roommate tries to take the fall. They say I can stay if I rat out the guy who sold it to me. I keep my mouth shut.

I ask for a refund. He refuses me. No call. No letter. No payment plan. No smokes. Nothin'.

Stealing my Mom's change jar wasn't bad 'til I realized I couldn't replenish it. Writing fraudulent checks from my Dad didn't feel shitty 'til my plan to repay him fell apart. Fronting all that weed from Lucinda was a good idea 'til it took me two years to pay her back. Maybe this guy has a plan for his bunk ass drugs.

At age fifteen I was busted for weed by my parents. They wanted to know where it came from, and pleaded with me. They offered my protection and their total discretion. So I caved.

My Dad mentioned it to one of the other parents. I was labeled a rat by a small family of criminals. In high school, I was implicated in an incident and told that all my friends ratted on me so I might as well come clean. I learned that dirty trick the hard way. Don't trust any of them.

The parents, like teachers, like cops, didn't keep their promise. Every snitch has an affadavit with a Confidential Informant sticker over his name. It's easy to put the details together.

The people who demand the truth are often the ones who don't deserve it. I'd rather lie my ass off than suffer someone's misguided sense of justice, blood or not, hell or not. With cops, the speech better be silver. If not that, then a golden silence is worth much more than compliance.

The clergy and my family spread their lessons through shame, guilt, fear, and punitive justice. As such, I become a better liar, all the more proficienct at picking locks.

This is how I soothe myself. This is how the wailing baby in the closet learns freedom.

Freshly kicked out of rehab yet determined not to relapse, I get a ride to my friend's couch; a houseful of non-users. I am riding out this suboxone kick while drinking a non-opiate DXM cough syrup, running upstairs to the toilet 30 times a day. When they're not home, I watch movies that make me sob uncontrollably. I'm addicted to this sadness. There's nothing else but deep sorrow. It's uncomfortable yet familiar. I cry until exhaustion, totally alone. Sometimes people are around me but I'm alone, behind closed doors.

A flicker of memory; the smell of my dad's shirts. A radio left on to keep me company. Totally alone. Frightened. Hopeless.

A memory of asking anyone older than me about anything. They always had it worse. Minimalize any amount of suffering I hold because theirs hasn't been acknowledged at all. All generations going back, emotionally walled off from even worse generations. All mishandling each other. It's no ones fault.

You think too much. Just stop thinking about it. Keep it simple, stupid.

I will turn up every stone and open every door. The ones that lead to Heaven and ones that lead to Hell. I wander through fruitless deserts and bountiful forests. I find in the mirror, a sad psychopomp looking for a way through this cyclical tale.

I live and breathe inside my journals.

Jonny gravitates toward writing. We need to push him to be a writer.

I discover a tortured artist facade somehow validates this sensitivity and suffering. Maybe I can even get paid for this bad craziness. Maybe I can still salvage this life, yet. Make it worth something, as they say.

As if commodifying misery gives a sense of meaning to this. If insecurity can be transformed into security, is that alchemy wrong?

I scribble relentlessly, finding comfort in the moving of hands. The blank page is a mirror, the pen, a scalpel. I'm cutting into habits of commercialization, commodification, industrialization. Burn it, light it. The room is basked in an aura of blue.

What about the blues?

I'm reminded of serenity, of the real. The comfort of hard truth-saying. Admitting how much shit sucks, in song. This is not the truth of enforcers, nor the truth of justice systems, nor the truth of blood lineages and history.

It's the truth of displacement, of ruined cultures, of total loss of meaning, of fear & chaos, and finally the truth of death, always coming & always near, transformed by the truth of music & dance & joy, not in spite of the suffering or because of the suffering but for liberation.

Naming your kids after Biblical characters whom you know nothing about, naming your cities after a religion you don't even practice. Decimate entire civilizations just to fit in. Tell these children they walk funny and talk too much and think too much when they learn the truth about this. Offer them medication when they ask uncomfortable questions or make uncomfortable observations.

The barbed wires, forcing crooked teeth into place like people, restraining them to look normal. Guilt and shame for how much time, effort, and money went into this operation, all for the sake of comfort. Appeal to their sense of duty and obligation by reminding them they need to repay their debt to family and society and state. Catholic and Protestant refrains echo through my DNA. Prayers asking for forgiveness for sins not even committed yet. Feeling guilty about seeking death.

Death comes sweet child, like change. No need to rush.

For now, let us turn this life into a ritual musical theatre.

Thread the canvas of coffins with golden hairs of poetry and song.

I can see the light man! The band! We gotta get the band back together!

I put my journal down and, trusting the wrong fart, waddle off to the laundry room with shitty sweatpants sticking to my legs. I rinse off, masterbate three times, and lay down on the floor of the shower. I sip DXM cough syrup 'til I'm seeing lightning bolts. Pop immodium til the diarrhea slows enough for my asshole to heal from all this coarse toilet paper.

Toilet paper? In my day we used the callouses on our over-worked hands to pinch our hemmerhoids clean!

Suboxone was a terrible idea, is a terrible drug. It killed the part of me that could hear music and feel it.

I make it into another rehab, only they don't offer detox. I already fucked up on the intake form; shoulda lied.

Now I'm off to the Brattleboro retreat to detox before getting shipped up to Serenity House.

The Brattleboro Retreat is full of the ghosts of mental patients going back to the early 1800s. You can't go outside. You can't smoke inside. The food is below hospital-food grade. It's basically a prison that poses as a mental hospital. Aren't all mental hospitals?

I'm on day ten of my suboxone detox. A sub kick usually lasts three weeks, sometimes more. It's feels like an unbearably long initial detox, primarily because while detoxing from opiates, your sense of time dilates rapidly.

Conversely while high, your sense of time constricts.

At the retreat, their protocol is to titrate new patients up on suboxone in order to taper them off it. They're required by law to offer it three times a day when they take vitals.

Three. Times. A day. I am offered the very drug I am seeking to get away from.

One easy yes could provide relief from my suffering. Nevermind that it's temporary. I am face to face with a pusher in a nurse's costume. Us, locked in this building together. A detox center that is also a psych ward that is really just a haunted pharmaceutical drug den with shitty food.

Sterile hall psych ward. I pester the med window constantly 'til they load me up on hydroxyzine, an antihistamine similar to benadryl. I wander around like a space-zombie, asking for more. They won't give me seroquel. I demand something, anything. They offer me suboxone and more atarax. No to the suboxone, yes to the atarax. Fuck it.

I take a hot shower and shiver uncontrollably. Looks like my blood will never get warm again. I hear music inside my head through the day. Something from the fifties; the playlist from Fallout: New Vegas. Not bad. These meds are doing something to distract me from the withdrawl. I wonder what else they got?

I pace around. Go to groups. Sleep. Ask if it's time for another nicotine patch. They warn me not to leave it on at night or I'll have nightmares. My arms and legs are covered in nicotine patches from days gone. It doesn't matter; this place is haunted and so am I.

I'm on the bathroom floor in a familiar ritual. Preparing another shot. A blast of fresh air comes in the window followed by a bright light. The dope is gone. I'm alone. Space and time collapse and I'm empty except for the blackest kernel of despair and it's all there is, the density of suffering drags me into an abysmal darkness yet somewhere, a light still shines through a crack in the closet door. Through the core wound, a rose doth bloom.

Still, death is on my mind. Why?

Heroin is like a mother's hug. Kalvin would to say.

I remember leaving notes on empty bags before I'd shoot them.

If this kills me, it was an accident.

Is this how I learned to soothe? Death? Or it's cousin, sleep?

A week goes by in this retreat. I have to be careful what I say to the counselors. One slip of confessing a suicidal thought will have me hemmed up in daygroups awhile. I lie my way through the counseling and finally, they deem me worthy to leave the dungeon.

I pick up a carton of smokes and commence a twenty-one day program in a place called Serenity House. This suboxone takes so long to leave the body. Weeks. Goddamn! I'm horny, overcaffeinated, half-crazed. Endless diarrhea. My appetite is returning. I start cutting out the bikini model ads from the magazines and gluing them into a homemade zine to inspire me during my showertime. I have to do this in secret during arts and crafts group.

We make a Ouija board, using a shaving cream cap for the planchette, start talking to ghosts and demons. One of them says "Jonny, find God".

I crave dope constantly yet I don't want to go through this again. I am positively desperate.

At some point, praying is the only thing that adds up. Might as well give it a try. I don't know who or what I'm praying to at first, but I am begging for mercy. Begging to be of service to the omnidirectional force of flowering life. I'll ease off of the death worship to balance things out. Please, let me throw my life away to something better than this.

I'm trying to survive the day-to-day long enough to understand the point of any of this, like the rest of us. I vent at meetings. In journals. Later, in books and on the internet.

Maybe there is no point. Maybe believing in points and hope is a mistake. The twelve-steppers tell me to dumb it down.

Remember: K.I.S.S.

Keep it simple, stupid.

You think too much, kid. You need to turn that head of yours off and put it into the big book. This program saved my life and it will save yours too, if you work it. Don't go off working your own program, now. Remember: you are powerless.

I'm going to meetings in earnest. Working the steps. Fucking desperate. Many tours of rehab and state facilities. Some of them closed down for over-prescribing suboxone. People in for cocaine, given suboxone. Nodding out during groups. Nodding out right in front of all the sweating, shitting, hungry junkies.

If you're high as fuck while taking suboxone, ya don't need it.

I remind myself I'm lucky to even have this option. Grimace died in the gutter with lice in his hair and fleas in his clothes; filthy, broke, beautiful, and high.

Loose kicked in county jail.

Smurf rots in prison, probably perpetually high and kicking in some godawful liminal realm.

Lives are thrown away in slow-motion.

In the meetings, I make new friends. We deliver impromptu inspirational visionary speeches to rally each other, encourage and support each other to reinforce the momentum of this doctrine.

It works if you work it.

I move to a sober house in Western Pennsylvania. Get out of Vermont for awhile. I make it a couple months, staying clean by skateboarding and getting into spraypainting throw-ups on bridges. One day, I pull a whipped cream can from the fridge aisle and suck half of it down. Should I throw my chips away now?

What the fuck is sobriety?

I pull tarot cards which tell me what I already know. I don't need external divination but I try it out anyway.

It's time to leave Pennsylvania. I quit my job on the spot and drive back to Vermont. Two weeks later, the president of the sober house and a few of the roommates get busted trying to rob a jewelry store. Story for another chapter.

In Vermont, I slowly begin to relapse. Comfortable, quietly alienating myself from my sober and clean friends and their meetings. De-alienating myself from my using friends.

Is there a middle road? Can't I hang out with everyone? It seems that these cults are incompatible. They say working your own program is a sure way to fail. Can't I just get high sometimes?

I can't do this dichotomy shit anymore.

Clean & sober or dirty & downward! Red or Blue! Capitalism or Communism!

I save up enough to hit the road before my tolerance bankrupts me. I take my last shot and drive west with some adderall, whiskey, and a lot of concentrated caffeine juice. I learn to leave before it gets bad. Don't stay anywhere for too long.

Dopesick on the road. Dopesick on the trail. Dopesick in the desert. Better than kicking around Vermont. That place will eat me alive merely 'cus I let it. It's the cards I was dealt and the way I played 'em. I was self-soothing with the tools I had at hand. Heroin isn't a bad thing; a society of pushers & jailers is. They're in our hospitals and in our homes.

It works 'til it don't. I have a famous Christmas bender out west, ending with four hours facedown on the bathroom floor from an overdose and three days in a hospital recovering. I nearly lost a gallblader and went septic.

I had to argue with a doctor about keeping my organs.

I didn't have to argue for some methadone.

It took me months to walk right after that one.

I'm extremely lucky. I have one human to thank for my survival among many.

Thank you, Jonny.

Initially, the twelve steps, kratom, and a geographical cure helped me break from the cycle of habitual heroin consumption. I still binged around every Christmas. I called it self-care. After that last overdose, I began to recruit a lifeguard for these excursions.

Never use alone. It's not safe.

I tried peyote. Huachuma. Psilocybin. Ayahuasca.

Eventually, I hallucinated that a giant tree was sprouting from my chest and was informed that Iboga was calling me in. I haven't dreamed or craved an opiate or kratom since my iboga sessions.

Let me say that again:

I HAVEN'T DREAMED OF OR CRAVED FOR AN OPIATE OR KRATOM SINCE MY IBOGA SESSIONS. Not ibogaine, but iboga. Connected to a long-standing tradition, with an oral lineage. Not a molecule and westernized pharmacological function that's been utterly decontexualized and commodified, but an entire plant taken within an entire cultural context.

Really, I have writing, plant medicines, Dharma, and simple luck to thank my life on this day. And my parents for making me.

I haven't touched an opiate over four years. I don't keep track. I don't go to meetings. I don't collect chips. I don't post about sobriety on Facebook. By telling these stories, I am getting them off of my chest and laying them to rest. Welcome to the funeral of a past life.

This story is dedicated to some veterans of the war on drugs who didn't survive:

Kalvin

Ed

Smurf

Sully

Otis

Grimace

Missy

Erica

RyGuy

Stryker

And many more I've missed,

many more to come, I'd wager

If you're a prosecutor or a state/federal government employee, none of this is true. This entirety is a work of fiction.

If you're not a cop, thank you for enjoying a piece of living myth, for recieving this tender part of all of us.

Thanks to my Mom for watching her son emerge from that closet and continue to learn to hold himself with healthy means, to go through his own transfiguration and for her to still be able to hold love for him, no matter how strange or grotesque he becomes.

It's not easy raising kids while you're still raising yourself.

Thanks to my Dad for not burying me in the back yard all those times he said he was gonna, for always sticking to his own outlaw code (however sticky) and never saying shit to the police, even if he did rat me out to other outlaws. And for teaching me many things about what being a man is and is not, for picking me up when I was wailing in that closet as a baby, and for dropping me off and picking me up at the state facilities when nobody else would or could.

Thanks to Ange and Guy for being strong parents and teaching me what it's like to truly stand in the face of great change with tenderness and an open heart.

Thanks to Jonny for literally and unequivocally saving my life. I wouldn't be here without you.

Thanks to Sierra for going through some of the worst of it, and for sticking with me through it all. Even today. You are my ride-or-die and you are my tuning fork for what a reliable ride-or-die teammate is, through all those times I was a die without a ride kind of guy.

Thanks to all my friends who have put faith in me, were patient with my lies and trickery, watched me fall down and rise a hundred thousand times, listened to my endless bitching and complaining and bouts with suicide, trusting that no matter where I go, be it oblivion or enlightenment, that I'm exactly where I need to be.

Thanks to all the social workers and counselors who actually have experience and give a shit to help those who struggle. You are true heroes.

Thanks to all the plant medicine specialist and the MAPS psychedelic integration counselors.

Thanks to all the musicians and writers and artists whose works got me through the trenches of my own heart.

"If artists cannot show us the way, then the way is truly lost." Terrence McKenna

Written by J.D.R.

A typewriter troubadour, a mix & match moniker'd monk who spends time tramping around the world, occasionally paying rent with poetry. He is co-founder of the Rogue Writer's Guild and always open to patronage + sponsorship to continue ramble-reporting & lore-leasing.

He is working on two novels, a collection of short stories, and a street poetry anthology. They will all be in hardcopy very soon.