Authors: Joe Putignano
Acrobaddict (35 page)
But my relationship with Nick was crumbling, and the last few times I had seen him he knew I was in bad shape. Those mysterious bruises had made their way onto my veins. The blue, green, and violet colors coordinated with the violence of my syringe. I knew Nick wanted out of the relationship. He wanted to do more with his life, and I was
the heavy weight holding him back. After weeks of arguing and me watching him pull away, we broke up. Or rather, he left me.
I was devastated, and the loss sent me into an oblivion of Xanax, alcohol, methadone, and heroin. On the ensuing two-week bender, I left my safety net and ventured out into the city. The drugs helped me get over my fear of strangers, and I was able to visit the many gay bars in our neighborhood. Getting out of my own comfort zone made me realize there could actually be a life beyond Nick, to whose backbone, for years, I had nailed myself. Without him I was scared, but free.
I used until I ran out of money, and when I was finally broke, my body had been beaten to a lumpy pulp. My lungs felt like the insides of a coal furnace from the endless cigarettes I smoked. The place on my arms where I shot up ached, and without the opiates to protect me, I felt everything in my system. Running out of money was a beautiful grace that brought me so low that I decided to go see my counselor, who suggested I go back to twelve-step meetings. He also suggested I try the opiate blocker naltrexone. I thought that would be the cure for my disease. Imagine having something in my system that wouldn’t allow me to get high even if I tried. I wanted it, and I was going to give it a shot.
P
OLIOMYELITIS (ALSO CALLED POLIO) IS A CONTAGIOUS, HISTORICALLY DEVASTATING DISEASE OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM THAT WAS VIRTUALLY ELIMINATED FROM THE
W
ESTERN
H
EMISPHERE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
. A
LTHOUGH POLIO HAS PLAGUED HUMANS SINCE ANCIENT TIMES, ITS MOST EXTENSIVE OUTBREAK OCCURRED IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1900S BEFORE THE VACCINATIONS WERE CREATED BY
J
ONAS
S
ALK
, A
LBERT
S
ABIN, AND
H
ILARY
K
OPROWSKI
. A
T THE HEIGHT OF THE POLIO EPIDEMIC IN 1952, NEARLY 60,000 CASES AND MORE THAN 3,000 DEATHS WERE REPORTED IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES ALONE
.
My bedroom was Kip and Keith’s living room, which I shared with their little white dog, Keys. They lived a life that was completely unfamiliar to me, and I studied the relationship between them. They were caring, loving, enthusiastic, and drug-free. Every morning Keith would wake up to make coffee for everyone, and Kip would come out to sing a song from some musical he loved. I hated musicals and show tunes, but their excitement about those things made me realize that there were other things out there besides heroin. They were always practicing songs and going to auditions. They tried to inspire me to do some form of modeling, which made me laugh because I believed I was a monster—why would anyone want to capture that on camera? I took people’s compliments as expressions of their pity for me.
It astonished me to see two gay men happier than any straight couple I’d ever known. Their days were full of accomplishment, while mine were full of failure. I was seeking something other than syringes and spoons, and Kip and Keith recommended I take a dance class, thinking I would pick up the dance steps quickly because of my gymnastics history. The city’s energy somehow penetrated my self-made prison and pushed me to take my first class ever. New York has an amazing way of motivating even the dead.
I shot up some dope, put on my exercise clothes, and headed to Broadway Dance Center on Fifty-ninth Street. It was a basic jazz class, and I had no idea what that meant. Everyone was stretching outside the class, silently preparing. They seemed focused and ready for a fight, the way I used to be as a prepared athlete meditating before competitions. Why were they so focused? Wasn’t this just a basic dance class? I began to feel threatened.
The other students already knew the spaces they wanted, and guarded their real estate. The teacher came in and everyone got quiet. As the class started, I awkwardly followed along, unable to understand their dance language, which was completely different from that of gymnastics. I turned the wrong way and accidentally bumped into the girl next to me, embarrassed for stepping into her sacred space. I tried to have fun and ignore my humiliation, but I hated myself for my ignorance.
The teacher made a small choreographed dance, and we learned it together. At first I didn’t like it, but the more I moved, the more I lost the sense of myself. She made us do it again and again, and somewhere in the steps I disappeared, becoming energy, pumping blood, and life. It overpowered the heroin in my veins and shot straight into my heart. My body was hot, but not opiate hot. I felt alive, loved, happy, and eternal. In that moment I understood why dancers dance. It was like gymnastics, but different, a sharing of something very powerful and beautiful that I could not name. For a moment everything felt great and the world around me vanished. I was no longer an addict, but movement, pure and fluid.
Then, suddenly, I felt something strange move under my kneecap. My knee hurt every time I bent it, and I knew it must be bad because I was high on heroin and could still feel the pain. I became embarrassed based on an old belief from gymnastics that injuries are a sign of weakness. I stopped dancing, grabbed my things, and slithered out the door. I was limping and couldn’t believe my bad luck.
I didn’t have health insurance or a regular doctor, so I went to the emergency room at a hospital near my apartment. Every movement of my knee sent a pain through my nervous system. I waited in agony to see the doctor, and the nurse gave me two Percocet in a white paper cup. Pain meant getting painkillers, so, therefore, I liked being in pain. The doctor did a few physical tests, pulling my leg, turning it, and asked if those movements hurt. I said they did. He said I had likely torn my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), but wouldn’t know for sure until I had an MRI. There was no way I was going to get an MRI without insurance, so the doctor gave me a prescription for Vicodin, which was below my normal dose. I was a Percocet and OxyContin guy, and Vicodin didn’t do much for my addiction.
I went to several different doctors, using my new ailment to obtain prescriptions for more painkillers. My injury felt healed, and I decided that I hadn’t torn my ACL, but I was going to milk it as long as I could and avoid a truth-telling MRI. One doctor gave me a prescription for 100 Percocet, with a refill, and even I thought that was way too many pills to prescribe, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Taking my prescribed medication with heroin let me use as much as I wanted and avoid the usual dope sickness. I loved that aspect.
I was a mess on those pills, and one night I randomly decided to go to the Tenth Avenue Lounge, a bar in our neighborhood. I hobbled into the bar with my knee brace and crutches, chewing Percocet, and began drinking beers. The bar was dark and loud, just the way I liked it, so the noise of a song could muffle how medicated I was in case someone struck up a conversation with me.
A short guy with big arms in a beige Banana Republic shirt asked how I was doing. I have no recollection of our conversation, but I remember walking to my apartment with him, and instead of trying
to kiss me, he reached out and shook my hand. There was something nonintrusive about that gesture, and it left a good impression. His name was Matt and he was only a few years older than me. I shook his hand and went upstairs to my apartment alone. When he walked away, I stopped using the crutches, because I knew I no longer needed them, but I kept using them in public to garner sympathy and pills.
The next day I received an email from Matt saying he wanted to see me again. He had a fun personality and seemed interested in getting to know me better. He was everything Nick wasn’t, and I needed a fresh start. Matt worked for a prestigious law firm. He was intelligent and had his shit together. We made plans to hang out that night, but before I headed down to his apartment, I shot up and took some pills. We had a good time laughing and talking, and I told him that I’d had a brutal past with drugs, but didn’t really do them anymore. I was a great liar when I was using—at least I thought I was.
I stayed the night at Matt’s and woke up to the sound of his cell phone ringing in sync with his house phone. He immediately jumped out of bed and turned on the TV. I was still coming out of an opiate haze and heard the strange, nervous reactions of the news anchors who usually seemed to hold it together. What was happening? I didn’t know, but I needed to shoot up, because the anxiety from the TV screen was already too much to bear. I needed to clear my head and pry open my eyes before letting that news in. Every channel was the same. A plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.
Matt looked nervous and said, “I have to go to work!” I grabbed my things, said goodbye, told him to call me later, and left for my apartment. I still didn’t understand what had happened, and everything around me moved in slow motion. The air was still, not calm, but frozen, as I walked home, unsure of the situation. Kip and Keith were watching the news, and by the time I got to the apartment another plane had crashed into the second tower. In confusion and fear, I went into the bathroom and got high. I lay my head against the wall of the bathroom, unconsciously eavesdropping on the sounds of human disaster coming from the living room. I shot up again, into
my other arm, before leaving the bathroom. Kip and Keith sat still, staring at the TV with tears in their eyes. I wanted to have my own tears in my eyes, and knew if I were a human being with a heart I would, but I was empty. The devastation couldn’t penetrate my disease, and I was numb to real human emotion. Then the towers fell and giant plumes of black, chemical clouds blotted out the sun. The apocalypse had begun.
“This isn’t really happening, is it?” I asked myself. “We are Americans; this never happens in our country. We are always safe.” The news anchor kept saying the word “terrorist” and I kept thinking, “No way. Nobody would do this to the US, and especially not in New York; we accept everyone here.”
Why would someone want to do that to us here?
I knew nothing about politics, government, or the relationships of countries. I only knew my own pain, which shadowed any desire to know about external conflicts. The news anchor confirmed that it was a terrorist attack, and Kip and Keith looked scared. Why didn’t I feel anything? Why couldn’t any authentic emotion break through the high? I wanted to feel something and watched them, sitting close together, with Keys on their laps. Was I witnessing their love for the first time as the World Trade Center towers collapsed to the ground? The unfolding horror was bringing them closer together, while I just wanted to inject more heroin to dull the news. What would happen after this? Would New York ever be the same? I didn’t know how to handle the rest of the day, so I went to my dealer. I knew she could comfort me and make me feel safe again.
When I arrived at Kimi’s apartment she was drunk, with swollen eyes, and told me in a raspy growl to come in. She launched into a tirade about the injustice of the world and how we must stay high to protect ourselves. I agreed. Panic replaced the air we breathed, and all the comfortable thoughts of being safe as Americans were under threat. The city came unhinged for the next few days, and everything felt surreal. Ghastly looks of horror replaced the city’s smiles. Hundreds of deaths were being reported, and it was impossible to escape the images on TV. The news was full of fear, giving the sense that another
attack could happen at any moment. So I continued to use, since the only safety I felt I could count on was inside a syringe.
In the following weeks I was in a coma of opiate sensations, and I don’t remember the details. Matt and I walked as far as we were allowed to go toward the site now being called Ground Zero. Posters of missing people were everywhere, and crowds gathered around them, with people crying and arguing. It was chaos. Those were images I had seen on TV from other countries, but never my own. My chest heaved as I saw a woman holding a picture of a man who had been missing since the towers fell. She stood there, almost shaking, her skin stained with tears, hair matted, and eyes wild with desperation. I wanted to do something, anything, but couldn’t. I couldn’t even stop using for more than two days in a row. How could I possibly help?
That night I saw a documentary that claimed using and buying street drugs had enabled terrorists to thrive in their countries. If my addiction had contributed to terrorist attacks, did that make me an enemy too? I felt even worse than before. I would never understand the full extent of what had happened that day. Almost 3,000 people died while I slowly but steadily worked on killing myself. I don’t think it was possible to hate myself more than I did for who I was and for what I had become.
