Crystal Clean (3 page)

Finally, I reached the point that I stopped going to classes because the flashbacks came so often and I couldn’t keep myself from falling apart in front of everyone. Embarrassed as I was, I was
more worried about the connotations for Andy. I was terrified there might be a dark part of me that wanted to hurt him. Why else would I be having these horrible thoughts and images? Finally, I was in such agony that I talked to a professor I’d done independent study with in the area of adolescent psychology. I sobbed into my hands as I explained what was going on, and told her how worried I was about what it all might mean. She recommended I talk to someone who had experience treating post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Huh?

PTSD is something soldiers have when they’ve seen heavy combat, right? Men and women who were in the Vietnam War or Desert Storm. PTSD is a serious condition that stems from having witnessed trauma and death and man’s inhumanity to man. I’m a middle class white chick from Boise, Idaho whose son was born with a few problems. What the hell do I have to complain about? There are millions of people in the world in significantly worse situations. I don’t
deserve
a diagnosis like PTSD, I told the therapist I’d started seeing.

I did go through a major trauma with Andy, she pointed out. At one time, his medical situation was so bad that I started thinking about what I would do for his funeral. How big would the casket be? Would I rather have him cremated? What would I do with the ashes? But that’s not what caused me to have all the flashbacks and other problems. The post-traumatic stress occurred years later because I didn’t deal with my feelings when I was having them. I never stopped to allow myself to feel scared, angry, sad or helpless. Anytime I came close, the people around me were there to tell me that I was overreacting. “You’re strong. You can do this. Andy needs you, Kimbo. You can’t fall apart. You can’t get upset every time the doctor talks to you. You can’t get mad at the doctors. I’m worried about you. You’re crying too much. Cheer up, things could always be worse.” It’s the same message I’ve heard since I was a little girl. I feel too much, I cry too much, I need too much, there’s no reason for me to feel the way I do.

So I stuff my feelings as far down as I can rather than dealing with them as they come, because I’m afraid of them. I don’t want to be an oversensitive mess of a woman. I want to be like other people, and when I look around, everyone else seems to have it all together.

I dropped out of school when Andy was little because, in light of everything that was happening, working toward something I wasn’t sure I wanted in the first place didn’t make sense. Leaving seemed the right decision for me.

When I decided to stop fostering children, I did go back to school, but I was angry. I thought I was angry with my parents, but that wasn’t true. I was mad at myself for doing something that I didn’t really want to do. And I was doing it because I was still seeking validation. Mostly I was mad because I was aware how pathetic it was that, as an adult, I was still such a child. Pathetic or not, though, that was how I came to enroll in school for the third time.

I was exhausted. A psychology degree is useless unless you intend to go to graduate school, and since I knew I didn’t want to do that, the only goal I had was to obtain a piece of paper that said I’d graduated: Tangible proof that I’d finally done something worthwhile. Even so, I obsessed about my grades. I studied every chance I got, but uninterrupted study time was next to impossible. When first semester finals loomed, I started to panic, and on a Saturday afternoon, I made a phone call to my brother that changed my life forever.

Chapter 4

Chuck, who’s two years younger than I am, lived a somewhat bohemian lifestyle. My brother spent most of his twenties wandering the streets of San Francisco and following the Grateful Dead around in his weathered VW van. Just before Andy was born, he lived on a beach in Hawaii.

By the time I decided to go back to school again, he’d settled back in Boise and lived with a woman and their two small children just around the corner from Andy and me. He delivered pizza and still led a hippie lifestyle, so when I decided I needed something to keep me going during finals, I figured he’d be able to help me. We’d partied together in the past, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to ask him to get me some crank. “I just need to get through finals,” I told him.

He got me a quarter of a gram and it lasted me the whole week. I would snort a line or two after Andy was in bed, study all night and take a nap during the day between classes and work. Things went along swimmingly. I aced all my finals and felt like Wonder Woman. I’ve always loved the rush of speed. I had plenty of energy to clean my house and I could get more done at work. I also lost a few pounds, and I don’t know of a woman alive, no matter how thin or fat, who wouldn’t count that as a huge bonus.

Weight loss. For women especially, that’s one of the biggest draws to meth. Whether it’s the reason they try it in the first place, or if it’s a welcome side effect, losing weight becomes powerful reinforcement to continue using. It seems so easy at first: no appetite, tons of energy. You’re a
God
dess. You can do everything: take care of your family, run errands, cook and clean, work, shop for groceries, take the kids to practice and lessons. Until it’s too late, and too late comes too quick. For some people, it only takes one time. Others may use for a few days or a week before it turns on them, but it always does. And the result is always the same. One hundred percent of the time. Meth will rip you apart and destroy you, no matter who you are, and by then it won’t matter how thin you are or how clean your house is because the whole picture is uglier than anything you can possibly imagine. But right then, it worked for me. I got exactly what I thought I wanted that first week. Then the week was over and the crank was gone.

And I crashed.

Although I slept every day while I was doing it, for at least a few hours, when I ran out of drugs, I became lethargic. All I wanted to do was sleep. I couldn’t stay awake at work. Driving was scary because my eyelids were like lead. I started wearing rubber bands on my wrist, snapping them to stay alert. I couldn’t stay awake to play with Andy and had no energy to do anything around the house. I felt awful, and I didn’t want to feel awful, I wanted to feel good again. I wanted my super powers back so I could do all the things I’d been doing when I had the drug. I wanted to be a
God
dess.

So I called my brother again.

“It’s different this time,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s called meth. It’s just like crank, only better. Much cleaner and a way bigger high.”

A better high for the same price. Who would turn down that?

Again, I bought a quarter of a gram, the smallest amount you can buy, that cost twenty-five dollars. He was right. I fell in love with the first line I snorted, and that was the end for me. The end of everything I knew and cherished for a long time to come.

The only reason I never started using needles is because I knew I would never go back. Shooting up is the end of the line, and since I didn’t shoot up, it was easier to convince myself that I wasn’t really an addict.

I loved meth, and I loved the ritual of snorting lines: chopping it, crushing it, making intricate patterns. But the day someone showed me how to smoke it, I never went back to snorting. When that rush hit my brain, a single tear dropped. I was finally home. The exact words I said when I called my brother were, “I want to do
this
drug in
this
way for the rest of my life.” Those words will haunt me to my grave.

Meth, in the form of an opaque, white cloud of smoke, entered my brain and my soul at the same time, filling the emptiness inside me. It was as if I’d finally found what I’d been searching for my whole life. All my insecurities evaporated, and I was finally the woman I wanted to be. I was funnier, smarter, more confident and enormously productive. Every addict I know says the same thing, in one way or another: their drug of choice filled that empty space in their soul that nothing else could touch. It’s the same thing as the creepy man in the van offering candy to a child. Who doesn’t want
candy? When you take it, though, it’s too late and everything you knew and loved will vanish in the back of that dark van. The man with the pretty candy that tasted so good only wants you for his own dark, sinister pleasure, and just as the sweetness starts to melt in your mouth, it’s too late.

For me, the man with the candy was meth. The day I smoked my first bowl was the day I climbed in the back of the van, and it took me years to find my way home again.

Within a week, getting high became a daily habit. I started buying in larger quantities. Meth is a commodity like any other product, and the more you purchase, the lower the price.

I would pool my money with my brother or someone else, and split the meth between us.

That’s how most people start dealing. If enough people contribute to the buy, you get your drugs free, and that’s how it started for me. Chuck didn’t want to be involved with buying larger quantities, and eventually introduced me to his dealer, Garnett.

Garnett was a lanky man with horn-rimmed glasses and a mess of loose curls that fell to his shoulders. He was soft spoken when I first met him, ducking his head beneath his hair when he wasn’t wearing a battered Fedora. He seemed almost fragile. We met in May, and when spring melted into summer, his knobby knees and pointy elbows occasionally peeked from beneath his Bermudas or short-sleeved shirts. He was bright, interesting and funny, and we became friends immediately, spending more and more time together over the next couple of months. There was nothing about him, initially, that indicated the destructive malevolence behind the meek façade. Nothing that indicated the true Garnett. The one I would, unfortunately, become well acquainted with in the near future.

He was a drug dealer. That was his full time job. Prior to that, he and his friends from high school worked at the same pizza parlor as Chuck. They were all close friends with my brother, playing poker, Ultimate and Frisbee golf in their free time. Garnett started spending more time with me and before long, I met all the guys, occasionally joining in the card games, or hosting all night bull sessions. Among them, I felt like a queen. I was one of the guys, separated only by sex, and therefore treated like both a lady and a pal. I was elite in an exclusive club whose books were closed. I felt special.

Meanwhile, I started buying meth more often. People I knew who used preferred the quality I could get as well as the lower prices I offered. I wasn’t out to make money; I just wanted to get high. As long as my share was paid for, I didn’t charge any more than I had to in order to get the lower price. Word got out, people I knew started buying for their friends, and I began buying larger quantities. By the end of summer, I was making a couple hundred extra dollars per month on top of what I was using myself. As a single mom always struggling to makes ends meet, it felt good to be able to afford extra things for Andy. I paid the bills on time and in full. We could buy name brand food and fresh produce. There was extra money so we could go to the movies occasionally and have our picture taken together at a studio for Christmas presents for Grandma and Papa. I had the money Andy needed for field trips at school, so he never had to miss out on activities with his peers. I also had the energy and stamina to do everything I needed to do. That’s how I started seriously dealing meth. It wasn’t as much a conscious decision as it was an evolution.

I was out of school for the summer. Andy qualified for extended school year (summer school) due to his disability, and he still went to developmental therapy as well. Since I didn’t have to go to work until three, I had most of the day free and it was then that I went about the business of dealing drugs. I always had all the meth I wanted, so once I started dealing, I never experienced the crash that comes with sudden withdrawal. Occasionally, Garnett would run out and we would have to wait a day or two before he could pick up again, but I usually had some stashed away. I never went more than a day without being able to use. It was simple: I loved getting high, I had unlimited access, and for the first time since Andy was born I was able to take care of us both without worrying about whether or not we could pay the electric and the gas bill each month.

I realize, now, how unreal this sounds. Now that I’m in my right mind, the way I rationalized what was happening is ludicrous. The constant influence of meth and the seduction of easy money made everything seem worth the risk. Sitting here sober, telling you about the woman I was then, I’m embarrassed and disgusted. It’s obvious now that I was addicted to meth the first time I tried it, but it wasn’t clear to me then. I was Charlie Bucket and I’d just found
the last golden ticket. At the time, meth seemed the answer to all my problems when, in fact, it was just the beginning of them.

About that time, two things happened almost simultaneously. My brother broke up with his girlfriend and then disappeared without a trace, leaving his two young children behind. Soon after that, I lost my job.

Chuck and I were close. Our bitter sibling rivalry during childhood mellowed to deep friendship in our adult years. When he vanished, it was easy for me to use the heartbreak of the situation to validate my increasingly erratic behavior.

I started showing up late to work. At first, it was only a few minutes, a day here and a day there. Then I started coming back from lunch late. My chronic tardiness became an almost daily event, and a few minutes turned to half an hour or more. I was distraught over my brother’s unexplained absence, I told my boss and co-workers. He left behind a mess. Between trying to help his family, everything I had going on with Andy’s therapy, school and everything in between, I was overwhelmed. I was doing my best to stay afloat in a sea of obligations. I was a martyr.

Maybe people bought the sob story for a while, but I was never quite able to convince myself completely. I remember rushing around the house at the last minute, or later, out of breath, looking for my keys, taking one last hit off the pipe, and then another. And all the while, I would think to myself, “
Why
am I late again? I have so much on my plate trying to deal with everything that’s going on in my life. People just don’t understand.” Poor, poor me. As hard as I tried to make myself believe that my brother’s disappearance had such a grave effect on me, the real truth was this: I could never get high enough to leave my house.

I’m not sure when that knowledge hit me. Today I can see it clearly. All those times I was late or blew people off entirely were because I could never get my high right. Sunday dinners missed. Ruined Christmases and Thanksgivings, Mother’s Day’s, birthdays, and weddings. I was late for my grandmother’s funeral where I was to give the eulogy I wrote. They couldn’t start without me.

I’m not sure if I knew it back at the beginning, but I suspect that somewhere very deep inside me, I did. That’s a frightening concept, though, and one that speaks to something much bigger than, “I just like to get high.” Even if I’d had any inkling, the thought would have been inconceivable, as it nearly is now. It was easier to blame someone or something else for my troubles, and my
brother’s vanishing act coincided perfectly with the beginning of my downward spiral.

I would smoke and smoke, as fast and deep as possible, desperately trying to take as much of the drug with me as I could. I would get irritated when I had obligations to meet. I could feel my stomach tighten, my heart race and my muscles tense. The world and everyone in it expected too much from me. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?

Addicts are great at shunning responsibility. Nothing is ever our fault. The universe has conspired to make our lives miserable. Ask any addict, especially an active one, and they’ll tell you the same thing. We try, man, we really try, but the system’s got us down. The landlord’s an asshole. Fuckin’ boss is prejudiced. Cop pulled me over. Long line at the store. Battery died. Ran out of gas. Alarm didn’t go off. Up all night with the kid. Left my woman and kids because she’s a bitch. No,
she
cheated on
me
. Locked myself out of the house/car/office. The goldfish died.

Addicts excel at blame, but the truth always boils down to the fact that in one way or another, we just can’t get high enough to leave the house.

So I told myself, and anyone who asked, that I lost my job because I was so distraught over my brother that I fell apart. I was worried about him and his family and damn it, as his big sister, I by
God
had to
do
something.

Like stay home and get high.

Meth was everything to me. And every
one
: My lover, friend, parent, sibling and shrink. It took the place of everyone I’ve ever wanted or needed.

Wake up in the morning and see a beautiful sunrise? Smoke a bowl. Bad day at the office? Smoke a bowl. Time for celebration? Feeling down? Smoke a bowl. Want to go out dancing on a Saturday night? Smoke a bowl. Curl up under the covers and watch movies all day? Don’t forget your dope. Entire family coming for Sunday dinner?
Damn
sure, don’t forget your dope.