Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (14 page)

MY FATHER CALLED. THERE
was something wrong with my grandmother in Tennessee. I have a hard time paying attention to him, my mind shuts down a little whenever he, or even his voice, is in proximity. All I heard were the words
infection, necrotic tissue, surgery.
He asked me to come down to take care of her in the weeks after she was released from the hospital. “She’ll need help around the house,” I was told. The rest of the family would take turns once I left. My grandmother, Bobby, had been the only member of my family besides my two sisters who had ever showed a consistent interest in my personal life or my career. I’d even put Bobby in
Jane
once, describing a trip we took to Alaska together to see the glaciers and look at whales. She was the only family member who subscribed to and actually read every issue of
Jane.
(My mother once described it as a magazine “utterly without substance.”)

During high school, I had spent every summer with Bobby in Tennessee. I’d sneak booze from her liquor cabinet, and we played card games for dimes on a large, round green marble table she’d had custom-built. Her house had been designed by her and my long dead grandfather. It has glass walls that stretch the entire length of the back of the house, looking out over a long, curved stone porch
and a sloping lawn that leads down to dark woods, teeming with birds and deer. When I was a teenager, she was the only member of my family who ever made me feel like I could do something productive with my life. When I had first gotten my job at
Jane
my father had congratulated me, but what stuck out the most in my mind was him laughing and saying, “I’d always thought you’d be in jail by now.” But Bobby, who had worked as an editor for years, told me about the Kennedy side of my family, which ran a small newspaper dynasty in Michigan. “It’s in your blood,” she said, and raised her glass of bourbon in salute.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived in Oak Ridge, but I knew that I was going to do the caretaking sober. I didn’t bring a single pill with me. I wanted all my faculties if I was going to be taking care of the one woman who had made me feel worthwhile. As for her injury, all I knew was that she had fallen a few months ago and developed a small cut on her left calf. Over time it had become red and infected, and then it became seriously infected. The tissue in her leg had become necrotic.

When I arrived I ran straight up to Bobby’s bedroom. She had the blankets pulled up to her chest. One of my cousins was sitting on the edge of the bed. We all hugged hello and Bobby said, “Do you want to see it?”

I nodded. There was a strange slurping sound coming from the other side of the bed. She pulled down the blankets to reveal a foot-long, four-inch-wide trench dug into her calf. The inside of the trench was stuffed with foam, vacuum-sealed with some sort of clear plastic wrap, and hooked up to a clear tube that ran down her leg, onto the floor, and into a Medi-Vac, the source of the sucking sound. It was a large, whirring machine that constantly siphoned pale pink goo out of her leg with a wet, straw-at-the-bottom-of-a-milkshake sound.

None of this did anything good for my sudden onset of pill withdrawal.

The next morning I woke up early, snot pouring out of my nose and onto my pillow. I was freezing cold and my legs had the shakes, but I forced myself downstairs to prepare breakfast and coffee. I’d
had minor bouts of withdrawal before, in between pill hookups and when I’d moved up to Hudson, but those were nothing compared to how I was feeling now. While I was trying to make toast my arms began to shake and my bones felt as if they were being clawed apart. I fought the sensations, took deep breaths, brought everything up to Bobby on a tray, and set it on a card table my cousin had set up in the room. I helped her to the bathroom and sat on the bed with her while she ate, trying not to look too sick, but I kept blowing my nose. She, of course, went into grandmother mode, but I convinced her it was just a mild cold.

“I’ll run out and get some DayQuil when I get groceries,” I said.

She listed a bunch of items she wanted me to pick up, and as she was talking she reached over to her bedside table and picked up a bottle, opened it, and swallowed two pills. The act itself caused a Pavlovian response in me. When she put the bottle down, I saw that it was Percocet and felt a tremor course through my entire body. I couldn’t hear anything she was saying. I just stared at the bottle, fighting with myself not to devise a plan to get inside of it. I refused to let myself fall that low, to steal pills from my sick grandmother.

I had to ask her to repeat some of the grocery items she was craving and took off for the store. I drove the long way, wondering what would have happened to me if my mother hadn’t remarried and moved us away from this town when I was in the fourth grade. I’d probably still be stuck here.

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of three towns built to complete the Manhattan Project. The farmers who originally lived there had all been kicked out under eminent domain, the law that allows the government to seize private property for its own use. It was called The Secret City, and lived up to its name. I remember very little about my childhood in Oak Ridge, and what I do remember is always cloaked in shadow.

The town is filled with sirens built onto the telephone poles, and a few times a year they go off as a test, in case anything goes wrong at the laboratory. Our teachers taught us to crawl under our desks with our arms covering our heads.

Besides its nuclear history, Oak Ridge is different from most suburban towns in that most of the houses were built up in the ridges, so they can’t be seen by aircraft. All of the winding roads make it sort of like driving through a low-rent, prefab government housing version of the Hollywood Hills. All the houses look the same; there were only seven different versions of the same model with a few sub-models thrown in as well. The town’s residents were later granted land at a cheap price to build their own homes.

Bobby didn’t find out what my grandfather was doing at the lab until after the bombs were dropped in Japan. One morning in August 1945, she turned on the radio and learned what her husband had been working on. He called her almost immediately after to explain. After she hung up, she sat by the phone and wept.

On my way to
the store I drove past the children’s museum. It was housed in a building that had been an elementary school in the 1950s and then, when I was a child, converted to a day-care center on one side and a day facility for mentally disabled elderly people on the other. The school’s decaying gymnasium in the center of the two wings separated life and death. The bathrooms were located on the old people’s side of the building, and twice a day, we kids would march down the hallway until we hit the stench of prepared food from the cafeteria. The old people weren’t allowed in the bathrooms while we kids were inside, but if you had to go anytime that wasn’t designated, you had to make your way alone down the old school’s hallway through the safety zone of the gymnasium. Past the old men with rotten teeth, drooling and grinning as they wandered the hallway. Sometimes one of them would follow you inside the bathroom.

On several occasions when my father or mother would pick me up from day care, I would have shit or pissed my pants rather than go inside that bathroom on my own.

When I got back
to the house from the grocery store I swallowed three DayQuil, then fixed lunch for Bobby and brought it upstairs.
She was dozing and the goo tube had become wrapped around her leg. The Medi-Vac was making a scary buzzing sound, so I quickly unraveled the tube until the sound stopped and I saw another glob of pink jelly get sucked through the plastic.

She woke up and told me that the home health care nurse had called and would be coming by soon to change the foam in her leg trench. I watched as she ate her lunch. And after I had cleaned up the dishes I came back upstairs to her bedroom.

“I just hate that you’re seeing me like this,” she told me. She loathed not being in control, and so did I. I was feeling worse and worse and was beating myself up inside. I knew that I needed to be entirely present in order to properly take care of her. We were two invalids, but I had to keep my sickness secret. I lay down on the bed next to her. The back wall of her bedroom, like the rest of the house, was one huge window that looked out over the lawn and into the forest beyond. We sat there together quietly for a while, just staring at the woods, when my fingertips suddenly went numb and I wasn’t able to catch my breath. The light in the trees suddenly looked strange, disorienting.

“I’ll be right back,” I said and ran outside, grabbing the cordless phone in the kitchen to call my older sister, Erica. We’d always been close. She pretty much raised my younger sister and me until she went away to college when I was in seventh grade. But she’d become increasingly busy raising her own two kids, so much so that our adult friendship seemed to be taking a backseat. I understood this completely, but sometimes I couldn’t help but feel jealous.

She was completely unaware that I had an issue with pills, but as far as I was concerned, I hid that fact from everyone.

“I think I’m having a panic attack,” I said, when she answered.

“Just breathe slowly,” she said. “Concentrate on the air going in and out of your lungs.”

“I can’t even breathe,” I said, laughing to make it sound like I wasn’t scared, but my voice cracked and shook. “My fingers are numb.”

“You’ve got a lot of responsibility down there,” she said, her voice maddeningly soothing. “It makes sense that you’d be nervous and scared.”

I got angry. She had no idea what I was going through. I briefly considered telling her the truth, that I was going through withdrawal, but when I played out that scenario in my head, my anger softened. She’d want to fly down, she’d have to find someone to take care of the kids and her business—I couldn’t do that to her. I was alone in this, and that thought distracted me enough to snap me out of my panic attack. I knew I could take care of my grandmother, and suddenly I was pissed that Erica thought I was too weak to do it, when she had no idea what I was actually going through. I held onto that anger to get me through.

“I’m feeling better now,” I told her, suddenly. “Thanks, I can handle it.”

I went inside, made some tea, and went back upstairs.

“Who were you talking to?” Bobby asked. “I thought I heard voices.”

“Erica,” I said. “I had to ask her something. Want to play cards?”

Bobby smiled and sat up in bed as I maneuvered the goo tube so it wouldn’t get stuck under her. I sat cross-legged next to her and began to shuffle. Just over her shoulder, on the bedside table, I could see the giant bottle of Percocet. I kept shuffling the cards over and over, staring at it, until Bobby dryly said, “I think they’re done.”

The home health care
nurse showed up later that afternoon. She had the east Tennessee twang that no one I knew growing up had: most of the families I knew had been imported to the town to work at one of the labs. Her hair was dark and crisp from hair spray, and she wore way too much eyeliner and Payless sneakers. I loved her.

I sat on the bed and watched as she pulled a chair up to the side of Bobby’s bed, turned the machine off, and began to unwrap the wound. I trusted her implicitly, because Bobby had told me she was the one who first realized something was wrong with her leg. She had sent her to the hospital after dressing the wound one day, and the hospital had sent Bobby home, saying nothing was wrong. But the nurse knew necrotic tissue when she saw it and sent Bobby to another doctor, who immediately admitted her to the ER.

As the nurse removed the foam from the trench I felt my stomach lurch. Bobby winced and grabbed my hand. I was feeling dizzy, but I refused to leave her side. The nurse gently cleaned the wound, and Bobby gripped my hand tighter while I babbled about what Netflix movies we should order next. She went along with the conversation and never once said a word about the pain she must have been feeling, but my hand quickly grew numb from her grip.

The nurse removed a large new piece of foam from her bag and held it up to the wound, then she cut it into a matching smaller piece. As she stuffed the foam inside the trench, pulling the flesh back so it would fit inside, Bobby cried out. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, but I held them in. I just rubbed her shoulder and arm and said, “It’s going to be over soon.” She looked at me and laughed, but I recognized the sound, it was the same scared, cracking laughter I’d spat out when I was talking to Erica.

It was over, finally.

The nurse turned the machine on and I watched as the plastic vacuum-sealed the wound shut, like a late-night infomercial for a machine that sealed up meat for freezing. The sucking sound started immediately, and after a few seconds we all watched as the first glob made its way down the tube.

“Your surgery is set for the end of the week?” the nurse asked.

Bobby nodded. As long as the machine was able to get rid of all the necrotic tissue, she was set to have the foam removed and a large flap of skin cut from her abdomen to seal up her leg. I had no idea how they were going to fill the hollow space inside. The nurse left and Bobby fell back asleep.

I went into my room, which was my father’s old bedroom. The ceilings were high and slanted, with exposed crossbeams. I’d always stayed in this bedroom as a kid, and my cousins would sleep in the adjoining bedroom, which had belonged to their father. I’d also lived in this room for a few summers as a teenager. It had always given me night terrors. When I was a child I would wake up in the night and see a dark figure standing over the bed next to me. Sometimes it would sit down beside me. And once it left, I was convinced it was hiding in the closet next to the bed, waiting for me to fall back asleep.

This bedroom still haunted me. I could never get a good night’s sleep in it. Now, as an adult going through withdrawal, I felt even worse in there.

The next day, when I got out of the shower and walked to my bedroom, I smelled a strong odor, as if the cat had defecated right outside the bathroom door. I heard Bobby calling weakly for me. I grabbed a pair of jeans and ran to her room. She was standing just inside her bathroom leaning over the sink, trying to slip her nightgown over her head. Her back and legs were covered in runny feces.