Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict (19 page)

We bar-hopped the entire night, whole conversations disappearing into the holes in my brain as soon as they were finished. The pills kept me steady. I could drink and do as much blow as I wanted, but I could always feel the protective bubble around me, keeping me on my feet, keeping my words from slurring. I’d see Joey pointing and laughing at me, and when I asked him what he was laughing at he would imitate my face, a dopey smile with my eyes always looking up somewhere toward the ceiling. He kept his arm propped up on my shoulder whenever he stood next to me.

We ended up back at his house around four thirty and fell into bed. We fought—he kept trying to pin my arms down and I’d kick upward and slam him into his window, the bookshelf.

When I woke the next day my body hurt worse than my head. I stumbled out of his room and into the bathroom, trying to stretch my arms. My legs were covered in bruises, and there was a huge bloody scrape on my right knee.

When I got back to his room his eyes were open.

“What the fuck did we do last night?” he asked. “I’m covered in bruises.”

“Me too,” I said, sliding in next to him.

He propped himself up on one elbow. “Joshua,” he said. “This isn’t cool. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“So don’t,” I said.

We dozed off for a while, and I woke back up around five. He was still sleeping. I slipped into my clothes and left.

I was done with processing events and information that weren’t work-related. I was ready to go on autopilot as far as real life was concerned. Books written by Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis had informed my entire adolescence, and I learned from them at an early age that when things got to be too much, the best way to deal was to simply not care.

I checked out. I floated through work, starting my pills earlier each day, always still surprised at how much I was able to accomplish on them. Part of my job was to top-edit the display copy, meaning I was in charge of all the headlines, dek intros, and photo captions for the entire book. I liked this part of my job because it meant I got to work with every single editor on staff. I was also now top-editing all of the front-of-the-book fashion coverage, in addition to writing and editing features and cover stories. I was busy, and it was a good distraction, but at least once or twice every week I would show up to work still drunk, and every single weekend I would binge myself to the point of becoming nonverbal. Pills were always my base high, and coke was a steady constant, but suddenly I found myself doing Ecstasy and K as well. I was disgusted with myself—I wasn’t some fifteen-year-old kid. I’d find myself in giant lofts in Brooklyn, wandering around parties in nothing but my underwear. Or suddenly it would be 10:00
A.M.
and I’d be lying in the sand on Long Beach, with no idea how I’d gotten there, head to
head with three other people, all of us still snorting coke under our beach towels while families plopped down with coolers and lawn chairs around us.

But the most significant part of that summer was an accidental introduction to someone with access to Candyman.

I’d always thought Candyman was a rumor, a myth. Supposedly, if you had an in, there was a man who would show up at your apartment with a briefcase full of every kind of pill you could imagine for sale. I’d begged strangers who mentioned him for his number, but I was always told he wasn’t taking on new clients. I needed to befriend a current client if I had any hope of becoming a customer.

It finally happened one night when I was out at a club with Joey. I ended up sitting next to a girl named Kelly on a banquette. She had short blond hair and was wearing high-waisted jeans, boots, and a tank top with no bra and one strap that kept sliding off of her left shoulder. We started talking about pills and before I knew it I was trading four of my Valium for two generic hydrocodones that she pulled out of a small Comme des Garçons pouch. I swallowed them immediately with vodka from the giant bottle sitting in front of us. This was the other great thing about hanging out with Joey and his friends: I never ever had to pay for a drink. Somehow they could just show up at pretty much any bar or club and get free bottle service and drink tickets

“What’s your source?” I asked.

“Candyman,” she said.

“Really?” I yelled. “You have to give me his number!”

“He’s not taking on new clients,” she said shaking her head. “He does fine with the ones he’s got.”

“Please,” I begged. “You’ve got to let me order with you next time you call him. I’ll pay you a service fee.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to do that. Let’s trade numbers.”

I got hers and then called her phone so she’d have mine, just as Joey came and flopped down next to me.

“Make me a drink!” he demanded. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing at Kelly.

“This is our bottle, but you can have some.” He was wasted.

“It’s cool, she’s with me,” I said, and poured him a drink.

I texted Kelly the
next day, determined not to let this opportunity go by. I was sick of always having to scramble for my next source. Even though MySpace and just asking around had given me a relatively steady supply, I was desperate for a regular, solid source so I’d never have to worry again.

She texted back around 7:00
P.M.
: “Going to call tomorrow at 8. Meet me at my place. $100 minimum.” She gave me her address, about ten blocks away from me.

The next night I left work early. Before stopping at her house I went to the bank and took out $600, and then picked up a few beers to bring with me, just to be polite.

It was a little awkward at first since she was pretty much a total stranger and we were both still hungover from two nights before. But we watched episodes of
The Simpsons
while waiting for the delivery guy to show up. I pictured Christian Bale from
American Psycho
, impeccably dressed in a suit with a luxurious briefcase.

But it wasn’t the actual Candyman who came, just one of his runners. He looked like any other dreadlocked drug delivery kid.

The runner pulled off his backpack, pulled out a metal briefcase, and opened it up to reveal hundreds of tiny plastic baggies in neat rows. He handed us a menu, with a complete list of everything he had that day. There was no Vicodin, but plenty of Dilaudid, Oxy, and morphine. He also sold weed, mushrooms, Ecstasy, MDMA, Adder all, Valium, and Xanax. I was in heaven.

I thought I was some sort of big shot, whipping out my $600, but the runner just shrugged. “I’ve got dudes in the West Village who drop several thousand at a time,” he told me.

Clearly I’d been hanging out with the wrong people.

I settled on thirteen 4-milligram Dilaudids, two 80-milligram morphine pills, one 100-milligram morphine pill, and one 80-milligram Oxy. I’d spent enough money to qualify for their special, which meant I got to roll a ten-sided Dungeons and Dragons die and
call two numbers. If I got one of them right, I got my pick of anything I wanted out of the box. I called 7 and 9, and 7 came up. I cheered, maybe a little too loudly, and asked for an extra Oxy. After Kelly made her deal and the runner left, I sat and drank a beer with her.

“Um, don’t tell any of my friends I did this,” I told her.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I don’t even know those guys that well.”

“So you don’t mind if we do this again?” I asked.

“Anytime,” she said, swallowing a Dilaudid and washing it down with one of the Coronas I’d brought.

Access to Candyman changed everything. I never had to worry about where my next haul was coming from. I kept it a secret from Joey. I had barely spoken to Emily that summer. I’d been too busy with Joey, and she was dating some semifamous artist from the Midwest and was always traveling out there to see him. I knew he kept her in pills, so I didn’t feel like I needed to tell her about my new connection.

As fall started, I
could no longer deny the effects the drugs were having on me, no matter how hard I tried. I was growing increasingly paranoid, and became convinced I was having signs and visions. Joey is an avid collector of taxidermy specimens. One night, after we had gone back to his house almost blackout wasted, I felt something fall off the wall and hit me on the head while we were having sex. I just shoved it to the side and kept going until Joey suddenly stopped, a look of horror crossing his face. He jumped out of the bed. “Don’t look at your face,” he demanded.

It felt wet suddenly, and I reached up to feel it. I pulled my hand back and it was covered with blood. I leapt up and looked in the mirror. My face was soaked red.

“What’s happening?” I asked, terrified.

Joey didn’t answer. He had picked up his camera and was eagerly taking pictures of the scene.

“What the fuck?” I screamed, scared out of my mind. I couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. I looked down at the side of
the bed to see what had hit me. It was a cloven hoof from a deer or an antelope or some other animal.

I ran into the bathroom and Joey followed me with the camera. I splashed water on my face, but it just made the blood run more, creating a bigger mess. Joey finally put the camera down and and started wiping my face and head clean with a washcloth. We discovered the source, a nasty split directly between my eyes. Half an inch in either direction and I’d have been blind in one eye, the cut was that deep.

I sat there shivering on the toilet in just a towel while Joey kept cleaning me up. All of a sudden his roommate and some guy she had brought home were standing in the doorway.

“Holy shit,” she said. She was topless and leaned in to get a closer look. “That looks mean.”

The guy who was with her moved her away and leaned in. “I used to be an EMT,” he said. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“I’m not going to the hospital,” I said, trying to angle the towel so nothing was hanging out.

“Do you have any medical tape?” he asked Joey, who nodded and got some out of the medicine cabinet.

“We can try to just pull the skin together with the medical tape,” the stranger said. Joey pinched my wound shut while the guy made an X with the medical tape over it. It stung, badly, and I could feel my skin tighten in the center of my face as the glue from the tape affixed itself to the inside of my wound. I stood up and looked in the mirror. I looked gaunt, haunted.

“Thanks,” I said and shuffled off to Joey’s bedroom. A massive bloodstain was smeared into the wall above his bed. I pulled a sheet partially over me, lay down on the bloodstained pillow, and passed out to the sounds of Joey’s camera clicking away.

Since it was a
legitimate, painful head wound I felt justified taking extra pills over the next few days. But I was disturbed—not so much by Joey’s glee with the incident, because, to be perfectly honest, I’m glad now that there’s photographic evidence out there of what hap
pened, but, come on, how much more of a clue from the universe did I need? I’d been sleeping with someone I shouldn’t, high on drugs, and a fucking
cloven hoof
falls from the sky and clocks me between the eyes! I’m not religious in any way, but I like to pay attention to signs and patterns, provided I’m sober enough to recognize them for what they are.

But in the end, it wasn’t anything so dramatic that made me end things with Joey. It was old-fashioned jealousy. I didn’t trust him at all. And while a lot of that was most likely a side effect from the pills, there was still the fact that for every night I spent out with him, there were four or five others during the week where I had to work and he was out partying with his crew without me at bar after bar. He could never tell me what he’d been up to the night before; he always, always blacked out. Anytime he wanted to show me a photograph on his camera, he would quickly scroll through the ones that showed a crew of young guys in his living room, partying shirtless after the bars got out. Sometimes I’d freak out, scream at him, or cry, demanding to know what had happened, and he’d never give me a straight answer. I hated what I’d become—a shrill, rage-driven addict consumed with fear that he was cheating on me. But I couldn’t stop.

Everything came to a head after we took a trip to his grandmother’s house in Massachusetts. She was in the hospital for some sort of surgery. We brought Ecstasy.

The inside of the woman’s house looked exactly like Laura Palmer’s home from
Twin Peaks
. Everything had been frozen in time. Outside, it was cold, gray, and rainy. As it got darker we sat down at the kitchen table and Joey handed me my tablet. I’d found an old puzzle of tropical birds in his basement and started working on it while I waited for the Ecstasy to kick in. He helped with the puzzle, but after about twenty minutes we both got up from the table and silently wandered off to different parts of the house. He headed to the parlor; I headed to the TV room with all the old photographs of his family.

There was only one of him, one I’d seen before. He was around five, dressed in a sailor outfit, a devilish but innocent grin on his face. My heart ached. I knew the reason I was really so drawn to Joey. His past was eerily similar to mine. He too had a father who’d
left when he was really young, and he’d also been mostly raised by an older sibling who had left at the first opportunity. He’d once told me that he had shut down so completely that he hadn’t even known how to have an emotion until he was nineteen. He’d been overweight in high school and hadn’t had any friends, but once he graduated he starved himself, eating only one meal every other day, and suddenly he became skinny. With that, came friends.

“Josh?” I heard him call from somewhere in the house. I went through the kitchen, which was impossibly yellow. Everything was yellow. The toaster, the refrigerator, the plates, the calendar. I got out of that room quickly.

In the dining room, everything was blue, even the chandelier and placemats. I whimpered a little under my breath.

“Josh?” Joey’s voice was closer now. I found him sitting in the front parlor, standing over a massive old-timey radio housed inside a wooden box the size of my dresser.