My piss has not always been poison, neither has my blood. A cleaner version of myself last existed when I was 14. As long as I can remember I've had an infatuation with holes(God sized) and the art of filling them. Up until the age of 15 I used food, masturbation, violence, girls, gutter weed and malt liquor to fill these holes. These shoddy patch work jobs failed me miserably. I found my solution, my cement, at 15, in opiates; hydrocodone, lorcets, lortabs, fentanyl, morphine, codeine, oxycontin, oxycodone, and eventually heroin. My first embrace with the nod was when I had my wisdom teeth pulled. After surgery I was prescribed to hydrocodone tablets, and for 3 days I did nothing but sleep, read, dream, and be free. I fell in love for the first time in my life. I found perfection, balance, warmth, passion, and unrestrained love. I started hustling in school afterwards and became a big fan of the greens and blues.
After high school, the pharmacy game became a huge part of my life, keeping it a secret from most people close to me, besides the few friends that were knee deep in it as well. Prescription pain killers started becoming increasingly more difficult and more expensive to get, up to $5 a pill on the streets with my habit reaching 10 at a time just to feel somewhat comfortable. Right around this time I had a new neighbor move in upstairs from me in the midtown apartment building I was living in at the time, a character nick named Slave. My new neighbor was a professional middleman dealing in heroin trade, and suggested a cheaper, more powerful alternative to pills. Slave was a born salesman, and sold me on the fact that I could buy a 20 bag and stay high for hours. Being low on cash I was willing and ready, the only problem was Slave had ran out of clean syringes. A pharmacy run was our next step and since the area pharmacists already knew Slave's schemes and refused to sell to him,it was up to me to get the rigs. Shaking from withdrawals, I memorized the script and walked into the pharmacy and nervous explained to the pharmacy tech that my Grandfather was diabetic and visiting from out of town when he realized he had no more syringes and had forgotten to bring his diabetic card. Successful transaction, onto the ritual.
Now all we had to do was cook and poke. Slave handed me a piece of cotton and a spoon, with detailed directions from him I stuck my muddy quarter gram on the dry spoon, added 1 drop of water from a sweaty Busch tall boy, mixed the heroin and water while heating it up with a lighter, and dropped the small piece of cotton in the thick brown mixture. With trembling hands I plunged the syringe into the piece of cotton, pulled back, and sucked up the medicine. I was too much of a wimp to shoot myself up, plus it was extremely difficult at the time to find a vein on me, so Slave grabbed my wrist, placed it under the oven light, and dug the syringe into a pulsating vein on the top of my hand. Slight pinch, pull out, blood, wipe off, brown, lick off. Ritual almost complete.
Stumbling back from the stove a warmth quickly rushed from my scalp to my toes. The world slowed down for a few minutes and I tried to regain balance as every problem poisoning my mind seeped out of my skin and into thin air. As I'm coming to the realization that I finally found what everyone's been searching for, my stomach roars and I make a quick run to the lowered porcelain altar to pray. Orange juice from yesterday's sickness violently erupted from mouth and nostril in one holy burst. Using the bathtub as leverage I slowly crawled to my feet from the prayer position only to be pushed back down by a nod amplified from the vomit. The quilt had quickly been replaced by my Grandmother hugging a comfortably hot electric blanket around me. The puking intensified the high in such a way that I spent the rest of my nods sticking my finger down my throat working and begging for a liquid outburst with the same focus and desperation a bulimic nun has on pageant day.
What's most important to know about getting on the horse is the release I get from me. I feel a God consciousness envelop me with every poke, I become confident, capable, comfortable. The thoughts and feelings I had been working so hard to quiet and push down were finally expelled from me, if only for a short period of time. For the first few hours every thing's manageable and non threatening. I can look in the mirror, no more feelings of unworthiness, despair, loneliness, uselessness, anger, depression or self pity. I'm relieved of criticizing thoughts of never being good enough for anyone, of being too lumpy and scarred, of failing my Mother and dissapointing my Father. Relieved of thinking death the only logical solution, the only way to please those who I have known (those I have harmed). It's never cold on the nod.
I soon found out that these thoughts and feelings come back tenfold as soon as I hop off the horse. It quickly became a stressful full time job keeping the dreaded four horsemen( terror, bewilderment, frustration, despair) at bay at all times. With the spirit of a hustler and a fierce determination to never feel again, this daily struggle for reprieve continued for many years. I found myself in a midtown treatment facility February 17th 2010, hurting, hopeless, and willing to surrender. This is catholic guilt, please don't tell my Mom.
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