“Press Start” Part 2
May 12th, 2010 by bobd
So, it was April 19th when I hear a knock on my bedroom door. Until then I was just kind of sitting in my room, staring off into space with NPR on in the background, smoking cigarettes and weed; I was just hanging out there.
“Who the fuck?!” Nobody was home last I knew and any of my family members would have either come in without knocking or yelled from downstairs.
“Who is it?!?!” I call to the door.
“Deputy So-and-So from the Local County Sheriff’s Department” called a female voice too sweet sounding to be coming from someone who was potentially here to lock my ass up.
I shuffle to get any illegal or “probable-causing” materials out of view of the doorway as I make my way over to the door and call: “Just a second!”
I crack the door just slightly enough for me to see out, but not for this bitch to take it as an “invitation” to come in and start rummaging through my shit without a search warrant.
“Why don’t you come on downstairs with me and have a talk?” she asks.
“Uhhh….ummmm…..do YOU have a warrant?! Who let you in the house?! Am I under arrest?!?!” I rattle off as many questions as I can think of at once in order to get my bearings in and hopefully gain some sort of semblance of control over this most unexpected and mind-fuckingly horrifying of situations.
“Nah. Absolutely Not! I’m just here to talk to you! Do you smoke??? Why don’t you walk on downstairs and we’ll talk outside and have a smoke?”
I struggle to recall my legal rights and temporarily contemplate slamming the door and telling her to go take her badge and fuck-off out of my (parent’s) house.
“Uh, Um……alright.” She failed to address the issue of just how the fuck she got in the house without committing B and E herself. Her reassurance and kind tone are enough to get me to cautiously follow her downstairs and out into my driveway.
After all, she was already IN the fucking house and it would have seemed “probable” that I was up to something worth investigating had I slammed the door in her face and tossed my “kit” and any weed or weed paraphernalia out of the only window in my bedroom on to the back porch and possibly the hood of her squad car idling in the driveway down below: precisely where she wanted to go “talk”.
We get outside as another “Sheriff” or “Deputy”, this one a cocky looking male no older than myself, steps out of the car he had parked behind the first officer’s.
I light a cigarette and sit on the concrete steps that lead from the driveway to the backdoor we had just come out. A flash of a story a good friend of mine once told me rushes to the forefront of my most troubled mind: This guy my friend’s family knew was a dealer and one night he hears pounding on his door in the early hours of a weekday. He goes down to investigate without turning on any lights because he half-knows what the score is: the jig is up, the cops are here, they are coming in whether or not he lets them in. The guy sits down and harfs down as much of a cigarette as he can before the cops come through the door. Why?! It’s the LAST ONE he’s likely to get for a VERY long time.
I take my time smoking while this scenario runs through my head and I contemplate the distance between this smoke and my next. “Hours?!” I wonder: “YEARS?!”
The cocky younger cop starts laying down what the fuck is up. Apparently an anonymous member of my immediate family called the ER for fear that I was a “danger to myself”. Looking back, they were half-right. I was a “danger to myself” but not an immediate danger. Left alone in the state I was, it was likely I would soon become more of an immediate danger to my neighbor’s valuables than to myself. But these cops assure me I’m in ZERO legal trouble. “Strictly medical”.
The law states that when the ER gets a report of someone being a “danger to themselves” they, by law, have to call in law enforcement to bring you in for observation.
“Okay” I think. “This is cake! They’re going to take me to the hospital, put me on suicide watch for 12 hours MAX and release me back into the world.” This I can calmly handle.
As the female officer pulls her cuffs off her belt with a look that says “I’m sorry, kiddo”, I ask “Is this absolutely necessary?!”
“Yeah Bobbo, it’s the law: WE have to take you in, and YOU can’t enter OUR vehicle unless you are cuffed.”
“Fucking asshole – I’ll bobbo your head right off the hood of your shiny fucking cruiser” I think to myself.
“We’re going to have to make sure you don’t have anything ON you first. If you tell me about it now and because you are cooperating, I never see whatever you voluntarily give me out of your pockets. If you lie to me, and they find it at the hospital; you’re going to be in some shit.”
Then comes the line that makes my stomach turn; the cliche that anybody who has ever watched any significant amount of the show COPS has heard dozens of times: “Now, you don’t got anything that’s going to stick me in here, do ya?! It’s going to be easier on you and I wont charge you if you just cooperate, okay?”
“Nope” I say. (I’d left all of my “sticking things” hidden away upstairs).
SHIT! I remember that my favorite pipe, one I’ve had for nearly 10 years (by far a record for someone who admittedly tends to drop, leave behind, or misplace a piece of glassware at least annually) is in my left front pocket, along with a gram or two of mid-grade brick weed in my fifth.
“Well, there’s a pipe in my pocket here” as I lift my leg to indicate where was “here”. He first pulls out the pipe and hands it to the family member which called the hospital and happened to be outside to witness this shit-show (and let the police in in the first place, I suspect) “I never saw this.” the male officer says in an I’m-cutting-you-a-break tone.
“SICK” I think to myself. “At least I get that back tonight.”
“And there’s some shit in my fifth over here.”
He pulls out the bag of weed and exclaims “Bobbo! You gotta get some better weed, man!” No sooner does he knock the quality of my weed, he turns back to my family member and sweeps the pipe back from his hand.
“Gotta take this, man. I’m sorry”
“Yeah” I think to myself; “you’ll need that to smoke MY shitty pot tonight after the shift. Asshole!”
I totally forget that there is half an 80mg OC in my pocket, but the cop doesn’t feel it and I’m put into this female officer’s squad car and I try in vain to fish it out of the bottom of my fifth pocket; say nothing of actually getting control of it and either ditching it in her backseat, or somehow eating it or concealing it with my hands (in cuffs).
I hope to myself that the cop was bluffing about the hospital pressing a charge against me when they inevitably take my street clothes when we get to the “suicide” ward.
-BD
Part 3 of 3 coming soon!
Tags: pinched, terror
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“Press Start” Part 1
May 12th, 2010 by bobd
I’m a junkie. That is, I’m a recovering junkie. The following summary will serve as a starting point that will give readers of my blog a logical “beginning” and point of reference, especially for those of you who have no idea who the fuck I am or are not fully aware of what I’ve done.
I used to be a guy who was afraid of needles. I’d get a queasy and sick feeling in my gut every time I had to have a shot in a medical setting; I even had to avert my eyes anytime some poor lost soul stuck a spike in a vein on any of these new television shows that masquerades as “edutainment” when It’s really straight up exploitation at its very worst.
Shows like Celeb Rehab and Intervention put up a facade of wanting to warn the public of the most serious perils of drug and alcohol addiction-but at the base of everything, they are merely a prime-time train-wreck that the virtuous (or at least not completely fucked up) man can shake his head at over his spaghetti and frozen meatball dinner. After all, if these networks wanted to make money by teaching people how to live a happy, enlightened and habit-free life, they would be private colleges and not the attention seeking, advertising dollar-whores that they really are.
It’s in our nature to take interest in and thrive upon disaster, especially a disaster so far removed from ourselves and isolated from our own lives’ that we get to watch it happen to somebody we will never meet, from the comfort of our own home. I have a few theories as to why this urge exists in all of us-I won’t go into those here, but it’s the same primitive part of the brain (I suspect) to which NASCAR and the WWE owe their very existence- we don’t watch that shit for the beauty of the “sport” WE WANT SOME FUCKING BLOOD! I digress….
As a bonus: at the end of, for instance, an episode of Intervention you are rewarded for your time with an “update” on the junkie of the week. The part of all of us who slow our car and crook our necks when passing a car accident, hoping for blood and hysterical shreiking always hope the week’s featured fiend relapsed and OD’d (or was at least accosted by the Iron Sheik and “made humble” with the use of a folding chair).
As a direct contrast to this phenomenon, we seem to run and hide when the accident, the blood orgy, the painful screeching and urine-soaked writhing mess lands on our own doorstep.
If you wish to test this theory, go out and get hopelessly hooked on dope and see how many of your “friends” and family stick around to watch you life-fuck yourself. They won’t. They will delete you from their life (analog AND digital), hide from you over fear that you will steal from them or beg to borrow money in the midst of a significantly painful bout of “dope-sickness”.
You see, when you do a lot of dope, then there’s no more dope/money, you get “sick” and the only “cure” is……..MORE DOPE!
So, anyway, these friends and family members will most likely retreat from your life to a safe location and talk amongst themselves about “how much of a waste” you have become or “how much you have changed”. This is the most common approach, but there are others including, but not limited to becoming an “enabler”, a “savior”, or an “ignore-er”. Saviors are the most troublesome for the dopefiend inside of you-as they refuse to believe you have no CHOICE in the matter (which you ALWAYS do) and place responsibility squarely on your own shoulders.
So enough theory here. The long and short of it is that I found I had a great fat affinity for that warm, detached feeling opiates provide when I was prescribed my very own supply of Vicodin after a wisdom tooth extraction I was so fucking terrified of having in the first place, I half joked with my then fiancee about jumping out of the car and bolting off as she drove me to the office.
Fast forward several weeks (or months??) and I was able to get Vics from several different sources. One day I woke up with no more Vicodin and this is when I first discovered what it meant to be “dopesick”. “What the fuck?!” I thought to myself. “This is worse than the feeling one gets after a night of snorting 3 8-balls of coke, pounding 2 liters of strong drink, and eating from the shitting-end of a questionable ‘fuck-for-hire’”
I knew immediately what had to be done: I had to break down, swallow my pride and reach out to a very old friend from whom I had distanced myself when rumors of “intravenous dope use” were swept my way (probably during a night of lots of coke and finger-wagging at “lesser forms of addiction/indulgence”).
So, before I knew it, for the low introductory rate of $60, I had in my possession two bags (or “squares”) of the finest “King of New York” dope one could possibly hope for. These two bags lasted me three days, and I would sneak off during rehearsals and family time to do the tiniest of bumps of this shit and just melt into a glowing, blissful stasis.
Roughly seven weeks later, I had lost my job, my friends, my fiancee’s (and partner of nearly a decade) love and respect, my band that I dearly miss; not to mention anything of any monetary value I had including, but not limited to: my x box 360, laptop, guitar, computer, engagement ring (bet your ass that when a girl bounces on you after 8 years of faithful servitude-you’ll cop anything of value she’s left behind out of sheer spite), ect, ect.
Oh, and the “King of New York” bags had gone, giving way to the “Notorious” bags bearing the image of Densel Washington and Russel Crowe: the dealer of which was raided after a couple weeks of craftily evading Drug Task Force Agents in the area by moving from out-of-the-way hotel to further-out-of-the-way hotel and had some local kids picking up from him and doing the legwork. Right before the heroin dried up in town I had been “given my wings” by an acquaintance user; that is, I learned how to shoot myself up. MY FUCKING LORD, I was gooooooone (and the rush of IVing so intense) that any fear or queasiness associated with needles may has well have belonged to an earlier incarnation of myself.
So, as I said, the decent dope in town dried up, so I learned how to procure (and IV) various “legal” prescription drugs that won’t immediately kill you by filling your lungs with fluid like shooting Vicodin would. Nothing too crazy, you know, just OC and morphine.
A note on shooting morphine: it WILL get you high, but the “rush” is less of a warm bodily glow than it is an intense feeling that some microscopic brigade of Army Engineers is quickly laying freshly-sharpened and ice-cold razor wire through your arm, down your leg, across your chest, through your other two limbs and up your spine to the base of your skull.
Some junkies I know hate the shit and associate the rush with a discomfort not unlike the “pins and needles” feeling you get after waking and discovering you’ve spent an entire night cutting off the blood supply to your arm by sleeping ON TOP of the poor thing. I for one LOVED the rush, but wished the “high” or “after-glow” would have stuck around longer.
So, that was me at my very worst. It was a shameful existence but it’s ALL true.
I’ll leave that at that for now. My next post will chronicle my near incarceration and involuntary “cold-turkey” detox at the most understaffed “hospital” in good ‘ole Upstate, NY.
-BD
Tags: dope, drugs, scumbaggery
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