A Snowy Tale

Content notice: drugs

Above: Michelle Pfeiffer as Elvira in Scarface.

Content notice: drug abuse, self-harm.

Content notice: drug abuse, self-harm.

The first time I did crystal meth (1979? 80?), I sequestered myself, put pen to paper, and spent hours ranting like an incel at a friend with whom I had an unrequited passion. I wrote over 20 pages, discussing our complicated relationship, explaining to him why he was doing both of us a disservice by not courting me romantically. We were, I declared, meant to do great things together. I told him how he would write music on his guitar while I would write lyrics (something we had already been doing together), and we’d revolutionize music – nay, the world! – with our unique insights and socialist politics. I told him I understood why he was afraid to be a weirdo outcast like me when he had a chance to be one of the popular people, but I, wise weirdo that I was, would free him of that fear and set his creativity loose, and then he’d never have to play in another cover band.

I never gave him the pages, fortunately. The next morning, I was so embarrassed by them that I couldn’t read past the first page, and I unceremoniously burned them. Four decades later, after I had experienced an inexplicable reprieve from addiction and he had not, he committed suicide. We’d been out of touch for three of those decades, so I could hardly have had anything to do with it, but I wished I could have done something to help. Evidently, I still held traces of my belief that we were meaningfully connected.

That fervent night of useless writing is the earliest example I remember of how stimulants helped me lean into my most grandiose tendencies. During what I considered the best part of a speed high, I had the power of my convictions, founded or not, though it would always devolve into paranoia and grievance. I spent years chasing that golden hour when it felt as if I had infinite wisdom, that everything I said mattered, and that everybody wanted to hear it. I was willing to accept a proportion of unpleasantness as the price of euphoria.

I still feel bad for the people who had to share those golden hours with me.

I would have kept doing speed, but the bikers from whom I was getting it got busted, and in the interim, I developed a preference for crystal meth’s swankier cousin, cocaine. I did so much blow in the 1980s that I still can’t believe there’s any left for anyone else.

In Atlanta nightlife, cocaine was common as grits. I lived in a blizzard of the stuff (cocaine, not grits). While working, I’d often get tipped a tiny baggie wrapped in a bill. I would take a tampon out of its cardboard applicator (what we elegantly called “a trail”) from which I had removed the tampon. I would keep it in the broken tampon machine in the bathroom at the classy cat, periodically (ha) going back to take a bump. I was also spending a lot of my spare time partying in bars, and I was a cute young thing, and people were giving me coke left and right. My friends and I had ample access, and we imbibed liberally.

I cocained all day and all night. Once, a friend and I snorted at least two grams between noon, when we woke up, and 2 PM, and then went to an afternoon matinee of Scarface. We sat there, vibrating with paranoia, drinking whiskey sours from a thermos, and finally emerged, deeply harrowed, into the late-afternoon sun. People heading into the theater asked us how Scarface was, and we told them it was great, very relatable.

I kept doing cocaine.

I was briefly a tarot reader for a guy who was flying pristine powder into the city from I-don’t remember-where, and we would sit up for hours smoking cigarettes and cocaine while talking about what I was seeing in the cards. I remember a reading during which I told him he was going to feel betrayed by someone and that, even if he couldn’t trust them personally, he needed to continue to trust them in business. Shortly thereafter, he found out his wife was sleeping with one of his pilots, fired the guy, and then accidentally hired an undercover agent to replace his former friend. He went to jail, and that was the end of that gig, but I didn’t stop doing cocaine.

There was a guy (different guy) at the club who would pay a group of strippers $3000 to drive his car to a hotel in Florida, park the car, promise not to use it for three days, and then drive it back. This practice ended when, after a few fun and easy trips, three of the girls were found in pieces in the trunk. I didn’t stop doing cocaine.

Not long after, I spent a few days with a girlfriend, two men we were dating casually, and an unmeasured amount of blow in a hotel room on Cheshire Bridge Road with foil taped over the windows. We’d order food from the restaurant next door, then not eat it. Open boxes of chicken fingers and uneaten French fries were piled up on every surface, including the bathroom vanity. I thought it was so rock n roll. I felt like I had arrived. I thought, “I’ll be telling this story for years to come.” I kept doing cocaine.

At some point during these years, I read an interview with Pete Townsend in Rolling Stone in which he was talking about how he was glad he quit drinking and doing drugs. He described how he would get really drunk, do cocaine to get sober enough to stay conscious, get drunker, do more cocaine, and keep the cycle going for days at a time. I hadn’t yet hit my drug-using peak, and I thought it sounded fabulous. I should have heard a warning; instead, I felt inspired.

That is how twisted being an addict was. In search of intensity, the worst ideas sounded divine. At about the time I read that interview, the proportions of pleasure to punishment began to change, with the price of euphoria rising while its supply decreased. I was so out of control that I would get thrown out of a bar, then go stand in the parking lot till they threw me out of the parking lot, then go stand across the street and yell at them until they called the cops, and then I would get in my car and, horrifyingly, drive home. I didn’t stop doing cocaine.

As I began approaching the end of my cocaine career, I didn’t want to share my cocaine with anybody, and ended up hoarding it by myself in bathrooms all over the city. I don’t think anybody who wasn’t doing cocaine would have wanted to hang out with me, but now I didn’t want to hang out with anybody who might want some of my cocaine. Finally, I started paying for it, thinking that then fewer people would know I had it. This led to some lonely lows. At least once or twice a week, after five in the morning when drug dealers would no longer take my calls, and I was too tweaked to tolerate the jovial ambience of after-hours clubs, there were a few skincrawling hours of comedown between the night’s final access to cocaine and the day’s first access to alcohol. Because the convenience stores within walking distance of my apartment would not sell any wine before its time – if I remember rightly, there was some law that kept them from selling alcohol between four and ten am -- I would be frantic. I would show up at the door of the convenience store half an hour before they were allowed to sell booze. My eyes would be spinning as I prowled and paced, while they watched nervously. Finally, they’d sell me some California Coolers, and I would drink a few so I could get some sleep and then get up and start acquiring cocaine again. And I kept on doing cocaine.

One morning at around 10 AM, sometime in the late 1980s, I suddenly realized I was alone in a hotel room outside the city, but not su’t sure where. I had arrived with people, but they had all gradually left. Eventually, there had been just one guy left, who tried to get me to let him masturbate in front of me, which I could not accept at that level of tweak. He went out to get cigarettes and didn’t come back (I experienced this regularly in those days). I was smoking two packs a night and was very upset he didn’t return with my smokes, which were part of my rigorous drug consumption ritual. I wanted to get home, where a carton was waiting. I knew I was still probably in the Atlanta environs, but I was so high I couldn’t read the stationery to figure out exactly where. I called the desk, and they told me I was in [memory fails me]. They called a cab for me, and somehow that ride back to my apartment cost me as much as a gram of coke. To pay the driver, I had to leave my purse in the car while I went into my apartment and got cash from a baggie I kept hidden in my toilet tank so that when my fellow drug fiends were using my bathroom, they couldn’t find it.

Something happened once I got home from that hotel room. It was a banal night out compared to many that preceded it, but something in me changed. I realized that I had not, in a very long time, achieved any satisfaction from cocaine. I realized that there was no more pleasure to be had. This kind of insight is unlikely to happen for an addict, generally speaking, but it happened for me, and it was a true white light moment.

And I stopped doing cocaine.

This was a miracle. It wasn’t the last miracle I needed, as I kept drinking and drugging (sans cocaine – I maxed out on plenty of other drugs) for a few more years. But it was a miracle.

After a few more disastrous events, I got entirely sober. When I quit, nobody ever said, “Gee, I didn’t think you had a problem.” One of my co-partying stripper friends who also sobered up told me, “We thought everybody else was getting wasted too, but everybody else thought of us as the girls who got wasted.” We were the last to know.

I stayed sober while working in strip clubs for over a decade, and then I moved on to the dungeons of New York, where I had a brief foray into fine wines before I got sober again and stayed that way. I haven’t had a drink or a toot or a tab in about 20 years. The longer I’ve been sober, the more I realize how unusual it is for an addict at the levels I descended to to realize a particular drug isn’t working, decide to stop, and be able to JUST STOP, while still spending eight hours in a bar several nights a week. I didn’t do it alone. So many people pitched in to make sure I stayed afloat. My co-workers, my bosses, and even some customers were there for me when sobriety felt impossible. I was then, and I am now, grateful for all of the people who helped me, both in AA and in the bars.

Cocaine was never again remotely tempting to me. Even now, I can’t look at it without immediately feeling those hours between four and ten AM.

Like many recovering addicts, I have a fair amount of survivor’s guilt. I know many people who are not okay in a range of ways, including in jail or dead. I make my living amends by not using drugs, doing my evolving best to not be an asshole, and telling my story so other people know a change is possible.

If you’re trying to stop using and someone offers you your drug of choice and you feel tempted, try remembering not the golden hour, but the crash, that sense of being interminably trapped in twisted wreckage. I wasn’t in a position to offer help to my old friend, but I hope I can help somebody, so drop me a line — just not a line of cocaine – and I’ll remind you what it’s really like. I’m pretty sure I can take the fun out of it.