I Stepped Across a Line.
Like every family, mine was raised with some dysfunction, but we were raised to know the difference between what’s right and what’s destructive. My entire, enormous extended family comes from the same moral fiber.
There are people in my family who drink, but I’ve never seen any of them drink the way I did. I drank like my grandfather, who died of alcoholism. I have a couple of cousins who, at some point, got sober; I never saw either of them drink. Everyone has demons to battle – but in my gene pool, there just aren’t very many active drunks or drug addicts.
To say that I was raised believing drugs were “wrong” would be a drastic understatement. Not only did I grow up in a drug- and alcohol-free environment, but I took the required health class in school. I knew that heroin would kill me, LSD would make me jump off a bridge, cocaine would make my heart explode, and PCP would land me in an insane asylum.
Even nicotine is hugely frowned upon throughout my extended family – about 115 people at last count, not including my cousins’ grandkids. Smoking and vaping are nearly non-existent. To this day, I can still visualize the poster of a cigarette-smoking old person that hung in the middle school locker room – a horrid creature whose skin was like a sun-dried tomato. “Smoking is glamorous,” said the poster.
I was always very attuned to sarcasm. I never planned to smoke.
But in late 1984, I stepped across a line that I’d drawn for myself in the sand. I didn’t know the line was there until I’d stepped onto the other side, and by then it was too late.
I smoked cigarettes for about six months before I started “trying” to quit. I hated what cigarettes did to my throat, to my lungs, to my soul. But I liked the feeling of having a cigarette in my hand. And if it was in my hand, I smoked it. As a result, I burned through a pack a day pretty easily, through two packs a day within a year, and three packs a day before I was done.
I knew that drugs would kill me. I knew that drinking would cause my liver to disintegrate and that marijuana would ensure that I never worked a full-time job. But by the time that famous commercial announced that my brain resembled a fried egg, I scoffed.
I laughed even. Because I knew better.
Once I started doing drugs, nothing could stop me from doing drugs.
Bonnie had explored drugs more than I had. Maybe a month before my first cocaine, Bonnie described an LSD trip to me: “You would look at a lamp and suddenly it would be the best fucking lamp,” she said. “And you would realize how much you fucking love lamps and then you would laugh because lamps are so fucking awesome.”
I didn’t understand; LSD still scared the crap out of me. I was raised to be terrified of all drugs – and rightfully so.
But on cocaine, I was floating on a cloud, a euphoria right inside my head. There was no pain; my usual feelings of anger and self-hatred disappeared. It was exhilarating.
That feeling lasted approximately 42 seconds.
Then it vanished and the only way to get it back was to do more cocaine, to feel that way for another 42 seconds.
Thank God I had no money to buy it. It was way out of my price range.
If no one had cocaine, I just drank. And smoked. A lot.
