Before I begin to tell my story, I want to make it clear. No one intends to overdose. That is called suicide. When an addict pursues an ever-elusive high, overdose can happen. Sometimes it’s just a miscalculation. If you are considering suicide, talk to a mental health professional, now. Overdoses happen in the pursuit of a temporary escape, not hoping for a transition to the afterlife.
Anyone who judges an addict is not very self-aware. I became an addict slowly, over a decade or more. I used to think that my journey began when I sought to have fun with friends. Not entirely true. I sought to fill a gaping hole. A hole in my heart that pierced my mind and left me feeling empty all the time. Once I was consistently hooked, I needed my daily fix. For the first few years, I prided myself by saying, “I can stop whenever I want to.”
I made that statement to my latest honey, whomever she was. More than once, she like those before her challenged me to, “Prove it or I am leaving.”
I knew my addiction was destructive. I could go a day or two without the high, but by the third day my mind couldn’t focus on anything but a hit. Not even a disaster could tear my attention away from worrying about where my next fix would come from.
One day I was playing Fortnite with some of my buddies who knew me before I became an addict. We sat in Kyle’s man cave. Beer was their intoxicant of choice.
As he tossed back his third beer, Kyle said, “I have not even begun to feel it.”
Cliff smiled and said, “Tolerance. Sometimes, I can drink a six pack of the factory brews and drive. No impairment. It’s why I have been drinking microbrews. More alcohol.”
Kyle lifted an unopened can in my direction, “Want another?”
“Sure,” as I reached out to take it, my boys saw the track marks on my arm.
“Damn,” Cliff sounded as serious as his alcohol buzz allowed. “We got to do an intervention and get you to rehab.”
I snagged the can and recoiled to cover my arm, “You’ll have to join me. Your tolerance for alcohol is no better than my need for something a bit stronger.”
They ignored me. Cliff sat back in his chair. Kyle joined him and resumed game play.
I took a sip of my beer and announced to no one in particular, “Got to use the can.”
Steeped in their virtual reality, the boys didn’t acknowledge me as I left the room. I entered the bathroom and took my rig out of my pocket. I had some sweet stuff. One line more on the medical grade syringe should be fine. It would make the rest of the afternoon with these a-hole friends more fun.
I didn’t feel the prick as I went black. Not a regular rush from the initial injection, but black. Non-existent.
Moments later I saw the outline of Cliff’s face over mine. As he shouted, “Benny stay with us,” a line of spit fell from his mouth onto my cheek.
The spit felt cool and grounded me. For a moment I remembered that I had been playing Fortnite with Cliff and Kyle.
Time swirled around in my head like a tropical storm forming over the Gulf. With the image of Cliff drooling on my face stuck on the interior screen in my forehead, I heard Kyle ask, “You got any of that Narcan shit?”
He had it right. That Narcan was like shit. Last time they used it on me, it tore me away from my comfort and security into a drastic and traumatic scene of resuscitation.
My senses were flooded with the smell of powered gardenias. My face pressed against the starched gingham cotton covering an elderly woman’s breasts. The clean smell of starch threatened to overtake the sweet smell of a garden full of gardenia blossoms.
I opened my eyes and the blue-gray curls that framed her seventy-year-old face fell toward me.
“Benny, you are so loved.”
Before I could acknowledge my Gram’s presence, I felt air rush into my lungs. Narcan. When did breathing become so painful. I gasped so loudly it sounded like a scream to me. Cliff who still sat beside me didn’t hear the scream.
I looked down on myself from a point of view above the scene. A young EMT pushed Cliff out of the way so that he could move that body, my body, onto a stretcher.
“What is your friend’s name again?”
“Benny,” Cliff said.
I went black again. Then I saw that body on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. The EMT sat beside it. As he turned to look at Cliff, the flatline alarm sounded. Yes, that body was dead or dying.
“Get in or not, we’ve got to get him to the ER now.”
“Go,” Cliff released me.
Cliff was still mumbling about something as the EMT closed the door. For me, time alternately sped up and slowed down. A staccato flash storm of awareness and blackness.
“Shit,” the EMT yelled, “he’s seizing. How long to the ER?”
A distant voice said “Almost there.”
Suddenly I was there. I was in the backroom of the club with my new friend, the owner, and his dealer. It was the first time I mainlined. The owner looked at me suspiciously, “What’s wrong. We all do it.”
The vivid memory then took a turn that I never saw before. Both the owner, a handsome and well-dressed man, and the dealer, a woman who had a career as a beauty influencer, transformed. Their bodies flattened. Their faces hollowed out. Their skin color changed from fresh and vibrant to decaying brown. Their fingers became elongated like dead branches pruned from a dying tree.
“I….” hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” the club owner looked like his original handsome self as he waved me over to sit beside him. “The first high is free. I got you.”
I realized the decision in the back room of the club had been the moment of no return for me. It tipped the scales of my future and led years later to my overdose in the bathroom of Cliff’s man cave.
As I stood up to move closer to the owner, the beautiful dealer was preparing my trip for me. I knew that I had to make a different decision.
“No thank you,” I turned and rushed towards the door. Two bodyguards blocked my exit. I looked back over my shoulder.
The club owner looked disappointed but said, “Let him go, we’ll get him another time.”
The memory faded to nothing. No blissful nirvana, no awareness interrupted my sleep. I don’t know how long I had been unconscious but I awoke in a hospital bed with an IV stuck in my upper chest. All the veins in my arms had collapsed from years of injections. The neck was the only place the IV could flow freely.
To my surprise both Kyle and Cliff were sitting next to my bed when I opened my eyes. I cleared my throat.
“Am I dead?”
“Buddy, we thought we lost you,” Kyle stood up and took my right hand in his hands.
“I’d like to take you up on that offer of rehab.”
Kyle said, “I will join you. But first, I want to offer a prayer of thanks to God for bringing you back.
”