Thank You Ronald Reagan for Saving My Life!

 Soprano, my dirty, matted, little Maltese ran ahead as I climbed the six floors. I had a few bags of dope in the front pocket of my jeans and a bottle of red wine in a plastic bag. Copping had been the usual cat and mouse game of waiting for the Dom Perignon heroin spot to open on East Second Street. Police cruisers and unmarked cars were out in full force. The second they left the block, junkies would file up both ends of the street, do the quick transaction and keep walking. When it was hot everyone worked together seamlessly, like a finely choreographed dance, like lanes merging into the tunnel at rush hour. I was part of a well-oiled machine that continued to run whether there was police presence or not.  On a scale of 1-10, tonight was a ten but often scoring drugs fell somewhere around a four. It could take up the entire evening and put an end to all my other plans. On these nights Soprano got a lot of fresh air and exercise even if it did put a wedge in my marriage.   

On the night of September 14, 1986 the streets were quiet. Every drug addict, drug abuser, and drug user in America was sitting in front of a television set. As soon as I entered the apartment I locked myself in the bathroom. I came out comfortably high and whipped together a gourmet meal. I carried the plates into the middle room which doubled as our dining/living room and painting studio.  We’d re-upholstered booth-style banquettes we found on the street and built a small table. Other than this dining ensemble, there was a 13-inch black and white portable TV propped on a footstool, a large sheet of plywood leaning against a wall covered in a plastic tarp, a roll of canvas, and cans of paint. I put dinner on the table and poured the wine while my husband adjusted the focus and volume on the television. As much as I despised Reagan for his lack of interest in the AIDS epidemic, I was curious about tonight’s speech.

A commercial preceded the President’s speech. “Crack cocaine hits the streets of New York City - news at eleven.” Ronald and Nancy came on next, inviting us into their make-believe living room. This falsified down-home intimacy was hard to swallow. I pushed my plate aside, grabbed my wine, and sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV.  Reagan droned on and on about the drug epidemic and the financial commitment he was putting forth to win his War on Drugs. Meanwhile the running commentary from the peanut gallery inside our small apartment rivaled Mystery Science Theater 3000. Every commercial break was filled with “Crack cocaine hits the streets of New York City. News at eleven.” One thing was certain - the network knew who had tuned-in for Reagan’s speech. I was in the bathroom shooting my last bag of dope when the President closed with a combination of political and biblical terms to declare the war on drugs “a national crusade.”

There have always been myths, legends, conspiracy theories, and truths. We’ve heard about heroin coming in on military planes during the Vietnam years, talk about corrupt cops who take all the stash but don’t bust the dealer, and countless questionable connections between drugs and politics. Whatever game was about to begin on the world stage, I knew the War on Drugs wasn’t going to affect much on the street level.

Just when I thought nothing could get more surreal than the “at home” chat with Ronnie and Nancy, the news came on.  Within five minutes, I knew what crack looked like, what it cost, where to buy it, and how to smoke it. News cameras panned intersections complete with street signs as they zeroed in on the hand-to-hand transactions. My husband and I looked at one another in disbelief. We’d just watched an advertisement for crack cocaine.

I’d been buying drugs in the East Village since the late 70s. I knew what blocks sold weed, heroin, and dime bags of coke. I’d never heard of anyone selling crack. Within two weeks, I could feel a new level of menace on the empty late night streets. I wouldn’t even walk on certain blocks anymore, day or night. Crack had happened.

One night I was killing time waiting for the spot to open when the wife of one of the dealers invited me to sit in her parked car. She pulled out a pipe and held a lighter to it. I took a hit. I'd never been a free-base fan. I'd rather inject my coke. Nonetheless, I took a second hit when it came around again. When it was time to go, I opened the door and thanked her for the base. “Honey, this isn’t base. It’s crack.” Immediately I saw the face of Ronald Reagan and the crack commercial disguised as news. Their connection was sealed in my brain. I knew I'd never smoke crack again.

It turned out I didn’t need crack to hit the depths of despair. Shooting coke did a fine job on its own. At a certain point, as I watched everything I cared about disappear, heroin stopped getting me high.  Coke came back into my life to fast forward my downward spiral. Without it, I may have never gotten clean. God only knows what horrors would have been in store for me with crack. Most likely, I wouldn’t have survived. Ultimately, I have Ronald Reagan to thank for saving me from becoming a crackhead. In my mind, it was always impossible to separate him from that drug.

TRYING TO GET TO REHAB

As a child, I’d always imagined the day would come when, like Anne Welles in Valley of the Dolls, I’d pull my dying drugged self out of the ocean and return to New England. When I came to the end of my road it was far less glamorous than I’d romanticized. It was easier to remain curled in a blanket on the floor and fantasize about changing my life than it was to pack my few belongings and get to Port Authority.  

I was on the floor of my room at the dismal Belleclaire Hotel facing the open closet estimating packing time for what remained of my worldly possessions: a few hanging garments, a pair of red and black stiletto heels, and old combat-style boots. Weeks ago a hole the size of a quarter appeared on the sole of my boot. I’d been limping from an infection ever since.  My ankles were so swollen from another illness that a cab driver carried me up the flight of stairs to my room the night before. I'd lost  sensation in two fingers, couldn’t hear out of one ear, and watched mysterious liver spots appear and disappear on my skin.  For a year I’d been writing down these various symptoms in the event that, should my body be discovered, someone would find this paper and autopsy me to find out the real cause of death  rather than assume it was a drug overdose. I kept the list on me at all times.

My reflection filled the security mirror as I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Toronto, eyes the color of egg yolks. Fourteen hours later, I woke up in Toronto with no recollection of passing through customs.  At Women’s College Hospital my various illnesses were treated with several painful shots of penicillin. It was past midnight when the taxi pulled into my parents’ driveway.

My mom’s eyes filled with terror as she unlocked the door. I was supposed to be living in California not standing in the Canadian night. Three months earlier, I announced I’d started going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings, not realizing how the news would affect my family. She didn’t ask why I was there; simply told me to sleep in my old room and went back to bed.

But I didn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep for the next ten days. Every night until dawn, I creepy-crawled around the dark house carrying plates of food.  The food combos were random – ice cream followed by kosher dills, peanut butter sandwiches, cucumbers in a bowl of vinegar, canned corn, cereal, an apple. I hoped I’d hit a food level that would put me to sleep. Instead, sounds of a battle being waged inside my stomach snapped me to a heightened alertness.

Guilt-ridden and fearful my late night mania would be misconstrued as drug use, I spent my days on the phone trying to find a rehab. There was one problem – in 1988, Canada seemed unaware that there was a drug epidemic going on. In the early 80s I didn’t know anyone using heroin in Toronto but by the late 80s it was everywhere. I explained this to every professional I managed to get on the phone. True, I was the only one in my crowd who had a desire to get clean but I knew there must be others. I’d attended a Narcotics Anonymous World Convention with thousands of recovering addicts in California.  Words like therapeutic community, rehab, sober living, and detox were common in the United States. In Toronto, one or two facilities existed to treat alcoholism but drug addicts were on their own.  I called the Narcotics Anonymous hotline. There were 5 meetings a week, each night in a different corner of the far reaches of the suburbs.

Hepatitis, compounded with other illnesses, helped my narcotic withdrawal pass without much notice.  I was amazed that bad health could trump the melodrama of kicking a dope habit. On the fifth day I drove to a meeting. The building was dark and the doors were closed. I guess that meant there were four NA meetings a week in Toronto. I was getting scared. I knew that if I couldn’t find help soon, the minute my health came back every cell in my body would pull me back to heroin. If I was feeling good enough to drive, it meant time was running out.

An old friend called to say that a huge shipment of dope had just come in and that I should drop by. I told him I was done.  If I really wanted off this ride, there couldn’t be one last time. I’d spared my family the reality of my life by moving to a different country. I’d deceived them with cheerful long distance phone calls. The morning after I’d arrived home, my mom said that I wouldn’t be welcome if I showed up like this again.  It broke my heart to see how much she was suffering. I would have gone anywhere to spare her this pain but the truth was - I was dying and had never needed her more.

The next day I struck gold. Someone I’d talked to found a way to get Canadian health insurance accepted by a treatment center in Louisiana. The guy sounded shifty on the phone and I’m sure was scamming the government in some way but with no other options available, I was grateful for his ingenuity.  He said I had to pay my airfare down and if I finished the forty-two day program, they’d provide my ticket home and $100.  I copied down the name of the treatment center, Bowling Green in Mandeville Louisiana, and my contact’s name and number on a piece of paper. They’d meet me at the New Orleans airport in two days. 

This news brought my parents back to life.  Being in Toronto in ‘88 and getting into rehab was as close as it came to winning the lottery. The house was buzzing with excitement. My mother took me to the mall to buy pajamas and jeans since the clothes I’d arrived in were rags. She held up various garments “Patty, there might be doctor addicts and lawyer addicts there. You should look nice.” She never gave up the dream.

The night before my flight I dyed my hair magenta. The purplish color did not complement my jaundice complexion and no amount of washing could remove this “temporary” dye. By the time I arrived at the airport, the best I’d managed was a dull shade of pink similar to flesh tone. I kissed my family good-bye and headed through the gates. Customs and Immigration greeted me on the other side. I’d forgotten in Toronto you pass through US customs before boarding the plane. Boney at hundred and five pounds, with yellow skin and flesh colored hair, I was far from inconspicuous. The first round of questions began. 
“Where are you going?”
“New Orleans”
He looked at my ticket.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Forty-two days.”
“Purpose of trip”
“I’m going to an alcoholism treatment center.”
Silence.
“Can I see the return ticket please?”
I pulled out the piece of paper with the treatment information on it and explained that they give me a return ticket when I finish the program. I was escorted to an interrogation room. An official looked at my hand written note with the rehab information.

“I can’t let you into the country with no money and no return ticket. You must have something official faxed to you from this Bowling Green place. Did you know there is a law stating that known alcoholics are prohibited from entering the United States?”


I began to cry uncontrollably. It was a miracle I’d found a treatment center that would take me. I hadn’t expected to not be able to go. Surely he could see that I was dying. How could he deny me the right to save my life? He pretended to be absorbed in his paperwork while motioning for someone to escort me out. That’s when I lost it. I grabbed onto his desk and screamed “Take a good look at this face so when you open the paper tomorrow and read that a woman has slit her throat you will remember me. Think about that when you go to bed tonight.” Filled with indignation, I stormed out.

Sitting on the curb outside of the terminal waiting for my parents to pick me up, I realized that even with the proper documents I wouldn’t get through customs again tomorrow. After the scene I just caused, they’d surely remember me.  I devised Plan B.


When my parents arrived I told them I had to be smuggled over the border. My father began complaining about the money, the tickets, and the trips to the airport. Now that he knew I’d been on heroin, he was remembering the times he’d gone to airports for flights I’d forgotten to take, money for emergencies that didn’t exist, gifts that were never bought. He was thinking of all the lies and all the money I’d cost him wondering if this time was any different.

“Please dad, I’m going to die if I don’t go to this rehab.”

At the Peace Bridge, my dad explained how we’d spent the day in Niagara Falls and wanted to go to the states side for good New York pizza before driving back to Toronto. I sat in the far back corner, deep in conversation with my fifteen-year-old brother about Ninja Turtles. As long as they didn’t open the trunk, it would go as planned.

I said good-bye to my family for a second time at the Buffalo airport. I had fourteen hours to kill and twenty dollars. Since I hadn’t slept for ten days, I was prepared for a night of pacing. By nine-thirty,  I caught a shuttle to a nearby hotel with a restaurant/bar to help kill a few hours.

It was a typical hotel bar, a cross between a dimly lit TGIF and a local tavern. A dozen people were spread throughout the room, some sitting alone, couples, the rowdier guys at the bar. I took a table by the window and stared out at the mountains of snow rising up at the far end of the parking lot. It was the first snow I’d seen, reminding me that it was December. I had no recollection of the previous Christmas in LA other than I was living in a hotel above a punk rock bar on Hollywood Boulevard. I’m sure I’d spent it alone.

A waitress materialized at my table and I asked for a glass of red wine. I’d meant to order coffee but the soft jazz, the snow, the desolation, and the feeling that I was inside an Edward Hopper painting seemed to call for red wine. The first sip went straight to my inflamed liver followed by a bile sensation moving toward my throat. I pushed the glass to the far side of the table beyond reach. I was overcome by intense and unanticipated fatigue. I looked around for a clock, hoping it was later than it seemed. Of the four men at the bar, one smiled. A moment later he asked if he could join me. I agreed, not because I wanted company as much as I needed someone to help me stay awake.

David offered a cigarette as the waitress brought over a second round. My liver throbbed at the site of it. For the next few hours, while I sipped wine, we traded stories. He described himself as a night club impresario from Hamilton Ontario (a working class steel town with no night life to speak of) and said he was on his way to New York to invest in a new hotspot. I said little about myself other than I was waiting for a 10AM flight to New Orleans. As time passed and our guard went down, we bonded on wild adventures involving drugs.

When they announced last call, I asked him to walk me back to the airport. “Patty, don’t be ridiculous. I have a room in the hotel. You are more than welcome to crash there until your flight or I can get you a room of your own.” There was definitely chemistry between us but I couldn’t have had sex with him even if I’d wanted to and said as much. I was too sick. He flashed a thick wad of hundreds inside his jacket pocket.  "It's not a big deal. I can afford a room for you.”

We checked in at the front desk adjacent to the bar and started our trek down the long hallway in search of my room. I carried my half filled glass of wine and David carried my suitcase – which contained new jeans, pajamas, and several dozen stripper costumes I’d been traveling with. I was grateful to have a bed and was figuring out how I could get rid of him at the door when, suddenly, we were surrounded by a swat team and I was shoved up against the wall. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

Apparently whatever David was really doing in America with his wad of cash, the border patrol and Swat team had been watching him. They believed I was his contact. I was too defeated to cry so I handed my little paper with my contact info and treatment center scribbled on it. Holding my wine glass, I looked into the detective’s eyes and said “If I don’t get to this treatment center, I am going to die.” He put his handcuffs away. Twelve cops escorted David out of the building while I unlocked the door to my room.

The next day, I landed at the New Orleans airport. It was my first day clean. December 10, 1988.

Health Food and Heroin - Acquiring Culinary Skills - Part Two

By my third year of college, I was getting restless. The student life was no longer challenging or engaging me so I returned to NYC to raise funds for my “right of passage” student European vacation. By the time the new semester started, my heroin habit was impossible to replace with weed, wine and black beauties.  Debbie and I had gotten involved in a new dangerous lucrative career.  Once a month, I’d go to NYC, make some money I’d turn into heroin that I’d smuggle back so I could make it through my classes. When I met my future ex husband, it was time to go straight on all fronts. This meant getting a job.

Although my husband wasn’t an addict or a criminal, he was an artist and lived off grants and lived rent-free at a friend’s hotel.  Neither of us had much experience working a normal job. The best we came up with was sharing a few dishwashing shifts at a trendy French restaurant. The pay sucked but they fed us and we could occasionally steal food from the walk in fridge once the staff went home. On Sundays, my mother would give us a basket of tomatoes from the garden.

Our diet consisted of white rice and tomatoes. We were always hungry. It was during this time, I cracked open the box of forty-nine cookbooks. I spent countless hours, over my bowl of rice and tomatoes, reading thousands of recipes.  This was my culinary institute.

Eventually, I convinced Napoleon we needed to move to New York and devised a way to make it happen. My plan involved him working as a museum security guard long enough to be eligible for unemployment while I tended a friend’s bar.  In October, we’d find a cheap winterized cottage to rent, save unemployment money, and move to New York City by May. Since I’d memorized fifty cookbooks, I’d save us money by making everything from scratch.

Carless, we were dropped off at a cabin in the middle of nowhere with 100 pounds of flour, 50 pounds of sugar, powdered milk and eggs, dried beans, and 2 deep freezers full of vegetables and meat. A year earlier I’d announced we were vegetarians but when I noticed that he’d lost his edge, I put him back on a meat diet. Some people needed meat to feed their aggression and without it, he seemed to wilt.

It was six of the coldest months of my life. Time was spent baking bread, gaining weight, and snowshoeing to the mailbox to wait for hash to arrive. Chubby and stoned, we’d do TV aerobics with Jane Fonda and dream of springtime in New York.

 In New York we found jobs in the art department of a popular nightclub called Area.  It didn’t take long before I began using all of our money for drugs. To rationalize this, when we’d walk the dog, I’d show him prices at the trendy restaurants then replicate the meals at home explaining how what I spent on heroin was less than we’d have spent if we’d gone out for dinner.  Eventually, my cooking skills became so sophisticated, I started moonlighting as a cook for a caterer.

Throughout our years together, Napo and I were always seekers. We’d gone through a Carlos Castaneda phase, had a moment of shabby shamanism, crystal dowsing, vision quests, and built a sweat lodge. We somehow arrived at homeopathic remedies.  In the mid-80s a few health food stores began popping up but were still considered oddities by the mainstream. The patrons included old hippies, holistic drug-addicts, and people with terminal illnesses desperate to ward off death.  I was interested in all forms of detoxification from fasting to volcanic ash enemas. Anything, that is, except stopping the poison I was injecting into my body several times a day. I guess you could say I was trying to find balance between health food and heroin.

Eventually the nightclub closed, my husband went back to Canada, and I moved to LA. Which began the spiral into the eventual desperation to get clean. In 1988 I found a rehab in Louisiana that would accept Canadian Health Insurance. When I returned to LA, I was truly a stranger in a strange land.

After 18 months of sofa surfing, sleeping in cars, and living in vacant buildings, existing on vanilla cake mix with milk or chocolate chip cookie dough, when I finally got clean I really was starting my life from scratch.

I got my first apartment just before I celebrated my first year. Detached from my domestic skills, I ate all my meals out. My refrigerator was always empty with the exception of coffee creamer. It didn’t occur to me that I could feed myself.  

I had no connection to my past whatsoever and my new friends had no idea of what had come before them. To them, I was this unusually articulate single stripper who’d taken a greyhound bus to LA with 70 days clean with a duffle bag of G-strings. I’d talk about my outrageous life before recovery and even I wondered if I was making it all up.   Whenever I’d mention living in a cabin baking bread, how easy it was to make cinnamon buns from scratch, or the type of herbs to take for whatever was ailing them, the room would fall silent. Eventually I discovered all the knowledge accumulated during my health food and heroin phase had not been lost.  

A lot of recovering addicts talk about how they started using drugs in search for something of a spiritual nature. To me, any quest for knowledge that helps us to treat our bodies better is spiritual. Food, meditation, exercise, breathing, fresh air, even drinking lots of water promotes sanity and wellbeing. Participating in these things is, to me, living a spiritual life. It means, essentially, that I believe I am worth caring for. On a simpler note, it is self-respecting behavior. To this end, I always incorporate all of the above into my work as a sober coach.

Of course, clients always ask where I learned about nutrition and diet, or how I learned to cook. I’m sure they expect me to list certification programs, places of formal training.  Instead I think of how none of it would have come about had I not met Marty. Or maybe not come about the way it did.  

Finding One Day at a Time

My mind has a way of illuminating certain moments in time and elevating them above others. Usually it takes years for me to realize why.  These memories replay in my head like scenes in a movie. They are my “act breaks”, where the direction of everything changes.

I remember standing at 14^th and First Avenue with my ex-husband and my dog Soprano in the mid-80s. I was saying something about wishing we could afford two apartments so I’d have somewhere to go to write (which he heard as “I don’t want to live with you anymore”). Years later when this footage rolled before my eyes, I realized that it was at this very moment he emotionally exited the marriage. He left for real a few months later.

We’d been living on Ludlow Street when I learned our $700 apartment had been $170 before we moved in. I was outraged and indignant.  The fact that we were illegal aliens with no rights, had an extension chord running into our apartment off our neighbor’s electricity, and all our collective money going into my arm, didn’t matter.  I wanted to fuck the landlord by banning the tenants together. When human shadows began appearing at our fire escape window in the middle of the night and death threats came by way of the phone, we did a midnight move.

A cab driver sublet us his uncle’s apartment in the projects below Grand Street by the river. We arrived with our stuff and discovered the uncle hadn’t begun to pack. In silence, we watched the cab driver throw every object inside that apartment into a dumpster before handing us keys. For the next month, we would wake up with a very drunk seventy-year-old Puerto Rican man crying in our kitchen.

A call came in offering my husband his first art show in Europe. As he packed, I knew we would never live together again. Another call came in. It was my friend Cindy in Toronto. She was saying something about trying to hang herself in the shower and how the curtain fell. She joked that she couldn’t even kill herself right and asked what was new with me. My marriage was crumbling, I had a crying old man banging on the door all day long,  our former landlord continued to threaten me on our new number, my heroin habit was out of control, and Area, the nightclub we’d worked at, had closed. I was too fucked to take her suicide attempt seriously. Besides, I had a ticket to visit Christmas day and wanted to surprise her.

Frenchie had been a poet during the ‘68 Paris riots, a Krishna in India, and played in the No Wave band The Contortions before dealing dope on East 2nd Street. On his way home from jail, he swung by the new apartment and found me living alone. “Patty, when you are caught in the gusts of the tornado it's exciting but once you get sucked into its eye all you can do is watch everything disappear”.  I didn’t know it then, but I was about to get sucked in.

In 1980, after a couple strung out years, I’d returned to Toronto to get my shit together and go to school. I found 3 very cute young Yugoslavian coke dealers to get my mind off heroin. Without thinking, I hurt the one I was dating by going to Montreal with his brother. When I ran into him at a club, he tried to make me jealous by introducing me to Cindy. An hour later we left him at the bar and she moved in with me. We were now six years older, both of our marriages had failed but we still had each other.

  

I arrived in Toronto Christmas morning. After Cindy left her husband, she moved in with a rich yuppie coke dealer. “Patty, I wish you’d told her you were coming” he said as he took my number.  “I don’t know when they are letting visitors in.” The previous evening they’d had a party. Cindy calmly rose from the sofa, walked to the balcony, and jumped six floors. She was in a coma. 

The hospital floor was filled with people who thought they would get free coke by supporting the grieving boyfriend. I stepped off the elevator and saw someone doing lines in the waiting room.  I was disgusted. Cindy was twenty-four and beautiful. She could have been sleeping if it hadn’t been for all the tubes and machines surrounding the bed.    The scene was too surreal and numbing.  I was withdrawing from dope as I always did when I went home for a visit but even that didn’t seem to have any effect on me. I couldn’t cry.

Cindy died in February. My husband had never returned to New York.

In the early spring I was walking up Avenue B next to the park.  It was sunny and birds were chirping. The season seemed to renew my optimism. I carried a notebook and was trying to write something other than bad slit-your-wrist poetry. I wanted to write a novel. I had plans to move to LA. Surely a new city would make anything possible.

I was standing between 7^th and 8^th street when one of those illuminated moments struck me.  All my plans for the future, how everything was going to be alright one day, how I would do this and that and get my shit together, I suddenly understood these things were not real. I thought of Cindy and had this realization: the only thing that mattered was what we share of ourselves with one another human being. What I shared with Cindy was real and all of this – the birds, the baby leaves opening, the blue sky, this was real. The noise in my head, the endless fantasizing and planning about the life I will have one day only stops me from living in the moment.


 I jotted into my notebook  “Life is made up of moments like this and the people who touch me. Everything else is bullshit.”

Little did I know that two years later I would get clean striving to live “one day at a time," a concept that I'd discovered through Cindy's death yet had never been able to implement into my own life.


When I'd gotten the news that she'd jumped that morning, I'd understood how she felt; high on coke believing there was no way out except through death. We’d never heard of recovery. We didn’t know anyone who'd ever gotten clean. 

People have asked why I blew my anonymity by being on television calling myself a recovering addict.  

Canada to copping - August 24 blog

I admit, like most impressionable kids, my earliest influences came from film and television. I bet if I were an adolescent, given today’s choices, I’d be a ghetto-fabulous, booty shaking, gangsta bitch dreaming of meeting my own Avon Barksdale.. Makes me grateful I came of age in the 70s.  We didn’t have guns – only punk rock and heroin.

I was seven or eight when I first saw Bonnie and Clyde. There is a scene where Faye Dunaway turns to Michael J Pollard as he pumps gas and says, “We rob banks.”  She was beautiful, sexy, confident and lived outside of society. My favorite game became “Bank Robber’s girlfriend”.   

I even loved the idea of drugs long before I ever picked up; loved the coming-of-age anti-drug propaganda films of the early 70s: Go Ask Alice, Maybe I’ll be Home in the Spring, Lenny, Lady Sings the Blues.

When my dad said, “He’s a dope addict” Johnny Cash immediately took on a mysterious edge that made me pay closer attention. I was eight.  Not to mention 60s rock stars on drugs were fabulous, sexy and exciting. The very words “counter culture” had an authenticity to my pre-adolescent ears. It seemed there was something to rebel against “out there” and I wanted to be part of the revolution.

I was a child in a country without Vietnam, without racism, without ghettos, without glamor, without rock stars.  In 1968, I couldn’t have felt further removed from mod, swinging London, Warhol’s New York, or San Francisco’s Summer of Love. There wasn’t a Canadian version of Go Ask Alice.  Canadian teenagers weren’t running away to the counter culture revolution. We didn’t really have a need for the Black Panthers or the Weathermen.

We moved into our house when I was four, an only child. If I stood on my toes, I could peer over the window ledge and watch children walking to school, longing to be old enough to join them. But when I finally got there – to kindergarten – it was a letdown.  The problem, I decided, was my age.  My childhood was spent waiting to become a teenager.  

“Patty, stop trying to grow up too fast. Enjoy your childhood.” My parents didn’t understand.  There was an exciting world out there waiting for me to be old enough to join it.

I loved getting high. The people, the lifestyle, the risk, the thrill, the crazy situations, the glamor, the image, the dramatic suffering, the euphoria, the absence of pain, the false confidence, the not giving a fuck what anybody thought, the distorted perception of my own cool, the way it separated me from others and from society as a whole.

I loved getting high and it worked, as they say, until it didn’t.  This wasn’t the bottom that made me get clean. It took a few years of trying and failing to get drugs to work again.  “Not working” can best be described this way: when I had money in my hands and was on my way to cop – it was working. I had hope that relief was on the way – relief from the physical withdrawal and relief from the voice in my head   criticizing and blaming me for the disaster my life had become; relief from the devastating loneliness, not only from the separation from my family and friends, but a loneliness for myself, for my soul (for lack of better word). So with money in hand on my way to cop, all was right with the world. This would last until the final drop of heroin was injected into my veins. Then my first thought would be “You fucked up” and the self-hatred would begin again.  I’d be swallowed by my own personal hell until, once again, there was money in my hands and I was on my hopeful way to the dealer. I never found that peace, the fun, the pleasure drugs had seduced me with ever again. It always felt like the dope was too weak or I should have done more. I could never get high enough to quiet my head.   

It took several years of getting no relief, of wanting to stop and not being able to, when the need for money and drugs completely consumed my life before I was ready to consider getting clean. I always say that if I could have figured out a way to use one more day, I would have.

Complete abstinence and a program of recovery was my way out.  For about a year, I grieved the loss of that once dependable relationship I had with drugs. It was like a death or a break up but thankfully, it was not difficult to stay clean once I made the commitment – and it is a commitment because to be honest, some days life is hard and it is a drag to have to feel ALL of it without the luxury of taking the edge off.  

For me, nothing is black and white. There are many shades of grey. I am not anti-drug and I don’t think everyone who takes them needs to be clean. At the end of the day, I have no opinion on what another person should do with his or her life. We are free to make our own choices. My experience with complete abstinence is that once drugs were out of the picture, my life got bigger. I am never bored.  For all the early years of thrills and bigger than life excitement I found in drugs, the final years were the most boring of my life.

August 16, 2011 - Butter Tarts

“Wow, you were an authentic 1950s-style juvenile delinquent.”

I said this after hearing stories about how at twelve he was buying loose cigarettes for a nickel, was shooting at people with a BB guns, sneaking off to drink the priest’s wine when he was an alter boy in the 1940s, 

“Not at all. This was what boys did”, he explained, offended. Then his memories took over and a twinkle came into his eyes.  “It wasn’t about getting drunk so much as it was the rush of getting away with something. That old priest had no idea.” It still made him laugh. He’s been sober for forty-one years without AA. Had he gone the AA route, he would have heard stories similar to this a thousand times.

In many ways it was no different from my story – being fueled forward by the “rush” of breaking rules, of being bad, of intense feelings. Hell, I still like a good rush wherever I can find one.    

It got me thinking about own early thrill-seeking behavior; of all the ways I sought out a “rush” long before I ever had my first illicit drink, before drugs were in the picture. It got me thinking about Butter Tarts. For those not “in-the-know”, Butter Tarts are a national Canadian foodstuff. Japanese have sushi, Eastern Europeans have pirogues, and Canadians have butter tarts.

I was a teenager trapped in a child’s body, at least that’s how I felt. Parental supervision horrified me. That was for babies and, god help me, I was NOT going to look like a baby. I demanded personal space. When I was four, our backyard opened up to the school playground.  This house was an ideal set-up for my parents. They could keep their eye on me from the window.  

Winter in Canada is brutal and the 1960s were no exception. A few times each winter, the chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard would get covered by beautiful, sparkling ice.  Each link coated like a candy apple, twinkling in the sun, like diamonds, seducing me.  Traumatic memories of last years’ fence experience shot through my Being like a warning bell but I WAS POWERLESS.   I couldn’t stop myself from sticking out my tongue and licking that fence. The consequences were immediate. My tongue instantly stuck to the fence and I’d be racked by terror. The fear that my tongue was going to get ripped  out of my bod. All I could do was scream. There were at least ten of us hanging by our tongues every winter day. (Ha – I wonder what path their lives took?)  Eventually my mom would spot us from the window, come over and pour something warm on our tongues to dislodge us.

By the fifth grade someone turned me onto a new kind of high and it was the only thing I thought about.  I would wait impatiently for the recess bell, start counting the minutes until 330 when school let out so that I could run to the playground with my friends and we could knock ourselves out. Here’s how it worked: one person would spin around until they were completely dizzy and then hold their breath while another kid would lift them up and squeeze their diaphragm until they passed out. My blackout never felt long enough to satisfy me.  I was ravaged by jealousy when a friend would pass out for three or four minutes. I suspected they were faking but I was dying of envy nonetheless.

“Patty, why were all the kids laying on the ground like that?” my mom would ask when I finally came home. “  I’d come up with  a full description of a fictitious game.  Nothing was going to get in my way of blacking out the next day. I knew she wouldn’t have gone for the truth.

The constant high throughout my childhood, though, was corn syrup. It was a bit more opiate-like than the adrenaline-fueled thrill-seeking.  I was a chatty, restless and often bored kid. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom discovered it as a way to calm me down – sugar coma style. I would fill a cereal bowl with corn syrup and spend the entire episode of a TV show dipping and licking my spoon until it was gone.  It was my way of unwinding. When people talk about using sugar as a drug I recount my corn syrup childhood.  It took 20 years of telling this story before I started to wonder why we always had corn syrup in my house.  I personally have never had a reason to buy it. In fact, I avoid all foods that contain it.

Last year I asked my mother to send me a recipe for butter tarts after realizing my American friends had never heard of them. Butter Tarts, this delicious combination of butter and brown sugar filled tart pastry that oozes with sweetness as soon as you bite into it. The secret ingredient it turns out is corn syrup.

While we were filming Relapse, I was invited to several speaker events put on for the cast and crew of both Relapse and Intervention. Researchers, scientists, policy advisors, treatment specialists, therapists would bring their latest findings. One topic was how to recognize the potential addict and how to intervene before they ever pick up. I saw a chart and words jumped out at me Thrill Seeking Behavior.

While writing blog, this I thought I’d google corn syrup for the hell of it.. I found this:

1.  In early times, they tried to treat alcoholism by substituting corn syrup for alcohol while weaning off.  2.  High fructose corn syrup is as damaging to the liver as alcohol.

Although you might consider this a controversial statement, understanding it is actually quite simple:  Both corn syrup and alcohol are metabolized by similar pathways in the liver. 3.  It is very damaging to the body's metabolism and biochemistry which makes it a major contributor towards alcoholism and relapse.