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.

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.