The Skin-E

Now everytime I tried to get clean, there was always something wrong. My so-called “Last Run” was never up to par. It always consisted of doing JUST enough to get right before going into detox. So, I think that was what I was working towards while I was in the street, and one day in January, it happened.

Now, I did something VERY horrible in order to attain this money. It involves my grandmother, and her ATM card, and $1,000 dollars. Catch my drift? Okay, so after that was done, I went to the spot and got two bricks of heroin and 200 dollars worth of cocaine. That’s 100 fucking bags of heroin, and about 4-5 grams of cocaine. All the junkies are drooling over their keyboards right now. I had about $200 or $300 dollars left after this and I spent this on a shitty little hotel room for the next three nights and got fucking wrecked. The amount of dope and coke that I was injecting directly into my bloodstream was almost inhuman, but this was how I NEEDED to go out if I wanted to get clean.

You better believe it when I say that after all this ran out, the withdrawals were absolute hell. I was extremely desperate and willing to do absolutely anything to get that feeling back. After I finished everything and had not a pinch of heroin or cocaine left, I did something else extremely drastic. Well, first I begged my mother for money for a few days but the amount she gave me just could not compare to the extreme bliss I experienced a few nights before in that hotel room. I knew I needed another good score and my grandmother (of course) cancelled her ATM card already. So what did I do now? Well, I did something involving her car, and trying to sell it to thugs for a mere $500 dollars or so. This did not happen though, and the car had less than a quarter tank of gas so I was forced to bring it back. I parked it and crept in the house through a basement window so I had some place warm to sleep and shot my last 2 bags. Something told me that this was the end. I couldn’t go on doing these things to my family, and if I kept trying to find that feeling I experienced in that hotel room, I know I would do something extremely desperate and probably wind up dead or in jail, so the next morning, I made a desperate attempt at calling everyone I knew trying to procure some more money to go cop, but after that didn’t work, I crept upstairs from the basement and showed my face. The look on my grandmother’s face was that of absolute terror. She was demanding I bring her car back, and after some refusing I gave in. I was lucky though, because without what happened next I may have never gotten clean.

She called her next door neighbor, who turned out to be a counselor at a Methadone clinic in New York, and he came over and saw the condition I was in. It was Sunday, so he and I knew there was no where I was going today. The detox centers do not accept admissions on the weekend, so I sat there pleaded with my family to just give me $20 dollars and train-fare to get what I needed to make it through until tomorrow, but my father would not give in. “I am not giving you money to get drugs,” I believe were his exact words, and I know it sounds insane, but it was really the only thing they could have done. I told my father that there was nothing else that anyone could do for me until tomorrow, but he wouldn’t give in. Eventually he kicked me out of the house, but I crept back in through the basement window before he could see me. However, once they found I was back in the house, they called the cops and the cops came and arrested me for being in possession of a hypodermic syringe. A stupid misdemeanor charge. The cops weren’t even concerned with charging me. They saw how much of a wreck I was and just wanted me to get me to a hospital. The same hospital my father was actually trying to get me to go to earlier, but I told him that they were just going to discharge me and not let me stay the night.

Well, when the ambulance dropped me off and I told them what I was there for, they gave me a quick once over and what do you think they did? They fucking discharged me just like I said. They said I was not withdrawing because I was on 2mg of Xanax. So I called my father, furious, and told him that they were kicking me out of the fucking hospital and I needed a place to stay for the night. My grandmother agreed to let me sleep there after all I put her through, and the Xanax I took earlier was enough to let me get some sleep through the night.

When I woke up the next day, I begged my grandmother to give me money for the “train” but I spent this money buying a few bags. I scraped to get by the next few days by actually getting some money from my mother, but I realized that what I was doing was useless. I was just delaying the inevitable, and I needed to go to this Methadone clinic.

On February 9th, 2009, I shot my last bag of heroin in a stall in a homeless shelter in NY, and did the unthinkable. I actually went to the Methadone clinic and got admitted into their program. I have relapsed one time since then, but other than that I have been clean from heroin and cocaine ever since. Since getting clean, I have been attempting to mend most of the relationships that went sour during my addiction, and the people that truly care about me are so happy to see me doing better that they were actually able to forgive me for some of the truly horrible things I did to them. A lot of my friends that I lost touch with during my addiction are supportive of my recovery, and even though I am not with my ex-girlfriend KB anymore and things still are not great between us, I have a new girlfriend who I absolutely LOVE and loves me for who I am, even with all my mistakes. I have a job, and an apartment, and life is absolutely great. I am still on Methadone, 100mg actually. I am working on tapering down and lowering the dose gradually so I can be completely substance free in a few short years.

I really don’t even want to think where I would be now if I never would have gotten clean, and believe it or not, if it wasn’t for my “last run,” I like to think I would still be chasing that feeling. My last run helped me see that that feeling of bliss that these drugs supply you with is extremely temporary and short-lived. You can be much happier if you find something else to replace the drugs with, otherwise you will be stuck chasing that stupid feeling that you experienced that ONE time. There’s a lot more to life than that, and I hope anyone that is currently addicted to drugs and reading this will find some kind of help in what I had to say. If not, at least I kept your mind occupied for a little while.