I saw this and figured I would post this little excerpt from a memoir I'm writing.
SUNRISE DETOX:
The second night is always the worst. I’m in an old nursing home that has been converted into a dirty, crowded detox. It is not a rehab, only a place to endure the pain of withdrawal from alcohol and/or narcotics. This particular place is cheap and severe. There is crime, there is noise, and there is pain. The staff is comprised of badly paid former addicts and a few negligent, evasive nurses. There are no doctors and there is very little medication if you manage to break through the mob that is constantly swarming the medication dispensary window. Ten days here coming off of heroin and pills is an eternity spent in hell.
I am crawling around in a boiling pool of sweat and slime on the wrong side of the country. I flew into Palm Beach International from SeaTac a few hours ago and the little pharmaceutical cocktail they gave me at the intervention has completely worn off. The fear is setting in. There is no way to turn back. There are no options left. I know I am beginning a process that will bring me to the edges of my physical existence and my sanity. I am writhing on hard starched sheets and a rough blanket that feels and looks like an iron cobweb. I am feverish and yet desperately cold. I cannot rest or sleep. I am left only with an insatiable hunger, my entire being screaming like all the fallen angels in hell singing in one giant chorus for an opiate, for relief, for one granule of mercy.
All I can do now is think.
I can consider the swollen, red abscess that is currently smoldering like an inverted volcano in the crook of my right arm. I can think about my parents disowning me. I can think about the university that I’ve been made to resign from under threat of expulsion after overdosing at nine in the morning on a busy campus walkway a week after returning to school from rehab. I can think about the fact that I am back in treatment again, that I have failed again, that I am a weak, sick, pathetic piece of junkie shit again and forever, and that the world does not give a fuck about and would be better off without.
I can ponder my best friend Chris who overdosed alone in some dealer’s basement buying drugs for me. I can think about the destroyed everything, the overdoses, the insanity, the constant endless, pulsating, wildly relentless agony that is my life.
I have no reprieve and there will be no relief. All I am left with now is a seething self-hatred and a bottomless, unending sorrow, an all-consuming sadness that shivers through me like a wind of cold fire. I am left with an overwhelming sense of aloneness like an orphaned child, knowing nothing except the terror of being thrown away and forgotten, knowing nothing except the loss of being lost, knowing nothing at all, really.
I sleep briefly and again I am made to be conscious; a horrible sound has broken my fragile rest. A scabrous, throaty voice is screaming about methadone in the courtyard. The voice of this girl is like a steel trap on my brain and she is literally sitting right outside my window. She’s chain-smoking Newport 100’s, wildly gesticulating and rambling hysterically to anyone that will listen. Hers is a blistery, grating sound, an almost inhuman tone of voice you hear begging drug dealers for hits. It is the voice of a frenzied junkie with no fix. Someone who, like me, has destroyed everything good and pure in life and exists only to feed the terrible engine of her addiction. This insane woman does not stop howling about methadone, where she cops heroin (the Chevron one block away), and her three year old daughter, in that order, the entire time she is there.
I drag myself to the medication counter where they give me a few more milligrams of valium and I rest consciously for about twenty minutes. It stops working. I’m completely lucid again. It’s the middle of the night, but patients are outside my window in the courtyard talking and smoking, trading war stories. The methadone siren is describing how to inject heroin into the carotid the correct way, “You have to turn your head and squeeze your chin into your shoulder and you really have to be front of a mirror because…” I have silenced my senses with OxyContin and Xanax and Mexican black tar heroin, my senses, they are angry at this abuse, this starvation.
I will feel all of this. I won’t miss a single thing.
A new sound cracks like a whip into my burning skull. I gather the strength to stand and peer out into the hall where the noise is coming from and there is a blinking fire alarm three or four feet from my room. A dead battery is causing this alarm to emit a loud, high-pitched shriek that makes it feel as though planets are colliding inside of my feverish head every three minutes. Fuck, I think, almost laughing. This can’t be real. I stumble back to my bed and I am now losing whatever it is that I had that was holding me together. I am too physically weak to summon help or to break the ghastly alarm. Helpless, I coil up into the fetal position on the cobweb where I spend the night drowning in the various undercurrents of the darkest parts of my psyche, utterly alone and yet crowded by a vicious, endless cycling of terrifying memories and visions that all speak to regret. The alarm becomes a nauseating metronome accompanying the shrieking wraith outside my window creating a kind of infernal refrain, a chorus of suffering, perhaps being sung to me by pain itself. At some point I am overtaken and I fall into a black, syrupy delirium and my mind sinks ever deeper into the utter, unending madness.
And what dreams I have.
