EXCERPT FROM METH HEAD ANONYMOUS BY ALAN AWAKIM EDITED BY SAMANTHA SUTCLIFFE
Collage by Johnny Scuotto
PART 1.
There are people that make you and there are people that break you. I write their names down in side by side lists in the same notebook as my drawings of Jess that I take to group. I write them down because the whole point they say is to realize the difference, it’s a thin line.
In the fall of the year 2003 I turned 11, my mother, having little money and no one to take care of her, could afford me only a pair of used men’s Clarks desert boots, two sizes too big, to wear to school on my first day at St. Catherine’s. She found them for a dollar and a half at a Salvation Army store in Ozark. I’m doing the best I can she used to say to me. I used to close my eyes and imagine I was wearing pink mary janes with ribbons on the strap that sparkled. I used pink watercolors and gold glitter in art class, and at recess I always played hopscotch with the girls, never kickball with the boys. Scotty, and all the other kids at school, would tease me, ask me if I was a boy or a girl, beat me up no matter how I answered.
By the end of sixth grade, I was suicidal. No friends, no money, no prospect of sex anywhere on the horizon. During summer break, I started bussing tables at my aunt Frankie’s truck stop diner in Cash Village Shopping Center where Eighth street becomes Highway 71: north to Minneapolis, south to Baton Rouge. Drifters, drug dealers, and sweaty truckers passing through Arkansas on their way to New Orleans. Gas stations and fast food joints, 80’s clad rusty motels with scattered trash, pale and faded facades, a murky mishmash devoid of any color, any movement. The only thing was that every early morning there hung a thick standing fog, enveloping highway 71 altogether. I would pretend I was cleaning tables at a fancy restaurant in the clouds while wiping up the sloppy leftover grits of every slob from here to Louisiana. That was how I met Patty Anne. She came in every Thursday at lunchtime and ordered the six-piece fried catfish meal with a side of fried okra and a dr. pepper. Patty’s face was all bunched up and smooshed together like a cabbage patch kid. Her hair was brown and huge like a 1980’s beauty queen. Crimped and curled and permed, teased so carefully that it looked as if it sat that way naturally on her tiny head.
Photograph by Alan Awakim
PART 2.
Every Thursday night I work at the county line liquor store with this Mexican who’s got a brain tumor. He smells like a brewery and tells me I need to accept my hardships as a pathway to peace. He talks to me about 401K’s, credit scores, retirement accounts. Shit I know nothing about. He says I have to save my money now that I’m young and not wait until I’m older. Save up for what, I ask him. He says he doesn’t know all the answers. Soon it’s midnight and the store is closed. I’m waiting for Jess to pick me up because she borrowed my car after she wrecked hers over on Osage Road, speeding up and down the steep hills, high as fuck, trying to get that funny feeling you get in your belly. I’m waiting out in the back parking lot, smoking out of a bubbler, blowing crystal clouds with the Mexican. He’s telling me about how he used to be a banker with all these banks down in Little Rock. He says he’s 71 and that he retired several years ago. He had all this money but then something happened and he got a brain tumor and he was forced to get another job to make ends meet. That’s when he started working at the liquor store. He knew I was a tweaker as soon as we met. He asks me for teeners all the time, wraps the dope I give him in a Walmart bag, then tries to pay me with his leftover pozole or half-empty bottle of modelo negra. As we wait, he’s smoking and talking to me about work ethic and moral. The Mexican hands me a bottle of beer from his six pack. No manches guero, mochate güey. I look at Jess, then back at him. I hand him a baggie, no more than a gram, and he laughs and looks upward before taking a swig out of his bottle. Gracias carnal, he says. He wraps his arms around me and puts his head on my shoulder, crying. I sit him down on the curb and kiss his forehead. As we drive home Jess makes fun of me. She laughs and shakes her head and says it’s cute that I have a crush on abuelo. I pay no attention, thinking only of the Mexican’s tears and how they really are my own. What Jess doesn’t know is that I’m writing his name down on my make or break list under break. Right after hers.
Drawing by Johnny Scuotto
PART 3.
Today I am going to drive to Tulsa to meet up with Squints and get half a gram of Anestesia de Caballo (heroin mixed with horse tranquilizer). My friend Ron. That’s what I call it – short for heroin. On the way, I stop at Casey’s for some Coricidin and a pack of Newport light 100’s in a box when this blue-haired lady in the cough syrup aisle catches me talking to myself. I cover my mouth with my hand and that, you see, gives me the freedom to talk to myself and no one can know who’s saying what.
I drop some things off at the house and just wait. That Loretta girl that I met at the meeting today hasn’t called and it’s after 6 so I’ve had quite a few hours by myself at the house at this point so I pray. I talk to God. I don’t watch TV and I hate talking on the phone so I write in my journal for about an hour and a half because I’m a writer. I play my guitar and it’s only then that I start to think I got stood up again. I can feel the familiar golf ball in my throat when I realize that I’m truly alone and that I don’t have anyone to walk through life with. Go to a store, or go out to eat, just things like that that I always end up doing alone. Then I realize I do need to go to Rogers so I can get money from my parents who tell me I’m a disappointment, that I’m not to be trusted, then they give me the $120 I ask for but it takes a lot of begging and a lot of time. What they don’t know is that I haven’t slept for two days and I need some zannies to come down so I don’t care what it takes, I’m getting that money.
The night before last – it’s Saturday right? – so that means it would have been this past Thursday night going into Friday – I slept like a baby for like two to three hours so I tell myself it’s ok, I’ve had some sleep. I’m so high right now and I come down really hard and it’s the worst feeling ever, but I still get high. That’s why I make sure I always have zannies in the little metal screw-top pill holder my doctor gave me when I went in for an STD check.
It’s almost midnight before I get to my room at the Eighth Street Motel. I’m walking into Room 108 and I have the sudden urge to take a shit probably because of the eight ball I have in my pocket that I need to start smoking and hype myself up and make me horny so I have the balls to let this stranger put a needle in my arm and then fuck me. He says his name is Alex and he’s got a thousand little needles in a Walmart bag around his wrist and he keeps reassuring me that it’s meth. A nervous laugh escapes me and I realize I’m laughing at my own stupidity as I step over the edge of the tub and into the shower to douche myself.
I wish I didn’t have to rely on someone else to slam me. The high is too high and the sex is too sexy to pass up on it. When you slam meth, the devil hits the back of your throat and you start coughing, uncontrollably gasping for air, your eyes begin to roll around in your head a little. You feel a flutter, a rush. And BOOM, just like that, I’m hornier than I’ve ever been.
Photograph by Alan Awakim
PART 4.
I have a love-hate relationship with dope. I think I love it and I think I hate it at the same time, but my hate is becoming bigger and my love is being diminished and my love for Christ is going higher, even though I believe he is making me go through more than I can handle going through. My bible says temptations in your life are no different from what others experience. And God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, he will show you a way out so that you can endure.
It’s like a primal instinct of desire to protect her, mixed with primal feelings of wanting to enter her, to be inside her. I love to sniff her and I put my face in the nape of her neck, my nose behind her ear, and fill my lungs with her. And she’s mine even though she says that people don’t own other people.
I don’t give a fuck because she is mine. The honest truth is, together we are only one person. When it comes to her and me one plus one does not equal two, it equals one. I would gladly rip my own heart out of my chest if she asked me to; endure the most gruesome suffering for her, and sometimes I find myself actually crying when she tells me that she’s better off when I’m locked up, that I’m nothing without her. Then she’ll be all over me telling me to give her some dick and that she wants me and misses me fucking her. I only want the best for her but I don’t know what the best means, so the only thing I can think to do is mix a little tweak in her rig when she isn’t looking so she won’t overdo it again like last time. It’s just a little upper to her downer so she won’t go down as far. That white china was really strong and she went real down last time. Way down deep. She almost turned blue on me and I was wiping a wet hand across her face and rubbing my knuckles across her chest but she went way down deep anyway. So deep I couldn’t even see her anymore and I couldn’t reach her and all I could do was hope she’d come back up again. I do whatever she tells me to though. I do dope with her when she wants dope, we get high together and fuck however many times she wants. What I want is for her to be happy. Sometimes I tell myself that the crazy bitch and her multiple personalities aren’t worth it, and I’d rather just get myself off than have to deal with her or any other girl for that matter. But I know that I will never leave her, because I can’t. I won’t survive without her.
Photograph by Alan Awakim