WINNING THE WAR Part I

Losing the battle against myself....

The needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting. Try to kill it all away, but I remember everything…

—Johnny Cash and Trent Reznor

We’d just gotten back home. We picked up our fix for the day, shot half of it before we left the Pic-Pac parking lot, like many days before. It seemed pretty good, good like strong, but nothing was ever good enough for me. I couldn’t wait to get home to do the rest. I got home and ran to the bedroom to mix up the rest. Angela came in and said, “don’t do that yet, Heather is running me down to Kroger.” I said, “why? I won’t do your half.”

“Just wait, we won’t be gone long.”

“You’re gonna be gone hours!” They would, it was food stamp time.

“Just wait, please.”

I said, “Okay, I will,” is what I actually said, what I was thinking is why is she being such a bitch. That ride back here was so long. She’s gonna be gone forever. As soon as I hear that car start, I’m doing it! I did and ascended into darkness. I’m not real sure of what happened next but, I have flashes now and then when I think back, of trying to stay on my feet. And struggling. I wasn’t ready to go yet. I believe if I’d been sitting down when I did it, I’d be gone now. That’s one of the things we would do if we thought we did too much, stay on your feet. Time escapes me but I remember not wanting to go down! That shot seemed so harmless, it was nothing close to how much I’d done before. It was less than I’d done at Pic-Pac. Then, I come back. Now sitting on my bed. Angela was there, I don’t know how long she’d been there. I said, “What’s going on?” Their were eyes staring at me, I could feel their concern. She said, “You were overdosing! I knew you were gonna do it. I told Heather, ‘No chance he’ll wait’. She said, ‘Nope he’s doing it right now’.” I was in disbelief. I didn’t do that much. When she found me, my face was turning blue from not breathing. I was lying against the wall, but still on my feet. She grabbed me and slammed me against the wall. She was a brute, that’s her form of help. Beat on things until they work, but it worked. It jarred me out of it, and I started breathing again.

It had happened, I’d actually OD’d, I never believed it could happen to me. That’s the modern human experience, right? That really bad thing happened to him and I’m doing the exact same thing, but it could never happen to me! Right?! Wrong. Because it did; It had been my blanket to hold onto my whole life, never let me down, never treated me bad, never decided I wasn’t who I thought you were, and now is trying to kill me. I’m very shallow and faithless when it comes to this, nothing scares me more than dying. I really, really, want to believe there’s something for all of us after death, and most of the time I do, but back then I had no reason to believe anything, and I didn’t. Now I differ from that. This incident marked a move toward that difference.

I look at the clock, it’s been no time, they just left, it’s been like 15 minutes. “What happened? I thought you were going to Kroger?” My mind is spiraling, I’m still very high but, what just happened was extremely sobering. She’s confused and shook up. She says, “I don’t know”, it was obvious she was shaken. She yells, “Heather, why didn’t we go to Kroger?” Heather yells back, “James Wilbur!” Angela says, “Oh shit, that’s right. Bank Street was blocked at the intersection, at 29th and we couldn’t get through, some people were outside, and we asked what happened. They said, ‘James Wilbur OD’d, they kicked him out of the truck in front of his moms and left him for dead. The EMS truck had the intersection blocked so we came back home to tell you about it….”

“Is he okay?!” I asked.

“Don’t know, he was still with EMS.”

“Damn.”

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They could’ve let me die. I was very bad, you could say, the worst. My best friend Will, who occupied the back room of the house would wake me up for work. I was so hard to wake up and I knew it, but he’d always try. I’d offer to pay him for getting me up on payday because I felt so bad for being such an asshole to wake up, no one wants to deal with a grown man that doesn’t wanna get up for work in the mornings, but he never let me down.

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This was a moment in my life that I have put a lot of thought into. By the way, James Wilbur lived. James ODing is the only reason I’m alive. I’m more sure of that of that than anything I’ve ever been sure of, ever. Someone was looking out for both of us, whoever that may be. James was an interesting character; he was always waste deep in the politics of Bank Street. One day I’ll write about the night I came down there to get my daily fix and found The Cockerell’s vs The Wilbur’s in an all-out war in the middle of the sidewalk. Steven handed me the point I came for and went right back to war, swinging, guns coming out, cell phones recording, insane. James sold me fake dope twice and his brother Jon did once. The last I seen him was my last hoorah in a jail cell. He gave me a look in that jail cell, and within that look I could feel him saying, “My bad for ripping you off.” He offered me a shot of coffee, and all was forgiven. He had gotten caught with a handgun and doing a 7-year bit for it because he was already a convicted felon. I always really liked James. He had a swagger about him that made you wonder how he got here. You always knew what you were gonna get if you dealt with James. He was going to rip you off. Everyone knew it and he’d admit it, if you did a deal with him anyways that was on you. James was also hopelessly addicted to drugs. I understood this well, if I had the guts to rip people off the way he did, I’d have done it too, and he was actively trying to get better the whole time I knew him. Or other people were. It’s hard to tell. I can’t tell you how many times I was at the “trap”, and heard Jon say, “you didn’t sell to my brother, did you?” Or hear the bosses say, “if James Wilbur comes through, don’t sell to him.”

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That was something about that whole mess, maybe my caliber is off, but even the main guys were good people. Steven Cockerell was a good guy. He wasn’t mixing fentanyl with his drugs and crazy shit like that, he would bring me and Angela down to test his drugs because he didn’t wanna put something out that was too weak to get well or too strong and hurt people. He believed he was bringing a service to the people. By the way, the overdose I had was after he was raided and sent to prison. We were forced to buy from more shady characters that didn’t care what they put out. Maybe I had Stockholm Syndrome but after 5 years of dealing with the same group of people every day, you start to pick up an understanding of who they are.

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This was one of those eye-opening moments that I had to think, maybe there is a God. If they had went on to the grocery store, I wouldn’t be sitting here, tapping away on this keyboard in my lawn chair hiding from the beating sun in-between my home and the *bando next door. They would’ve been gone at least an hour, and I had already stopped breathing when they got back 5 minutes later. An hour later they would’ve found me dead. The idea that they had turned back over an overdose of a friend on Bank Street to find me overdosing at home was extraordinary. Talk about working in mysterious ways. This moment was the Prologue to the Rest of my Life. It wasn’t over from there though. I would continue using, but much more cautious. It came to the point that I became so cautious that I couldn’t get high anymore. I was afraid to do enough to get high. The thought was always in the back of my mind, every time I tried, this could be your last. It was also getting harder to get every day. I was dealing with people who were shadier and shadier. A month later I was done with heroin. I always had Suboxone on hand that I’d get from different people on the streets, to resell when I could or take if I didn’t have anything to get me to work that day. I started taking those and made the decision to only take those. Good thing because one week later, an indictment was unsealed on Angela and me, for Engaging in Organized Crime and 18 counts of Theft by Unlawful Taking, for a scam that we had very recently taken part in. In brief, it ended with me in a jail in Franklin, TN, the sickest I’d ever been, handcuffed to a bench in front of the booking desk because they were “Not sure what happens when a feller stops takin’ that dang stuff. We heard it’s bad!” This was after being run through an MRI and X-Rayed to see if we were storing drugs in our stomachs because, “Why else would you be driving through our town?!” Story coming soon…

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*Bando- Abandoned house, especially one now occupied by a family of racoons, possums, and cats. Co-existing peacefully, without war, or visitors stealing their parking spot.

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THREE YEARS LATER

Counselor: Mr. Canter, please come to my office.

I know what it is, I’m dirty as hell. I sit down, she closes the door.

Me: Yes.

Counselor: We just checked your urine sample and it looks like something is in there that isn’t supposed to be.

Me: I know. I’ve had a rough time stopping, the meth. I’ll go a couple weeks then have a bad day and it’s so easy to make that bad day a good day.

Counselor: This has been every week. We cannot continue to treat you unless you do something different. This Suboxone is great for stopping you from drifting to sleep and never waking up again on opiates, but it does nothing to save you from dying slowly and painfully from your brain bleeding on meth—

Me: Fuck—

Counselor: Yea, it’s not pretty.

Me: Ok. What do you need me to do?

Counselor: We’ve already ordered you to complete our Intensive Outpatient Program(IOP), but you’ve only shown up 3 times. We don’t have anything more intensive than this. If this doesn’t work, it means you’re beyond our ability to help. That doesn’t mean you can’t be helped but you’re beyond what we offer at this facility. We’ll write up a contract if you’ll agree to it, to complete IOP. If you break this contract, it’s immediate discharge, no questions asked. The contract will be complete 6 weeks of IOP, that’s Tues, Wed, Thurs, and the weekend thru Monday off. 9am to 12:30pm. You must see the doctor weekly until you complete IOP, not miss a single class, and not have a single failed drug screen. Can you do this?

Me: I can…

TO BE CONTINUED……

I broke this up into 2 parts because it’s pretty long, and the editing process is becoming more of a rewriting process and it’s getting longer instead of shorter. So, this is part 1 of 2. The second part will be done soon. It’s already written, it’s been already written for 2 weeks, just in the editing process, I get other pieces that jar my psyche, and I must attack! Also, I’m pretty proud of it and didn’t want it too long to read. Thank you for reading.

Jordan Lee, Editor-in-Chief, Declaration of Liberty