Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(66)

Here’s the thing: these drugs work miracles for most people. Maybe they did work as antidepressants. I could no longer tell if I was depressed. I had that same numb feeling I’d had before, but on the pills, I couldn’t laugh, couldn’t cry, couldn’t fucking scream. I felt nothing except the electricity firing through my brain that had me convinced I was having a stroke. At first the zaps only happened when it was quiet, while I flipped my pillow to the cool side to try to sleep. Then they grew louder. I was shocked no one else could hear them. My brain felt like touching an old console TV. I was trapped behind the screen like a shitty horror movie, screaming at anyone and everyone to let me out. But they just went about their day because all they saw was the blank stare of the heavily medicated. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I could think about wanting to die, but if I took enough trazodone or clonazepam or whatever they’d given me that week, I could fall asleep without taking any action on the whole wanting-to-die thing except to hope maybe I wouldn’t wake up. I fucking dreaded waking up each morning to another day of nothing. Most days I don’t remember at all. But I kept taking the pills.

   The pills had to work. I was raised by hippies who smeared my feet with chopped garlic to cure the measles and prayed to cure the flu and stuffed garlic in my cheeks to cure swimmer’s ear. So I fucking believe in medicine. I believe in vaccines. (Not to mention Q-tips after swimming.) And I truly believed the doctors who told me they just needed to find the right combination.

I went back to work after a month. My eyes had stopped leaking and the panic attacks had subsided, but I was a fucking shell. There was a guy I worked with named Andre, a fat guy with a goofy smile. We were work friends because he’d been in the Navy and his dad was gay. (Work friends don’t require a long list.) He called me to help out on a job, and afterwards, we were smoking out by his van and he asked me what I was on. I told him I wasn’t on anything.

   He cocked his head like I was full of shit. He said I was full of shit. “Are you even awake?”

I said I couldn’t tell either. I needed to adjust my meds. I fucking hated that I talked like that now, like a crazy person whose meds needed to be adjusted. He asked what I was on and I started listing things. I’m pretty sure naming more than three items on a list of “What are you on?” is a sign your doctor might not be listening to you.

He said, “Dude. What are they, trying to make you happy? You’re not a happy person, Hough. It’s okay. I like you grouchy and funny.”

I’m not advocating taking medical advice from a dude at work. But I couldn’t get it out of my head, partly on account of racing, obsessive thoughts being a new side effect of one or three of the pills I was taking. So I called Amy, my old bartender friend, and asked her to meet me for a drink.

Amy was already out for a drink with a couple bartenders I vaguely knew. I met them at Badlands because we could get a free drink. The guys wanted to go to a different bar, they just had to make a quick stop, and that’s how I accidentally went to a meth deal.

I always did feel cool hanging out with bartenders—the nods from bouncers, the free drinks, the occasional wave from someone you only know as “vodka soda, doesn’t tip after the first round.” I was glad there were four of us or I’d have ended up walking a step behind, which is decidedly uncool. We wound up at an English basement off Logan Circle. The bartender, who we’ll just refer to as Mike because he was one of the bartenders, who were mostly named Mike and if they weren’t, they got used to it—anyway, Mike had called ahead but still had to beat on the door for a good five minutes before it was answered by a tweaker whose bones looked ready to break through his skin. He stared at the four of us, looked up and down the street, and said, “Did you bring the batteries?”

   Batteries? I looked at Amy, who just shrugged like, Meth dealers, am I right?

The tweaker flung open the door, and there, all across his living room floor, were cop-style flashlights in various states of disassembly. The tweaker was rattling off his findings on lumen variations between lenses and bulbs. He was close to figuring it all out. What he was figuring out, you’d have to ask him. I walked out and waited on the steps.

When the bartenders came out and said they had to run to a store to buy batteries, I decided to wait in Logan Circle. The sex workers in the circle, who were smoking my cigarettes, thought this was the funniest, whitest thing they’d ever heard. They told me, “Crack dealers will kill you. Sure. But at least they don’t send you on errands.”

I tuned them out. I was trying to think and trying not to think all at once. Trying to think about anything else, but I couldn’t. I’d just seen myself in the mirror. And it scared the shit out of me. I was down to about 160 pounds. I’d been picking the same scab on my arm for months, convinced it would never heal, which it wouldn’t because I couldn’t fucking stop picking at it. And while I wasn’t taking apart flashlights, I’d been just as manic about everything from researching cameras I’d never buy, to googling names of everyone who’d ever wronged me. I was as glassy-eyed as a meth head, but my drugs weren’t even any fun.

   When we were finally alone and I was driving Amy back to her apartment, I asked her if she thought I was acting strange. She’d known me about as long as anyone in D.C., and I figured she’d tell me the truth. She waited a minute and I knew the answer. But it was worse. She said, “I almost didn’t answer when you called.” It was all I could do to keep the car between the lines.