Chapter 2 · Moments of insanity

My mind felt cloudy and little heavy. I was confused about where I was and how I got there. My eyes were still closed, but as the blanket of confusion began to lift I could feel the drops of summer rain on my face and my hands. The smell of the incoming storm was refreshing, and my body began to relax. I felt warm and comfortable as the earth beneath me had started to give way to the weight and contours of my body, almost cradling me.

My mind wandered trying to reignite the movement in my body and located my hands. They felt numb and heavy and were loosely balled-up into fists. As I made the mind/muscle connection and started to relax my hands, my fingers slowly stretched back into life. As if I were strumming the strings of an imaginary guitar, my fingers started to move through the blades of grass, my nails scraping against the cool dirt.

With each drop of rain that splashed against my face, I was being revived a little more, and with each moment that was passing I was gradually being restored to consciousness. The defensive flickering of my eyelids trying to stay open were fighting off the sprinkling of summer rain. As my eyes opened wider and wider I could see the blank gray cloudy sky above me. I took in my surroundings piece by piece. It was starting to make sense, where I was, and how I got here. I remember what happened now… They thought I was dead.

For weeks now, I had been living in this apartment building selling cocaine from a back room. After a long stretch of homelessness in the streets of Portland, ME, I had found my way back to MA, with someone else's drugs, and a ridiculous plan to sell them and make some money.

I had chosen a friend's apartment where we used to smoke freebase (cooked cocaine) together, to set up my base of operations. I was living in his room, and we shared the apartment with his mother, his brother, and his stepfather.

Together we had a pretty good thing going. I brought the cocaine in, and they would sell it for me. For their efforts, I would keep them smoking for free, and when we ran out, I would buy more. And so on, and so on. Everything was going as well as could be expected. We had a twisted little family system set up, but somehow it worked and everyone was getting what they needed out of the deal.

Earlier that day, I was sitting in my friend's room with a few other individuals and we were all smoking cocaine. I remember the terrible smell of burning plastic and the evil air that hung over us, as we all stared with obsessive lust at the bottle being passed around. We had crafted a makeshift crack-pipe out of a larger than normal Mountain Dew soda bottle. It was not a pretty looking thing, but it was working. We used tinfoil in the mouth of the bottle to hold the ashes and cocaine in place, and we had melted a pen-tube into the side of the bottle to draw the thick yellow smoke from.

We were all desperately trying to reach the same level of euphoria that we had from the previous hit, but my tolerance went up with each hit and it was getting harder to get as high as I wanted. I had to keep increasing the size of the hits I was taking, and of course there was no cautious advice being shared regarding the dangers of my decisions.

I was getting extremely close to exploding, or at least that's how it felt. My heart was beating out of my chest and I could feel the pulsing in my head. My ears were ringing and I was getting dizzy from the lack of oxygen to my brain, but I kept at it, hit after hit, chasing this elusive feeling.

Being the guy that was supplying the stuff I was able to choose the size of my own hits, and so I chose a larger than normal one this time. I wanted this next one to be "the one", so I went for it. Now, I had passed out, or "overdosed" from cocaine use before, and I usually came back after only a few seconds of shaking on the floor or a little ice water in a tub. But this time it must have been different.

The last thing I remember was hitting my goal, and feeling that feeling, but then it all went blank. I don't know what everyone else experienced in that room that day, but they must have thought I died, because I was lying in an alley behind the building in the rain.

I started to feel around on my body to make sure I was ok. I immediately stuffed my hand into my pocket to make sure that I still had my money and my drugs, but they were both gone. They thought I had died and just kept moving on with my stuff. I got angry for a minute, but that feeling of anger was quickly overpowered by a growing desire to get back in there before it was all gone. I hopped up off the ground still a little shaky, and shuffled back into the apartment building.

My knock on the door was met with the traditional hushes and rumblings of a crack house. They answered my knock with, "who?" I said, "it's me, I'm good, let me in." The door opened and I was greeted with vacant unconcerned looks from the dark empty eyes of my people.

I shuffled through the door and back into the bedroom where it looked like nothing had changed while I was gone except my seat was empty. Everyone looked at me and said "heyyy, you survived… we thought you died", and then went back to what they were doing. I found my seat in the circle and took back the mountain dew bottle to finish what I had started, whatever that was.

There was a moment, however brief, but it was there. There was a moment where I could have seen what was really happening and done something about it. A moment where my life could have taken a turn for the better because I had felt the negative effects of what had happened.

Unfortunately, that overdose didn't happen to me, it happened to them. I didn't experience it, I just blacked out and fell down onto the floor, they were the ones put in the position to act, and they made their choice to move the "body". When I woke up I made my choice as well, but it was not based on the overdose. Instead, I was immediately drawn back into my old way of thinking, despite what had happened. I was stuck in one of my many moments of perpetual insanity.

This was the way I dealt with most of the situations of my life. My decisions were defined by these moments of insanity, and I was driven by my addiction, not by reason or rational thought. I was not capable of seeing things for what they really were or learning by consequence of action.

If I had the ability to learn through consequence of action, then I would have been able to stop years before this story took place and I wouldn't have much to write about in this book.