When you get into recovery, there’s not much room for who you were. The people around you don’t like how you used to act (sometimes), the world tells you that you were evil, the rooms tell you not to engage in war stories, and your psyche tells you to never go back there again. People have ghosted me, left me, hated me, and dismissed me because I used dope. And if I’m on dope, I can’t come around. The only person they want is a distilled version that gives them advice from the trenches, empathy for the hell that enters their lives.
It was a Saturday afternoon that my sister kicked me out and told me she had got me a room at the Motel 6 in Rapid City, SD. I had seen this coming earlier that day after going upstairs to tell my sister I landed a job at $80.000/year. She wasn’t happy and said something like “well fuck you I’ll never make that anyway you have no idea what its like to be me.” To have a high school education? I know that. In the altercation she brought back up that I had run my course after staying there for two weeks and stopping using fentynal, meth, alcohol in bolts.
She left my belongings outside and everything I owned, anything that I had managed to keep, sat in a pile in her driveway as we pulled up in a 2007 F150 and I had the help of some hopeless cowboy who had the day off from his ranch somewhere in BFE, South Dakota and we took my dog to the park. I started texting my dealer (also my best friend) and got to work on arranging a ride back to Gillette, WY where I had set up shop to do just this—throw my life away.
The dog ended up running across the highway chasing after a group of big horn sheep and in another harrowing rescue we loaded her back up into the truck and found some bar on the highway where we assessed if us two outlaw cigarette smoking, Bud light drinking, wannabe renegades would find acceptance. We bought a bottle and got drunk into the evening and fell asleep on top of the thin orange bedspread.
No sexy times, thank gawd, that was always my biggest goal collecting men to accompany me on my various pursuits of dope. I would often say come to my hotel room and then get them to bring a bottle or pizza, deny them sexual favors, and pass out to awake again to the slight smell of men’s cologne and the distinct feeling of shame. I learned a lot about the intentions of men this way, but stringing one together they started to act as assassin angels in my life, I just had to make sure I wasn’t the target.
The few days my sister had gotten me at the motel were running out at exactly at 11:00 am my dog and myself were kicked outside our room, scrambling in the lobby to charge my phone and computer desperately trying to find a ride, a home. Next door there were some Lakota (I’m not going into the tribal details, I’m not trying to be racist) folks who looked like they had a night like me and I asked first for alcohol, and then if I could stay and there until my friend arrived. They agreed and I looked around to see a few baggies of meth and I scraped the last puff of a few tiny shards into some foil, took one hit, and folded the foil into my pocket to re-use the tiny square for fentynal later.
I tried to stay as neutral and inviting as I could in the room that began to smell heavily of body odor and one girl had left the room in anger and withdrawal while a man and woman stayed and laid on the bed. I watched frozen as she started to jack him off and I didn’t know what the fuck to do. This was the last chance corral and had turned brothel so quickly I became the reluctant Matre’d. I grabbed my dog and we started walking to Wal-Mart.
I had tried to pre-plan in what fucked up ways I could for this homelessness and had asked a friend what to put on a cardboard sign. He told me “It’s never about a you, they really don’t give a shit. They want to feel good about giving you something, so make them laugh.” I grabbed some cardboard and a marker and walked to the corner. A man approached me and said he would give me a dollar for a piece of fruit. I came back out with an apple and another Lakota man hissed at me. The corner had been taken, I was shit out of luck.\
I checked my phone for the nearest liquor store and got to walking and finally found what was an overwhelmingly white establishment and I knew I could walk in undetected. I slipped a fifth into my bag and walked back to the room. The women were gone and the man sat shirtless in his bed. I asked for more dope and he politely declined a swig from my bottle, apologizing for earlier. “No big deal, we all need our dicks suck” fell out of my mouth wreaking of alcohol and we both fell asleep.
Later that evening my friend had called in some favors which is a pretty big deal in the dope game so I felt elated that I at least would get back to the town where I could get fentynal, no problem. Two friends arrived, I had met the male and the female was on the run after walking out of the halfway house. She was on parole for burning her ex boyfriends house down. No big deal, I thought. We all want to burn something down. We headed off to gamble which I equally hated watching and doing.
The first casino was full of zombies, pulling levels and selling cheap jewelry. I smoked fentynal in the car out of a little makeshift cup that the rescue friend had put together for us beginners. Just a little square of tinfoil, wrapped into a tiny cup with a handle so that you drop a pill inside and it it jumps around from the heat, you don’t lose your dope. He had also given us all metal straws with rubber tips—the tips so you don’t burn your lips and the metal straw so you can scrape later and smoke the reclaim. Can’t never say a junkie ain’t handy.
We drove onto a next casino and I had a pile of meth at this point, another favor my best friend turned dealer, and I began smoking heavily inbetween hits of fentynal and the fear started to grow. While the casinos were open, no one was around and we were starting to stick out. I kept begging we leave and finally when the light came up we started driving through the windy roads of the Black Hills back over the Wyoming border to GillAette.
I prayed on those roads and looked out the window pretty convinced my life would end within the next few minutes or definitely the next few days. I prayed for my dog, for my family, for the mess I had gotten into. After a few times switching drivers and running off the road we pulled up to my friend’s trailer where she was staying. She was curled in a tiny ball on the only open space on the couch. There was no room for me to even sit and smoke dope if I wanted.
I walked out and asked for a ride to the br where I could sit and hustle for a second and take hits of dope in the bathroom because I was hooked. Fentynal is a new level of high and a new level of low that I was swimming in and started to drown. And you can’t teach a drowning person to swim. I got a hotel room for a few days after using some victim protective services. My boyfriend(?) had pulled a gun in my face and I saw this as opportunity. A few days in another hotel to make a better plan.
A few days turned into over a month at the National 9 where my room became quite the focal point of the biggest dealers in town. I was just a pawn at this point, smoking pills handed to me by dealers waiting for the girl I had let stay with me. I couldn’t hold it together long enough to ask for help. Finally, on a Saturday I drove a UHaul with me and my dog and just a few bags down to Colorado.
It took some fucking around and fucking off to finally get myself to rehab where I stayed for 30 days and slowly started to warm up. Theres so many more stories of recovery but that’s the shit everyone wants to hear. I’m hear to tell you everything you have avoided. I am not just an addict, but I am the shadow we all have. I am the archetype of darkness and here I am shifting archetypes again to try and become who I really am: human.
the misfit west 