My Story

I’m the last guy most people would ever suspect would have a problem with drugs or alcohol. There’s a family picture taken in probably 1971 and I swear my little sister and I look like we’re sitting in the laps of the most optimistic young couple in America. We were LDS -”Mormons” -living in Idaho and Utah. As a kid I earned money delivering the newspaper, mowing lawns, and shoveling snow. I got reasonable grades though my test scores indicated that I should have done much better. I was an Eagle Scout.

I was also hopelessly unhappy, terminally unique, and, I see now, doomed to look for a solution outside myself to the problems I had inside. Everything worked to a degree. I liked to drink. I took my first drink at age 8 and by the time I was in high school I was regular binge drinker. I always drank to get drunk. I liked pot. The first time I smoked pot I was 14 years old. By age 16 I had become a daily pot smoker. It made me comfortable. It helped me relax. It made the overwhelming problems at home seem to not matter. I would go for extended periods without smoking or drinking, usually because it was inconvenient or I was simply too broke, but I’d always come back to it and never in moderation.

I left home when I was 17, thrown out of the house by my step-father, and unable to make a go of things in Boise, I threw a few clothes into a duffel bag and hopped the next flight to Los Angeles. I did whatever I had to do to survive. Whatever I had to do. And my use of marijuana and alcohol increased. It made life bearable. I continued like that well into my 20s. A friend correctly identified me as a “potential alcoholic” and for awhile I attended AA meetings. Though I had begun to experience some pretty unhappy consequences due to my use, none of them were enough to make me “fully concede”.

I smoked crack one time and knew I had better never use it again because I could see it becoming a problem. Then I did a line of crystal meth. For the first time in my life I felt OK inside my skin. I was suddenly optimistic in a way I never had been before. I was so excited to be alive and be in the world. I knew I’d found my answer. I had found what was missing in my life. I vowed that nothing would ever come between me and that feeling again.

I’ve been trying to think of the polite way to describe the next part of my story, the PG version, and I can’t seem to do it, so I won’t go into any detail except to say that I had ended a relationship with someone whom I had loved very much. That whole relationship had been prior to my methamphetamine use. I “sought out sordid places” to ease the pain of the breakup and it was there that I was introduced to meth.

All the feelings of sorrow over the lost relationship vanished. All my shame over being gay vanished. My fear of people vanished. I felt brilliant and sexy and I didn’t want that feeling to end. I immediately became a weekend partier. Coming down was too hard, though, so I began using during the week. In very short order I lost my job, lost my apartment, and lost my mind.

I began making the rounds of sanitariums. By a bizarre stroke of luck I happened to still have really good health insurance so I was admitted to a very good psychiatric hospital in West Los Angeles. There I was diagnosed with major depression, but I refused to admit to any drug use. I knew that had been the source of the problem but there was no way I was going to admit to it. After a week I was released. Within a week I was back. The next time they released me I was sent to a group home in Torrance.

By this time I was very clear that I must never touch methamphetamine again and was resolved not to do so. Not too long after moving to the group home I met and began dating an attorney who was somewhat older than me but who was obviously smitten. I thought he was adorable and he obviously had the means to keep me in the manner to which I wished to become accustomed, so when he asked me to move in with him I did. From the beginning of our relationship I had been honest with C. about my problems with drugs and how important it was to me that I never return to that life.

He agreed. He was supportive. I enrolled in college and I got good grades. He was a fan of theater and in sharing that I discovered one of my great passions. We went on fantastic vacations together. My favorite was a trip through the high Sierras in Yosemite. It is still one of the highlights of my experience, but on the way home C. told me how much he wanted to try meth; how my description of it had made him interested in doing it, and he suggested that we pick some up in LA on our way home.

I felt like I’d been stabbed in the heart. I don’t remember ever feeling so unloved. There had been nothing except loving this man standing in between me and using again and so, of course, I agreed.

Methamphetamine quickly assumed a great role in C’s and my lives. He became a slut. I became resentful. It ended badly and violently.

I was unable to stop using and I continued like that for a year, frequently exchanging sex and drugs for the sound of a heart beating next to me to help kill the pain. It didn’t work, of course. I just continued getting crazier. Somewhere in there I landed in a psych ward again. This time I was taken there by the police. In the end I decided that I couldn’t get sober on my own. I needed family near me and I came home to Boise.

Of course I still didn’t have any sort of permanent solution and being in a new town I was anxious to meet new men. I found the couple of local gay bars and frequented them. After I became employed by the call center of a local bank my drinking rapidly increased. When I realized that I was spending $40 a night at the bar, I decided to start carrying a bottle of vodka under the front seat of my car. That way I could be drunk by the time I walked in. It only made me drink more.

I would wake up in the morning and throw up in the shower. I’d go to work hung over. After work, walking to my car, I would begin having dry heaves, knowing that I’d soon be poisoning myself all over again. I’d pray for my car to take me home, to eat a decent meal, and to go to bed early, but my car would never make a left at the first light to get me there. It always went straight and it always went straight to the bar.

It didn’t take long to get a DUI. I bailed myself out of jail. When my check bounced I used my position at the bank to transfer the money out of my mom’s account into mine to cover the check. I continued transferring money to cover my ever increasing drinking; always with the intent of paying it back, but never doing it.

Five months later, when my mom noticed the missing money, I was fired from my job. I abandoned my apartment and started staying with friends, trying to elude the police. Eventually I was found and arrested. I was convicted of my first felony and placed on probation for 5 years and ordered to pay restitution. I was also ordered to attend AA meetings 3 times a week.

I complied with all the requirements for the first four years. I paid back the money. I went to the three meetings. I had a sponsor, but I never read the book and never did more than the first 3 steps. The fourth year I ran into crystal meth again and picked up right where I left off.

Weeks before I was to be released on probation I was arrested for burglary and possession. I had “borrowed” money from the till at work to do a drug deal. Felonies number two and three. This time I was sent to prison, but only for six months, and placed on probation for 7 years. I made an effort to stay sober but still wouldn’t take steps. Within a year and a half I was using again. That pattern continued on and off for another four and a half years, always becoming worse. By the 5th year I was using daily. I had graduated from snorting to smoking and at the end, injecting. I was maintaining my habit by dealing.

By the 6th year after prison my life was a complete catastrophe. I had lost my apartment and everything in it. I was again exchanging sex and drugs for the sound of a heart beating next to me, hoping that it would warm the chilling vapor of loneliness I felt at all times. By this time I had been on supervised felony probation for 11 years. It had been 14 years since I’d had a boyfriend -C. being the last. I was selling drugs to support my habit and occasionally eat. I was sofa surfing. And I had absconded from supervision.

Then, on the night of my birthday, I was supposed to spend the evening with the straight boy I thought I loved; the last person who treated me like a person, sort of (not really), the last person who seemed to be able to see the real me underneath all the wreckage. We were really in a commercial exchange, of course. I was exchanging an 8 ball and a blow job a day for permission to create the illusion of intimacy out of thin air and a heartbeat. He was exchanging his heartbeat and his body for drugs. I maintained my denial and he maintained his high. He promised to pick me up at 3 PM. And he didn’t show up.

Three hours late and he told me he’d be there “soon.”  Six hours late and he yelled at me when I called. Nine hours late and his phone was turned off. I set out to find him. Trudging the frozen streets of Boise’s North End, looking for him in all the places he frequented, the noise in my head, the grief and the anger and the fear were overwhelming. He was nowhere to be found.

It was 3 AM. Snow began to fall. Exhausted, I sat down on the curb on the northwest corner of 6th and Pueblo streets, under a street lamp and gazed across the street at the Christmas lights in the window of the little 1940’s clapboard cottage and I couldn’t figure out how a life like that had slipped through my grasp. I knew I was at least as smart as the people in that house. I’m smarter than most people, but most people have lives, and loves, and homes, and jobs. And here I was, at 3 o’clock in the morning, in improper attire, in the snow, with all this noise in my head and with all this anger and fear and grief, and sitting there on that corner, in the night, in the snow, profoundly alone, I began to cry. Wail, really.

I could finally see that nothing was ever going to be different. Nothing was going to be better. No one had loved me in 14 years and no one ever would. I was incapable of staying sober. I was incapable of having a job and a companion and a house with Christmas lights in the window. My willpower had always failed me. The greatest need and the deepest desire for things to be different hadn’t been enough to effect a change. Please, I prayed, please let me die.

And everything became very quiet. The noise in my head stopped for a moment. I felt peaceful for a moment and the cool blue streetlight and the snow settled on me. I finally saw myself clearly. I had tried for 25 years to find my solution in drugs and alcohol and for 25 years I failed; had tried to control and enjoy drugs an alcohol and couldn’t. Nothing I could do was ever going to change that and nothing I could do ever would.

Then a tiny idea crept into my mind. There had been one thing I hadn’t really tried. There were people who had been where I was who had gotten out. And I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in, asked His protection and care with the desperation of the dying, and I went home and went to bed.

The next afternoon I woke up and I called someone and asked for help. And I have never looked back. I have given myself without reservation to a program of recovery and, in spite of the bumps in the road, I can see, everyone I know can see, that there is something at work in my life that is greater than anything I was ever able to do on my own.

My journey began here.