First Step of NA / AA: We admitted that we were powerless over drugs / alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable.
Doctor please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
... She goes runnin' for the shelter of her mother's little helper...
-"Mother's Little Helper" by the Rolling Stones
I have no memories from between the third and the seventh of each month for a-year-and-a-half-stretch of my early twenties. I have chosen those words carefully. It’s not that I retain hazy or occluded memories for these periods. Neither do I possess fragmented recollections, when – as after an alcohol-induced blackout – the early moments as well as the most intense ones punch through the amnesia, and some of the rest can be recovered with prompting. Rather, I am utterly unable to access any memories whatsoever from these timespans. They have been lost to the void (presumably the same one that devours the memories of the dead): It is as though someone else lived them.
On the third day of every month, I would skip my morning lecture – the only one that I ever missed – so that I could take the earliest bus to the grocery store where I filled my Xanax prescription. I would arrive six or seven minutes after the pharmacy section opened, always worried that appearing on the dot would prompt a douchebag “virtuous” pharmacist to call my doctor and report my blatant drug-seeking (by contrast, a college student showing up on the same day of each month at five minutes after 8:30 a.m. opening time, rain or shine, with absolutely no variation, was the height of subtlety; pure genius).
My ritual was to drop off the script, inquire about how long it would be until it was ready for pickup, and then pretend to contemplate whether I should stay to wait for it to be filled or come back to pick it up later.
“I guess I’ll stay,” I’d always declare in as nonchalant a tone as I could muster. Then, I’d head to the bakery to buy a Boston Creme donut, following which I would bide my time in other sections of the store until the fifteen- or twenty-minute waiting period had elapsed. I would force myself to linger for an additional five or six minutes, and please believe me that those final few ticks of the clock felt longer than entire two-hour molecular biology lectures. I would never eat the donut until after I left the store with my script, incidentally – I wanted those first couple of pills to hit on an empty stomach so as to have maximal impact.
And this time, it would only be a couple of pills, I assured myself. Because this month, it would be different. I would space the script out, make it last. Of course, the day of filling the script justified some indulgence, but I wouldn’t, couldn't let myself embark on another benzo bender. I’d limit myself to 1.5 milligrams, a magic number that would leave me in control of my faculties. Mostly. I'd give it 4 to 6 hours to wear off, and then maybe take another 2 or 2.5 milligrams before bed.
In the days before my script was filled, I would review my planned dosing schedule scientifically, reverently, ritualistically. I couldn’t let it happen again. And as I waited for my script to be filled, I could almost taste the bitter dust that the generic pills made when they knocked against each other inside the bottle.
On the bus ride back to campus, as the first 1.5 milligrams of serenity started to kick in and I finally began to feel comfortable in my own skin, I assured myself that another 1 or 1.5 milligrams couldn’t hurt. My tolerance had increased, of course, and I’d failed to properly account for this fact. Plus, using more benzos would help me to reduce my intake of dope and thus spend less money on that diabolically expensive drug (I laugh derisively as I write that now).
Before too long, I'd concocted a veritable cornucopia of reasons for taking more benzos than I had planned to: I’d had too much coffee that morning, or too much food the night before, or was too stressed by my prelim or my boyfriend or whatever crisis I could conjure up. Sometimes I was still humiliated by what I’d done between the third and the seventh of the previous month and thus required the extra Xanax to round off the jagged edges of the memories that I didn’t have from that. That’s what the medicine was prescribed for, after all: To reduce anxiety.
Whatever my justification, my inner memory track inevitably faded to black by the end of the 30-minute bus ride back to campus. Sometimes the last memory that my brain encoded was of me munching on my Boston Creme donut between the first and second rounds of pills; sometimes it was of the oval-shaped, blue pills jostling around inside the bottle or lined up in the crease of my palm.
Just as predictably, I’d wake up four days later. Scratch that – “wake up” is lazy language. I’d come to back to myself. I’d suddenly become aware of myself again. I’d reappear. A wrenching, mounting panic would swallow me as I realized that it had happened again: I’d gone into another fugue. I’d check the date and time, then search my apartment for the missing pills, because surely they were there somewhere: I hadn’t gone through 60 milligrams of alprazolam in four days on top of my daily heroin habit. It wasn’t possible.
When I failed to find them in the pockets of my pants or scattered beneath my comforter, I’d begin a frantic search of my text messages and emails for evidence of places where I might have misplaced the remaining pills; the truth is that I’d be too panicked about where my script had gone to feel properly mortified by what I found there. Besides, it is difficult to feel shame about something that one doesn’t remember doing; I found that imputing the proper horror and humiliation after the fact to be surprisingly difficult. (However, months and years later, when those emotions did surface in unpredictable fits and starts during my stints in treatment, they were vicious, overpowering, and intensely physicalized. To this day, realizing what I did during some of those benzo binges brings an uncharacteristic heat to my cheeks and forehead; I tense everything that can be tensed without showing it as I write this now).
The first time that I traded sex for drug money, I found out about it three days after the fact during one of these desperate, seventh-of-the-month forensic forays into my messages from the prior four days. Specifically, I discovered that I had messaged an older guy who I had met at a bar a few weeks ago, offered him fun if he wanted to be “generous.”
“How generous?” had been his reply, and the “60” that I sent back, followed by his address and our subsequent communications, let me know that we had sealed the deal. Moreover, it had apparently gone well enough for him to ask if I’d be up for meeting again in the future.
During these benzo binges, I sent the graphic nudes that I used to mock other guys for offering before they even introduced themselves. I submitted lewd images with my face in them, heedless of the possibility that they could be circulated by someone else or the very real chance that they could resurface to haunt me in the future. Likewise, I unblocked and messaged lovers who I had sworn I would never talk to again; I sent deranged, vitriolic messages to friends and acquaintances, accusing them of lying to me and abandoning me, causing some of them to block me. To this day, I sometimes have strange, gloaming recollections of houses I have been in and men that I have been with whose names I don’t know and whose faces don’t fully register; they come to me apropos of nothing, often as I enter or exit sleep, like misplaced answers to crossword puzzle clues.
For Part II, click here.
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