Chapter 5
In my active addiction, I felt like that nameless kid in Blood Meridian who joined the Glanton gang and rode shotgun on their descent into madness. The Glanton gang was a pack of sadistic scalpers Cormac McCarthy described as a bunch of “vicious-looking humans.” They remind me of the psychotic tweakers I ran with—shot up, toothless, and looking like they crawled out of a horror movie. Some had tattoos on their faces, one looked like the Phantom of the Opera because he was a burn victim, and one had a short little T-Rex arm because he got shot and the jailhouse surgeon used some of his butt skin to sew it back on.
The Glanton gang was hired to hunt Apache, but somewhere along the way, they decided why stop there? They started murdering everyone. Random people. People who weren’t threats. Native Americans. The Sonoran Cavalry. Women, teenagers, children, babies. They even took out their rage on mules and puppies.
PURE MADNESS
You know the drugs are bad when everyone in your circle is losing their minds, or when a substance that’s supposed to be colorless and odorless tastes like jet fuel and smells like a dead body. Looking back, it’s hard to say exactly what chemicals were in the meth we were doing, but whatever the mix, the combination of sleep deprivation and a subculture built on paranoia and violence sent us all into a downward spiral. Nobody walked away unscathed. Not a single one of us.
THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
I may or may not have been a little delusional during my intake process at the facility. The people closest to me know all about my history of hallucinations.
In the past, my drug induced delusions were so extreme that I was misdiagnosed with “delusional disorder” because I needed more time to withdraw from the substances prior to the psychological assessment. Turns out, 72 hours wasn’t enough time for me to come off the drugs so that the clinician could separate psychosis and give an accurate assessment of my psychological state.
HEARING THINGS
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud talked about how he heard voices in his everyday life that amounted to nothing.
Freud wrote:
“During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city—I was a young man at the time—I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice, I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious inquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened.”
The voices Freud admitted to hearing weren’t any cause for concern obviously, but it’s interesting that so many people report hearing more overwhelming voices in moments of danger. Freud, for instance, wrote in On Aphasia that he heard voices attempting to help him out of danger on two separate occasions:
“I remember having twice been in danger of my life, and each time the awareness of the danger occurred to me quite suddenly. On both occasions I felt this was the end, and while otherwise my inner language proceeded with only indistinct sound images and slight lip movements, in these situations of danger I heard the words as if somebody was shouting them into my ear, and at the same time I saw them as if they were printed on a piece of paper floating in the air.”
I’ve never experienced letters dancing before my eyes, but I’ve heard voices that stopped me from committing suicide.
SEEING THINGS
The last two years of my addiction came with a special bonus feature: full-blown visual hallucinations. I started seeing kill houses—houses that felt like they were used to murder people. Steel blinds. Plastic-lined floors. Mysterious construction noises outside that could easily cover up loud sounds from inside the house. And hey, maybe some of those places really were kill houses. Problem was, I always thought I was the intended victim.
My brother and I had an inside joke where, whenever we saw each other, we’d ask, “What day is it?” We weren’t talking about the day of the week. We were talking about how many days it had been since we last slept. By day three, things got weird. By day five, it was Doomsday.
THE 72 HOUR BLACK OUT
The facility’s 72-Hour Blackout was basically a forced nap, which, after Day Five Doomsday, was a welcome change. They brought me food, monitored my showers, and let me sleep off the withdrawal. I think I showered once, which is honestly pretty good for a tweaker.
On the third day, they released me into the general population, where I realized that some of the people from my blackout dreams were real. The “torturer” I hallucinated hooking me up to a machine? That was just the night nurse from the facility next door. Turns out, she wasn’t performing sadistic experiments—she was just checking my vitals.
drink your milk 