Gay Meth Addict Starts Writing Down His Trauma

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 9 Part 3

The day before Thanksgiving, I stood on the back stoop of Dexter and Laura’s house in Springfield, Illinois. A thick white blanket deadened all noise save for occasional car tires crunching snow like Styrofoam.

Big puffy flakes fell endlessly — their descent calm, slow, and gentle in the still air.

It was quiet. Peaceful.

My Crazy for You denim show jacket, with fraying cuffs and torn shoulder, was doing what it could to keep me warm, along with my extra layers underneath. Smoke from my cigarette drifted up toward lazy snowflakes. My exhales dissipated smoke into a winter wonderland.

I realized in that moment… I was happy.

It had only been a couple of weeks since my nadir of guilt, shame and grief had me reaching out to the only person I thought I could talk to, Richard. I wanted only to be held, comforted, lied to, told everything would be okay. But Richard was wracked by cascading psychoses and unable to be anything close to a friend, let alone comforting.

Now I was back in Springfield rehearsing a cute holiday show about Christmas travelers stranded in an airport where holiday songs and shenanigans ensue. I would drive around with Laura, a fellow Christmas mega-nerd, singing along full-voice with every carol on the radio. Tomorrow night, I would sit down with Dexter, Laura, and the other members of the cast for a love-filled and food-filled Thanksgiving.

I was under no delusion I had arrived at a happy ending.

Far from it. I had once again stopped using shortly before the trip out to Springfield. The expected crash and withdrawal were more manageable, more of a “bad trip to the dentist” unpleasant: something to suffer through but becoming more routine.

I absolutely planned on using again when I returned to New York. Perhaps I toyed with the idea that “Maybe this time. Maybe I won’t use again. Maybe I can stay clean.” But this was fully conscious wishful thinking. Like, “I’ll start my diet on Monday.”

Even though I wasn’t using in that moment, I was still a meth addict. I was still the same person I had been a few weeks prior when, defeated, tears drying on my face, I curled up in a ball and fell asleep on Richard’s couch.

I was still the same person.

Only now… I was… happy.

Even after all I’d been through, after all these frightening, devastating days, I was still able to be happy.

I had to write this down!

I crushed out my cigarette, tossed the butt into a coffee-can ashtray, and headed in. After shedding several layers, I sat down at Dexter and Lauras’s dining table, opened a notebook with a yellow cover, found where I had left off, and wrote:

“I am happy.”

Writing never really interested me. Growing up, I was far too enthralled with theater and performing to have room for anything else. Writing was academic. It was school work. Writing was for papers, book reports, tests to regurgitate knowledge.

Writing wasn’t an art form or a craft at least as far as I was taught. Even if it had been, there was little chance a hyperactive like me could have focused to pursue it, not when finding immediate gratification in performing. So, I came away from high school with a less than basic knowledge of even simple grammar.

When I tested HIV positive, I developed a desperate need to tell my story. I felt compelled to write, lack of grammar be damned.

It started with emails months before my trip to Springfield.

I compulsively started composing an email to an actor I worked with on my first professional job. He was handsome with a shaved head, a charming Texas drawl, kind eyes and an even kinder heart. I had very much wanted to be his friend — more than friends had I not been with Henry at the time. Yet, as nice as he was to me, I was awkward as fuck. I saw him as out of my league on both counts.

After more than an hour of pounding stream-of-consciousness into my keyboard, I came to my senses. My screen was a giant block of incoherent text nearly devoid of punctuation, splattered red with squiggly lines denoting spelling errors.

I deleted the email without sending it, leaving this actor undisturbed and unknowing of how his kindness nearly bombard him with a screed about sex, drugs, and trauma — from a lost soul who desperately needed a friend.

The next instance was in response to a message asking “Hey, how are you doing?”

This was from a guy I had chatted with several times. We both desperately wanted to hook up, PNP, and fuck each other’s brains out. For some reason we never had the chance. Since he actually asked, I decided to tell him, still pretty stream-of-consciousness, but with a touch more structure.

In one email I told him about Richard and Jackson’s arrest. In another, I wrote about Richard’s psychoses. I was in the middle of composing a third email where I think I started over at the beginning when he responded.

“Sounds like you’ve been through a lot! Listen, I’m clean now and I lead a Crystal Meth Anonymous Group. I think it would be great if you could come. You don’t have to share, you can just listen.”

Absolutely not!

I responded with a polite version of “thanks, but no thanks” and cut off communication. The only thing that gave me even a brief reprieve from the shit tornado swirling around my life was the slam. No way in the deepest circle of hell was I was giving that up.

Yet, even though I didn’t want to talk to Mr. Crystal Meth Anonymous, I wanted to keep writing my story.

So, when I took the subway to get my third shot of penicillin for the syphilis, I brought a small spiral notebook with a green cover and a pen with me and started writing.

*Original handwritten draft

Well here I am, which in this case means the 190st stop on the A line. Got to go and get my third shot of peneciln in order to get rid of this pesky case of syflis. Usually people only get one but for people who happen to be HIV posative like myself, well they don’t play together very well and for some reason 3 oh so wonderfully comfortable, not painful at all, fucking needle the size of my finger, shots seem to do the trick.

*Edited for clarity.

As I’m now on the subway train, I wonder if wearing a long sleeve black shirt in the sweltering sauna that is the New York City subway system during the summer could be giving cause for people to stare? What if I had worn a short sleeve shirt and let my needle track marks be seen? Would they have gone mostly unnoticed? Would anyone actually be looking for them and look that closely? Would they care?

I’m not sure why I’m here. Not on the subway, but where I am in my life. In less than two years I have had every sense of reality, of the human condition, and perhaps mostly of self, tested, abused, shaken, inflated, and pushed aside. Two weeks and one day ago I found out that I am HIV positive. I just thought I needed hand moisturizer. That, hopefully, will make more sense later in my story.

“My story.” …goddamn it.

I guess now might be a good time to start at the beginning. Whatever the hell that is.

The entire subway ride down to Chelsea and while I sat in the clinic waiting room, I wrote. I wrote about the first night I tried meth.

It’s not very surprising to me that the beginning of this story is, in itself, an end. So the irony begins. To invoke Sophia Petrillo, “Picture it, New York City, Spring, 2003.”

As well as having just received my penicillin shot.

Mother Fucking, Goddamn, syphilis is a pain in my ass. It’s three times the pain thanks to my new STD buddy.

As I left the clinic, I kept writing. I scrawled, filling page after page, while walking down 9th Avenue. It’s a miracle I didn’t walk into traffic.

Stopping occasionally to see if some ATM would tell me a different story and bequeath me with a little cash to get cigarettes or something to eat, I found myself roughly 25 blocks south. Father Demo Square on 6th Avenue in the Village. I sat on a park bench and continued to write, filling every page with every detail I could remember.

As the sun began to set, it threw a warm amber light on apartments buildings and Village businesses. Then it snuck behind the downtown skyline still fractured and gaping with the missing Twin Towers.

I flipped through the notebook, surprised by how many pages I had filled with chicken scratch. I had so much more to write, but I was getting painfully hungry and needed to head home.

As I continued to write on the A Train back uptown, I came to a life- altering realization.

For over two years prior to the spring of 2003, as far as my life and career was concerned, my career provided me with the only occurrence of a life. My battle cry was “I want to be a storyteller.”

I pause to think on that.

For now I am telling my story.

Reader, bear with me, I’m having a bit of a moment. For the first time in my life I feel my story is worth telling, as all stories are or they don’t get told. More to the point, until this moment I did not realize that, not only do I want to tell my story, now I have a story to tell. I have my story to tell.

I just wish this moment of realization didn’t include being so hungry.

There was a strange motivation in my story, fucked up as it was, being interesting, as if I was finally interesting.

For a few months, I wrote sporadically but passionately. I found returning to a chronological telling of my origin story difficult, in part due to events happening to me in the moment.

Like when I’d been awake for three straight days:

Today is interesting to say the very least. I’ve been wearing my sunglasses on the subway again. Not to hide. I just want to spare people who need not gaze on the proof that Medusa has a brother. Which is definitely who I am after I have been awake for three days.

That’s right, three whole days.

I believe at this point one can be declared legally insane. I’m not surprised cause I don’t really feel like I have all my marbles at the moment.

Strange things happen when you have been awake for this long. Especially when Miss Tina is helping you burn the midnight oil. One of the first signs of sleep deprivation is the background noise: the “business” of the picture transferred by the eye and ear to your brain. The things you never even think about. The sounds made by the piano music when you’re in a restaurant. The pulse of the swinging door to the kitchen as it does an endless back and forth. Conversations being had at other tables. The brain processes this information instinctually. It knows what to do automatically with this sea of white noise.

This artificially created state that I’m currently in, however, goes beyond fatigue. The brain becomes tired and confused. Consequently, background noise becomes incorrectly processed by the brain. The sound of an air conditioner becomes a conversation being had in another room. I hear commercials playing on a TV that I’m not watching, when in fact the TV isn’t even on. A small distant bump causes me to think someone is knocking on the front door when there is nobody there. Combined with any and all levels of paranoia, this sleep deprived delusional state can become stressful and often frightening.

There was the rather unfortunate hook up with Bug Chaser Ted:

Then he started talking about how “hot” it was that I got “pozed up” and how he had wished it had been him who had “impregnated me” and “filled me with his babies.”

I even began to wax philosophical:

Nothing is without cost and we all have a price. We are the cost.

To have no reaction to every action is both an insane expectation as well as one of the main qualities of the human race.

That is what separates us from the animals. The honest naive hope that action will stand alone. Then the horrid surprise when its reaction comes. Yet, simple as the connection is, the disorder and despair that follows, however cliché and uncalled for, cuts the flesh of the mind no less torturously. It is in fact heightened by consequence’s unavoidable occurrence foreseen when action was taken.

Unfortunately the reaction’s blow is not softened by this. It’s doubled by the image of obvious consequences being seen by one and all. To all, thinking then troubles should then be lessened. To the one, solely knowing that troubles are unbearable and borne alone.

It wasn’t until I was on my way to Springfield for Thanksgiving, with a fresh new spiral notebook with a grey cover, that I could start to really focus on my story beyond what was happening to me in the moment.

I began writing as the bus pulled out of Times Square Port Authority and didn’t stop till I was in Springfield. Even as night fell, I would continue to write by the light of passing street lamps, haltingly but enthusiastically.

During the month I spent back in Springfield, I was able to cover nearly everything that had happened to me from the moment I took my first hit right up to my breakdown at Richard’s where I desperately wanted my mommy. Now, holiday show closing, I was facing a trip back to NYC, unsure of where my story would lead next.

And I still wanted my mommy.

But I wanted more than that.

When I began writing, I saw my story as beginning with my first hit of meth. I derided everything that came before as naïve, unimportant, and inconsequential.

These past two years have dwarfed everything I’ve experienced previously in my life. All my special memories and moments now seem so juvenile, silly, and very worldly naive. I look back and see all too clearly that I have been cast out of Eden, never to return.

But now, much more clear headed, I knew my origin story happened long before I ever knew what meth was. It was my family’s story.

It was the story of two loving parents who persevered.

Persevered when one child developed a dangerous condition where he bruised to the touch.

Persevered as another child suffered a stroke at age 13.

Persevered even as a third son was taken from them at age 5.

They persevered, and I knew they had persevered, but because I was too young or not yet born to remember any of it, I had never heard from their lips how they persevered.

I decided to change that.

I traded in my bus tickets back to New York for tickets to Billings, Montana.

I was going to wish my parents Merry Christmas on Christmas Day in person.

Before I came out to Springfield, the only thing I wanted more than anything in the world was a hug from my mom.

It was time to get that hug!

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