Hell is an 18 Hour Car Trip after a Meth Bender

Slammed: a Memoir — Chapter 4 Part 5

Dexter and Laura lived in one of a long line of tightly packed houses on Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, Queens. Though each two-story house was structurally identical, each had its own distinct personality. Their house boarded 7 or 8 actor/waiter/temps at any given time, with nothing but a few garbage cans in its small concrete lot. The house next door was The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a veritable jungle of plants and potted trees.

As Richard drove away, I felt like a puppy abandoned at a shelter. The reality of my situation grew in the pit of my stomach like I had swallowed a kettlebell.

When I slammed that final time over 12 hours earlier, I bet I would come down enough to feel somewhat normal by the time we started this car trip to Illinois.

I was wrong.

I was so fucking wrong.

I was still high. Not fun high. Just high. Incredibly high. High like I had slammed four times over the last couple days, because I fucking had.

It seemed so warm for October. My body felt like a screeching fire alarm. I nearly didn’t have enough willpower to keep my shit together. At the same time, even hours later, my body was uber sensitive, begging to be groped and grabbed and fondled.

Clearly, that couldn’t happen.

I made my way over to Jason and handed him my bags. “Morning.”

“Morning, bud. Glad you made it,” he said, taking my bags and loading them into the van.

“Yeah.” And that was it for my witty banter.

“How long of a drive do we think it is?” Allison asked. Allison, tall and blond, had a proper air about her, like she knew which fork to use at dinner. She was dressed conservative casual with a white button up blouse and light blue jeans.

“About 18 hours,” Laura said over her shoulder as she continued to talk about the route with Amy, who would be driving the other car.

With Dexter starring in the national tour of Kiss Me Kate, Laura was the de facto leader of the group. She had long straight hair the color of dark chocolate, a slim nose on an oval face, and alabaster skin. She looked like she jumped out of a rendering of Guinevere and Lancelot if Guinevere wore jeans and a black t-shirt with “princess” scrawled in pink on the back. She was very no-nonsense yet always had a fun snarky comment to break the tension if the tension needed breaking.

Jason, Allison, Laura and I would be riding in the minivan while Amy and Benjamin followed in Amy’s car. Amy was short with short, dirty blond hair and an athletic build due to her love of marathons. Benjamin was the sassy gay friend, slender and cleaver, very Jack a la Will and Grace.

I stood quietly off to the side, all my energy funneled into trying not to draw any attention, presenting an unassuming and pleasant exterior.

The more I looked at the blue minivan I was about to spend the next 18 hours in, the smaller it became.

Let’s hit the road,” Jason said.

Fuck.

Jason took the driver’s seat, Laura sat shotgun, I sat behind Jason, and Allison behind Laura. For the second time in as many hours I was crossing the George Washington Bridge. As we made our way through Fort Lee, I stared in the direction of Richard’s apartment, the only place I wanted to be from the last place I wanted to be.

As we wound our way through the townships of New Jersey, I rested my hands on my lap, closed my eyes, and took a couple of deep breaths.

It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine. I’m going to be fine.

Calming a bit, I noticed a mild ache in the crook of my right arm. I opened my eyes and looked.

Track marks.

A cluster of four spots on my vein where Jackson had slammed me, one of which had a bruise more than half an inch across.

I immediately crossed my arms and looked out the window.

Fuck.

Though panic had begun to boil deep in my stomach, I was also pressing into the crook of my arm. Every time I did, I felt a miniscule fraction of a slam, a hint of cold air on the back of my throat. Whether it was real or in my head, I didn’t care. I continued to press, attempting to will the sensation upon me, if for no other reason than perhaps it would calm me down.

An hour or so into the trip the dense suburbs began to retreat and before long we were winding through the Appalachians. The slopes and hillsides were still covered with green trees that hadn’t yet given over to fall save for a few scattered hints of bright yellows and reds. This relaxed me a bit and I felt comfortable enough to try and get some sleep. I leaned my chair back and, with my arms firmly crossed, tried to let the crash and exhaustion take me under to a blessed unconsciousness where, hopefully, I would stay for the majority of the trip.

“John? John, wake up. John!”

I woke up, annoyed. “What?” I was finally fucking sleeping.

They were all looking at me. Jason had slowed the car to a good bit under the speed limit preparing to pull over. Allison had her hand up clutching her pearls, regarding me as if I was about to explode. Laura was looking at me like she was seeing me for the first time.

“Are you ok?” Jason asked. He was looking at me through the rearview mirror. Traffic whizzed by on our left.

“What…Yeah? Why, what happened?”

“You were shaking. Like, you were seizing or something.”

“What?” I made a face like he was kidding, but looking again at Laura and Allison I realized he was not. “Shaking?”

“Yeah,” Laura said.

Allison nodded.

“Oh. Ok, well…sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re ok?” Laura asked. She was staring a hole through me.

I mustered up some conviction and composure, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sorry, I don’t know what that was about.” I shrugged as if to say “silly, isn’t it?” hoping that would end the interrogation.

Apparently, when I had fallen asleep, my head started to nod to the left till it was full on snapping back and my legs were kicking out like I was being electrocuted.

Jason accelerated back up to the speed limit and the car was silent for the next 20 minutes. I sat with my arms still crossed. By this point I was crashing hard, but now I couldn’t go to sleep? Cause I might, what? Start to seize again? We still had 16 hours to go!

Fuck!

When we stopped for a bathroom break, I stayed by the car and chain smoked.

Inside the gas station, Laura interrogated Jason.

“Are you sure he’s ok? What the hell was that?”

“Well, John… John’s a little claustrophobic. He’s got a lot of energy and he doesn’t do well in tight places.”

Not buying it. she said, “Then how did he survive on a bus for three tours?”

“Well, those buses are a lot bigger. He could get up, walk the aisle if he needed to. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.”

Best friends cover for each other, that’s just what they do, even when they don’t know what’s really going on. Despite Jason not believing what he was telling Laura any more than Laura did, it seemed to pacify the situation, and we continued on.

For the remainder of the drive I fought the increasing weight of the crash, staying awake by sheer force of will. My arms ached from having been crossed for hours, but every time Laura turned to look back at either me or Allison, I tightened them. I was convinced she’d seen my track marks at some point and was trying to catch another glimpse of them.

By the time we hit Indiana, the sun had thankfully gone down. With the interior bathed in darkness, I let my arms relax. For the first time during the trip, I finally felt somewhat comfortable. I joined the conversation, even enjoying it, portraying what I thought was my normal bubbly John energy.

I sensed that Jason knew that something was off. I could see his face in the rearview mirror every time it was lit up by lights from the highway. He was looking back at me. At least I thought he was.

Was I trying too hard? Is the light sheen of sweat on my forehead giving me away? Should I just jump from the car, tuck and roll?

Toward the end of our drive, well after midnight, my hold on reality began to slip. Allison’s seat and my seat were two separate seats so passengers could climb back to a third row, yet I was sure they were a single bench seat. I remember resting my right arm — no longer worried about my track marks — across the back of this mythical seat.

I watched long worms of purple and blue light run around the cab of the car, running along the edges of the seats and windows. It was like in the movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks when the traveling bed comes to life and light starts running along the brass frame. This didn’t alarm me in the slightest. In fact it was quite entertaining. The seizing incident seemed so long ago that I felt like it had been long forgotten by everyone. It hadn’t, of course, but this blissful delirium was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than anything that had come before in this cross county drive from hell.

Well after midnight, we pulled up to the house where Benjamin and I would be staying. The host couple, thankfully, wasn’t home. I jumped out of the van — perhaps a bit too enthusiastically — grabbed my bags, headed inside, found my assigned guest room, and shut the door behind me. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in 20 hours.

I crawled into bed ready for the crash to finally take me into a long awaited unconsciousness, out of view so that my body could kick and seize all it wanted to.

Even then, the tweak wasn’t done with me. It hung over me like a fog, ringing my memory with the thrill of each slam. I writhed in bed, silently begging, pleading, whispering for the rush of the slam to return before, at last, I passed out.

Though a good night’s sleep definitely helped, it still took me a good three or four days to really even out. As we rehearsed, I worried I was speaking too loud or laughing too hard, second guessing every little thing I did as if at any moment something I would do would tip them off and the jig would be up about my recreational activities.

What I wasn’t worried about — which perhaps any clear headed person would have been — was this weird thing happening in my eye, a flashing strobe light up in the corner of my peripheral vision. And the tips of a couple digits on my fingers felt tingly, like they had fallen asleep. Yet these went away after about a week as I leveled out, so I paid them no mind.

What didn’t go away was a little blemish, a small pimple, on the side of my right knee. Try as I might, it just didn’t want to pop. It was annoying, but I didn’t think much more about it, sure it would go away like the other weird symptoms had.

Once we were into week two of rehearsal, I was back to normal — or at least as close to normal I could be, never losing that low thrum of excitement to get back to the city in a few short weeks to pick up where I had left off.

In the meantime, we put up a pretty enjoyable, silly murder mystery. Laura directed and played the victim everybody hated and everybody had a motive to kill. Her murder was revealed by lifting a serving dish lid to find her “severed” head presented like a Christmas ham.

I played a Peruvian parrot connoisseur, as in I enjoyed eating them. In my little segment where I tell my character’s story — dropping clues suggesting I might be the killer — I sang Skylark by Johnny Mercer, at the end of which I “sneezed” out a couple parrot feathers. I always felt it was a corny gag, but the audience loved it.

Jason decided to take his character for a test drive as Lenny since we were doing Of Mice and Men the next summer, playing a bubbly, innocent child in the body of a large man. His story portion of the show had him singing Our Love is Here to Stay, only Dexter didn’t write any lines for him. He just wrote “Jason does monologue.”

Through rehearsals and into performances, Jason improvised a story about how he fell down a well as a child. Until he was rescued, he kept himself company by singing one of his favorite songs. “It’s very clear. Our love is here to stay…”

Man, was I both impressed and jealous. Like I’ve mentioned, I hate improv. I’m just bad at it. I become crippled by the pressure to be funny, terrified I’ll say the wrong thing and ruin the scene. I cling to the lines on the page, never straying, not having the first clue what to do if someone or something goes off script. That Jason could just make up a story, and a good one at that, on the fly? Having a best friend who was as talented as Jason was awesome…and intimidating.

In the end, Killer Jazz was a rousing success! There was indeed a hunger for theatrical entertainment in the corn fields surrounding Dexter’s home town.

So we finished up and looked ahead, first to Dexter and Laura’s wedding in November, then a meeting in December to officially found a new theater company.

The drive back to NYC wasn’t nearly as torturous. The Appalachians had given over completely to fall, the hillsides blanketed with magnificent spatterings of golds and yellows, auburns and oranges, and impossible reds.

Then back through the townships of New Jersey, over the GWB, Queens, bags, hugs and goodbyes, then a long subway trip back to my apartment.

The minute I got home, I called Richard.

A short while later, he slammed me. I watch myself in a mirror I had positioned by his bed. I watched my pupils dilate, my face and body become flush. I watched myself writhe with heat and pleasure once more.

This is where I wanted to be. Here, in this abandon.

All the while, in Seattle, in Illinois, while I played my part, inhabiting the increasingly fragile mask of my former self, I dreamed of being slammed, enthralled, overcome, at once powerful and powerless,

This is who I was now.

This was home.

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