Not long after Susan and I got strung out on
morphine she went to work at a topless bar. At first she fooled around
with dancing a little bit. When she found out the waitresses consistently
made more money than the dancers she switched to waiting tables.
I put aside any jealous thoughts I had about her working around sexually
aroused men and accepted her decision. I was distressed about her
being at work in a topless bar every day, but the thought also excited
me. It didn’t take long, however, for me to understand why she had
been so upset about me being gone all the time. I hated every minute
I had to spend at home without her.
Susan told me all about her job. She
liked taking money from men who were desperate to have sex. She became
experienced in the art of sucking up to their egos so she could make more
money. She told me her dominant side took great pleasure in stringing
them along only to give them nothing in the end. She got off on the
tease, on denying them what they wanted. I got off on hearing her
tell me about it. Susan often came home super hot and bothered, and
I loved to accommodate her.
Susan asked me to come to work with her and
meet some of her friends. I had met Natalie before. She was
a friend of Scott and Aaron. When I saw her at the club I thought
she was somebody else. I thought there was some mistake. The
girl at the club looked like a fallen angel. Natalie was petite.
She had long brown hair in those days. She was good looking.
She had a large fairy with beautiful butterfly wings tattooed on her ass.
Natalie soon became Susan’s best friend, and I liked that just fine.
In the past I had been turned off on topless
bars by some of my experiences in New Orleans. A large number of
strippers in any given joint will be drug addicts. In New Orleans
they were hard core junkies. I thought it was depressing to see women
take off their clothes just because they needed some more dope. I
thought the practice degraded the woman and reeked of male hegemony.
As I got older I came to see the degradation and the humiliation as something
very erotic, precisely because of how wrong it is from an egalitarian viewpoint.
I tried to explain to Susan that the business
was degrading to the woman. She showed me an opinion with a lot more
depth. “It’s the men who lose more face,” she said. “Displays of
nudity are only natural, but only a supreme loser would pay to see something
he should be able to get for free. There isn’t any shame in letting
people see your beauty.” She went on to say that all the girls she
knew felt superior to the males because they could twist them around their
little fingers and make them pay.
“What do you think about me?” I asked her.
“I can watch all I want and I will never pay a penny.”
“You’re different. You’re special.”
“That’s a good answer,” I said with a laugh.
“You can keep me twisted around your little finger all you want.
I love it.”
***
The first party Susan and I had with her friends
blew my mind. There were four busty and curvaceous women in my bedroom
doing cocaine. I knew that nothing sexual would happen with that
many women present, but I was still grooving out on how much sexual potential
existed in that room. I wanted to guzzle every last drop of it.
One of the girls was called Goldie, because of her hair. She leaned
over in front of me and asked me to give her another hit of rock.
She wet her lips and looked directly at my crotch. Her eyes gave
me an open invitation I could not bring myself to give into. In my
mind I could see her on her knees in front of me, looking back at me over
her shoulder. The thought was so pretty. The idea sent chills
down my spine and heat into my loins. And then they all left Susan,
Natalie and I alone.
Natalie always came across as a shy girl,
unless you made her mad. She was quiet as a mouse. That probably
owed to her constant paranoia. Natalie had a lot of things to be
paranoid about. Her brother went out of his way to be protective,
to the point of compulsion. He was one of the founding members of
the white boy street gang Three Blind Mice. Natalie also had an on-again
off-again boyfriend she was involved with. His name was Corey.
Corey was also obsessive and compulsive when it came to Natalie.
Since Natalie perpetually did things they didn’t like (drugs, stripping,
tricks) they were always looking for her to straighten out whoever she
was with. On top of that she did enough dope to kill an ordinary
fraternity boy. These things combined to mean she rarely spoke loudly.
She usually listened for car doors. If you made an effort to find
out the things she thought, you would find out she was super cool.
Natalie lived a hard life. She started dancing at sixteen.
She turned tricks when she felt like it. Those things depressed her
a lot. She used alcohol and drugs to medicate the pain. Deep
down she was sweet and innocent, like a young girl. She even looked
like a young girl, but she was all woman.
After the other girls left Susan asked Natalie
if she wanted to try morphine. Natalie responded in the affirmative.
By now you probably know the routine I went through to ruin other people’s
lives. I fixed her up, tied her off and injected her. She vomited
repeatedly, like a lot of people do. She stayed in our bed with us
that night. We all slept well together. She went to work with
Susan and came home with Susan when they got off. We came to be very
close to Natalie. We spent so much time together. We shared
so much (or she shared so much with me). We all wanted a better life
and to get off of drugs.
“I wonder what the hell happiness is.
I’ve been getting fucked up my whole life,” Natalie said.
I have never forgotten that because it summed
up all of my thoughts at the time. I had a hard time talking to Natalie
about it. I was too eaten up with self-loathing to open up and discuss
my feelings with anybody. The common factor we all understood was
that life is pain, and being a junkie is twice the pain of a normal life.
Natalie told us, over and over, “No matter
what happens promise me that you will both be there for me. If something
bad should happen I want us all to be there together.”
I slept next to Natalie for many months and
never tried to get into her pants. I considered her a very dear friend.
Besides, as boring as it may sound, I was always faithful to Susan.
That did not mean I did not desire Natalie. She was a very attractive
woman. I kept my desires to myself out of respect for our friendship
and my marriage.
Susan kept me sexually satisfied beyond my
wildest dreams. I never looked at other women with any serious thought
of having sex with them. I wallowed in the deepest bowels of drug
addiction, though, and I loved to do drugs with beautiful women.
Like I said, a lot of my fights with Susan revolved around my drug use.
The money I spent played a large part. The fact I always had other
women doing dope with me made matters even worse. On many occasions
I stole money from Susan so I could party with other women. That
hurt her badly. She cried over that a lot. She threatened to
leave me time after time. She would have been so much better off
if she had found somewhere to go, but she wouldn’t. She loved me
too much. I still don’t understand how I provoked such intense loyalty
in a woman I treated so badly. I loved her to death. I would
have done anything for her. The problem was that I was a dirty drug
addicted thief, and I more often did things to her than for her.
Susan said she didn’t see it that way. It isn’t even funny the way
love will make a person blind.
The truth is Susan was hopelessly addicted
to the pleasure she obtained in my company. There was the pleasure
she could get from sex any time she wanted it, any way she wanted it.
Then she had the pleasure of having me to do anything she asked, because
I was genuinely devoted to her. Lastly she had all the drugs and
alcohol her body could handle, and a lot more beyond that. She had
all three pleasures at one time if that’s what she wanted. Susan
loved me, but it was her addiction that kept her so close to home.
***
Jodie was one of the women I enjoyed getting
high with. I have been friends with Jodie for almost fifteen years.
I have never yet had sex with her. I don’t think Susan believed that.
All I ever wanted to do with Jodie was get inside her head and turn it
inside out. I liked her tremendously, but I am a terribly manipulative
person. At the beginning of our friendship she was having sex with
Biff. She was fifteen and I was seventeen. She was petite and
blonde, and so fine. She was one radical little girl to boot.
She liked all the crazy music I liked. Back in those days she lived
on Maximillian Street, not far from my dad’s house. That made her
the only white girl my age in the neighborhood. I knew I had to get
to know her better.
When I was eighteen she and I went to an acid
party in Southdowns that I supplied. That was the first time Jodie
went crazy in front of me. She dosed heavily. When she started
tripping I could see she was having a bad time. All of the other
girls there were from the upper middle class neighborhoods of South Baton
Rouge. They were a bunch of stuck up bitches. They were talking
bad about Jodie in whispers, calling her a slut, calling her trash.
Jodie took a butcher knife and slit her wrists in front of a whole room
full of people. She laughed hysterically as the blood ran down her
arm. I rushed over and grabbed her. I told her everything was
going to be alright. I held her while Nick bandaged her arm.
Since then I have felt a strong bond with her. I could easily say
that I love her, but I have never been in love with her. Sometime
after that she got committed a couple of times, and went to jail for almost
a year. I got to know her again in 1995. She had changed a
lot.
In 1995 Jodie started hanging out with me
because of all the dope Scott had at my house. She had been clean
for a few months. Once that siren song sounds in your head all the
recovery time in the world won’t make any difference. She didn’t
have
the power to resist. She spent a lot of time at my place, but
I came to understand she was seeing Aaron. Shortly before Scott went
to prison she and Aaron broke it off. Jodie’s dad came all the way
from Houston to get her. She was so strung out she was losing her
mind. Her arms were covered in tracks, and the least little thing
freaked her out. When she came back from Houston she was doing better.
She quit using needles and started smoking rock. Jodie had always
been a very sexy girl, when she tried to be, when she cleaned up.
When she came back from Houston all of her feminine charms had returned.
Jodie knew a lot of tricks to make men do
what she wanted them to. In that respect she and Natalie were a lot
alike. In fact, she and Natalie were best friends before I ever met
Natalie. They spent a lot of time together in and out of work.
Their friendship crumbled in an argument over one of their “customers”.
Natalie thought of the man as hers, but Jodie hooked up with him because
she needed money. The screaming argument that ensued took place in
my living room while everyone was wired to the gills. I thought they
were going to kill each other. It was a very nasty scene. At
the time I knew Jodie a lot better than Natalie, so I took her side in
my head. When I came down some I could see that what Jodie did was
pretty contemptuous after all.
Jodie always talked to me like we were lovers.
She always made me feel good. That was why when I saw her again in
1997 I wanted her company. I enjoyed getting high with her.
She would wait until Susan went to work before she would come over.
She used me to get her dope because I got her better deals (without her
having to spread her legs). Most of the time she got me high with
her money, but every now and then I got money from Susan. She always
split the dope down the middle while we were doing it, even if I didn’t
put anything into it. Jodie was a very generous girl. Until
I found out that kind of generosity hurts I always felt she was showing
me kindness. She can not be faulted for that, though. She and
I were both addicts, and we both knew what we wanted.
Susan became extremely angry when she found
out I had been doing drugs with Jodie. Jodie has always been a smart
girl. She took the bull by the horns and began coming over while
Susan was still at home. Jodie would lie about how much money she
had. We would only spend most of hers after Susan left for work.
It was a slightly more open way for Jodie and I to get high together, and
Jodie did give Susan many rides to work.
Jodie and I had some good times together.
I regret that she and I never made love. It has to be chalked up
as one of those “could have been” affairs. I wanted to be with her
many times, but I didn’t want to cheat on Susan. The absurd part
about this was that my loyalty to my wife was only skin deep. I wouldn’t
sleep around on her, but I would lie to her and steal from her. Sometimes
the bullshit got so deep in my head the vapor fogged up my eyeballs.
I also spent a lot of time getting high with
Natalie and Stephanie. They both used the same strategy Jodie did.
They would come over after Susan was at work so we could party secretly.
Stephanie was only nineteen years old. She was gorgeous. Her
fake breasts went very well with her natural ghetto ass. She looked
spectacular. Because she was only nineteen, and because I was married,
I never acted on my urges to savage her. I think it would have been
a wonderful thing. I might never get that opportunity again.
I regret my decision not to try it. I don’t plan to make such a mistake
again, if I am lucky enough to get a second chance.
Susan cheated on me at least once, that I
know about. That is a major reason I regret not doing the same thing
to her. The fact the women I might have been able to do it with were
breathtaking does not help matters much. Also, my grandmother’s cousin,
Steve, happened to be the person Susan did it with. I didn’t like
that at all. One night Steve came over wanting to buy cocaine.
He brought a bottle of whiskey. He and Susan were drinking heavily
when I left to get the dope. When I returned they were acting very
strange. Steve kept dishing out huge amounts, and when it was gone
he sent me to go get some more. Well after midnight we had done all
that and he left.
While Susan and I laid in bed together she
told me what happened. Steve had known it would take me about an
hour to get the coke. He talked her into letting him go down on her.
She was drunk, and she got horny when she drank. Susan didn’t want
to tell me, but I am fairly certain she went down on him the next time
I left. I knew her better than I have ever known anybody else, and
there was something she lied about. If that wasn’t what it was, it
was something like that.
What happened hurt me, but not as bad as I
acted like it did. I didn’t get pissed off at Susan. I wanted
to kill Steve. I used the incident to make Susan feel guilty.
That allowed more leverage in pressuring her to do the things I wanted
her to do. I was not a nice guy. I told her I forgave her,
but I acted like I never did. I didn’t want to lose the emotional
edge. Eventually we stopped bringing it up at all, mostly because
it stopped working to my advantage. Steve quit coming around, which was
the best thing to come out of the incident.
Though I did not like the way things worked
out in reality, I often fantasized about Susan having sex with other men.
A lot of my fantasies didn’t just involve her and other men, but her and
complete strangers. I got off on the thought that she was that desirable.
All I had to do was think about the look on her pretty face while she was
receiving and I would become filled with lust. Similarly, she had
the most naughty way of glancing at me when she gave pleasure. The
memory of her eyes alone could excite me.
***
I have skirted a couple of issues throughout
the narrative. I simply can’t go any further without relating the
tale. If you know me then you know that I wrote this while imprisoned.
Is it any wonder? By what you have already read it should have been
clear that it would happen eventually. All of the sex and drugs affected
my reasoning until I wasn’t careful anymore. I never got caught with
dope, though. I went on several crime sprees while dope sick and
desperate for morphine. I played it renegade to the core. I
did not give a damn about the law. I had been breaking it for years.
I committed burglaries downtown and on the south side of L.S.U. I
stole from everyone. I shoplifted. I ran credit card scams.
I used all of the mental talent God gave me for the wrong reasons.
I finally became too greedy and was apprehended
at the scene of one of my break-ins. When the police checked my residence
they linked me to a number of other burglaries. The detectives dropped
a whole series of charges on my head. Each time I bonded out I got
rearrested on more charges. I never did learn my lesson. After
the last time I bonded out I was videotaped attempting to shoplift a bottle
of brandy. I aborted when I sensed trouble, but by then the officer
on duty already had enough evidence to write me a misdemeanor summons.
I found out that one more arrest would mean I could not bond out.
After that I chilled out. I tried hard to stay out of trouble… that
is to say, I tried hard not to take risks as I continued to commit crimes.
My surviving grandmother, Wilma Day, suffered
from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. She had been removed to the care
of a nursing home not long after John Day died. I had been renting
out her vacant house for years. Susan and I moved there when we got
too strung out to pay our bills. Our tenants there, Gary and Hillary,
allowed us to live in the apartment in the back as long as they got a break
on their rent. Gary went to jail, and Hillary moved out. She
gave us a new tenant, whose name I can not even remember. My third
arrest was for burglarizing her half of the house and stealing her compact
disc collection. I could not understand how they planned to make
burglary stick. Before long the charge was reduced to four counts
of misdemeanor grade unauthorized use. After I bonded out our tenant
moved, understandably. Susan didn’t have the money to pay our outstanding
bills on Europe Street, so we moved into a motel room with what valuables
we could carry with us.
We stayed at the Corporate Inn on College
Drive for a couple of months with our dog Gus. It was not an easy
thing to do. We had to keep him hidden all the time. I had
to smuggle him out to the car every time I took Susan to work because he
would start howling if we left him alone. I had to smuggle him back
in (usually wrapped in a blanket) when I returned. I had to repeat
the whole process all over again when I went to pick her up from work.
That was the tedious part of motel life. I remember it fondly because
of all the good sex we had there though. Susan got off on the bed
pounding against the wall of the room next door. We played humiliation
games with the noise, which I am sure the neighbors could hear. The
room also had cable... HBO even. We spent a lot of our free time
watching videos and movies. We stayed loaded the entire time we were
at Corporate Inn. That’s what junkies do. Natalie and Jodie
would come by the room, at separate times, to do cocaine. I stayed
paranoid except when I could get xanax. I did a lot of xanax around
that time to keep my stress levels down. I hadn’t been billed for
my first court date yet, but I knew it was coming. Tranquilizers
helped to take my mind off of the heavy legal consequences I felt sure
I would soon suffer, and all of the trouble I could get in for all of the
drugs I didn’t have the strength to quit. After we had been there
almost three months Susan became too sick to work.
Susan called home and asked her parents for
help, which was something she never did. She hadn’t called them in
over a year. They knew something was horribly wrong. We hadn’t
gone to see them in over three years. They knew she wouldn’t act
like that unless she was hiding something. They knew damn well that
she wouldn’t ask them for help unless she was in bad shape. They
told her they were coming to get her. Susan told them she couldn’t
just leave me hanging in a motel room with a broken down car. She
made them give me enough money to get the car fixed and get back in the
house. They agreed. I had the terrible sinking feeling I was
losing her forever. She had to have wanted to get away or she never
would have agreed to go. She hated cocaine, and she knew I was doing
it with other women almost every night. I normally talked her into
doing it when she got off from work. She had bad reactions to it
on a regular basis. I thought about all the money I stole from her.
The thought struck me she would come back when hell froze over.
The next day her parents showed up after driving
all night from Austin. They took her to a doctor immediately.
When they got back they loaded up her stuff, gave me $1200 and headed back
to Austin. I paid for the hotel room for one more night. I
had to get loaded to deal with the fact she was gone. I spent $400
on coke and did it for the next twenty-four hours. I got the car
towed to a shop the next day. Then I went to stay with my mom for
the first time in many years. It was the only free place I could
stay.
The problem with staying at my mom’s house
was that it was only a few blocks from The Park, and less than a mile from
Fairfields. Several of my pill connections were in Fairfields, and
I could get all the coke I wanted in The Park. I waited until my
mom and stepfather went to work. Then I had a coke party in the extra
bedroom all by myself. I started doing morphine again the next day
(having given up on methadone). I talked to Susan every day on the
phone. I paid to get the car fixed and spent the rest of the money
on drugs. I didn’t get my lights or my water turned back on like
I was supposed to. I did convince Susan to come back home if I could
get her a bus ticket, and shortly after that things got even more messed
up.
I went to get the car. The engine burned
up before I could get it back to my mom’s house. I ripped off my
mom and stepfather in a fit of deceit and depression. They pressed
charges against me. The cops looked for me. I dodged them while
I spent all of my people’s money on dope. I hated every fiber of
my being. I went to my family to make amends. They forgave
me and dropped charges. They felt sorry for me because of how drug
addicted I was. I think they knew how much Susan helped me, so they
agreed to buy her a ticket home. They also turned my lights and water
back on. Susan came home. We snuggled, made love and talked
all night long after she got home.
I went to my first court date from Europe
Street, which was just a short walk away. Once again I did cocaine,
morphine and benzodiazepines every single day. As soon as Susan was
back Natalie started coming around again. The lights were only on
like a month before they got cut off. I hooked them up illegally.
Then they got cut off at the pole. Then I jacked into my neighbor’s
outside breaker box with a heavy-duty extension cord. It stayed that
way for at least six months. We lived with nothing but a lamp and
a television set. The water also got cut off within sixty days.
We filled up five-gallon buckets at any outside faucet we could find and
poured them in the bathtub to take baths. Sometimes we just washed
ourselves under our neighbor’s hose. Life was not easy.
Even if we had been the richest people in
town I still would have had to bust my ass to keep us supplied with opiates.
We did a huge amount, and if we didn’t get it every single day we became
violently ill. I didn’t have a car, and neither did most of my connections.
If I couldn’t get a bus I wound up walking about fifteen miles (round trip)
to get our dope. Natalie didn’t have a car, so I walked for her when
she wanted coke. Sometimes she sent me on that two-mile walk five
times a night. My brother asked me to do the same thing when he got
strung out. I never ate much of anything. My weight fell like
a stone. I got skinnier and skinnier. I had the worst tracks
I had ever had in my life. I needed morphine so bad I couldn’t even
steal for coke. Every penny I got went to pills.
If there is a devil, and I believe there is,
then opiates are his crown jewels. Heroin is the ruby, opium is the
emerald, and morphine is the diamond. The days passed in a painless
haze as I faltered on the brink of oblivion. The sickness greeted
me more and more quickly as time passed, but I always got a fix.
When I hit time turned somersaults and my guts wrenched upside down.
The relief was even more painful than the nausea. Often I fumbled
with the needle in my flesh, crying and cursing in misery again and again
as I tried to make myself well. I called the ritual “The Festival
of Blood”. It was a carnival of grotesque self-destruction that never
closed its doors. In fact, any fool who dared enter through its gates
was granted free admission. If one can not get help there is no other
choice but to abandon all hope. Release can not be gained without
outside assistance.
I learned not to eat. The slightest
weight in my stomach would tear me apart when the opiate started to wear
off. The only thing I could eat without fear was plain chocolate.
It took me up to ten days to vacate my bowels. Even the mass of the
chocolate became excruciating by then. Hunger earned my deep respect
as my most worthy adversary. When the pit in my stomach gnawed away
at my backbone I didn’t have the strength to walk. Often I felt as
though I slept in my deathbed. Only cocaine gave me the will to use
my atrophied muscles. All of that came after I made the worst mistake
I ever made.
***
Gone were the days when I could sit around and get loaded for fun. The ritual actions I went through on a daily basis had nothing to do with fun anymore. This was all about disease, compulsion, imbalance, and impurity. My whole life began to look like a consequence of my actions. The very act of breathing reminded me of punishment. I lost even the slightest hope that everything would be okay. The terrible part was that I was right. Nothing turned out okay.