When I got to the end of the street, I came upon a house, which was completely empty and rundown. I assumed that no one lived there, even so there was no “for sale” sign on the lawn. Why would anyone want to buy such a dump anyway? I decided that this house would be where I would spend the night. Little did I know, but it was already being occupied.
The door was locked, but I found an open window and crawled in that way. I had to be careful not to rip my pants because the window frame had jagged edges. It took a bit of maneuvering, but I was finally able to get inside without injury.
When I got in though, I received an unexpected welcome. Not only was the house shabby, so was the hospitality. These people, all addicts of some sort, lived in this house. It wasn’t theirs by ownership, but by brute force. They were there to shoot up as well and I wasn’t exactly welcome. I was a threat to their very existence.
But that was before they could get a good look at me. It was dark after all, and I never looked like a criminal in the dark. A sick little boy maybe, but a criminal? No.
One moment I was on my feet, the next I was jerked to the floor. I could hear the intonation in their voices, but I couldn’t hear the question. A flashlight was shone into my face and seconds after the beam hit its intended target, I heard loud gasps circulate around the room.
I felt myself being pulled off the ground and gingerly brushed off. When I looked down at my arm I noticed that that my jacket had been torn at the arm and the puncture marks exposed. I hate to say it, but sometimes the heroin came in handy.
They still weren’t perfect angels to me afterwards. After all, I had found their secret layer and caught them doing something they weren’t necessarily proud of…or so I thought.
They asked me some demanding questions about drugs and how to use them. When I answered the first question, which was “how do you take drugs?” (they were trying to test me) I answered, “Ii ddoonn’tt rreemmeemmbbeerr.” They were nearly in tears from laughing so hard. They weren’t laughing at my stupid answer, but at the way I answered. It sounded like I was high.
After I answered a few more questions, they allowed me to stay for the night. In the morning, I would have to go through with the “initiation.” I’ve had to do those kinds of things before, to get into clubs and things. But most of the time my classmates were only joking. They never let me into any groups and I knew that it would be the same with these guys. In fact, the only group I’ve ever belonged to is the Backstreet Boys. I was never accepted before that. When I joined the Backstreet Boys, my self esteem just sky rocketed, and I never thought about this sort of thing until my mom wrote her book.
I found a spot on the floor and fell asleep almost instantly. I felt that I had to make it last because I wouldn’t be able to stay another night, or so I imagined.
When I awoke I felt a terrible ache. As I opened my eyelids, the pain increased like the speed of a moving train. And it hit me like a moving train would too. All I could do was scream out in agony.
I heard nothing, and I saw nothing. But I did feel. I felt the terrible pain all over my body, and someone taking something out of my backpack. I didn’t need to think twice about what it was, but I couldn’t protest, the pain was just too great. It began to diminish, slowly at first, then faster and faster. The pain left as fast as it came, all thanks to heroin.
“Man, you shouldn’t go so long without your heroin! We were thinking about stealing it, but now…” he looked at his fellow druggies, “we just can’t.”
“Ii ccaann ssttaayy?” I gasped. They nodded and I rested my head back on the ground. My body was still trying to recover from the shock. Now I knew what getting all of your bones broken at the same time felt like. I supposed that I wouldn’t have to go through with the initiation, because they had told me that I had to take a shot of heroin for that. Well, I had just proved that I could. Maybe it was the shock of finding out the reason why I used heroin, I didn’t know, but thankfully they let me stay.
The drugs worked their way into my system and I started to fall asleep again. It turned out to be a fitful, dreamless sleep, which I awoke from hours later. I was sweaty and feverish when I woke up, but even so, I was grateful that the pain had disappeared.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m not exactly an idiot. I went to school for the required amount of years and during those years I learned many things that are still useful to me. Unlike the rest of my class, I was awake through my teacher’s filmstrip about drugs and their effects. Unfortunately, I was fully aware of the after effects of drugs, but I still didn’t care. They were doing things for me, helping to block the feelings I was having and the pain that came with them. I could finally daydream without thinking about my situation. The drugs took care of all that for me. To me it seemed that the good finally outweighed the bad.
As a result of these thoughts, I decided to continue using the drugs until I could get some help. The problem was, I couldn’t remember exactly what it was that I wanted to do. While I took the drugs, I just kept on forgetting and the memory of it just kept on burying itself deeper inside me.
The druggies I shared house with barely paid attention to me. They finally figured out that I wasn’t joking about the fact that I couldn’t remember how to take the drugs and they taught me how. Most days they were gone, probably getting more drugs or going to parties. I honestly thought that they would act more as my big brothers and help me along in this new world I had entered. No such luck. Everyone had to find out for himself how to survive in this world, and that’s exactly what I did.
During the day, I would mostly stay inside the house. I was too sick to move, and I only got up once a day, at 4:00, to get my drugs. The addiction was worsening, because now I craved the stuff. It sickened me to think that it was partly my decision as well, even so it wasn’t really an option.
The only time I wasn’t lonely was when the guys came back from where ever the hell they took off to. They brought back food for me, because they knew that the drugs I was taking were the only things keeping me on my feet these days. Generally they threw the food in my direction and busied themselves with getting high.
The food they brought me really wasn’t helping matters any. But I didn’t complain, because at least they were feeding me. I suppose they didn’t want to take care of a dead body either.
The kind of stuff they brought me looked like stolen party food. In other words, it was mostly junk. After a few days, my body reacted to the lack of nutrients and nearly failed me completely. The druggies knew I was running on my last limb by now, so they sent a few guys out to get my drugs, since I missed my 4:00. They thought that my low supply was the problem.
After I they gave me my drugs and decided unanimously that I wasn’t getting any better, I gathered up some strength and told them what was going on with me. They were utterly shocked. Some had lived on junk food their entire lives and therefore could not remember ever getting sick from it. Nevertheless, they started stealing vegetable dips for me and my sickness went away for a while.
But what goes up, must come down, and my sickness came back down again a few weeks later. I could tell that the druggies were becoming very agitated with me. Most of the girls they brought to the house cooed over me before they gave their guys the time of day. Thankfully I was able to explain to them that it was their motherly instinct, and saved myself from a punch to the jaw. To them, I was a “picky” eater, and I got sick with high fevers so many times that their limited education skills stopped them from counting that high. I was inconvenient because they came to this house to live a carefree life, but since I came along, I was their responsibility. Again, they didn’t have to take care of me; they just didn’t want to be responsible for my body. Besides, they were addicts, and even they wouldn’t leave a cancer patient out in the cold, like I thought my friends had.
I thought about my friends and family a lot while I lay on the bed I made for myself. They hadn’t meant to do what they did, I realized. I should have been pleased that they thought that my acting skills were so thorough.
Some of my days were longer than others, and some were better than others were. On my good days, I was able to get up and move about for at least five minutes straight. That’s when I made myself a little bed out of an old mattress and a sheet. I was also able to find a piece of wood that served as a table for my food. If it belonged to anybody, no one said a thing.
On bad days, I would just lie there, staring at the ceiling and watching the spiders build their webs. While I was high, I thought about the strangest things. Like how the world worked, the meaning of life, and extraterrestrial creatures. I loved to think about the aliens most of all. Sometimes I find myself fascinated by the unknown. I remember wondering if all of the galaxies in the universe looked exactly like ours and had one planet where life boomed and other planets which repelled any remote chance of life.
There were so many possibilities concerning space. That’s why I preferred the subject. I could spend long hours just thinking about the strangest things and trying to come up with more solutions for the same topic. Sometimes I surprised myself with an intelligent answer, but that wasn’t really the point of the game I was playing. The point of it was to distract myself from my so-called life.
When I wasn’t thinking, or trying to get up for my 4:00, I was sleeping. Not by choice most of the time. Sometimes I would fall asleep in the middle of the game I was playing, and lose complete track of all of the solutions I came up with. Then I became angry with myself to the point of my face turning bright red. When the druggies saw this, they just laughed at me like I was playing some sort of game. Like I said, they didn’t know or care what the hell I was doing all day. In fact, they didn’t even know I had cancer. They just knew that I was very sick.
Once a week, they would take me down a forested path to bathe in the little lake at the end of it. They had to carry me down because there was just no way my body could carry me that far.
The druggies were terribly unsentimental with me. In fact, they were much nicer to me when they thought I was going to leave. As a result, I barely displayed any emotion at all, especially around one of their “one night girlfriends” as they put it.
If I fell asleep on the way down, they gave me a cruel awakening. They would strip me without my knowledge and literally throw me into the lake. Needless to say, it worked as a nifty alarm clock for them, but for me that meant waking up in freezing cold water.
The first time they did that to me, they had to pull me from under the water because I hadn’t resurfaced. They pulled me onto the shore, but they were too afraid that they would break my fragile ribs if they gave me CPR.
Flustered from the sudden change in temperature, I woke up in complete shock from my nap. When I got my hearing back, I could hear them discussing how they would dispose of my body in the bush, because they honestly thought I was dead. I didn’t quite understand this, so I screamed as loud as I could, thinking that I was in terrible danger.
From the suddenness of my screams, the druggies leapt ten feet in the air; clearly phased that a body was talking to them. When they finally realized that I wasn’t dead in the first place, they clamped a hand on my mouth and told me to shut up.
Because of the shock I was in, I forgot who these people were, and I fought them back with all my might. Eventually my body gave up on me and I passed out. When I awoke from another dreamless sleep, I couldn’t remember a thing what had happened. I also couldn’t understand why the guys were so mad at me, or even more astonishingly, why I was naked.
Even so they were angry with me, the helped me wash myself, because I was too weak to do it by myself. When I saw the scratch marks I gave them, I felt horrible, but they told me to forget about it.
So, when the end of the week nears and it’s time to go wash ourselves once more, I try desperately not to fall asleep. During the six weeks I was with them, I fell asleep for half of the bathing trips. The druggies never learned their lesson, and they threw me into the water, despite what had happened before. For them, I trained myself to recognize them after I got out of the water.
Chapter 37
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