While cocaine was my main man, I definitely cheated with pills.
Placing a pill in my mouth and washing it down with water is probably as natural to me as breathing—actually I think it’s more natural because I’ve been told when I’ve been worked up about something, “Just breathe” and have needed absolutely no help at all with my pill taking. I do it without thinking; one morning, I took my regular slew of vitamins, forgot I did it and five minutes later, took the whole batch again. I only realized what I’d done when I met Danielle at the Cabazon outlets (my home away from home) and almost passed out in The Gap from, I guess, some sort of a supplement OD. My first memories of pill taking is when I was about 10, had a cold and my dad gave me Actifed; I remember it perfectly, since I relished sinking against the cushions as if I’d just had chloroform put over my mouth.
Ah, the sweet low tolerance of youth.
I’ve always loved anything that made me pass out. Drinking was good for that at first but it had this unfortunate drawback of making me wake up insanely early cursing the sunlight streaming in the window, even in a dark room. I’ve never been great at sleeping and though I’ve had many tell me sleeping is not a skill, I don’t believe them. Writing skills, sure that’s great but sleeping skills? I mean, one is something only some of us need while the other everyone can benefit from! The problem with my not being skilled at sleeping is that I’m also someone whose IQ cuts in half and who feels tremendously depressed if she doesn’t sleep well. This is a terrible combination.
And so Ambien was a natural for me. Back in the 90s, no one talked about Ambien. There were no media stories about how it makes you shove Thin Mints down your gullet without you remembering. No one discussed how they were scamming their doctors to get extra Ambien.
I didn’t need them, though. I came up with a scam all on my own.
My scam was pretty good, too.
This was it: “I went to Palm Springs and left my pill bottle there.”
That was the whole thing. My grandmother lived in Palm Springs so this didn’t seem like too outrageous of a lie. After all, it could have happened. But I also altered the story sometimes.
Sometimes it was “I went to San Francisco and left my pill bottle there.”
Or: “I went to Arizona and left my pill bottle there.”
I always kept the places I was allegedly leaving the pill bottle relatively close, possibly because this made it seem like less of a lie since by the time I was doing this I was barely leaving my apartment, let alone the city. Going to that shrink on the West side was as close as I was getting to travel.
For a while, he bought it. Then one day he told me he couldn’t see me anymore and I “probably knew why.” He didn’t mention 12-step or rehab but I wouldn’t have listened to him if he had.
I was racing through the Ambien for one simple reason: I was supposed to be cutting them into quarters only if I couldn’t sleep and instead I was automatically taking a whole pill every night. Or at least I was for a while. Then I was taking two. And then three and so on (I stopped at 10). Tolerance and Ambien go horribly together.
Ever resourceful, I had other ways to get pills after the doc cut-off. California is, after all, quite close to Mexico. And so I went to Baja with a friend who made these sojourns regularly and told the person behind the counter at the Pharmacia that I was anxious—three simple words and I walked away with sheets of pills, including Ambien, Xanax and Valium. Have you ever seen a sheet of pills? I felt so exalted by the acquisition that when I got home, I handed them out to friends like I was Pablo Escobar.
They didn’t last long. I cursed myself for having been so generous.
When I got sober, I was more than willing to admit that my relationship with cocaine was unmanageable but balked when I was told that I also seemed to be addicted to pills. Didn’t these people understand that I suffered from insomnia? They didn’t. Or they did but they didn’t much care. I was put on a medication called Trazodone, an SSRI that’s also used as a sleeping aid. (While there are people in 12-step who frown on the taking of any prescribed medication, I refer them—then and now—to the pamphlet “Medications and Other Drugs,” which makes it clear that “no AA member should ‘play doctor.’”)
Trazodone did the trick for many years but while SSRI’s are technically not addictive, my emotional attachment to it was severe. One time I went to Jamaica and left my bottle of Trazodone on the plane (clear karmic payback for those doctor lies years before). I was staying in a town called Treasure Beach, which was 80 miles west of Kingston. 80 miles. Which means we drove for two hours to get from the airport to the hotel and it was only when I got there that I realized what I’d done.
Let me clarify that I do not speak patois. Let me also clarify that the hotel where we were staying, which was really more of a beach shack then a hotel, had no phone guests could use or Internet.
In a panic, I paid someone at the hotel to take me to “town” to find an over-the-counter sleeping aid. I walked up and down the desolate strip that was considered town, and while I was offered drugs that could have surely knocked me out for days from extremely friendly drug dealers literally every step I took, sobriety demanded that I pass. The best thing I could buy at the one store I found was cold medicine.
Alas, my tolerance wasn’t what it was at 10.
I returned to the hotel determined to get my bottle of pills back and so I convinced the people at the hotel to let me use the house phone to call the Kingston airport. I called that airport more times than I can count and tried to communicate what I needed to many people before ultimately giving up. I hadn’t put that much effort into scoring drugs as an active addict.
Then, my second day there, a man drove up in a rickety car and crazily, amazingly, handed the bottle of Trazodone over. The people at the hotel told me, in patois-English (my ability to understand improved immeasurably during my drug seeking 24 hours), that it was absolutely impossible that I’d managed to convince someone to look for the bottle on the plane, let alone find it, let alone drive it 80 miles.
Clearly, despite living in the ganja capital of the world, these people didn’t understand the determination of drug addicts—a skill that apparently doesn’t disappear just because you get sober.
About six months ago, by the way, I decided to try to get off Trazodone. That’s when I made an amazing discovery: I may not have trouble sleeping after all. What I have more than insomnia is anxiety that I will have insomnia. And so I cut my Traz into quarters and then take one of them only if I feel like I may be anxious about sleeping that night. I keep an Excel spreadsheet and if I take one of those quarter pills, I mark it on the sheet. I fully realize this is insane; my shrink told me a quarter of a pill is a complete placebo. My ex would tell me, when he’d find little baggies filled with cut up Trazodone in random drawers at his place, that I was a crazy person—and also that I talked about sleep more than anyone he’d ever met. But those crazy little cut up non pills serve as my security blanket and well, as evidenced by the fact that I just told you this story, I find talking about sleep fascinating. Sobriety, in other words, does not guarantee sanity.
Though I’ve found that it does help with sleep. Eventually.
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