I’m Special (20 page)

This is what drugs want you to think. They blow into your life looking hot as fuck, and before you know it, the two of you are in batshit love. Everything is great until it's not, and then you start to see the glimmers of instability and coldness. You convince yourself that this is just a rough patch and things will go back to the way they were in the beginning, but they never do. Once you see the cracks, you never see anything else.

The cracks started appearing in my life in October, maybe November. Lily, Cassie, and Maggie all moved to California, and we never really talked again. I heard that Maggie went to rehab and Cassie became a dog walker. I have no idea what happened to Lily. Olivia was the only one left in the city, so I spent more and more time with her. Her apartment was constantly filled with pillheads freebasing Roxicet, a painkiller that makes Vicodin look like baby aspirin. The smoke always smelled sweet, like cloves. Freebasing had ravaged Olivia's lungs, and she kept a mug next to her at all times so she could spit up phlegm. She was only twenty-one years old. If I'd been sober, I would've taken one look at the situation and been like “XOXO, gone girl,” but since I was high, I just thought, “Oh, this is fun and glamorous. Whose cups of phlegm are these? They're precious! You could sell them on Etsy and make a killing!”

My other friends had no idea my drug use had escalated. They knew I loved painkillers and sometimes would even do them with me, but they hadn't a clue I was buying drugs under a freeway at 2:00 p.m. and hanging out with people who freebased. It was getting harder to shield them from reality, especially because my behavior was becoming erratic. I'd experience these euphoric highs and then throw a giant tantrum over something as small as a long line at the grocery store. I had no tolerance for the unexpected. Drugs were eating away at all my coping mechanisms and turning me into a moody preteen.

At one point, I became paranoid that Percocet was making my face look sickly, so I decided to invest in the best eye creams, face masks, and colognes. I even bought a perfume that smelled like “Rich Lady Who's Going to Die Soon” and spritzed myself with it every night before bed so I could feel extra glamorous. Unfortunately, none of the products I bought improved my appearance. Pills had made my face so fat and puffy that I looked like Flounder from
The Little Mermaid
. It probably didn't help that I was also stuffing my face with chocolate bars. Remember heroin chic? I was heroin
not
chic. Opiates made me crave sweets. After taking my pills, my nightly ritual was a visit to the corner store for one giant jug of water and an imported chocolate bar. Then I would go home, lie in bed, and eat the entire thing in seconds. My roommate knew something was going on when she found countless chocolate bar wrappers floating around the house and opened the fridge and only saw “Hi, I'm on painkillers!” food like rice pudding, ice cream, and strawberries, but she probably just assumed I was stress eating.

When I wasn't binging on chocolate or moisturizing excessively, I was starting to nod off in public. Nodding off isn't like falling asleep. It's when you are so stoned you can't even keep your eyes open. Once, while in the throes of my drug problem, my family came to visit me in New York. We were all riding in a cab on our way to a museum when I started to take an impromptu nap against the window.

“Ryan!” my sister whispered. “Why do you keep closing your eyes and falling asleep? Is everything okay?”

Startled, I muttered, “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I'm just super exhausted . . .”

My mom was sitting in the front seat of the cab and stayed silent even though she knew I was on drugs. A few nights earlier, we were going through my bag looking for something when she saw that I had a bottle of Vicodin hidden in a side pocket. I took a deep breath and prepared to make up some lie about how the pain from my compartment syndrome had come back, but luckily I didn't have to. Instead of confronting me, she just zipped up my bag and asked me where I'd like to go to dinner. My dad did the same thing. Whenever I visited him in California, I'd take entire bottles of painkillers from his medicine cabinet. When I'd be back in New York, he'd call me and I'd think, “This is it. This is when my dad realizes I've been taking all the pills and I have to come clean.” But he never said a damn thing.

I don't blame my parents for looking the other way. I was an adult living a separate life from them in New York. My issue with drugs was my issue only, and nothing they did could've changed anything. It is fascinating, though, to witness the level of denial some parents can have about their children. They remember the trophies, the stellar report cards, the nice boyfriend you bring home for Christmas, but they choose to forget the churlish attitude and the long stretches of unemployment and the bill from the STD clinic that shows up on the shared health insurance plan. Whenever I went home for the holidays, I played a version of myself that I knew my parents would like. I gave them their special boy even when their special boy was taking all their drugs and acting like a demon. Being fucked-up is an inconvenient truth many people like to ignore. We live in a culture that's only interested in self-improvement. The girl who sleeps her way through her twenties and does all the drugs secretly wants to be the first person to settle down just so she can show the world how far she's come. The workaholic stress case reads
Keep Calm and Carry On
, tries yoga, and turns into a completely different person. Hooray! People are constantly trying to shake off any qualities that could be perceived as messy. We want to deny that there's any part of us that could take pleasure in the wrong things when the fact is that you can experience true comfort in destroying yourself.

On December 31, 2011, I reached a new low in my drug use when I decided to take a bunch of Percocet and almost slept through my New Year's Eve plans. Earlier in the day, I had gone out to eat with a friend and kept accidentally nodding off in the restaurant. I apologized for being “so sleepy” and went home with the intention of taking a nap before getting ready for the night's festivities, but the drugs had other plans. When I woke up from my nap, I looked at my phone and saw that it was 10:45 p.m. I was supposed to be at a house party an hour before. Panicked, I called up my friend.

“Hey. I'm sorry. I took a disco nap and I guess it accidentally bled into '90s grunge.”
Please laugh. Please never figure out how much of a mess I've become.

“How the hell did that happen, Ryan? It's New Year's Eve—the one night a year where being on time is kind of crucial.”

“I know, I know, but I'm on my way.” I threw on some clothes, ran the fifteen blocks to the party, and showed up right before the clock struck midnight. When I opened the door, I was unnerved by how joyous the mood was. People were dressed to the nines and bubbling with energy. They were acting like they were actually happy. To save face, I did my best impression of a person who was having fun, and everybody bought it. By now I was an expert at acting normal and hiding the fact that I felt deader than dead on the inside. As I walked home alone from the party at 2:00 a.m., I thought of a perfect New Year's resolution for 2012: try not to sleep through it, you fucking loser.

I attempted to quit painkillers many times, but it never worked. I'd go to Los Angeles for a few weeks to dry out, only to end up flying back to New York early so I could get high. Or I would flush the pills Dr. Kearns gave me down the toilet and delete Olivia's number from my phone, which would last a few days until I got a craving and I'd send Olivia a message on Facebook saying, “Hey, babe. Someone stole my phone and I lost all my numbers. Can you give me yours?” When I was really feeling hopeless, I would attend NA and A.A. meetings, but it was pointless because I didn't identify as an addict. My only hope at getting better was to wait until something happened that would make me come to my senses and quit doing drugs for good. For many people, this rock bottom comes in the form of a horrific accident or an overdose, but I got lucky. All I needed was a limp dick.

Somehow, in the midst of always being on drugs and writing a billion posts a day for
Thought Catalog
, I went on a college speaking tour. Even though I had experienced some success as a blogger, I felt like a hack telling someone four years younger than me how to land a writing job. If I were being honest, my number one tip would be to take a bunch of opiates and write some sappy blog post about love. That's what worked for me.

One of the colleges that asked me to give a talk was McGill, a university in Montreal. I had never been to Canada before and was excited to visit, but I worried that my growing dependency on painkillers would prevent me from stringing two coherent sentences together, let alone inspire a bunch of students. Since I never went to these schools stoned—even a druggie loser like me had a conscience—I would binge leading up to the trip and then start light withdrawals the day of my talk. It was an idiotic plan (why would you send your body into withdrawals right when you needed it the most?), but rational thoughts had peaced out of my brain a long time ago.

I flew to Montreal in the middle of January. The weather felt like knives on my skin, and I was starting to wilt. When I got to the event, I realized that this wasn't some casual intimate setting I could sleepwalk my way through. I was speaking to two hundred people in an auditorium. My legs started to shake. Visions of me passing out or—worse—puking
Exorcist
-style all over the podium began to haunt me. But then something truly spectacular happened. As I started to talk, a sense of calm washed over my brain and I realized I could do this. I don't know how the words and jokes came out of my mouth but they did, and everything was fine and people laughed and they clapped and they got the person they wanted me to be that night.

After the talk ended, I planned on going back to my hotel room alone and letting my body finish withdrawing, but my friend Laura, who lives in Montreal, persuaded me to go out to dinner with her and a few of her friends, one of whom was named Sam. Sam was a beautiful pale-skinned gay boy with wispy blond hair and crystal clear eyes. During dinner, I avoided him because I was feeling shy and unfuckable. When you do opiates, your sex drive goes AWOL. Since your brain is experiencing a thousand little orgasms a day, you completely forget about the existence of real-life ones. I still had occasional make-outs with guys, but when it came time to actually get down to work, I'd be like, “Hey, do you mind if we just cuddle for ten thousand hours while I play the same Washed Out song over and over?” Even if I weren't feeling asexual, I'd never pursue Sam, because he was way out of my league. On the spectrum of attractiveness, I fall in the depressing middle. People like me aren't ugly, but we never get laid because of our looks. We need to razzle dazzle them with our personalities and get them appropriately buzzed before they can be like, “Okay. Sure. I'm horny enough to do this.” Sam, on the other hand, could have shit for brains and you'd still be like, “That's so interesting. Let me see your cock.”

After dinner, we all went to a bar. I was getting drunk, which was helping to ease my withdrawal symptoms, and having an okay time. Every so often I would catch Sam looking at me and assume it was because my face was twitching from the absence of Percocet, but then Laura pulled me aside and told me, “Dude, wake up. Sam is into you.”

“No, he's not.”

“Yes, he is. He just told me.”

Seriously? I'm twenty pounds overweight, I haven't taken a dump in five days, and my face is doing an involuntary rendition of the Macarena, and you're telling me this megababe is interested in doing sexual things to my body? I couldn't waste this blessed opportunity. When someone attractive decides they'd like to have sex with you, you have to say yes. It's the law. I sat down next to Sam on the couch and talked with him for a few minutes. We both knew this was heading into make-out territory, so every word out of our mouths sounded like a stall until we could come into
each other's
mouths. Impatient, I took the plunge and kissed him. Within two tongue thrusts, we were making out in the club like a couple of horny monsters. I asked him to come back to my hotel so we could spare innocent bystanders the sight of me devouring someone's face. Once we got to my room, we rolled around on the bed and did that dance where you're not sure if you want to commit to a full-on hookup so you blue-ball each other until someone either falls asleep or takes it to the next level. Sam didn't want to go to bed. He wanted to fuck and/or possibly give and receive a spirited BJ. He took off his underwear and revealed a dick that was so rock hard and stunning it could've been on the cover of
Vogue
. I started to take off my underwear as well, but then I looked down and saw something so horrifying it caused me to gasp. My penis was flaccid. I began kissing Sam, hoping that it would jump-start something down below. I grabbed his ass and stroked his dick. I even tried the old, reliable dirty talk. Still nothing. I couldn't believe it. I never had trouble getting hard before and I had hooked up with some legitimate gargoyles. Now I was with Sam, one of the hottest guys my penis had ever had the pleasure of meeting, and it chose to ghost on me.

“I'm sorry, Sam,” I said, my face flushed with embarrassment. “I think it's because I'm too drunk or something. This never happens.”

“It's okay,” Sam assured me in a way that sounded like he actually meant it. “I really don't care.”

The next morning, Sam woke up and instead of running for the hills, he spent the next few hours in bed with me. The trauma from the night before seemed to be erased from his memory, and now all he wanted to do was spoon and make out underneath the covers. It felt great. Lying there in bed, legs intertwined with someone else's, I realized that I was, for the first time in almost a year, experiencing real intimacy with someone. It was something I had willed myself to forget. I forgot what it felt like to wake up next to someone and put your arms around each other. I forgot about the terrible dry mouth and the morning breath and the hot air that sometimes accidentally escapes from your lips and lands on the other person's cheeks. There are people in this world who experience this sort of closeness every day, and here I was, shocked to my core over an uncharacteristically tender one-night stand.