Sliding Into Home (8 page)

Eventually he either caught on or I chose drugs over him, because once Brittany came back to town our relationship was over. There wasn’t a fight or anything; we were just looking for different things, so we went our separate ways. I didn’t really care about the end of our relationship. I was always bouncing around and moving on from something, so this was just another opportunity for a new beginning for me.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was in a very bad place. My first night back at Brittany’s, I showed up high on crystal. Then I went days without sleeping. She knew I was in trouble, and she sat me down and tried to talk some sense into me.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“I’m fine,” I fired back defensively.

“Having fun every once in a while is one thing, but you are killing yourself.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said. “Everything is
fine
.”

She was worried. She’d go with me to parties and couldn’t believe the amount of drugs I was doing. I was doing coke or crystal almost every day, and she was very scared for me, but her telling me to try to stop only made me want to do more drugs. I was spiraling out of control.

I was fucked up all the time and when I was coming down I got very depressed and angry. Drugs were no longer something I did for fun. The coke, weed, acid, crystal meth, alcohol, and whatever pills I could get my hands on kept my mind in a haze. They allowed me to not think, which I needed, because when I had time to think bad things happened.

In order to take away my internal pain, I created physical pain by cutting myself. One day it was boy trouble; another day I felt like I wanted to run away but had nowhere to go. I either felt like no one was looking out for me or that I had no one to turn to. I was alone and I was miserable.

I’d take scissors and jab them in my arm, slicing until a stream of blood ran down to my hand. With tears running down my face, I cut until I couldn’t cut anymore. Then I’d decide to deal with my issues another way and do a line of coke. There seemed no end to the madness.

For weeks I kept cutting and hiding it from everyone. My arm was filled with gashes, but no one noticed. Then one day I had the scissors in my hand as I sat on Brittany’s bedroom floor and she walked in and screamed at the top of her lungs. She grabbed the scissors out of my hand and, crying hysterically, wrapped her arms around me. She didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to say. I was out of answers and excuses, and she was too scared to continue taking care of me.

It was time to go home.

My mom took me back, of course. She didn’t really have a choice. I continued cutting, and she didn’t know what to do, either.

I started becoming suicidal. One day I went through the medicine cabinet and took everything I could find. I put pill after pill in
my mouth, but it wasn’t enough. My mom and grandmother walked in on me as I was sitting on the bathroom floor surrounded by pill bottles and freaked out. They rushed me to the hospital, where the doctors said they were either going to pump my stomach or I could drink two cups of pure charcoal (I’m not really sure what that does, but I guess it works). I went with the charcoal, which was black and thick and tasted exactly how you would expect charcoal to taste. I gagged a bunch, but I kept it down.

Before I could leave the hospital I had to write a letter promising that I would never attempt suicide again and that if I ever had a problem I would talk to my mom instead of taking a bunch of pills. As you can imagine, that didn’t work, so my mom forced me to go to counseling. I was open and told the counselor how I felt, but talking about my feelings didn’t help. Hiding it didn’t help, counseling didn’t help—I just felt so lost. There were no answers.

I quickly went back to cutting whenever I was upset or high and crazy. It felt good. It was my way of dealing with all the teenage stress I had inside me. I always thought I was such an adult, but the truth was I couldn’t handle being fifteen. Everything made me depressed, which in turn drove me to cut myself.

One day right after summer ended and I was back in school, I got called down to the nurse’s office. I was nervous. Being called to the nurse’s office was not common.

“Let me see your arm,” she said when I walked in.

“No,” I yelled, refusing to push up my long sleeves. Someone had clearly ratted me out, and I was mad.

“I need to see your arm.”

“No!” I shouted again.

One of the counselors came in and held me down while the nurse lifted my sleeves. They saw the cut marks.

I had promised my mom I would stop. I had promised her I would straighten out.

I had lied.

On the school’s recommendation, my mom picked me up and took me to Mesa Vista Hospital, a psychiatric ward in San Diego. For two weeks I stayed in the mental institution. I felt like a crazy person the entire time. While I was there I got into a fight and they put me in one of those white rooms with rubber walls. I was losing my mind. After that I was moved to another room, also with no windows. For two weeks I didn’t see sunlight.

It’s all kind of a blur to me now, but I remember being in there and my mom, grandma, grandpa, and brother visiting every few days. I was sad and wanted to go home, but I knew I had to stay. I knew I was sick.

I was still so depressed and cried a lot. Every night the nurses gave us antidepressant pills, and they would check our mouths to make sure we took them. The pills actually did more bad than good, I think. Considering I had a problem with pills to begin with, I thought I was better off without them. So I vowed that when I got out of there I would stop taking them on my own.

Some nights the nurses took us to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I was fifteen and I was sitting in a room full of adults in an AA meeting. I drank a lot back then, but that was the least of my problems. The counselors wanted us to see how we would end up if we continued using drugs, but for me the scare tactics didn’t work.

I had two roommates at Mesa Vista. They didn’t really care about me, and I didn’t care about them. I was a lot more involved with
drugs than most of the people around me; they all seemed to have their heads on straighter than I did.

We were allowed one phone call every two days and I used mine to talk to Brittany every time. She would tell me about the fun things she was doing or some party she’d just gone to. I wanted to be there with her. It seemed like all my friends were having fun without me, and knowing that made me cry.

I needed to get out of there. I tried to prove to the counselor that I was better so I could leave, but she started being a bitch so I lost my cool and cursed at her.

Mesa Vista was not helping me. I didn’t think I needed to be there, and they couldn’t help me—mainly because I wasn’t ready to be helped. All I wanted was one line of coke. I wasn’t addicted. I swear I wasn’t. I didn’t need coke, I just wanted it. I just wanted
anything
to make me better.

I wanted to escape life. I wanted to just run as far as I could run. I would’ve run to China, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t go anywhere. I felt like I was in prison, like I was trapped—not only at Mesa Vista, but in a pool of my own problems.

I heard somewhere that you could overdose on toothpaste, so one night I tried to eat an entire tube of toothpaste. It didn’t work.

Nothing can describe my pain during that time more than the fact that I tried to overdose on toothpaste. That’s as low as it gets.

Maybe I actually
was
an addict. Maybe I couldn’t control myself. I don’t know. Either way, I had a serious problem.

CHAPTER 7
 

Hitting Bottom

After two weeks of hell I left Mesa Vista and returned home pretty much the same as when I’d left. Being out in the real world was nice, though, and I started to feel a little better about myself and stopped having suicidal thoughts. I stopped cutting, too, which was good, but I was not ready to give up drugs.

I could see that my mom was still very worried about me. She looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. I felt terrible that I was putting her through so much, but that didn’t stop me.

As soon as I got home I went right out to see my friends. Two weeks in Mesa Vista felt like a lifetime away from the apartment complex and all the parties. I missed being around my people and all the social aspects that go along with doing drugs—I needed to get right back into the swing of things. Almost everyone I hung out with was a druggie. Most of my friends didn’t go to school. A lot of them had jobs making more than minimum wage. They didn’t seem to have responsibilities or stress in their lives. Instead, every day was one big party.

My mom saw that I wasn’t ready to grow up from that life just yet, so shortly after I returned from Mesa Vista she enrolled me in Sunset High School in Encinitas, which was a continuation school for kids who were on drugs or named Kendra. It had all the classes a regular school would have, but the day was also packed with hours of counseling.

These types of schools are really only good for kids who want to be there. At the end of the day, someone has to make the decision to get better on his or her own. I wasn’t ready for that. Instead of taking it as an opportunity to get better I took it as a challenge to get more drugs. As it turned out, finding drugs wasn’t hard at all. I was surrounded by druggies. Pretty much everyone had something on him or her at all times, and if they were afraid of getting caught they hid the drugs in the ceiling at the school. When the teacher left the room, we’d pop out the tiles of the drop ceiling and smoke weed or do lines of coke. Sometimes during lunch we would sneak out through a window when the teachers turned their backs, or go upstairs to the bathrooms to get high.

The whole day was dedicated to this game of seeing what we could get away with. Every conversation I had with the kids there was about drugs and how we were going to do them that day. There was a thrill to being bad and trying not to get caught.

The downside was that we were doing coke almost every day, which wasn’t exactly what my mom had in mind when she sent me there.

We got drug-tested but we also took pills that flushed out our systems. It only worked some of the time, and I did get caught on a few occasions, but we never really got in trouble when we got busted.
After all, we were already in reform school. Where else could they send us?

I knew the place was bad for me. I was doing drugs as often as possible and I could feel myself going crazy again. I told my mom that I wanted to go back to Clairemont. I told her that there were more drugs at this school than there were at my regular school. I begged her for another chance. She agreed and somehow convinced Clairemont High to take me back for my sophomore year.

Back in my old school, I almost immediately fell back into my old habits.

I started hanging out at the apartment complex where most of my troubles began. Some of the characters were still the same, but during my sophomore year I met a new guy. His name was Mario. He was Puerto Rican and very romantic. He had that Rico Suave thing going on but, more important, he always had drugs, so he immediately became part of our crew.

I was always just friends with the guys who hung out at the apartment complex. It was just a place to chill and get high; nothing romantic ever developed with any of them, and it was probably better that way. With Mario, though, things would be different.

I’m not sure exactly how it got started, but I think we were on acid that day. We hooked up and immediately began a relationship that would ultimately change my life. I started spending every day after school with Mario. Sometimes I would skip school, and all day long we’d do coke and have sex. Looking back I wouldn’t call him my boyfriend. I never loved him. We just had a lot of sex and did a lot of coke.

Mario would give coke away to anyone and everyone who wanted
it. It was pretty nuts. His parents were great people who lived in San Juan, but Mario had some local friends who definitely weren’t so great.

At the time I wasn’t concerned with any of that. I just loved hanging out with him. But since I was living at home I had to sneak around to make it happen.

Luckily my mom had a regular routine back then. She’s still a creature of habit, but during that time especially you could keep time by her daily rituals. Every night at exactly nine o’clock she would go into the bathroom and brush her teeth, take off her makeup, and get ready for bed. From there she would crawl directly under the covers and call it a night.

Each night when I saw the bathroom light flick on I would sneak out of the house. I couldn’t go out the front door because it made too much noise and it would have to stay locked, but we had a sliding glass door in the back that I could open quietly and sneak out, leaving it just a little bit open for when I came home. I would slowly creep out the back, hop over a big wall, and fall to the ground on the other side where a road led me to freedom—and to Mario. My legs would get all scraped up but I didn’t care. I’d stay out all night, doing lots of coke and spending time with Mario.