Cracked Head Memoirs

As if my problems weren’t bad enough by the spring of 2002, I started drinking again. It’s a short step from depression to self-pity and I’d taken it. Additionally, I rationalized that maybe I could work more using booze as a crutch to deal with the pain. It was a bad idea. I don’t recall how long I contemplated the move, but one day I made it, and over seven years of sobriety were gone.

Things rocked along fairly well for a couple of months. The combination of booze, acupuncture, and tons of ibuprofen made it possible for me to work several short shifts a week. Then one night I drank a pint of Wild Turkey in about 10 minutes. The next day I was pretty hungover. Miraculously, I put it down and didn’t pick up again for about a year and half.

I’m not exactly sure what led to my picking back up, other than the obvious fact that I’m an alcoholic. I was in a fuge state due to all the meds I was taking. Additionally, I was still having back pain whenever I worked. It was a bad place to be in. So somehow I convinced myself that drinking vodka straight out of the freezer was a good idea. It wasn’t.

Like the whiskey experiment, it went pretty well for awhile. Of course I felt much better. I wrote several short stories over the period of about two months. I began playing the guitar and banjo again. And I was blogging and trying to come to terms with the Linux operating system. The combination of antidepressants and booze fueled my already obsessive nature and I was able to literally shut the world out for days at a time as I focused on my projects, none of which ever amounted to anything.

The controlling and enjoying phase lasted, I think, for about 5 months. Then I began to overshot the mark. Eventually I was drinking most of the day, often as much as a liter. Then, out of the blue and after a pint of Absolut, I decided to go see my old friend Rudy. That was like playing Russian Roulette with an automatic.

I hadn’t seen Rudy in about 10 years. As is often the case with childhood friends, it was like we’d never been apart. I had been so isolated for so long that it felt great to see him. (Having recently chugged a pint of vodka probably had something to do with the great feeling too.) And after I’d been in his living room about 15 minutes, the dope dealer dropped in. Just like that, I was back smoking crack.

I’m not sure whether that was a little over three or four years ago. The pattern that quickly emerged was going on crack benders, almost always with Rudy and his hangers on, every two to four months. Sometimes I might make it six months, but other times I might only make it a week or two between binges. It was pretty awful right from the start, but that didn’t stop me.

Quite frankly, I’ve gotten too old for all that bullshit. When I get high on cocaine in any significant quantity, I can’t sleep, sometimes for a couple of days after I stop. Even when I drink oceans of alcohol, I can’t sleep. It’s a nightmare, and one that could easily land me in the psych wared. Additionally, the places I go and people I associate with scare the shit out of me when I come down. It’s not like the heady days back in Memphis when we had lots of cash and the dealers at our beck and call. Now it’s street level, and that’s way too dangerous for an old guy like me.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my depression plays a huge part in my addiction, and probably always has. Whether I can come to terms with, and perhaps even overcome it, is not knowable. It’s a certainty, though, that I’ll never live long enough to recover if I don’t get with the program. Life can be a real bitch, but there’s no since making it exponentially worse than it already is.