Cracked Head Memoirs

My story is primarily about substance abuse, recovery from substance abuse, and the interplay between my depression and my substance abuse. It’s about many other things too, but the threads that run through its entirety are those relating to my mental health. By necessity adjectives like sad, scared, and happy will be used. My desire is not to overuse them, inasmuch as they probably mean different things to different people, and are impossible to define. My focus will be on the behavior that many times was the direct result of such feelings. “I drove a car into a telephone pole” is self-explanatory.

It should be stated up front that I’ve never been on the surest emotional footing. Without belaboring the point I come from a broken home and was a pretty unhappy kid. What I don’t want to do is start off by blaming everything that has happened to me on other people, least of all my family. Sometimes I do that, but in my better moments I know that if anyone is to blame for how I turned out, that someone is of course me. Nevertheless, if there is such a thing as normal or well-adjusted, by the time my addiction began I certainly wasn’t it.

Just before my junior year in high school was to start, me and a guy I’d known since fourth grade made the short drive from Mobile to Mississippi. Way back in 1978 there were these little hole-in-the-wall sort of stores just over the state line that would sell beer to anybody capable of carrying it from the cooler to the counter. There probably still are. My friend and I each bought two quarts of Miller beer. The effect I got from it was incredible. Shapes and colors that weren’t really there danced around the perimeter of my vision. We talked and laughed and had a great time doing absolutely nothing but sitting outside the elementary school we’d attended together several years before. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t have a hangover the next morning. I don’t recall being in any particular hurry to do it again, but the genie was at least partially out of the bottle.

A month or so later school was in session and I was out with another buddy on a Friday night. He bought some small amount of what we used to call “Colombian” pot from a chick he new, but for whatever reason, we didn’t smoke any of it that night. Then, one afternoon a few days while riding around in his car, he fired up a joint. Before we’d finished smoking it the genie was out and I was all in. Back then the band Boston had just released “Don’t Look Back” and I’ll never forget my legs jumping uncontrollably to the music. It was like someone was tapping my knees with a rubber hammer. We laughed our asses off. In spite of my best efforts since, I’m not sure I’ve ever been higher.

Things progressed rapidly from that point. Within a year I’d quit school and moved back and forth between my divorced parents and one of my grandmothers at least five times. Shortly after hurricane Frederick hit in ‘79, I was living with one of my two life-long best friend’s family, and the two of us literally did whatever the hell we wanted to. That consisted almost exclusively of drinking, drugging, and trying to get laid. That Halloween we took our first Quaaludes and I drove his car into a tree. It was the second serious alcohol and/or drug related accident I’d had in that calendar year.

A few months later in May 1980, I had a serious motorcycle accident that very easily could have killed or crippled me. My left ankle sustained a break of the compound, sticking through the skin variety. My left elbow was broken. Worst of all my head was cracked. My face was pretty well smashed. After a week or so in the hospital they discovered that the cover of my brain was torn, and the fluid around it was leaking out my nose. I have a huge scar running almost from ear to ear through my hair from the operation required to save my life. How prominently my cracked head has figured in the rest of my story is anybody’s guess.