August 26, 2000

I'm writing this because I've read so many frantic letters on methadone pages from people who "just want to get off this stuff and lead a normal life."

Listen: if you're one of them ... and you're anything, ANYTHING like me, methadone IS giving you your normal life. You just can't see it---BECAUSE---(take a deep breath here)---your addiction---your disease---is trying desperately to tell you it isn't.

Read about a bit of my twenty-five year saga "out there." Before I found methadone.

It all hit home the other night sitting here watching TV. They were re-playing a Conan O'Brien Late Show thing. A commercial came on....For "Ambien." Oh yes. Ambien.

Now, opiates were always my choice. And Ambien isn't an opiate, I know. But bear with me.

I had discovered Ambien about two years before my wife kicked me out. Always stole it from people, of course, but it was one of those script drugs that seemed particularly good at first. Kind of seemed like something somewhere between a barb and a benzo. ("Between a Barb and a Benzo"---how's that for the name of my first novel?) Anyway, I could take a couple and, for about thirty minutes, just have a loose blast. One time I was down at this little country town, watching the kids while my ex-wife and her friends went horseback riding. We all got in the car to go somewhere, I've forgotten where, maybe down to where the horses were. I was driving and the Ambiens were just kicking in. I couldn't concentrate on what people were saying to me. They would tell me I'd be turning left up ahead and I'd go right past. I remember they began joking about "what the hell I'd been drinking." I had stolen the Ambiens from Jim, the guy whose house we'd just left.

And as usual, I managed to talk my way out of it. I thought.

So a couple years later, when my umteenth psychologist sent me to my umteenth psychiatrist for "medication management," I, on my second visit to the psychiatrist, told him I had "trouble sleeping." I asked if there was "anything I could take." I knew perfectly well that Ambien was the 'in' scrip for sleep right then. Just a little, I told him. Damn! He whips out his pad and asks if fifteen would be all right.

Next thing I know, I'm falling asleep at the dinner table, with my ex yelling "Mark! Mark!" and my kids crying for Daddy.

Funny. Remember how I said a "loose blast?" My neck seemed rubberlike. I couldn't hold up my head. My schnoz kept heading for the soup. So here I sit, nineteen months later. I live in a one-room apartment, rented from my big sister upstairs, at forty-six. I have my kids here. My littlest is sleeping in a portable crib. My five-year-old sleeps with me.

I take my methadone on schedule every morning. I've been going a year and now only have to drop by there three times a week. I'm writing a letter to a bunch of total strangers who desperately post to a methadone page. The reason? I'm not sure. Mainly, I guess, because I need to write to someone because sometimes it's very, very difficult to believe that I'm not the only person on earth that this has happened to. But also because that, after having found the methdone clinic and becoming "stable" after 25 years, I feel like maybe---just maybe---I could eventually help someone else. Even if it's just to volunteer my network administration computer knowledge at a substance abuse center or methadone clinic.

But guys! I still dream many nights of Tylox and Percocet and Tussionex and Paregoric. Of Lomotil and Hycotuss and Dilaudid and Lorcet-10. Of Norco and Talwin and MS-Contin. And Ambien.

The dreams always involve my father, and the house I grew up in, and his sign shop. He and I are at it again, trying to hide the pills here and there, always denying we have them or that we're taking them. Each knowing a terrible secret about the other that we have to keep from my mother. In real life, he hid his pills in his golf bag and under the seat of his Ranchero, and I stole them. In real life, I hid mine from him far more successfully, for by that time I was on my second marriage and he never came over.

But in the dreams, the pills are always turning up out in the open, right where we can see them. I open a drawer and they're there. I stare at them, horrified, knowing my mother could have found them if she'd been the one to open that drawer or cabinet. Dad's always finding mine and accusing me of too much drug-taking. I find his and tell him he's a closet addict. We can't stop, neither each other nor ourselves.

And no matter how much I think I'm getting better now, how much money I make, how "stable" I am, how hard I work, how much I accomplish, the dreams are there, and the drugs are always right behind the pharmacist's window. I daydreamed (just yesterday!) about rubbing black body makeup over my arms and hands, wearing a ski mask, talking like an African-American, and robbing a pharmacy. They'd say it was a black guy! I could pull it off! I trained as an actor!

What a wonderful use of my God-given talents.

There was even a time, in 1991, when I came into Narcotics Anonymous for a couple of years. Yes, I stayed "clean." But all that really happened to me was that I just stayed very, very busy "being sober." It served me sort of like ... well, just another drug. I went to meetings all up and down the East Coast. I became a Tradition Expert. I became "famous" for the way I gave out chips, finding different names for all the colors.

And of course, before you knew it ... I had married my fourth lovely wife (from the fellowship), had two kids, and eventually, here came the scrips again. With bells on.

In flying colors.

And here I sit.

The ONLY reason I have a great job and any hope for a future now at all is the methadone. The money I pay---$65/week---is NOTHING. I would collect aluminum CANS if I had to to pay for it. And God knows, sometime, somwhere, I have to begin giving back.

So I'm starting here. If I convince ONE of you that there's hope for you by putting your addicted, damaged chemistry back near to where it should be with methadone hydrochloride, then I've begun a successful journey.