Day One

I don’t know if I slept last night.  I know I tossed and turned.  I know I laid there dreaming of sleep, praying for sleep – but I’m almost positive it never came.  You know how your mind can play tricks on you, like shadows in the dark looking like people or a dream so vivid you wake in a sweat.  There is a blurry line between the reality of sleeping and actual sleep for me.  It’s constant this whole “trying to sleep” thing.  Some nights I do not even bother, watching the sun rise.  It’s a disgusting feeling to be honest, 3 am, 4 am, 4:45 am – I know the sun is coming up and I do all I can not to recognize it.  I play games in my mind to avoid the light, the birds chirping, the sick feeling that follows.   I turn up the music (I’ve no tv), I sharpen pencils, test pens to find the perfect one to fit the indentions in my finger (I might hold them too tight at times).  The beautifully soulful Eryka Badu plays on and on.  I scribble this and that, blocking out the rising sun that is inevitably coming for me.

These are my 24-hour cycles, they never change.  Every once in a while, I’ll find sleep, I’ll get 5 or 6 hours and wake to a new reality, sleep changes a person’s perception.  On those mornings I welcome the chill of a breeze, the dew on the grass – even those little chirping birds that I wanted to shoot the morning before.  Maybe a shower, grind the fur coat off of my teeth and out of my mouth with stiff bristle brush.  I remember being a child, preteen, early teens and sleeping in.  Looking forward to the weekend, to the summers to stay up late and sleep the morning away.  I loved the summers then, more so than now that’s for sure.  I would wake at 9, eat and make call’s too friends.  Grab my backpack and skateboard, make my way to the beach.  We would all meet up on the left side of the pier and stay all day, sun burnt and sandy, broke and hella hungry; can’t wait to get home to eat something.  My old man lived a bock off the beach back then, but I was never offered to go there to eat, I don’t think I was even given a key.

It’s now 6 am and I need to head out to work - still wondering if I slept, pretending I slept.  I know I searched all night for a cool part of the sheets like I had restless leg syndrome.  Kick, push, squirm – slide over to the right and heat that area up and then over to the left.  Hot, contorted, confined – come to think of it, I think the sheets were trying to kill me at one point.  

I look ever at Caswell Nicky and he’s on the couch, face buried in the cushions. I try not to wake him as I dress.  Pants, shirt, boots and a jacket, I try to creep out the door.  He says “See ya later” in a morning voice.  Caswell Nicky is my guy, me and that dude hang tight nowadays.  We met a few years back; he didn’t really care for me but I worked my way into his heart.  He had most likely heard rumors of me and my misdeeds, I was not a saint by any means, I was quite self-centered and mean.  But as the years went on he became one of my closest friends.  I lived on his couch a couple summers back and his old man gave me a job as a painter, that was an awesome summer.  Now he’s on my couch, doesn’t live here though.  I say sorry for waking him and I’ll get at him later today.  He grumbles.

I jump in my truck, she starts with ease, surprising cause she is so old and beat up.  About 6 months back she was stolen and retrieved in Pacoima, luckily she wasn’t set ablaze.  Truck now warm I split, up Rose to Centinela and onto the 10 freeway.  I bounce along forgetting about the quandary of ‘did I sleep or not’ and onto the fear that is rising in my gut.  I’m going to be late again.  How on god’s green earth this is possible I have no idea, I’m pretty sure I didnt fuck’n sleep so there is no way I slept in.  This is a new job, only had it for almost 2 weeks now and maybe I’ve made it on time 3 or 4 times.  Tony is pissed about it for sure.  He’s a dude from the neighborhood that landed this job and hooked me up, installing fiber optics.  I’m ground level, but Tony tells me the company is run by a bunch of racist white guys so I will advance quickly.  I can tell you I seriously needed this job, like something fierce.  My life was stalled out in the toilet and I couldn’t find work to save my life and now here I am with a good job and I’m shitting all over it.  

I go from the 10 to the 60, doing about 70 mph, my truck can’t handle speeds much faster than that.  I start to get sleepy; I start to think of my life and all the choices I have made.  It has been on a steep decline over the past year, like I threw it off a cliff.  My head starts to talk to me, my head creeps – them ugly bitter demons that come from corners and cracks that never see the light of day.  The ones that only come out when they know I’m at my weakest point, the ones that are trying to kill me.  They infest my thoughts like ticks, burying themselves deep down in mind and sucking the life from me. “You can’t continue to live this way, you should kill yourself” they say.  How many times have I turned to that solution in the past 12 months I ask aloud.  Shit how many times throughout my entire life have I asked this!?  I have hurt so many people, been a complete failure to friends and family.  I was meant to be so much more.  Now tears are starting to well up in my eyes, I reach to the floorboard, pick up a piece of broken mirror, reach into my pocket and pull out a baggy of coke.  

I use one knee to steer, work the gas with my other leg and hope I don’t need to shift.  It’s now 6:40 and the freeway in LA county at this time is damn near full up. I’ve 20 minutes to go and 5 minutes to be there, so of course doing some dope is the way to go.  I empty the baggy onto the mirror then throw it in my mouth trying to get every morsel out of it.  I pull a razor blade off the dash and chop up the coke some.  It’s bright white and as soft as new fallen snow.  I roll up a dollar bill and commence to snorting it.  My nose is packed full from last night but I manage to get it all in there.  Squeeze both nostrils shut with fore finger and thumb, sniff as hard as humanly possible and release.  The coke goes further in.  I can now taste it in my throat, the drips sliding down.  Mouth numb, nose numb and now I’m high again.  The day looks better now, now I can do this – everything is going to be ok. 

I arrive at work 10 minutes late, they are just handing out assignments, you know like who’s going where on the project, who’s working with who.  It’s a couple 6 story buildings somewhere in Diamondbar, there’s about 15 of us on the project.  Tony says he’ll take me to test the phone lines in building one.  We walk to the tool truck, grab a couple walkie-talkies and head up to the building.  He looks at me, knows I didn’t sleep a wink and tells me “You need to get my shit together, I hooked you up with this job and your fucking me”, I look at him in silent agreement, a quite pitiful look I’m sure.  I want to say sorry but I’ve been sorry my entire life and I know he doesn’t want to hear that shit.  We head through the lobby and up a flight of stairs to the second floor.  He goes to the main circuit board for that floor put’s me underneath the desks in the cubicles plugging in some device that will tell him if the line is good.  I get to plugging in the device and he barks at me through the walkie-talkie, ‘That one’s good, go to the next’.  I crawl from out one cubical to the next, there’s a never-ending sea of them.

It’s been about an hour or more since I did the last of my coke and I’m coming down, the head creeps return.  The suicidal thoughts, the regret, the fear, the pain – every fucking feeling I have been trying to avoid over the last year, over my entire life are coming on and not like normal.  These feelings are not the ones that I get and power through, these are heavier, these seem to be way more dangerous.  The anxiety builds, Tony squawks on the walkie-talkie, ‘move to the next’.  My world is spinning and all I want to do is curl up in a ball and hide under these desk’s.  “I can’t fuck’n do this anymore, I’m going to die, I need to die”.  I think about how I can’t stop using, how I thought this job was going to save me, I can’t, it won’t and I just want to fuck’n die.  ‘Move to the next’ he says again, sounding more annoyed.  Maybe he has been saying that and I haven’t been listening, completely caught up in the voices.  Tears well up in my eyes again; I can’t do this, I’m really going to kill myself this time.  I think to the razor blade in the truck.  “All it takes is one cut, one slit vertically from wrist to elbow” I tell myself. 

I radio Tony, I choke back the tears, try to stabilize my voice, ‘I need to use the head, I’ll be right back’.  He doesn’t reply. I crawl out from under a desk, leave my radio and tools behind and head to the exit.  Down the stairs and out into the heat of the sun.  It’s bright and I can’t see too well, the tint on the windows in the building is quite dark I realize and I’ve been in there a few hours longer then I thought.  I’m seriously coming down.  I see the job superintendent, he’s standing near the parking lot, I can’t go to my truck.  I head to the left, there’s an outhouse over there, head towards that.  I pass it and duck behind a building and there stands a phone.  I’m on the cusp of a complete breakdown, there’s a defining silence in my head.  The voices have stopped, I don’t know why or how but they have gone silent.  I walk to the phone and call my mother collect.  She picks up and I start crying and can’t stop.  Everything inside me falls to the away - all that has been keeping me up, all that has been keeping me alive, it drifts away like dandelion seeds in a breeze.  In between sobs I tell her “I can’t go on like this, I’m going to die”.  I can’t stop crying.  “Jacob, Jacob, calm down, it’s going to be ok.  You need to come home, you need to come up here”.  “I can’t’ I say, ‘I’m going to die” “No you’re not, you’re going to be ok.  Get in your truck and drive here now, you’re going to be ok”.  She just kept repeating it, “you’re going to be ok”.  I couldn’t believe her but I had no other choices, it was trust her or kill myself.

I had never asked for help before that day.  I knew I needed it but the drugs had a hold on me like no one but another addict would be able to understand.  I told my superintendent everything that was going on, he had sympathy in his eyes and told me it was going to be ok.  The need for hearing those words was so great, they were words that seemed so vast and incomprehensible yet as simple.  I had gone home, packed some clothes into a paper bag, stopped by my old dealer’s house to smoke some weed and let him know I was going to go get clean.  He had stopped selling me coke a month or two prior being I was so strung out and he had empathy for me.  I left his place and drove the 200 miles up the coast to San Luis Obispo to sleep on the floor at my mothers and step-fathers house.  The date was March 26^th, 1998 and that was the first time I tried to get clean.