Jane Says

CW: Suicide, addiction, sexual assault

I had no idea at the time that I was falling in love with a dying man.

Head resting on the glass window pane as I drove silently through the night, he slurred more to himself than to me, "St. Christopher sent you. You're my very own patron saint. I don't deserve you."

The more he mumbled in appreciation, the more I wanted to scream. He was right about one thing, he didn't deserve me. A few years clean when we met, I didn’t know he struggled with a lifelong addiction until he relapsed. By then, it was too late. I was already in love.

Naive and ill-equipped, I cannot overstate the depth of my misunderstanding regarding the use of intravenous drugs.

I drove for four hours in the middle of the night to pick him up after spending the previous three days trying to track him down. When he finally answered his phone, he was scared, panicking on the other line. 

My heart dropped into my stomach, and after arguing and threatening loss of limb, I convinced him to give me his location, nervous about that tinge of vulnerability in his voice. I was in the car within minutes, speeding down I35, the long, lonely Texas highway that severs the state. 

As high as he was, when the sun came up, and I pulled back into my driveway, I thought we had one of the best, most honest conversations we'd ever had. Except, and I recycle this revelation now and again: it was all bullshit. We didn't connect on a deeper level. He was so high he could barely function, cooing words he thought I wanted or needed to hear. Maybe they weren't meaningless, but they were hollow. 

It was always that first hit that was best, he explained. It made his stomach warm, his body relaxed; sometimes, he craved sweets. He told me that's where the term junkie came from, but he was high when he said it, so I don't know if that's true. I knew it was unhealthy and dangerous, but I didn't initially understand, so instead of being repulsed, I listened to his musings with a sick kind of curiosity when he described the feeling. That was before I knew the signs: pupils the size of pinpricks, voice high and light, lies so real I believed them.

The first time I saw him get arrested for some petty crime or other, the arresting officer came to find me waiting in the parking lot while I sat there like an idiot, wondering where he went, assuming, like usual, he was off getting high in the public bathroom.

The cop told me point blank to leave him. “He’s bad news. Got a rap sheet a mile long.” But you didn't leave someone you truly loved just because they had an addiction or a sordid past. I hadn’t reached my boiling point yet, anyway.

When we met, we’d bonded over having immigrant families. He’d cook his mother's tamales while we shared a love of good coffee, punk music, and spicy food. His family hailed from Chihuahua and was full of famous flamenco dancers and street musicians. We were the same height—short—and he was twelve years older than my twenty-two. We were a bit of an odd pair. He liked my tattoos, and I liked his tattoos, and it never occurred to me that the script in Spanish across his chest, translating to life is no more, was some scribed prophecy.

When he spoke of his family, it was with longing and self-shame. He felt they outshined him, that they walked around stable, brilliant and happy, unsullied by harsh living. He was the dirty penny, the one who stomped through the mud puddle but couldn’t get clean, even when it rained.

I had assumed his suicidal ideations were a result of the drug use, a symptom of the downtrodden life he'd led and the seemingly impossible task of getting clean, but that wasn't true. It started earlier than that, when he was thirteen, and his older cousin shot him full of heroin so he could have his way with a pliable victim. The abuse went on for years and didn't stop because of some big dramatic event. They just got older, and by then, he was a full blown addict. That’s when I realized the two were inextricably linked—his wish for death and the clutch of his heroin addiction.

It wasn’t an accumulation of all the terrible things he did that made me leave him, otherwise I’d have been gone much sooner. It wasn’t that time he shoved me into a wall or tried to convince me to sleep with his friend in exchange for drugs. It wasn’t that time he stole my car—which we were living out of—only to have it stolen by someone else because he got high and passed out or that time he dragged me to every border town from Mexicali to Juárez to Tijuana, leaving me alone in a cafe watching young girls across the street sell their bodies to aging men while he stocked up on supplies. It wasn't the dozens of times he took me into dangerous situations where I watched people get stabbed or high or beaten, or that one time he stole thousands of dollars from his friends then left me alone with them, not having any clue what he'd done or even any of the many times he'd stolen money from me.

It was the time he asked me to shoot up with him. 

It had been a hard line, a firm stance he’d taken previously. But as time passed, he said he wanted me to finally understand what it felt like, that only then could I truly comprehend how good it felt and how intense the pain of not using could be. He was sick of me trying to get him back into rehab.

Inherently, the sentiment was inside out and backward, but I didn’t cry, shout, or scream. I just said, “No thanks.”

Leaving someone you love is really hard. Leaving someone you love when you know they’ll get worse without you is harder. But I couldn't stay. So I didn't. 

I left so fast and so hard, I put states between us.

Three months later, he was dead. 

A friend from Texas called to break the news, and I still recall the conversation with perfect clarity. The phone rang, and I broke out in a sweat, my nerves sensitive beneath my skin, like that feeling you get just before a fever settles in and wrecks you. Hot, cold, wet, chilled. Heart racing, palms sweating, throat dry.

“Are you sitting down? I need to tell you something.”

My exact response: “He's dead, isn't he?”

I didn’t have some existential experience or feel a change in the air. I just knew.

“How did you..? Yeah, he killed himself. There's umm, there's a memorial—”

"I have to get back to work." 

I didn't cry. I still haven’t. Guilt consumed me for months because all I felt was relief. His life was a tragedy, his brother used to say. I don't think that's true, but I was glad he no longer suffered living because he hated it. His despair was in having to wake up each day and carry on with existing. They say, for many addicts, and this was true for him, that happiness is a trigger. What do you do when even the joyous moments in life cause pain?

A year after he died, my uncle, who had a problem with pills and sex, shot himself in the head. A year after that, my other uncle, who struggled with a gambling addiction, jumped off a bridge and died. The Patriots lost that year. A few years after that, my cousin, after a back injury, became addicted to opioids, then overdosed on fentanyl in a parking lot. The number of people who have died or been impacted as a result of opioid addiction caused by big pharma, to date, is incalculable.

The other day, I saw this flier floating around online that pinned well-meaning community activists against people who didn't understand addiction. The flier, with a safety kit and infograph was—admittedly—disturbingly enthusiastic, adorned with emojis and thumbs-ups. It had been circulating a local encampment and enraged the locals, who felt like supporters were trying to encourage people to get high, be unhoused, and rely on assistance and government aid. 

As if one might choose anal drug injection not because it was safer since their veins were too blown out to keep ripping into but instead because they chose addiction and all its accouterment for its ease and glory. 

I’m reminded of those days, over a decade ago now, before his relapse. If I was on the outside looking in through a lens unobscured by poisonous memories, and life was just happy and full of good coffee and tamales before the warm belly and pinprick pupils, I know he wouldn't have chosen to cause so much pain if he was in control. 

Dedicated to AG ’76-‘12