Danielle C.
DOB: 6/28/65; San Pedro, California. I thought I’d love dope for the rest of my life. I have always been a rebel. That’s the first problem. Being a rebel and always wanting to do what I want to do when I want to do it.
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I have a father who is a cocaine addict, so he drove us crazy. And when he got into cocaine it was basically when I got the “fuck you” attitude at home. There wasn’t any more closeness and family get togethers and this and that which always was a major scene. So I didn’t care anymore and I didn’t care about them, I cared about me. But I just cared about me having fun and about what I wanted to do.
So this wonderful thing called punk rock started happening for me in about `79 when I was fourteen. My parents tried to put curfew on me but I would sneak out the window and I would go out to clubs and slither in at six in the morning, right before I had to start getting ready for school.
And I loved it, it was wonderful. It was complete freedom. It was do what you want and say what you want and look the way you want and fuck authority. That’s where my head was at the time, because my family, all being on drugs and kind of doing their own thing.
So — but I’ve always been a leader. I was always very popular and have a really strong personality. So what I did was, I got into bands. It was the best way to express how I felt and to kind of be leading the scene, so to speak, even though there were hundreds of bands. But I had lots of organ and guitar lessons as I grew up, but I couldn’t remember how to play anything. I had blocked it all out.
So I started singing and I got into a band called “Desecrated Romance,” to rebel even further, because my parents decided I was getting a little too wild and they didn’t know how to handle me because they had too many of their own problems, with my Dad being on drugs. But they sent me to Riverside to live with some friends of the family.
In Riverside I was watched over real closely, so I really had to sneak around a lot. But see, that was just more intriguing for me, if I had to sneak around. That meant I was going to do it to even more of an extent.
So I’d have to get up and put my little normal Mary Jane clothes on and go to school with a backpack and go to school and put my cateyes on and spike up my hair and change. Then I’d be picked up from school and I’d have to run to the bathroom and put back on my little prissy clothes and everything was hunky dory, so they thought.
And at nighttime I’d have to sneak out the window and go play in clubs and they had no idea. My family thought I was doing really well. I hadn’t really begun to do drugs, I mean I had, I was popping acid and I was drinking, but compared to how I ended up, I hadn’t even begun yet. I was just playing around with it when it came my way.
Being in a band there was always somebody willing to give me something, thinking I was an easy mark, you know, let’s get her fucked up, this little cute punk rock singer and maybe we can screw her after the show. That’s the way they felt, but I took real well to the drugs and I could never get fucked up enough. So it never worked out for the guy who was feeding me the drugs.
Anyway, I faked that I was going to kill myself, I was going to O.D. And my parents brought me back to San Pedro and I got even worse. They thought everything was fine but I met up with my group of friends that helped me hit bottom. They were a lot older than I was and they were all in bands and so I got into a band within a week. We were up continuously, frying on acid and shooting up speed.
Anyway, God, that’s just how my life has been, sung in bands, and I did manage to go to beauty school. I got a cosmetician’s license. I wanted a cosmetology license, but the quickest, easiest way out was to get a cosmetician’s license, and because that only took six months and the cosmetology took a year.
So I managed to get a career out of all of my using, which is rather odd for an addict. And it kept me in the money, which is where I needed to be. Because I would work in nice places up in like Hollywood and Beverly Hills, and I would take money from the register so that I would have my pay check to pay my rent and my car payments and have the extra cash for the drugs.
But I could never get high enough. I always wanted to get to that point of almost O.D.‘ing — but yet not. That’s just the way I liked to do drugs.
The only time I did manage to O.D. once, but not. I was speed balling and I just hit the ground and started flopping around on the ground for a couple of minutes. And I came to and I jumped up and I thought that was just like the coolest rush, but I never thought about it.
But now I think of what a mind, to get to the point of almost O.D.‘ing, and that’s like the best rush you’ve ever had, tells me of what kind of warped sense I have on things.
I tried the program (maybe we could put, “stopping to use drugs”) about three years ago. And what brought me there was I was living with three roommates and I sold speed out at clubs. I made lots of money because I shot heroin so I didn’t use up my profit of what I was selling.
All the people that I was living with dealt coke and they were all in bands. One night they played at this place called “Dancing Waters” in San Pedro, and I was up at the “Fetish Club” in Hollywood, and over the PA system they invited the whole club to an “after party” at our house and I come slithering in about four o’clock in the morning.
There is this raging party going on at our house and the roommates that were having the party were out of it. They were just completely obliviated and I couldn’t believe that the party had been busted up because it was four o’clock and it was just outrageous. So I was trying to get people out the door and before I’d turn around they’d be coming back in and before I knew it disturbing the peace officers were there but they didn’t knock.
And what I found out happened was they saw people doing lines of coke in the front window. They were so out of it that all the lights were on, the shades were open, they just walked up, just to tell us to quiet down the party, to get some people out, and they saw people doing lines and immediately stormed the house.
And I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do. Because of all my roommates I was the only one that shot up, and I knew what would happen. They go twice as hard on you if they think or know you’re a junkie.
So I ran in my room and I locked it and started throwing everything out the window. Oh, and as a matter of fact, when I was out at the club my roommates were using my room to deal out of, so everything was in my room, so I had to throw scales and tons of coke and syringes and pills and everything out the window.
And they started knocking on the door of my bedroom and I just ignored them and kept throwing things out, and I was halfway out of the window and they came in. They just grabbed me and threw me on the floor. They knew what I was doing. Looked out the window and saw all the stuff and they went out there and filled up and they had a garbage bag filled with paraphernalia and drugs.
There was about ten of us that got busted and they handcuffed us all and they found the syringes. So they said, “Oh, who’s the fucking junkie out of this crew?” And they looked around and they checked all our arms and they saw it was me and they started calling me really sleazy names and tightened my handcuffs and said, “You’re a waste of a human being and you’re the type of people that are polluting our society. You deserve to be dead.
Look at you! Look at your, you little fucking bitch!” And they tightened the handcuffs so that my wrists bled. And they threw me in the cop car. And when they threw me in they threw my head against the window and so my jaw, my mouth started bleeding. I kind of dislocated my jaw.
Out of all the people only two of us were women, and they treated me the worst because I was a junkie. So they piled ten people in one cop car and there were like six cop cars there.
When we got to the station they threw me into a cell with this horrible girl. She was this little beach bunny prostitute. I wanted to deck but I was so burnt out I just told her to shut the fuck up before I whack you upside the head. And she left me alone for a while. Then she started gabbing again and bouncing off the walls.
And finally they let me make a phone call and I called my Mom and she wouldn’t bail me out. And everybody else had gotten out. I had nothing to do with this party and everyone else had been bailed out and I hadn’t been bailed out, so I finally called my house and my boyfriend said, “We are selling all the drugs we can to get up the money to get you out.
We’ll have you out of there pretty soon.” So we were busted on Saturday night, which was really Sunday morning, like four in the morning, so I spent the night, Sunday night — and then Monday they pulled a real slick move.
Nobody had bailed me out so they decided I wasn’t going to get bailed out, so they transferred me up to civil grant, which they didn’t have the right to do, but they did it anyway, and so all of a sudden I am in civil grant prison. Because nobody could bail me out.
What I found out happened was, since they tried to get me up there so quickly, my roommates and my boyfriend had come with the money an hour after they transferred me up to civil grant prison. When I was up there I wasn’t scared, probably because I was so sick. And they would tell me to get up and to go to dinner and I would just say, “Fuck you, I’m not going anywhere. What are you going to do with me? I’m already in prison.
What more can you do to me?”
And I was throwing up, I was physically sick, and I was throwing up, and throwing up, and they grabbed me, these bunks they had, I was on the top bunk, and they grabbed me and threw me on the floor, and they’d tell me to get my ass in line for food. I threw up on the feet of the guard and I said, “I’m not going anywhere. Fuck you. What are you going to do with me, throw me in solitary? Good. Get me away from all these bitches.”
But they wouldn’t do that because they thought everybody was going to hassle me because I was a young little white girl. But they didn’t hassle me because I had a “fuck you” attitude. So all the other prisoners thought I was cool because I was being rebellious to the guards. So nobody messed with me.
But anyways, since I shouldn’t have really been up there, I got bailed out the next day. So I had to spend maybe a day or a day and a half up there. So that made me think that maybe something was wrong and this life style wasn’t as cool as I thought it was.
I came back, got out of prison, went home, and I decided I’m not going to live with all these people. This is a mess. If I was living alone, I would have never gotten busted. I knew I wouldn’t have ever gotten busted because I was too slick. I do all my dealing out of clubs. I move from club to club. Nobody would ever know, and this would never have happened if I didn’t have all these ignorant roommates.
So I moved to my parents’ house and I drove them crazy within a month.
And my Mom was about to kick me out and she said, “You’ve got to do something.” So I decided that it was time to relax, so I would go into a detox. I went into a detox. I thought detox is wonderful. They hook me up to an I.V. valve and I was out for five days.
I woke up and I was feeling great, I was feeling like a real human being again. I went through a twenty eight day hospital. It was really groovy. It was this really neat hospital in West L.A. that was called the “Rock Star Hospital” and I was in there with this guy from Paul Revere and the Raiders and this other guy from Fleetwood Mac and we were all junkie musicians. It was great.
So I kinda like cruised through and I got out of the hospital and I went into a halfway house and I got loaded two months later. So I got kicked out. So I went to another halfway house and I’d have my friends pick me up and we’d go out and get loaded and I’d come back right before curfew and go straight to my bedroom. So they never knew that I got loaded.
Then one night I was really just too wasted on Quaaludes and heroin that I just walked in, I packed all my stuff and just took off and ended up in Venice and woke up. I couldn’t believe what I had done.
I didn’t have anywhere to go. There was this guy I was going out with that was clean for a year, and he picked me up and he let me stay at his place and after that I stayed clean for nine months. I did really well. I was managing a beauty supply and I got this really neat ’62 Chrysler Newport. I was really cool.
I didn’t believe in a Higher Power so it didn’t work for me. My ex-boyfriend came back into my life. We decided to move to downtown L.A. and I got back into my old artsy scene and I thought, well, I’m a junkie and I can go out to clubs and drink every so often, maybe smoke a joint. And I did that for a whole two weeks before I started shooting up again.
I’m an addict now and an addict means that I’m addicted to anything and everything. It’s taken me three years to get back to where I want to get clean. And in those three years I went through four cars, just kind of lost them, and ended up doing things I never thought I would do.
Working as a sleazy dance hostess, club in downtown L.A. Pretending that I’m attracted to these men that I am dancing with. Slipping Quaaludes into their drinks. Telling them I’ll meet them down in the parking lot and do a trick for 100 dollars. And I would slip a Quaalude into their drink.
I would time it for fifteen minutes. Tell them to go down to their car and after I got down to the car within two minutes they would be passed out. And I’d steal their money and I would go back up into the club.
They would see me the next night but they couldn’t say anything because first of all they weren’t allowed to do that, or else they wouldn’t be allowed to come to the club again. They’d call me over: “You dumb bitch; you owe me, and dat da dat da da.” And I’d smile and walk past, and luckily I only worked there for about two months, because I couldn’t have gotten away with it for much longer.
And I was starting to get paranoid because they could of followed me home. I always looked in my rear view mirror, thinking one of them is going to follow me home one of these nights. But there were guards that patrolled the parking lots, so nobody could hide in my car or try to beat me up, so the only thing they could do was to try to follow me home and then get me.
Well, I pulled that off for a couple of months and when I got sick of that, I pawned everything I had. I started boosting with a girlfriend of mine for a while. And I just got really tired. And one day I had been on like a week run,
I had been gone from home for a week, and I was making a sleazy drug deal and the dealer knocked — well, he jumped into my car and I ran over, he grabbed my hair and he knocked me on the side door and I sort of passed out on the ground. And he took off in my car.
This Mexican in his low rider truck all blasting out music pulls up and picks me up and puts me in his truck and asks me what happened. And then I told him to help me look for this guy and he did, but what happened is that I had this concussion, so I kept like passing out on him.
So he brought me to the hospital and checked me into the hospital and the next morning I woke up. I forgot and I didn’t know where I was and I forgot what happened. And then I realized and I jumped up, grabbed my purse, I ran into the bathroom. I fixed because I still had my drugs on me and I ran out of the hospital and I ran to my drug dealer right away.
Then, I didn’t have any money left, and no drugs, and my car was gone and I didn’t know what to do. So I had my Mom pick me up. She told me that she would drop me off in my place in Hollywood and she doesn’t want to hear from me again until I can do something good for myself or she’ll get me into the hospital.
And I didn’t know what to do because I was kinda tired of it but I liked doing drugs. So I took a bath, I just lounged and I took a bath, because it had been a rough week, and I got out of the bath about an hour later and I told her, sure, I’d go into a hospital. In that hospital they couldn’t accept me for like five days.
So my Mom said, “What am I going to do with her for five days? She’s got to stay loaded.” “Mom, that’s okay, five more days, okay?” So Mom had to give me the money for five more days to keep me loaded until I got into the hospital. I thought that was wonderful. My Mom was helping me stay loaded. How cool!
I had the worst detox in that hospital. They were into this natural organic amino acid trip and I was a raging bitch for ten days out of the fourteen that I was there. I didn’t sleep for eight days. They wouldn’t give me anything to sleep. I had never known such pain before because I always detoxed the easy way and they were making me do it on my own.
That’s one of the big things that keeps me clean now. But anytime I get that little inkling in my head, I remember my detox and what I looked like and what my body felt like and getting to the point of having absolutely nothing, no self esteem, which I usually have a lot of, and no morals, and just not a care for anything or anybody, including me, just not giving a damn.
So, I am clean four months and one day and I have such a different attitude from when I first got clean. I meditate every morning, call my friends that are clean. My Dad has been clean now for four years. We get along really well. We have the exact same personality, really cocky personality, and when we use it for good it gets us really far in life.
But I love being clean now, I love the clean friends that I have. I have real friends, real people I can tell anything to and trust and know that they aren’t going to just use me. People don’t use you. What do they have to use you for?
I have a God too. I was always scared of God.
I was raised in the Catholic religion and God damns you to hell for this and for that. And with everything that I had done, I knew that I would be damned to hell. But now I know that I have been to hell. And now I am just working my way up to heaven. I lived hell. I didn’t think I did.
I thought being recognized, being somebody in the club scene, was like a really big deal, and specializing in partying. I thought that that’s where it’s at. It wasn’t. It was a living hell, that got me nowhere. It got me in debt. It got me mentally screwed up.
All these people I’ve known for so many years, they are not my friends. They probably don’t even think about me anymore, that I am gone. They probably think I’m dead. The way I used drugs probably doesn’t phase them. Because they are thinking about them, thinking about what they have to take care of day to day.
Recovery is hard sometimes. It’s hard lots of times. Responsibility I’ve never been good at. I was supposed to start school, back to beauty school, a month ago. I just started a week ago. I just kept putting it off and putting it off. So I’ve got this to do, I’ve got that to do. I still freak out when it comes to responsibility. I’m not sure why. I guess I am fourteen years old mentally.
So I have to take small steps at a time because I never took responsibility. I had a chance to go to New York and model when I was seventeen. I was living in San Francisco and I did runway modeling at this Fairview Agency on Market Street and this photographer just adored me and wanted to set me up in New York. But I didn’t want to leave my band, my friends, and my junkie world.
It’s things like that opportunities blown like that — they get me so angry they make me want to succeed, even more now because I know I can do it, because I have a strong personality and I have the good will and because I am running on God’s will. It makes me really strong. It makes me know the things that I can accomplish if I just set my mind to it.
Sometimes at night I just sit and think and all these wonderful ideas will hit me. And I sit and think a little bit more and I’ll realize how I can achieve them. And then I get mad because I think, well, I should have achieved some of these by now, but that’s okay because at least I am here.
I went out and used drugs for three years and I am lucky that I made it back, I really am. I’m sure I could use drugs again, but I don’t know if I would make it back. I don’t think that I would have another chance, not for the things I did and the people I ran with.
The trouble I like to get into — it’s like I like chaos in my life. It’s just, it’s really worth it to stay clean, to be in recovery, to participate and be part of. And it’s a neat feeling knowing that everybody is — we are all the same.
We come from different places, and had different life styles — yet we haven’t. And we think alike and we feel the same and it’s neat to have that many people together at a meeting or convention, all in one place, that you feel that closeness and you just feel the serenity and the peace of mind.
That’s what I am most happy with, is peace of mind, knowing I am doing good. Knowing that God’s working through me and that I am not in hell anymore, and that the devil isn’t running me. It tries. I feel him, I feel him on my shoulder, nudging me in the back of my head a lot of the time, saying, “Let’s do this. This is fun. Remember how much fun this was? Remember that?”
And I just want to scream and I just stare up into the sky, “Well, help me, help me! Remove this, please God, help me remove this from me. I don’t know how to deal with this. I can’t take this.” And if I sit for a minute, it’s removed. It really is.
My obsession for using is lessening week by week.
When I first got clean, I wanted to get loaded every day still. I wanted to be clean. I wanted the best of both worlds. And now there is no best of both worlds. Recovery is it for me. I have to stay clean if I want to continue having peace of mind and serenity in my life and friends, people that love me and people that are willing to help. If I ever need help and to ever be able to do anything good in life.
So now my obsession I maybe have, like once a week, and I can deal with it because it’s a real small obsession now. And if I just ask God to remove it and sit for a minute and meditate. It’s gone and that feels really neat because I never thought it would leave. I thought I’d love dope for the rest of my life. I haven’t even been having dreams about it. They have gone away.
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