Maria M.
DOB: 2/8/58; New Orleans, Louisiana. Heroin is a great drug for becoming very close to comatose without actually being unconscious. I look at it as going back to the womb. When I think about shooting dope, I think about the warm feeling it gives me and the feeling of comfort and safety, and I think it’s very close to what I feel would be like going back to the womb.
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I am the youngest of four children, of four women, a family of four girls. Like I said, I was born in New Orleans. We moved to Washington, D.C. when I was three. My family is fairly well to do, and growing up, as far as material things, I had just about everything anyone could want. I wasn’t given a lot of things. I don’t think I was horribly spoiled. I think I might qualify as being somewhat spoiled. But I think part of the reason I ended up being a drug addict is because I think my family is emotionally dysfunctional.
My parents aren’t alcoholics, although they drink rather heavily. But I don’t think that they were very healthy in a mental sense. Not only am I the youngest, but there’s seven years that separate me from the sister that’s next in line, and I ended up bearing a lot of the brunt of what was going on in the family. I think I wanted to fix everybody. I was very sensitive to the fact that things weren’t right in the family, but not really understanding what was wrong or anything like that. I was always trying to soothe over arguments between people, fights, and that kind of thing.
I was a lonely child. When we moved here from New Orleans (my mother has told me this, I don’t think I really remember saying it) but I told my parents I was going to make a friend for myself, and that I was going to go out and find some mud and blood and bones and build a friend, which I think is indicative of not having pretty many friends.
So anyway, I was a fairly bright child. When I was in kindergarten my best friend was in first grade and I decided that I needed to be in first grade too, and I convinced my parents to talk to the school authorities and I got pushed up into first grade as well.
I think in a lot of ways I had a typical childhood. I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and I went to public schools, I got car pooled to the country club on the weekends. I remember when I was around eleven or twelve, I started to became aware of my sisters and what they were doing, and I’m sure this happened long before twelve or twelve, but at any rate it was very important to me that I be just like them.
They were into dating guys and smoking cigarettes and smoking pot, all of which they did in front of me. I was very interested, I would try to flirt with their boyfriends and stuff like that. Cigarettes and smoking pot I was adamantly against. I hated it, it scared me when they were doing that. I used to steal their cigarettes and hide them so that they wouldn’t smoke any more, things like that.
I recently remembered this and I heard someone say lately that all addicts have like a very traumatic experience that after which would have turned them to drugs, and I think this is what brought it to mind. I think it was probably a culmi¬nation of a lot of events throughout my life, but at any rate this one instance stands out in my mind today, and that was when I was twelve.
I came home from school one day and walked in on my parents getting stoned with two of my sisters and one of my sister’s boyfriends, and that pretty much blew me away. I had, I was very against it, and I was certain my parents were, and that society was, and then walking in on the scene — it just like knocked me out.
I think I started drinking — that was the first drug that I abused, right after that. I don’t think that it was long after that I started drinking. It started off as fun, but it also started off in an abusive way, with the first time I drank with friends it was to get drunk. The idea was to finish off a complete bottle of wine, not just have a couple of drinks, and we all got real drunk. I didn’t black out. I don’t think I was able to walk by the end of the night. I think I had to crawl home, but I wasn’t far from home anyway, so that didn’t matter,
And shortly after then I started smoking pot. There was . . . by this time I was in eighth grade in junior high school. Most of the people that I was hanging out with, well there was another traumatic experience actually that I think also. . . the people that I had been hanging out with weren’t really into drugs, maybe drinking some, and I had gotten into this situation with this guy — and this is in eighth grade — we weren’t doing anything, but we were going steady, and we broke up for some reason.
He decided that I had been unfaithful to him while we were going steady, why I have never understood. I don’t think I was. At any rate, he managed to sort of turn the rest of the group of kids that I was hanging out with, the clique that I was part of, against me. And they started doing some horrible things to me. They threw eggs at our house every weekend, and drove up on my parents’ lawn, and ruined it with wheel marks, but actually that was some years later. They once, on my birthday, chased me through the school halls with a milk container filled with spit that they were going to throw it on my head, shit like that.
So I stopped hanging around with them, and like the group of friends that I started hanging around with were very much into drugs and that was fine with me. At that point it was pretty important for me to start medicating my feelings. Having an entire group of kids act like they hated you on a daily basis was a pretty painful thing. And I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know how to turn for help or to turn to anyone and ask for help in dealing with it. My parents were aware of it because of all the eggs being thrown at their house. I guess they didn’t know how to deal with it either.
Rapidly I progressed from smoking pot to taking acid and experimenting with whatever else was available. There was a time when I took anything anybody ever gave me, I think there was a time when I came close to really screwing myself up physically, because I took three tiunals and started throwing up blood and stuff like that. But that didn’t matter at all, I would just go on to the next drug. It did make me stay away from Quaaludes and stuff like that for a long time.
There was another time when I was — it was before I was driving, so I was probably fifteen — and I was at Fort Reno Park. We had gotten drunk before leaving to go to Fort Reno. When we got there we found someone selling acid and took some acid and then sat in a circle with people that were smoking green. At that time we had never been exposed, or I had never been exposed, to green. I don’t think my friends had either, and we thought it was pot.
I took a couple of huge hits off a pipe that they were passing around, and spent the rest of the night laying on my back with one thought in my mind, and, that was that I was going to die. And obviously I didn’t, but it just, I like to pull those memories out of my file, to remember how insane all this shit was. And it didn’t just get insane when I was twenty-six and shooting dope. It started being insane pretty early.
I got through junior high school and I got through high school. I never did as well as I could of, as far as getting grades and that kind of thing. I just sort of hung in there. And ended up graduating and going on to college. I decided that I wanted to be an architect because that sounded like a neat thing to do. Not because I knew anything about it. And I got accepted to one school of architecture and that was at Tulane University.
So I went to college in New Orleans, which was . . . For a long time I said that was a mistake. It’s something that happened that way. It’s just part of my story. I don’t regret it. I didn’t belong in any school. I started off behind. I didn’t know anything about drafting or mechanical drawing or anything to do with architecture, and most of the people there did. And I wasn’t really interested in being in school. I was in college because that’s what was expected of me.
My drug addiction really took over. I was drinking very heavily. I stopped smoking pot, which was really interesting. It was making me very uncomfortable. I was becoming really paranoid, and so I stopped smoking pot and I started drinking quite a bit. At that point it was very obvious, all the blackouts and the fact that I was really abusing it.
I had never really been in touch with the fact that I might have an alcohol problem before I went to New Orleans. And I was aware of it. I didn’t do anything about it. I might have a few times tried not to drink as much.
At any rate, what happened is that I went home. I managed to get through that year. I had to leave the school of archi¬tecture but I was told that I could attend Newcomb, which was the women’s school there, on a probationary basis the next semester.
And I went home for the summer, when I met this guy and so consciously I decided that he was the guy that was going to rescue me from all of this, from the life that I didn’t know how to deal with, and I didn’t know how to handle, couldn’t live on my own. And I ended up dropping out of school to live with him.
Sort of surprising to me in retrospect that we ever got together. He was really straight. He was not an addict, and I tried to become what I thought he wanted me to be. I wasn’t capable of doing that. I was capable of spending three years with him and not allowing my addiction to become really obvious to him. I don’t think that he ever had a clue that I was an alcoholic and an addict.
But things didn’t work out between us. As soon as that happened, what I did was I would go back to school, and that didn’t work out. It was the same, it was the same old story. I would start to fall behind and my life would become very unmanageable, my school, doing homework, and keeping up with papers. And that kind of was just impossible for me to do. I got a job in a bar. At first the idea was just to work part-time, just to make extra money. Going to college wasn’t working for me. It just wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t happening, and I think I knew that and that’s another reason I got this job.
After living with this guy for three years — before we got, or just shortly after we got together, I dumped all my friends, made his life, or just centered my life around him. So when we broke up, I was really, really lonely, and I went to the University of Maryland for a while and that didn’t help. I wasn’t living there. I was commuting. And I hated it.
Like I said, I wasn’t doing well, so I got a job in this bar and it was very easy to make friends there. It wasn’t long before I was part of the crowd. And there was lots of drugs going on there, lots of dealers that hung out there, that kind of stuff. And I started getting very heavily into cocaine.
And that was another, it was a whole other world from what I had been used to, this sort of straight life that I had led the previous three years. And it was fun at first. It was a club where local bands played, and I got to know a lot of Washington’s musicians, and even some national acts, and hang out with people after hours at bars, after they were really supposed to be closed, and that kind of thing.
We had a lot of wild parties. My parents have a swimming pool in their back yard, and they’d go out of town every weekend, and I used to have people over to drink their brandy around the pool and snort cocaine at four o’clock in the morning, after the clubs closed, and it was fun for a while.
But it started to get old, and the cocaine, just like the marijuana, started to make me feel paranoid and uncomfortable with myself. So I eventually stopped doing that. And I just sort of abated my use. I stopped buying it, eventually turned it down when people offered it to me.
I’d like to say that once I decided I wasn’t going to smoke any more and had cut back, that I just completely stopped using it, but actually I never did. I just every now and then, I would still do it if someone offered it to me, even though I hated it. And the fact that I could stop smoking pot and stop what I thought was stop using cocaine, was something that was part of the huge denial that I had built up about my drug problem.
I figured that if you’re an addict, then you have an addict mentality, and that I didn’t. And that these two cases where I had just stopped doing those drugs was proof of that. What happened is that every time I stopped doing those drugs I just went back to alcohol. I never considered alcohol a drug until I found recovery.
I stopped using coke and started looking for something better, and it was very close to a conscious search. I started talking to people about I.V. drug use, about shooting up, and how much I wanted to try just once, because I wanted to experience everything once in life.
I have heard a lot of addicts say that same thing, a lot of us use that same line. It’s a bunch of shit. So asking around in the place I work in, it wasn’t hard to find people that were into that. I found a guy that was a junkie, and started using heroin, and that eventually was my downfall.
It took me six years to get strung-out to the point. . . well, actually after three years I was strung-out to the point where life was becoming too unmanageable for me to ignore what was going on.
But I stopped using it, I detoxed off of it by buying Valium on the street. And I was able to stay straight from heroin, not from anything else, or I don’t know what it was now, maybe two or three months, and then I started using again, and the whole time I was living with the same guy.
It’s strange now that I look back on it, because when I started shooting dope was the same time I decided that I couldn’t work in this bar any more, that I really needed a profession and a career, that I was getting too old to just be a waitress, and I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life and so forth. So I like consciously fucked up or allowed one part of my life to get really out of hand, while I sort of really straightened up my act in another area.
What I did was go into the printing business, and after three years of working at one shop and ending up managing it and doing a good job for these people, and becoming pretty good and pretty knowledgeable in the printing industry, my addiction started getting out of hand, and I started to steal money from them. And I decided I better look for another job because, like I had screwed things up at this place, and I had better get out of there while getting out was good — that kind of attitude.
I did find a better job, so I went to work at this other place and kept on, or shortly after working there I started shooting dope there again. All that time I was living with this same guy and it was a really horrible relationship. I don’t think that we really cared for each other. We stayed together because we didn’t want to face life alone. It was a very peaceful relationship.
A lot of times I was shooting dope just to run from the feelings of the low self-esteem and the low self-worth that I had. I don’t know where those feelings came from. I guess it was a whole lot of things. I know that my father is a perfectionist, and I grew up feeling that he expected a lot from me more than my other sisters. I just manufactured that, but it was hard for me to live up to my three older sisters. One of them has an incredibly high IQ, and the other two have their lives pretty much together.
I think that I thought like I couldn’t live up to what they were all doing, and the life that they were leading, and made the choice of turning to drugs and leading a different kind of life, one that maybe I would be better at, or maybe where I could feel superior to a lot of the people that I was hanging out with.
Heroin is a great drug for becoming very close to comatose without actually being unconscious. I look at it as going back to the womb. When I think about shooting dope I think about the warm feeling it gives me and the feeling of comfort and safety, and I think it’s very close to what I feel would be like going back to the womb.
Eventually things got really so unmanageable that I couldn’t deny the fact that I had a problem. I had been living, I had rented eight hundred million places and been kicked out of them because of not being able to pay the rent because of buying drugs, and the last place that I got kicked out of the house was locked.
The locks were changed on the door so I didn’t have access to the house. There was just like no motivation to get it together and try to find another place, to try and con anybody out of any money to get another place, or anything like that.
I started staying at the print shop that I was managing, slept there at night after the shop had closed on a pulled-out lounge chair. It was pretty horrifying. I had a few friends that were pretty much as bad as I was, or in as bad shape as I was, and they would stay at this print shop at night with me too, and it was a constant, and there was a whole lot of stress involved with that because the owner of the shop really wasn’t going to be happy knowing that I was doing that.
Besides that I was stealing quite a bit of money from him. It got to the point where there was absolutely no cash in the cash register, and every day there was a struggle to keep him away from it so that he wouldn’t discover it. Every day I had to collect the mail before he looked at it so that he wouldn’t see the bounced check notices coming from the bank.
The guy I was working for became my brother-in-law after I worked for him for about a year and a half. I introduced him to my sister and they got married and so I sort of felt some security in stealing from him, being his sister-in-law probably wouldn’t send me to jail.
And for a long time I covered it up well. At the end I stopped, I really didn’t care, I think subconsciously I was hoping to be caught.
It’s very hard for me to describe the last few months of my addiction, because it was really horrifying. There was, I think, the predominant feeling that I had was one of hopelessness. I thought that I was stuck, that I was going to be a junkie for the rest of my life. That there was no chance for me to do anything else, and the only future I could see was being a bag lady, or a bum sleeping on steam grates, whatever those are.
The last straw was when I got fired. I got fired by my brother-in-law because I finally missed getting to the cash register first and missed picking up the mail first and also — well, that’s another story. So he caught on to what was going on and fired me. And that meant, besides the fact that I no longer had any money coming in to support my habit, I could no longer steal an money from him to support my habit, and I no longer had a place to sleep.
When that happened I went to my parents and told them that I was a heroin addict and needed help. And I thought at the time that I was just strung-out. And anyone that was shooting dope was. I never understood the fact that shooting dope was a sign that I might be an addict. I just felt that I was physically strung-out and that I needed help with that.
What happened is that I went on methadone for twenty-one days — it was a detox. I didn’t abuse that, although the first day that I went to the clinic the nurse offered to up my dosage. Why I didn’t abuse that I don’t know. It wasn’t like me, I thought about doing it. But I was really beat. I didn’t want to go back to where I had been. I wanted to change my life.
At this place they told me to go to these meetings for recovering addicts. I started to see a therapist. She told me to go to those meetings for clean addicts. The guy that I had been living with that had gone through rehab, a VA hospital in New Jersey, told me to go to those meetings for recovering addicts. And all this combined got me to my first meeting of recovery. And I was still on methadone. The people there were very friendly, they gave me their phone numbers, two women, and told me I could have all the literature I wanted, and all that kind of stuff.
I started. It took a long time. I didn’t go to seven meetings the first week. I think I went to one. I think I went to two maybe the next week. And so on. I started meeting people in the meetings, and I started seeing them at other meetings. once again I was really lonely. And I started making friends that were clean. That was real important to me at first. I started seeing the same people in the same places and they seemed to be happy to see me. And they would invite me to go out and do things with them after the meeting.
So I kept coming back. I started taking advice or suggestions that I heard about. I just started doing same of those things like going to meetings. Just like anything else I started to incorporate some of the things people suggested into my life. It started working.
I went through withdrawal after I got off of methadone, and I felt like shit for a long time, not for a long time actually, for about two weeks. I managed to get through that. I thought New Year’s eve was going to be, I got clean shortly after New Year’s eve, and I thought definitely that was going to be my downfall. And I got through that. I went to a recovery dance with some clean friends and I was pretty flipped-out. I don’t think I could say that I had a good time. But I saw other people having a good time.
What happened is I started to get some help. I saw that there was a lot of other people that had changed their lives. I’ve heard a lot of people tell their stories and there were some that were worse than mine. There was some that weren’t as bad, but I saw people recovering, and I got some hope that I could do that too. I started to get an idea, having a spiritual force in my life means that I can’t do it alone any more, that I admit that I can’t do it. And I seek help. I turn to other people for help in getting through life, and that was something that I was never able to do before.
I’ve come to recognize that I have a set of values that I have to do my best to live with, to not go against. It’s when I react and I don’t think through on the actions, when I forget to think about what the action I am taking, what the results of that is going to be. That’s when I can go against what the right way for me is, and it’s that that brings about a lot of uncomfortableness.
It’s just I can’t just go against the grain of what’s right for me any longer. I could when I was using drugs. And it’s not that I physically can’t. I still do sometimes, but the pain of that is too acute for me to do it very often. The result of that is that I am a much happier person because I am doing more often than before, what’s right for me. And I have learned a lot about myself and about what is right for me. Which were things that I never thought about before. I have become a lot more aware of myself and who I am.
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