As far gone as I was, I couldn’t fathom “serious” crime—selling pills was one thing, but I wasn’t going to get into big-time robbery or cocaine distribution channels.
I wasn’t going to come clean, either. Ask for help? I couldn’t face the shame of it; there was some tiny element of my pride still holding firm. I hadn’t come to the end of myself, which is that one destination we must reach to find any hope.
So I opted for the stopgap. I’d sell even the few possessions I really cared about. My personal things went to the pawnshop; my baseball card and comic book collection; my guitars, amplifiers, and stereo equipment; rings and jewelry. I even tried selling the air-conditioning window unit, but I couldn’t figure out who to sell it to. However, pretty soon it was useless anyway, because the power company cut Rick, my roommate at the time, and me off. We had no lights, no water, no gas. All of the furniture my parents picked out for my apartment was gone. I sold everything.
I’d buy drugs with the proceeds, get high, come down, and walk down the same dead end street. Addiction is utterly merciless. The drugs never told you, “Okay, that’s enough. You’ve completely ruined your life. I’ll leave you alone now.” They just shout even louder, “More! More!”
So I hit absolute bottom.
As the gap in my relationship with Mom and Dad widened, my friendship with Rodney deepened.
Rodney was all in as a dealer. He had an apartment downtown where I often crashed or just hung out. Rodney sold Crystal Meth and Special K (ketamine)—serious drugs he could move quickly on the street. The police knew him as well as I did, and he’d been followed for some time, which is why he moved out of Chalmette.
In Rodney I couldn’t help but see my future—someone who no longer thought about turning back. He was in this life for the duration, wherever it led, and he wasn’t kidding himself about turning over a new leaf. After the blowup with my parents, I felt like Rodney pointed the way where I was heading. The old world was gone.
My new friend welcomed me with a proposition. “Let’s get out of this place,” he said. “They know us too well here. Cops will get us sooner or later.”
“This is my home,” I said. “I love this city. Where would we go?”
“San Diego.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“A rich life and an easy life. Look—I’ve done this before. We move to Southern California and rent an apartment. Once a month, we cross the border. It’s half an hour to Tijuana, two hours to Ensenada. And Special K comes in 10-mil bottles there, dirt-cheap without a prescription. You load up, fly home, and you’re in business.”
“Either sell the whole bottle or put the stuff in the oven on a cooking sheet, one or two bottles at a time—heat it up, place it in baggies, and you’re done. One trip a month gets you ten or fifteen thousand, and you enjoy your profit the other twenty-five days. No more frantic running around for nickel-and-dime business transactions.”
I thought about what he was saying. In Southern California, we’d be safer. And San Diego wasn’t a bad place to be. The sun was appealing to someone living in a freezing apartment in February, taking icy cold showers. Seven months later, the window would close forever on anything like this involving airplanes. The attacks on the World Trade Center would see to that. But in February of 2001, you could still pack just about anything on a plane and take it wherever you wanted.
“Come on, dude,” said Rodney. “San Diego is sun and surf, a whole new life. Easy money. There’s nothing here for you anymore—you have no family, right?”
I looked up at him. The words were like a knife to the heart. It was true, but I didn’t like hearing someone else say those words.
“I don’t know, Rodney.”
He sighed, shook his head, and kept after me for four days. He really needed a buddy to go with him. And he had no choice about leaving. He had a permanent “Go directly to jail” card in New Orleans. He needed a clean slate.
I had every reason to go, nothing tangible to hold me back, and a desperate need for something new. But in the end, I said no. Something deep inside wouldn’t let me pull that trigger. I wasn’t even sure why, but I chose the current hell over the promise of California.
Call it the “still, small voice” inside. Call it an angel watching out for me, applying some invisible hand of restraint. Whatever it was, I’ve come to believe there are moments when our lives are teetering on the edge of some abyss, and there’s a gentle—or sometimes not so gentle—hand that takes hold of us, shelters us, protects us from our most dangerous threat: our own self-destructive impulses.
That divine hand held me back from California.
Chapter 9
The Party’s Over
I’ve never spent a colder, more desolate winter.
Rodney left, so I had one friend fewer. As for family, I had nobody but my sister.
Lori would come to see me in that freezing, dark apartment. “Just checking in on you, Robby,” she’d say. Then she’d walk past me into the apartment, look around, and say, “How can you live like this?”
I felt ashamed, but at least the gloom of that place might keep her from looking into my eyes.
Lori was in school at the University of South Alabama over in Mobile, working toward an engineering degree. But whenever she was home, she’d faithfully come “just to check in.” I was all bundled up in a cap and jacket, sitting under blankets, cold but too high to care much about it. That was why I spent whatever money I had on drugs. They sedated everything at once—the chills, the
