I arranged to meet up there with a friend named Joseph Magee, whom I’d met during my first stay at Crossroads, in 2003. We’d remained close. Originally from east Texas, where in the late 1990s he helped stage a controversial college production of Angels in America, and now a successful businessman in New York with his fashion-company-owning husband, Joey was a recovering addict who’d helped me and countless others through many trying times. He was also a bit of a rehab junkie—he’d been to about forty different rehabs, no exaggeration, and was beloved everywhere he went—and was always willing to come to a friend’s aid at a moment’s notice.
This time was no different. I just called him and said, “Hey, Joe, I’m going to this crazy fucking wellness ranch in Sedona. You want to come?”
His reply: “I’ll meet you there.”
I asked Joey to join me because I knew I wouldn’t want to let him down. Left to giving my recovery over to a pair of strangers, I’d likely as not hit eject before getting there by employing my default evasion in such circumstances: Fuck it. Joey would be my fuck-it insurance.
I had become resistant to traditional twelve-step-based rehabilitation—or too burned out on it, or too proficient at gaming it—for that method alone to seem like much use. It had worked for me for extended periods in the past, and there’s much about it I believe is invaluable—I still employ many of its tenets to stay sober. But addiction is so complex, so individual, and dependent on so many factors that combating it can often make an addict feel like a rat in a maze, continuously searching for solutions while bumping into barriers that keep him or her from staying clean.
It’s a maze in which too many alcoholics and addicts find themselves trapped. Relapse rates for rehabilitation centers hover between 60 and 80 percent, a distressing volume of failure for a $40 billion industry into which abusers and their families pour so much time, money, and emotional currency.
The truth is, by my midforties, I had learned every lesson I needed to learn. Now I was learning how to ignore them. There were more pertinent matters for me to master: the most efficient ways to buy and smoke crack; how best to hide my use.
Those were the sorts of things I became hyperfocused on—not my failures at attempting to get clean but my successes in buying and using without getting caught or hurt or killed during some random drug-buy mix-up. Walking into a park in a high-crime neighborhood to buy crack at 4 a.m. was no different than playing Russian roulette with two shells in the chamber. In some places, it was like playing with five shells—and still, I was willing to spin the chamber again and again.
So off I went to see Puma St. Angel.
I arrived at Dulles International Airport at 7 a.m., three hours before my flight’s scheduled departure, a nod to the ridiculous amounts of time it now took me to accomplish even the most mundane tasks. Before getting out of my car at the airport garage, however, I took a hit off a pipe to hold me over. Two hours later, I was still sitting there, still smoking. I decided it didn’t matter if I left a little later, that I wasn’t on a strict timetable. I’d just take the next flight. When it was too late to catch that one, I resolved to take the next one. A few hours later, I resolved to take the one after that.
I never left my car. Stocked with what I guessed to be enough crack to last a couple of days, I finally missed the last flight of the night. By that point, crackhead wisdom kicked in big-time: I had always wanted to drive across the country, and now seemed a perfect opportunity to do just that. I pulled out of the airport garage around 10 p.m., pointed my car west, and headed toward Arizona, more than 2,200 miles away.
That was day one.
I drove through the night, finally stopping in Nashville a few hours after sunrise. I checked into a hotel and smoked away the rest of the day. By nightfall, I realized I was already running low on drugs. I rummaged through my car seats and floor mats for crumbs, then drove off sometime around midnight to score more.
By now, I possessed a new superpower: the ability to find crack in any town, at any time, no matter how unfamiliar the terrain. It was easy—risky, often frustrating, always stupid and stupendously dangerous, yet relatively simple if you didn’t give much of a shit about your own well-being and were desperate enough to have an almost limitless appetite for debasement.
Crack takes you into the darkest recesses of your soul, as well as the darkest corners of every community. Unlike with alcohol, you become dependent not only on a criminal subculture to access what you need but the lowest rung of that subculture—the one with the highest probability of violence and depravity.
Navigating that landscape required me to be absolutely fucking fearless. Almost everybody assumed I was a cop—flashy car, false bravado, white—so I’d often pull out a pipe first and smoke whatever I had in front of them, even if there was only resin left on the screen, just to show I was for real.
Then there was the matter of not getting ripped off. Like cold-calling clients, it was a numbers game of hit-and-miss. I’d either hand $100 to someone to make a buy and wait outside a building as they went in the front door and out the back, or I’d find someone smart enough to
