Of course, that made all that time and effort ineffective. I didn’t necessarily blame the treatment: I doubt much good comes from doing ketamine while you’re on crack.
The reality is, the trip to Massachusetts was merely another bullshit attempt to get well on my part. I knew that telling my family I was in rehab meant I could claim they wouldn’t be able to contact me while I was undergoing treatment. I’d made my share of insincere rehab attempts before. It’s impossible to get well, no matter what the therapy, unless you commit to it absolutely. The Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book”—the substance abuse bible, written by group founder Bill Wilson—makes that clear: “Half measures availed us nothing.”
By this point in my life, I’d written the book on half measures.
Finally, the therapist in Newburyport said there was little point in our continuing.
“Hunter,” he told me, with all the exasperated, empathetic sincerity he could muster, “this is not working.”
I headed back toward Delaware, in no shape to face anyone or anything. To ensure that I wouldn’t have to do either, I took an exit at New Haven.
For the next three or four weeks, I lived in a series of low-budget, low-expectations motels up and down Interstate 95, between New Haven and Bridgeport. I exchanged L.A.’s $400-a-night bungalows and their endless parade of blingy degenerates for the underbelly of Connecticut’s $59-a-night motel rooms and the dealers, hookers, and hard-core addicts—like me—who favored them.
I no longer had one foot in polite society and one foot out. I avoided polite society altogether. I hardly went anywhere now, except to buy. It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up. All my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs—feeding the beast. To facilitate it, I resurrected the same sleep schedule I’d kept in L.A.: never. There was hardly any mistaking me now for a so-called respectable citizen.
Crack is a great leveler.
Just like in California—like practically anywhere else I’d landed since this long bad dream began—each new day looked exactly like the one before it. Nothing occurred on a traditional wake-up/go-to-sleep continuum.
If I knew my crack connection, meaning if I’d bought from that person before and had his phone number, I would start making arrangements to buy from him as soon as I neared the end of my stash. If I reached him, I had to figure out how to meet with him. If we agreed on a time and a place, it was almost always at the most random hour, in the sketchiest part of town.
Impossible to factor into all of this: the waiting. No dealer works off a user’s urgent timetable. So you arrange to meet in front of a 7-Eleven on such-and-such street, then sit in your car and wait. And wait. An hour passes since the time he said he’d be there. He doesn’t answer his phone. You start freaking out. People keep going in and coming out of the store, and the man or woman working behind the counter keeps glancing your way, wondering why the hell you’ve been parked out there for two hours.
By this point, you’re also about to jump out of your skin—you need that hit. You feel wholly depleted and it gets harder to keep your eyes open, even a little bit. You call the dealer’s number a couple of times. Then a dozen times more.
You keep calling. He keeps not answering. The store clerk keeps staring.
Hours later, the dealer shows. No explanation. Odds are he has arrived with less than you asked for, or he wants more money than you’ve already agreed to pay. It’s never straightforward. It’s always some bullshit negotiation. You finally take what he has and hope it’s what he says it is. Chances are better than even that the product is so trashed with look-alike filler as to have hardly been worth all the effort.
You’re back on the phone three hours later, or eight hours later, cycling through the same routine two or three times more. By then, you no longer care or can tell whether it’s morning or night. There’s no longer any difference between 4 a.m. and 4 p.m.
It’s so clearly an unsustainable life. The monotony is excruciating. It’s truly the same thing over and over—same movies on TV, same songs on the iPod. Your mind is devoid of any thought other than how to get your next hit.
The motels where I stopped were frequented by active addicts who needed to support their addictions and pay their room bills. They ranged in age from their midtwenties to their forties and fifties. They were easy to spot. They stared out their windows or slouched outside their doors to see who might be a possible connection. Our rooms all faced one another, or they looked out onto a common parking lot. If you stared out your window long enough, you’d see who was going in and out of where, and who might have crack or information on where to find it.
Somebody would eventually come over to my room to sell me something directly, or pass along a connection, for a finder’s fee. When we finished the transaction, the addict was usually out the door before I realized I was missing my watch or jacket or iPad—happened all the time.
More frustrating was when they told me they heard so-and-so had some good stuff, but he was in Stamford, about an hour away. I’d head to Stamford, wait in a parking lot there for an hour. A guy would finally show up with nothing, then make ten calls before telling me about someone else with something in Bridgeport, a half-hour drive back up 95, where
