You and All That Cocaine

What was that like?

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When I was conceptualizing an image for this Cocaine edition, I tried to come up with the grimmest one I could think of. The one that kept popping up: an empty dinner plate. 

It's tough to tell what it is without proper context, so it requires some explanation to those who have no idea what an empty dinner plate could represent in a story about cocaine. So here is why I chose it.

I've had a few (trillion) nights that have ended in rambunctious merriment at some new pal’s apartment in the after-after hours, where we all gather around a coffee table and pass a dinner plate with lines on it. Good tunes are blaring, earth-shattering truths are revealed, and long-term bonds are formed in a circle of people whom you most likely would have never considered close friends, but now you are pretty confident that anyone seen here tonight will one day help carry your coffin.

Time marches as it does, and before you know it, the music is turned down, the bags are empty, the bags are licked, and then the plate is kernel-scraped clean, and it's time to go home. 

So that's what I'm trying to evoke: right before the birds come out, a few seconds before the noxious dread creeps in, there is the empty plate. 

Ok. Let's begin.

Today, we are dropping some of the responses from the "Why Cocaine?" prompt I sent out a couple weeks ago. The responses were intense, and this was one of the first to arrive:

Your "Why Cocaine?" email landed in my inbox on a Sunday morning. Over the last three days, I have spent a decent amount of time asking myself the same question. I have spent a lot of the rest of the time snorting endless lines of cocaine.

I don't even LIKE it that much. But I keep doing it. Why? Why cocaine?

Below, some of our readers explain why they did it, why they quit, and why they can't quit.

We received almost two dozen responses this time, and some have very high word counts, so I've decided to split it into two parts. One batch today, and then the rest will run next week.

For anyone unfamiliar with our Check-In format:

All the Anonymous writers in the below portion are credited collectively as 'The Small Bow Family Orchestra.'

The ***** separates individual entries, as do pull quotes.

And, of course, TSB looks amazing because Edith Zimmerman drew everything. 

Thanks for your continued support of The Small Bow. If you love what we do, please try a paid subscription and access our complete archive and the Sunday newsletter.— AJD

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I Don’t Even Like Cocaine (But I Would Love Some More Cocaine)

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

The first few hours or days, you do feel like you’ve gained insight into something so important it’s impossible to imagine ever turning it down.

I’m writing this email while walking my dog at 7:48 am while living a life that coke-addict me would not have thought possible or enviable.  And yet, here we are! For most of the two years, I did coke every day; I wouldn't say I liked it and swore that I would stop. I had brief 72-hour periods where I did stop. I deleted the dealer numbers. I went for long, long walks. But I always came back to coke, a drug I used only in solo 24-48 hour binges where I didn’t sleep and made really good art. I haven’t made anything creative since I stopped three years ago. I also haven’t paced an apartment wanting to die because I couldn’t get a single atom of cocaine more into my miserable plugged sinuses. So why did I keep doing it? I’ve written explanations over and over again, but it always sounds pathetic typed out, but the first few hours or days, you really do feel like you’ve gained insight into something so important it’s impossible to imagine ever turning it down. And then you spend the rest of your life remembering how it used to feel.

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I would convince myself that it’s okay and I could go to sleep at midnight, even though that’s never happened before

The thing that comes to mind first when I think about me, and cocaine is the excess. The excess of use, the excess of feelings, the excess of dampening feelings! What also stands out and seems to be a marker of my relationship with it is that it was so often used alone.

I would get my order in, have a few beers, and play online poker or slots, which would feel like heaven! I would have my own space, no one to answer to, no responsibilities, and the only objective would be stuffing my dopamine receptors with so much that I’m sure I could even hear them asking me to stop.

One of the memories that keeps coming back to me in sobriety, as a sign of the excess, is a night when my nose was so blocked up (on both sides, of course) that I was practically forcing it up, and I would see the excess float down back onto the desk, like some dystopian Christmas scene.

But as most of us know, this seeming pleasure is only short-lived and of value while in the escapism bubble. Even though I would push the boundaries and lose whole nights of sleep in my little bubble, I would always have to wake up the next day (or the same day) and face what I had done. This was the reality—the person with a job, responsibilities, regrets, secrets, and shame. A whole lot of shame.

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I am 63 years old and a drug addict. I have been sober for 2 years. Cocaine has never been a problem for me because I learned at 17 how much I loved it. I had done it a few times with friends and fell in love with that euphoria. I feel that anything is possible, and I’m about to set the world on fire. I went in with a few friends for prom and purchased 1/3 of an ounce. I have no memory of the cost—I remember a gram was $100. A significant expense on a boxgirl’s wages.

Knowing how much I loved the drug, I set out some guidelines for how much I could use at a time to make it last. I also promised myself that after this purchase, I would not buy it again for at least a month. Before the night was over, the cocaine was gone, of course, and I was making plans to buy more the next day. How could I come up with the money? What lie could I tell my parents? Then I remembered the promise I’d made myself. I realized how my mindset had completely changed once I was under the influence and realized, “This is how it happens.” I was sufficiently scared to never use it again. I did go on to spend the rest of my life abusing other drugs, but not cocaine. As I said, up until two years ago.

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The nights of sneaking out all blur together. They'd end always with a racing heart.

I feel an instant identification with people who were heavy cocaine users in their teenage years. I grew up in a place where sometimes it was easier to find coke than weed, so my friends and I started doing coke. It was the summer before my senior year of high school. We were fake deep anarchists or, less glamorously, the weirdo druggies. Our dealer was a friend who had just started college, and we would all sneak out to his dorm and fill in huge lines of new textbooks. We stayed up late drinking and talking about old movies and new music, reveling in how much more world-wise we were than our classmates. It wasn't too long before I was buying my own to take home.

In the morning, after sleeping just two or three hours, I'd sometimes need a line to make it to the bus and get to class. The nights of sneaking out all blur together. They'd always end with a racing heart. My friend, who died a few years later from a bad speedball, would take me to the same random parking lot over and over. We'd do one more line than another off an Interpol CD, feeling the night squeeze in on all sides. One night, I got paranoid. I had my friend drop me off further than usual from my cul-de-sac and walked the rest of the way home. When I heard a car approaching me, I hid behind a bush. Freaked out, I threw the baggy I had on me into the darkness. When I went back to look for it the next day, I felt the pit I'd gotten myself into. I love how cocaine lit up my brain and made me think I was accessing some secret world of connection and action. It's come back into my life a couple times, and I never manage to not want more until I pop into the bathroom for a pick-me-up in the middle of a Wednesday workday. I haven't bought any in years, but I still find it impossible to turn down when offered.

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The first time I tried cocaine was probably the first sign that I used drugs differently than others. My older sister was visiting with her husband and asked me if I could score any. Up until that point, I had only bought weed (I was 19, and this was in 2003), but my dealer also had the hard stuff, and so it began. 

I remember doing it with my sister, going into my childhood bedroom, and thinking about the paper I needed to write for class. I wrote the paper lightning fast and got a decent grade, thus justifying why I needed to get more. My sister ended her visit a few days later, and I bought more coke. 

My best friend and I then went on what could only be described as a four-month bender. I quickly ran through the $2k that I had in savings and spent days and nights just doing coke. 

I loved cocaine because it made me feel happy and like my opinions and ideas mattered for once. It is also connected to a time when I was realizing my queerness, something that I had been unable to accept up until that point. My friend and I entered a situation where we could finally be honest about our feelings for each other. Falling in love and being on drugs can feel the same, but when you are doing both at the same time, it's magical. It also likely doomed our relationship, as I came to realize I could only tolerate intimacy when I was intoxicated. It was too painful any other way. 

Notable fuck ups: I drove high most of the time, and once with my younger cousin in the car, which I still have deep regret for. The time I locked the keys in my car with lines laid out on a CD case on the driver's seat chair. We eventually broke in, but how lucky we were not to have a cop car roll by. I was barely eating, and my clothes were falling off me, but for once, low-waisted jeans looked good on me, so it was a draw. I dropped out of school, unable to concentrate in class or do assignments. I just traveled around my campus, isolated and getting high. I had terrible breath, and my circulation was getting so bad my toenail fell off. Still, not a cause for concern! 

I was living at home then, and my mother never said a word about it. I was resentful of her, and even if she had, I would deny it. The catalyst for stopping was that my best friend's mom found out. My friend was also living at home, and we were at her house when the truth came out. Her mom called her into the living room and started yelling in Spanish. Her little sister was still in the room with me, and the look on her face when she heard what they were saying and repeated it with disbelief.  "....drugs?" At that moment, I freaked out and (also high on cocaine) I jumped out her first-story window and started walking back to my car. Unable to handle any sort of confrontation. My friend came after me and asked me to come back, and we sat with her mother while she lectured us and angrily asked, "How much do you owe?!" likely imagining the worst-case scenario. Thankfully, we never got that far, but most of the money was gone by then. 

My contempt for my mother at the time kept me from saying anything to her. I didn't want her to have the satisfaction of seeing me vulnerable, so I stopped using it too and white-knuckled it for a few weeks through withdrawal and depression. 

I did coke maybe 3 times after that, in random situations, but I never enjoyed it very much. The last time I did it was in 2011, and it was so strong I immediately threw up. 

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I felt fast and dangerous and that I was also finally a part of the elite society that knew how to party. I'd talk in euphemisms and use the skiing emoji and try to use it to cement relationships—like "this is real, now, because we did coke together." In the end, I was panic sobbing at my best friend's wedding, distracting the entire wedding party to come to my aid because I was the only one who understood what it would feel like to die alone. That wasn't the last time; there was the time I did it at a concert on my birthday, and a picture of me from that night with my brother and sister was the Christmas card that year? And a desktop of my mother's home computer for even longer. So, I could never escape it or learn how to use it; it was just disastrous, as it should have been.

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I was drawn to coke for more than the pleasure of the drug, though. Because if it were just about the coke, I would have simply bought some for myself. But that wouldn't have been the same. An even better high was finding a stranger who would share their coke with me. So exciting - we're both disgusting people who love coke who found each other, AND you have coke on you, AND we're sneaking off someplace to do it? What a treat. Like a sexual conquest, but with different consequences and more pleasure. Then, I could simply ghost them and move on to another bar. 

One guy - a deep sea fisherman about ten years younger than me who played me his Soundcloud rap after we snorted coke - followed me home. He drove by later that week to shout some obscenities at my window and texted me a few times about how much of a bitch I was. There it was. He closed the loop on my self-loathing-fueled mission to be recognized as a bad person.  

My secret longing, though, was a ladies' room cocaine conquest. Maybe one night, I would be fixing my makeup in the bathroom mirror at a club when I would hear some giggling and shushing from a bathroom stall and see multiple pairs of feet under the door. Eventually, one of them would come out and notice me, a good, cool, trustworthy fellow woman, and they would invite me into the stall with them. Alas, this delusional fantasy never played out. 

I was afraid of my heart exploding, though. During one doctor visit, when she asked about recreational drug use, I caved a bit and told her that I did cocaine sometimes. This is the only time I ever mentioned non-prescription drug use to a doctor. She said, "Don't do it." Years later, when I was about to undergo an emergency medical procedure after childbirth, the doctor glanced at my chart and asked me if it was ok to administer fentanyl given my "history." She said "history" with very wide eyes. My husband was confused. I accepted the fentanyl. For that particular procedure, and as I was already doped up on whatever natural chemicals our brains dump during childbirth, I have to admit that it didn't do much for me. 

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Until I met the man I would later marry when I was 23 years old, I had snorted cocaine a handful of times. I didn't really get what the big deal was. It was okay, but nothing as great as alcohol. 

Alcohol was my everything. Until it wasn't. 

I delivered myself to detox in 1993 and got sober. Six months later, I was hanging out in a local bar, drinking Diet Coke, and meeting a man who was also sober. Within a month, I had my first experience shooting up cocaine. I can still remember that first time—the rush as it hit my brain was sheer bliss, something like nothing no drug had ever offered before. Truly heaven.

Then, I spent the next 12 years spending every bit of money trying to get that feeling back. Everything about this was addicting: the buying, the fixing, the searching for a vein. So much time and energy for a drug that lasted maybe 30 minutes. And then I was looking for the next fix. One night, I overdosed, but he was able to get me conscious again, and then I got mad at him for not letting me have another hit.

We got married, and I had a child. The memories of trying to get this baby to go to sleep so that we could do more coke still haunt me. We went to Cocaine Anonymous for years; the first year, we kept getting new 30-day chips, then finally stopped being honest. I don't remember what finally led us to stop, but the marriage didn't last long without the drugs.

That was 30 years ago. I still feel the same rush of anticipation when a needle comes anywhere near me. I will never get that time or money back. Recently, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's. I wonder if I did this to myself by using up my dopamine all those years ago. 

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I don’t feel like coke will ever feel as good as it used to. But did it ever really feel good? I think the fun of the anticipation—finding a hookup, going on a mission, sitting there while you and your friend microwave a plate and complain about how much you hate it when red-faced, stinking drunk guys snuff uncrushed lumps up into their nostrils at the pub, only for tiny white powder bindys to haphazardly crumble down the front of their shirt and onto the sticky floor, gone forever. We hate those guys. ‘RESPECT THE COKE!’

Surely the fun part is everything around coke, the idea of coke. Not actually consuming the drug… Yeah!

I’m not even sure I like coke?

But my housemate got a bag the other night, and I didn’t have a second thought about blowing $200. I didn’t have to split a packet of 80% baking powder, 10% meth, and 10% rat poison long weekend combo with him.

I don’t even really enjoy coke… even though I finished off half of an eight-ball of weekend leftovers over 48 hours while working from home, on my own, from my home office. 

Literally working. Using it kind of like Adderall (Dexies where I live.) But with the re-up time being much shorter. What a stupid waste of money. It wasn’t the first time I’d done this. But I couldn’t just let it sit in my drawer! Not for a whole week until the following weekend.

Not even for a whole day. 

I had to get rid of the coke so I could stop thinking about it. Everything would be better once it was gone.

I had an appointment with my clinical psych on the afternoon of that second day. I did a few bumps before I went to see her, and I told her how I have managed to keep off Dexamphetamine (Adderall where I live) for a whole four months! 

Wow! Go me! I am recovering from my abusive relationship with prescription stimulants. She said I should feel proud. I wondered if she noticed; surely they can tell.

Afterward, I went home and finished the bag so fast that I got a crushing headache and my nostrils burned for hours.

*****

I only lied about using once, but the use increased, and with it the lies did as well.

It's hard to pinpoint where the cocaine itself became more important than the experiences the cocaine should enhance. After years of partying and using in nightclubs, on stage, behind the stage, on the dancefloor, always with friends, always with booze. I only lied about using it once, and it was a little white lie (pun very much intended). But the use increased, and the lies did as well. Now, even the drinking is often more something to ease in the first line, get a solid ground. I hardly ever drink without cocaine, but I never do cocaine without booze. There's something very Pavlovian about the booze-night-cocaine connection, and one of those three is happening each and every day, unfortunately. It's been just over three years since I first saw my use really was becoming problematic, but after some bouts of months of abstinence notwithstanding, it's proven very hard to kick the habit. It'll come since the fun of it all has mostly left the building.

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I read Jeffrey Bernard's memoirs years ago, and at some point someone asks him why he drinks so much. He says something to the effect that he doesn't even want to drink nearly as much as he does—all he wants to do is inhabit the magical time halfway through his third vodka tonic, when his anxiety recedes and he's charming and witty and the world seems to shimmer just a little. But he can't, of course. No more than I can inhabit that magical time after the second or third line, when my heart starts racing and I feel awake and alive.

I guess that's what I do like about coke: it makes me feel alive. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to do to me what it does to a lot of other people, insofar as it doesn't turn me into an endlessly tedious asshole who'll talk the ears off anyone unfortunate to get stuck listening, or make me feel like I rule the universe, or lead me to making performatively terrible decisions (apart, of course, from buying more cocaine). It just makes me feel like I'm here. For a bit. 

Also: I was interested to read your story about being "a coke guy", because one of the things that kinda confuses me about the situation in which I find myself is that I'm not a coke guy. Prior to this financially disastrous yearlong flirtation with cocaine, my drugs of choice were always downers—alcohol, first, and then opiates. Both of those drugs essentially allowed me to construct a chemical edifice over all the stuff I was trying not to deal with, and in doing so, to forget those things for a while.

I got off opiates, but I guess I still crave that ability to just ... delete the feeling. I never really thought coke would do that for me, but it does. That's the other thing i like about it--but fucking hell, the cost is steep, and not just financially. For me, coke just rubs away at my emotions. All of them.

My father was an architect. He was an early adopter of CAD software, so my memories of him drawing on an actual drawing board come from when I was very small. One thing I remember clearly was that the final drawings were always done on tracing paper, and if he made an error on one of those drawings, he’d scratch the ink carefully away from the surface of the paper with a razor blade. But you could only do that so many times, because every time you did it, you’d also scratch away some of the paper itself. Eventually, you’d just be left with a hole, an emptiness into which nothing could be drawn and from which nothing more could be removed.

This is perhaps a weird analogy, but its effect reminds me of the cover of Radiohead's OK Computer—the way that all the imagery is half erased, the sense that everything is disappearing back into a blank white background. 

It's a really pernicious effect, and one i've only come to understand after months of doing way too much coke. I find myself caring less about my lack of work. I find myself caring less about the ongoing disintegration of my industry, and my general feelings of being confused and lost. I find myself caring less about my marriage, and my future, and myself. And I find myself caring more and more about how to acquire more coke. And I hate that. I hate it. 

No one would ever describe what I'm doing as "partying". It's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting here in an apartment that needs cleaning again, racing to finish the last of the bag before my wife gets home, and promising myself I will never buy any more coke. And, of course, at the same time, the cold part of my brain is already figuring out its plans for buying more.

I feel like I'm at war with myself, and I honestly don't know if I'm winning. And I never thought I'd find myself in this place again. When I got off opiates, I felt like I'd won. I'd beaten addiction. Ha. Ha fucking ha.

But at the end of all this, I think I do have an answer to "why cocaine?". It's in a study I read recently. Here's the key passage:

"When cocaine blocks the dopamine transporter, dopamine will continue to stimulate the reward centre–even though the experience itself is not particularly pleasurable. In other words, we become incapable of distinguishing between what is truly pleasurable and what is not, and then all types of input given by our senses will seem great. You could say that cocaine tricks the brain. It is a form of chemical brainwashing.” [emphasis mine]

Someone once told me that the only thing coke does is make you want more coke. I suppose this entire email could have just been that sentence, but if you've read this far, then thank you for doing so.

fin

Part II will drop next week.

If you’d still like to contribute email me here: ajd@thesmallbow.com

SUBJECT: Me and Cocaine

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

After the Titanic

by Derek Mahon

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     They said I got away in a boat

And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you

     I sank as far that night as any

Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water

     I turned to ice to hear my costly

Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of

     Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,

Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide

     In a lonely house behind the sea

Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes

     Silently at my door. The showers of

April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the

     Late light of June, when my gardener

Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed

     On seaward mornings after nights of

Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is

     I drown again with all those dim

Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul

     Screams out in the starlight, heart

Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.

     Include me in your lamentations.

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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN