Demonica: Crackhead Chronicles 2

A profile in hopelessness. The second of my stories of active addiction.

Photo by Colin Davis on Unsplash

Hello, and welcome back to you all, my fine readers and subscribers! This is the second in my Crackhead Chronicles pieces, which are relating my struggles with addiction and my time as a crack addict in Austin Texas over 20 years ago now Trigger warning if discussion of drug abuse bothers you. If you can afford to do so, please consider a paid subscription. I am running the “Dumbest apocalypse EVER” sale right now which is 50% off of annual subscriptions FOREVER! That's just $15 a year for all this bpnwc goodness! Can't go paid? That's cool too, Mon frere…I will always be free to read!

Monica, or as we all came to eventually call her, Demonica, was the worst case of fully embodied human hopelessness I had ever encountered.

By the time I met her, through two sketchy dope dealing brothers whom we all simply called the Wolf brothers, I was deep into my crack addiction and I was already beginning to flail and fray around my edges. When a person embarks upon an active addiction, many times it tends to follow a similar trajectory to the one I found myself traveling upon in those days. The longer one is involved in that addiction community, the more extreme the other fellow addicts one tends to encounter. Demonica was one of the worst I ever met, and in a strange way, meeting her was a catalyst to begin waking me up to what might lay in wait for me if I continued down the same winding road.

Monica was a junkies junky. She would do pretty much anything that was around, but by the time I met her, her preferred method was to shoot up cocaine straight into her veins. I didn't shoot drugs, mind you, but when you are addicted to something like crack that isn't considered a socially acceptable drug to bust out with at parties, you find yourself immersed in the shadowier places and sharing spaces with the shadiest of inhabitants pretty quickly.

We only hung out a few times because even in my tattered state of mind, she was a klaxon call warning alarm, projected directly into my brain. The ghost of Christmas (and every other day) future, come to life in the form of a die hard needle addict. What first stuck out to me was just how empty and bleak her days seemed to be. Her whole entire life revolved around finding something to shoot. This, coming from someone who was strung out on crack cocaine at the time, might seem hypocritical but there is a hierarchy of severity in the wide and varied world of drug addicts and needle users are perched directly upon the top tier. As stated earlier, she would do just about any drug that was available, but the needle was where her heart really lived. I remember watching her shoot up diluted Jack Daniels once because she didn't have any dope and just wanted something to put into her veins so badly that anything would work.

I also recall watching her clean out her dirty needles with hot water and bleach, using them so many times in a row that they were dulled, sometimes so much that piercing her scarred and ravaged arms was tough. In Texas, pharmacies require someone to have a legitimate prescription for syringes. The supposed purpose of this is to decrease drug use, but that's just a ridiculous justification that leads to worse health outcomes, more disease, and more deaths of despair amongst the most vulnerable populations. And Monica was nothing but vulnerable in her addictions. Her veins were so blown out from the regular abuse they received that finding a working spot to use became more and more difficult. Tracks dotted every inch of her arms and legs. Sometimes, she would get the needle in, get the blood pulled back like it was supposed to, only for the vein to fail at the very last second, leaving a quickly coagulating syringe full of dope and blood. Injecting something that has blood in it that has thickened upon sitting can kill you or cause huge abscesses to form, but she would sit and try over and over and over again, her desperation increasing exponentially with every failed stick.

Just watching her saw away at her veins with a dull needle would make my jaws ache with tension. Eventually if it got to the point where the syringe full of drugs and blood was simply un-injectable, she would just squirt the contents into her mouth so as not to waste the drugs. I remember watching her shoot drugs between her toes once, and thinking that it was something you heard people talking about but not something I ever imagined I would see in person. I also watched her try to inject her own jugular vein once, which didn't work out in the end.

It was the afternoon at her place when I met her mother that clarified a few things fairly quickly. I noticed that her mom simply stepped into their needle gallery apartment with all the obvious accoutrements of drug usage scattered on every surface, and she didn't even blink. Then she pulled a crack stem out of her purse and the rest of the puzzle pieces fell rapidly into place. Even in my lost and fallen condition, I felt my heart seize up a little bit, wondering if Monica's mother had been the first to turn her into the broken soul who now bled before me crouching on threadbare carpeting, weeping because she couldn't find a working vein. All of the disgust and internal loathing I had felt upon witnessing her depravities drained out of me in that clarifying moment. I saw her then for the wounded and pitiable creation that she was. Creation, because this was almost certainly not a hell not of her own engineering, but one which she inherited as her cursed birthright. I knew then. This was not a place I needed to be. This place was hopelessness and helplessness carried to their furthest damning conclusions. I knew that if I allowed myself to stay here in this desperate place for too long, the sheer horror of this existence might carry me away on its dirty tide and sweep me out onto the seas of despair, never to be seen again. I never returned to Monica's apartment after that day.

I only ever saw Monica once after that, in fact, and it was very much by random chance. She owed me money and had been dodging my boyfriend and I for some time, which honestly had been just fine with me. I knew where she lived if I really wanted it, and I didn't want to bother going back there to collect after the scene with her mother. The way I see it, if a mother is capable of participating in the debasement of their child to that degree, what aren't they capable of? I didn't want to find out the answer to that question. Eventually one day we did happen to run into her one day in town, and she offered to repay us right then and there with some magic mushrooms that she had just come into. At that point in time, my boyfriend and I had never tripped mushrooms together and we eagerly jumped at that offer.

The mushrooms, as it turned out, were poisonous toadstools. JP and I were incredibly sick and not only did we have to endure a car ride to the hospital where neither one of us could stop puking or shitting, we had to remain at the hospital for the following two days under observation and on IV fluids to assess the damage done to our kidneys and livers. I don't think it was purposeful. I think it was just a terrible mix-up. Perhaps whoever had given them to her had intended on poisoning her and she just happened to see us that day and saved herself a poisoning. Maybe it was an honest fuck up. Whatever the cause, I couldn't find it in my heart to hate Monica even after the mushrooms. She was already serving prison time in a cell of her own making. Most likely one of her mother's making as well. I knew I couldn't save her, and I knew that I needed to save myself, which could only be done by avoiding the company of her and those like her. I still had quite a tumultuous journey within my own addiction to complete and many dark roads to travel down myself before I was out of the shit and safe once again. Still, sometimes I do wonder about her, just the same as I wonder about all the wildly varied people I met during that part of my life. All these people make up parts of the patchwork quilt that is my life, and that means they all held value to me. Some were good, some were bad, and some, like Demonica, were simply too tragic to contemplate.

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