Active addicts don’t form relationships, they take hostages. One of the hostages I took I met back somewhere around 2005, I was 20, she was 18, and just about to graduate high school. I met her through a drunk dial, if you can believe it, which should have been a red flag, but I was so consumed by drunken mindless self indulgence and blotto that it could have been a neon sign, and I would have over looked it. A friend of mine, who is now dead, go figure, made a call one night as we were coming to the end of a thirty pack and a fifth. The voices on the other end sounded ready to party and have sex, and within an hour two girls were inside his apartment. One of these girls would go on to be my sidekick for the next few years. My hostage. Of course I did not plan on “taking a hostage” so to speak, but in a sense that’s what active addiction relationships are like. Toxic, poisoned, and codependent as hell. We finished the night off the way we had hoped it would go, and we all now had new friends. This girl liked me, I think because I was older, hip, slick, cool, and had the connect on all the best drugs. I liked her because she liked me, and that was that. We hung out almost everyday and used just as frequently. Weed, booze, LSD, Ecstacy, coke, crack, heroin, mushrooms, 2CI, pills, you name it. Junkbox, remember? It didn’t matter. Whatever we had the taste for, we did. No questions asked. Somehow this girl was able to keep her shit together long enough to graduate high school with exemplary remarks. She was a budding young art student with a very bright future. A very promising young girl. She had no idea what she was getting into when she met me. I was also very promising, but was so into partying and living this life style that I couldn’t see just how in the grip of addiction I really was. I don’t think many of us can see how bad it is, until we are able to look at it clean, or through a moment of clarity. The drugs numb the wreckage. But onward we go, now she was graduating, and I had recently been placed on probation, for the incident at Clear lake, where we broke into the house to party with the two girls. I was on Antabuse at the time, which made drinking VERY difficult. I pretty much could not drink, the only way I could was to dose early in the morning Wednesday, skip Friday’s dose, and dose late Monday. This was such a chore, and probation was not happy that I kept missing my Friday doses. After a while of all this, I got sick of dodging the Antabuse, and tried drinking on it. Worst decision EVER. This chemical is given to problem drinkers to thwart their alcohol abuse. And it works. I never wanted to drink again on this stuff, about 5 swigs into my first beer I was hating life. I turned bright red, my blood pressure sky rocketed, I got the sweats, the chills, and really labored breathing. It was God awful. And after this attempt, I had decided to just stick with drugs, I mean, because using non stop and trying to pass a drug test is just SO much easier, right? I was totally insane. The more I got into drugs, the more she got into drugs, and we were using heavily every day. Smoking crack all night, eating percocet all day. One night the two of us stayed up all night long smoking so much crack, about three eight balls’ worth that my lung actually tore. Pneumo Media Stinum they called it at the hospital, which, they said, was a result of my lanky and tall stature, and that it is common in tall athletes whose bodies go through growth spurts. Yeah right. I got it because I was flying to the moon all night non stop on some super hard super white. They told me that there was really no way of fixing it, that it would just have to heal itself, and wrote me a nice long script for some Percocet tens. That was a win. Even though I had just damaged my lung from smoking rock all night, I was actually happy with this turn of events, because I got some quality pain killers out of it. The script was supposed to last me two months, it might have lasted 5 days. Maybe. All it was was more fuel for my constant insanity. We were using and partying so much, that we both just knew that this was not going to go well with my P.O. There was no way I was going to be in compliance for long, we needed a plan. With her graduation coming up, her open house would be next, and she had a very well off family. We knew she would be receiving lots of money. Cash. And so our plan was born. We were going to ride it out until her open house, take all the money and skip out of state, to go live in Georgia. To “get away from all the insanity and crack.” Yeah right. Her big days came and went, and we loaded up my ’96 Dodge Neon with all of our stuff, all the cash and a hope and dream that this was going to work. It wasn’t. We set sail in June. We were leaving it all behind, the friends, the life style, the crack. This was going to be different. No it wasn’t. We pulled off the Interstate in Chattanooga for some gas, and as I was getting out to pump a young black guy was getting out of his car at the same time. He must have seen our Indiana  plates. “Y’all want some weed?” I scanned the surroundings. Ghetto-check. Black guy openly offering me some weed-check. Arab guy behind the counter-check. “Actually, lemme hollar’atchu’ dude.” “You got any hard?” CHECK. We hadn’t even made it TO Atlanta yet, and I was smoking again. Spinning the pipe down highway 85 all the way into the peach state, which made for a miserable come down, being stuck in traffic, trying to navigate. We finally made it to Senoia to my grandmother’s house, where we were to be staying. I walked in and saw my little brother! Oh how I was happy to see him finally! After our welcomes and I love yous we made our way outside for a smoke. He let me know he had been partying a lot lately and had a good connect on some Ecstacy. All it took was a mischievous look in my hostage’s direction, and she was sold. We decided to get a hotel room in Peachtree City that night and have a little welcome home party. Her open house money would be gone in 2 weeks.