Princess Leia Guards My Sobriety

PRINCESS LEIA GUARDS MY SOBRIETY

A receipt, secured to the mirror above my writing desk by a sticker of
Princess Lea, keeps track of the day I returned the Xanax to the CVS.

“I don’t want this.” I told the pharmacy tech. “I did not request a
refill.”

“We refilled it automatically.”

“Well, please take it back!”

“We can’t do that. It is a controlled substance.”

“Exactly! And I am telling you I do not want it. Should I just give it
to the homeless guy panhandling out front? I don’t want this anymore.
Take it back!”

I really did not care about the $10 refund, or whatever it was, so much
as getting this dreaded substance off my monthly calendar. But, since we
are at it, why are the optional, addictive drugs so cheap and the
essential, life-saving drugs so blood-suckingly expensive?

But there it was, my refund and the receipt. It was like I got my life
back, and here was the document to certify the transaction. Xanax had
been returned to the never ever shelf, right next to alcohol. The tiny
little CVS receipt quite literally a new lease on life.

I am blessed with a razor sharp intellect, a fearless love of adventure
and a deeply thoughtful ruminescence. And I have become very good at
blotting them all out. The skills and techniques required to bludgeon
my synapses into a state of dysfunction are not unique. But staying that
fucked up for that long surely deserves some sort of recognition,
however dubious.

As I recall, some quarter of a century later, staying drunk was the full
time job. Everything else was done in the name of that overarching
goal. Go to grad school? Great! College kids can drink with total
abandon. It makes good movies. Get a job in New Orleans? Super! The city
runs on bourbon, not gas or water.

Success is how I blotted out the 1990s. I successfully drank a bottle of
vodka every day for at least a year. It started out as rum, but rum
leaves a stink on your skin that vodka does not. Unless you drink as
much as I did. I am sure I stank of vodka too. But then one day, I just
decided to stop.

I went to AA, where there was a group of people in the same boat, trying
to help each other. With a cigarette in one hand and a coffee full of
sugar in the other, my first sponsor dropped me as a sponsee when he
found out I was using marijuana as a crutch. He took back his copy of
the Blue Book, and told me I was on my own. Which, in all honesty, is
the truth. AA is a crutch. And a useful one. But as with all crutches,
the real work is done by the person in distress. The crutch cannot keep
you and protect you, and ideally one day you can live your life without
the crutch again.

For a month I went to AA meetings every day. Then every week, once a
month. Then, when I finished my one year stint with AmeriCorps and moved
back to be with
my true love in Florida, I found out not all AA groups are the same.
The cozy, friendly gay AA in Sacramento was nothing like the dark,
unfriendly rooms I found back home. But that was OK. By then I no longer
needed the crutch.

I had others. Lots of others. Especially ecstasy. A classmate at New
College, Rick Doblin, owns the patent for MDMA and he made certain we
students got lots of good quality ecstasy so he could study supposed
changes to spinal fluids and other possible effects of rolling on
methylene dioxy meth amphetamine, not to be confused with just straight
meth. The love drug makes you want to dance, and screw and have deep
and meaningful conversations. But you can’t stay
high on it forever. It works for a while, and then it is done. Other
than a bit of dehydration and tired legs, and maybe sore privates, there
is little or no hangover. Of course, for years I smoked
whenever I was rolling on ecstasy. But oddly enough, as soon as the high
was done,
cigarettes became disgusting again.

I watched in horror as the club scene changed in the late aughts. Where
once the dance floor was full of happy, loving people on ecstasy, now it
had become a strange panopticon of panicky staring eyes, pockmarked skin
and endless figiting. Ecstasy was really really nice, but the harder
stuff was destroying many of the people I knew, rotting their souls and
teeth along with society.

I had become a pro at “harmless” partying, the kind that did not make me
miss work or say things I would later regret. Ecstasy encourages you to
say things you might not normally, but I never regret them. Sweet and
loving, if a bit too saccharine. But definitely not life destroying.

I get no thrill from cocaine, or so the song goes. And in my case, I
love the speed, but hate the crash. So it is easy to say no when blow
flows near my nose. No thanks! And opioids are delicious, a thrill ride
I have tried out of pure curiosity but twice, once as a ground up
OxyContin pill and once as an injection of delottid. An overwhelming
delight, once you are done vomiting, and it feels something like a
caramel roller coaster, or a sea of satin marshmallows. But such
dalliances are so dangerous and so destructive to people I know, there
is no reason for me to ever dally again. Meth is even worse, because it
turns people into manic paranoids with erectile dysfunction.

Other friends love LSD, and mushrooms. I had my fill at New College,
and though the mental adventure is mostly harmless, it can also get
really weird. The last time I tried mushrooms the boy I was kissing
transformed into a 100 year old man and then into a six year old child.
That never happens on ecstasy, or as my friends called it Johnson’s Baby
Acid. Never a bad trip.

But then I did trip – big-time fell right into a big bottle of Xanax.
So innocently offered up at the doctor’s office; this was an approved
drug. A good one! Good at getting folks hooked that is. I was able to
say no thank you to everything else on the menu except this one thing.
It creeped in on a prescription and became a life-consuming obsession.
But it is all based on a lie.

Xanax for anxiety. Well, it is a true lie. Xanax will definitely make
you anxious. Especially when you are running out. I cannot imaging a
heroin addict suffers more than a Xanax addict. I watched as my own
grandmother became a junky, begging for more every day.

“Is it time?” She would ask my mother, who kept grandma’s giant bottle
with hundreds of blue pills someplace safe, where her addict son could
not get it.

Yes, I stole from my own grandmother. I needed more Xanax, so I did
what it took to get it. And of course, just like alcohol, all judgement
goes out the window with Daddy’s Little Helper. And thanks to my network
of druggie friends, I found more Xanax than the doctor would
give me. Some days I would take twenty little pills, justifying each one.

Bad news was a reason to eat a “football”. Good news too. Dinner plans
or no plans at all. But mostly when things got me upset, I took another
Xanax. And that would make me far more likely to get upset about
something else. Raging, furiously upset. Throwing things, marching down
the middle of third street all the way to Publix, cars honking as I gave
them the finger.

One day my mother answered the door to her condo and was greeted by two
policemen accompanying her 40 year old son, wearing a bathrobe. I had
been in the next door patio, going through their recycling and shouting
advisements to the astonished neighbors. I would have called the police
on me too.

Princess Lea also had a drug problem. Well, Carrie Fisher, the actress
sure did. She was very public about her struggles with drugs and mental
health. As a child I loved Princess Lea and C3P0 the most, so it is no
wonder I ended up a gay druggie. She had rabid fans, I once had a
stalker. She spent days tripping and doping in exotic, remote escapes,
I spent days unshaven and paranoid, scanning my emails for secret
messages from the Mossad.

Also like Carrie Fisher, I was diagnosed with atypical bipolar
disorder. I have 45 days of utterly delightful mania followed one day
of very mild depression. Well, I say mild. On one of those one days I
pulled a huge bookshelf full of books down on myself, and if there
hadn’t been a desk to catch the shelves I might still be under it. I
have never been suicidal. Whatever is after life is definitely not
chocolate, sex and sunrises. So this destructive incident scared me.

On those dark days it could rain gold coins from the sky and I would
bitch that they were denting my car and punching divots in my lawn.
Worried about my random rages, I spoke to a doctor who offered me
lithium, but warned me that it would tamp down my up days as well as
softening the down ones. She told me “this sort of mental distress gets
worse with age.

I did not want the lithium. I wish I had told the Xanax doctor the same
thing.

But it was an attempt to cope with my precarious and confusing mental
health. Carrie and laugh at the suggestion that we were experimenting
with drugs. We were not experimenting, or abusing. We knew exactly what
we were doing. Trying to dull the hurt.

But while Carrie Fisher even famously tried electroshock therapy to
treat her depression, she also continued to “experiment” with drugs. The
autopsy done on her young corpse showed cocaine, heroin, morphine and –
I found myself strangely both thrilled and horrified to read – ecstasy
in her blood. The official cause of death was asphyxia hinting at sleep
apnea, but opiates also create Smurf skinned corpses, starved for air
after overdosing on dope.

These days I have gone back to the destressers that I used as a high
school geek, before I dove in to the abyss of alcohol. I used to like
to sit back in a chaise lounge and look straight up into the sky and
watch the floaters in my eye. Tiny transparent shapes someplace between
my brain and the outside world. Or maybe I would pick out a spot on the
ceiling and focus attention on it, or try to count the little popcorn
spackle dots over the bed, or repeat a word over and over until it lost
meaning. Milk. Milk. Malk. Mulk. Or pull out a journal and let random
thoughts flow. As it turns out, these are all methods of meditation. I
had stumbled on them myself.

So as I sit and write and look up at that sticker of Princess Lea
holding up my Xanax receipt, she is both encouragement and warning.
Right up to the day of her death, Carrie was open and honest about what
she was doing, but also kept right on doing it.

“Good for you,” she says. “You turned off the party. You might survive
even longer than I did!”