Drugs part 2

I remember how triumphant my friends and I were when I came back with that money. The guy was a sleazy bastard, anyhow, I didn't feel bad for conning him simply because I knew he was a shitbag. The funny thing about this story is that the group I was living with and getting high with was a family I had met when I was 14. I used to eat at their house, play barbies in their basement. We had stopped hanging out when I moved away to Oregon but when I was 19 and getting high we reconnected. Their mom was a provider, she was the one that had introduced me to the prof, he was her sugar daddy. The deal they had was she had sex with him on demand but he didn't pay her, he was supposed to provide things to her as she needed them. Trouble was, he never provided, always kept her waiting. She was doing the best she could to keep her real family and drug family afloat and he continually was dicking her around. It made the initial scam an easy deal for me. I wasn't destined to survive in this group of people basically because I did meth like I do everything, excessively. When you are in a house full of meth heads and THEY think you're too far out there: they're right. I got to the point where it stopped making me numb and just made me neurotic. Instead of killing my insecurities it fed them. I would sit for hours drawing, never moving from the couch. When they were back in their bedroom I would feel as though I was physically unable to go back there with everyone, I felt like I was unwelcome, which I wasn't.

The first time I was shot up changed everything. I remember sitting in the bathroom while he injected me, as the rush hit me tears ran down my face. They asked why I was crying, worried that he had missed (it's very painful to get it anywhere outside of the vein) but I was crying because it felt so fantastically, amazingly, out of this world GOOD. In fact I didn't know I was crying until they pointed it out to me. It was a full body orgasm, I swear. And that is officially when I lost it to speed. I was a girl with a lifelong fear of needles and suddenly they were my best friend. I was hooked. I don't really remember how soon after but they wanted to cut me off. I think the excuse they had was that I was too good to be doing it, that they felt they had ruined me and soon he refused to shoot me up. But I'm stubborn and soon was spending hours trying to hit a vein on my own. It seems like it would be easy, but really it's not. Veins 'dive' when you are trying to hit them all willy nilly. It took a long time before I finally drew back blood, finally gave myself that release I used to depend on getting from someone else. But I did. And I fell further into my strung out mind, further away from being a human being. For me the goal of getting high was to sleep as little as possible, to escape through losing my mind as much as possible. I had full on hallucinations so many times, of people trying to harm me, or people talking about me. My hallucinations were so real that I had no qualms about complaining about them to people that knew damn well there was no one on the roof next door talking shit about me. My insecurities were manifesting in my waking hours instead of falling away behind my high.

The very first time I actually had sex for cash was traumatizing. A friend and I had agreed we would try it out together. The prof had a friend that was also a dealer and they wanted to 'double date'. My friend and I agreed that we would charge a hundred dollars an hour, we thought that we, at the wise age of 19, were in control. These adult men were our puppets and we were going to be in charge. What the reality of the situation was that it killed me inside. I went over there in my '90's pleather pants thinking that I was the woman in charge being as I was in possession of the vagina and in the end the cash. But when I left I knew I was a whore. It was something I was accused of growing up and in a way it was a big "FUCK YOU!!" because I was fulfilling the prophesy of someone that should have never called me such things. And here's the kicker: I lost the rolled up hundred dollar bill I had tucked into my waistband.

The next day when I came down was surreal. I was crying, self loathing. I wanted to die. My friends brought me morphine pills so that I could sleep. Everyone knew that I was a whore. I knew that I was a whore. I didn't feel in charge anymore. But I had already done it and in some part of me I felt like I was paying some penance by doing what I was doing. I deserved this and nothing more. So it continued. The drug dealer seemed to think of me as one of his girlfriends, it became regular thing. We traded sex for drugs, he took me with him to Yakima to re-up, I met his contacts. I was in the game. I had a boyfriend at the time, a guy I had gone to school with. He knew what I did and I imagine he hated it. The thing with me was I provided. People wanted cigarettes? I would steal them or buy them and hand them out. People wanted weed? I would call everyone I knew, work up fake tears when necessary and we would have it. People wanted speed? I fucked for it and I shared. In a sick way I felt like these people were family. I was naive. I thought that they felt as much fealty to me as I felt for them and I provided for my 'family'.  I was a sucker. But I was the one with carpet burns on my back and I was the one carrying around the mark of a whore. So I did more, because the darkness didn't fade so easily anymore.

I remember a time when the prof had a friend in town. He wanted to show him what a 'baller' he was and had his whore come over to service him. He had never had a prostitute before and it was more of a mark of shame to him than the mark of a 'baller'. I quoted him my usual price and it was too much for him. We debated, eventually the price went from a hundred dollars to thirty five. I was livid. But I was desperate. In the end he gave me the money but the whole time he was fucking me I resentfully said "You get what you pay for". I don't think either of us walked away feeling as though we had won.