CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
2004- Riding It Out
The next six months were a blur of dungeon work and maintenance medicine. I’d cut out the alcohol and Ambien completely and got by on as little heroin as possible- I was very careful to do enough to stay well, not enough to raise suspicion. Donya and Marisol never said anything to me and I’m sure my clients had no clue.
I’d also picked journaling back up, even though I bored myself. But most importantly, I’d taken to jogging through Fort Tryon Park several times a week. It gave me something constructive to do and helped clear my head.
If you’d passed me on the street back then, you’d never have been able to guess I was using heroin. I was a clean-looking junkie.
I must’ve also had my P.O. fooled, because she dropped my check-ins to once a month, and even started encouraging me to do phone check-ins in lieu of office visits- I guess her caseload was bananas and I seemed like a low enough risk.
I wasn’t particularly social during this time- Simone kept bugging me to get together, but I kept brushing her off. Last time she called me I was kind of a bitch, and told her I’d see her as soon as she got rid of Little Lord Check Fraud. She hung up on me and hadn’t reached out since.
June and I emailed back and forth a few times but neither of us suggested meeting up. The only real effort I made to stay connected was to take the train out to my brother’s, to check on him and my nephews. I’m pretty sure my brother didn’t have a clue I’d quietly relapsed, so hopefully the familial gossip feathers weren’t being ruffled.
Looking back, I remember how surprisingly easy it was to cut down when I was with ‘Brón- I’m sure it had something to do with the rush that I got working with him combined with the fact that I had open access to the best quality dope I’d ever had, and for free. Well, almost for free. I definitely wound up paying for it.
But I just couldn’t pull off that same type of effortlessness here. Sex work, even non-penetrative sex work, was weighing me down.
And none of my clients could ever take the place of Cabrón. With his fine ass.
