There were so many moments that should have counted as my rock bottom. The night I took an emaciated and bloody girl to the ER after she OD’d shooting cocaine, and the ambulance guys alerted the cops, who grabbed me in the waiting room and beat the shit out of me: I pissed blood for a week and a half.
Or when I was sitting on the toilet with my flaccid cock in my hand, pressing a trembling needle against the vein that runs up the side of it—every other vein in my body collapsed and useless—wondering if gangrene of the penis would be a worthwhile trade-off for one more hit.
The abscesses, my teeth falling out, screaming at my ex-wife because she refused to have sex with our drug dealer in exchange for a $40 dollar bag of heroin when we were dope-sick and broke. The list goes on. Unfortunately none of these moments turned out to be rock bottom; they were instead trapdoors that led invariably to ever deeper and darker caverns of degradation.
That summer of 2000, when things were at their relentless worst, I was sick and desperate. I would have crawled through a city sewer lined with barbed wire for one more bag of dope. I was what the doctors called a chronic addict. When there was finally no more money, no more credit with my dealers, no more belongings to pawn, and nowhere further to sink. I found myself in a treatment center at age 22.
I was flabbergasted when my counselor—a very intelligent ex-speed-freak who shared my admiration for the writer Charles Bukowski—told me that I would be expected to abstain from all drugs.
“Even weed?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Booze?”
He laughed. “Yes, even booze.”
I let this sink in. As a near-dead junkie, I had—with only the greatest reluctance—finally come to terms with the fact that I would never be able to use smack again. What I hadn’t bargained for was that recovering from heroin meant spending the rest of my life completely sober. Never again being able to enjoy a cold beer on a hot summer day. No more lighting up a joint and listening to my favorite music. Sure, I might have lived to be 80 under that regime of total abstinence, but it sounded more like a life sentence than a victory.
In my 30 days in treatment, I never admitted that I was powerless over my addiction: to me that seemed like surrendering to a lifetime of living in fear of relapse. Instead of teaching me how to be powerless, I argued, couldn’t someone teach me how to have the power over my destructive impulses. Couldn’t I learn to use drugs and alcohol normally—in moderation—again? The answer was always no: You suffer from the disease of addiction, so you can never use any drug at all normally again.
I left treatment and relapsed within 24 hours. What followed were years of further destructive drug use, homelessness, and overdoses. I bounced between Los Angeles and London, living a double life as an AA attendee and a heroin addict (I found the meetings a lot more tolerable on smack) and eventually washing ashore at a methadone maintenance program in East London. Away from the daily grind of the needle and having to procure a fix, my health started slowly improving.
Getting clean for me was less about hitting a rock bottom than about yo-yoing in and out of the depths. And looking around during one of those brief moments of being “up,” I decided that my life didn’t have to inevitably spiral down again.
I met a woman and fell in love. My relationship with Vanessa was the first relationship I’d had with a nonjunkie in many years. Suddenly I found myself in her world: the thriving 2002 East London music scene, where the prevalent drugs, ecstasy and cocaine, made my own gloomy routine of methadone clinics and intravenous drugs seem constrained and depressing. The combination of falling in love and rediscovering the joys of music and MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy) were huge factors in my eventual decision to quit opiates altogether. Another reason—probably the biggest of all—was my impending fatherhood.
I quit heroin and methadone in the summer of 2003. It wasn’t easy. I almost relapsed more times than I can count, but the fear of giving my daughter an absentee heroin addict for a father kept me going. Our daughter was born October 23, and when the midwife came around with her little cart full of painkillers like Demerol that day, it took all of my self-control not to leap across the room and make off with a handful of ampules. But when Nico Estrella O’Neill finally made her appearance, and I was able to hold her and see her face for the first time, I knew that things had changed forever. It was no longer a matter of whether or not I could stay clean; it was a matter of whether or not I could be a father to this baby. The battle had been won.
Of course it wasn’t as easy as simply walking away from heroin. The path I chose required constant vigilance on my part. Recognizing my demons and taking precautionary steps to avoid danger were essential. We moved to New York in 2004. In a new city, with no drug connections or using buddies, I remained willfully ignorant about the city’s dope spots. Easing back into recreational drinking was done cautiously and with great care. Painkillers, when a doctor prescribed them, were treated with a lot more respect and caution than they would have been by a civilian.
In the early days of getting clean, I used marijuana the same way an asthmatic might use a Ventolin inhaler. When the drug need became overwhelming, smoking pot would immediately snap me out of that dangerous frame of mind. Weed short-circuited that craving, and resulted in quiet self-reflection. The terror, the anger, and the attempts to self-justify the idea of “one more hit” would thankfully recede. After years of substitute prescribing with drugs like methadone, it was a relief to find that a nonaddicting drug could have such a positive effect on me. However, finding a creative outlet in my writing, and having a child who I loved unconditionally and who depended upon me were undoubtedly the biggest factors in my staying clean.
I wrote my first novel, Digging the Vein, during that long, painful summer when I detoxed for the last time, finishing it the week Nico was born. I had never before expressed a desire to write, but faced with a life that was in pieces—a child on the way, no career to speak of, and almost broke—I clung to whatever sliver of hope that I could find. I had spent a lot of my heroin years reading books by the likes of William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Dan Fante, and Herbert Huncke. If these writers had managed to transform their painful and chaotic lives into something like art, maybe I could, too. Writing and getting off heroin became intertwined for me: they both represented a final throw of the dice, one last chance to prove that I was a worthwhile human being. The book wasn’t perfect by any means, but it represented something very powerful to me: a way out.
One of the many difficult things about getting off heroin was the general consensus that stories like mine—addicts who find their way back to nonproblematic drug use—simply do not exist. Certainly there is no reference to us within the 12 steps. Those who get clean but do not work the steps are often disparagingly referred to as “dry drunks,” while the cocaine addict who still drinks or smokes marijuana is thought to have simply switched one addiction for another. Yet I’ve met many others like me: former problem drinkers, cocaine abusers, or heroin addicts who have somehow found their way back to moderate use. Why are their stories never heard?
I believe part of the problem is the overwhelming need we have in America—the country that gave us Hollywood, after all—for a “narrative,” when in fact real life is often convoluted and inconclusive. The “recovery story” regularly played out in popular culture—“boy meets drug, boy falls in love with drug, drug destroys boy’s life, boy quits drug”—has become fixed in the public imagination as the only possible story. A tale of addiction isn’t deemed complete until the protagonist has embraced total sobriety with the same zeal as she once embraced self-destruction. But this black-and-white rendering of addiction and recovery may alienate those who cannot manage total abstinence—and even help drive them back to the same fatalistic, dangerous drug use that sent them to treatment in the first place.
While I disagree with the widely held assertion that total abstinence is the only way, I am not at all critical of those who practice the 12 steps. I have many good friends who are alive today because of A.A. When I was at my lowest ebb, it was often people who were in the program who took me in and extended a much-needed helping hand. I found the 12-step programs to be no different from any other organization, really—there were as many saints as charlatans in those rooms, and usually good old junkie intuition was enough to steer me in the right direction. However, having been off heroin for almost eight years, I am living proof that the “abstinence only” approach is not the only way.
But the path I chose is not lit up and sign-posted with support groups and literature. Those of us who manage it tend to stumble around in the dark, make mistakes, and risk a fall with every step. I choose to tell my story because I know how much I would have appreciated knowing, back when I was that poor, bloody, desperate dope fiend, that others had taken this less traveled road to Damascus and found a recovery of their own.
Tony O’Neill is the author of several novels, including Digging the Vein and Down and Out on Murder Mile and Sick City. He is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Hero of the Underground (with Jason Peter) and the Los Angeles Times bestseller Neon Angel (with Cherie Currie). He lives in New York with his wife and daughter. O’Neill also interviewed Jerry Stahl.
