i can't wait to read this 30 days from now.
One last time, the prequel.
It’s not like I haven’t tried.
I don’t want to be sober. And it’s hard, takes the breath from my lungs, and I’m crying like that eight year old kid wanted to do when his mother abandoned; and I’m crying like when my best friend mita died, but I didn’t cry. and I’m crying like how Charles rejected me that night, and I’m crying how Myron played me like a fool, and I’m crying like when my sister didn’t bail me out of jail, and I’m crying like when Tom tells me why am I’m still her. I’M FUCKING SURIVING THAT’S WHY I’M STILL HERE. I stayed strong. I was the “boy” man. And its rushing down on me like a sledgehammer, so much pintup, so much I decided not to feel, so much I didn’t want to deal, and I think I’m going to melt. I think I’m going to drown. I think I’m going to drown. I don’t know if I can swim. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO ME. I know now why babies come crying into this world. It’s the addiction of being safe. But life is never safe. Fuck, I don’t want to be sober.
The fear, there’s nothing to go back to. I never had a home, that’s the worse part. People always say they’re going home, a place where there childhood pictures are, or some stupid award they won in elementary. A home where there prom pictures are displayed, where there diplomas hang, all my degrees are in the same tube they sent them to me I think in a storage in Chicago. I have no place where I go back to and remember what life was meant before, no place that misses me, somewhere in Texas Mama is probably sleeping on the floor or passed out in somebody back yard or sucking dick for the hit of the pipe. Don’t know where my middle sister is. My older sister has blocked my number. There is no home for me, I’ve been everywhere.
And I’m starving. I look in the mirror and I only see skin and bones. I need to eat. I need to drink. I need the fucking drugs. I’m starving. I tell myself I’m no addict, but I’m starving.
I’m sitting here thinking I only got enough high for another snort of the cocaine. Ran out of the white lady. And I only got about a half of drink in the bottle. And it makes me want to cry. It makes me want to set fire to the apartment. Anything to feel and I don’t care if it’s the cold handcuffs. I want to leave the apartment and attack the first person I see on the streets. I want to fight. I want to fight. Damn, I need something. I need it. I’m fucking starving.
I’m supposed to be sober for the next 30 days. Why did I tell people? They all looking for me to fail. And I only have enough rum in the bottle for another drink. And it’s only 1 o’clock in the evening on a Tuesday. I know the liquor store is opened. I know my drug dealer is home and I got money. I take another sip from my cup, cradle the liquor in my mouth, snort the last of the cocaine, and it feels good. Yes, my nose has been a little bloody lately. I got bloody boogers. But it feels so good. My hookup for the day ran into some problems. I don’t need the dick, don’t care about the sex, but I want company. So I guess the sex want happened today. He told me tomorrow. He doesn’t know I don’t like sober sex. I can’t get fucked up tomorrow. Tomorrow the sobriety begins. Fuck him. He didn’t know I woke up at 8 this morning to start drinking so that I could be ready by noon to have sex. And that pisses me off. Funny, he asked, do you like with a condom or bare. Why do they ask that when they know they have a plan? Why doesn’t he just say, I like it bare. Or if he liked it with a condom, just say I only play safe. Not that he has the power. I just want to get fucked. I just want to feel nothing. I just want witnesses.
So I snort the last of the cocaine. I swallow the drink. I fix another drink. I think about walking to the corner and buy another bottle because I’m feeling good. So good. So good alone in my apartment with all the lights turned down and blasting the stereo with porn playing the background. Of course I’m not at work. I can’t work. And I think to myself another day of this bullshit. So I drink a big gulp of my rum, drink it straight from the bottle. And I like how it burns my throat. I like how it mixes with the cocaine in the back of my throat. I go try to find my Tina pipe and hope there is some residue left. I fire it up, the flame burns the pipe, makes it look like charcoal and I watch desperately it burn, and pray that it glows, pray that that beautiful gray smokes rises from its death. But it doesn’t. I inhale but it just tastes burned. I want to throw the pipe across the room but its too expensive and I don’t want to waste another 40 bucks for a new one. I want to call up my man, tell him I need a half, fuck rent.
And I hate it. I hate every fucking body. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND ME. I HATE IT. I fucking hate it. And then I’m scared. I’m that eight year old kid again whose mother abandoned him. I don’t want to be him. I hate that fucking kid. He’s so fucking incurable. I can’t do it. I need to run to the liquor store. I need more rum. I need more drugs. I need more. I fucking need more. And then I start crying because I’ve been doing that lately when I decided the 30 days of sobriety. It’s like I’m dying. It feels like I’m dying. I can breath. I’m panicking. It feels like anything that’s good in the world, anything that’s fun, anything that makes me feel good is ending. Why is that anything I like has to end. Why is it that anything that I love is always bad for me? And I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back to that hell. I don’t know that person anymore. Who the fuck is Michael Whitley. I’m a whore. I fuck for drugs that’s what I do. I go to bars and sit in the back with my shirt off waiting for the next trick, waiting for the next drink.. I cause drama. I don’t know Michael Whitley anymore. I hate that bastard. Nobody likes him. And then I’m shaking. And then I’m take another sip from the rum bottle. It’s empty. I hold it at my lips like a dead lover. I feel the tears falling clouding like a storm. Will I allow the storm? I know I have to give it up. It’s so out of control. I’m so damn stubborn. Nobody will tell me not to love my Mama. and I know she’s a fuck up. Nobody will tell me not to love this addiction. and I know she sucks dick for the next dollar. But no one will tell me not to love her. I know she turned her back on me. but no one will tell me not to love her. Shit, I haven’t been sober in eight years. I haven’t been sober since I was eight years old. No one will tell me not love my mama. that’s the addiction to the destruction. that’s the real addiction. If I stop, if I turn my back, if I get well, if I stop, it’s like I don’t love her. I only have to pain to hold to. It’s the only thing I belong to anymore. If I stop, I belong to nothing. I’m alone again.
When I was a small time drug dealer back in the second Baptist projects in San Antonio, Texas, I used to think, drug addicts were so stupid. Then again, I was fifteen years old. I come from a long line of drug dealers. It’s sorta the family business. I was always surprise what the crackheads would do for that high. They would steal clothes out of the laundry mat, bring them to you soaking wet, begging for the crumbs at the bottom of the matchbox. They begged for crumbs, and I would be like, it’s just crumbs, why you asking to suck my dick for the crumbs, you can’t get high from that. I didn’t know. But I hated my cousins who were more successful drug dealers. I hated how they treated the addicts like they had no souls. They took their cars and donuts, spinning the car around in an open parking lot burning up the rubber. They embarrassed. They abused. They acted like they were gods just because they were a drug dealer. And if a crackhead didn’t have the money, they got their heads beat bloody. A memory, I was ten years old and I woke up to screaming. It was two of my uncles who tied this crackhead to the front yard tree and was beating him with chains. He stole drugs. It was only a couple of hundred dollars worth. I never saw that person again. I would ask grandma what happened to him, she told me I shouldn’t mind grown fold business.
Growing up in the ghetto, crack was a shame. My mama was on crack. She sold her body. I didn’t want to be anything like her. Yes, my uncles got high on weed. It was the strong stuff they stayed away from. It was that white boy’s shit they stayed away from. And I remember growing up in the ghetto when the expensive cars rode up, the whites to score. They were always the best customers. They weren’t so desperate so they were always overcharged but never could be trusted. You weren’t a good drug dealer until you had the rich white clients. The ones you could sell to in the clubs. And soon it stopped being about crack and just weed. It was cocaine. But I hated being a drug dealer. I had a bad habit of making friends with the clients. We weren’t supposed to see them as human, my uncle would say. They’re diseased rats looking for the cheese. We only sell them the cheese. If they don’t buy or wont to steal, we kill them like diseased rats.
And I hated being a drug dealer. There was Jackie; she was the most beautiful girl in the ghetto until she met Crack. Yea, she had her problems like falling in love with no good men. She had four kids. And then she was pretty, sometimes a curse for some girls who don’t grow up with good fathers. I saw the drugs ravish Jackie. She had a son, Jacob. She came over to the apartment to score a dime bag in nickels. She left her son with me. He was only a year old. I didn’t see Jackie again for a month. I kept the son. I took him to school. I enrolled him in our daycare system at my high school because I was from the inner city, and young black girls had a habit of being knocked up. Jackie came back. I didn’t want to give Jacob back to her. My aunt made me. It wasn’t my child. Jackie house used to be full of furniture. The last time I saw her, she was breaking into the back window and her house was empty. She had gotten evicted. I will always wonder what happened to Jacob.
I never saw them as lost souls just people who lost their way. I always saw them as people. Maybe because my mother was one. I remember thinking as a teenager standing on my corner waiting for the cars to pull up or the crackhead I paid in drugs to bring me new customers that I’d seen both sides of the coin. I been a victim of what drug abuse can do to the family and then I became the pusher. I stopped selling drugs not only because it was an exhausting business. Drug addicts never go to sleep and you can never trust them. It was too hard my soul.
I don’t think of myself as a drug addict, more alcoholic. It’s like my life has become full circle. I was victim of drug abuse, became the pusher, then became an addict, now I’m back to whatever.
I’m not a diseased rat. I have a soul I don’t need the fucking cheese. I can say no. I can say no. Watch me. I want my dignity back.
so I say goodbye to you beautiful addiction, the only thing I loved for real. And it’s so hard. it’s so fucking hard. you were the best thing that ever happened to me. but you’re ruining my health. you took away my insanity. and people think its crazy for me to cry over a empty rum bottle. but everytime I throw away it’s like throwing away a corpse. with every empty bottle I mourn death again. they think it’s crazy for me to cry, they say you’re ruining me beautiful addiction, but damnit if I didn’t love you, but it’s not about you anymore. it’s not about you anymore. It’s not about you anymore. and I’m so tired of being alone in this apartment with all the lights turned off, the shades pulled down, like I’m in prison. like I’m ub solitary confinement. I’m tired of loving you like I love my mama, like anything she does to me I will forgive. I can’t forgive you anymore. I won’t forgive you anymore. I’ve stopped forgiving you addiction. I’ve stopped forgiving you.
Love,
Michael
Beautiful Tyler
