Hero of the Underground: A Memoir - Hardcover

Peter, Jason; O'Neill, Tony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031237576X ISBN 13: 9780312375768

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2008

Synopsis

I wasn’t afraid of death.

How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin . . . after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live---to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief.

Toward the end, I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out.

I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun.

And then all--
of my problems--
would be solved.

About this title

About the Author:

JASON PETER grew up in Middletown, New Jersey. He was an All American and a member of three National Championship football teams at the University of Nebraska, co-captaining the championship team. He was also a National Football League first-round draft pick by the Carolina Panthers, where he played for four years before injuries forced him to retire. He is now married and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he co-hosts a sports radio program, The Spread, for ESPN.

TONY O’NEILL is a poet and novelist whose books include Down and Out on Murder Mile and Digging the Vein. He lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

Are You The Guy?

I WASN’T AFRAID OF DEATH.

How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow sixty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined by dollar amounts but by the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin... after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live—to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief.

I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out.

I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun.

And all—

Of my problems—

Would be—

Solved.

This had all started the night before. It started in the way that life-shattering events, like suicides or murders, usually begin, with something so small, so meaningless, that it is almost comical.

It started with an argument over a television program.

Diane had been on my last goddamned nerve, ever since we had driven from my apartment building in New York to my folks’ house in New Jersey. They were out of town and had asked me stay there to watch the house and look after the dogs. Our heroin habits were again out of control, so we talked it over and decided that we would take the opportunity to kick dope. The plan was this: We would take a small amount of heroin with us. Week one, I would start to kick. Diane would use enough dope not to get sick so that she would be able to look after me and get me through the worst of the physical symptoms. Then, when I was feeling better, Diane would kick, and I would nurse her back to health. It seemed like a simple, obvious plan.

What could possibly go wrong?

Doctors will tell you that kicking heroin is like having a severe flu. They will reel off a list of symptoms: runny nose, runny eyes, muscle aches, stomach cramps, fever, the chills, insomnia, diarrhea, nausea... I mean, it doesn’t sound like a walk in the park, but it’s hardly as bad as having your vertebrae crushed under a 300-pound offensive lineman, right?

Well, as any addict can tell you, doctors—for all of their good intentions—really don’t know shit. Comparing heroin withdrawals to the flu is like comparing getting hit by a truck to falling off a tricycle. I don’t care how severe your flu is, it’s unlikely that you’ve seriously considered throwing yourself out of a window, just to make the screaming in your head go away and the agony in your body stop. Heroin withdrawal is the nearest thing to hell that the living ever get to experience.

We barricaded ourselves in my parents’ house. I had gotten a prescription for a new drug called Subutex from one of my doctors, a little white tablet that dissolves under the tongue. Supposedly it would help with the withdrawals. I also had Xanax to help me sleep. Diane carried the heroin and cocaine, and I resigned myself to a very unpleasant seven days.

By the time I reached day three, the huge flaw in my plan became apparent. Withdrawal sickness tends to come to a peak around the third or fourth day. You are vomiting, shitting yourself, your body is twitching and spasming so hard you can involuntarily throw yourself out of bed. You feel like you have white hot sulfur in your veins instead of blood, and your brain is literally screaming out for some heroin to take the pain away.

As all this was going on, in would walk Diane, high as a fucking kite. Her pupils like pinpricks. Slurring her words. And I knew that in her purse there was enough shit to take all of my pain away. All I had to do was ask.

You see, the relationship with Diane was not exactly an equal partnership. I knew that at the end of the day, if I asked her, she would have to give it to me. Because she knew that if she pissed me off too much and I kicked her out, she would be left with nothing, except a drug habit she had no way of being able to support.

Diane had been a dancer when I met her. A truly beautiful girl with a body that could drive a man insane. She was also a very sweet, kindhearted person. She came into my life like so many of the others—we met at a club, we exchanged messages, and one day she turned up at my apartment with two or three other girls to party. Only Diane never left when the party was over. She stayed, and at this point we had been together for just under a year.

She had changed. I had changed her, I suppose. There was no way that someone could live with me, could be around me for such an extended period without changing. When you live with someone who is high literally seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day you either leave... or you adapt. Diane adapted. When I met her she used drugs—maybe a little crystal meth when she danced, or coke recreationally. Normal people stuff. The stuff that is happening in homes and clubs all over the country at this very moment. After a year, however, Diane was snorting as much heroin and smoking as much crack as I was, and I was supporting her habit. Without me to continue funding her drug habit, Diane would be completely screwed.

It was during this attempt that I realized that maybe Diane didn’t want us to get clean. After all, it’s an old story—if you take the drugs away from a relationship like this, often there is nothing left in their place. Maybe a part of her worried that if we weren’t high all of the time, I wouldn’t want her around anymore. It would have at least required a huge period of readjustment. Outside of getting high, we didn’t have much in common.

At some point during the third day I had managed to hold down enough Xanax that I passed out in a dark, dreamless sleep. I don’t know how long I was out. An hour? Two? Maybe only a matter of minutes. Soon something started to bring me around...

Then I smelled it.

Something familiar.

Something dragging me out of my cocoon of sleep.

I started to become aware of my surroundings again. The duvet that I was wrapped in, soaked through with my sweat. The aches in every inch of my body. The relentless fucking daylight burning into the back of my eyelids.

And the smell.

That fucking smell.

With a groan of disappointment, I woke up fully. I was curled in a fetal position. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. I became aware that Diane was sitting on the edge of the bed next to me. I gingerly turned around.

"What the fuck...," I gasped, "are you doing?"

She turned and looked at me. In her hand was a large square piece of aluminum foil. A pipe fashioned from foil hung casually from her lips. Her bleary, stoned eyes looked at me quizzically, before she fired up the lighter and carried on smoking heroin, right there, in the same bed where I was trying to get clean.

"What the fuck are you doing, Diane?"

She exhaled plumes of white smoke from her nostrils, and took the pipe from her mouth.

"I’m staying well, Jason! So I can look after you. How are you feeling, baby?"

I was furious with her, but too sick and weak to argue. Instead, I told her to give me the fucking dope so I could get well, too. I swear she looked relieved when I finally caved.

This sudden change in our plans necessitated a trip back to New York. Once I was using heroin again, I realized we needed more. More of everything. We drove back to the city that night to have coke and heroin delivered to the apartment.

My connections were always ready to deliver. It’s pure economics. I was everybody’s best customer, and there is no better working model for capitalism than the relationship between a dealer and his customer. If I called at 7:00 in the morning and he was dropping his kid off at school—he made sure I got my drugs first. Late for his mother’s funeral? He made sure I got my drugs first. So within an hour of making the call I had five eight-balls [? ounce] of cocaine and three bundles of heroin sitting on my coffee table.

It was too late to drive back to Jersey. We decided to stay home, and we started our usual routine. I cooked up the cocaine with bicarbonate of soda to make freebase. We put the TV on, began to furiously smoke crack and snort heroin, the same thing that we had been doing daily for the past twelve months.

A woman, in tears, was screaming at her boyfriend, about how she was going to keep her baby no matter what. I noticed Diane staring at the screen intently.

"Fuck," I laughed. "I tell you. Diane... If you ever got pregnant we wouldn’t be keeping that baby."

It was an innocuous enough comment, I thought. After all, we were heroin addicts with out-of-control crack habits. We weren’t exactly the models of stability. Whatever I was expecting from Diane, it wasn’t the reaction that I got.

"How do you mean?"

"I mean what I say. If you ever got pregnant, you wouldn’t be keeping that baby!"

"What the fuck do you mean you wouldn’t be keeping that baby, Jason?"

"You’re a fucking junkie, Diane! So am I! What... You’re saying you’d keep it if you got pregnant?"

"I couldn’t get rid of my baby," Diane told me quietly.

"What, you’d rather have a baby born addicted to fucking crack than get an abortion? Listen to what you’re fucking saying!"

"Fuck you!"

Then Diane lost it. She started screaming about how I didn’t love her. How I was taking away her right to choose. How I was a controlling asshole. She hadn’t slept in days, and we were both loaded on dope and crack, and with our psyches so fragile the argument quickly escalated. I screamed at her that she was crazy if she thought that she was ever having my baby. She told me that I was crazy if I thought I could tell her what to do.

"Fine!" I yelled at her. "Then we aren’t having sex again, period! Not until the both of us clean up!"

With that Diane stormed into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

It was a ridiculous argument. It wasn’t as if Diane getting pregnant was at all likely. At the beginning of our relationship it had been all sex; but that soon fizzled out as drugs became the focus. Sometimes when she got high Diane would get horny, but the last thing I wanted to do was have sex. To keep her happy, once in a while I would cut down on the drugs, pop a Viagra, and we would screw, but there were so many chemicals in my bloodstream that even this was an extremely rare occurrence. When you have been doing crack for a while, it becomes the least sexual drug you can imagine. The very idea of touching another person, or doing anything that would divert your attention away from the pipe, is unthinkable.

I sat and fumed. Fucking bitch! She was acting crazier and crazier. The crack was making her unstable. All it would take was a wrong word out of me and she would be in tears, screaming, throwing things. In my eyes, I was the stable one. I sucked on the crack pipe angrily and contemplated throwing her ass out on the street.

After an hour I checked in on her. She sat at the desk by the bed, furiously writing a letter, with the pipe next to her. She was so high and so angry, her eyes looked like they could pop right out of her skull. When you’re high on crack you get into manic bouts of activity like this. I decided to leave her to it. I went back to the TV room and carried on getting loaded.

I couldn’t concentrate on the screen. I started to cook more crack, using a large dessert spoon to dump the cocaine and the baking soda into. At every step of the process—adding the water, cooking up the coke, draining off the water, drying the base cocaine—I would stop to smoke some more of the previous batch. My hands trembled from the effect of the coke.

Schhhhttttt!

I heard the noise maybe a half hour after the crack was cooked. I immediately realized that it was the sliding door leading to the fire escape. What the fuck was she doing?

It was 4:00 in the morning. My building was one of the more exclusive in New York City. I counted Matt Damon among my neighbors. The heads of multimillion-dollar corporations lived here. As I stormed into the bedroom I caught a glimpse of Diane, crack pipe and torch in one hand, letter in the other, disappearing up the fire escape.

My blood ran cold. My mind still reeling from the crack I had been smoking, I started to realize just how messy this could get. One of my big-shot neighbors hears Diane stomping about on the fire escape, thinks somebody is trying to break into their apartment, and calls the cops. I mean, Jesus, I could see the headlines:

EX-NFL PLAYER JASON PETER ARRESTED IN HIS MUL TIMILLION-DOLLAR CRACK DEN

"Diane!" I hissed. "Get the fuck down!"

"Fuck you!" she yelled back. "Leave me alone! You don’t love me!"

I saw her climbing unsteadily up the fire escape. Oh Jesus, it got better and better. I could hear her muttering to herself up there about what an asshole I was. The girl was so high and so hysterical that there was no reasoning with her. I tried a different tack.

"Diane, baby," I pleaded, "come down. Let’s just talk."

"Fuck you, Jason!"

Goddamn it. Any minute now, lights were going to start coming on all over the building. If one person called 911, this whole house of cards was going to come tumbling down around me.

"Diane!" I hissed, louder this time. "If you don’t get the fuck down here RIGHT NOW, so help me God, I’m gonna lock you out on this fire escape! Now I’m going inside! If you aren’t in here in TWO FUCKING MINUTES, I am locking the door!"

Fucking bitch! I was suddenly gripped with the drug-fucked certainty that if I didn’t get away from the apartment right this minute I was going to be spending an extended period in a prison cell. I opened the door, and as I did so I heard a noise above my head.

Crunch!

Diane had either dropped or thrown the crack pipe down and it shattered into fragments on the escape. Tiny shards of glass tinkled as they fell through the cracks and started to settle. I could see them twinkling like frost on the metal walkway. I pulled the door open, and stepped back into the relative safety of my apartment. I thought about locking the door and then decided against it. My concern for Diane’s safety was fading now, and my survival instinct kicked in. There was no way in hell I was gonna do time because of her tantrum. I was going to split, whether she decided to stay on the fire escape or not. My heart pounding, my adrenaline levels pumped to insane levels, I started to throw my clothes into a bag.

I grabbed all of the drugs in the place. I stashed the cocaine in my pockets. I looked at the heroin. I had three bundles left. Every time I heard a siren outside on the street, I thought that the cops must be showing up at my building already. In a moment of idiot genius I decided to flush the heroin. After all, if I walked outside and the cops were waiting, I could deal with being busted with coke. There is something acceptable about coke. I mean, shit, 90 percent of Wall Stre...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 031237576X
• ISBN 13: 9780312375768
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304