Lying there realizing that I was conscious, looking up at the ceiling, I was suddenly aware that I wasn't dead, nor was I looking up at the ceiling of the 12 Step Anonymous meeting place in Orlando. I had survived another rocket man overdose and was alive, but not well at all in The Bronx.
Though I'd made it through another paid overdose for a couple of perverts once again, I sensed that something was more than different.
I couldn't fucking believe it! I'd done it again! But how I asked myself. Why the fuck was I still alive? Needless to say, I fucking chukled in disbelief, but was immediately angry that my customers had fled without paying me.
But I'd gotten what I deserved.
The huge knot on the side of my head was killing me and the needle was still in my arm leaving a huge mass of infection. So desperately composing myself, I rolled to my side and managed to get to my feet. Then I made my way to the bathroom to gaze at myself in the mirror to survey the wreckage of my folly. I mean, on a spiritual plane I was a wretch. But that kind of spiritual damage goes unseen, hidden in the mind.
Looking in the mirror now, the outside of my body suddenly matched the inside.
I'd received the news a few weeks earlier. It was back and there was nothing they could do except maybe make me comfortable. Yeah, there was another drug coming up for FDA approval. But I have to be honest. The first time around, the chemo had been worse than the fucking cancer. So I was at peace with the decision I'd made to have quality time rather than quantity. With radiation having been the culprit that caused this, that was not an option. So why had I done this? It's not as though mine was an exactly rapidly growing cancer.
I mean who the hell had ever heard of malignant plasma cells anyway?
The only problem now was that it had gone on to the point where I have a tumor on my spinal cord, one that they'd removed before, On top of that, it was in my lungs, something I thought to be kidney stones. But what can you do? I'd consciously chosen the path of damnation, much like my Crystal Meth addiction, doing nothing about this. And then it appeared, the answer I had sought for so long.
I was the all powerful answer to my addiction.
The person I had searched The Yellow Brick Road for, Oz, the only one who could ever tell me to stop using stood right in front of me. I'd simply been too selfish, like a Goddamned idiot all those years to accept it.
And it's not like this was something I'd never expected.
Philllip had warned me the night he'd stuck that first syringe in my arm. I would be an addict for the rest of my life, and here I was, staring down my very end, Metastatic Neoplastic Cancer. So what was it that I was ready to do to finally find my way back home, the fabled Emerald City I'd searched so long and hard for? Anything and everything it took.So I made my way down to the rental office and let them know that I was abandoning my apartment as well as my belongings.
I was heading home to Florida.
The next morning, riding the escalator at Moynihan station down to the awaiting Amtrak, I realized that I was not so much running away from my addiction, but rather escaping it. It was the only thing I could do and I knew where I had to go, the 12 step anonymous meeting room on East Colonial Drive in Orlando, Florida.
I had achieved a couple of scattered weeks of clean time there the year before, and now I was desperately desperate!
Reflecting on my sudden departure,I remember reaching my right hand towards the heavens and making a victory sign the moment I stepped on the escalator, drawing the attention of the passenger behind me who stated, "I guess you're happy," and how she drew her hands to her mouth when I turned to her, revealing the steady stream of tears flowing down my face. Being in the midst of a mammoth crash,I could say only one word to her, "Home," which brought her to tears. Then she placed her hand on my shoulder, seeming to almost know that I was faced with some type of insurmountable problem. And it just about was because sobriety, or clean time as they say, was a task I had never been able to achieve.
I was literally that far gone.
But all that mattered, being against all odds, was that I was going home, back to the place where I'd turned down this long dark Yellow Brick Road of Methamphetamine addiction years earlier.
But all I could do was wonder.
Could I finally make it back to that place, to the time where I'd known peace before making the mistake of allowing someone I remained attracted to to stick that first needle in my arm? I wanted to, but I highly doubted it. But that in itself should have been encouraging in as much as I'd never even considered that sort of victory in all of my previous journeys south.
And there were many of them.
Thinking they had been nothing more than a getaway to get high and then return to New York City, theirs had always been planned failures. But no such ideas were coming into play here. So perhaps I was starting out on the right foot.
Was this going to be that final journey home?
Sitting there looking out the window, the thought of capitulating never entered my mind. I was tired of feeling very used by the endless stream of Crystal Meth dealers the manager of my building had rented to, not that she was to blame. My addiction has always been my choice to make. But they made sure that the choice was always easiest to get wrong. So this was a matter of survival!
Needless to say,I felt no remorse abandoning the tabs I'd run up with them.
You know, people always speak of the moment Grace was bestowed upon them. And maybe this was it, I told myself sitting on a brand new train, heading home without so much as a worry in my heart, being at peace with a God who I'd cursed for so long. Maybe this was the journey where I wouldn't make all the wrong choices just so that I could shoot up again. Then it began, with the train gently rolling out of the station.
Little did I know, I was riding off into the sunset.
