Smith Galtney (3:21)
So my partner John and I, we're on a hike. It's 2009. It's a really hot day in August, but I'm wearing a long sleeve shirt to cover the track marks on my arms. I'm addicted to crystal meth, but shh. It's a secret. Shortly into the first incline, an incline that wouldn't have phased me about a year and a half before, I feel winded and I feel like all this tingly feeling in my chest and I'm obsessed and thinking that I'm actually going to have a heart attack. But I can't be honest about any of this, so I lash out. You said this was going to be a Pleasant Mountain hike. John stops and looks at me. Pleasant is the name of the mountain. We're hiking on. Pleasant Mountain. I told you this before we left. Lately, he tells me a lot of things I don't hear. We'd moved to Maine several months beforehand and in that time he'd already gotten a new job. He was looking into ways doing a lot of research on how we could start a farming business together. He's worried about how we're going to pay the mortgage two years from now. He also does a lot of wondering, like, why does it take me all day to run the most simple errand? Why can't I get up in the morning? What's with all the blood stains on my shirt sleeves? He thinks I'm depressed. He keeps saying things to me like, you need to exercise more. And I'm like, I'm gonna get right on that. Great idea. So then I go to Walmart and disappear for the rest of the day. When I'm in the car, I drive off somewhere and I go shoot up in really dodgy places like parking lots and department store restrooms. I'm in a hurry when I do this. I've got shaky hands. This is not the way you want to handle a syringe. I miss the vein a lot and end up with these really large kind of tennis ball sized abscesses on my arms and they hurt, but not as much as the fact that I realized that I just wasted a fucking high that really hurts when I do Hit the vein. The rush is like the DSL of highs. It's like the total sweep cut in the movie where I go from zero to let's fuck in, like, five seconds. My clothes all but, like, fly off of me. And I start walking around feeling, like, sexy. And I'm just like, all right, y', all, let's do this. Which is kind of a problem when you're in Walmart. Sometimes I finally, like, you know, I don't get home until really late at night. And so I crawl into bed or I sneak into bed, and I stare at the ceiling, and I try to regulate my breathing. And I feel every second pass. Anytime my partner gets close, I scoot away. I don't want him to feel how sweaty I am. And I'm worried that he can actually hear my heart beating. It's pumping so loudly. I'm finally falling asleep just as he's getting up. And then when I finally get up, like, at noon, he looks at me. He's like, will you please start exercising more? He's so in denial. We're both so in denial. And here we are, and we're trying to hike up this hill together. It's this beautiful, beautiful summer day, and all my partner really wants to do is just hike up this hill with me. Up until recently, I'd been playing tennis, I'd been riding bikes, I'd been working out. If I can't make it up this measly little hill, this pleasant mountain, then I'm confirming that something is just undeniably fucked up. So I turn around and I head back to the car. And he keeps going alone. And when he gets to the top of the mountain, he takes out his phone and he snaps a selfie and he sends it to me. And when I see the look on his face, it's heartbreaking. It says, I shouldn't be up here alone. A year later, I take the dog, I hop in the car, and I disappear for a week. Thanks to a certain website that I won't mention, I find an ongoing orgy happening in a cottage in a small, seaside main town. It's hosted by the local psychic. He and I smoke meth. And, you know, he looks at me and he's like, I see the number seven above you. And I'm like, dude, there are seven people in my family. And he's like, well, it's really interesting that you say that, because I think I see your mother. And I'm like, my mom's fucking here. Can she come back? When I have clothes on. And I'm not holding a crack pipe when I'm high. And he's, you know, he opens up a door and there's just orgy ness happening. And I kind of disrobe and get into the fray and get lost in chemical sex for a few hours or a couple of days. I can't really remember. This is after chaining, you know, leashing my dog to a dining room table. And at some point when I come to, I'm like, I gotta find my dog. And I go to the dining room table and she's not there. And we look all throughout the house, and I look under the bed and there's my English bulldog, my sweet puppy, just gnawing away at a dildo. And when I pull it away from her, I see that she's eaten half of it. And it looks like, you know, kind of like Hedwig's angry inch. It's just like this nub with testicles. I hand it to the host, the psychic, and he looks at it, and with great sadness he says, my favorite dildo. I get out of the house and I drive around. And days past, hours go by. I don't really remember exactly what happened. All I know is that I ended up in an ER in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And shortly after that, the cops found me in a rest stop on i95. I was hyperventilating and barefoot. I had bruises all over my arms, still, a hospital band on my wrist. A cop told me they were going to have to search my car. And I was just like, look, you know, search my car, but there's just a ton of porn in it. And he was like, it's okay as long as it's not kid stuff. And I'm like, yeah, but it's really embarrassing, you know, Somehow the idea of them pulling out a tote bag full of dirty syringes was nowhere near as humiliating as them finding DVDs with names like All About Cox with an exclamation point. It was a very comprehensive study. The cop cuffs me and he brings me to the Kittery police station, which is not exactly like the Mean Streets, but still. I was being arrested. I'm booked for possession and furnishing a hypodermic needle. And when he uncuffs me and releases me, I have this feeling that something may finally be finished. Like, I'm coming to maybe to the end of something, and I actually have to restrain myself from hugging him. He was also very attractive. He was completely hot. So in rehab, I learned how to sleep again. I sleep for an entire week and I started eating food again. And look, I'm not gonna lie to you and say that I went to some, like, girl interrupted institution covered with cold white tile and with German nurses and everything. I'm also not gonna tell you that I went to some, like, David Carr inner city place where there was some Samuel L. Jackson guy shaking me and saying, this is life and motherfucking death, man. I went to a really nice rehab in Arizona in the desert. There was a swimming pool. We got acupuncture. It was great for my old needle thing. Then we got massages because the acupuncture was really stressful. And it was desert, so there was big skies and all of these Technicolor sunsets and everything, you know. By the time that John arrived for Family Week, I was so chilled out, I was like, gosh, he is going to love it here. And when he arrives, I give him this huge hug, but I can see that he's visibly shaken, and he cuts our hug short. And then that's when I realize I've got another hospital band on, I've got a name tag on, and I've grown a full beard because I don't have access to razor blades because, shit, I'm in rehab. I'm in a fucking mental institution. The next day, they give us an assignment. The two of us, we're supposed to draw two pictures. One illustrates how we are now, the state we're in now, and a second picture that illustrates the way we want things to be. John shows two stick figures at the bottom of a very steep, steep hill. One stick figure is holding onto the handle of a little wagon cart, and he's looking up the hill, ready to pull the cart up. Inside the cart is the second Stig figure who's reclined and lying in the cart. He's smoking, he's unshaven, he's got headphones on, and he's looking the other way. So I. I don't think I need to tell you guys which one I am. Okay, that's good. In his second picture, two more stick figures. They're riding a tandem bike on a flat road, and you can't tell them apart. And John looks at me and says, you can't tell who's leading the way. You can't tell who's doing all the work. Coming home from rehab is really weird in the sense that when I was there, I felt like I was. You know, when you don't have food and sleep for a while, and then suddenly you get them. You know, it's this very profound, immediate sense of change. Like, oh, my God, I've just, you know, there was all these people there who would, you know, a lot of like, fashionistas would come to this place and like, they'd show up just like these sort of Tim Burton looking, you know, things. And they were like, I work in fashion. And then they'd leave and they'd be like, you know, I've always wanted to work with children. And that was me. I was like, I'm gonna work with substance abuse people. I think I found my calling. But of course, you get home and like, everything's exactly the same and you just immediately slump and you're just like, oh, God. You know, So I slumped. I sat around. I didn't do half the things I pledged I was going to do in my exit interview. And wouldn't you know, I used and I used a couple of times. And on the way home from the last time I used, I was crying and driving. Have you ever driven and cried at the same time? It's not easy, not easy. And I mean, it's not just like, you know, this. It's like sob shit, you know, Like, I was like, I'm going to get in a wreck. I knew that it was just very obvious what I'd been up to. So it was like there was really no lying, covering anything up. And I got home and when I said I got high again, I used again. I was expecting him to just finally be like, okay, I can't, I can't, I can't. No more, no more. But instead he just was like, you haven't been trying, you haven't been doing anything. He's like, you know, you can do this. You just have to work at it. So I listened to him, you know, for once I actually heard everything he said. And hitting rock bottom is a really weird place to be because on the one hand, you've totally fucked your entire life up to that point. So it feels absolutely impossible that you're ever gonna get back on your feet again. But the good thing is that you've lowered the bar so low that, like, the smallest amount of effort just radiates through your entire world. You know, if you get up, like before 10 o', clock, like, everybody is like. And then if you take a shower, everyone's like, I'm showering. Then if you say you're going to go outside, everybody just flips the fuck out. So at one point, I actually woke up earlier than John, and I got up And I made the coffee and I was like, God, I love waffles. So I made some waffles. And like, he woke up to the smell of coffee. Not the scent of chemical sweat next to him, it was the smell of coffee. And I was like, oh, I just made some waffles. And like, the next day he like looked at me and he was like, you know, when you made waffles for me, it made me so happy. And I was just like, dude, it's fucking waffles. What is wrong with you? I also took up photography in this time. It was like, you know, everyone in rehab was like, find a new thing, you know, don't go home and like play guitar again, you know, I don't play guitar. I DJed on DJ software, which is so much more pathetic. But anyway, I took up photography and it was like this whole new thing. I immediately got obsessed with it. And it was Christmas Eve and I was going through all these pictures that I'd taken of our life and I looked at him and I was like, you know, we have a great life. Do you know that? And he was like, that's the best gift you could have ever given me this year. Just gratitude. And so In August of 2012, it was another one of those hot days and we decided to give Pleasant Mountain another shot because I'd never made it to the top before. And I put on a short sleeve shirt and at some point I started to get winded. I was like, is this the point where I asked to turn back? And he looked at me and he was like, we are so past that point. That was so long ago. And we get to the top and there's all these people hanging out because it was a beautiful day. So it was like everyone was hiking up there and there's all these people up there hanging and catching their breath and everything. And I went over and said hi to them and was taking pictures and he's kind of standing back and I'm like, what's going on with him? And I finally go over to him, I'm like, do you want to come say hi to these people? He's like, no, let's go over here and talk. And so we go over and we sit on this rock and there's like this amazing view. And just the phrase, let's talk. I'm like, oh shit, what did I do? Did I not like hike up the mountain fast enough? Am I like, I don't know. I'm like, was I in the cart again? And he looked at me and he said, so I was wondering if you wanted to get married. So that's actually the way what that sound. I felt on the inside, right in that moment. Like, it was just like I was just inside. My stomach was just this gigantic little soft.
