It didn’t take long for my sister to get word that I did ketamine and decided she didn’t want us living there anymore. Even though I was distraught at the time, she was in every way justified for being that way.
TJ was able to stay behind and help my sister renovate the rest of the trailer. Chris and I decided to head back to Maryland for an opportunity to stay with his half sister’s mother, Donna’s house and his teenaged sister Delana. Donna owned a drywall company called T&D Drywall and offered him a full time position and I worked a couple times with him, too.
Looking back on it I wish we never went back to Maryland. When it comes to heroin, Chris was never able to stay sober long while there. He was so weak that being in Salisbury was the equivalent to being a kid in a candy store. Heroin was way too readily available and he had endless contacts from his fast to get them from.
It wasn’t maybe a week before we had a steady drug dealer or three that we could buy from depending on who was available and who could drive it out to us. Not before long we were shooting up four or five times a day, staying consistently high the entire day.
This was still really early in my addiction. Getting high with Chris was fun. It turned into some of the most intimate, affectionate and loving times for us. Heroin made me never want to take my hands off of him and he the same to me. He made me feel like the most beautiful woman in the world – the only woman he had eyes for.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
It wasn’t before long that Donna started noticing a change in our behavior and we started to burn some bridges and spoiling opportunities. She didn’t fire him but she didn’t want us to live under the same roof of her kids either, as any protective mom would do.
We crossed a line, bringing drugs into her home, around her children. She even found a syringe under the mattress after we left. We’re honestly so lucky that things ended the way they did.
We moved into a house owned by an adorable gay couple. There was Mike, a man in his 40’s that used to be an erotic dancer in his past life and Phil, a man in his 50’s that resembled a Hobbit and collected antiques and worked at Macy’s. They love blaring Adele and Taylor Swift at the crack ass of dawn while getting ready for work.
They lived in a beautiful Victorian home right on Park Ave near downtown. We rented out two of their upstairs rooms. One room, for lounging had vintage gay porn hanging in the walls and the other room for sleeping was entirely decorated with pink flamingos.
We were in too deep with the heroin at that point and if we stopped using we’d get incredibly sick, so we didn’t stop.
I became best friends with our drug dealer, Liz and while Chris was at work I’d ride around with her all day so I could shoot up when Chris wasn’t around, I’d bring shots so him while he was at work but I wasn’t honest about the amount of heroin I was actually using.
Liz came over one day while Mike and Phil were at work and she had a much stronger batch than we were used to. Chris let me do my shot first, which was probably the last time he ever did that, because within moments I fell out. I have my very first overdose.
Next thing I know I’m lying half naked in a bath tub. Chris hovering over me with a look of absolute panic on his face and Liz in the doorway with a useless, shocked expression on hers. Those were the looks of two people who thought i was going to die.
Not five minutes later Chris and Liz do their shots and Chris falls down the stairs, busting his face and Liz is slumped over in a chair with the needle still sticking out of her bicep.
After bringing in the new year it was becoming evident to everyone except us that we were on our last leg and it wasn’t before long that Chris finally lost his job at T&D Drywall. We were stealing antique nutcracker dolls from Mike and Phil and selling them to a man who buys antiques and costume jewelry.
We were a set of untrustworthy, thieving junkies.
So, I called up my dad who was living in Colorado and he agreed to take us in, not knowing of my new found addiction to heroin and Donna paid for our bus tickets to get there.
We experienced some record breaking, almost impossible to get through, excruciating withdrawals. It shouldn’t be humanly possible to be that uncomfortable experiencing so much physical pain from simply not taking a substance anymore but on a 56 hour long bus ride from Salisbury MD to Pueblo CO we withdrew from heroin
Allie Willey 