Ten years sober

a memoir in doses

Today I celebrate ten years of continuous sobriety. This is the most personal piece I’ve ever written.

Some names and details have been changed to respect privacy. Most have not.

The Renowned Orders of the Night by Anselm Kiefer, 1997

1^st time

The first time I got high, I was a freshman at a big public high school with open lunch. Two juniors named Spencer and Mike, notable cool dudes and bad boys, took Sam and me to Dmitri’s house that afternoon. Dmitri’s parents, professors at Georgetown, left his townhouse empty during the day, making it the perfect getaway.

We gathered in his backyard. Maryland sky, crisp air. Spencer pulled out his mega bong, his meaty paws twisting the grinder—pack it, light it, toke it, pass it. When it came to me, I took a big, big hit that filled the entirety of my lungs, held it until my chest burned with the effort, and proceeded to cough my guts out, laughing all the while as the smoke billowed out of my mouth and nostrils. My boys lost their shit. Everything became clear and mushy at the same time, each sense turned up past ten while my thoughts turned to honey.

We piled back into Mike’s Jeep. He cranked the music up loud, cheap 12” subwoofers thumping in the trunk as Jurassic 5 rattled the doors. The car bounced our youthful levitating bodies.

Goddamn, did we feel cool.

Sitting later in the back of history class, Dorito-dust caking my fingertips, the room tunneled nicely; it seemed obvious that this—this looseness, this sense that the world was finally arranged correctly—was how things were supposed to feel. Everyone else was working much too hard, missing the point. I, however—I’d somehow stumbled into the next-level operating system I always knew must exist.

4^th time

Three weeks later. Sam, Dmitri, and I were in Rachel B’s basement after smoking a big bowl with the girls, sprawled out on the floor together, laughing and laughing and laughing. Our bodies were tangled in the remains of a Twister game gone… right.

When the munchies hit us hard, we walked a mile to Micky-D’s on Rockville Pike to score some burgers, fries, and, like, ten hot apple pies, the cardboard boxes warming our hands.

Back in the basement, Lizzy giggled uncontrollably on my lap.

Where is it?! she demanded, looking around wildly for her warm apple pie.

I dunno, I said, laughing.

Everyone was dying because everyone but Lizzy could see it—the crumbs in my lap, the other pie sitting right there, not even pretending to be hidden. We were all high out of our fucking minds.

I don’t remember which girl I had a crush on, because I think it was all of them.

213^rd time

I’m in the attic of Vera’s house. She was a senior and I was a junior, and we were having a fling, or some such. Technically, I had a girlfriend. Well, we were on a break. Ross/Rachel sitch. Or I’d talked myself into believing it was fine. Vera had brown hair and a pretty face, the kind of girl who carried herself like she knew things I didn’t.

Take one of these, she said.

What is it?

Percocet. A painkiller. If you chase it with this, it’ll be nice.

She took two pills from her palm and washed them down with a long pull from a bottle of Smirnoff. Then she handed them to me. I followed her lead, feigning the same casualness as I took my first opioids.

The room softened. She climbed on top of me and started kissing me, a lá Francaise, and I tasted the vodka first, then her, then the vodka again. Sharp and sweet on my tongue, and fuck, I’d never felt anything like this. I immediately wanted more.

Not long after, we got into her white Volkswagen Jetta. She asked if I was ready but didn’t wait for an answer: she continued teaching me how to drive a five-speed, patiently correcting me here and there. It felt good to be properly schooled by an older woman—especially on vodka and painkillers. We chased the winding bends behind Rock Creek Park, with no one around, on roads that felt like private swampland, the kind of place you’d joke about burying a body. Or actually bury a body. We played a game, turning the headlights off and driving in the pitch until one of us got too scared. It was always me.

We ended up near an abandoned medical facility near the woods, as creepy as it sounds. She told me the high school lore, how it had once been a loony bin and was now ghostville. It was quiet and eerie, thrilling. We wandered around, moonlight our only witness, talking and sharing, until we found a spot beneath a willow tree. The bottle still between us.

414^th time

We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in Jandro’s kitchen, laying the magic mushrooms between the bread like banana slices. We ate them standing around the counter, grinning at each other and already laughing in mere anticipation.

The start of Ghost was on, which none of us had seen, and as it played, I proceeded to experience each human emotion in turn, in turn, in turn, like that spinning potter’s wheel Demi works so fiercely, Swayze holding her phantamasgorically from behind… Yeah, that movie was sweet.

Then we went into the backyard. It was fall. Red and yellow leaves. We rolled round on the grass, climbed past the fence just to see what was there, laughing with our whole bodies. Everything was tapped in and full of possibility.

Once inside again, I held something bright red in my hand, staring like it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought it was a wild raspberry, ripe and glowing. Then someone said, Alex, you’re bleeding, you’re bleeding, and I looked down and saw that the raspberry was my own blood—a big open cut on my finger from scaling the chain-link fence, stains smeared down the side of my gray lacrosse sweatpants.

But I didn’t care. I just kept laughing.

Later, we piled into my dad’s Toyota Avalon parked in Jandro’s driveway, passing around a fat blunt, windows closed, properly hotboxing, with John Scofield’s jazz band playing loud enough to feel it in our spleens. Jandro had a gal curled up on him like a cat because, at some point, we must have invited girls over. Lester was holding court about guitar tone and drum work, giving a sermon the way only he could, and Jandro and I just kept laughing, choking on smoke bouncing off the windows.

It was perfect. Whatever people spent their lives looking for was already here. I was at home in my body, in the group, in the night. Nothing else needed to happen, because being here was enough. I was enough.

15,423^rd time

Selling weed and LSD will make you popular on a campus full of money and ambition. So will DJ’ing. By then, I was the treasurer of my fraternity at Dartmouth, Alpha Delta, the literal Animal House, and the treasurer of a secret society I won’t name, because otherwise what’s the point? Not a bad outcome for a kid whose parents worked overtime to get him there, always saying education was the one thing no one could ever take away from you.

That morning, I woke up groggy. I climbed down from the loft in my fraternity’s storied Room Nine, careful with my footing. My head pounded. My lungs ached. Once I was down, I packed a bowl in the massive German-engineered ROOR bong and took a long wake-n-baker’s rip. It did what it was supposed to do. We called the bong the Patriot. It was a gift from Ube, an older football player from California who had shown me the ropes.

Ube shipped me medical-grade California weed because New Hampshire didn’t have much beyond low-grade beasters. I checked behind the couch to make sure my safe was still there, a cheap Home Depot model, stuffed with cash. It was Green Key weekend, and Room Nine once more assumed the altar of the host: come on by, I will get you high.

I had my connect from the Philadelphia nitrous mafia bring up two large tanks, which I sold—one balloon at a time—over the course of a very profitable weekend.

Shortly after, I heard a knock. Oh-lo-oo? a voice called, meaning me. I tiptoed to the door so I wouldn’t wake Riley. She was still sleeping in the loft.

It was Nick, the house janitor.

Come in, man, I said.

I packed him a bowl, and he got right to it. Nick was in his forties, hanging on, and had been around the fraternity for years, long enough that we’d developed an understanding. I was always good with people, you know, good at reading between the lines.

That bad? I asked.

Yeah, man. I dunno know how much longer I can do this. But this Cali shit helps.

His wife had terminal cancer, and he spent most of his time outside of work caring for her or camping out at the hospital. Because of the illness, she had prescriptions for all kinds of things, including OxyContin and Opanas. At some point, Nick and I fell into an arrangement where I traded him weed for his dying wife’s pills.

Pretty much everyone did drugs at Dartmouth. It was a party school, especially for an Ivy, at least the parts I rolled in. I mostly kept the pills to myself. Some mornings I woke up with a dull headache and a low irritation. But I had people who wanted to be around me, girls who were interested, and a primal sense that things were working in my favor. So, I didn’t think much of my first signs of withdrawal. I learned to space the pills out, chase them with beer instead of vodka. I’d learned some since Vera.

17,781^st time

Your turn, Brolo.

Z nodded toward the back room off the pool house, where the light was dimmer. Two neat lines of OxyContin waited for me on the glass top. I rolled up a twenty, bent down, snorting them both in one go—the sweet, buttery powder hit the back of my throat just right. It was a taste, a texture that signified relief. Almost immediately, the stuff of life I ever-braced against was poof, gone. I was invincible.

Love you, man, Z said, clapping me on the shoulder as we drifted back out together, half-philosophizing about literature, like, whether anything serious could survive the internet.

I enjoyed cocaine when it was good shit, but it made my hands tremble and my whole body too awake in the wrong places. Oxy, my love, was different. Oxy didn’t ask questions. It just worked. Especially as landing gear after taking a bunch of uppers.

The combo made me feel something I’d felt before, dead sober—freshman year, benched for stealing Heinekens on the team flight out West, watching the Northern California hills from the back of the van. Happy cows circling through fog. Then I became them, became the hills and cows, all of it dissolving into one thing speaking without words. You don’t survive by trusting free gifts, so I went looking for the chemical route back, even though I knew then that my destiny lay in California.

And four years later, I found myself at Z’s pool house in Atherton, in those same hills. His parents’ place was immaculate and expensive and sealed off from the street. Here, consequences were only theoretical. Our friends floated in and out, leaving wet footprints on the stone, Fred Falke playing in the background, melodic and slowly building. Benny handed me an IPA. Sauce passed the spliff around. Someone else laughed too loud.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 2009, I headed straight into the Great Recession. Instead of landing a banking or consulting job—the path most of my peers were gunning for—I was unemployed. But I’d saved about twenty grand selling weed and DJ’ing, and that money carried me and four of my closest boys out West. It was to be a magical summer built on borrowed time.

Officially, I was staying at Anthony’s mom’s beach house in Stinson. Sometimes I did, rolling big spliffs and driving the PCH with electronica blasting, my black five-speed Subaru cutting through blind curves, clutch and gas working from muscle memory. But I didn’t spend much time there.

Riley was the reason.

She was a year younger than me, interning in Menlo Park for the summer, technically for work but really so we could be closer. We’d been orbiting each other ever since our first drunken night in her Hitchcock dorm room, after one of my DJ sets. She was sweet and shy and breezy. Rural Maine clung to her—backwoods and pine, her blonde hair always a bit unkempt. She was the younger sister of a famous Hollywood actress, though she never carried herself that way.

That afternoon at Z’s house, somewhere between the fifth game of pong and Benny’s theory about how winning was just losing in reverse, she gave me a look: she’d reached her limit with the frat-boy circus. She called me by my real name, never Olo. We left together and drove back to Palo Alto. The windows were down, Daft Punk blaring as we shared a spliff. We cruised past low gates guarding long driveways that disappeared into ancient hedges.

At her place, we turned on a show we barely watched, poured some cheap Malbec, and started making out. We did a few more lines of Oxy. The night fell away, bringing us together.

We were outsiders in a type-A world we mostly wanted to escape. Riley loved the version of me who DJ’d and liked to party, while I loved how little she seemed to need from the world we were in. The difference was that she could take or leave the drugs. I didn’t know that was even an option.

20,000+ time

After I got promoted at Salesforce, I joined a new team at 101 California Street. That morning, I took the Muni in from Hayes Valley and stood with the rest of the commuters, surrounded by suit jackets, goofy backpacks, and leaky coffee cups. The city’s tech boom was well and truly popping off, and your boy was fully in the mix.

Once I got to the office, I dipped into the bathroom for my morning pilgrimage, praying it would be empty. Of course it wasn’t. Someone was destroying a breakfast burrito nearby, the sounds and smells making my stomach turn. I locked myself in the handicapped stall—the junkie’s office—and crushed the last of the blue Roxies with the back of my Muni card, using the toilet paper dispenser as my desk.

Someone else came in, boots banging on tile. I froze, Muni card suspended in hand, waiting for them to piss and leave. My nose was running in anticipation. Finally alone again, except for Breakfast Burrito Guy’s ongoing crisis, I laid out a thin, careful line and snorted it through a trimmed plastic straw I kept in my pocket, tilting my head down just as Burrito Guy flushed, using the sound as cover.

When I stood, my nose burned and my hands were already starting to shake because I knew they knew, they had to know, nobody spends this much time in the handicapped stall with a sinus infection that never goes away. I washed up fast, checked my eyes (fucked), straightened my tucked-in flannel, and went out to sell.

I was good at the job. That part was real. My grandparents fled the Third Reich with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the Nazis hounding at their heels, and built lives from scratch in a new country. Work was proof we belonged, that we earned our place. Even if it was a grind—endless calls, manufactured enthusiasm, the slow, soul-sucking arithmetic of quarterly quotas… But with the right mix of Adderall, Oxy, Xanax, and caffeine, I found a familiar mode where my charm was dialed up and my confidence was effortless. People loved me. Deals closed. I was one of the best. At least for the four-hour windows when my chemical cocktail was properly calibrated.

I was twenty-three years old and burning through my paychecks as fast as they landed. Riley and I were still together, long-distance now while she finished her senior year at Dartmouth. She was taking care of my pet snake, Ram Dass, feeding him, checking the heat lamp, texting me updates. I did love her. I was faithful, too. Except on the nights when I ran into Alina, who’d always been my kryptonite.

Around this time, my body started to rebel in every way possible. By lunch the opiate high turned. My legs wouldn’t stop trembling, the restless dope shake that starts in your bones and works outward through your muscles. Sweat gathered at the base of my spine. My chest caved in, like I’d been punched or was starving. Nothing Gatorade and Advil could work to abate. This was pain that took over the whole field of awareness, and worse, I knew that today I didn’t have anything left to make it stop. Withdrawal. Broke. Not a single tablet left in the fold of my pocket.

That scared the shit out of me.

I stepped outside near the Embarcadero, the Golden Gate Bridge foggy and metallic in the distance, and started calling doctors from the Yellow Pages. I wasn’t looking for addiction treatment per se; I thought I had a physical ailment, something purely chemical. I was a committed materialist, after all. So I did what I thought a smart, rational person would do—I called a professional.

I worked up the alphabet, starting with A. The first few offices didn’t answer. One receptionist told me, There’s a process, son. Another said the doctor wasn’t taking new patients. The eleventh call went through.

Dr. Paul Abramson listened longer than I expected. He told me he didn’t usually take calls like this. He said there were steps, and he called me Alexander. I explained my symptoms carefully, leaving certain details out, emphasizing my job, my responsibilities, my increasing lack of funds, the fact that I couldn’t disappear, and, most importantly, that absolutely no one could find out.

When I met him the next day in his office, he tried to explain how serious and dangerous things were getting for me. I cut him off.

What do I do, Doc? I can’t go to rehab. I’ve gotta keep working.

His answer was Suboxone. An opiate-antagonist that helps addicts safely stabilize and taper. Imagine if a sex addict were only allowed hand jobs. Such was the hollow agony of its relief.

27,000+ time

I was teaching Riley how to ride a longboard, gliding backwards on mine so I could watch her wobble forward—when my wheel caught a crack in the cement. The world spun. I flew face-first into asphalt and everything went blank.

Oh my god, oh my god, I heard Riley’s voice, far away, then closer.

Half my eyebrow was gone, scraped off on Telegraph Ave. Blood ran into my eye. It should have hurt more than it did, but I was already floating rather nicely on cannabis edibles and a morning benzo.

Two hospitals later, we found someone willing to stitch my face back together. The ER doc wrote me a script for Vicodin—two weeks’ worth that wouldn’t last me two days—and kept asking about a possible concussion. Did I know what day it was? Could I follow his finger?

That’s when I saw my opportunity.

I called my manager, played up the head injury. Told him I used to be an athlete, you know, have had a bunch of concussions, so gotta be careful. Said I needed a week, maybe two. The concern in his voice told me I’d sold it.

I’d already been through one failed round with Dr. A—stabilized on Suboxone for a few months before convincing myself I could manage with just weed, booze, benzos, and, you know, a little blow with the boys on weekends. That led to a spectacular five-month relapse and bender that ended with me back in his office, shaking and begging for another chance. He took me back, but I couldn’t stay clean. Failed test after failed test until finally he cut me loose. Then I sent him some late-night screeds I couldn’t quite remember, surely professionally worded.

This was my chance to do it right. Cold turkey. On my own terms.

I set up camp in our bedroom with concentrated cannabis and a blowtorch for dabs, which essentially turns your lungs to glass and makes you cough up demons. It wasn’t crack, I reasoned. I added my leftover antipsychotic meds, Seroquel, for sleep. I told Riley I needed rest. Leave me alone for a few days. She brought me soup I couldn’t eat, and coconut water I couldn’t keep down… for my concussion.

Days two and three were their own particular hell. The first day always fakes you out; you feel almost human, start thinking, this time, maybe, things will be different. Then day two arrives like a debt collector. That scooped-out feeling where your bones turn to straw and nothing in your body works anymore. I’d ridden this bronco before, even made it to week two once, but please know that Trainspotting makes cold turkey look like something you can actually accomplish by locking yourself in a room instead of what it is: dying, without the relief of being dead.

Somehow, impossibly, I made it two weeks.

I was exhausted, but the world looked different. Sharper. Though less interesting. I picked Tim up and went to Golden Gate Park, where we set up my slackline between two trees, me wobbling above the earth like I was learning to walk again. We went back to his place, smoked more, had beers, and ordered Thai food while we watched Breaking Bad. I felt empty but clean.

Then, four beers in, that familiar whisper: You know what would make this even better.

30,000+ time

The week Twitter IPO’d, we threw an epic company-wide celebration. I was twenty-six and convinced we were changing the world for the better.

Six months later, when the equity lockup expired, everyone on the fourth floor refreshed their Schwab accounts to see if the money was real. I checked mine. There it was. Nothing life-changing, but more than enough to keep the party going. I felt supremely validated—a kid from nowhere special, now holding shares in the coolest company in tech, where everyone wanted to work. For a while, it erased everything else.

That bright day in early May, I sold everything I could at around $32 a share and transferred the proceeds straight into my checking account, where I desperately needed the money. I was now spending all of my salary on “performance-enhancing” drugs.

Twitter was full of vegans, coffee snobs, tattooed hipsters, ultramarathon runners, nerdy ex-Googlers, nice people, and buttoned-up Stanford grads. Afternoon smoke breaks were rare. I lit a cigarette anyway and walked away from the building alone.

I strutted across Market, skipping the trolley tracks, heading toward where Ninth becomes Larkin. I tried calling my guy, Kayvo. No answer. Classic.

By then the cold sweats had already started. Earlier that morning, I’d been sitting in a cleverly named conference room with Sylvia, my loyal Account Manager who ran my book, closing a high-stakes deal with a major bank. That’s when the drugs turned on me. First hot, then so fucking cold. Full-body shivers. An ache in my thighs. The feeling of termites crawling under my skin, especially in my arms and neck. The perennial pain signal: it’s time.

I picked up my pace, brisk and deliberate, careful not to draw attention. As I passed Civic Center, I ruffled my curlyish hair, untucked my flannel, and pocketed my employee badge, loosening the tech uniform. I knew it didn’t really matter. Where I was headed, I was going to stand out.

At night, with time on my side, I could roam the Tenderloin until I found what I needed. Midday missions were different. The thought of running into colleagues out in groups—people who’d skipped the bourgeois catered lunch and wandered into the city together—made my insides swarm.

I cut up Larkin and turned right on Golden Gate, eyes darting. I was making my way to Turk and Leavenworth, aka Pill Hill—the undisputed center of drug dealing and crime in the city. Pigeonholed between the new Mid-Market tech opulence and the skyscrapers of the Financial District, it’s one of the most lawless places west of the Mississippi River.

I’d become the hunter, and that thrill never died. My gift for gab, and a face people couldn’t quite place, had always given me cover. Still, you never knew who was tweaking too hard. I’d been robbed before. Almost stabbed, too.

I walked towards a group of three young men, all clearly dealers, passing around a blunt, bobbing to East Bay thizzle from the sidewalk stereo. I checked my pockets. The cash spilt up between them, and my badge was hidden. I slowed, making eye contact with the tallest one.

Blues, I said.

They closed in too fast, offering everything else. Hands came at me from every direction. I backed off and kept moving.

I checked my watch. Only nine minutes before my team meeting.

Rounding the block, I took in the scene. Low-riding cars idling on the one-way, stoops filled with dice games, bent figures stumbling, electric wheelchairs buzzing past, tweakers and earnest folks down on their luck.

What you need? a man leaning on a dented Camaro asked.

Blues. And pins if you got ’em.

The price was wrong, but I didn’t have time to haggle. He pulled out a crumpled plastic baggie with easily a hundred blues inside and handed me one to inspect. That told me enough.

I handed him the cash and he handed me the rest.

Take my number, he said.

Good idea, I replied, already thinking he might replace Kayvo.

Just call me T.

I liked T more and more, but the pushers were now surrounding me like a scene out of Black Hawk Down, and I had to go. I walked uphill fast, half-expecting a police cruiser to roll up behind me. Nothing did.

Departing the sea of criminality, I allowed myself a grin and kept moving.

On the way back, I crossed Larkin and handed the last drags of my cigarette to a gray-haired homeless man on Market. He squeezed my hand with greasy fingers and told me God had blessed me. For a moment, everything inside me felt right as rain, like some deeper order had reasserted itself and was watching over me.

I ducked into the side elevators closest to Ninth, the ones I’d learned to favor. They dropped directly in front of the new seventh-floor locker room, below the cafeterias and coffee bars everyone else loved. I locked the shower door, laid everything out, and finished my prayer. Two minutes, start to finish.

I poured a coffee, grabbed a Dutch waffle, took the stairs down to the fourth floor, and slipped into my meeting with a quick apology, my eyes scanning the room to see who’d noticed I was late.

40,000+ time

At 1 a.m. the night before my wedding, I realized I had a problem: I was running out of drugs. I was two hours from home, from my narcotic resupply in Oakland’s skid row, which might as well have been on Mars.

We’d picked Monte Rio, California, for its idyllic Dartmouth summer-camp vibe. A hundred friends, colleagues, and family were in town. I knew I couldn’t deal with withdrawal this weekend.

Riley was already sleeping on her side, her golden hair cascading off her face. The moonlight nestled in her locks. She looked peaceful, untouched by whatever was happening with me, or what I was about to do. I was sweating, but not uncomfortable.

I grabbed my phone and stepped onto the balcony, making sure the sliding door shut behind me. Overlooking the Russian River and a crescent moon covered by light clouds, I dialed Kayvo.

It was late. He was annoyed. I told him it was an emergency, that I’d pay five hundred. He told me to fuck off. I reminded him it was my wedding. He asked about the big order. I said it was mostly gone. So, after some back and forth, I said I’d come to him. What choice did I have?

Fine, he said. Just don’t be wakin’ my kids, Al.

My soul alight for the first time all weekend, I went back into the hotel room. Summoning the second wind only cocaine can gift, I scrambled to find some of the cash Riley and I had received as early wedding gifts. I grabbed my keys and cigarettes. I glanced at my sleeping bride, nodded, and left the room.

Once outside, I breathed in the fresh midnight air. The edges of my body were nowhere to be found. I turned the ignition, lit a Camel, cracked the windows to let the smoke dissipate, and stepped on the gas.

I cruised through the redwood darkness, so far from God but so near to meeting Him. The speedometer climbed past rational thought; seventy miles per hour on serpentine roads that twisted like the lies I’d been telling myself, where each curve was taken on faith that the next one wouldn’t be the last, the moon following me through the canopy like a conspirator who knew exactly what kind of madman leaves his bride sleeping alone the night before their wedding to chase drugs through wine country, knew and didn’t judge, just watched as I pushed the accelerator harder, trying to outrun the withdrawal already whispering in my bones that this would never be enough, there would never be enough. I would always be stealing from tomorrow to pay for tonight.

Only fifteen minutes into my journey, and out of nowhere, I saw police lights blaring in my rear-view, speeding up to my tail so fast I could hear its engine humming. Its red and blue lights strobed, its siren wailed, and it killed the nostalgic buzz of my favorite jam band.

Next thing I know, two more cop cars joined the parade. One shot ahead and slammed its brakes. Another pulled flush to my left.

I hit the brakes hard. Four cops stepped out with their guns drawn.

Weirdly, I wasn’t scared. Instead, a serenity enveloped me. I felt a culmination taking place.

Well, you finally did it, Al. You found the edge.

One of the officers asked what the hell I was doing. I told him it was my wedding tomorrow, that I was stressed, that I’d gone out for some air.

Some air? he said. Do you have any idea how fast you were driving?

I said I did not. I told him I was just thinking about, you know, the Big Day. We talked some more. I nodded and apologized.

They stepped back and talked among themselves while I waited. Eventually the police chief came over and told me to follow his cruiser. I assumed that was it, that I was headed to jail the night before my wedding, but ten minutes later, we pulled into a 7-Eleven instead.

He bought me a coffee, put his arm on my shoulder, and steered me outside, sitting me down firmly under the redwoods. We talked and talked, I nodded along, gone but seeing everything, saying whatever seemed to keep the moment alive.

He told me to drive straight back to the inn and get some sleep. Of course, sir, I said. I can’t thank you enough. I really needed that.

The moment he was out of sight, I turned the car around and booked it to Kayvo’s, ripping cigs the whole way.

I never told Riley. Not that morning, not ever. She woke up next to me, her husband-to-be, and we got married happily that afternoon under the burning California sun.

50,000+ time

I woke up locked inside my body. I hadn’t been sure I would wake up, and that had become routine. The night before had been bad. I felt used up and ashamed.

But I still had to act.

I stumbled downstairs and made coffee. Riley was already at work. I was between jobs, to put it charitably, with my unemployment check still a week away. I’d already liquidated my 401(k) and was more than $96,000 in debt. I was out of cash, rideless after crashing my car on a late-night run to Kayvo’s, and deep in skull-splitting withdrawal.

In the garage, I found my black Dre Beats headphones next to my old DJ equipment. I stared at them for a while. Then I lit a cigarette and walked the half mile to Buy Sell Loan on 51st and Telegraph. I can’t tell you how humiliating it felt to walk in there again.

How much for these, I mumbled.

Sixty to sell. Twenty to borrow.

That would barely get me through the day. Still, I said, fuck it. I sold them and called Kayvo, who was waiting nearby.

Just three? he asked.

Uh, for now, I said, embarrassed even by my dealer.

I took a CD from his side panel and crushed up half of a tiny pill, trying to conserve. Let’s go to Starbucks, I told him, knowing that if the moment presented itself, I might try to steal a handful more from a man who would kill me for it.

The last time

Minutes before my interview with Slack, I snorted a personal-record mixture of uppers and downers. I found that flow where my body disappeared into its source and then something else took over—I got the job. It was the hottest startup in the Valley, and I’d be the first Sales Operations Manager, helping build strategy on their founding sales team.

Despite everything falling apart—the hidden debt, the multiple rounds of failed secretive treatment, the most recent string of startup blowouts—I still had an enviable résumé for a twenty-eight-year-old. This job was going to be my saving grace. The equity alone would be worth millions. It would finally correct everything that was wrong with me. I’d be fixed. More than that, I’d be legitimate again. Three generations of striving would stay intact.

The company was a typical startup stress ball, and so was I. My manager would tell me to do one thing, then scold me the next day for doing exactly that. We worked around the clock—twelve-hour days plus weekends—because we were the ones who built the messaging tool that meant no one was ever not-working.

The night before a trip to Miami to visit my family, I worked until dark. Then I drove my ratty 2001 Sebring convertible to Kayvo’s place. The block had dried up. All he had was morphine. I railed it all before the red-eye. In Miami, I’d be in withdrawal, relying on transitioning onto leftover Suboxone.

That was my master plan.

At breakfast the next morning in the hotel lobby with my parents, my sister, her friend, and Riley, I nodded off and passed out into my eggs—my family frozen in the horror of watching someone you love become exactly what you always feared they were becoming, while the hotel lobby carried on with its mundane breakfast sounds, the clink of silverware and murmur of normal families having normal mornings.

My sister’s friend was a doctor, which did not help. She looked at my parents and sister and said, he’s high as a kite.

My family staged an intervention. I was open to it, too, even touched by their care. I was so tired. My body couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t have much fight left. I came clean about the debt as well, sitting there like a child, crying to my parents after years of keeping them at arm’s length. The problem was I came clean to them before I did with Riley, which was an amateur move, ethically and strategically.

We’d been growing distant anyway. My lies were mounting and mounting, this double life impossible to maintain. But Riley and I were soulmates. I had to get better.

I agreed to go back to outpatient treatment, to see Dr. A, whom I trusted. It was a way to stabilize the pain, appease everyone, and get my hands to stop shaking. I wasn’t ready to stop. I wanted to keep using, just not like this. By then I’d moved on to fentanyl and other harder drugs. If I wasn’t actively using, my body tipped into acute withdrawal within minutes. That’s what drove everything else.

Once I was back in the clinic on 450 Sutter Street, a long walk from Slack’s HQ, Dr. A had tightened the screws. The place had grown, and so had the rules: twice-weekly groups, weekly therapy, daily drug tests, a crowded waiting room, shitty coffee, my name called from a clipboard, again.

I failed the first drug test, then the next. I told them I’d just been to Vancouver for a company happy hour and had some whiskey. Don’t you know how important my job is?! I said. I didn’t even know you could test for alcohol. That part was new.

You fail the next one, we’ll have to kick you out again, Alex, Dr. A said, looking disappointed.

The treatment nonetheless helped. The worst of the withdrawal eased. I felt like utter dogshit, but I was no longer in free fall. I had a doctor prescribing me things again, which felt reassuring. We trust the medical system. My parents, bless them, were paying for it this time. I obviously couldn’t afford it.

The program’s psychologist was the first therapist I’d had who was in recovery herself. A PhD, a recovering alcoholic, and a meditator: the trifecta appealed to my sensibilities. In our fourth session, after I’d spent an hour defending my sophisticated relationship with substances, she cut me off.

You know what you’re actually looking for, right?

I didn’t.

The drugs, the danger, this whole outlaw spiritual quest. What do you think that’s really about?

Getting high? I responded.

There’s already a fire in you, she said. But you keep trying to light it with gasoline.

She was the first person to really understand me. A few times, I even felt a momentary recognition that she might be right, that there was another way. But my plan stayed the same. Make it through the worst of the withdrawal. Get my hands to stop trembling like I had Parkinson’s. Get off the hard drugs—my only real problem—and keep the booze, weed, dissociatives, and designer drugs. Plenty of therapists and counselors told me I needed to quit everything to give recovery a chance, including her. They obviously didn’t know who they were dealing with. I was the Hunter S. Thompson of the goddamn valley.

That Saturday, we went to a STS9 concert. Riley danced, just moving with the music, and I watched her from the crowd, feeling almost normal for a minute. Sauce passed me a fat joint. I knew exactly what it meant: failed drug test #3, potential expulsion from the program, my therapist’s face twisted in something deeper than disappointment.

I took a long drag anyway, swearing to myself it was the last time.

I didn’t know I was finally right.

Three months into Slack and the secretive-outpatient-treatment grind, I was pulled into a meeting with HR and my manager. They told me I was okay at my job, then let me go. They never said the word drugs. They didn’t have to.

I rushed to pack my things and leave without seeing anyone, sick with shame, and walked out onto Market Street. Another startup squandered. The comeback equity that was supposed to save me never vested. Work had been the one thing holding me together. Without it, I was just another pathetic little man, a drug addict, a complete fraud, a nobody. I walked so fast I was nearly out of breath, past establishments I used to frequent, phone tight in hand, the Tenderloin just a few blocks away—until, miraculously, I found myself waiting on a BART platform at Embarcadero for a train home.

Riley was on the couch, working. I told her I got fired.

Are you serious? she said.

I tried to explain myself.

This is unbelievable, she muttered.

She stared at me and shook her head, and under her gaze I felt very small.

I’m so sorry, I said.

You’re always sorry, she said, her voice exhausted.

She’d been hearing it since Dartmouth. Through every lie about where the money went, where I’d been, why I’d sleep till noon with the blinds drawn. Through every promise that this time was different. I could see in her face that she was fed up with making sacrifices for someone who wasn’t going to change.

We argued until she left the room. I was surprised to feel my legs give out.

Next thing I knew my face was in this ugly beige rug we’d bought at Target when we first moved in, when I still had tech money and she believed I could still get better, and now I was drowning in it, tasting dust mites and my own snot while Riley moved around upstairs, probably calling her best friend like she always did when I fucked up, definitely not coming back down. Somewhere between the choking and the guttural sobbing it hit me that this was it, this was the edge I’d been racing toward like a maniac my whole life, another fucking startup gone, another comeback turned embarrassing failure, only there was no helpful country cop to buy me coffee this time, no money to call Kayvo, just me and this itchy ass rug and the truth that I was never going to stop, not like this, not on my own. And that thought was scarier than withdrawal, scarier than losing Riley, scarier than realizing I’d spent a decade learning how to die but had no fucking clue how to live.

The whole elaborate performance I’d been holding up for years—the fancy job titles, the double life and alter ego in the hood, the idea that I was somehow more special than every other addict—finally collapsed into a single, intolerable stillness. There was no way to scheme my way out of this one. No identity left to defend. No next job to save me, or last appeal to effort or endurance.

I’d made promises before, but there was always a loophole hidden underneath, one I didn’t even know I was keeping. Now there was just nothing left. Not even the part of me so good at clawing his way out.

There, on that scratchy rug I always hated, in the ruins of everything I’d built myself to be, I finally admitted that I couldn’t handle life on my own. I said I would do anything, and whatever was listening could have me.

My breathing slowed. Face wet, pressed into my palms.

And in that moment, with nothing left to protect or pretend, I was done.