Story Time #2: Craigslist Fiendin', by Adam Lehrer
Back in 2010, New Yorkers got their drugs on Craigslist. Adam was one of them.
When my dad and I drove into New York to move me into my first apartment, I was staving off dope sickness. My dad is no fool, and already had years of experience watching me getting on and off hard drugs, but he suppressed whatever concern he had and tried to focus on the positive. After all, his eldest son had just been admitted to a prestigious graduate program. He tried to focus more on the pride he felt in his blood and ignored the shame that I brought upon him and the family. Or, maybe he really did have no clue.
Moving into my apartment didn’t take long. It was a small studio right across from the Village East cinema on E. 12th St. My dad asked me why I was so quiet during the strenuous work of muscling boxes out of the moving truck and into the new apartment.
“Are you nervous about school?” he asked.
“I suppose I am,” I said, truthfully, though obviously obscuring the whole truth.
My relative silence was because my mind was busy with thoughts far removed from moving to New York and beginning school. I was, you see, mentally planning my detox.
“OK,” my mind raced. “I have 10 days until school starts.”
I moved to New York knowing that I would have zero drug connections and that I couldn’t study with a crippling opioid addiction. I prepared myself by purchasing two Suboxone strips that I planned on using ⅓ of for six days, leaving four to five days to fully withdraw the drug out of my system.
My dad left, and the process began. The days of Suboxone were relatively easy. I was shocked by the extent to which those sickly and astringent tasting films erased the opioid cravings whence dissolved beneath the tongue. I even enjoyed those six days exploring the city by myself, walking all over downtown New York, and even enjoying the fitness center that I now had available to me my with my student ID card.
When I ran out of the Suboxone is when the process really started. You know the deal. Four days of bedridden hell sickness. I failed to take into account the fact that Suboxone has a longer lifespan in the bloodstream. So, even though the sickness was a bit dulled from what I was used to, it was prolonged. The first two weeks of school I was still feeling rather awful. Hot flashes, insomnia, queasiness, and a general sense of unease and paranoia. But, I fucking did it. I white knuckled the whole way through and by the end of two weeks, I was free. The drug was completely out of my system, and I remember waking up feeling like God himself had opened up the heavens to embrace me in his glow. Warmth and comfort and, most of all, FREEDOM! I was free, god damn it, why couldn’t I hold onto that feeling?
Everything was going just fine until one day, as I was walking south on Broadway in NoHo, a black man with a gray beard, bald head, and memorably eye-grabbing gray and black camo pants came up to me and asked: “Hey young man.”