James Hippie

Confession #28

When I was first getting sober I used to hang out at this alano club in L.A. A lot of low-bottom people there. Like me. I had put together a little clean time and this guy asked me to sponsor him. Right away I could tell he was a little off. Like touched, you know? Not all there. So I would go over to his apartment to do step work with him, not that this was really gonna help him ‘cause he was barely functional like I said. He lived with a woman, I don’t know if it was his girlfriend or sister. She looked more messed up than him. I only ever saw her in bed watching TV. The whole scene was a drag. Anyway, I was helping him with his fourth step, which was a trip because he was saying all this weird stuff about his dad being John F. Kennedy, then five minutes later it would change and his dad was Walt Disney, and I figured he was like schizo or something, you know? So I said hey, let’s take a break and I headed into the bathroom to piss. When I finished I decided to check out the medicine cabinet. Old habits, right? Inside there was a small fortune worth of painkillers: Oxys, morphine, Vicodin. And without really thinking about it I just stuffed them all into my jacket pockets. I didn’t even try to cover my tracks or leave the bottles, I just grabbed everything. I walked back out and told the guy we were done for the day and I’d see him at the meeting later that night. I split and jumped on a bus and headed down to Long Beach to look for some friends I knew I could sell the pills to. Never went back to that meeting or saw the guy again. The thing I think about, the thing that I’ve always remembered, was I had to pass the woman’s bedroom, the girlfriend or sister or whatever, on the way out of the apartment. As I walked by I looked in the room and she was in bed watching TV, like always, and our eyes met. Her expression never changed, but in that instant something passed between us, a flash of recognition or, I don’t know, shared consciousness, and I knew that she knew what I was doing and there was a moment where I could have turned around and walked back into the bathroom and put the drugs back, a move that would have spared me another five years and everything that went down afterward. 

Instead I looked away and walked out the door.