by Dan Peres
The upside of being addicted to pain pills is that there is no discernible evidence of use, at least not at first glance. Booze reeks. Weed stinks. Coke leaves residue around the nose and makes your jaw dance like you have a mouthful of Pop Rocks. Pills are clean and odorless and can be taken without drawing much attention to yourself. Still, I generally preferred to take them when no one was around. I excused myself from the table and went to the bathroom to take the last pill—lucky number thirteen. Maybe a small dose of the active ingredients in a single Vicodin might stave off withdrawal for another hour or so.
Leaning over the sink in the bathroom, I popped the pill and cupped a palmful of water from the faucet.
“Hello, Dan Peres.”
Are you kidding me? At that exact moment, Tom Ford had to walk into the men’s room? It couldn’t have been a bathroom attendant or a complete stranger or another drug addict looking for privacy? This was the fashion community, for Christ’s sake. Surely I wasn’t the only hot mess in a tux.
Nope. It was the biggest fashion designer in the world.
“I’m just taking a Tylenol,” I said, wiping the water from my mouth.
“Sure you are,” he said as he walked past.
“Funny. Okay, good to see you.”
That was the extent of our exchange that evening. I left shortly after returning to my seat, just as Bridget went on stage to collect her award.
My hair was damp at the temples by the time I got down to my apartment on 11th Street. My shirt was stuck to my back and my stomach was in knots. I tossed my clothes at the foot of my bed and curled up in a ball. It was happening. I’m not sure which is worse, going through withdrawal or the fear of going through withdrawal. I’d been there many times before, and I had never gotten used to it. The anxiety is crippling. It’s like a scene from a horror movie. You are hiding under the bed. The boogeyman enters the room and slowly stalks around. You hold your breath. You see his feet as he goes past. You hope and pray that he doesn’t find you. And just when you think he might be gone, he yanks you out by your ankles and slaughters you.
I was under the bed. He was coming for me. I was terrified.
After a couple of hours of physical misery and sheer panic, I did what anyone in that situation would do—I put on a tuxedo and went to the nearest emergency room. I wasn’t ready to face the pain and was hoping for a stay of execution. Maybe I could con some exhausted resident working the graveyard shift into giving me enough pills to hold me over till Monday morning. I figured the tux might help distinguish me from every other junkie looking for a fix in the middle of the night.
“How long do you think the wait will be?” I asked the admitting nurse through a cluster of holes in the smudged glass window separating her from the crowded waiting room. “I’ve already had two back surgeries and I’m in agony.”
What I meant to say was: “I’m in a tuxedo, in case you hadn’t noticed. Clearly I should be getting some sort of preferential treatment here. I mean, look at these people. Is there a VIP check-in area or some hospital version of a first-class lounge? I didn’t want to have to mention this, but I’m the editor in chief of Details.”
“Sir, you’ll have to take a seat,” she said. “We’ll call your name.” She was chewing gum.
I was eventually moved into the brightly lit room. The woman in the pink paper gown was down to the last few alcohol wipes when a nurse came in to get me.
I picked up the bag holding my tux and followed her to an examining room. A young doctor came in a few minutes later and I took him through my standard routine. Microdiscectomy. Recurrence. Numb toes. Excruciating pain radiating down my leg. I made it a point to mention that I traveled a lot for my job as the editor of a major national magazine. This always seemed like an impressive detail.
“I’m sure you’ve seen it all,” I told him, “but I just had the weirdest experience. This woman and her vagina have been staring at me for the past thirty minutes. And she was rubbing alcohol wipes on her face the entire time.”
“What color gown was she wearing?” he asked as he dragged the tip of the handle on one those knee hammers across the bottom of my right foot. “Was it pink?”
“No way! How did you know that?”
“We put the people that require psychiatric evaluation in pink gowns. That way we can all keep an eye on them,” he explained before writing me a prescription for thirty Vicodin.
I swallowed hundreds of pills a week without giving it a second thought. It was business as usual—as normal for me as eating three meals a day is for most people. It was only when I ran out of pills that I realized I had a drug problem. That something needed to change. The answer was obvious. I had to make sure I didn’t run out of pills.
The day after my emergency-room visit, I swore to myself I would never let this happen again. It was classic morning-after regret—the shame spiral that causes so many people to take action on Monday mornings, like vowing to limit carbs for the rest of the week after a big pasta dinner.
I would manage my pill intake in order to be sure I always had a refill coming in before the old batch ran out. I could do that. Or I could try to get larger prescriptions—more pills. That was even better. Or I would take them every six hours instead of every four. Maybe that was the answer. Either way, I was a smart enough guy. I knew I could figure something out.
It was five months later when I found myself back in St. Vincent’s emergency room. I’d probably gone through a few days of withdrawal here and there at least ten times since the night of the CFDA Awards. But this night was particularly rough. Each time the boogeyman came into the room looking for me was more brutal than the last.
It was a Tuesday. I hadn’t gone to the office that day. I’d taken my last handful of pills the previous afternoon and was in full shake, rattle, and roll mode. I had a migraine, every muscle ached, and I hadn’t eaten or slept in twenty-four hours. One of my doctors had given me some Valium and Ambien to help me sleep after I complained to him about increased back pain. I took two of each by nine p.m. Nothing. I popped a couple of muscle relaxers at around midnight and walked over to the hospital.
I didn’t recognize the admitting nurse from my last visit. If it was the same woman, she probably wouldn’t have recognized me, either. I wasn’t wearing my tuxedo. Instead, I had on plaid pajama pants, a long-sleeve navy blue T-shirt with Wu-Tang Clan written across the chest in yellow, and a zip-front hoodie. I had never listened to the Wu-Tang Clan, but I loved the shirt and the idea that it made me appear edgier than I was. There were five or six people in the waiting room.
After making a photocopy of my insurance card, she told me it would be a few minutes before I was able to see a triage nurse.
“Is it okay if I wait outside and get some fresh air?” I asked.
“Of course. Check back with me in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
I walked through the sliding glass doors and lit a cigarette—my idea of fresh air. A homeless man sitting on the wheelchair ramp that led down to the sidewalk facing Seventh Avenue asked for a Marlboro. He offered me a sip from a large McDonald’s cup.
“You look like you could use some of the juice,” he said after lighting his cigarette with mine. He laughed loudly. I declined.
Back inside, the triage nurse took my blood pressure and my temperature. I ran through my usual back-pain shtick, just as I had countless times before, though it’s possible I was slurring my words a bit. Sensing this, I explained that I’d been in so much pain the last few days that I hadn’t managed to get too much sleep. I was sweating.
“It’s warm in here,” I told her. “Isn’t it warm in here?”
“Why don’t you go ahead and take your sweatshirt off?” she said. “In fact, why don’t you go over there behind that curtain and put this on?”
She handed me a pink paper gown.
Crossing the Line
Can dogs smell pills?
This was not a question I’d ever pondered, but for ten unbearably long minutes on an early Feb
ruary afternoon it was all I could think about.
I was inching toward the border in my white Ford Taurus when I spotted the dogs. I knew they could sense fear, which was already freaking me out given the fact that I was terrified, but could they actually smell Vicodin?
I wasn’t expecting dogs. And now I was stuck. Fifteen lanes slowly merging into ten. There was nowhere to turn around. Nowhere to stop. I was creeping closer to the United States border inspection station that stands between Mexico and San Diego. And I had a thousand Vicodin in the trunk.
To make matters worse, I had awoken that morning with a giant pimple on the side of my nose—almost as concerning as the possibility of a Mexican prison—and I was due to be a guest on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher later that day. Zits made for bad TV.
It was already 12:30 p.m. and I could still see Tijuana in my rearview mirror. I needed to be in LA by 3:00 p.m. for a quick shower and to put on my Helmut Lang suit, which was in the trunk of the rented Taurus in a gray Tumi garment bag next to a pair of shiny black Prada lace-ups and $6,000 worth of drugs.
And now I was white-knuckling my way toward California anxiously trying to gauge canine olfactory precision.
This had all seemed like a great idea just twenty-four hours earlier.
I’d walked over to the bank the previous morning. Making my way down 11th Street, I contemplated how I would travel with all of the cash I planned to withdraw. A quick internet search had informed me that if you took out $10,000 or more from a bank account, it was reported to the IRS.
I was in full “outlaw” mode, and I didn’t want to tip off the feds to my movements. I’d seen Law & Order. This was only six months after 9/11. I knew there were “watch lists” and “persons of interest.” I envisioned my name popping up on a computer screen in some nondescript federal building. “We just got word that Dan Peres has made a cash withdrawal of $10,000,” they’d say. “Let’s get a team in place to keep an eye on him. And take the threat level to orange.”
I figured $8,000 was a safer bet.
In my mind, $8,000 in cash was something that could fill a shoe box. I thought I was going to have to tape stacks of $100 bills to my stomach the way Brad Davis did with bricks of hash in the opening scene of Midnight Express. Maybe I needed to pick up a roll of duct tape and a fake mustache on my way home from the bank.
It turns out that $8,000 in hundreds is no more than half an inch thick. I split the stack in two and put the money in the front pockets of my jeans. You couldn’t even tell it was there.
I’d been considering doing a little shopping in Tijuana since August, after spending a long weekend at a resort in Baja. Like many Jewish men visiting Mexico, I made a stop at a local pharmacy to pick up some Imodium and aloe. No one does diarrhea and sunburn quite like the Chosen People. While I was there, I’d bought ten OxyContin—all I could afford with the amount of cash I had on me. Still, the seed had been planted. Plus, I definitely couldn’t go back to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. I was getting pills from a few different doctors, but it wasn’t enough. I needed more.
When the invitation came in for me to do Politically Incorrect, I was excited. I loved Bill Maher and was looking forward to meeting him and possibly even getting him to do some writing for the magazine. He had taken a big hit after he called the United States “cowards” in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks. The show had lost advertisers and must have been struggling to bring in marquee names, which no doubt explained my invite.
I made up some nonsense to my assistant about wanting to fly to San Diego first so I could spend the night and pay my respects to a friend whose father had just died. I didn’t have any friends in San Diego, but if I did, I probably wouldn’t have gone out of my way to see them. Either way, someone was always sick or dying in my excuses. My addiction killed a lot of imaginary people over the years.
It took me about a half an hour to drive down to Tijuana that morning, where I’d never seen so many pharmacies in my life. They were everywhere. Huge signs touted Discount Drugs or Open 24 Hours or We Beat Any Price. There was even a guy dressed as a giant capsule with a sombrero on top, like some goofy team mascot. There were holes cut for his face and arms, and he was handing out yellow flyers promising “Lowest Drug Prices in the Country.”
This was my kind of place.
Instinct told me to avoid the bigger, more polished-looking stores. I knew I was going to find what I was looking for somewhere off the main drag.
“Good morning,” I said after finding a place that seemed just sketchy enough. “I’m looking for some extra-strength Vicodin or Vicodin ES.”
“Do you have a prescription?” asked a man in a white lab coat.
“Nope.”
He looked over toward the door before pulling a small bag out from behind the glass-top counter. It had five pills in it.
“Thirty dollars.”
Aw, how cute.
“Um, yeah, I was looking for a bit more than that. A lot more, actually. Like five hundred or a thousand.”
I was wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into a pair of Levi’s 501s and navy low-top Chuck Taylors. I was clean-shaven and had a silver Rolex Air-King on my left wrist. A black messenger bag was slung across my chest. This guy obviously didn’t know what to make of me. He shook his head and said he couldn’t help me.
I spent the next forty-five minutes wandering around and striking out at every turn. If I’d been looking for large quantities of Lipitor or Viagra, I would have been set. But sadly, I didn’t have high cholesterol and I had no use for an erection. Finally I stopped for a Diet Coke at small taco joint next to a gift shop. Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca” was playing from a silver boom box next to the frozen margarita machine. The guy behind the bar was singing as he gave me my change. I decided to ask if he knew where I could get some Vicodin.
“Go to the farmacia at the end of the block on the right-hand side and ask for Izzy,” he told me. “Izzy can help.”
When I walked in, Izzy was smoking a cigarette behind the counter. He was built like a jockey and had a huge head of jet-black hair. I actually thought for a moment that he was wearing a fright wig. I told him what I was looking for.
“Lifetime supply?” he asked.
“I’m in a lot of pain,” I explained. “Just easier to buy in bulk.”
He studied me for a few seconds before asking me to follow him to a back room. The store was long and narrow and dark. The ceiling was missing a bunch of tiles and had a fan hanging down that swayed back and forth as it turned. There was a woman behind the counter helping another customer. I went with him.
“Are you DEA?” he asked once we were in the back.
“No. Definitely not. I didn’t even think the DEA had any authority down here. No, man, I’m just a normal guy.”
Izzy opened a rusty metal cabinet that was flush against the wall of the windowless room. They must have eaten lunch in there every day because I could practically taste the street meat and stale smoke. The cabinet door blocked my view inside. He reached in.
I just stood there quietly, my heart racing: Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.
“You have cash, normal guy?” he asked as he produced a large bottle of Vicodin. I exhaled and told him that I did. He opened the bottle to show me that it was still sealed. It held five hundred tablets. He broke the seal and dropped a few into my hand so I could examine them. I’d seen bottles like this behind the counter in pharmacies in New York. He explained that it would be $3,000 for all five hundred pills. I asked if he had another one. Izzy dumped the contents of both bottles into a giant ziplock bag, nearly filling it to the top. I paid him, put the Vicodin in my bag, and headed for the car.
My heart rate had finally dropped back down to normal by the time I saw the dogs. They were on long leather leashes and were weaving in and out of the barely moving vehicles. Their handlers would touch the front tire of a car or the passenger door of a pickup
truck and the dogs would give it a sniff. They were constantly moving.
I watched with fascination and terror as they got closer. What if they could smell the pills? Or worse, the fear? There was plenty of both in that Taurus. I took a quick inventory of anxieties. How would I explain being busted at the border with enough pills to choke a stable of horses? What would Si Newhouse, the owner of Details and my boss for the past year and a half, say? Or Patrick McCarthy, my mentor? Oy, and my poor mother. She’d be the talk of Pikesville—and for all the wrong reasons. And how about Bill Maher? This wasn’t likely to get me invited back on Politically Incorrect. I was aware of the consequences, of course, but none of that really mattered. All that truly mattered was the drugs and making sure I had enough of them to feed what had grown into a profound habit.
I was only a few cars away from the border patrol agent who was checking IDs when one of the dogs and its handler passed in front of me. I held my breath. The air conditioner was blasting even though it couldn’t have been more than 70 degrees outside. The border agent holding the leash passed by my passenger-side window and looked at me from behind his sunglasses. He stopped at the back of the car and touched the rear right tire. My heart was pounding. I held the steering wheel with both hands and watched through the side mirror. The dog darted over, its tail wagging excitedly. I was sure it was going to bark or lay down or do whatever it had been trained to do when it smelled drugs. I gripped the steering wheel tightly and held my breath.
And just like that, the dog was on to the next car.
I slowly pulled up to the border agent and handed over my driver’s license.
“What was the purpose of your trip?” he asked.
“Pleasure,” I said.
“Welcome home.”
Chickpea
The night we met, she introduced herself as Emma.
The following night she told me her name was Agnes, after her maternal grandmother, who despite being legally blind still joined her knitting circle once a week in a small town not far from Ashland, Oregon.
