The End of the Road, Pt. 1

Jumping to the period in time at the end of my travels, when addiction has taken over, I learn about Grant passing, and some writing from back then

If you haven’t, you can look back through my post history to read older posts about my time spent traveling and homeless, and it will give context to these intermittent posts about my past. A large chunk of my three years on the road was spent traveling with Grant, whom I loved dearly.

The progression of addiction can happen slowly, over years. The first few times I had used heroin, I was impressed by my ability to fuck around with it for a couple days and move on with my life.

The policemen who showed up to my school when I was a child told the auditorium that if you try heroin even once, you’ll be hooked. It’s a familiar narrative, if you were born in the 90’s you might remember the myriad commercials focused on preventing drug use in teenagers. There was a meth “not even once” series of commercials that looked like scenes cut from some Japanese horror film. I even remember being in elementary school and being shown some cartoon about evil marijuana that was personified in a smoke cloud, that had to be from at least the 80’s if not the 70’s.

So, when I did heroin once (or several times within a couple days) and I wasn’t instantly mentally and physically addicted, I thought I was different. It wasn’t enough to derail my life or turn my world upside down. I kept traveling, my momentum and drive to experience the world kept me going, still being the priority.

But, from doing it once, or a few times, I had carved out this place in my mind that could only be filled by that one thing. So, in the back of my mind, the thought was always there—“oh, that would be nice.” I’ve always been drawn to substances that slow my thoughts, reduce anxiety, let me relax, and feel good physically. Instant relief from myself and my thoughts. Heroin encompassed all of those things.

Over three years the drive within me to keep traveling became less and less and my drive to find heroin was more and more. I started going through periods of drug use that would lead to terrible withdrawals.

The worst one (and first major withdrawal) I can remember was after I had been living in Pittsburgh for a couple months, and I was using whatever fentanyl mix they put into their wax-paper bundles with stamps on each envelope (a way to promote personal brands among different suppliers).If you bought a gram, it came in little stacks of ten of these runner banded together.

This was a period of time where Grant and I weren’t together (we went separate ways here and there, mostly to go back home and visit our family, and then would find our ways back to each other.)

Coming off of that two months of daily use was hell. I was lucky enough to have a couple with me who were able to look after my dog and clean up after my vomit. Another traveler had left me her house (sounds weird, but it was a house given to her through a local housing program, and I wasn’t able to keep it for long).

Withdrawals started with a period of deep sleep that was punctuated by the some of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had in my life. Like a surplus of dreams had been building up over those couple months of hard use and were all unleashed within a span of hours.

Then came a week or so of no sleep, with the inability to even stand up, a sickness that you truly feel on a cellular level, like the mitochondria of your cells are nauseous and vomiting throughout every moment. At the same time all of my nerves were on fire, I couldn’t stop twisting and writhing, at some points slapping myself in the face as hard as I could to try to tear my mind from the hell I was in. Consuming anything beyond sips of water was out of the question.

Those sleepless nights I was haunted by infomercials on the television, Medicare packaging and reverse mortgage loans targeted to elderly insomniacs, pitched by an older Magnum PI. Those nights were a terrible despair drenched purgatory populated with Tom Selleck and I, because for some reason having the TV on was minutely better than being trapped in there with nothing but my suffering.

That was probably my first true withdrawal experience. I remember running into the other traveling kids who lived not far in another house at the gas station down my street. We talked about kicking this specific dope and the withdrawals and they told me I was lucky that I had TV and air conditioning, and it’s true. I can’t imagine if I would have been in some alley somewhere, unable to even go get water for myself. They refused to sell me any drugs after knowing the hell I had just been through, somehow having a better mind than myself about it.

Many people think those eternal hells you experience should be enough to scare you away from the drug forever. It would be enough, for any sane person. But for an addict like me, whatever pathways that exist between my memory and pleasure are hardwired together, and memories of how awful things were are pushed all the way to the back of my mind. More importantly, I can always convince myself that I will never let it get that bad again.

And then, in the future, when I let it get that bad again (or worse), I now know the true extent of the hell that awaits me if I stop. So you don't stop.

Anyway, near the end of the line for me my traveling had become more and more stagnant. A true sign of this was the fact that I stayed the winter in Medford, Oregon, probably one of the more depressing places I’ve been. I don’t really know what was going through my mind during that period. I hadn’t befriended any locals really, the weather was miserable, and making money busking was difficult. I was using while I was there, but not often enough to really be hooked. On top of that heroin was expensive there.

But whatever drive I had at the beginning of my travels had been slowly deteriorating over time. Medford is towards the end, the last winter I spent on the road. I was used to going south for the winter, down the West Coast, but not this time for whatever reason.

Medford also happened to be the last place I ever saw Grant. We were together for a while there. I had received a stimulus check from back home and I was able to buy a car with it, which got us out of the elements.

The last time I saw Grant was waiting with him for his Amtrak train that would take him home. We fell asleep in the car for a little bit and woke up about ten minutes after his train was supposed to leave. I woke up to him yelling, “Fuck!” and told him to run in and check if it was running late (because Amtrak). He came back out of the building smiling, slowly walking back towards the car. “Yeah, it’s running like 15 minutes late,” he told me. “Well, get in there!” I replied. There was a “love you” exchanged after he grabbed his stuff and then he was off on the train. No hug though.

I stayed in Medford for a little bit after that but eventually made my way up north.

My final resting place was Olympia, Washington, after a week or so in Portland again. Grant and I had a mutual friend there and I was able to stay with her here and there, but mostly I stayed in my car.

That was where I slid into true addiction, being what people would call a “home bum” (a term some homeless travelers use to describe people who live outside but don’t leave the town, another stupid term for further dividing the lower classes on the most granular level).

At my most steady point, which lasted the longest, I was using twice a day. Once when I woke up, and once around 5PM. To make my money I would go to Fred Meyers or Target and sit outside and play the same five or six songs. The thing about busking is that you don’t really need to have much of a repertoire, no one sticks around long enough to listen to all of them.

Shit was relatively cheap there. $40 for a half gram of black tar.

After time though, I started adding methamphetamine into the mix. Never smart, but I already wasn’t having any good ideas at this point. Originally, I would do a little bit of heroin and meth in the morning to keep myself from nodding out. At some point the whole “only using twice a day” thing broke down.

Living on the street and being addicted to heroin brings up all kinds of images in people’s minds. You hear stories about things people have to do to keep their addictions fed, and I wasn’t exactly proud of what I was doing. It almost makes me reluctant to talk about it because I don’t want people to hesitate to give money to people who are experiencing homelessness. I still do to this day, because I accept the fact that it’s none of my business, and honestly if someone is using the money to buy a beer or whatever, I get it. Being homeless is a lot of work, whether people want to try to understand that or not. I don’t think people should be criticized for how they choose to survive on a day-to-day basis. There’s a reason why the phrase self-medication is used, sometimes that is the only kind of medication you have access to.

That being said, I kept playing guitar, and I kept my dog fed, and a lot of that period of time was relatively boring. I had the vehicle that I had got with the stimulus check, it was an old cadillac deville, which was actually incredibly comfortable to sleep in, and I spent a lot of time reading books in there.

Grant was still down south of San Francisco, living at his parent’s house and working. We were in contact, and we were supposed to meet up with each other in a couple weeks.

I didn’t even know what happened for a couple days. I forget what I had for a device. I think all I had was this little chromebook, I remember using some text app on it to communicate with our friend there, who had traveled with Grant and knew him longer than I had.

I remember seeing a message at one point that read, “you should come over,” something simple like that. I don’t know exactly what it was that gave me a bad feeling that grew over a couple days. Probably that message, she never asked me to come over, and not having any messages from Grant.

I ended up kind of finding out what happened while sitting inside a grocery store and getting on their Wi-Fi with my Chromebook. Someone who had known Grant from high school messaged me and asked me if it was true. If Grant was really dead.

I’m not going to go into too much here about how all this felt because I don’t have the bandwidth for that right now, but what happened after that was that I messaged back “M” and went over to her house and waited for her in the backyard. She showed up, and I said this isn’t true is it, she confirmed it was. And I broke down. In short.

I still remember the sound of the windchime on her back porch and the wind that began to blow through the trees in that moment. I remember everything.

The issue with active addiction, is that you aren’t able to truly process stuff on an emotional level. There was that initial shock, and sobbing, and talking about it, a lot of initial processing going on of recording and knowing the fact, taking down the information into my brain. But the emotional processing that needs to take place over longer lengths of time was impossible.

I remember the next morning waking up and being crushed with the realization of the day before. But I still did the thing that I did every morning after I woke up. I used. This knowledge of putting into my veins the same thing that killed Grant wasn’t enough to make me stop. Though I would try to stop over the next couple months.

I might have mentioned earlier that I had gained access to an old email, the one that I had during this time, as well as all of the documents on that google drive. There are writings from this period of time, right after it has happened to me. Here is some of that:

The truth of the matter is, no matter how much I write, how many details I include, I could never capture you in words. I just wish my memory was better, you were always the one to remember the things that I had forgotten. I don’t know, maybe it’s not important when it comes down to it. I know if you were here you would tell me not to worry about it. It just sucks that you’ve been reduced to memory and ashes and my memory is very much lacking. That’s all that’s left of those so many months that we spent together, the moments that were just you and me traveling.

Things were lighter with you around. Most of the time you eased the burden of existence. I’ll never forget the feeling in those early days of waking up and just feeling good. When we would throw our packs on and start walking, not knowing what was in store for the future. There was nothing quite like it. That feeling of adventure, even if a lot of the time it meant sitting at a hitch spot for hours. Even that though you made much easier. We were quiet a lot of the time, probably a lot of our conversation based on the assholes not giving us a ride, especially those fuckers in otherwise empty VW buses with grateful dead stickers on the back. Sometimes if we didn’t get a ride for a couple hours we would reach a manic state where we stopped giving a shit and would just fuck around.

We never had a problem just stopping for the day either. We weren’t the fastest travelers and we didn’t give a shit. One spot is as good as the next, and deep down we knew we were traveling for no reason really. We would give ourselves vague objectives, some random reason to travel. Because life is fucking boring and we were looking for a reason to keep going, to feel alive in some way after being dead for so long.

I think you felt it more strongly than me even, I think that explains your willingness to go climb mountains by yourself. You had that attitude that said “fuck it, nothing matters,” but you didn’t stop there like most people. The idea was fuck it, might as well go look at stuff. Wanna go to Texas? Fuck it, why not? Check out the east coast? Fuck it, never been there before, might as well. And that was the engine that drove us. I remember us talking about this too, how the ability to travel the way we did simply came down to not giving a shit. Now that I think about it it was really a delicate balance of not giving a shit and giving just enough of a shit to keep moving. We definitely had our days where we would stagnate and wallow in mutual depression but eventually, we would get fed up enough with our own stagnation to keep going.

Because we knew we had to keep going, that if we didn’t keep moving, we would fall apart. I need to remember this more than anything, because I stopped moving a long time ago.

Little did I know back then that I would eventually remember everything. Memory is funny that way. Once I start writing, it all comes flooding back.

That’s a good place to stop for this post. I was going to write about me getting off the road, which happened around this time, but I’ll just do a part two for that. This period of time isn’t easy to write about.