Chasing the high (closed)

Sami Jackson

The craving was still there. Day and night...

It was never going to go away.

At least that's what I was told. And so far, they had been right...

Who were 'they'? They were the assholes from my drug addiction group. And to tell you the truth, they were starting to get on my nerves. All this talk about how God is the answer.

It's God's will.

So, OK, I can blame God for letting this happen to me? Blame Him for letting him choose this path for me? Great! Now I feel better.

This must what it feels like to sin all week and go to church to beg for forgiveness.

Idiots.

All I was trying to do was get through each day by trying to ignore that craving for drugs---weed...coke...X...

But here I was, pretending everything was good in life...my my friends at school didn't know the internal struggle I was going through to get through each day, so I just pasted on a fake smile upon my features and politely turned them down on their offers to include me in their after-school activities...such as happy hour or partying during the weekend. No, I couldn't even go do that for fear of something happening to where I ended up addicted again.

I had made it through another day of living and now, I found myself at another meeting at the drug rehab clinic...here to talk about how we made it through another week of not using drugs...

One day at a time Sami...one day at a time...

It was Thursday night and Chase Donnelly was fucked up.

He and his friend Dre had been out all night, drinking hard and partying harder. Chase could barely feel the alcohol though, since he was so tuned up on blow that he couldn’t feel his face, much less his alcohol buzz. Dre had been smoking meth out of a lightbulb for the past three blocks, so he was tuned up as well. Saying nothing of the X that Chase had sold to those girls who were grateful enough to split the pills with them both.

“Shit, man! I gotta piss so fucking bad. I’m just going to go here,” Dre whined, grabbing himself through his jeans to illustrate the urgency of his need.

“Fuck you, man! I’m carrying six G’s in cash and a boat of pills, I’m not getting busted because you can’t hold your piss!” Chase objected, looking around to get his bearings, “hang on, I think I know this block. I used to sling to somebody around here. Yeah, that building there. Follow me.”

While Dre was trying to walk with his knees pressed together, Chase ran up to an apartment building and began looking over the names beside the different buttons, he stopped at: S. Jackson and pressed the button long and hard. It seemed that she wasn’t home, so Chase followed up by pressing every button in a long sweep until the door buzzed and he pushed his way inside.

“Come on man, third floor. Sweet release awaits you.”

“Let’s take the elevator, I don’t think I can do stairs!”

Luckily enough, the elevator car was on the ground floor and it moved pretty quickly to the third floor with no stops in between. Chase led Dre about halfway down the hall and used a credit card to jimmy the door open in a matter of seconds. As Dre rushed past in the direction Chase indicated the bathroom was, he closed the door behind them and dumped a pile of coke onto Sami’s glass coffee table, using the same credit card he’d used to foil the lock to cut up some lines.

“Ohhhhhhh shit that’s better,” Dre could be heard moaning from the other room where he’d left the door partway open, “another ten seconds and I might have pissed in my fucking pants.”

“Yeah, yeah, glad to be of service. You know, come to think of it, I think this bitch still owes me some money. We should wait here until she gets back. As I remember, little Slammin’ Sami was always good for a fun time and a good fuck. Bitch could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch for a pill.”

With that, Chase lowered his custom-made golden straw to the table, snorting a line up his nose before dumping a small crystal of meth onto the table and crushing it up with the straw and incorporating it into the lines of coke he’d already laid out—a practice that Chase had dubbed the “Double Rainbow.” Chase lit a cigarette as he continued cutting his drugs together.

Tonight’s meeting had run a little longer than Sami had expected. She had promised her father that she would stay clean and keep up with her college studies and he promised to keep paying for her off campus apartment and of course, her car.

To say she was a little spoiled was an understatement. It also helped that her father was the chief of police (and considering a bid for mayor) so that meant she had to keep a low profile with everything. When she had been caught and arrested for possession some months back, it had all been kept under wraps. Her parents had intervened and if she would rat out who her supplier was, then her charges would be dropped…again, thanks to her father’s connections in the judicial system.

She didn’t even think twice about it all. Hell, she had spent one night at MDC (metropolitan detention center…aka jail) and those women there…the true meth addicted whores picked on her so bad that she didn’t want to end up like them or spend another night in jail, waiting for a hearing… So, she told her father who gave her the drugs and before she was let out the next day, her suppliers had been caught and booked on a slew of charges. She wasn’t sure what else happened to them as she was quickly placed in rehab by her mother, a doctor at one of the hospitals, under a false name and she had gone through a 30-day detox treatment.

Sami didn’t know they were out within a matter of a few days. All charges dropped. No one told her, and she never asked. She had just figured that was the end of it all.

But damnit, the craving! It never went away. Sure, she had almost lapsed a few times, but thankfully, she didn’t.

Entering her code to let her into the main lobby of her apartment building, she steadied her book bag, and some take out dinner as she entered the elevator and pressed the number for her floor. When she reached her door, she unlocked it and set her stuff down on the nearest table, not even noticing that she wasn’t alone. After her hands were free, she pushed the door closed and locked it.

Looking down at her phone, she walked into her living room and looked up finally…only to see Chase and his friend sitting on her couch, as comfortable as can be. She wanted to scream but quickly covered her own mouth. She saw the ‘goodies’ spread on her glass coffee table. Finally, she found her voice, “What the hell are you doing here?!” She said as she quickly reached for her phone, which she had dropped, and started to dial for the cops…

“Hey now,” Chase chided playfully, leaning forward to snatch Sami’s phone forcefully from her grasp, “is that any way to greet an old friend? My pal Dre and I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I recognized your place. Is that dinner? Great, I’m starving. Anyway, I was just telling him about that money you owed me—see I never got a chance to collect, since I got locked up for a stretch, and ever since I’ve been out, you don’t come around anymore and you changed your number. Some guys might find that suspicious, if you and I hadn’t been so… close, back then.”

As he spoke, Chase poked around Sami’s now unlocked phone, entering his own number into it and sending himself a quick text so that he’d have her new number. With that, he promptly snapped the back cover off of the device and removed the battery, slipping it into the pocket of his worn, leather jacket before moving to the kitchen table and trading the useless phone for the bag of food which he opened and began snacking from as he crossed back to the couch.

Chase helped himself to a small tray of fries before passing the bag over to Dre who began fishing for something to eat.

“Did you bring any beer?” Dre asked, looking up from the bag, apparently disappointed.

“Anyway, as I was saying. Most people, even my employers thought it was awfully suspicious the way that Sami vanished just after I got hauled in on an anonymous tip, you know, the kind of suspicious that gets people hurt in ways they can’t even imagine—but I told them, ‘Sami couldn’t have dimed on me, she knows better than that. Sami knows what we would do to someone who snitched on our operation, she knows how serious your friends in Mexico take that shit, she knows that there are much worse things that can happen to somebody than getting killed…’ and besides all that,” Chase continued, his eyes full of malice as he stared daggers at Sami, his threat was intentionally less than subtle, “she’s in love with my cock.”

At this, Dre spat the mouthful of ginger ale he was drinking, straight from its two-liter bottle, spraying across the living room as he erupted in laughter. It was clear already that this was more of a home invasion than a friendly visit, but as the whole thing had been undertaken on Dre’s behalf, he felt obligated to back Chase’s move, no matter what. He just hadn’t been expecting to hear him talk so casually about their history.

“Holy shit, dawg. Warn me next time you’re going to drop a line like that, I almost choked.”

“Aren’t you?” Chase taunted, his mouth full of food as he grinned, making it clear that he expected obedience from her, that even if she got away from him now, the consequences of her previous betrayal would find her anywhere she might hide, “you were addicted to the pills, but you love my cock. Isn’t that right, Slammin’ Sami? Don’t worry, I didn’t come empty handed. I brought your favorite.”

Chase extracted from his pocket a Ziplock bag filled with easily over a hundred round, blue pills, each stamped with the silhouette of a naked woman, Chase’s own personal recipe, MDMA cut with Viagra.

“Go on, help yourself, unwind,” Chase leaned forward to clear one of the lines from the glass table, “I can see that you want it. It’s right there.”