The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

belonged to John Crowell’s brother, except one of its eyes was blue and the other was green. I placed the keys on the table, and Polly lunged for my hand, tearing away the flesh over my tendon. I grabbed her violently by the neck. Missi was on the phone complaining to a girlfriend and ignoring me, but when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw me go on to throw her cat against the wall, she slammed the receiver down and began screaming at me. It only got worse when she saw the glitter, now mingled with the blood, on my face.
    Everyone in the house was against me. Even the dog had, as usual, managed to find the exact book I was reading (Tetragrammaton) and tear it to shreds. My heart kept speeding up and swelling against my chest, and I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. From outside, Missi could hear me vomiting messily into the toilet, and her attack softened and turned into the sympathy I definitely didn’t deserve. Blows of panic upon panic were hitting me because the more you get worried about being too high, the worse your situation becomes because the stress only makes your heart beat faster. To make matters even more dire, all I could think about was the fact that, like my dad, I had Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome—an erratic, rapid heartbeat—and probably wouldn’t make it through the night without the help of a doctor.
    I tried to relax and lay down on the ground and drink water, but my heart was clenched too tight to let me calm down. I could literally see it pounding against my lacerated chest. I wasn’t worried about dying. My overwhelming concern was my usual fear of getting arrested or having to talk to the cops. As Missi tried to make some sort of arrangement to get me to the hospital without a press or police incident, I flushed the empty ziploc bag down the toilet and cleaned off my credit cards. Then I bent over the toilet, dry heaving and spitting, before unlocking the door. I walked to my closet and put on neat, respectable clothes and asked Missi to drive me to the hospital. I was detached from myself as I did this, as if I were watching someone else make these preparations. From that vantage point, I was impressed with how rationally I was acting for someone whose head was reeling from alcohol and whose heart was hammering so fast and heavy that cardiac arrest seemed imminent. My left arm was tingling, and I flashed back to years ago when someone had told me that this was a warning sign of a heart attack.
    I woke up in that hospital bed next to a dead man, confused. I remembered the night before as if it were a series of photographs. At first I could only see a few snapshots, but slowly they began multiplying until they formed a complete moving picture. The only missing chunk was arriving at the hospital: I remembered a fat black woman who admitted me, I remembered a metal tube draining my blood for chemical analysis, and I remembered thinking, “Now I know how Brad Stewart felt.”
    As I regained consciousness in the hospital bed that night, I tried to figure out what I had meant by that. Brad Stewart—not the person, but the addict—was despicable to me, a creature so much the opposite of what I wanted to be. He was someone who had let something else control his life. I thought I was different, because I could stop. But why hadn’t I? Why did I need drugs to work, to play, to go to sleep, to do anything? I had always told myself that doing a drug is okay, but needing a drug isn’t.
    As I lay in the bed, however, I managed to convince myself that I was not Brad Stewart, that I was still in control: this overdose would not be an epiphany or a wake-up call to straighten up. It was simply a mistake. There was too much going wrong with my life to just blame it all on drugs. That would be too easy. Drugs weren’t the root of the problem, they were a symptom. Antichrist Superstar had become a figment of our imagination, a fairy tale that had no other function than to scare us, like the bogeyman or Corey Feldman. Not only was nothing getting done, but everyone was telling me that it was weak, poorly executed and simply a repeat of what Trent had already done with The Downward Spiral . And maybe they were right. Maybe I had placed too much confidence in the concept of Antichrist Superstar . Maybe everyone was trying to save me from myself.
    But maybe they had never really taken the time to listen to and understand the idea. Maybe the album