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The Bottom
The next three years were to become an absolute hell. My drinking had progressed to the point where I couldn't sleep for more than two hours at a time. I would wake up in a cold sweat, fear coursing through me. Some- times screaming because of the rats running over my body or the spiders crawling all over me and sometimes both. Every night this happened. I didn't know it then but I was experiencing the D.T.'s. And this after only two hours of sleep. Instead of quitting drinking I turned to the only other thing that I knew, DRUGS. Crack Cocaine.
For the next three years I lived the life of a crack addict as well as a drunk. At first I started sleeping in my pick-up truck, even in below zero weather. I started missing more and more time at work. I stopped eating and sleeping. My eyes had become sunken, black marbles in my skull. My weight dropped down to nearly a hundred pounds on what used to be a five foot ten inch frame.
After a while I didnt even have the truck to sleep in. So, I started to break into houses or apartments of people that I knew were on vacation. Sometimes I could con someone into letting me stay at their house, sleeping on the floor. It wasn't long before I had no friends and no more people to con, so I began to sleep in abandon buildings. Through all that I still managed to keep my job. I thought that as long as I had my job then I didn't have a problem. It didn't matter that I was starting to commit burglaries and break-ins to get money for the drugs and the alcohol. There were a very few people that tried to help, Mostly by feeding me and trying to get me to get help, but I wouldn't listen, after all I didn't have the problem. They did. More resentments and anger flared up inside me and I started to become even more violent. Besides, as long as I had my job, I didn't have a problem.
Then came the morning of the 12th of February, 1995. I had spent the weekend conning and robbing people of their money and drinking and drugging it all away and now here I was in an old hotel room. My life was in shambles. For the last month I had been arrested just about every other day, I was about to lose my job, I had no friends to come around anymore and I didn't see any way out except to take my own life.
I didn't want to live like this any more. My life really sucked. God, if there was a God, had abandoned me. So, I took out my 12 gauge shotgun, racked a shell in the chamber and stuck the barrel in my mouth. I remember thinking how sweet the barrel tasted and then I pulled the trigger. When the gun didn't go off I just laid back and cried. I curled up with it and for the next 24 hours. Just laid there all curled up, wishing I were dead, blaming God for not letting me die and with the next thought telling Him he didn't exist.
The next morning I tried walking in traffic. I stepped out in front of a semi and only got cussed out. I was told to get my drunken ass out of the road.
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