End Of The Lines

         Frank was my old coke dealer, and as far as coke dealers go, he was a pretty decent guy. I had plenty of opportunities to get to know Frank a little better, visiting him as often as I did. All in all, a personable guy, with a quite beneficial propensity for completely forgetting about past debts. That’s one of the many wonderful side effects of heavy cocaine use; I think the clinical term is “brain rot”. Anyhow, he was as reliable as a dealer gets. I was on my way to his place when the police kicked in his door, ransacked his apartment, and dragged him away. I missed being there at the time by maybe twenty minutes.

         I was employed at the time by a vending machine service company, a family business owned and operated by two brothers. I basically drove around an old, rickety Chevy Van full of soda and various snacks, and filled the machines and collected the cash on my route. The pay was mediocre, and the brothers were a bit overbearing and annoying in general, but for a few months it was a snap. I was an efficient, productive little vending machine technician, I was unsupervised and could get high anytime I wanted to, everything seemed like smooth sailing for me and my coca-addled brain.

         The brothers rewarded my hard work by giving me a new route, one that was more of an “opportunity” for me, and my first thought was, “uh-oh”. My intuition was spot on, too. My pay would remain the same, but now my workload was tripled, I’d be putting in two more hours each day, and, I would be required to be “on call” every other weekend, twenty-four hours. This meant now, I had huge banks of various machines to fill and service at every stop, instead of the two or three I was handling before. On call meant having to go out on service calls for literally any reason, even if it was because someone lost a dime in a hospital waiting room Coke machine at 2 o’clock in the morning. I was keeping up, but barely. Smooth sailing became gale conditions. I was cracking, I was stressed, and my mediocre paycheck was now looking downright pitiful.

         None of that justifies stealing, but let Lady Cocaine be your guide, and you’ll end up rationalizing away things you’d never imagine you would stoop to. There was no inventory control of any kind in the termite and rodent infested shack they called a warehouse. All I needed to do was overload a few extra cases of soda, or cartons of cigarettes, which was laughably easy. Then, I would undercount the amount of product sold in the machines, add the pilfered product to make the counts accurate, and pocket the difference. Two or three dollars seems like nothing, but do it twenty or thirty times a day, and it really begins to add up. It all just became part of my work routine after a while. I’d take my bag of coins and dollar bills to various banks, and cash them in for the larger denominations favored by drug dealers. Just your basic cokehead stealing to support his idiotic drug habit, and believing he’d found a perfectly justified way to supplement his insufficient salary.

         Then Frank got hauled off to the county lockup, and was out of business permanently. Coke was suddenly not quite as easy to score. As I began to detoxify, and eat actual nutritious food again, instead of my usual sustenance of vending machine snacks, the effects of my constant blow snorting had subsided a bit. My brain began to function somewhat normally again, and I realized that I had in fact stolen thousands and thousands of dollars from those stupid vending machines, and could potentially be in big time, felony style trouble. I stopped my scam immediately, and prayed no one had become wise to it. The horrifying reality that the vending business has often been associated with what I will describe as “elements of organized crime” also flashed through my mind, along with the vision of taking a ride with a guy named Anthony, and ending up in a salt marsh in Secaucus, with a bright future as “skeletal remains identified by dental records” ahead of me. “Prison bitch” flashed through my mind as well. I had done a very unwise and very illegal thing, I knew this was the second time I had gotten lucky, and luck is something that always runs out at the most inopportune times.

         Without the means to keep myself anesthetized all day, the job became intolerable for me, and I quit a few weeks later. I’d never done anything so awful before, and I was guilt ridden about how low I’d sunk. I knew I might have escaped the law, but karma would not be so kind, and indeed, I was correct with that assumption. The next few years were nothing but a personal disaster I both created for myself, and I richly deserved it. I bounced around from one meaningless job to another, feeling nothing but a sense of loss for both the time I’d thrown away, and the confidence I once had in myself. Frank ended up with probation; he got married, and ended up gaining an awful lot of weight. Like someone once said, “karma is a bitch”.

         Many cautionary drug tales describe unbelievable horrors, and eternal struggles against personal demons, but not this one. I quit using cocaine for good, a few months later. There was no program or outpatient facility for me, I just became disgusted with everything and everyone associated with cocaine, most of all, myself. I never looked back, I never missed it, and the thought of using it again is absolutely repellent to me. Nor do I look back fondly on anything about those days, for me, it was hardly some hedonistic, debauched saga, full of “war stories” and “battle scars”. I was nothing more than a liar and a thief, a coked up, selfish asshole, and the only thing I still carry with me from the experience is the deep embarrassment I have for ever letting myself become such a poor human being in the first place. To this day, it is the darkest shame I carry, and the biggest regret I have. The only wisdom I gained was learning what depths I am capable of sinking to, and I wish I’d never discovered exactly how low that is, oh yes, and that I was dumb enough to pay to find out.