Never Too Late (15 page)

When Dan got to the strip club, he looked so nervous it was adorable. I was just cracking up watching him take the place in. It was obvious he didn’t know how to deal with being in the same room as a bunch of naked women and his girlfriend at the same time. The poor kid didn’t know where to look, and it was cracking me up. And then, obviously, I had to take it further. I just couldn’t resist! I turned to him and said, “Hey, let’s go get a private dance.” Dan looked at me like I was completely insane, but at that point I think he just didn’t know what to do other than go with it.

We went to the little back area where they had a couch with a mirror behind it, and we sat next to each other to get the dance. I was a little bit excited because it was my first time doing something like that with a guy, but I wasn’t exactly that far out of my element at that time. The dancer was actually a friend of mine, as a matter of fact. So it was definitely even more of a crazy experience for him. She did her thing on me first, putting my hands on the sides of her body and all of that good stuff. And then she’d move over to him and try to do the same. But this kid was so sweet, he snatched his hands back and practically sat on them. He was looking at me all wide-eyed like he was going to get in trouble. I was like, “Dude, it’s okay—I’m paying!”

The boy could not handle my life. Can’t blame him.

Besides that, though, we had a beautiful connection. It was even good enough to withstand all the bombs that started going off as a result of my addiction and my behavior. There were fun and games on the surface, but I was still on the same steady slide toward self-destruction I’d been on for the last few years. The amazing thing about Dan was that he stuck by my side for as long as he did. He was a sweet person and a gentleman all the way through. I will never forget how considerate he was. In another life, I think we could have had something special. Unfortunately, we weren’t cut out for making it together in this one.

When I was with Dan, I was still on probation from when I was charged with assaulting Leah’s dad. That meant I had regular appointments with a probation officer, and I had to take urine tests basically whenever they wanted me to, to show I wasn’t on drugs.

There was a problem with the urine tests, though. Not a problem for me, exactly, but a problem for anybody who was interested in getting me clean and sober. The thing was, all the drugs I was taking were prescriptions. I wasn’t smoking weed or shooting up or anything. I was abusing pills I’d gotten from doctors, which meant nothing was showing up on those pee tests that I wasn’t actually supposed to be on. I was allowed to be on Klonopin, for example, and no test could tell them whether I was taking one or five at a time. It couldn’t tell them if I was getting more pills from the street to kick up what I was supposed to be taking. Basically, the pee tests were pretty pointless in relation to what my actual problem was.

Let’s take a minute to talk about how I ended up on so many drugs in the first place. It’s actually one of the easier sets of facts to pin down, believe it or not. It all started with my first visit to the clinic in Anderson, where I got my first prescription for Klonopin. That was prescribed to me for my anxiety, which was getting to be crippling at the time. I wasn’t diagnosed with anything, formally, when I got that prescription. I hadn’t seen a psychiatrist, so there was no way to get a diagnosis at the clinic.

A doctor diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, which pretty much guarantees you’re going to go through a whole lot of meds. The nature of the illness is that you swing between periods of extreme highs and lows, and you have to find a way to medicate them both without pushing the scale too far either way. Like most people who get told they have bipolar disorder, I tried almost everything that’s normally prescribed for it, and the only one that worked for me as an anti-depressant was Cymbalta.

The Klonopin wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do for me, and I was still having a seriously difficult time dealing with the anxiety, depression, and the other symptoms they were chalking up to bipolar disorder. I ended up getting prescribed Vistaril and Lithium, as well, to deal with that.

More medication was added to the menu when the doctor finally checked out my back and told me the insane amount of pain I was having was caused by scoliosis. That led to me being prescribed Soma, a muscle relaxer, and Hydrocodone, a painkiller. My complaints about the back stuff might be easy for people to roll their eyes at, but it is serious. My brother has a similar problem, and actually has to get shots to deal with the pain in his back. It’s horrible pain, sometimes to the point where you can barely move.

I can’t blame the doctor for letting me have what I looked like I needed. The thing is, as an addict, you really play the game and do the acting part when you talk to your doctor. It’s really what any addict does when they find themselves with a doctor. They overact, overreact, and milk the most out of anything they can just to get more and more of what they actually think they need. That’s exactly what I was doing, and I think unfortunately I was pretty damn good at it. So I can’t blame the person who wrote the prescriptions. The man thought I really needed these things, and he thought I was doing everything I was supposed to.

Or maybe it’s not so simple. I don’t know. It’s hard to look back and honestly believe it wasn’t obvious I was messed up on those pills. But what do I know? I mean, I was messed up on pills.

I will say this: the people who are usually prescribed the hardcore medications like Oxycontin and Hydrocodone are cancer patients or people who are dealing with serious chronic pain. Those are the kinds of cases where you can look at a person and get a pretty good idea that they need to be on something like Oxy. The people who get it for back pain, for the most part, have to diagnose themselves. But Hydrocodone is a drug you’re supposed to take for seriously painful back problems, and it is effective. It’s just a problem of whether you abuse it or not. I was abusing it. I was taking eight in a handful every three hours if I wanted to. How was the doctor going to stop me from doing that? There’s only so much even authorities can do to protect you from yourself. My addiction just wasn’t the kind that was easy for doctors to prevent. It wasn’t even the kind a pee test could always catch.

Still, I had to follow the rules and pee when they told me to pee, meet my officer when they told me to meet my officer. And breaking those rules was what got me busted.

Like my ex-fiancé, Dan wasn’t a fan of the pills. I don’t think he ever touched one in his life. All he ever did was drink, and he only did that like a normal guy. The pills had no appeal for him.

One night he came upstairs and found me passed out on the bed with a bottle of them right beside me. When he saw me laying there, he was so scared he started freaking out, shaking me, and trying to figure out if he should call 911 or something. I guess I did something to reassure him. I only remember waking up at four-thirty in the morning and giving it to him, which just goes to show you how adjusted I’d become to that way of life. That I could take so many pills that my boyfriend thought I was on the brink of death, and then wake up and want to do it. How crazy is that? Scaring the shit out of somebody and then waking up and just having sex? I don’t know what was going on in my head.

Unfortunately, even though I was apparently able to wake up for sex, I wasn’t able to wake up for my appointment with my probation officer.

I must have been completely out that morning. The officer said she was banging on the door for ten minutes before I finally dragged my ass out of bed and opened the door. The first thing she said was I’d missed my appointment and I needed to do a pee test.

The thing is, I never really got the hang of peeing on command. And that morning, I literally couldn’t pee. Once again, the ironic thing is that nothing bad would have shown up on that test if I’d been able to take it. All I was doing was buying more of the same opiates I was prescribed. I would have gotten away with it. But I just couldn’t pee.

So the probation officer started looking around my house, and it was a matter of minutes before she found the extra pills I’d stashed in my purse under the bed. That was that. I could hear the hammer coming down.

I asked her if I was going to jail for this, and she gave me the kind of vague answer that told me exactly what the deal was. I went straight off to tell my family and friends: “Hey, guys. I’m going to jail.”

They didn’t believe me, but I wasn’t an idiot. I could read between the lines, and it turned out I was right. They gave me a date to come to the courthouse and pretty much check myself in for three months at county.

Three months in jail. God. I’d had a taste of county early on when the battery charges were brought against me, but I’d only been in there for twenty-four hours, and I was too out of it to really get much of an impression of it. Three months, though? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. In fact I’m not even sure I tried. At the time, I thought I was still going to get out of it somehow, the way I almost always get out of everything.

But probation’s no joke, and those pills had sealed my fate. Somewhere deep down, I kind of knew I was screwed. As the day got closer and closer, I just kept myself in a haze where I didn’t really have to deal with it. Maybe I literally couldn’t deal with it at that point.

Surprisingly enough, or not surprisingly considering what a sweet guy he was, Dan spent that whole last night with me. We just stayed up hanging out while I enjoyed my last taste of freedom before I went behind bars. I’d describe what that felt like to know I was about to head into a place I’d never expected to go into, but I was still in such a haze of pills it was hardly even real. I just know Dan and I hung out that night and enjoyed every minute, soaking up each other’s company for as long as we could.

And then off I went to the courthouse.

One thing I will never forget is the outfit I was wearing when I headed into county. I walked into that courthouse wearing five-inch glitter pumps and my long white Jackie O coat, topped off with an off-white knit ski cap with flaps on the side. Talk about not giving a shit. Imagine somebody handcuffed to a chair in the courthouse in that get-up! I definitely did not present the image of somebody who was taking that shit very seriously. For what it’s worth, though, I must have made an impression on the sheriff and all the people at the courthouse, because they are all very sweet to me now. I guess sometimes you just can’t argue with glitter.

Not that I ever wanted to get on such good terms with that crew. When I walked in, I had every intention of paying my bond and getting the hell out of there. I just needed a lawyer to fix me up. All these guys in suits kept walking by, and I sort of called out to one of them like, “Psst! Hey, come here!”

The lawyer walked up to me, and I leaned toward him and said, “Listen, I’m in a lot of shit, and I need you to get me out. This is jail, and I do not want to be here. Get me out. My name is . . . ”

“I know who you are.”

Name recognition at the county courthouse. That’s one way to be famous, huh?

“Okay,” I said. “Well, get me out.”

That was when the sheriff rustled a few papers and dropped the bomb.

“You don’t have a bond.”

Talk about a punch in the gut. I didn’t have a bond. Which meant there was no paying my way out. There was no way around it. Since the first day the state caught wind of me through the show, it seemed like people had been trying to send me to prison, and everybody who had my back had fought hard to keep me out of it. But I had finally crossed the line. I was screwed.

I was going to jail.

W
alking into county for a three-month sentence must be a really shocking experience. I mean, that must really freak a person out, walking up those stairs with all of these crazy bitches banging on the doors and screaming and laughing, freaking out and yelling, “Hey,
Teen Mom
!
Teen Mom
!”

Seriously, it must be weird. I can’t really tell you from personal experience, though, because I was so high when I walked into county jail, I couldn’t really process anything. Nothing was real to me yet. But it was going to get real pretty soon.

Remember all those prescriptions I was on? After a few years of being prescribed medications, legitimately, for depression, anxiety, and back pain, I’d designed a pretty serious cocktail for myself. I never doctor shopped for more prescriptions, because I had plenty. But what I would do is supplement the pills from the pharmacy with more of the same pills from the street. That was what kept me in supply so I could keep gobbling them up the way I was doing.

Pills, pills, pills. I know. But let’s break down what this means a little further in terms of what I was doing to my body. I weighed about a hundred and fifteen pounds, and every day, about every four to six hours, I was taking eight or ten of my ten-milligram Hydros, which is an unholy amount of those to take. Then I was rounding it out with three Klono-pins, two Valiums, and a Soma. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you don’t have to be a drug addict or an expert to realize that’s a hell of a handful. But I’d down that cocktail every day, and then there would be times that I’d forget I took certain pills and end up taking more than I could handle and getting sick to my stomach. That’s another dangerous thing about being a pill-head, forgetting what pills you take and then taking more. It’s pretty terrible and can end very bad. I pushed my body way too far on several occasions by doing that, to the point where I knew without a doubt I was lucky to wake up alive.

Anyway, that was the menu I was living on when I went into jail. And any doctor will tell you, that’s not something you can stop cold turkey.

One of the most notorious things about opiates, and the reason why they are so serious, is the fact that once you’re on them it’s very difficult, physically, to get off of them. Someone who’s been on those painkillers for a long time has to be careful getting off of them, because it’s such a shock to the system. Usually a doctor supervises the process. Coming off of opiates is no joke, and I became the poster child for that fact the day after I went behind bars and started going into withdrawal.