Spaghetti Sauce on a White Carpet
Cocaine, poor decisions, bad men, it was the lifestyle I had chosen for myself. I was ready for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the people I was choosing to hang out with were right in alignment with that. Hanging out at the shop was my favorite pastime, drinking beer, snorting lines, listening to music, and smoking a lot of weed.
One night at the shop, I was introduced to a man that had just enough attitude to grab my attention and just enough asshole to keep it. He was older and associated with a bike gang that we won’t discuss. I thought he was so cool, and I immediately felt smitten.
That night, we took a drive in his truck and spent the entire night talking, and snorting lines.
By the end of the night, I had made the decision that I was going to move with him to a town in northern Alberta. I was ready to pack my bags and take off, thinking that this would be the solution to my problems. If I just ran away to another town, I could start over.
The only problem is, starting over with a drug dealer isn’t the smartest move, and I immediately realized that I now had access to all the drugs I could ever want. The day I moved, it was -65 degrees Celcius in town that day, and all the oil rigs were shut down. The basement suite he had rented had an inch of frost on the inside of the windows, and we were locked inside for over 3 days because it was so cold even diesel trucks wouldn’t start. We spent the entire 3 days partying.
It got so bad in those first three days that I forgot my own name.
I was so high that I was unaware of my situation and to this day I’m surprised that I survived.
Coming out of the other side of that binge, I realized that I needed to get my act together, and I found myself a job at a local greenhouse. My job was to plant the seedlings that would be released in the spring. And that is where I met my new best friend.
This girl was so full of life. She was diagnosed as bipolar schizophrenic, and she was hilarious. She was the life of the party and fully willing to own her weirdness. We were attached at the hip from that moment on, and spent hours and hours together, giggling, drinking, and having fun. She helped me to ease off the drugs for a brief moment in my three-year cocaine binge.
Instead of doing cocaine, she would show up with a case of beer, a bag of weed, and a bag of mushrooms and we’d take off hiking for the day. Never a dull moment, we’d often get in trouble with our boyfriends because we would forget to tell them where we were going.
My time in this town was to be short-lived, however, due to the nature of my relationship with this older man. The fighting was off the charts, and we would rarely be able to go for a full week without a raging argument.
Some of those arguments ended in physical violence, with him and I both hitting each other.
One night it got particularly bad, and I grabbed a plate of spaghetti and threw it at him after he had punched me.
I was so angry, and as I watched the red spaghetti sauce spill all over the white carpet I laughed like a maniac. The red matched my anger and the rage that was flowing through my veins from the amounts of cocaine I was using.
The next day, after a thwarted attempt at getting the sauce out of the carpet, and only staining it worse, I packed up my bags and left. I was beginning to see the error of my ways and understand that something needed to change. I wasn’t quite sure yet what that change needed to be, and wasn’t ready to give up the drugs yet, but the punch had shifted something in me. I began to see that maybe, just maybe, there was more to my life than this.