I got dumped.

Hah, we weren’t even officially together or doing anything more than seeing where things would go, yet? I still got thrown away, even though the events that led up to me being tossed weren’t even my doing. Seems I’d rather roll over and play dead than have to fight for my own integrity or myself in general.

Funny how they always seem to be the ones that set the ball of demise in motion, and I’m the one who always ends up at the end of the day bearing the weight of the fault.

I was told I was a STD ridden skank, an ice cold bitch, and an impenetrable force. When I called someone who knew me in a similar way to ask their opinion on the matter, I got egocentric thrown into the mix.

Hah. Egocentric. I never saw myself that way, but maybe I am.

Their loss, right? Yea, I know. Isn’t that the standard line of consoling because there’s really nothing else that can be said other than “What an asshole, it’s his loss”? Maybe it is their loss. I was fantastic to the ex, and I can say that without even blinking an eye. But that’s why things lasted so long with him, and that’s why things went so wrong with him: I was so emotionally invested I couldn’t ever hurt him, even if it meant nailing myself further to the proverbial cross with each passing day.

Strange how when I actually make the decision to be more open, to allow myself to like them, and to take a few steps out into the water, they suddenly wake up from whatever dream it was they were in that had them thinking I was something worth exploring, and they look at me with clear eyes and see me. Or see that I’m not what they thought I was, or expected me to be.

Their loss…maybe so, but certainly it always seems to be mine.

I can’t keep falling from grace and getting back up again. I can’t let myself build a higher wall, because the one I have now is insurmountable to most. I can’t keep losing pieces of my heart, because it’s becoming almost impossible to breath.

Something has to change, because apparently what I am and what I’m doing now just isn’t working.

I could be painfully me, but having my shit together, being laid back, easy going, impossible to offend, and funny just don’t seem to cut it in the end. I could be exactly what they want, but eventually the charade would come to an end. I could change everything about myself, but people don’t change and that’s a lot of effort to put into an endeavor that most likely will fail.

Well, if I can’t seem to ensnare them with my charming personality, then it seems I’ll have to go about things that good old fashioned way: rely on my looks alone.

Fucked again.

I see the way they look at girls. I see how they’re eyes always seem to stick to the skinny girls. It seems it doesn’t matter what you look like, as long as you’re skinny and petite you’re hot, hot, hot. That’s fine. I’m no stranger to the supposed pressures to be thin. I hear it from every corner of my life, and the pressure screams at me to get myself on a treadmill every fucking time I go out.

So, I can either starve myself, or go absolutely insane with working out. Both I’ve done, but apparently not to a satisfactory end, because I’m still not a skinny bitch. But then there’s that whole issue of the fact I can’t ever be as tiny as them.

Hah. Fantastic.

There’s always plastic surgery, though, and I’ve had that offered to me on a silver platter a number of times. Ahhh yes, happiness is ten pounds of fat being sucked out of your gut. It seems Peanuts had it all wrong by thinking it was ice cream and finding a skate key.

So that’s the solution to loneliness. Become a size two. Sure, the asshole may not like you for who you are, but I’m at the point where I just don’t give a fuck anymore.

Liking me for something is a far better alternative than never liking me at all.

The winds of change are stirring, and for better or for worse I'm all-in.

Let's just say it was that trip to Cedar, the one where I walked in a junkie and walked out a junkie dad, that let me know how far I'd sunk. Even now the details--before, during, and after--make me want to pluck my eyes out and pound dirt in the sockets. There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming. At this point, there's nothing left to do but let it out.

So...by way of time and place: March 31, 1989, I found myself in the sterile confines of the Cedar-Sinai OB/GYN tiolet, injecting a bomb-size hit of Mexican heroin while, twenty feet away, my baby daughter inched her way south in my screaming wifes uterine canal.

Somehow, cross-eyed and bloody-armed, I managed to scuffle back in time to witness the sweetest thing in life shoot out of the womb and into Los Angeles. Not, however, before I saw the sheer unfettered loathsomeness of my being reflected in the eyes of the man delivering my daughter. One glimpse of this little girl's father, it was clear, and Dr. Randomangst would just as soon have shoved the poor thing back into oblivion.

And who could blame him? It doesn't take Jonas Salk to surmise the future of a newborn whose daddy slimes into the delivery room oozing from the arms. I was hells's own creepy beast, and he could see it.

You might say that success ruined me. You might say I ruined success. The eighties launched me on a drug-soaked spiral from feature magazine to sex films to the multi-G-a-week world of network TV. On one level I may have qualified as Young Urban Professional. But that status--newly married and monied--occupied the mere surface of a life whose underside embraced a more tormenting reality of drugs and addiction, betrayal, loss and crime.

Father. Husband. Writer. Junkie. On a daily basis I lived this double and triple life. I pingponged back and forth from LA's hard core 'hoods to those studio digs, from the comfort of my just-bought home to the rougher confines of the dope house...The hard fact: whatver the universe in which I touched down, Hollywood High or Hollywood Low, among family, friends, or fellow hypes, the only constant was the facade. I was a gangster with gangsters. I was a Yuppie with Yups. I was a daddy with the dads.

How i slipped into this abyss--and how I made it out--are questions I'll chase down from one end of this volume to the other. The truth: This book for me is less an excercise in recall than exorcism. And a schizophrenic excorcism at that. Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector. As the film goes in one end, at the other it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.

The soul, I believe, allows you to forget such trauma. It wants you too...The real record of these years exists on the ceullular level. The mind buries the horror. And the body is where it's buried. Hence the sideshow liver they tell me could fail in a year, this recent souvenir in my scrotum, the fatigue and ache and feverred, sweating nights that never end. Until they do.

It fell.

Again.

It was in the habit of just falling completely from perspective, and dropping itself carefully on the ground of affliction to lament and converse with everything else that had fallen, but was never picked up.

It was always picked up. It was always brushed off. It was always cleansed of the doleful dust of actuality. It was always placed, neatly, back upon the self of indispensable.

It was cherished, doted-upon, dreamed of. It was tired.

Bing the object of every woeful daydream and interaction began to wear on It’s luminescent posterior: each fall from grace resulted in a fall from the shelf of indispensable and each time it fell it was placed, ever-so-gently, back just so it could fall again.

And again.

And again.

And each time It was placed back upon the pedestal adorned with a name tag of “Necessitous”, the pedestal was higher; each time it was placed back upon the pedestal, conditions became more afflicted, until one day the pedestal had reached a height that was beyond the comfort level for the compulsory phantasm.

“Necessitous,” it pleaded “Nothing is right. I don’t belong here. I’m dying inside, and I’ve got to be strong, I know, but I need to leave this time. I can’t keep denying that everything is wrong now. I carry it all deep inside myself, I hold it in, and I’m keeping my guard up this time. I’ll keep her far away. No…no, she won’t get in.”

“But what is it that you want?”

“I need some kind of miracle. I need someone to let me know that they won’t get go of me. I lie awake at night and I see the light of this miracle gleaming at me. I need that miracle.”

“Then you must go.”

“But, where do I go?”

“You must go.”

And It did.

And the flame of adulation, the desire for tenderness, the inclination towards infatuation did as well.