"Towards a History of the Opioid Epidemic and the Midwest-to-Florida Pill Mill Carpools" by Nick Gardner
I asked my characters what they wanted and they answered: Oxycontin, Xanax, blunts, and booze. My goal was to write a book about middle America during the opioid epidemic. Instead, I ran cars full of dopeboys with fake MRIs from Ohio to Florida where we picked up prescriptions of painkillers from the Fort Lauderdale pill mills to snort and shoot and sell once back in Hillbilly Oz. It was immersive research, the kind people sometimes don’t come back from.
Dallas introduced me to Oxycontin sophomore year of undergrad. We were taking a creative writing workshop with professor Stoneman, an exemplar of the old guard who loved his scotch and simple sentences. Stoneman praised our enthusiasm for the machismo-driven underbelly, turning a blind eye when Dallas and I passed a flask beneath the desk and slipped out of class to get high. Stoneman said that in any good story your characters have to want something. Once they have it, that story is over.
For Dallas and I, the tale began when we had the drugs, sniffing them from the backs of toilets in Westwood Hall. We got hooked on the stuff together, though, while I stayed and held onto my job at the campus writing center, Dallas dropped out, slummed from apartment to apartment, scraping by on his girlfriend’s, Judy, Cracker Barrel paycheck.
As we both dipped into addiction, I’d started to fool around with the idea of the book. At Cracker Barrel, Dallas and I ate gratis pecan pie and discussed how we could Scarface our way to the top. He wanted to be the hero of my story, called himself the King of Ohio. He said he was going to get a tattoo of the skyline on his arm and below it, I run my city. He said, You’ll write it all. Preserve our legacy.
So, I took notes on Dallas’ life and M’s junkyard, Rust’s Wrecks.
M’s Uncle Rust was rumored to have ridden in a twister all the way from Youngstown until his trailer plopped down in the middle of Ohio. He christened it Hillbilly Oz. His family settled down and the trailer park grew until the legacy was dropped into M’s scrawny lap. It was M who let us in on the ground floor of his scheme: he’d cover the expenses of the Florida trip, the medical forms and copays, the fuel and petty cash, all in exchange for half of our prescriptions.
And then we were off. Dallas and I broke speed limits through the cornfield-stubbled Midwest wasteland, past the black Hell is Real billboard on seventy-one South, into the relentless sunshine and sandy berms of Florida. We stopped at a Chick-fil-A in Georgia and let the grease run down our chins before we continued toward the shore. So close, but we never touched the ocean. We waited in line at the strip mall, pain clinic sign gleaming, mouths thirsty for the sustained high, a ceaseless supply, an answer to all our struggles. We alternated pilot and co-pilot on the return trip, down the peninsula, and back to Hillbilly Oz, pockets rattling with pain pill scripts which we’d split with M, and then blast off.
Those were our glory days. Hope and momentum propelled us through recessions and housing crises, through breakups, deaths, wars, and other losses. I didn’t even question the precariousness until the day Dallas shoved Judy down the stairs. He’d blown through all his pills and when she got on him for swiping her cash he slapped her. She dialed 911 so Dallas pushed her and she fell. He stood there and watched her prone on the landing. The operator questioned the gasps, then the buzz of silence on the line.
When I showed up to the Verdant Valley Villas for another carpool to the Sunshine State, I saw the lot swarmed with cops and I bounced. M texted as I crossed the river from Ohio to Kentucky: possession, abuse, resisting arrest. As my pre-drive high slaked into shame and the deciduous trees turned into Florida palms, I began to wonder about the abyss we all edged around, how happiness could dive straight into violence. And I thought about how close I was to Dallas’ abandon, how lawless and high-strung I could become.
The last conversation I ever had with Dallas, after he got out on bail, before he OD’d on some fentanyl-laced stamp bags from Pittsburgh, he told me that the day he’d nearly killed Judy was the day he saw his soul. He cried into the pecan pie I’d taken to-go, didn’t even use the fork I’d shined with a damp paper towel. The folding chairs we sat on kept sliding from under us. We avoided eye contact. He said, Look at this clock, and pointed to the plastic ticking disc on my apartment’s wall. He said, It’s broken. I told him it was just wrong because I hadn’t changed it for daylight savings half a year ago, but he said, No. Broken. Like time itself is broken. Then he collapsed from his chair, thumped on the floor.
I admit I was a bit confused. I knew that time wasn’t real, was all too familiar with the whole time is an illusion rhetoric we stoners would wield against the man. What Dallas meant was literal temporal failure. He said that as Judy began to tumble his own body froze. Everything paused. He watched his soul emerge in a bloom of jellyfish, a great many-tentacled soul. Dallas believed it was the pills that made it happen, and this jelly cloud was his true self come unbound where his bumbling body failed. The bloom is what kept Judy from death. When she lost consciousness, when her own bloom emerged, the jellies met in an electrified cloud, hummed bolts into her limp limbs to shock her, gasping back to life. So, really, he told me, at once he’d killed her and saved her, which made him no less guilty, no less a horrible person. Years later, reading Dallas’ obit on Facebook I imagined his manifold soul pouring out and hanging above his own slumped torso, failing this time to jump-start his own heart back to motion.
But when Dallas first told me all this, I figured it must have been a drug-induced hallucination. I mean, we’d all OD’d to greater or lesser degrees. We’d all projected astrally on LSD, or sleep deprived on uppers, seen our own bodies sprawled and useless. But, after his funeral, as my tolerance increased, as I became M’s primary driver, his right-hand man, I began to notice I too existed in a strange temporality that couldn’t be completely blamed on delirium. I oscillated from full to empty, never lingered in between. I’d pull into M’s lot with my pockets bulging, shout over the sound of him welding chasses to reified beaters as he readied another jalopy for the next Florida run, and then I’d blink and be pill-less once again, in the same spot, impatient to hit the road. All the dopeboys became interchangeable. Driving to Florida with S. and W., I’d look in the rearview and find them replaced by R. and L., or Kilo and Litany; silent and awkward, or conked out with placid smiles. Everyone served the same purpose. Then the Feds would crackdown on Lauderdale and new clinics would crop up in other cities, in Georgia and Mississippi, but it was the same drive, more-or-less, the same need-fueled jut—ten, fifteen, twenty hours down from snowbanks to humid warmth, a tentacled mass swapping out one dopeboy for another dopeboy, one landscape for another landscape. Even the color and the shape of the pills would change. The only constant was that we needed more than we could ever achieve.
Once I was on M’s couch watching Scag and Brando inject themselves, but instead, they drew the liquid out of their bodies, removed the needle from their veins, squirted the stuff back into the spoon. There were other situations too where the world worked in reverse. We began to talk about escape.
During one of his lectures on Story, Stoneman said that the quotidian sometimes holds more weight than the sensational. He cited works by Carver and Hemingway, quiet stories that roiled in the back of the mind. He said, You don’t need explosions, death, violence. Write a dinner party or a walk home from the bar.
I thought about this while I loaded up the vehicle with dopeboys in front of M’s trailer, listening to M clang on metal, engines roaring deep in the field that was Rust’s Wrecks. Sounds like the echoes of when the original tornado touched down. We all waited for a tornado. All I had in those days was shock and melodrama, spikes of emotion to connect vague blurs of storytime. We waited for something to move us: an act of God, prophecy, a palm-full of tablets crushed and snorted, a few Speedway gas cards, a set of scrapped-together wheels, and some petty cash.
M was our angel donor, our mentor, and guide. He’d been using opioid analogs since before Big Pharma called pain the sixth vital sign. As we pushed our luck, jetting off for brief glimpses of southern sunlight, M stayed beneath Ohio’s cloudy skies, waited, pounded, and welded new transports, planning more expeditious getaways. When we returned from our trips we’d sit around his coffee table to split our bounty, count our take. We’d gather our individual doses and ingest. We all leaned back into the rush, the drip, the numb. I would feel awake again and everything would freeze. I’d watch the room smoke and plume, jellyfish tendrils pouring out of all of us to scatter and reconvene. A mutual loving soul.
Then one day there was Judy. She stood in the kitchen wearing skin-tight Cracker Barrel slacks under an apron, her bare arms plump. She blamed us for Dallas’ death. I struggled up from the couch, managed my way across the floor where she slapped and scratched at me till I was close enough to hold her. The noise she made banished our blooms back into our individual chests, reanimated all of our limbs and torsos, hearts pounding, throats gasping for answers.
She said, It’s all your fault. Which we were aware of, which we had accepted into that agglomerate guilt buried deep inside persistent dread. I’d added Dallas’ death to the disconnect from my parents, my grandfather’s funeral that I skipped, my wasted education, the slim hope of my book. We all made dope eyes at Judy. We nodded along with her swell and bellow. She finally heaved out a sigh. She sobbed only briefly. She said, I need to understand why he’d go so far. You owe me. Which we did, a few pills from each of us as penance, and Judy was hooked. Her bloom rushed a circle around the room the color of pale green ocean before it charged ours and integrated. She alternately watched our souls and nodded next to me in the low spot of the couch, thigh against thigh in a way that in a more sober era would have been seductive.
It was Judy’s idea. She’d learned on the Discovery Channel that people all over the U.S. were building rocket ships in which they could escape the earth for some lunar commune where there was no poverty, no ongoing war, where they’d built a bubble to filter oxygen. M took over the operation, employed us to scavenge sheet metal from crumpled Buicks, to swipe bolts and piping from Menards. Judy downloaded the specs from a message board. I was doubtful about the plans as Judy leaned her head on my shoulder on yet another Florida trip, somewhere between Nashville and Birmingham. I said, Judy, wake up. Tell me a story or I’m gonna pass out. Everyone but me was sleeping and there was little energy left to keep me awake. She blinked, slapped her face, and reached for my zipper.
And I wanted to put all of this on paper, the darkness and the fumble of sex, a quest, and a glorious homecoming. Judy was my maiden in distress now saved, or my siren who sent giddy chills at each touch and fondle. We worked on the rocket ship all day then drove around, slung pills. We slept on M’s guest room couch and writhed into each other in a shared sleeping bag. She gained weight off our diet of communal pizzas and Mountain Dew but I stayed scrawny, though I often grew a constipated gut. I liked the feel of her soft belly as I wrapped an arm around her, holding her flesh so it wouldn’t slide off the cushion.
But what could I write of our life when my hands were too busy to even scribble a letter.
Time passed or it didn’t. It proceeded and reversed. This all occurred over a series of what? Five years? Less? And once it fell to pieces I never saw any of them ever again. In a way, I’m younger than my birth certificate says. I survived all of those years, but survival relies on erasure, the cutting of specific scenes and details. I voided the periods that most aged me from my new life in recovery.
What I do remember is that at one point Rench ran off to rehab, and later Scag got nabbed slinging weed; we lay low and prayed they weren’t snitches. The rocket ship took form and M lazed back on his lawn chair. He was shirtless, cave-chested, going over the ever-morphing scheme. He plotted. He said he needed pictures of the clinic the next time we took a southbound trip. He wanted to know where security cameras were positioned, the locations of personnel, guards, receptionists. He gave me a digital camera to snap the shots. He said, We hit this lick and it’s like a hundred thousand pills, man. You come straight back here and we blast off and there ain’t no laws on the moon. This was Ohio, fall, leaves scraping across gravel, squirrels scurrying to shelter with the racket of much larger beasts. Judy brought us lunch while we worked. We ate the room-temp pizza off torn corners of the greasy box. Judy crushed her pills on a detached rear-view mirror and I noticed she was up to three at once, ninety milligrams of Roxy required for a buzz. I was annoyed. I said, What’s the fucking point? We’re just gonna run out again. I wanted to tell them I knew the rocket would never make deep space, that we were only building to build, soldering metal to metal for the sake of shattering the static.
M gave me a look both wild and anxious, a fury in his eyes. He said, Something’s gonna happen. And then leaned over to vomit, a noiseless splurge into the dirt yard. He came up laughing, tossed me the bottle of pills, an answer, or at least the end of the question.
We loaded into a dinged-up Impala, Judy and I in front, Rench replaced by Butler, Scag usurped by Kilo, Litany in the middle. We left in the dark before the birds, stopped for hashbrowns at McDonald’s, then again at Speedway across the state line. Judy smitherened her tablets, took the fattest line first. Then she passed around the jewel case. She chased the drugs with my Mountain Dew, turned up The Carter II as I idled at rest stops, ate Snickers and peanuts, and left the car on cruise. Day showed us distant foggy mountains and night revealed only headlights, exit signs. We slept in the Walmart parking lot to save hotel funds. Or rather we tried to sleep, but I stayed awake while jellyfish tendrils swarmed about their bodies, dipped in and out of the cracked windows, giving and taking away. I sat on the curb weighted by humidity, opened up my diminished stash, crushed, inhaled. The pills that remained rattled lonely. I counted and came up short until sunrise when Butler, the phlebotomist, took his works into a stall and never returned.
But who were any of us to say that such and such a plan would fail, that the craft would never fly? We returned from Georgia a man short and I handed over an empty camera, no data for a bigger hit. We split our pills, dosed up, and then I went on a drive alone for once, windows down and AC on. I took the country roads that Dallas and I used to roadie on, sucked down joint after careless joint.
When I’d found him in the Walmart bathroom, Butler’s hand dangled to the ground, jellies flashed as I peed, until the flashes stopped. That’s when I was certain. I’d counted the cameras while I power walked through the sliding doors without him. Seventeen lenses preserved my solitary escape, our car pulling off from that Georgia Walmart parking lot, photoless, Butlerless, failed.
As they say, it was only a matter of time before we were caught. I took the county highway to the interstate and for the first time in forever, I cried over everything that had ended. Then I pulled over to the shoulder and did more pills. I headed back to work on the capsule, anything that would propel us far from earth.
Litany was hard at work when I pulled in the drive, painting the scavenged decklid armor with anime characters and graffitied empowerments—thrive, hope, love. I complimented her on the art, the colors, the way the blue dripped weirdly on the slickened surface, but it would all burn off once the capsule broke the atmosphere. She said, I’m not stupid. I know we aren’t going anywhere. It will blow apart before it breaks the ozone layer.
The crooked cone I’d banged out of rusted metal tapered down into a pod outfitted with dirty pilot seats sewn with extra belts and buckles. It weighed over a ton which was actually quite light considering its size, the components used. Along with her favorite heroes and positive words, Litany dedicated an entire panel to a jellyfish bloom. It emerged from a pile of pills to alter time and space, to make room for flying saucers. Seeing those pills, their possibilities, I realized there is no knowing the truth until we try it, and once we’ve tried the truth, it becomes malleable, altered by ludicrous whims.
M approached with Judy behind him and Kilo bringing up the rear in a dirt bike helmet and protective pads. Other junkies banged out of the trailer. M had attached chains to the pod and bolted them to the ground and Kilo began prepping the engines fueled by ten-gallon forklift tanks. Kilo would be going up alone, held to within fifty feet of the earth, and if the ship flew, if it could be controlled, then we’d all attempt to rise together.
As we prepped the tanks, checked the hoses, I thought of the moment of flight. I imagined how Judy would take my hand while we counted down: Ten. Nine. Eight. At five I would snort a couple of pills. We would all snort, inject, smoke. We would need to be in the right headspace for this to work. Then back to the countdown: Three! Two! One! And there would be a sputter, a combustion too soon stifled. And the bloom would pour out, surround the ship, an electric storm of our jellyfish lightning, tentacles stinging the craft into a rumble then a hum. It would all happen like magic. We’d applaud as the capsule rose, fire shooting from every rocket, grass roasted to char. We’d have to back up. It would be marvelous, the spacecraft rising, Kilo rising, the Jellyfish bloom rising, all as one. And the chains would begin to snap from the ground and as we rushed to grab them, to secure the vessel, we would also lift upwards, rise from the earth. And all need, all desire, would leave us with the heave of the rocket ship, our drive to vanish in the firmament. People talk about the search for meaning, of higher powers and ascension, but have they ever felt it? We would feel it. We would leave like Dallas and Butler and Brando and Scag, and all the others. It would be wonderful, will be wonderful, to grip the chain in one hand, Judy’s fist in the other, and then gone, into the sky.
Nick Gardner's writing has appeared in Atticus Review, Ocean State Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Bowling Green State University. His book of sonnets about his opioid addiction and recovery, So Marvelously Far is available through Crisis Chronicles Press.
