By Max Oppen
I want to rewind the tape to 2001—November-ish. It was soon after 9/11, I remember that. I was 29 or 30, and the decision to move to Southern California, specifically San Diego, was easy. Heroin was plentiful, and I was chasing it. I had just finished a 9-month bid in the old Greene County Jail. It all started when a Greene County Sheriff pulled me over, and, surprise, they found drugs on me. I was initially sentenced to eight months with work release, so I spent my nights in the old Greene County Jail and my days working at a pizza joint in Colonie. It was a prime opportunity to save money: no rent, a solid job, and a reliable old blue Buick my Great Aunt used to own—it drove like a dream, smooth and plush.
Unfortunately, I managed to screw that up too. Almost every day, I got high, showing up to the jail hours late with a pizza for the guards, stuffing my shoes full of cigarettes, matches, and the occasional joint. The inmates loved me for it. That arrangement ended abruptly one morning when the guards couldn't wake me for work. They had to slap me to get my eyes open. But that's a story for another time.
Following my release, I hopped on a Greyhound bus to San Diego with a bundle of dope—10 small glassine bags—barely any money, and all of my poetry from college. My luggage got lost along the way, including all of my writing, which still upsets me today.
I got a job at the Crowne Point 76 gas station in Hillcrest, the center of the LGBTQ scene in San Diego. Hillcrest was a different world entirely. I moved there with a friend from New York and moved in with a mutual friend I'd known from my time in Vail, Colorado, back in the 90s, from 1994 to 1998. He'd quit drugs, and one night, he caught me doing cocaine in his bathroom. That was it for me - he kicked me out immediately.
The gas station job was overnight and quickly became one of the most insane, terrifying periods of my life. Everyone came through that gas station at night—fellow addicts, criminals, taxi drivers, struggling actors, porn stars—it was a madhouse. I'll never forget some characters: one guy had a silver pistol; another brought a sawed-off shotgun he found in a dumpster. Sometimes, someone would bring in a PlayStation, and we'd play hours of Madden Football, strung out on crystal meth, black tar heroin, piles of cheap cocaine, and even GHB, which a friend brought in those old black film canisters.
GHB—gamma-hydroxybutyrate—is a dangerous, illegal nervous system depressant, often used as a date rape drug. I was mixing with perilous people, playing with death on a nightly basis.
One of my closest companions during this time was a Pakistani taxi driver. He stayed awake for days on end using meth and somehow survived a terrible accident after falling asleep behind the wheel. He barely had a scratch. Despite his own situation, he tried to stop me from using heroin. We connected, though I can't remember his name for the life of me.
I lasted only a few months at the gas station. One night, I decided to close up shop and head to a barrio for an eight-ball of coke. I had bought a wood-paneled station wagon from the taxi driver for $800—no registration, no insurance, and an out-of-state driver's license. After picking up the drugs, I rolled through a stop sign and got pulled over. I had 15 Valium stashed in my sock and the coke, of course. The cops found the coke almost immediately. They dragged me out of the car, cuffed me, and threw me in the back of an SUV—not in the seats, but way in the back. I knew I was headed to jail, so somehow, with my hands cuffed behind my back, I managed to grab the Valium in my sock and boofed them. For those unfamiliar, "boofing" means inserting drugs into your anus. Not exactly a proud moment, but it's all about survival in those situations.
On the way to San Diego Central Jail (SDCJ), we passed the gas station where I was supposed to be working. I had just gotten a pound of weed fronted to me and had put it behind the counter, and I remember watching someone illuminated by streetlights, kicking the locked glass front door, trying to get in. There was nothing I could do.
After a few days in SDCJ, I was transferred to Otay Mesa, near the border with Mexico. I believe it was the George Bailey Detention Center, but I'm unsure. County jails in Southern California are much different than those in New York. They're segregated—strict and rigid, like prisons back home. I was housed in a dorm with whites only. The inmates, not the guards, ran the place. Every race had its own "representatives," and the inmates ran their own exercise routine every morning. Whites with Whites, Mexicans with Mexicans, and Blacks with Blacks. I couldn't eat, play cards, or interact with anyone of a different race. If you did, you'd get a visit from your "own" people. I came close to getting my ass kicked a couple of times.
Despite these rigid race rules, I did make friends with a couple of Mexican carjackers. But the jail was brutal, nicknamed "Thunderdome" for a reason. There was constant violence. I managed to avoid fighting, but I was there about a month before I got to court and was sentenced to Drug Court—probably a relatively new concept at the time.
While I was locked up, my "friend" in Hillcrest packed all my things—papers, journals, even my Italian Birth Certificate—onto the street and moved in with his girlfriend. I lost everything. When I was released, I had a few hundred dollars from my last gas station paycheck and the clothes I was arrested in. I was officially homeless. That night, I slept behind a dumpster, using a patio furniture cushion as a bed and a wood pallet for cover. It's frightening to realize you have nowhere to go, no "safe space."
I rarely contacted my parents during this time. My father was still alive then (he passed away in 2012), and they knew something was terribly wrong. I came out as a heroin addict to my family around then. My sister told me she cried and embraced her former partner when she found out. My mother was worried sick, and most of our phone calls involved me begging for money, desperate for help.
After that, I fell in with a group of homeless people called the "Canyon Kids," loosely led by a guy named "The Wolf." We set up camps under a freeway, where I saw horrors—people poked with used
needles by addicts with HIV, constant conflict, and hopelessness. I remember scratching a poem into a green metallic power source in an alley: "Look beyond the horizon, and feel for the sun. For we shall thrive as masses, instead of only one."
I learned how to survive from the Canyon Kids. We'd grab used cups outside burger joints and refill them for free. I got pretty good at boosting (stealing) razors to fence at the local flea market, and we'd use the cash to buy coke and heroin. I wrote a short poem about doing a speedball in a Taco Bell bathroom and feeling "beautifully diseased."
But I wasn't in control. There was an active warrant out for my arrest because I had blown off Drug Court. I found a cardboard refrigerator box and hauled it up onto a rooftop. That became my home for the winter, which had the typical Southern California mild weather. I made a flap in the box for a "window" and had a giant glass jug to use as a bathroom. The rooftop felt relatively safe, but I'd return to find my things ransacked almost daily.
Eventually, I just got tired of it all—the drugs, the lifestyle, the constant fear. I called my old boss from the pizza place in Colonie, and he wired me money for a bus ticket home. I absconded, warrant still active, and returned to work at the pizza place in Colonie, with the weight of that arrest hanging over me. For years, every time I got pulled over, the warrant would pop up, but they never extradited me. The University at Albany, which I had transferred to after graduating with my two-year degree from Columbia-Greene Community College in 2012, saw the warrant and wanted it resolved before I would be accepted on campus. I had to meet with officials at UAlbany, who put me through a process to ensure I was not a danger to fellow students. Finally, in 2012, my Uncle paid for a lawyer, and with his connections in California, the attorney resolved the warrant. The felony was dropped, teaching me a valuable lesson about the connection between money and the criminal justice system in America.
Despite all that, I wasn't done using drugs. I still thought I had control. Man, was I wrong.
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