She ‘Hit the Bull’s-Eye,’ and Then She Hit Bottom

Her arms are a mass of vivid red scars. She has an upturned nose, a face still young despite four children and almost a year of “chasing the bag.” She puts on sunglasses before she starts talking.

She curls up a forearm and twists her fist so a vein stands out.

“That’s a good vein right there,” she says. “You get so used to flexing like this. Hype city. I was deep into it.”

Today there is no needle. There hasn’t been one for about a month, since the woman left her husband and came with her children, ages 3 to 14, to an Antelope Valley shelter for abused women. She wants to stay free of methamphetamine’s powerful draw. She agreed to talk about her addiction if her name was not used. At 32, she hopes the counselors at the shelter will help her start over.

Her speech retains the methamphetamine edge, words and images piling onto each other.

“It started when he was doing two jobs . . . unloading trucks and construction,” she said, referring to her husband. “He started dealing too. Getting these idiotic phone calls in front of the children.”

Her husband, she said, was in and out of the house, living in motels, sleeping with “bag whores”--women who trade sex for crank.

At first her own habit was moderate, and she snorted “a toot here, a toot there.” She divided her time between her kids and a job cleaning homes. Her own house was immaculate, a product of obsessive all-night cleaning binges.

“Three a.m. I’m scrubbing the oven with Q-tips,” she laughs. “It’s not like pot, you mellow out and eat ice cream, watch TV and eat more ice cream.”

Meth makes “you go and keep going,” she said.

Her husband helped her graduate to the needle.

“I hit the bull’s-eye the first time. There is nothing like it. They call it pinging, you ping yourself. After a while I wanted that rush like the first couple of times. I was saying ‘I want that rush.’ They call it chasing the monkey.”

She said she weighed 95 pounds.

“At first I thought I looked good. My cheeks were sunk in. The part of me that stuck out furthest from my body was my pelvic bones. I had never seen them before in my life. I had been heavy most of my life, pregnant most of my life. My face was chalk white. My hair was falling out. Big chunks, every time I combed and washed it, on the floor, in the comb, in my fingers.”

She said her husband got busted but was soon released. He worried that other dealers would learn that he was an informant, and he began carrying a gun. He wanted her to carry one. “Everybody had a gun,” she said, “in their pants, in the car.”

She talks about addicts who knew her husband and who were involved in “satanic stuff,” about strange disappearances, about fears that her house was bugged.

It is not clear how much of the paranoia she is recalling and how much of it she is reliving.

The conversation returns inevitably to the needle.

“It is total control. You are controlling how you feel. You have achieved something.”

She mentions her fear of AIDS: Her husband shared needles with others without her knowledge. She doesn’t dwell on it. She returns to the present.

“What happens now is, my little boy does something and all of a sudden I say, ‘I didn’t remember how cute he was.’ I didn’t use to notice stuff like that. I missed that.”