How It Feels to Overdose on Meth

The author in 1994.

In the summer of 1994 I overdosed on methamphetamine. I was in a dorm room in a frat house on the campus of a school I didn't go to. Neither did my boyfriend, he was just renting a room. July in Philadelphia is hot; the air covers the skin with a fine, humid mist. Anything floating in the air—bits of dust kicked up by cyclists and cabs—sticks to bare arms and legs.

I was almost 19. I was on summer break from Sarah Lawrence College. I’d been doing drugs since I was 18. It was a promise I’d made myself when I was 12—that when I was 18 I could do drugs, and I’d kept it.

Despite the heat I wore Doc Martens, a green plaid kilt, and a white button-down shirt that had once been my dad’s. 

Me and my boyfriend met up after work to get high. That’s what we always did. This mid-July heat-waved day was no different. First we met up at Wawa a few blocks away. I got a cherry slushie and sucked its frozen ice chips up through the straw until I couldn’t feel my face. 

Meth was everywhere, it was constant, it was not hard to get. Most of our amphetamines came from this kid we called Shady John who went to the pharmaceutical college. He was into bodybuilding, his hair, and making amphetamines. 

He tried out different strengths, colors, consistency, texture, durations of high. Part of his mission was quality control so we knew it wouldn’t kill us, at least not right away. Because our dealer was also the manufacturer, it was always a good price; lots of times free, just because he was proud of his creation. He once made an MDMA capsule that lasted for 24 hours. 

Everyone we knew was high all the time. College kids high on meth and Kierkegaard who listened to shoegaze, quoted Bukowski, and blew lines like it was an intellectual pursuit. ‘The Doors of Perception’ and all that. Anything that was up, we were into. 

“Meth was everywhere, it was constant, it was not hard to get.”

We didn’t shoot it because we were afraid of AIDS. From junior high through high school we had been bombarded in sex-ed class about how sex and shooting up would kill us because we would get AIDS and die. So we cut it and snorted it. We did it in my boyfriend’s room. He was on the top floor, the room with roof access. 

We cut lines on a plastic CD case on the desk next to the hulking typewriter that had no ink. No paper, either. It was a massive electric Smith Corona that just sat there. 

The meth stuck together when we tried to cut it. The white powder, sticky in the muggy air, stuck to the edge of my school ID. It made a soft mushy impact when I crushed the hard little chunks of the powder. 

I didn't like to use a bill so I used a rollerball pen, disassembled it with my teeth, to snort it. In addition to AIDS I was afraid of germs on bills. One time the whole thing exploded and I walked around with blue ink streaks on my face.

I liked when the powder would hit the top of my throat. It would hit, and begin to drip, and it would be only a few seconds before my teeth went numb, if it was the good stuff. I’d drink water and have a cigarette to get rid of the taste, and wait until colors sparked in my eyes and my body released the weight of consequences. I’d feel like I was looking at the world from a slant, or maybe off to the side somewhere. I was another object in orbit.

I didn’t take drugs because they made me feel good, but because they took the emotions and anxieties I was having—sad ones and scared one and ones where I felt like I didn’t matter—and it put them somewhere else. When I was high, it focused my consciousness on me. Normally I would only think about the ways I was not who I should be, but when I was high, I liked that me better: the one who could barely see past her own nose, who inserted herself into every story, who was the heroine of the narrative. 

We did a bunch of lines and then went downstairs where there was a party and did a bunch more lines in my boyfriend’s friend Rabbit’s room and watched fractals on his big beige PC monitor. Rabbit loved fractals—he designed them, he projected them on the wall, they spun out of his monitor, they were everywhere, and we watched them. 

He was a coder before anyone knew what that was. He was talking online internationally, putting together the early framework of what would become the web revolution. Rabbit talked about how the internet was gonna be for us, a place the authoritarians and consumerists couldn’t touch, the ultimate underground. 

The monitor thrummed under the sound of Pink Floyd coming from chest-high speakers. When we weren’t listening to Floyd we were listening to My Bloody Valentine, and when we weren’t listening to them, we were listening to Morrissey. My boyfriend had recently picked up a CD of The Smiths’ early demos at the record exchange. I had plans to steal it from him.

When there wasn’t music playing on Rabbit’s multi-disc changer there was live music in the house. Bands came and went, and groupies, too. Rabbit and my boyfriend had a band that they could never quite settle on the name of, and they would play before the indie acts that the frat booked. Rabbit wore fishnet stockings over his boxers and played bass. My boyfriend wore eyeliner and thought he was a cross between Morrissey, Jim Morrisson, and Bernard Sumner. 

This was a party house. This house always had the best stuff, the coldest kegs, the stickiest weed, and the guys who lived here loved to share. They had huge parties and the floor would visibly undulate under the weight. Everyone was talking in Rabbit’s room. Voices were loud, raising in laughter, spinning around me, I couldn't track the conversations. 

I started to get dizzy. I checked my pulse. Two fingers on wrist, clenched fist, count. I could never find mine. I asked my boyfriend to do it. He took my wrist, placed two fingers, and counted off, keeping time by nodding his head. He kept talking to Rabbit while he counted.

“Syd Barrett was the superior Floyd lead,” he said, “there’s no way around that—he went insane, sure, but he was more inventive, more creative.” I could see him lose the count. This was an old argument between him and Rabbit.

“Yeah, and he blew his brains out with LSD,” Rabbit said, “just like we’re gonna do this weekend.”

My boyfriend smiled at me and tapped my wrist. “You’re good,” he said. “Sure it’s quick. Not too quick, 110.” There was pride in how quick we could get our heart rates, how up without dying. We listened to music with high beats-per-minute and spun our hearts out with the drum machine.

“110?” I asked. My throat felt a little tight.

“You’re okay,” he said, “I promise.” I never believed him when he said that. 

I headed back upstairs. It felt like my vision was watery and I was moving through the air as something vicious and penetrable. Normally it feels like air doesn't exist. Normally air doesn't feel there. I wanted my boyfriend to come with me, but this was a point of contention between us—me wanting him to want to be with me, him wanting to stay where the drugs were. I wanted more drugs too, but I needed quiet. I needed to go where I could hear my heart beating.

I climbed two flights, I think, and around to the bathrooms. I had to pee and I wondered why my boyfriend hadn't come to find me. I bent my mouth under the tap and gulped water from the spout. 

Another flight up. The late evening sun was pouring in and dropping out the southwest window. It was bright inside my eyes. The typewriter invited my lost words and I had none to give.

To the left, his desk, the chair that leaned back too far. To my right the green couch, velour maybe, Victorian. Wood-framed windows letting in the street light. This was an old house. The itchy feeling of stars in the sky, the sound of big speakers in little cars. The bed straight ahead, a mattress on the floor. Blankets hanging off, a sheet. Sweaty. This was a rented room with a rented bed. My boyfriend was only here for the summer, and after that he didn’t know where he’d go. I’d been sleeping there most nights. I slept there last night. 

“We listened to music with high beats-per-minute and spun our hearts out with the drum machine.”

Lots of nights we’d climb up to the roof and sit out there. We would look out at the city. The oil refineries in Southwest, the flames licking up at the dark blue of the summer sky. The masonry would turn to dust beneath us, crumbling. The tar roof melted and stuck to our shoes in the heat. A little impoppable bubble of decadence, this frat house at UPenn, where neither my boyfriend nor I went to school.

I considered sitting out on the roof, alone, a cigarette, curling smoke between my fingers like the flames of the oil refineries. I felt too wobbly, uncertain of my footing.

A noise like airplanes took over my hearing. The yellow inside my eyes was getting so bright it was burning until it burst and I couldn’t see anything. 

I wanted my boyfriend. I wanted my mom. I wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want anyone to know. I was ashamed. I knew it was bad. I didn’t want anyone to know. I had to fix it. I had to get out of this. I couldn’t breath, it was hard, and it hurt.

Most people who die of a methamphetamine overdose do so from heatstroke, organ failure, high blood pressure to the point of hemorrhage. I had all the symptoms of an OD. My chest hurt, my heart was going crazy. I tried to slow my breathing to keep it together, to make it even, but the pain of breath got in the way. My heart felt like butterfly wings in my chest. 

I stumbled to the bed and the blankets. I wrapped myself in them, they were a cocoon, they were hot. My cheeks like the mercury in an old thermometer. My vision still dark, the edges a pond of red heat controlled by lunar gravity, in and out, a froth of red blood cells. 

Airplanes that would not land but only hovered over my head. Small explosions on my scalp, and around my neck the water rising. I was shaking. I was burning hot. I was drenched in sweat and drowning. I wanted to sleep but I kept shaking awake with the impact of my chattering teeth.

Was it the sun or was it a streetlight I felt on my face when I heard his voice asking beyond the plane engines me if I was alright. I wanted to say “no” but I couldn’t say another. My face wasn’t working right.

He bopped around in the room and then was gone. He came back with Rabbit. 

“How long’s she been like that?” Rabbit asked.

“I don’t know,” my boyfriend said. “I think she’ll be okay though.”

“We could do an ER drive-by, drop her out front and take off,” Rabbit suggested.

“I think she’ll be okay,” my boyfriend said. 

They turned out the lights and left.

There was no time, there was only sweat and shaking. I lost consciousness before it was over. 

Sounds of pigeons on a wire woke me with sunrise. The sound of some homeless man rummaging in the dumpster in the alley behind the frat house. My clothes were wet and cold and stuck to me. My hair was plastered to my face.

Sometimes with a drug you just have to ride it out. 

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