Chapter 16 Hey, Ma #2
Grace was like my instant soulmate—and even if she was a single year younger than me, she became my little sister.
I just felt so protective of her. And we fought like sisters too.
I’ve never argued with a woman the way I did with her—but by the next day, we’d be completely fine.
We were just riding the wave of her Gemini bipolar energy—and half the time, we were also coming down off copious amounts of drugs.
Throughout our almost decade-long friendship, she would teach me how to be free.
How to have fun. Before Grace, all I did was work—I didn’t know how to enjoy the moments I was given because I was always so wrapped up in responsibilities.
But her wonder-filled eyes would always win me over, and instead of going home and going to sleep, we’d wind up being out until nine the next morning.
She would beg me, Lis, puhhhleeeeaseee can we go out?
and poke her bottom lip out. I’d always cave.
I wanted to be the fun party girl too. I brought Grace into my little coven of females. All my girls became hers.
* * *
IF I THOUGHT I PARTIED before, damn was I wrong. Partying with Grace was on a whole other level. It was all GHB, cocaine, and X, and we even dabbled in meth together. We would go to all sorts of parties, and half the time we didn’t even know the people. It didn’t matter. Grace was fucking wild.
She was notorious for getting lit and stripping off everything but her heels.
Her long legs always gave her this runway model presence and she owned it.
It didn’t matter who, where, or what, she was gonna strut.
We ended up at a party one night with all these gangsters and dealers—so everyone was strapped.
Guns on tables, guns in waistbands. She was strutting around, buck naked, and somehow Grace grabbed someone’s gun. A loaded gun at that.
Everyone froze, and our eyes got as big as cartoon characters’.
Throwing her head back laughing and lying back on a counter, Grace spread her legs and put the tip of the loaded gun on her pussy hole.
We were all shaking—if she accidentally pulled the trigger, it would be a horror movie.
But in typical Grace fashion, she gently rubbed it on her clit, giggled, and then crossed her legs and set the gun down.
You could hear a collective sigh in the room. The party kept going, and we never spoke about Grace and the gun again.
* * *
WE WOULD ROB TRICKS BLIND right in front of their faces.
We would party so hard with them until they passed out, or we would feed them Xanax so they would pass out and we wouldn’t have to touch them.
And our clientele was elite: We partied with lawyers, politicians, and doctors—we even had regulars in the operating rooms in Vegas hospitals.
“I love playing God with the patients in the OR,” one of the surgeons told me, coked out and smiling ear to ear.
I was always good at snagging sugar daddies and keeping them around, so they would hand over credit cards. Even though we had our own houses, we’d pick a casino and I’d rent us a room on Sugar to party for weeks at a time.
We often flew to LA to get away from the Vegas scene, and once we ended up staying at the Beverly Hilton for three weeks on a drug bender. I barely even remember leaving the room for food—and you have to figure that anyone who got a look at us knew we were up to no good.
We eventually overstayed our welcome, and the fine establishment asked us to leave. Coked up and grinding our teeth, we hopped on a flight back to Vegas, sneaking Newports in the airport bathrooms. When I’m doing cocaine, the only thing I want to inhale is menthol smoke.
I would get extremely high and then need to bring myself down, so I’d take Xanax to balance out the cocaine. And when we didn’t have Xanax, we would drink bottles of mouthwash. We’d be too fucked up to go buy real alcohol, so the mouthwash hit the spot. I am not proud of this fact.
Eventually, the drugs stopped hitting like they used to.
But we weren’t about to give up on getting high.
Lucky us, one of our tricks taught us to do cocaine enemas.
You’d lay out a line like you were going to snort it and put it into a syringe without a needle.
You’d add water and shake it up and then up the wazoo. It was the best high I’d ever felt.
The booty blasts only lasted us a short time before they became child’s play. We were so deep in a haze that we didn’t realize we were full-blown addicts. We thought we were just looking for a higher high.
Even if I dabbled in meth here and there, I looked at it as a poor man’s drug, and I mostly stuck to what I called my “designer” drugs. But in reality, they’re all the same—and we tell ourselves all kinds of lies about the risks we’ll take with our lives when they’re nice and pretty.
Grace had been on a meth kick for some time, and she told me it was a way better high than coke. Fuck it. Grace handed me the glass pipe and I breathed in.
“Hold it for as long as you can,” she said.
“But not too long. Your lungs could crystallize.” I blew out the biggest cloud of smoke I’d ever seen come from my body.
And then it hit me. I’d snorted glass and meth plenty of times, but this wasn’t the familiar, amped feeling—it was relaxing?
I smoked crystal meth and it relaxed me? I was hooked.
Grace and I would hole up in hotel rooms and smoke meth for days on end. We would gamble, we would have my sugar daddies come and split the money they gave us, or we would go fishing down in the lobby and pull tricks. The money bought more meth.
We were so far gone that we didn’t even notice how rough we were looking to the outside world. We were both dealing with legal troubles—I had a DUI and some other charges hanging over my head—and we shared a lawyer. When we went to drop off payment one day, he looked us up and down.
“Girls. You know you both look terrible, right?” We were stunned. In our minds, we looked the best we ever had.
“Excuse me?”
“You guys are strung out. It’s obvious. You look like you’re on meth.”
“How can you say that? We would never!” We denied it to the fullest. How dare he say we look like crackheads?
“Listen. My opinion doesn’t matter. But you’re both beautiful women. Don’t ruin yourselves over drugs.”
We both nodded and walked out, staring at each other. Was it that obvious? You would think his warning might have swayed us. Not in the slightest.
* * *
WE RAGED ON, UNTIL ONE drug-induced manic episode finally caught up with me.
I’d decided I wanted tattoos on my arms, and I found myself in some random dude’s garage where he was banging out backyard tattoos for free.
We both hit the glass dick together and bonded over our love for Dear Old Methany.
I wanted two big stars on each wrist. So he started drilling away on the first one. Done! It only took five minutes—total cinch. He moved on to the next one, and for some reason, the pain felt good. I wanted more.
“Go deeper,” I said, tweaked out of my mind.
“You sure?” He looked at me, nervous, and I nodded.
For hours, this man dug into my flesh with a tattoo needle all because I said it felt good. It went so deep that he hit my wristbone, and I started bleeding so much he finally had to stop.
“You’re pretty twisted, girl,” he said. I took it as a compliment. I wrapped my wrist and headed home.
By that night, my wrist began swelling. The pain became overwhelming.
I was on enough drugs that my body didn’t have a chance in hell of healing itself normally, and the fact that I’d had ink drilled into my bloodstream didn’t help.
I got sick and feverish, so I took a shower and lay down.
I couldn’t get out of bed for two days, and I ignored my phone.
I was too sick to speak. Grace knew something was wrong, so she showed up to my house and somehow—thankfully—she got in.
“Bitch, why the fuck aren’t you answering the phone?” She pulled the curtains open to let some light in, and I slowly raised my wrist. My entire arm was infected. My wrist was the size of my biceps, and my fingers were swollen like balloons. The whole room smelled like death.
“Alisa! What the fuck!” she screamed. “We have to get you to a hospital right now.” I shook my head.
“I don’t have insurance.”
“Oh hell naw. We’re going to see Dr. What’s-his-face. The one who likes to play God. He’ll help you.”
“Fuck no. That dude scares me. I’m not going. It’ll go away.”
Grace yanked the covers off me and told me to get up. She was never serious, so to see her all business got me moving. Reluctantly I threw on sweats and she got on the phone and tracked the good doctor down.
“He’s working at a hospital in Parhump,” she said. Parhump is a little town an hour outside of Vegas, full of chicken ranches. Apparently, he worked there once a month, helping out the working girls from the local brothels. Must have been my lucky day.
“That’s so far,” I whined.
“Shut up. I’m driving. Let’s go.”
I slept the whole drive, but when we got there, Grace pulled me through a back door. The doctor was waiting for us—I was getting the VIP treatment. To my horror, he took one look at my arm and panicked.
“Oh my God. You’re going to lose your hand.”
Well, that’s about the last damn thing you want to hear from a doctor. I burst into sobs. I knew just how bad it was.
“Get her on IV meds now, two bags. STAT,” he snapped at the nurse.
Someone whisked me away and I had an IV in my arm within minutes.
The minute they started pumping those antibiotics into my veins, my entire arm—from fingers to shoulder—was itching violently.
It was brutal, and I had to sit still for what felt like hours being pumped full of them.
Grace tried to make me laugh—anything to distract me.
“If you lose your hand, let’s make you a blinged-out hook.”
“A hook?” I asked.
“Yeah, bitch. We’ll call ’em hook-ers,” she said. It worked. I burst out laughing. For a minute, the pain faded.
After a few hours, Doctor God swaggered back in.
“If you’d waited ten minutes longer, I’d be amputating your hand,” he said, before launching into a lecture about my addiction to meth. He’d seen all the drugs in my bloodwork.
“If you don’t get clean, you’re going to kill yourself. Your body just doesn’t have any defenses left. You’ve depleted everything you need to survive.”
He sent me home with antibiotics and the fear of God. I was done with meth. I would never touch it again.