Sambuca and Cocaine

My 24th birthday

These previous posts give some background, but are not necessary to understand this story. Soulmates Weren’t Enough and Breaking and Entering (about our first affair date).

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By my 24th birthday, I had been married two months and was one month into an affair with Jay. He used and sold drugs. It was just a casual part of his existence, completely normalized by how he grew up. I had dabbled in drugs, experimenting here and there and I had settled in to being a regular pot smoker.

Seeing plates of cocaine around was pretty normal and Jay knew I was curious. A week or so earlier, he offered me a bump and I readily snorted it up with the segment of a BIC pen casing. I liked the feeling. I’m pretty sure everyone who has ever tried cocaine likes the feeling the first time. The first time you’ve never had the come down. You do not know the hell you are in for. It’s easy to enjoy it the first time. I only did a couple bumps but I said I wanted to do it again.

At this point in my life, I thought of myself as utterly invincible. Nothing terrible was going to happen to me. I just lived that way and when that is how you genuinely feel, you’ll make a lot of bad decisions. You have no fear of repercussions, no foresight into dangers. No good reasons to say no.

It was my 24th birthday and I was going to spend the evening with Jay and CB. I had worked with CB for about four years. He actually went by his initials “CB”. CB grew up with Jay and they were really good friends, basically best friends. CB was slightly jealous when I took up with Jay. He and I were homies but now I was spending my free afternoons with Jay. CB and I would often drink and smoke weed together after work. I think at one point CB really liked me, but he decided to bang a different, easier coworker. The first time I met Jay, CB and I were picking up weed from him.

After work, CB and I made our way to Jay’s house. Jay had a plate piled with cocaine. It looked like an ant hill there was so much. CB had a bottle of Sambuca. Sambuca tastes like black licorice and rubbing alcohol. CB was always drinking something random. You never knew what the hell he’d bring out to drink. My 24th birthday was my first and last time having Sambuca.

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Jay pulls out his YMCA card and starts moving around the pile of white powder while CB and I are sitting on his bed. Some of it is in little chunks that had a pearly sheen. He smashes the chunks with the card and scraps off the cocaine caked to it with the razor blade that was also sitting on the plate. He neatly arranges 3 lines. He is grinning with anticipation. Besides his own excitement for snorting poison, he is excited to usher me fully into his world. I can tell he wants a partner in crime. Doing drugs alone is honestly not very fun.

“Here you go birthday girl” he says as he hands me the plate and the familiar BIC pen casing. I am way too nervous to hold the plate myself and concentrate on snorting up that line. Jay holds the plate for me like you would hold the door open for a date. He brushes my hair to the side and I snort up the line. Jay snorts his line since he’s already holding the plate then passes it to CB. CB is like a little kid after his line. He is jumping around and pouring Sambuca. CB says “The best part about doing coke is you can drink a lot". You can drink all night and not feel it”.

I can already tell what he means. The cocaine is overriding the buzzed and relaxed feelings from the drinking. My mind is going a mile a minute and I am thinking about things a lot deeper than I ever had. But mostly I am thinking that I want to do more cocaine, drink more, and go out to a bar. And that’s exactly what we did.

CB drives us to an Uptown bar. The three of us sit at the bar and the bartender is really engaged with us, laughing and taking shots. After a while, we all go back to the car to do a few more lines and after that, we walk to a different bar. We are super rowdy at this point. We are playing pool, stumbling around, yelling instead of talking. CB was about to pick a fight so we bounced out of there. We are probably close to being asked to leave anyway. It is a weeknight and we are off the rails.

CB drives us back to Jay’s house. At this point, Jay is back living with his mom. He had lived in an apartment since he was basically 18, but moved back in with her after her health started to deteriorate. It was a little awkward hanging out with Jay in his mom’s house. Like Jay would do for me after parties, he always saved his mom a couple lines. She knew I was married. She really liked me. I had been with her when she had to put her cat to sleep. People bond when they watch something die together. Thinking about my interactions with her is tough. Thinking about my last conversation with her while she was on her death bed is nearly impossible.

CB does not hang out too much longer. We kill the bottle of Sambuca. Suddenly, I am way too drunk. We have not done cocaine now in a couple hours so the come down is setting in. All of a sudden, any magic of repressing the alcohol is gone. Every ounce I had drank hits me all at once. Happy, laughing drunk, turns to the spins and vomiting, the worst I have ever had. CB was wrong. Cocaine doesn’t allow you to drink as much as you want. It causes you some immunity to getting drunk, but once that coke is leaving your system, all the alcohol rebounds to the forefront. When that happens, you are in trouble.

I spend the next several hours making horrible loud wrenching, gagging and hurling sounds and puking. More noises than actual puke. I am a very loud when I puke and I know I woke up Jay’s mom. For this, I feel really bad. She is more than understanding. She has been in my position before. She has compassion and the attitude that it is a right of passage to do cocaine and get too drunk.

I spend most of the night on Jay’s bed in the fetal position, agitated and drunk. Clenching my jaw and hands in tight fists, all part of the cocaine come down. I stay there until about 4am then head home. My husband is sleeping. All he knows is I went out, I drank, and I waited to sober up before driving home. My husband has no reason not to trust me.

I knew even then that this night was a huge turning point in my life. For better or worse, I was going to head down this path at 100 miles per hour. I was absolutely going to do cocaine again. Life was too short to not be happy. Life was too short to not try everything. Life was just too short…I successfully hid the affair for years, but more remarkably, I hid the cocaine use the entire time.

For this series, I will have 3 more posts (maybe 4) that will chronicle the affair, drug use and the fallout. Titles subject to change.

Finding Time: The logistics of an affair

End of an affair: Exactly how it sounds

A Marriage from Ashes