Product integration was broken. I provided a service. I needed customers. Unfortunately, all my customers were secret heroin addicts. You can’t list in the white pages. You can’t take out an ad during the local news broadcast. No, this business requires a personal touch.

To find heroin users, I needed to know where the heroin was. I had connections. I knew people. I kept all the numbers and names. Most people were…not happy to hear from me. Everyone I called actually. I realized quickly if I was going to get ahead in this world, I had to get more forceful and apply my leverage.

I was surprised to find that heroin dealers aren’t at all what you expect. Sure, some of them live in large brick buildings in the poorer parts of town, but many of them live in perfectly nice neighborhoods in small houses where children play outside. This latter group was much closer to my target demographic. It turns out heroin dealers don’t take house calls though. Nor do they like cold calls. I did get the shit kicked out of me. Twice. Same day actually. It’s a business. And I didn’t fit in.

I was wealthy, but not lifetime wealthy. I had maybe 250K in crypto that I had saved up, but that only lasts so long. I needed fresh money coming in. I had a good business model, but no contacts. My job prospects were basically eliminated because no one who ever called my former employer would consider hiring me. So, I did what seemed like the next logical step. It takes money to make money, so I re-invested my profits.

In drugs.

I bought a bunch of drugs. Just like…a lot of drugs. Any drugs. I bought coke, I bought weed, I bought MDMA, I bought uppers, downers, every fucking drug I could get. Drugs got me in this mess, and by damn drugs could get me out.

I want to be clear - I didn’t want to be a drug dealer. I wanted to be a methyl-thiobutyrate dealer. You might ask, “Why not just buy heroin then? Isn’t your business focused on heroin?” I’d like to give a better answer but, frankly, I just don’t like needles. And I found the overlap between “heroin dealer” and “drug dealer” was pretty high. High enough at least. No pun intended. My goal was to ingratiate myself into the community, validate myself as a high-functioning user, and continue to make profits based on client referrals. Standard business practices applied to a non-standard business.

Having a large amount of drugs has a bunch of really useful immediate positive improvements to your life. First, it immediately excludes you from being a cop, especially if you are doing an eight-ball a day. If you are trying to drum up clientele from drug dealers, this is a perk. Those nice homes with respectable drug dealers? They weren’t interested in my little service, so I was forced into going to some of the less aesthetically pleasing areas of town. The cocaine helped the difficult introductory part of these interactions. A nostril in the door so to speak. I found that if you stopped doing cocaine to talk business it brought a lot of scrutiny and made everyone edgy and uncomfortable though, so over time, I focused more on partying and less on the business. I figured it would work itself out.

Second, having drugs brings girls. Lots of girls. Pretty ones, crazy ones, high ones, ugly ones, kind ones, sad ones. Lots of girls. I’m not handsome. I’ve dated a few girls. We made each other happy briefly. But only briefly. Not with cocaine though. I made a lot of girls happy. All the time. Well not me so much as the cocaine, but hey, I was winning by proxy! I had girlfriends during this period. I guess. If someone is dating the drug you are holding, and hates you for having it and not giving it to them, is that the same thing as a relationship? I feel like it checks a lot of the same boxes. We went to parties together. We woke up together. Sometimes when we stopped waking up together, I found someone else to wake up next to. After a while I forgot about my business. I forgot about methyl-but…what was it called? It didn’t matter.

Third perk of forgoing your life for constant brain-melting drug addiction, days melt away. Time isn’t real. Hit the song Blue Monday by New Order. Crank it up to 1000. Dance. Go to clubs. Dance some more. Do some blow. Fuck someone. Turn up the volume. I look amazing today. People love you. Everyone loves you. Is this Blue Monday by New Order? I fucking love this song. Josie’s on her vacation far away. Who sings this? Who is that girl? Who cares? Can I snort coke off her tits? Do I need to ask first? What’s polite discourse in the Champagne Room? Wait is this a strip club?

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I was doing grams at a time at my peak. I OD’d once. I was high again later that night. I remember spending the night singing Motley Crue songs and telling people I was Nikki Sixx. It wasn’t like coke was the only thing I’d do during this period either. Coke to come up, Percocet to come down. All sorts of prescription shit to mellow out the areas in between. When my pipes started to bleed, I’d eat 80mg of amphetamine to keep the jitters away. I slept in block units, 2-3 days at a time awake, 2-3 days at a time asleep. I was a modern-day Johnny Cash without any of the talent.

Fourth perk of the partying lifestyle, after a few months, drugs solve almost all of your problems. You don’t have to worry about money, or rent, or jobs, or spouses, or food, or really anything. There are two states of being “Yes, I have enough drugs for today” and “No, I don’t have enough drugs for today.” It’s a beautiful, binary, Boolean existence. Yes or no. Day or night. Black or white. Your happiness can be measured in grams and the solution to all your problems is only a phone call away.

But they don’t tell you these perks are temporary. Sure, there were signs. The eviction notices. Nose bleeds. My clothes were all too big. My gut ached all the time. I took thirteen shits a day, then I couldn’t shit for two weeks. They cut all street grade stuff with chemicals. Laxatives, crystal meth, Adderall, etc… cocaine in Atlanta was like everything else in America, a big diverse ball of chemicals and poisons designed to fuck you up all attached to a price tag that was ten times too high from the last ten guys taking their piece of the pie.

I guess the most surprising thing about all of this, was that when I looked at a calendar it was October. I had been fired in March.

Damn, I thought it was May. I was still looking forward to summer.

I was more than a little concerned when I found myself sitting on a park bench with less than $100, no drugs, no job, no house, no food. Since the start of the year, I had gone from mild mannered drug tester to wealthy business magnate to homeless junkie all because I figured out a stupid trick for masking heroin in drug tests.

The weird thing about life, is that without this improbable series of prior events upending my entire existence into a formless void of blackness marked most genuinely by a distinct lack of drugs, I probably wouldn’t have ever participated in any of the following events. Not only would it not have happened, but if it had, I would’ve passed the opportunity right on by. Sometimes it feels like everything that happens is forcing you in a single direction. Making you be in a certain place so you can say yes to a certain thing. Is that what happened to me? Did I have a choice in this whole thing? If not me, then who?

I got a call on my cell phone. One of the last remaining vestiges of my previous life. I had maybe 14 days left plus whatever time they gave me til missing payments resulted in them turning it off. Had I paid recently? Had I paid ever?

“Hey. John.”

Did I know this girl?

You meet a lot of people when you’re high. Random numbers show up on your phone. Sometimes these people programmed them in on their own and you see you are getting a call from “Your new friend Amber.” Sometimes you obviously programmed them in yourself because you get a call from “Big Tits” or “sex last night”. This was just numbers, no name. Another common occurrence. Someone that wants to get high?

She sighed. “It’s Pearl.”

I did know this girl?

She seemed frustrated by me. “Was all that shit you said true?”

I pulled my phone away from my ear to look at it quizzically, but didn’t answer.

“About the drug testing stuff. Like you said you were some sort of drug testing expert. Like a fucking scientist or something. Look can you really help us out? Like you said? Get us all past a test?”

I had no recollection of anything that was happening. I remembered parties, I remembered talking, I remembered doing drugs, but Pearl herself was a mystery still.

“Look, we’ll pay your price. Me and some friends. We’re desperate. We gotta pay you after though.”

“After?” I muttered semi-coherently

“We’re gonna do one of those high-risk clinical trials. I know a guy who can get us in. But…they won’t let you in unless you are clean. And…none of us are clean. But we got a guy who owes us. He’s gonna pull some strings if we can get on the registry. They pay $100K to participate. Cause of the shit with the Grey Plague tests they gotta pay a bunch more now. If even one of us gets in, the money goes into an account. We’re gonna share it. Me and the team at the club.”

Some synapses finally snapped on. Pearl. Stripper. User. Friend? No. Acquaintance. Danced at The Buffalo. Beautiful. I had spent the better part of a week there once. A wonderful week.

“So…me and some of the guys and girls that dance at the club wanted me to ask. Can you do it? We need it like now. They test us in four days.” In my head I was already saying yes. Honestly, I would’ve said yes to anything she asked because I was cold and lonely, and she was a girl and pretty. I was lying though. I couldn’t. But I did have an idea.

“I’ll give you a discount. You can skip the payment. Get me in the trial,” I said. It had been 30 minutes since I ran out of drugs, and I was already sick of being poor and sober. $100,000 bucks sounded like a new lease on life.