How to Say ‘I’m Fucked’ in French
By Jason Smith
Because I wouldn’t tell the French police — the Gendarmerie, or whatever they called themselves — where I got the OxyContin, the hospital simply kicked me out. I went to hail a taxi but realized I had no money. I didn’t even have a fucking wallet. I walked for over an hour through the streets of Nice, the promise of the Xanax in my room the only thing that kept me going through the agony of withdrawal. The Naloxone the doctors hit me with to bring me back left me feeling sick. Finally, I arrived at my hotel, exhausted and hungry, an hour removed from an overdose and ready to pick up right where I left off.
I needed more.
“Hello, I think I lost my room key,” I said to the man working the desk.
“Your name?” he asked.
“Jason Smith.”
“I see here,” he explained, “your check out eez this morning.”
“Huh? This morning? Like, tomorrow this morning or yesterday this morning?”
“Sir,” he said, “I don’t understand.”
“This morning? You said this morning. What do you mean? How did I check out? I was in the hospital. Wait…fuck, what day is it?” I realized I didn’t know if it was dusk or dawn.
“It is Tuesday, sir,” he told me, which was absolutely no help.
“What about my stuff? My passport? There was some medicine?”
“No, we don’t have nothing,” he said.
“What? I had a passport and some Xanax! I want my stuff,” I yelled.
“Sir, there was nothing in your room.”
Just then I vaguely remembered at some point in my blackout returning to my room for my passport and more Xanax. But it felt like a dream. I’d deteriorated to the point where there was no distinction between dreams and reality. I didn’t know what was real anymore.
“Is it night time?” I asked the man.
“Yes, sir,” he said, starting to look concerned. “It’s night time.”
Walking out of the hotel, I walked until I found the train station, where the homeless were sleeping. I curled up under one of the benches and closed my eyes. Just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, a police officer nudged me with his boot to tell me that it was midnight, and I had to leave the station. Making matters worse, it started to rain.
Finding a bush that offered slight cover from the rain, I curled up into a ball and thought about my life.
This right here should have been my “bottom.” You often hear addicts talk about hitting rock bottom, having a moment of clarity, where they see the destruction they’re causing in the world and decide to make a personal change. This entire fiasco came exactly 72 hours after my meeting Marco, the psychiatrist who prescribed me the Xanax. I had no luggage, no wallet, no cell phone, no passport, no money, and fairly certain I had no more job, because how the fuck do you explain losing 2000 Euros to your boss when you didn’t even make it out of the airport? This should have been my bottom. I wish I could say it was.
“Jason is a great writer who’s clearly done the life-destroying research that I can relate to. This is the voice of a new generation of drug addicts.” — Jerry Stahl, NY Times bestselling author of Permanent Midnight and Happy Mutant Baby Pills
“This memoir grabs you by the throat on the first page and doesn’t let go until you’re done, in one sitting — gasping for breath because you know, finally, what it’s like to be a drug addict without having been one yourself.” — Jonathan Alter, former senior editor Newsweek, NBC News, MSNBC
Excerpted from The Bitter Taste of Dying by Jason Smith, Thought Catalog Books, July 6, 2015.
E-book available for purchase from Amazon, and iBook.
Hardcover and paperback available on Amazon and at www.authorjasonsmith.com.
Contact Jason here.
(Photo source: Carole Chabut/EyeEm/Getty)
