"Oh. That photo."
Back in the early 90's while I was in highschool, my friend's dad used to organize some of the infamous L.A. warehouse parties, ultimately resulting in part to the passing of the R.A.V.E act. The upsides were free admission to as many people as we could cram into our cars, and a cut of the profit (2-3 thousand dollars) for getting the word out discreetly as possible. We would take the thousands, spend it all on MDMA and resell into the show and double our money, I was dirt fucking poor before that. We could give less of a shit who came to these, as long as they had the money for admission and party favors (mostly preyed on high school kids in upscale neighborhoods). After a year, it was just a job to us. All of these nights blend into one mass except for one.
Thats when I met Alice. When I first saw her, I knew I could sell her drugs because I knew she would buy them.
After a year in the crowd you develop an eye for what we called "needers". We looked for people who needed drugs as well as wanted them. They all look like they have terrible stories to tell, but one of those same stories had sewn their lips shut. Alice was the definition of a needer, as well as beautiful and had railroad track scars on both arms. I dont know what it was about her that made her different from all of the other pieces broken glass that swept themselves under the rug. Maybe it was her eyes. I've never seen a pair like them. They were hollow in the most beautiful way, and they made you feel hollow too. I offered her drugs in exchange for a conversation, and she accepted. Me and Alice has a lot in common turns out, no real plans for a future just living in the scene. I had shit grades so school wasn't in my plan and we just talked about running away and going someplace different. I had $28,000 in cash at that point and to me that felt like a mountain of money. I showed alice the cash and asked her if she wanted to actually do it. Run away, and cut all ties. I was a little more than surprised when she agreed, but hey I had been meaning to do this for a long time and I could spend years looking at her eyes and she assured me she has nothing holding her back. So we piled all of my cash into my car and just drove. We ended up in Colorado by random. My shitty car broke down right outside of Boulder CO, our original plan was just to stay the night there, but we ended on staying and falling in love with it. I got us some shitty apartment and we just lived for awhile. Went hiking, talked, and played ourselves off as college kids. We first did heroin with one of the people I had met at a college party, and it did not take long at all for us to get latched to it. We had no responsibilities, and zero things to do in the daytime with school in session. The heroin drained all of the rest of our cash in months. I started to sell drugs at concerts in denver to feed our addiction. The money was nowhere near the level it was at in the Warehouses, but we got by. Heroin came first. We were homeless for a few months, but then I started fixing peoples computers on the side through a news paper ad I scraped the money together for. Still crippled by addiction, but we had a roof over our head. Me and Alice fell in and out of love alot. I could never tell if she cared about me or if she just cared about me bringing money home so we could get a fix. Ill never know. Alice killed herself with an overdose in the Summer of 1997. That broke me for a long time. I lost my job and became homeless again. I begged for money, I got really good at it too. I found that you can make more money in the poorer neighborhoods then the richer ones. Heroin was my life at this point. I was riding my bike one winter night through one of the worst white outs ive ever seen trying to find someplace warm when something just clicked in my head. I think the actual thought was “I dont want to be cold anymore”. I got off of my bike and just cried. For what felt like hours I just fucking cried. It took me about 3 months to curb my addiction. I prioritised my life into 1. get off of heroin 2.Get off of the streets 3.get the fuck out of here. After number 1 was out of the way, I used some of my begging money to buy some clothes at a thrift store, and get a add in the paper again to fix peoples computers. I gave them the address and phone number of a ex-homeless man I met who told me I could use his address and phone number for jobs. He took the calls, and I would go check for them 3 times a day. I was making good money again. I got a place, bought a car, and saved up a bit of money to go back to California. I knew i couldn't go back to my parents, a year before I got in contact with them and told them everything. When they heard the word “heroin” they told me not to come back. This was right around 2003. I moved to riverside and started fixing computers again. I met my wife there and weren't making boats of money but enough to keep the utilities running. I started learning to program right around 2004, just for fun. A few years went by like this, untill I read about iphone application development. I made a few crappy apps and made a few dollars, but never enough to be a full time job, so I stopped for ahwile. I picked it up a few years later and one of my apps (im not going to say which one) took right off. I made $200,000 in a few months. I dropped everything to make more, and while not eclipsing the first one made me into a rich, but not wealthy man. I took 80% of what I made, hired a bunch of college kids and started my company to develop corporate applications for medium to large businesses. We were profitable within our first 6 months and its been an upward wave since then. Often times I look back and think that this is all a dream and im still crying in the snow, but here I am, a happy, and successful man with twins on the way. If any of you get tired of being cold, head south and be thankful for every step towards the sun.
Every few months Alice would pick up her things and drive to a new part of the country and find some hole to crawl into. She told me some of the stories that had broken her. I asked her what she was running from, and she told me "everything". I asked her if she would ever stop running and she told me "never".
I asked her if I could run with her, I told her that I had cash. I told her I was the same way, that I needed to run, but the truth is I wanted to make sure that she would never get trapped in some dark place that she could not climb out of.
She agreed.
We left that night, I piled in 24 thousand dollars into my bag in tens and twenties and we just drove. We decided on Colorado on the way. We slept in the car most of the time, and talked and smoked cigarettes on the drives. I learned about Alice in those two days.
Alice grew up in foster care, and was repeatedly sexually abused by her housemates at one of homes she ended up in. They told her that they would bury her alive if she told anyone. When she started cutting, they shipped her off like a dog in a crate to a home for troubled children in Oregon where she wasn't allowed to eat with utensils until her psychologist let her, and was not allowed to leave her room for the bathroom without a chaperone. She told me she begged for death. She told me in that home she tried to kill herself 4 times, once by locking herself in a closet with ammonia and bleach.
When they took a trip to the Zoo, she ran. She hitchhiked to New York City where she lived in an abandoned warehouse with a homeless population until some tweakers raped her and almost beat her to death. So she ran again,and she decided to never be anywhere too long. She went months like this, and eventually ended up in Los Angeles. She told me she had to do things to survive that would make anyone want to drink until they died.
When we arrived in Colorado the leaves had just started to change. We went from hotel to hotel occupying our time with drugs and Blockbuster movies crammed into a countless number of hotel VHS's. Her favorite was Goodfellas.
Colorado is where I started to fall in love with her. We spent months going from room to room, never looking back. They were the best months of my life. One morning she pulled me out of bed and drove us to Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder,CO. We hiked up to a spot where you could see the countryside sprawled out like map. I snapped a photo on my Polaroid right as she turned around with the most beautiful and peaceful smile on her face. A photo I still carry.
When we started running out of cash I started making friends and got into selling ex at concerts in Denver. It was easy money. I was making nowhere near what I was in the warehouses, but it was money none the less. Alice would come with me most of the time, she would just watch the shows as I worked. I liked it this way, If alice was in the same room as me it would always take me off edge.
One night, Alice disappeared from a concert I was working, and was not returning my calls. Figuring she just got tired of the act, or went to get some food. At the end of the show, I returned to where I parked my car to find it gone. I thought Alice started running again. The bus ride back to the motel was filled with terror.
When I walked in, the sight before me.
The sight.
The smell.
A hollow light somewhere inside of me was extinguished. Leaving a bittersweet smoke of memories that folded and bended inside of me. And then there was nothing. Hollow again.
She had purposely overdosed on Oxycodone.
Every few months since then, I go back to that hotel room, sit on the bed, look at the photo of her on flagstaff and contemplate ending my life and following her wherever she went.