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I hadn’t called Doug or Steven to let them know I was coming, so when I landed there that night, I was on my own. There wasn’t much going on around town, but I didn’t care.

“Hey, how far is this place?” I asked the limo driver.

“About forty-five minutes, sir,” he said.

“Okay. Listen, can you stop off somewhere to get me some silverware?” I asked. “I’ve got some food back here that I really want to eat.”

The driver drove for about twenty minutes and stopped at a Denny’s. He came out and handed me a knife and a fork, wrapped in a napkin. Great, I thought.

“Hey,” I said. “Listen, is there anywhere else we can stop? I need a full set of silverware.”

After another fifteen minutes we stopped again and this time I got the spoon. I promptly put up the divider between the driver and me, got my drugs out, and cooked up my meal.

I did my fix and relaxed while we drove to the hotel. The scrappy underbrush of the Arizona landscape suddenly looked much more inviting and the tinted glass made it look even more lush.

When we got to the resort, the Venetian, I took my one-man party into my room. It wasn’t the kind of place that I was used to, because it didn’t look like a hotel: it was a collection of bungalows along a beautifully manicured golf course… a lot like that place Doug took me to in Hawaii, come to think of it. My room was great: there were these sheer white curtains around the bed, a small adobe-style fireplace, and a bathroom with a glass-enclosed shower—it was like a well-appointed spa. It was so relaxing that I could think of no better therapy than shooting coke and smack all night to soothe my soul.

I soon forgot that the shit I brought was meant to last me four days—I was acting as if I had something to celebrate. Within hours I was out of heroin. It’s a common problem for junkies: when you’re high, you’re in a nice contented state, everything is good and mellow, and that’s when you make your plans; that’s when you figure out how much dope you need. Then you start doing your dope and everything changes. You reposition everything as you’re going; you find reasons why you can and should do a hit right now. And once you’ve done that, you find a reason why you should just finish what you have because, hey, you won’t need it later.

You do all of this crazy, psycho shit, because when it comes right down to it, the day you first did heroin, the time you did it and loved it, when your system was pure and unadulterated, that was the best time you will ever have doing it. You spend the rest of your using career chasing that high that you’ll never find again, so you convince yourself that you will get back there if you just keep at it. You try all different methods of getting there, but you’re chasing a ghost. You end up needing to get high just to feel well: you want just enough to not feel bad, just enough to get you to feel fine. But when you have a nice amount of it, you still try to find your original high—and before you know it, in one night, you’ve gone through what you planned to ration yourself over four days. Your careful planning is fucked.

That was no reason to stop the party, as far as I was concerned, since there was plenty of coke left to shoot. No matter how meticulous you are with the smack, it will always be done well before the coke. And when you start really shooting coke, the hallucinations you get are so real that you can no longer tell yourself that you’re just high and that it’s your mind playing tricks on you. It’s like being on acid, but with a whole different attitude. It’s scary and realistic, and not at all psychedelic. In my case, it got violent and terrifying. I had enjoyed that element of the drug in the past, but this time I went over the edge.

I kept shooting coke that night just to keep shooting; I’ve mentioned how I liked sticking the needle through my skin, into the vein, and feeling the drugs enter my body and take over. I also loved the ritual; the cooking, the straining, and the tying off almost as much as the high. I was pretty content with myself just going through those motions for a few hours.

And then things got weird. I started shadowboxing monsters that I saw on the other side of the sheer curtains that framed the large king-size bed. I was bobbing and weaving, as if I were working out at a gym. This shadowboxing continued all night long until the sun came up, drowning every shadow in the room and ending my activity. Once I snapped out of that trance, I figured that I should probably head out in search of Steven and Doug.

First, I decided to shower, to straighten up a bit. But before that, I opted for one last shot of coke. I felt great when I got under the big rain-style, luxury showerhead. And as I was there under the nice warm water, the coke hallucinations hit me harder than they had that night or ever before: full daylight was coming in through the skylight, but I watched as long shadows emerged from the corners. They crept up the floor toward me, up the glass of the shower, and took the shape of the shadow monsters I’d boxed earlier. They were right in front of me, filling the glass door, and I wasn’t going to let them get me, so I punched them as hard as I could, sending the entire pane of glass into pieces all over the floor. I stood there with a cut hand, under the water, paralyzed, paranoid, scanning the bathroom for other assailants. And that’s when my little buddies showed up.

They always looked like the creature in Predator to me, but a fraction the size and translucent blue-gray; they were wiry and muscular with the same pointed heads and rubbery-looking dreadlocks. They’d always been a welcome, carefree distraction, but this hallucination was sinister. I could see them gathering in the doorway, there was an army of them, holding tiny machine guns and weapons that looked like harpoons.

I was terrified; I ran across the glass on the floor and slammed the sliding-glass door to the bathroom shut. Blood began to form in a pool under me, issuing out from my feet, but I didn’t feel a thing; I watched in horror as the Predators squeezed their limbs between the door and door frame and began to slide it open. I put all my weight against it in an effort to hold it shut, but it was no use; they were winning and I was losing my balance on all of the broken glass.

I decided to flee: I broke through the sliding-glass door, cutting myself further and spraying debris all over the room. When I ran out of the bungalow, the bright sunlight, the shocking green of the grass, and the colors of the sky were overwhelming; everything was jarring and vivid to me. Everything in my room had been so real that I was not prepared, in my condition, to be so suddenly transported from the drawn curtains into the shimmering daylight.

I just ran… fully naked and bleeding, down the fairway, away from the army of Predators I saw over my shoulder every time I turned to look. I needed a reprieve from the harsh daylight, so I ducked through the open door of another bungalow. I hid behind the door, then behind a chair, as the Predators began to fill up the room. There was a maid in there, making the bed, and she started to scream when she saw me. She screamed louder when I tried to use her as a human shield to protect myself from the small hunters on my trail.

I fled again, running at top speed through the resort with a translucent army at my heels; the colors and scenery only added to my dementia. I made it to the back of the main clubhouse and went through the back door and into the kitchen; all of the cooks and activity were dizzying, so I ran out of there, right into the lobby. There were guests and staff everywhere and I remember grabbing a well-dressed businessman standing there with his luggage, once again using him as a human shield. He seemed so together that I believed he could hold the Predators at bay, but I was wrong. They actually got to me at that point and started climbing up my legs, loading their little guns. The businessman didn’t want anything to do with me; he shook free so I backed into a utility closet somewhere near the kitchen. As a crowd gathered, I ran out of there again, back outside, eventually finding darkness and shelter in a shed on the fairway, where I hid behind a lawn mower, until finally, the hallucinations began to subside.