The Angel of Xanax
I have three Xanax in my pocket that were given to me by a woman I met in Walmart tonight.
Let me back up..
I went to Walmart tonight after Barnes&Noble kicked me out at 10PM. I mainly went there because I didn't want to go home yet; the apartment was empty and I had a three hour nap today so I was far from sleepy and feeling restless. I figured I'd kill some time walking around Walmart, burning off the half-a-million calories in the tall iced mocha toffee-nut latte I'd just had, and besides, I needed milk for breakfast tomorrow. So, I picked out groceries in my usual repertoire of food I like to eat: mushrooms, jalapenos, granny smith apples, the miniature 100 calorie cans of Sprite, frozen grouper fillets, and mini dark chocolate Reese's cups (yaay Halloween!). I finished shopping quicker than I'd expected and I wanted to kill more time, so I avoided picking up the milk, my excuse for being there, until I was ready to check out so it wouldn't get warm. I walked around electronics [as an aside, why are ink cartridges no longer behind glass?] and shoes, and eventually found myself in the accessories aisle, looking at seven dollar White Stag necklaces and thinking how much jewelry in Walmart resembles Claire's, albeit even more expensive than Claire's, when this middle-aged woman walks past me, does a double-take and turns around to talk to me. Now, I've experienced this more times than I can count; people stop me all the time to tell me how much their admire my zebra print D&G glasses, or, when my hair was bright and colorful, they’d stop me to ask insipid questions about how I got it that way: "Is that permanent?", "Do you have to beach it?", “Where do you buy the dye?“ etc. So, when this particular woman turned around to look at me, I was prepared to answer with a prompt "Thank you, I got them at Lenscrafters", but instead, she just looked at me for a moment and asked quietly, "Are you okay?" Assuming she thought I looked lost, I nodded and said, "Yeah". I thought at first she might be an employee there, but after inspecting her in her tank top and pink pajama bottoms with faux Ugg boots, the predictable wardrobe of a late-night Walmart shopper, it was clear she hadn't just gotten off a shift.
"Are you sure?" she asked me.
"Yeah, “ I shrugged, “I mean, I'm a little stressed out but.."
"I can tell," she said. "Let me give you a hug," and she did. I usually lie about how I’m feeling, to everyone; it just seems easier, and now I’m telling the truth to some stranger? What’s come over me?
She said could tell I was "just like her", that I was on the “edge of a nervous breakdown“, those were her words. She said knew by looking at me, that it showed on my face. Now, I admit, I hadn’t showered in two days; My greasy hair mixed with hairspray was pinned back, out of my face with a tiny clip, I was wearing no makeup and my eyebrows desperately need to be reacquainted with hot wax, but I thought I had pulled it together enough to go out in public. At the very least, I thought I’d be able to fit in with all the other white-trash cretins they let in to shop at Walmart after dark. Apparently I was mistaken.
She said they knew her at Walmart, and someone at Walmart recognized it in her, just as she was doing with me. She began to explain what happened to her. She showed me yellow and blue bruises on her arm, left wrist and chest. She said her daughter took it out on her when she forbade Taylor, the daughter, to see this boy whom had convinced Taylor to cut her wrists in order to convince her mom to let her have more freedom [whatever to that logic; that's just what she told me..]. “My fifteen year-old daughter was going through it emotionally, but she took it out on me physically.” She told me, “ I used to be just like you; I was always drop-dead gorgeous, 120 pounds, French-manicure, all of it, and my life turned into a living hell when my daughter turned thirteen." She was fifty years now old with grey sideburns and a face hardened by age and too much sun, fraught with worry lines. Honestly, she reminded me a lot of my own mother.
“I know that you’re sitting here thinking ‘here’s a crazy woman trying to talk to me in the middle of Walmart’, but I know what you’re going through; you’re lost, it feels like you aren’t really here, like you can’t hear anyone, not even me talking to you right now.” She kept saying things like that. “And it’s not like you’re suicidal, you don’t want to kill yourself, you just feel like sometimes you’d like to not wake up.“ Somewhere in there, I must have begun to cry, because the next thing I know, she’s embracing me and telling me it’s all right and I can’t see for the tears. I knew I was a total mess, I’ve been an emotional basket case for months, but I didn’t realize it was visible; I didn’t know anyone could see it. That’s why I was crying.
I walked around the mall for hours a few weeks ago, sitting on the benches and people watching, half hoping someone, anyone, would sit down next to me and strike up a conversation. I wanted that social connection; I’ve been so socially starved for so long and I’m intensely lonely that I wanted to be out in public all day, just walking around and seeing people, listening to their conversations, instead of cooped up in my empty room. I can only escape into a book or movie for so long before I’m confronted with the reality that there is no one in my life. None of my friends want to hang out ever, I haven’t had a boyfriend in nearly a year, and even my sister is too busy to spend time with me. As much as I dislike being at home in Ocala, at least there is the constant sound of life in my house; social interaction with my parents is better than no social interaction at all, and sleeping on the couch is a small price to pay for sanity. So, when she said she could tell I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want anything I had picked out in the cart, that I was just going through the motions, that I was just there to be there, I guess I lost it. What really bit down to the bone was when she said, “You’re a beautiful young girl, but you feel the ugliest you’ve ever felt in your life.” And, as I tweeted earlier, I felt and looked like I’d been “ravaged by a dump truck full of shit”.
She tried to cheer me up by telling me that she got really gassy when she was all messed up like that. “That should make you laugh,” she said. “You know what would help you? I know. I’ll tell you where you can go to get help.” I was pretty sure she was going to tell me that my soul was wounded, that she had been saved, and that Jesus could save me, too, and recommend that I go to her church this Sunday. I had been contemplating returning to church anyway, so I was prepared for that sort of reaction.
That was not what she said.
She told me I needed to go to the walk-in clinic. I realize now that she thought I was much younger than I am. “Tell them a good friend made you try Xanax and that it helped you,” she said, and told me to ask them if they could give me even just a few pills to make me feel better. She said it was the only thing that ever worked for her, and that when she started out, she could only take half a pill because a whole one made her sleepy, so that’s all I should try at first. “And, I swear to you, you’ll start to feel better. I’ve had one relapse, but it really helped me.” she said, and told me, “It can be addictive, but you don’t look like an addictive person,” to which I said “No” and kind of laughed; addictive? I’m straight-edge for Christ’s sake! A fact I neglected to share with her; I figured it was simpler to just go along with whatever she was saying rather than have her waste an exorbitant amount of time trying to convince me of the benefits of prescription drugs.
I thought she‘d leave at this point, after sharing her experience and telling me where I could get help, but no, the encounter had only just begun. “Come, walk with me” she said, and I followed her; I wanted to see how far down this rabbit hole I could fall, reasonably speaking. “I told myself I’d be in and out real quick, but when I saw you there, I had to stop,“ she told me. We went to the folder/binder/back-to-school supply section; she needed two 1” binders and one 1 and ¼” binder, which I don’t even think exist, but they had to be the kind of binders with the rings on the side, not the middle, so you can fold one of the sides back and write on it. We spent several minutes trying to find the right ones, and when she found them, she put them in my cart, said something about never eating bratwurst before you go shopping, and had me follow her to the bathroom in the back of the store.
I don’t know what we talked about as we walked. I hoped she didn’t want to watch me swallow the Xanax, as I had no intention of actually taking it. Then, I wondered if she would make me pay for it, and, anyway, I only had ten dollars on me -- what’s the going street rate for Xanax? What if she was a pusher and this was all a clever ploy, a strategic way for her to meet new clients? Do I look like a pill popper? I also wondered if she wanted to rob me, steal my wallet, but that seemed unlikely. Then, at last, I went through a mental list of all the people I knew who might want to buy a Xanax.
“The best thing about this is, you don’t know me, you don’t know my name, you can just say a friend or relative gave it to you,“ she said.
She lead me to the bathrooms. A woman left as we came in, and there was someone in the handicap stall. At first she wanted to wait for them to clear out, but when they looked to be in there for the long haul, she ducked in the first stall and went for her purse. She spoke in a whisper. “I hope they don’t come out” she said. She told me she’d give me her phone number, although she never did, and showed me the bottle of Xanax. She pointed to the label with her thumbnail, I guess to prove to me that’s what it was. “I never, I mean, I never do this but ..“ she shook out three pills, handed them to me. I slid them swiftly into my back pocket. She told me to take a half of one and that she’d wait for me outside the bathroom. I washed my hands -- I wasn’t actually going to take the Xanax, and left the bathroom. She was talking to an employee when I came out of the bathroom.
“This is ___” I forgot his name, even though he was wearing a name tag. She said he was one of the ones who helped her, or recognized her problem or something, and she told him that I was an old friend. Then, she said she needed to get going and took her binders. She hugged me once and repeatedly advised me to go to the walk-in clinic, where this walk-in clinic is I have no idea, and that they could help me.
“You’ll feel much better in the morning, and you’ll be digging through your pants looking for that pill, hoping you didn’t flush it, I promise you,” she told me. “Now, keep one, so you can show them,” she instructed, so the people at the walk-in clinic would be able to tell what I’d taken. She said something about how I’d see her again in Walmart and say, “There’s that crazy lady who helped me.”
I thanked her -- what was I supposed to say? -- and she left. I went to go get the milk.
On the drive home, I thought, what if that incident sparked the spiraling demise of my existence? What if those three Xanax begat a lifelong addiction to drugs? Or, worse, lead to a life of homelessness and prostitution. What if because of her I became a druggy, and dropped out of school and totally ruined my life? It’s not often that a turning point in ones life is so fantastically evident. I’m being melodramatic, I realize this, but suppose two weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I threw away all my convictions about staying poison free and transformed into a completely different person, lost down in the bottom of a pill bottle?
I suppose she thought she was just being a good Samaritan. Perhaps she thought she was the Angel of Xanax, sent down to Earth to give guidance and salvation via the dispersion of prescription drugs, who knows?
It would probably make a better story if I’d flushed them immediately, but I didn’t. The three little peach colored pills are still in my back pocket. I’m going to sell them to a friend tomorrow for five bucks.
Let me back up..
I went to Walmart tonight after Barnes&Noble kicked me out at 10PM. I mainly went there because I didn't want to go home yet; the apartment was empty and I had a three hour nap today so I was far from sleepy and feeling restless. I figured I'd kill some time walking around Walmart, burning off the half-a-million calories in the tall iced mocha toffee-nut latte I'd just had, and besides, I needed milk for breakfast tomorrow. So, I picked out groceries in my usual repertoire of food I like to eat: mushrooms, jalapenos, granny smith apples, the miniature 100 calorie cans of Sprite, frozen grouper fillets, and mini dark chocolate Reese's cups (yaay Halloween!). I finished shopping quicker than I'd expected and I wanted to kill more time, so I avoided picking up the milk, my excuse for being there, until I was ready to check out so it wouldn't get warm. I walked around electronics [as an aside, why are ink cartridges no longer behind glass?] and shoes, and eventually found myself in the accessories aisle, looking at seven dollar White Stag necklaces and thinking how much jewelry in Walmart resembles Claire's, albeit even more expensive than Claire's, when this middle-aged woman walks past me, does a double-take and turns around to talk to me. Now, I've experienced this more times than I can count; people stop me all the time to tell me how much their admire my zebra print D&G glasses, or, when my hair was bright and colorful, they’d stop me to ask insipid questions about how I got it that way: "Is that permanent?", "Do you have to beach it?", “Where do you buy the dye?“ etc. So, when this particular woman turned around to look at me, I was prepared to answer with a prompt "Thank you, I got them at Lenscrafters", but instead, she just looked at me for a moment and asked quietly, "Are you okay?" Assuming she thought I looked lost, I nodded and said, "Yeah". I thought at first she might be an employee there, but after inspecting her in her tank top and pink pajama bottoms with faux Ugg boots, the predictable wardrobe of a late-night Walmart shopper, it was clear she hadn't just gotten off a shift.
"Are you sure?" she asked me.
"Yeah, “ I shrugged, “I mean, I'm a little stressed out but.."
"I can tell," she said. "Let me give you a hug," and she did. I usually lie about how I’m feeling, to everyone; it just seems easier, and now I’m telling the truth to some stranger? What’s come over me?
She said could tell I was "just like her", that I was on the “edge of a nervous breakdown“, those were her words. She said knew by looking at me, that it showed on my face. Now, I admit, I hadn’t showered in two days; My greasy hair mixed with hairspray was pinned back, out of my face with a tiny clip, I was wearing no makeup and my eyebrows desperately need to be reacquainted with hot wax, but I thought I had pulled it together enough to go out in public. At the very least, I thought I’d be able to fit in with all the other white-trash cretins they let in to shop at Walmart after dark. Apparently I was mistaken.
She said they knew her at Walmart, and someone at Walmart recognized it in her, just as she was doing with me. She began to explain what happened to her. She showed me yellow and blue bruises on her arm, left wrist and chest. She said her daughter took it out on her when she forbade Taylor, the daughter, to see this boy whom had convinced Taylor to cut her wrists in order to convince her mom to let her have more freedom [whatever to that logic; that's just what she told me..]. “My fifteen year-old daughter was going through it emotionally, but she took it out on me physically.” She told me, “ I used to be just like you; I was always drop-dead gorgeous, 120 pounds, French-manicure, all of it, and my life turned into a living hell when my daughter turned thirteen." She was fifty years now old with grey sideburns and a face hardened by age and too much sun, fraught with worry lines. Honestly, she reminded me a lot of my own mother.
“I know that you’re sitting here thinking ‘here’s a crazy woman trying to talk to me in the middle of Walmart’, but I know what you’re going through; you’re lost, it feels like you aren’t really here, like you can’t hear anyone, not even me talking to you right now.” She kept saying things like that. “And it’s not like you’re suicidal, you don’t want to kill yourself, you just feel like sometimes you’d like to not wake up.“ Somewhere in there, I must have begun to cry, because the next thing I know, she’s embracing me and telling me it’s all right and I can’t see for the tears. I knew I was a total mess, I’ve been an emotional basket case for months, but I didn’t realize it was visible; I didn’t know anyone could see it. That’s why I was crying.
I walked around the mall for hours a few weeks ago, sitting on the benches and people watching, half hoping someone, anyone, would sit down next to me and strike up a conversation. I wanted that social connection; I’ve been so socially starved for so long and I’m intensely lonely that I wanted to be out in public all day, just walking around and seeing people, listening to their conversations, instead of cooped up in my empty room. I can only escape into a book or movie for so long before I’m confronted with the reality that there is no one in my life. None of my friends want to hang out ever, I haven’t had a boyfriend in nearly a year, and even my sister is too busy to spend time with me. As much as I dislike being at home in Ocala, at least there is the constant sound of life in my house; social interaction with my parents is better than no social interaction at all, and sleeping on the couch is a small price to pay for sanity. So, when she said she could tell I didn’t want any of this, I didn’t want anything I had picked out in the cart, that I was just going through the motions, that I was just there to be there, I guess I lost it. What really bit down to the bone was when she said, “You’re a beautiful young girl, but you feel the ugliest you’ve ever felt in your life.” And, as I tweeted earlier, I felt and looked like I’d been “ravaged by a dump truck full of shit”.
She tried to cheer me up by telling me that she got really gassy when she was all messed up like that. “That should make you laugh,” she said. “You know what would help you? I know. I’ll tell you where you can go to get help.” I was pretty sure she was going to tell me that my soul was wounded, that she had been saved, and that Jesus could save me, too, and recommend that I go to her church this Sunday. I had been contemplating returning to church anyway, so I was prepared for that sort of reaction.
That was not what she said.
She told me I needed to go to the walk-in clinic. I realize now that she thought I was much younger than I am. “Tell them a good friend made you try Xanax and that it helped you,” she said, and told me to ask them if they could give me even just a few pills to make me feel better. She said it was the only thing that ever worked for her, and that when she started out, she could only take half a pill because a whole one made her sleepy, so that’s all I should try at first. “And, I swear to you, you’ll start to feel better. I’ve had one relapse, but it really helped me.” she said, and told me, “It can be addictive, but you don’t look like an addictive person,” to which I said “No” and kind of laughed; addictive? I’m straight-edge for Christ’s sake! A fact I neglected to share with her; I figured it was simpler to just go along with whatever she was saying rather than have her waste an exorbitant amount of time trying to convince me of the benefits of prescription drugs.
I thought she‘d leave at this point, after sharing her experience and telling me where I could get help, but no, the encounter had only just begun. “Come, walk with me” she said, and I followed her; I wanted to see how far down this rabbit hole I could fall, reasonably speaking. “I told myself I’d be in and out real quick, but when I saw you there, I had to stop,“ she told me. We went to the folder/binder/back-to-school supply section; she needed two 1” binders and one 1 and ¼” binder, which I don’t even think exist, but they had to be the kind of binders with the rings on the side, not the middle, so you can fold one of the sides back and write on it. We spent several minutes trying to find the right ones, and when she found them, she put them in my cart, said something about never eating bratwurst before you go shopping, and had me follow her to the bathroom in the back of the store.
I don’t know what we talked about as we walked. I hoped she didn’t want to watch me swallow the Xanax, as I had no intention of actually taking it. Then, I wondered if she would make me pay for it, and, anyway, I only had ten dollars on me -- what’s the going street rate for Xanax? What if she was a pusher and this was all a clever ploy, a strategic way for her to meet new clients? Do I look like a pill popper? I also wondered if she wanted to rob me, steal my wallet, but that seemed unlikely. Then, at last, I went through a mental list of all the people I knew who might want to buy a Xanax.
“The best thing about this is, you don’t know me, you don’t know my name, you can just say a friend or relative gave it to you,“ she said.
She lead me to the bathrooms. A woman left as we came in, and there was someone in the handicap stall. At first she wanted to wait for them to clear out, but when they looked to be in there for the long haul, she ducked in the first stall and went for her purse. She spoke in a whisper. “I hope they don’t come out” she said. She told me she’d give me her phone number, although she never did, and showed me the bottle of Xanax. She pointed to the label with her thumbnail, I guess to prove to me that’s what it was. “I never, I mean, I never do this but ..“ she shook out three pills, handed them to me. I slid them swiftly into my back pocket. She told me to take a half of one and that she’d wait for me outside the bathroom. I washed my hands -- I wasn’t actually going to take the Xanax, and left the bathroom. She was talking to an employee when I came out of the bathroom.
“This is ___” I forgot his name, even though he was wearing a name tag. She said he was one of the ones who helped her, or recognized her problem or something, and she told him that I was an old friend. Then, she said she needed to get going and took her binders. She hugged me once and repeatedly advised me to go to the walk-in clinic, where this walk-in clinic is I have no idea, and that they could help me.
“You’ll feel much better in the morning, and you’ll be digging through your pants looking for that pill, hoping you didn’t flush it, I promise you,” she told me. “Now, keep one, so you can show them,” she instructed, so the people at the walk-in clinic would be able to tell what I’d taken. She said something about how I’d see her again in Walmart and say, “There’s that crazy lady who helped me.”
I thanked her -- what was I supposed to say? -- and she left. I went to go get the milk.
On the drive home, I thought, what if that incident sparked the spiraling demise of my existence? What if those three Xanax begat a lifelong addiction to drugs? Or, worse, lead to a life of homelessness and prostitution. What if because of her I became a druggy, and dropped out of school and totally ruined my life? It’s not often that a turning point in ones life is so fantastically evident. I’m being melodramatic, I realize this, but suppose two weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I threw away all my convictions about staying poison free and transformed into a completely different person, lost down in the bottom of a pill bottle?
I suppose she thought she was just being a good Samaritan. Perhaps she thought she was the Angel of Xanax, sent down to Earth to give guidance and salvation via the dispersion of prescription drugs, who knows?
It would probably make a better story if I’d flushed them immediately, but I didn’t. The three little peach colored pills are still in my back pocket. I’m going to sell them to a friend tomorrow for five bucks.