Chapter Two

This is where I have to choose words wisely, and cautiously decide what to divulge and what to refrain from spilling. There is a delicate balance between seeing Ziggy as a monster and therefore seeing me as a pathetic co-dependant wuss, and seeing Ziggy as someone with a help-less disease and me as someone strong enough to trust/love/forgive. I don't want either of us to come off as self righteous heroic super humans or wastes of the human space either.

And so, here we return:
When Ziggy called that Saturday morning, I was excited, but I honestly had NO idea whether or not this was a date, or just a friend from work trying to cheer me up with a night out. I was still in my one bedroom apartment at this time. I slept on a futon in the living room and the bedroom belonged to Luke. Even though he was only about to turn 2, I wanted him to have everything normal that he could possibly have, so the room was his except for my dresser. I was saving up and had my eyes on a townhouse down the street that I would buy just 6 months later with the gift of a down payment from my dad.

So I was embarrassed for Ziggy to pick me up - I stupidly placed him on a pedestal from day one and that is where I wind up being partially to blame for part of his need to hide his dark side. When someone has you up on a pedestal, the last thing you want to do is disappoint them by having to step down in front of them. A year later, I would learn that I had no reason for the embarrassment, but having no idea what neighborhood he came from or how he lived yet, I thought that he would find my dwelling to be shocking and pathetic - as if I was looking for a superman to save Luke and I, when the reality was that I was doing better than he was and just didn't know it yet.

I went to Target and bought a brand new outfit that I can still remember to this day. We ate at Roadhouse Grill and then saw Bruce Almighty afterwards. We struggled through conversation at dinner. We'd known each other and worked together for so long and amazingly were both shy and awkward. In the middle of the movie, it happened. His hand grazed my knee and just as I thought it was accidental, his hand found mine. Oh. My. God. HE LIKED ME! In the car he explained that while he knew it wasn't the best timing, that he saw the window open and he knew he needed to jump in fast since I didn't tend to stay single very long. That still goes down as one of the nicest things he's ever said to me. He actually saw me as this unattainable person with a line of suitors a mile long.

After that we had several other small dates. Nothing progressed really, and I soon learned that Ziggy was very green in the relationship department. Though he had lost his virginity in high school on the floor of a Subway bathroom (no friggin lie, he was a sandwich artist and lost his virginity to an older co-worker at work), he had actually never been in a relationship. Being painfully aware of his physical features, he was often called Alf or Dr. Evil by friends, due to a small resemblance, or what they thought was a resemblance to both characters. In fact, his own real nickname given to him by friends in high school, Ziggy, came from the size of the cartoon character's nose. Personally, I found his prominent nose and cleft chin to be painfully sexy and he reminded me of my life long crush, John Travolta.

A few months later, the young work crew was pulled into a meeting and literally yelled at for our cavorting and friendships and we were warned that we all needed to grow up and realize that this was work and not 90210 - there was a whole lotta messin going on other than Ziggy and I. That night Ziggy did not call. I was crushed. My thought was that the meeting was about the triflin ho's and had nothing to do with the budding relationship that we had hidden so well. We only went out in his parents' car, and we would go 50 miles out if we chose to be in public - it wasn't us that had been caught.

The next day was Valentine's Day and I didn't hear from him. A few months later he called and told me that he had pulled away from me specifically because he knew that I needed my job way more than he did, and that he was afraid of jeopardizing it, because after the meeting, he was pulled in one on one with our bosses and told something that would keep us apart for a long time...he was being promoted and would become my official boss in less than a month.

I was devastated over a good thing ending so suddenly. I was devastated about him getting promoted and not me. But time passed and we got back into our work groove. I began dating again and we went our separate ways outside of work.

I would hear from him on the phone every now and then. He normally called late at night when he was sad. Amazingly, we would have some of the deepest conversations on those nights discussing everything from religion to death to love and childhoods. These were the nights when I learned how desperately he wanted to have a relationship, and more specifically, one with me, but he loved his job and he knew I loved mine and it was almost as if we were just stuck. We hung up at 6:00am just to shower and head in to work on many a morning, our cell phones scalding hot and slimy from sweat from six to eight hours of continuous use.

About a year later, we decided to throw caution to the wind. We began dating again - very cautiously. We only went out in his parents' car. We went as far as Slidell and Baton Rouge for dates. We decided to allow the relationship to finally just happen and if we found ourselves serious at any point, then we would discuss options for work. At work, we were absolutely amazing. Being my boss, he wound up being harder on me than anyone and we pulled the wool over every one's eyes. We still got comments about how great we would be together, but no one actually suspected us together. Later on, we would get sloppier about it and a loud mouth salesman would bust our cover, but for now, everything was going great.

He was so funny and so sweet and so innocent. Though he had been laid before, he had never been loved and never had the opportunity to love in return so everything was new to him. It was precious. He appreciated the tiniest of things - simple kissing, hanging out and being close. He secretly let me always keep one of his toe nails painted pink for months, just so that he could be reminded that he actually had a girl in his life. We had secret codes at work. Secret "work" words that meant "I Love You". We took weekend trips to anywhere we could go where we could be outside and a normal couple without worrying about being caught.

A few months into the relationship, I noticed strange behavior. I won't string you along or foreshadow, I'll just lay it on the line. Ziggy had experimented with every drug on earth. You name it, and he's tried it with the exception of heroin and crack, that is. Of course I had no idea. I've never in my life (honest to God) even tried pot, so I just figured he was like me and if he had ever experimented, I never imagined it was more than pot. I wasn't a goody goody, I was just raised with an addict father and an addict sister and the stuff just scared the shit out of me, so I didn't touch it. Towards the end of college, a friend handed him a Vicoden and that's when his love affair with opiates began.

Sure he was moody, but you did hear me mention my family, right? Moodiness = normality for me. Nothing seemed askew.

By the time we were dating seriously and "in love", he was crushing and snorting oxycontins about 2 - 3 times a week. Now enters his side of the story for a moment here, as it was once told to me by his own sponsor on a night when I almost threw in the towel and gave up on him. When we began dating, he wanted desperately to have that relationship and to be clean and just start a new life. Have you ever been fat and tried to diet unhealthily? Have you ever tried to quit smoking cold turkey? What happens? For the majority of us, we attempt to quit with no help/support/assistance and a day or a week later we are failures stuffing twinkies down our throats or smoking pack after pack like a chimney. Now take that experience and multiply by the strength of an opiate. Every attempt to quit was doing nothing more than increasing his addiction and he became absolutely powerless against it.

And so that was his life. His growing addiction was hidden from family, work and even his best friends. He was embarrassed and ashamed and desperate to be sober. He would quit cold turkey, hit the withdrawals (opiate withdrawals are as difficult, if not worse than heroin withdrawals) and then the next day he was using twice as much as before. The cycle continued for over a year and this is now where we are in the story.

He's sick all the time. He's constantly either sweating, or puking or having leg cramps. I'm constantly begging him to see a doctor, thinking that he must be dying from some kind of stomach cancer. He's spending so much time with friends instead of me that I'm convinced that either I'm fat and ugly or he is gay. (I would later learn that all that hanging out with buddies was really just him going to dealer's houses - his friends even had no clue what he was really doing...in fact they all hated me for taking him away from them, or so they thought).

He's almost 100% impotent at this point (opiates are notorious for this fun side effect), which increases my worries of either his homosexuality or my fat/ugliness ten fold. He's constantly broke. I made about $30,000 by this time and he was at $40,000. I was raising a kid and owned a townhouse. He lived with his mother and was always broke. I began thinking that he was gambling or a million other things that I just couldn't bust him on. I'm waking up at night to find him balled up in corners crying his eyes out and begging God for help...I'm scared shitless. This perfectly great guy is turning into a maniac right in front of my eyes. I'm afraid of him and yet I feel so bad for whatever "illness" this is that he's battling, that I can't just walk away from him.

I. Never. Considered. Drugs. Ever.

Ziggy was too immaculate, too clean, too polished and shiny to be a drug addict. I began checking his phone, digging through his over night bag when he slept over, rifling through his car while he slept looking for any clue on earth that would tell me why this wonderful friend and lover was turning into this monster. But he was a master at hiding it all...and skilled in turning it all around and blaming it all on me - a skill that most addicts are capable of.

And then it happened - the end. In a final attempt to get him to just TELL ME WHAT WAS WRONG WITH MEEEEEEE, I forbade him to leave the house. With one fell swoop, he took me by the head and threw me across the room and stormed out of the house.

The next day, I got a prescription for Prozac, I began seeing a therapist and I very slowly began life without him, determined that whether he was gay, a compulsive gambler, addicted to prostitutes or whatever it was, that it had to be HIM and couldn't be ME and that I would get myself out of this situation and find my health and my sanity again.

And this my friends is where Ziggy's hell truly begins.

To be continued.....