Some people try to help. Most of them just want to sit and watch the burn: a healthy man becoming a sick man becoming a corpse. The thing is that even with out the drug, it would happen anyway, but who has the time to just watch the natural decay? If you really want to watch someone crumble, you need an accelerant.  

So your friends just sit around and talk behind your back making concerned comments about the “situation” or the “problem” or whatever sanitized word that they can come up with for the rapid rot that has become your daily existence.

 

It isn’t their fault, though, and you know it. They want to help but they have gelded themselves by being willing participants in the early stages of your disease. You all did it together. A sexy, hot, fast, liquid, anywhere and anytime. That’s the brown life. The jittery life. Caffeine junction, what’s your function? That’s the train you ride.

 

Long before I ever hit bottom, I knew that I had lost control, but the truth is that I still don’t know if I’ve hit that point or if I ever will. What I can tell you is when I believe it started.

 

During my first summer home from college, I took a job as the solo night security guy at a local water theme park. As a cruel joke, the management gave me a two-way radio, the other end of which was not monitored. The only cell phones that anyone had at that time were attached to a base that looked like a car battery and the companies charged $1.50 per minute. Needless to say a $4 per hour college student wouldn’t have one. In other words, I was on my own.

 

The lack of communication with the outside world made my level of alertness all that more crucial. So I started using No-Doz that I procured from a Circle K up the street.  They also sold sandwiches and soda, which I freely mixed with the No-Doz. That was the first crack in the Faberge Egg that was my life.

 

On one occasion, I worked an overnighter on a Saturday followed by a Sunday morning softball game. When we were at bat, I would try to catch a few Z’s on the bench. Around the fourth inning, one of the guys noticed my unkempt state; shades on, beard stubble, telltale leg shaking.

 

He said, “Jesus, man. You look like a goddamned rhesus monkey in one of those heroin experiments.” Everyone laughed. I guess I probably did too.

 

It was years before I took another caffeine pill. I chalked it up to a phase in my life and convinced myself that I had moved on. When I looked back I would tell myself that I sucked at softball anyway and the caffeine wasn’t responsible for my zero batting average. In any event, I was relatively good for a few years and switched to Crystal Pepsi until the consumer world rejected that drink for the abomination that it was.

 

Like most addicts, there was a short period of a few years where I was able to drink some caffeinated beverages without completely falling to pieces. That eventually came to a crashing halt.

 

Looking back at the 90’s, I could easily try to lay off the blame on social forces. However, it would be more accurate to say that the culture of that decade greased the tracks for my continual downward slide. Whether contributory or incidental these forces cannot be denied.

 

Ask any group of junkies about what allowed them to become addicts and a pattern will emerge. Access, means, culture and enablement. I played around with the words until I came up with a fun acronym, because I’m a government employee and that’s what we do. Means – Access – Culture – Enablement = MACE. I could have done CAME also, but you know MACE is way cooler.

 

Enablement: In the early 90’s, my childhood friend, Stanton Ward (name made up to sound pretentious), would pick me up to get donuts, which of course meant coffee. I don’t blame him. He wanted to be a cop. This was just training for him. Besides, at that time my addiction was in its infancy. I don’t think that even I realized that I was only buying chocolate glazed donuts for the additional caffeine. Back then, no one ever saw me drink more than two cups of coffee or sodas in a row. I hid it well from Stanton et al.

 

Culture: A lot of people don’t realize this, but the television of the 90’s was cramming coffee down our throats. Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier, those God awful Maxwell House serial commercials that tried to build the sexual tension between the thirty-something singles that would borrow coffee from one another. Dennis Franz drinking coffee naked on NYPD Blue. Even Monica Lewinski drank coffee. You just couldn’t get away from it. The US started to resemble Brazil circa 1930, which I’m assuming had a lot of coffee drinking going on.

 

Access: Few things defined that decade, and therefore me through my addiction, than the construction of a coffee shop for every three citizens in the United States. However, if there was a point of no return for me, it was with the advent of free refill policies. Monday it was TGI Fridays and a pissed off waitress tired of refilling my glass. Tuesday it was Taco Bell or Wendy’s, because their dining room stayed open later than any other fast food place in town. More bang for the buck-nineteen, as I would refill into the next day. Wednesdays it was Miami subs. Well, you get the idea without me going into every damn day of the week. I took advantage of a lot of free soda refill policies.

 

Means: There’s not a lot to say here. You can get a caffeine fix for pennies if you’re resourceful enough. Even with a habit like mine, I was spending under $100 a week on the drug. Try maintaining that budget with any other drug.  

 

Every caffeine addict has his or her preferred method of ingestion. Some drink coffee or espresso. Some prefer swallowing pills while other crush them up and shoot or snort the powder.  Some people freebase chocolate. Yeah, I’ve done all of those things. Even worse. I’ve done horrible things for the opportunity to do all of those things, but in the end it’s always been about the soda for me, which is why the refill policy was the last nail in my addiction coffin.

 

I once went to a bar and had 16 rum and cokes. I kept telling them to make them weaker each time I went up so that I would get more of the soda. By the end of the night the bartender was trying to get me to do shots of whiskey just to even me out. I was so hyper and alert that I kept refusing. They called the cops on me, but I left before they got there.

 

I was stopped speed-walking home. I was incoherent, but because of the lax caffeine laws in Florida, they eventually had to let me go.  I thought I was lucky, but there are times when I think that I would have been better off if I had gotten twenty years. I’m just not really sure why that would have happened.

 

I used to have a pair of bar-noculars that I would fill with espresso. If you haven’t seen them, they’re essentially binocular shaped canteens with a screw off eye piece from which you drink. People use them to smuggle alcohol into ball games to avoid paying $6 for a thimble of beer. In my case, I used it as a vessel for lukewarm espresso and I wore them everywhere in public.

 

As pivotal as the 90’s were for my addiction, it wasn’t until after the turn of the millennium that my disease started to cost me friends, family and opportunities. The words still echo in my mind:

 

Slow down, champ. You’ve been to the soda fountain three times. Leave some for the fish.

 

You seem a little jittery. I’m not sure that you’re right for our super badass astronaut program.

 

Why are you wearing those fake binoculars to mass?

 

Wipe your nose. You’ve got grounds all over it.

 

Finally people quit saying anything at all. They had just had enough of me.

 

Stanton had moved on and cleaned up. Married a woman and raised kids. He was the last person in my close circle of friends to give up on me. I had no enablers left which left me with two choices. I could give up the brown life and make amends or I could just find a new group of friends who just didn’t give a fuck.

 

 I found the latter in the only place that I could, a little caffeine distributor known as The Toasted Beat (name changed to protect the culpable, but you can kind of figure it out if you give it some thought. I only changed two letters. ).  It was there that I engaged in a level of caffeine experimentation at the hands of a group of maniacal concoctors that I had never dared dream possible.

 

These are the people that can make anything more caffeinated. The kind that get you so high on the C that you don’t think you can hold a cup to drink anymore and then force you to drink vodka just so that they can sell you another cup of coffee.

 

Pushers.

 

You think you’re getting a decaf, but they are actually serving you normal coffee. Ask for a regular coffee and they give you some sort of super enhanced crap that the cooked up in a radiator in the back. It’s always about moving you up. They’re actually a horrible lot of people who I have no interest in glorifying.

 

Although it was a low point for me, the years of 2001 to 2006 were not a blur. Caffeine addiction isn’t like that. That period was a sharp focal point. Every piece of minutia that occurred during that time was both overly important and crystal clear.

 

Do you know how they say that people only use 15% of their brain capacity? Well, if you’re living the brown life, you start to use up the rest of your brain until you start to memory dump. I can remember the social security number of the hooker off of whose ass I snorted a jar of Folgers in 1998, but I can’t figure out a Florida voter ballot.

 

It’s not just brain capacity. Take everything that you know about alcoholism and drug addiction and reverse it. Tired becomes alert. Illegal is legal. Drinking in the morning is okay, but at night it’s a problem. Twelve step programs become negative twelve step programs in which the goal is to start at negative twelve and get all the way to zero. I actually don’t understand how it works, but it does follow the theme of opposites.

 

So if I know all of this, why do I still do it? Yeah, I’ve cleaned up a few times. It takes me about a day and a half, but it’s a wild ride. There is generally a mild headache and some slight fatigue. Then I’m actually fine, but I always come back to suck on the caffeinated milk that flows from the teat of my hyper mistress.

 

I was two weeks clean when I decided to write this piece. I used research as an excuse to end my recovery. Research today was two cups of coffee, a handful of chocolate covered espresso beans, three large Dr. Peppers, two cans of Red Bull and three lines of Java snorted through a rolled up coffee filter. As bad as that is, I know that tomorrow will be worse.

 

Hi, I’m Chillbear and I’m a caffeine addict…Um whose idea was it to have that coffee urn in the back of the room?