Tweak by Nic Sheff
Tweak by Nic Sheff
An autobiography about a guy who has struggled with his addiction to drugs and alcohol. He is honest, brutal and spares no details of feelings or opinions. It’s not a happily-ever-after-read, but keeps attention because there’s a glimmer of hope here and there, so there’s a constant wonder if this will be his day when he’ll get better. It really allows you to be in the mind of an addict who’ll stop at nothing to quench his next fix. Despite how hard I tried to see things from his perspective, I just couldn’t fully empathize or understand his thinking and reasoning. Guess that’s a good thing…
Here’s a look inside:
Day 1:
I guess I’ve pretty much spent the last four years chasing that first high. I wanted desperately to feel that wholeness again. It was like, I don’t know, like everything else faded out. All my dreams, my hopes, ambitions, relationships — they all fell away as I took more and more crystal up my nose. I dropped out of college twice, my parents kicked me out, and, basically, my life unraveled. I broke into their house — I would steal checks from my father and write them out to myself to pay for my habit. When I had a job at a coffee shop, I stole hundreds of dollars from the register. Eventually I got arrested for a possession charge. My little brother and sister watched me get carted away in handcuffs. When my then seven-year-old brother tried to protect me, running to grab me from the armed policemen, they screamed for him to “get back.” His small body crumpled on the asphalt and he burst into body-shaking tears, sobbing and gasping for breath.
Then there were the treatment centers, two in northern California, one in Manhattan, and one in Los Angeles. I’ve spent the last three years in and out of twelve-step programs. Throughout all of it, the underlying craving nev…
Pg. 19: That was my excuse to start sticking myself with needles. Putting the drug straight into the vein allowed me to conserve it a little more. I stole the syringes from the science lab. I taught myself to shoot up by looking at a diagram on the internet. It was a mess process. I’d miss the vein and pump the drug right into my muscles. It would burn so bad. I didn’t realize the veins were just under the skin’s surface, so I’d dig way too deep. Before long, my arms were covered in puncture marks and I’d lost a lot of weight.
Pg. 39: “We gotta be quiet,” she says. Her voice comes out slurred and deep.
I kiss her mouth and it’s like I’m pouring into her-or like I’m absorbing her into me. Her tongue is my tongues, her lips my lips, her breath mine. She moans and I whisper, “Shhhhhh.”
We kiss like that and then I have her clothes off fast, and mine-taking her nipples into my mouth, kissing her breasts roughly. We start to make love and it’s like, the most perfect, hard, pulsing, organic movement between us. We’re so there and not there-driving on sensations of color and beating hearts and the sweat coming down, down, down.
…We’re kissing and locked together and it just goes on. We’re out of breath, but not. Every sensation is heightened. My hand holding hers is alive, sensual-hot. The bed is shaking and the walls are shaking and the ground and shelves and lamps and everything is shaking down around us and we just don’t care-we just don’t. I wanna stay like this forever-here with Lauren, high on meth and heroin. It seems like I’ve reached the pinnacle of my existence and I just don’t want it to stop.
