July 1972
Seated at my kitchen table, I methodically shook the pills from the amber bottle. Each bore the distinctive "714" stamp—300mg of methaqualone. Quaaludes. I'd bought twenty-five of them from my usual dealer on 14th Street, the same guy who'd sold me acid months earlier.
The math was simple. 25 x 300mg = 7,500mg. According to everything I'd heard, that would be more than enough.
After I finished the letters, I spread them across the table like a grotesque farewell collection. There was nothing for my parents—as far as I was concerned, they could rot in hell. I had written one for Janice, though I wasn't entirely sure why. We had something, whatever that meant. But there was no letter for Connie.
Connie had been nothing but crude encounters—"quickies" two or three times a week in the locked science supply room during our free period all through my senior year. On graduation night, she told me she was pregnant but insisted it wasn't mine. I suspected she was lying, but she wanted me out of her life. "It all needs to end," she'd said. So, I have no letter for someone who didn't care what happened to me.
I also wrote to Linda, Teresa, Cynthia, and a few other girls from school—girls I believed cared about me. However, Debbie recently shattered that illusion. She told me, almost casually, that some of the cheerleaders had been "passing me around" and calling me a whore and slut behind my back.
"It's just a joke," she'd said, but nothing about it felt funny. Maybe none of them cared. Maybe all they wanted was the sex. Girls must feel this way when they're used and then branded with ugly names, which is precisely why I never talked about what I did with any girl or woman. I respected them while also protecting them from the crude stuff teenage boys usually said and did. A lot of good that discretion had done me.
Did anyone give a shit about me? Maybe Beverly and Albert did—they stepped up when I needed guardians, signing papers right before Social Services was set to send me to foster care. But they had their own family, their children. I was just an intrusion in their lives, one more burden they didn't need.
What was the point of these letters anyway? Nobody would care about my reasons. I swept them into a pile and methodically tore them up, one by one.
Picking up the bottle, it felt cold in my hand, its weight somehow both insignificant and monumental. I stared at the pills scattered across the table—small, white promises of an ending I’d been craving for months. The silence in my house pressed against me like a living thing, broken only by the distant hum of traffic and the muffled soundtrack from the drive-in next door. Even the movies felt like they were mocking me, their artificial stories of people who mattered, people who belonged somewhere.
I thought about all the women whose beds I’d slipped out of in pre-dawn darkness, leaving behind the scent of my shame and their misguided hope. I thought about having sex with the alcoholic mother of a girl I’d also slept with, another betrayal in an endless chain.
The worst part wasn’t what I’d done—it was how easily I’d done it, how I’d become someone who could destroy people’s trust as casually as other teenagers violated their curfews. The monster that Karen and the others had created was now fully formed, feeding on everyone who got too close.
I was seventeen years old and felt old, so old, worn down by secrets that sat in my chest like broken glass. There was no version of this story where I became someone good, someone worthy of the love some of these women kept trying to give me. The pattern was set: I would take what I needed and leave destruction in my wake, over and over, until there was nothing left of my self-respect and dignity.
Then I started swallowing the pills, one by one. Each one was a small surrender, a quiet agreement with the voice in my head that whispered I was beyond saving. Soon, I would cease to experience the feelings of abject disgust that crashed over me every morning when I remembered who I’d become—the boy who slept with a girlfriend’s alcoholic mother, who carried other people’s pain like trophies. Soon, the weight of being me would lift, and I would finally know a peace I’d never experienced, the kind that only comes when you stop being anything at all. I don't remember much after that—just the bitter taste and a growing heaviness dragging me down to the kitchen floor. The last thing I recall thinking was a strange relief that it would finally be over.
I woke up to the faint sound of Beverly's voice, urgent and frightened, calling for an ambulance. Where had she come from? She had stopped by to see if I had laundry that needed to be done—that was just like her, always looking for ways to help. She had used the key I had given her and found me crumpled on the linoleum.
The next clear memory is opening my eyes in a hospital bed, with Beverly and Albert standing beside me. Albert had already used his influence—being wealthy and well-connected in the county had its perks. My suicide attempt wouldn't appear in any official records. At the time in Georgia, such records could follow you for life, affecting everything from voting rights to job opportunities. I stayed in the hospital for several days. The period after my release only exists as fragments—a gray fog of shame, confusion, and the strange awareness that someone cared enough to save my life. Somehow, through that haze, I managed to pull myself together enough to make it to UNC when the semester began in August. But the real revelation came later. Beverly hadn't just stopped by that day; she’d been worried about me, checking on me far more often than I realized.
Someone had cared, after all—I had just been too lost in my pain to see it.