Leaving the OCD Circus. Kirsten Pagacz

angel dust. She was a girl with a big heart and a messed-up mind. She never had much cash, so she would turn tricks with the dealer in her back bedroom, but I didn't care. Just as long as my coke held out. In the early morning, the dealer came staggering out of the bedroom and asked me for a ride, since I was the only one with a car. “Sure,” I said. Why not? I was really good at killing time, and this seemed like an interesting thing to do. He said “That's cool, yo.” I liked to drive fast and did exactly that on the Eisenhower Expressway heading east. As it turned out, I was taking him to a Chicago courthouse for his hearing.

      While I was driving, he offered me a line of coke. I was glad that he had asked me, and I didn't have to ask him. This made me feel less like an addict. He tapped out a line, put a rolled dollar bill up to my nose, and with one big snort through my right nostril, bam, it was gone. I dropped him off. I never knew his name, and I never asked him why I was taking him to court or what he was busted for. It was just cooler to say, “Hey, good luck, man.”

      Drug addict math: Do X drugs and get Y feeling better. But the pockets of feeling better got smaller and smaller, and the leaps down into the dungeon got bigger and bigger. At this time I did think that God still saw me, but I just kept wandering aimlessly into the devil's palm and his long, grotesque fingernails were like my prison bars.

      I must have had at least a half dozen odd jobs and waitressing jobs between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven. My waitressing went all the way from greasy spoon, Greek-owned breakfast places, where my shift would start at 5 a.m. serving eggs and tossing toast to customers, to higher-end, white tablecloth Italian joints, where I poured loads of red wine and Dom Perignon until midnight or later.

      One day at L.L. early on, the art teacher had us start bringing in our drawings and hanging them on the back wall for each other to critique. One guy's work really stood out, and it became a game for the rest of us to see who could spot which one was his first. This übertalented art guy's name was Doug. Just what he, with his truly developed talent, was doing in an introductory art class at this high school with ashtrays was way beyond me.

      Doug sat in a row in front of me to the left. Every day in class he brought his big toolbox filled with well-organized art supplies, and he was always well dressed and had kind of a cool fashion thing going on. He sometimes had on light-colored chinos and a white cotton button-down shirt with a popular-of-the-times priest collar. He reminded me of the Professor from Gilligan's Island. Not a hair out of place, his shirt tucked in, and he always wore a belt. Sharp, smart, and about the only one who could be trusted in this community college's otherwise motley crew.

      Most of the time, I felt as though I was hiding under a rock, trying to be in denial as much as possible about my present fate in L.L. However, the feeling I had around Doug was warmer, lighter, and brighter, and I even felt safe. My time with him was different. It didn't have the dark magnetic pull of so many of the other things in my life at that time.

      Doug was also in my astronomy class, and one night during our long class break we were all standing in the hallway talking around a cement structure that was supposed to look like the moon (it didn't). I announced to the group that I had car trouble and asked if anyone could give me a ride home. Doug said, “I can.” A classmate also on break said, “Jeez, dude, you don't even know where she lives.”

      On the drive, I told him that this was just a ride and it didn't mean I wanted to be his girlfriend. He said he knew that. When we arrived at the castle, I asked him if he wanted to come in for a glass of something like lemonade. He said, “Sure.”

      I wasn't sure why, but I took out my grandma's best vintage crystal to serve our glasses of lemonade. In fact, I was sort of irritated with myself that I didn't just give him a regular glass from the cabinet. We talked and talked, and we even laughed a bit about our mutual dislike for our crappy school.

      I always looked forward to chatting with Doug. As if his general demeanor weren't enough of a giveaway, I discovered pretty quickly that his lifestyle was much different from mine. He woke up early on Saturday mornings to wash his car. Probably right around the time I'd be getting home from partying on the north side of Chicago. (One of those Saturdays, when I stopped at the corner gas station on my way home to pick up another pack of smokes around 5 a.m., I ran into my mom's husband, Richard, freshly showered and buying his morning paper. I think we acknowledged each other with a grunt. For us, that wasn't too bad; often that was as friendly as we got.)

      Doug and I hung out more and more as “friends” as I faded in and out of relationships with other guys. I would often tell Doug that I wished my relationships with other guys were more like our relationship. “They just don't get me,” I'd say.

      Doug didn't know about Sergeant, of course, but Sergeant had plenty to say about Doug. “You know, Doug is too short for you. He's not even six feet tall, and he's like the Professor on Gilligan's Island—he's kind of a square. I think I might have seen him wearing a corduroy blazer with patches on the elbows. He doesn't do any drugs, so clearly he's out! And every Saturday morning while you're sleeping off another long night, he's up doing errands. He's really not for you.”

      Deep down, sadly, somewhere, I knew that a romantic relationship with Doug would never last. I knew that I couldn't stay well long enough. I thought the safest way to keep this guy in my life and not completely blow it was to just stay friends.

      For years Doug wanted to be “more than friends” and I declined. The elaborate gifts that we gave each other at birthdays and holidays always made our current significant others quite irritated. We'd both say in retort, “What? We're just friends! God! They just don't get it.”

      The Zipper—1987: Twenty-One Years Old

       Artist: Doug Pagacz

      Despite my unbridled anxieties, fears, and rituals, I used to seek out thrill rides. They reminded me that I was still alive and made me feel something past my layers of addictions and desperation.

      My ride requirements: First, it needed to tap terror directly into my spinal column, to wow me out of my depression and soul numbness. Second, it had to be super high, at least a few stories up; and third, it had to be superfast, meaning all I would see was a blur of color as I whipped around violently, flipping and spinning. When I'd open my eyes for just a second, I might see only one thing in focus, like a car parked far away in the lot and everything else was a blur. Success! I loved the g-force pushing across my face hard, pressing into my cheeks and making them feel like they were wrapping around my ears. The more people screaming for their lives, the better. Let the adrenaline surge. (I had no idea that with OCD I had a monumental chemical imbalance, that my natural serotonin levels were off. It was like I was trying to turn myself on. Serotonin is the natural stuff that can help us feel good—mine wasn't working, clearly! Who knew?!)