Sin City

People ask me all the time what it’s like growing up in Las Vegas. I only have one word for it: fast. At 13, I had my first taste of alcohol. At 14, I started smoking cigarettes and marijuana. By 15, I was going to raves every weekend and dropping ecstasy. Rolling face is what we called it back then. At 16, I started smoking OxyContin, which we nicknamed Roxies. As in, I’m gonna hang out with Roxy this Friday, you in? By 18, we’d switched to black tar heroin. I only ever smoked it, never shot up, thank god, but that also meant that I puked as often as I smoked, which became every day for the last few months before I quit. I celebrated my 19th birthday clean and sober at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting with my sponsor, a New York Jew who used to shoot up white china until she quit, earned a PhD, and became a professor. At 20, I started drinking again. I used a friend’s old ID and knew which bars didn’t look at them closely. At 21, I started doing cocaine once a month. By 23, it was every weekend, but by then I also learned that if I did coke on a Friday I could get to sleep Saturday morning with a sleeping pill, but that would mean I would also sleep through most of Sunday, but at least that way I could get to class on Monday and mostly feel okay. At 24, I found a guy who turned sex into my drug so I didn’t have much use for coke that year. I heard someone back at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting say that cigarettes were harder to quit than heroin. I laughed and asked, “Have you even done heroin?” “For 20 years,” he said. “Have you ever quit smoking?” At 25, I finally quit alcohol and cigarettes. My ex, who was 6 years sober and clean by then, taught me how. On the street, I would chew peppermint gum whenever I thought about lighting up. With alcohol, my biggest concern was what I would drink at the bar. It quickly turned out that not drinking also meant I was not going to bars. Then COVID happened, which made everything easier. At 26, I quit sugar, caffeine, bread, rice, potatoes, carrots, peas. I quit fruit. For years. There was a week I quit eating altogether. When I tell you I quit sex at 27, I mean I would even turn my head away from people in the street I found attractive. I became the queen of quitting. But do not be confused: I was not free. Not free from fear or shame or anger or sadness that led me to use things or quit things in this first place, and so, at 29, I slowly started bringing it back: the sex, the food—yes, even chocolate cake. Six months into this, I drank a bottle of an IPA. Turns out, I still love that bitter taste, the carbonation on my tongue, but I went home that night already sober and loving it. Can I tell you what I’m most addicted to these days? Being present in my body: this breakable, temporal, immensely intelligent, powerful machine I spent so many years running away from. I’m addicted to her wisdom, her teachings, how she shows me to slow down, tune in, and live—I mean, really live—for the first time in 30 years.