When I was 15 years old, I would smoke cigarettes on the sly. One day my mother, who just happened to be going through menopause at the same time I was going through adolescence, yelled at me about stinking like cigarettes. I just gritted my teeth, but in the back of my mind, I thought, I'll show you—I’ll run away! Well, at 4:30 a.m., I woke up to do the dirty deed. Now, I really didn't want to run away—it was nice and warm and comfy in my bed, after all—but because I'd said, albeit in my mind, that I was gonná run away, I kindá felt like I had to.

    Strange now, but it made perfect sense to me at the time. So I did it. I ran away. I left my house, walked alone in the dark to a phone booth and called Mike, a 27-year old man I'd met a few days earlier while collecting donations for the drum & bugle corps I belonged to. Mike came and got me, bought me breakfast, and then took me to a house in a nearby city. The date, ironically enough, was March 27th. Although I couldn’t know it then, that date would become one of the worst days of my life. You see, 22 years later, my husband came home on that very same day and informed me that he wanted a divorce.

    When we arrived at this house and climbed the stairs to the second floor, there were all sorts of people lounging about in the large living room. Mike introduced me to his friend Fly, who was an avid motorcycle aficionado, and to Sweetpea, Fly's biker chick. A teenage boy nursing a beer in the corner introduced himself as MuskRat. Up until this point, I'd never met people this colorful! I had been so totally sheltered. I was such a straight kid. I mean, I got good grades, I volunteered at the library, never ditched school and was even polite to authority. Remember, I was the "good" Lori.

    Mike led me into a back bedroom that had only a mattress lying on the floor. He casually took off his clothes while instructing me to do the same. I was terrified. Not only had I never seen a man naked before, I'd never even kissed a boy, much less a man. I was very nervous. He pushed me down on the mattress, climbed on top of me, nudged my legs apart. Without saying a single word, he kept trying to push himself, over and over again. The only thought I allowed in my mind while all this was happening, was Ha Ha Mom and Dad, I'll show you, I'm not your nice little girl anymore. I kind of blocked out the getting deflowered part on purpose by doing this.

    By the time I went back home on April Fool's Day, I had a raging case of herpes. So not only did I feel guilt for having hurt my mom and dad so much but I also had the distinct pleasure of going for the very first time to a gynecologist, on an emergency visit. I was mortified. Back in 1977, herpes was not well understood and treatments were limited. I was only 15 years old and had just contracted this horrible social disease. My entire vaginal area was painted with a purple dye and an ultraviolet light on a stand was placed in between my legs, shining on the sores. My mother stood next to me and held my hand the whole time. God, how I cried on the inside. Though, not the outside. I was more than embarrassed, I was more than mortified. As I lay there on that table, the "good" Lori died. I became the "bad" Lori.

    I'd lost 27 pounds during my runaway trip and was diagnosed with mononucleosis, a case so bad it prevented me from finishing up my freshman year of high school in person. I had a tutor come in to teach me. A few weeks later, my sister Ginny, who was 18 months older than me, came home and told me that Lisa, her best friend, had fallen in love with a guy named Mike. I begged Ginny to tell Lisa not to have sex with Mike, that she might also contract herpes. Ginny brushed me off saying she'd already told Lisa I'd gotten herpes. That Mike had said it was because I slept with all the other men in that house. I must have gotten herpes from one of them.

    Ginny walked off, basically doubting me and my word. One more time I felt less than, that I was nobody worth going to bat for. From that point forward, I was actually a different person. I went to bars quite often; and because I always dressed and acted older, I could get in without any I.D. (back then, the legal drinking age was 18 years old). I ended up going out and dating grown men. Whatever they wanted me to do, I did because at least they were paying attention to me. I was worth something to them, right?

    During all those years, I told the following story whenever I was asked about my first experience with sex. I actually even started to believe this story. I'd been walking home one night from music practice, and a man in a green Chevy Nova stopped to ask me for directions. I leaned over in the passenger window to respond when he pulled me, head first, into his car. He took me to a house where he raped me with a glass soda bottle, broke at the end. I think I really believed that story for a long time. Sometimes I feel it was probably the only way I made it through those years without going insane.

    I was 19 years old in 1980, working for a chiropractor, of all people a doctor, when I got a call one day from Kathy, an old friend of mine. She invited me to lunch—said she knew a terrific place to get a slice of pizza. We drove over the George Washington Bridge and down the Henry Hudson Parkway to the Lower East Side of New York. Not only did we get some excellent pizza and a couple of beers, but Kathy also copped some heroin for herself. We drove to a deserted area by the Hudson River, where she cooked up the heroin, tied up with a belt and stuck the needle in her arm. To this day, I can recall how Kathy looked at that exact moment when she plunged that heroin into her bloodstream and the drug spread throughout her body. It was almost as if before she did the drug, her face was all squinted up and tight; yet after she did the drug, her face became more open, lit up and relaxed.

And I wanted to feel that way so badly.

    I said, I want you to do that to me. Then, and I can remember this as clear as day, Kathy turned to me, grabbed me by my arms and said, No, Lori, I don't want to be responsible for turning you into a dope fiend. My response? I looked her dead in the eyes and said, Puleez, Kathy...I'm way too INTELLIGENT to become...<<with a sneer>> a drug addict. So she cooked up some more dope and injected it into me. And at that moment, I knew: I'd finally found my true love, my reason, my purpose in life. Nothing else mattered.

    Towards the end of 1985, I was arrested for being under the influence of narcotics. Since I was terrified of going to jail, and because the police really only wanted Scott, the guy who provided me with my drugs, we cut a deal. I’d set him up, and they’d let me go. That night, I gave Scott my car and some money to go buy some heroin. While he drove over to Harlem to cop the dope, I called the anonymous CrimeStoppers hotline and told them what time he'd probably be driving back over the George Washington Bridge (from Harlem) into New Jersey. The police got him, but he managed to eat most of the drug, destroying the evidence, before they could bash their way into my car window with the butts of their guns.

    Ironically, the $150 CrimeStoppers fee I received for ratting Scott out was cash I spent on drugs for the two of us; but he never knew what I'd done. For two more months I actually used drugs with Scott, never knowing if he'd somehow found out and overdose me or kill me when we were in a shooting gallery or some abandoned house. But you see, none of it mattered. Nothing else ever did matter during those years. I started shooting dope around May of 1980 and didn't stop until January 7^th of 1986, when I shook it out alone in a third-floor attic, cold turkey. I’d woken up that morning determined to take a long, hard look at my life.

    What I realized is that in just a short number of years, I'd managed to do all of the following: I lost jobs (always the first to go); started sleeping with men for money so I could buy my drug (heroin wasn't quite the "attractive" drug to use...now if I'd been into cocaine, I could've just slept with men for the drug itself); got pregnant by God knows who, had an abortion while fully awake, then actually got pregnant again 30 days later and had yet another abortion. My body and mind were so numbed by the heroin that I was unable to feel pain. I'd contracted PID (pelvic inflammatory disease) and didn't even know it until I simply passed out one day. I almost lost my reproductive organs.

    I made it a point to try to understand the root cause of all my destructive behavior. I spent many sessions with psychiatrists, psychologists and drug counselors, but I felt that they just didn't understand me. I essentially talked and talked about nothing of any importance—basically lies—and I pretended that they believed me. I did the methadone clinics, I did drug rehabs, psyche wards, welfare hotels, slept in cars in the winter time (have you ever tried peeing into a bottle in the back seat of a car when it's below zero F° degrees?), turned yellow with the hepatitis I'd contracted somewhere along the way. I'd managed to completely alienate myself from everybody in my life. My family wouldn't let me in their homes, my friends...well, let's just say I didn't have any left.

    I was unhealthy and desperately lonely. I had no job. I do remember scrounging up enough money to buy a jar of peanut butter and a box of granola. I never went to college, never finished real estate school, never really had a career to speak of. Almost everybody else seemed to be moving on with their lives, with the exception of my friend Jimmy—they found him dead of an overdose in the gutter one morning—and another friend named Gary, who died of complications to his heart from smoking cocaine.

    So I moved to California on a one-way ticket, with half a pack of cigarettes, a box of clothing and one dollar to my name. I had a cousin who lived in the Los Angeles area who let me live with him at his condo for a few weeks. I got a job, bought a pickup truck, and I immediately picked up a new hobby—drinking. I would go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings on Tuesday nights and share how happy I was because I wasn't shooting dope anymore. The very next day I'd go to work and have a couple of drinks with my coworkers at lunch. I even got to the point where I would pour myself a glass of wine in the morning when I was getting ready for work. It was tough trying to curl my hair or driving while I was drunk, but I managed. It wasn't until August 26, 1986, that I finally stopped the drinking, too.

Then my new life began.

    I was clean and sober, going to AA meetings, volunteering my time bringing meetings into hospitals and institutions. Between my job and my AA life, I kept busy. I was also in counseling, working on issues I'd never dealt before with regarding my mother, my father and with men in general. I asked a woman I'd met one night at a meeting to be my sponsor (a teacher of sorts in AA), and then I followed her suggestion: that I wait at least one year before I got involved in a relationship. I followed her directions on the blind faith that if she could get clean and sober and stay that way, then maybe I could, too. For a whole year, I didn't date any men; hell! I wouldn't even slow-dance with a man during that year. I was about 2.5 years clean and sober, when I got a telephone call from a young woman I'd met at a meeting, asking me to be her sponsor. I said yes, and we met that night at a local meeting. I was thin, gorgeous and still so very confused on the inside but didn't yet realize it...and that was the night I met my husband...at the AA meeting.

    We met in January and got married in November. I suppose I wanted to share my love with somebody so much that I essentially took him hostage. I got pregnant with twins, miscarried one of them but managed to carry my son almost the whole nine months. Six weeks after my son was born, I had a heart attack of sorts. About a year later, I contracted viral meningitis. My son was diagnosed with autism. I got laid off, contracted pneumonia, broke my leg, got pneumonia again. Then my husband dumped me. He said he didn’t love me anymore and that it was pretty much all my fault that he felt compelled to leave me.

    No matter what I’ve experienced or what has or hasn't happened in my life, no matter how different I felt or how far down into the gutter I've fallen, no matter what...I made it through, and I'm still alive to tell my story. That is precisely why I have no secrets...keeping all those secrets to myself would have killed me much quicker than anything else could have, drugs included. I was too damned chicken to just outright kill myself, so I tried every other alternative method possible. Yet I'm still alive.

    I've never been all too religious of a person. I've always believed in a God, but I just figured He was good, I was bad, and the two of us just didn't mix. But after all the horrible things I've experienced in my life, and after all the things that have happened in my life that are good and true, I have no choice left. I really, truly believe that there is a God, simply because there is no earthly way I could have stopped using heroin or stopped my spiraling trip down the self-destructive path I was headed on. I am alive today, and it's not simply the result of pure luck. I believe there is no such thing as luck in God's world. I have been given a precious gift, the gift of being allowed one more chance to live, and I'm not willing to use that second chance to self-destruct again. It would be a sacrilege. When bad things would happen in my life, whether by my own making or not, I would always, always question why I was being punished so harshly. But now I know that since there is indeed a God (or whatever others choose to call the God of their own understanding), then there must also be the total opposite...Satan, the devil, evil.

    I refuse to give up easily. Very few people are handed the opportunity to live their life a second time; but I was, dammit! Oh, I may have been standing on my feet and breathing in and out, but I was dead, truly devoid of any spirit inside me. But now I'm alive and I am truly living my life the way I know I need to—for me, and not for anyone. But it's been a hard road to travel, one that has included its share of pain, mortification and embarrassment, along with lots of lessons in humility. I look at my face in the mirror sometimes and think. How could I ever have done this to myself? Every time I go to the doctor for lab tests, because they just cannot get blood out of me? They have to use my neck, or my feet or legs; and sometimes they even have to use an artery. Scarring from the needles? Yes, scarring on the outside from the needles, and scarring on the inside as a result of the shame at what I willingly did to myself.

    I still have health problems; in fact, drugs and hepatitis damaged my liver. Just two years ago, I had a liver biopsy done. Knowing that I could develop liver cancer or need a liver transplant terrifies me. Sometimes I think to myself, My God, what good has all this clean living done me if I'm gonná die the death of a drug addict, of a no-good drug user anyway? But then I realize that I have to allow the love and caring of other people into my life, and I need to let them love me and even take care of me sometimes. Why? Because I just cannot do it alone anymore. I don't want to do it alone. I believe I was born with a gift, an innate capability to feel. I like to think that I share this gift with others in the form of compassion, coupled with love and understanding. I’m willing to try to accept others just as they are, to strive to "treasure other people’s differences".

    Most importantly, not a day goes by that I don’t thank God for the miracle He’s given me...the precious gift of my life.