A very cool friend of mine died right in front of me.  Literally in my arms.  In the tweaker world, there are people that you meet and partner up with for a bit and then leave and then there are people that you develop more than just a drug relationship with.  Sometimes they end up playing a significant role in your life and what makes you who you are today.  Raquel and I had become fairly close friends.  I genuinely liked her as a person.  Even though we were both deeply and severely enabling each other’s addictions, we had a mutual respect for each other.  When everything that I am about to share went down, keep in mind I was high and somewhat emotionally numb the entire time.  I cried a few times, but I didn’t really feel the totality of what had happened until I sobered up. It never really set in that this had actually happened and wasn’t a bad dream or something that just happened to someone I know.  This shit happen to us. 

Raquel was around my age and I met her one day at a mutual escort friend’s home.  While I was dealing meth, I had a lot of clients that were escorts.  They are a pretty good niche market to serve meth to, especially in Houston.  They are always in need of shit and always have cash.  Many of them are out there on their own and get lonely.  I was a good dude that had good product and I regrettably fed off of that shit.

When I first met Raquel, she had recently relapsed after getting out of prison a few months earlier. The first characteristic of hers that comes to mind when I think of her was her quick-witted and dry sense of humor.  She was brutally honest, called people out on shit immediately.  Right in-your-face type funny shit.  A skinny blonde girl with sexy tattoos that cracked quality jokes? Shit, you don’t encounter many of those. One early morning around 3 or 4 AM, I had picked her up from an appointment and she offered to buy me Jack in The Box.  As we are about to leave the drive-thru window she handed the worker at the counter $20 and says something like “Here, you need it more than me girl!”  She did the same with people in the streets.  Would dig through her purse to find some cash to give someone that looked worse off than she did.  If she had money, she shared it.  I had a similar viewpoint.  When I had a lot of cash, I was very liberal with it.  I still have a few of our FB messenger conversations and pics we had shared.   I thought long and hard about sharing these and think she would have approved my decision to post them.  If it means it could possibly prevent an addict suffering now to realize that heroin has no good end game she would be all for it.  I found these pics she had sent me. 

Raquel battled A LOT of demons. I have met some pretty fucked off people in my life and she was in a worse hell than most others.  Her primary drug of choice was heroin, but she also did meth.   The day I met her we traded numbers in case she needed some shit.  Once I got the number of a girl/potential client like that, the texting ritual starts.  It begins with a few light messages here and there.  Maybe a quick deal where I drop it and leave, strictly transactional tone and vibe.  Eventually, we start chatting longer and longer and felt each other out.  I had a car. I had dope.  I had the fraud shit popping off. She was an escort.  She had more consistent income and a stable hotel room.  I am about to share a discussion her and I had a couple of months before she passed.  Check it out below, it will give you a sense of the humor and realness this girl emoted. This discussion took place after I went to jail jumping the bridge and breaking my leg.  Two other close girl friends of mine had bailed me out.  I hung out for a few days in Houston and then decided to go back to my parents place in Dallas.  They hired me a lawyer and were desperately hoping I would stop all this nonsense.  Per their request, I had enrolled in an outpatient rehab program at this time.  The following Facebook Messenger conversation took place while I was at home for these couple of months.  I later regretfully ditched my parents to fuck off and get one last run in before I went to jail for the 6-month sentence.

As you can see, Raquel was down for me to come stay with her as soon as I came back, but was also concerned about me getting back in the bullshit.  I had already made up my mind I wasn’t done fucking around yet unfortunately. Without any announcement I used my dad’s credit card to book an Uber to a nearby Pawn Shop.  I pawned an expensive digital camera I had bought on fraud and had some cash to do something now.   When I told Raquel I had done this, she bought me a bus ticket to Houston.  She was at a hotel in Willowbrook on the northwest side of Houston.  She told me she was doing good business and wanted me there.  I needed a home base for fraud operations so this worked well for me.  I showed up at her room on my crutches.  She had just re-upped on heroin and was about to shoot up.

[I feel I need to insert a brief commentary on this issue.  Raquel had been shooting up H since she was a teenager.  Her code word to her dealers that she made clear to every new dealer was that H would be referred to as her “boyfriend.”  Over and over again she would call and ask “yeah I was wondering if you had seen my boyfriend?  Is my boyfriend there?” I would be content on ice, but I would have to wait for her to fix her shot and find a vein and just about every time it would take up to a couple of hours, literally, to find a fucking vein. Jesus Christ how did I not stop her?  She would stab herself over and over and over again. Her lip and mouth would curl up in a strange way and I would hear “god dammit!” “Fuck!” “Why don’t you know how to shoot someone Alphatweaker?? Why didn’t you learn?? You know it would help a lot right??”  I never went there with the needles. After dealing ice and seeing the dramatic and immediate downturn people take once they start shooting it, I promised myself that is one thing I would never do.  I was OK shooting up H a couple times but never ice, so she was on her own there. Hours and hours of holding my cellphone flashlight over her ankles and arms in the effort to find a good vein.  Eventually I would say fuck it you are on your own and lay on the bed and get stuck on my phone while she cursed in the background.  Standing under a lamp or bright motel room light.  I remember hoping to see that red rose puff of blood enter the syringe so that she would hit a vein and we can fuck.  I’m so sorry to have been so selfish and not have realized what an obvious warning sign that level of desperateness should have been. I should have known she was on her last leg. I guess I was high. I’m so sorry for that.  For those that are in the early stages of or thinking about using H… it really is the devil and likely the end of you and all that you have become to know. For those of you deep in H addiction already… this could happen to you easier than you may realize.  H is insidious.  I urge you to talk to somebody.  Anybody. There is NO. GOOD. END. GAME.  OK I will get off my soapbox now.]

Eventually she found the vein and was good to go.  We fucked and enjoyed being in each other’s company again. Again, we connected on a good level and had spent a lot of time together before.  After we were done she hopped up to take a shower and I stayed in the bed.  At this very moment, I imagine Raquel hovering over my shoulder poking me and annoyingly giving me her two cents as to what I should write.  I do need to say quickly that she cared more about her son than almost anything else in the world.  Yes, she was running around fucking off, but she was doing her best to play the hand she had been dealt.  She would almost certainly proclaim “Goddammit Alphatweaker, don’t you make me look bad asshole!  Make me look hot! And keep staying out of the goddamn gameroom!” lol. Raquel would not let me gamble when we were together.  She had seen me lose thousands of dollars in the machines before on more than one occasion.  She knew it was a very bad habit of mine.  She would literally drag me away from the machine and beg and plead for me to not “ping” when I was with her.  We call gambling in the machines “pinging.”  She was a good friend that hated seeing me waste all of my cash to gambling.  I would tell her to do less H and more ice and she denied multiple requests of mine for her to shoot me up.  She did a handful of times, but didn’t like doing it unless I pretty much threatened to leave and find some other girl that would. Raquel’s typical cycle was to run around in the streets for 6 months to a year.  Get super strung out on Heroin and then to a hospital for a couple of weeks to detox and clean up.  Rinse and repeat.

The following events all went down on and around June 20^th 2017.  Raquel is inside the bathroom behind a closed door jamming out to her all-time favorite band, “The Bumpin’ Uglies.”  She knew every word to every single one of their songs and played them over and over again.  At this point I was on my phone on the bed. What feels around 40 minutes or so passes and her music is still playing.  It wasn’t that uncommon for her to spend a long time in the bathroom.  A lot of tweaker girls spend hours putting their face on.  I forgot why, but I end up having to leave to meet someone.  I gathered my backpack, crutches, and shit together and began to hobble out the door.  I yell to her that I am leaving and I will be back in a bit.  No response.  I walk up to the bathroom door and try to open it.  Its locked, I knock on it and say again something like “Aye girl Imma head out right quick, I’ll be back in a bit!” Still no response. 

This is one of those hotel bathroom doors with the small pinhole in the center of the doorknob so that it could be unlocked with any object narrow enough to fit through the hole and depress the unlock mechanism.  I grabbed a hangar from the closet behind me, straightened it, and poked it through the hole.  The door unlocked and began to open.  I start to hop in and the door immediately gets caught on an elastic cord.  She had intentionally wrapped the hair dryer cord around the door handle and the base of the hair dryer that was attached to the wall.  A crude additional lock.  The only reason I can imagine why she would do that would be to make it harder for me to get to her.  Since the door was wrapped in this manner, I lower my shoulder and barge into the bathroom and at this point, this post is about to get very real and graphic [legit photos of heroin overdose are about to be posted.]

[READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED]

The shower was running but she had plugged up the tub so she was soaking in the tub being filled from the shower head.  She is face-up in the tub and her face was about an inch below the water facing up to the ceiling.  She had an elastic band tied around her arm.  Looked to me like she was soaking in the bath, took too big of a shot of heroin, and slowly slipped under the water surface and drowned. Her diary/journal was carefully placed open-faced with the writing readable to me as I entered the room.  She wanted whatever she wrote to be noticed.   It was right in the center on top of the closed toilet lid with the ribbon bookmarker down the middle.  I won’t share exactly what it said.  It wasn’t meant for me. I think it was more meant for her son and baby daddy.  I remember reading it later and thinking that this is not necessarily a suicide note, it was fairly ambiguous.  I do remember she had written the time, date, address, and room # of where she was at when she was writing. I guess maybe she meant to do it.  I just don’t know. 

The first thought that jumped into my head is that she was messing around with me. I dropped my crutches and hopped over to her, bent down and lifted her out of the water screaming in her face…. Raquel?!…RAQUEL?! As I lifted her torso, her head and neck were completely limp and her head tilted back. Her eyelids opened slightly as her head tilted back and I could see that her pupils had rolled back in her head.  She was completely unresponsive. No movement.  No sounds.  Just a small consistent stream of tiny, frothy, blood bubbles coming out of her mouth and nose.  Adrenalin and panic set in immediately.  Reptilian brain fight-or-flight type shit.  I am ashamed to say that for a brief moment the thought of leaving entered my mind. I thought I would go to jail for sure if we get caught.  What if someone thinks I murdered her or did it on purpose?  People get fucked over by the public judicial system multiple times every day in every city. “Get out of here man.  You are going to get busted for this.”  Thankfully that was only a fleeting thought.  As quick as that fucked up thought entered my head, it exited. “Do the right thing.”  HELP HER NOW, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU WAITING FOR!? I laid her head down on the side of the tub so that she was out of the water and I hopped into the hallway to get help.  There were two Hispanic maids in the hallway cleaning up the rooms.  I motioned and yelled for them to “Come quick!!! My friend!!! She needs help!! Come help me!!!” I frantically motioned for them to come follow me.  They both immediately followed me hopping into the room and into the bathroom.  I hopped over to the tub to get her out and they both stopped frozen at the door.   I was reaching into the tub lifting her head and neck out screaming at the ladies “HELP ME!”  They didn’t do anything but stand there completely stunned.  They were both in complete shock.  So I lifted Raquel up and over the side of the tub and dragged her body clumsily on to the bathroom floor.  Not the easiest feat with a broken leg.  Still no response at all from her.

In middle school I took a CPR course and remembered one to five. Five compressions for every one breath.  I got on my knees and pushed her chest down five times and then pinched her nose and filled her lungs with my air.  An odd sensation that was.  I could feel her lungs expand and rise with my air as I exhaled into her.  With the first breath a bloody mix of red froth and water started flowing out of her nose and mouth.  I will never forget what that feels like.  Breathing into her felt like I was breathing air into some type of balloon-sponge.  Each time she exhaled my breaths, more bloody water mixture came out of her mouth and nose.  I figured that I was doing it right and that I was getting the water out of her lungs and she was going to make it.  I kept going.  Five compressions and one big breath of air.  One of the maids acted and ran and brought me a portable hotel phone that had a 911 operator on it.  I told the 911 operator what had happened and she told me to stop breathing air into her lungs and to only do the chest compressions.  So, I did just that. 

I don’t know how long it took the paramedics to show up.  Honestly it did not feel like very long at all.  When they showed up, I hobbled back up and got out of the way.  I started panicking and as casual as possible filled my pockets with the drugs and syringes that were on the counter.  Looking back, it feels like a fucked up thing to be concerned about, but I thought it made sense at the time.  The paramedics laid her on this board and strapped this pumping machine on her that pumped her chest down automatically, over and over again.  I heard one of them say they got her heart beating again.  Fuck yes!!! Awesome!!! I had a sense of relief.  After they said that, I took the following picture of Raquel.  I thought I had lost this photo but I found it in an old Google Photos album.  I honestly think that Raquel would not like how it looks, but I feel she would want me to post this photo in the hopes of delivering a message of urgency to people suffering as she suffered.  That message of urgency would be to take action NOW to at least try and prevent this from happening to you or someone you love.  It is not easy, but it sure as hell has been done before and it can be done in your case too. Take this picture in. It is not too late I promise you.

With heroin, death comes so easy from all directions.  You can drowned like she did in a bathtub, take too big of a shot and overdose, or nod out while driving a car and crash.  So many different ways to get got with this shit.  As the paramedics loaded her into the ambulance, I scrambled to hide the rest of the drugs and identity theft shit.  I got all of the obvious shit and large quantities of drugs taken care of in a few minutes.  I then headed to Willowbrook Hospital which happened to be like 4 minutes away.  As I hopped out the entrance, the agent at the front desk asked me how she was.  I told them “Well they got her heart beating again!”  The manager at the front desk said, “Wow, well you are a hero! You saved her life!”  I smirked and kind of aww-shucksed it.   I had honestly thought we had dodged a bullet there.

In the hospital waiting room I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I called a friend of mine in Dallas and started to tell her the story.  As I was talking to her, this cop practically jumps in my face from out of nowhere asking me if I’m the one that was with the girl that had just been brought in.  First thing that I thought of was “God damnit I should have left. Why did I stay here? FUCK!”  Oh well.  Here goes nothing.  I said “Yes sir, I am” and he sat down next to me and told me that I needed to tell him what happened.  I was completely honest with him.  I told him we had been doing drugs and that she was a heroin addict and how I found her in the tub.  I started crying and breaking down as I talked to him.  He seemed genuinely sympathetic to the situation and believed what I said.  I found it kind of interesting that he didn’t really know the situation.  He doesn’t know if I am telling the truth or if I am some lunatic boyfriend that drowned or killed her myself.  It popped in my head that I could very easily be headed to jail with this guy.  Fortunately, he believed everything I said.  He told me that I wasn’t in trouble but that he needed to follow me back to the room so that we could clear the room of all the drugs so that nobody else would find them and possibly get hurt.  I said OK and got in my car while he tailed me back to the room.  I had the stash on me, fake cards, and a big glass meth bong and ice in my car to say the least.  I was a bit freaked out at this point.  Here I am high, driving dirty as fuck, while a cop is on my ass following me to a hotel room that a friend of mine just drowned in. When we got back to the room there were still some empty baggies and random syringes laying around that he collected.  He took my ID and ran it.  It came back clean (I guess my recent arrest wasn’t in the system yet.)  He said something along the lines of me being a man and he trusted that I would take care of her belongings and then he just left.

I went back to visit her a couple of times in the hospital that following week.  When all of this went down, I was able to get a hold of her mom and ex-husband.  They were both very sad but neither I could say were that surprised.  She had a previous suicide attempt but nothing close to this and it was years ago.  I told her mom that I would gather all of her belongings and take them to the hospital.  So here I am on one leg packing up all of this girls’ worldly belongings and hauling them to her hospital room.  When I went back with her shit, I couldn’t find her room.  I got sent bouncing all over the hospital lugging all of these bags with me on fucking CRUTCHES.  I remember being angry with her and saying “Goddammit Raquel, you fucking owe me for all this shit.”  It was summer time in Houston and I was on a broken leg walking all over a fucking hospital.  I feel tremendous guilt for having those emotions and am sorry for that.

Raquel had alienated almost everyone that had cared about her.  There was no funeral… no service… no public announcement.  Not even a fucking Facebook post.  Nothing.  I kept her wallet, laptop, purse, journal, and some presents she had for her son on my person.  I met up with her ex-husband in the parking lot of a gas station to give him her things.  He had heard of me and just knew me as a tweaker fraud meth dealer.  Raquel and I actually opened up a Walmart credit account in his name one night when she was angry with him.  He rolls up with some big muscular dude and I was a bit worried at first.  Was not sure how these next couple of minutes were going to play out.  As we started talking by my car, I explained to him what happened and showed him the journal entry that she had laid out on the toilet.  I still very much thought she was going to make it back from this at that point.  She had just gone into the hospital and had a heartbeat, I mean that means they get better right? He told me that he wasn’t that surprised.  He said something along the lines of him knowing that was going to happen.  He just wasn’t sure when.  He told me she had demons that she had been battling a long time.  We both cried and hugged each other. Raquel had one son that she loved, cared, and talked about a lot.  I think he was like 4-5 years old when this happened.  I used to drop her off at McDonald’s for her hourly supervised visit and playtime with him.  She loved him, I know she did, but I guess the heroin had too strong of a hold on her.

I went back to visit her the next day in the hospital.  I placed my portable Bose speaker by her head and played the Bumpin’ Uglies.  No one else was there. I went back two more times that week, one time with the friend that had introduced us.  At this point I hadn’t seen any change in her condition and was starting to doubt if she was going to make it.  Around the 4^th day I messaged her ex-husband to see if she had regained consciousness and he informed me that they had pulled the plug on her the night before.  My heart sank and I felt sad for a moment.  I laid out a long, fat, line of ice and railed that shit.

I have had one relapse since getting out of jail.  It was on the 1-year anniversary of her death.  I heard her voice in my head telling me not to do it too.  I really should have listened.  I felt like absolute shit on the come down and vowed to stick with my recovery efforts so that I don’t end up in jail or like Raquel.  I think of her sometimes randomly. I remember funny shit she said.  I remember her loyalty and realness.  I also remember the hard-felt battles that she was fighting and part of me is relieved knowing that she is no longer at war with herself. 

Rest in peace homegirl.  I miss you.