He felt better when there were lots of people around. When his closest friends couldn’t keep up with the pace, DJ began filling their slots with hangers-on who viewed him like an open bar at a wedding, a bottomless source of free top-shelf drinks that demanded nothing in return. He started hanging around with the Hells Angels. He bought a nice mobile home parked near Weirs Beach in New Hampshire. It quickly became a favored partying spot for him, his club friends, and the many women who spend their lives chasing Angels.
He used a chunk of his remaining settlement cash to open a welding repair and fabrication shop in Waltham, renting a three-bay garage and equipping it with all the best tools. His newest girlfriend, who was named Michelle, encouraged him to do more to reach his potential. She used her skills as a lawyer in the financial industry to help him set up business accounts and establish credit with suppliers. DJ had always been a capable welder. If he couldn’t return to diving, he figured running a welding shop would be the next-best thing. Leveraging contacts he had around town, he got his business off to a good start.
For years, DJ had counted on the built-in structure of the diving industry to keep his partying impulses in check. He knew that the next job, along with its mandatory drug test, was always just around the corner. Now, with only himself to answer to, he began to lose all self-discipline. He kept two stocked refrigerators in his welding shop, and the place became a magnet for friends and acquaintances.
By 2004, DJ started coming to terms with the fact that a life of nonstop partying was not sustainable. In his shop, while jobs backed up, he’d fall asleep at his desk with the air conditioner on full blast. After three years of throwing around wads of cash like a sailor on leave, he’d blown through most of his settlement money. He’d already lost the high-end condo and moved back in with his mother. Now he fell behind on his rent at the garage as well as his child support payments. Troubled by his behavior, Cody’s mother restricted DJ’s access to their son. Searching for a new source of discipline, DJ turned to the military. He decided he would become an Army Ranger. With all the initiative he had shown when he’d started out in commercial diving, he threw himself into the application process. He rounded up a stack337 of exemplary recommendation letters and included a note from a Waltham cop commending DJ’s spur-of-the-moment assistance years earlier in chasing down a fleeing suspect. In the end, though, the army denied his application.
Dispirited, he returned to his partying ways with abandon, causing so much drama that he found himself banned from a couple of the Waltham bars where he’d been a popular fixture for years. He moved from Percocet and Vicodin to the more powerful opiate OxyContin. Before long he found himself unable to function without those powerful little green pills called OCs. Although OxyContin had arrived on the scene only in 1996338 as a treatment for cancer patients and others in serious pain, it quickly became the hottest prescription pill in the underground drug trade. Once the time-release coating was removed from the little pill, it took just a few seconds to deliver a head-spinning high that was packed with a twelve-hour punch of morphinelike pain relief. Oxy was so damn powerful that tolerance quickly built up, demanding more and more milligrams to deliver that same high. And any addict who tried to stop feeding the addiction was sentenced to debilitating withdrawal sickness. Oxy was also incredibly expensive. A single 80-milligram pill could cost eighty dollars or more on the black market, opening up the drain on DJ’s rapidly vanishing bank account.
Eventually, his erratic behavior cost him his relationship with his supportive girlfriend Michelle. Now not only did he have to keep running to stay one step ahead of the nightmares, but he had a worsening addiction that was beginning to dictate his life. One day in 2005, after his stash had run dry and he was suffering miserable withdrawal sickness, he called a friend who shared his opiate addiction and asked, “You got any OCs?”
“No,” his friend said. “Nobody’s got anything.”
DJ wasn’t buying that story. “You don’t sound like you’re sick right now.”
“No, I’m not,” the guy admitted. “But I don’t want to be the one to turn you on to something you don’t need to get into.”
DJ knew exactly what he was talking about. “All right.”
Then he hopped on his motorcycle and, five minutes later, was standing at his friend’s door, telling him, “You gotta give me some of what you’ve got.”
So began DJ’s introduction to the cheaper, deadlier opiate of heroin.
Among the many cruelties of heroin is that it functions like a door-buster deal at a big-box retailer’s Black Friday sale, perverting the concept of value to incentivize the reckless purchase of things you don’t need. DJ found that for what he’d been paying for a single OxyContin pill, whose high wore off after several hours, he could now get a gram of heroin. That generous supply could keep him feeling good for up to three days. Before long the addiction was consuming his life. Gone was his sense of initiative. Gone was the muscular physique he had long prided himself on but which had become impossible to maintain. Gone, most surprisingly, was the irrepressible charm that had made DJ so attractive to the parade of women he’d met and seduced over the years. The hunt no longer held any appeal for him. All he wanted to do now was get his drugs so he could get high.
DJ worked hard to keep his habit from his mother, but one day he’d been unable to hide it. As disconnected from reality as he’d become, seeing that lethal look of heartbreak and pity on her face punctured his haze. He’d always cherished the idea that he was her rock. Now what was he to her but another burden in a life that had already been saddled with too many?
Not long after that, he got a call from an old diving buddy. It was early 2006, and there was a desperate need for divers in the Gulf to tackle the rebuilding work following Hurricane Katrina. DJ’s friend told him he could make up to a thousand dollars a day. All he had to do was show up—and bring along his own diving helmet because hats were at a premium in the Gulf.
DJ stopped to consider the offer. On one hand, he hadn’t worked as a diver since the tunnel accident. And on his worst days his heroin addiction made him barely able to handle a walk to the convenience store, never mind a dive from an offshore rig into three-hundred-foot waters. On the other hand, he was broke and desperate, and maybe this was the chance he needed to jump-start his life. He sure didn’t want to see that look on his mother’s face again.
338 (Chapter 15, note 10)
OxyContin had arrived on the scene only in 1996: Donna Gold, “A Prescription for Crime: Abuse of 2 Painkillers Blamed for Rise in Violence in Maine’s Poorest County,”