A year after Josh and I broke up, he bought a house midway down Nectarine off Hollister in Goleta, right around the corner from 7-Eleven. It had a six-foot-tall, newly constructed wood fence around it and a giant weed-infested yard with the weight bench and weights we’d bought together years before, sitting rusted and unused.

Built in the ’50s, the house had one bathroom off the linoleum-floored kitchen, and a living room with two couches stretched lengthwise along the wall opposite two bedrooms. There was a giant fish tank filled with Oscars on the kitchen counter, a counter always loaded with a ton of dirty dishes. Every time I visited, I cleaned the kitchen.

Although only two people officially lived in the house, there was an endless stream of people there: traveling bands and crusty punks, local skaters, Josh’s friends, and a drug dealer or two.

It was 1997 and I’d moved to Los Angeles to start my first real job after college as an assistant marketing manager at a shopping center, but still drove up to Goleta most weekends.

I missed Josh a lot. We’d been best friends before we started dating. Not seeing him was difficult.

I was worried about him. He’d started using heroin. There was always dope at the house. I smoked tar a handful of times with him, even had him cook it up and drip it down the back of my nose, making me puke. Granted, I was puking all the time anyway. My bulimia was raging. I was going home on my lunch breaks so I could vomit after eating. It was a little tense with the former football player roommate because of this.

Or maybe it was tense at home because I’d slept with him. One night we’d ended up getting drunk, doing cocaine, and playing strip poker. I’d lost so egregiously that it was unanimously decided I had to give him a blow job and fuck him.

Something like that.

We’d been watching the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape while playing strip poker. I think he put that into the VCR as soon as we got back from TGI Friday’s, where he’d bought me a seared ahi tuna salad and several rounds of frozen bellini’s.

Unlike my living situation, Josh’s house was safe for my bulimia at least. At his house, finding vomit in the toilet was normal. Hell, people would puke outside sometimes. No one gave my bulimia a thought. They just figured I was using. I felt accepted, although nobody really gave a shit. Though Josh loved and accepted me no matter what I did, he turned a nodded-out eye.

After those years of being completely off limits as Josh’s girl, I was now available. And, because I had been his girl, I became the ultimate conquest. I was an easy target. I wasn’t hanging with the pack when everyone was shooting dope in one of the bedrooms. I was often alone in the living room watching television with our dog, Lucky. The guys would circle around –  whichever ones weren’t shooting up. The good news for them was that I would fuck whomever to manage the pain of watching Josh use. We’d fuck in close proximity to Josh – close enough for him to hear every single movement.

Maybe I was doing it as a cry for help to distract him. A part of me would have loved to believe that. But it’s not true. I did it to hurt him. It hurt me too, but that was beside the point.

One such incident occurred at a Fourth of July wedding in the hills above Santa Barbara. I was drinking outside in the sun, wearing a short strappy mini-dress. Josh and a bunch of our friends went inside to shoot up. I stayed outside, sitting next to a tub of beer, guzzling like a pro.

“Wanna go on a hike? You seem a little lonely and it’s a beautiful day. We can go for a hike a little further up the hill and watch the sunset.”

I don’t remember his name or if he even bothered to introduce himself.

“Sure. Let’s bring some beer.”

I grabbed a couple cans of Meister Brau Light from the ice-cold tub. I was on my sixth or seventh at this point, and believed that because it was light beer it wouldn’t get me drunk.

We walked along a hillside trail. It was a clear day and we could see all the way out to the Channel Islands. He found a spot for us to sit on a picnic table. I sat down and he started to kiss me. He pulled my dress up and slid his hand up the inside of my right thigh, under the edge of my panties.

For a minute it seemed like a good idea. It was physical affection and I was in pain. He pulled my panties off, stepped back and unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and pulled out his cock. As he slid his penis inside me, my emotions turned quickly. I started crying.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

I pulled my panties back up and patted my dress back down, grabbed my beer and started walking back to the party – but not inside. I was still afraid to go in there. I knew what they were doing.

Eventually we left and went back to Josh’s house, where I snuggled up on the couch, softly crying.

Another night, Josh and I went to the Mercury Lounge with some of the guys who lived up the street. It was a fun night. Some punk band was playing and the bar served Chimay Blue. I loved Chimay in all its iterations, but Blue was nine percent alcohol with a smooth caramel sweetness to it. I drank quite a few.

We got back to Josh’s house and one of the neighbor guys decided to spend the night in the living room with me. We hadn’t flirted or anything up to this point, but now he was staying there. He wasn’t really my type, but smelled like my favorite conditioner, Abba Moisture Scentsation.

I gave him a blow job. What I remember most about it was his complaint that it wasn’t good enough, pushing against the back of my head and critiquing the way my tongue caressed his cock. He complained loudly enough that I knew Josh could hear him. I moved to the other couch, passed out and woke up agitated and embarrassed a few hours later. I snuck out and drove back to L.A. before sunrise.

The situation in Josh’s house was out of control. On one hand, I kept visiting with this fantasy of being able to get Josh into rehab. I looked into it but it wasn’t affordable.  Even if I could have afforded it, I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting him to go. Sometimes I believed that I could bring the old beer-loving Josh back. I brought him cases of his favorite beer, kegs of others. When I visited, I’d make sure we made it out to the Mercury Lounge where we would see live music. I thought, maybe if I could get him back into music he’d stop using.

On the other hand, I visited for reasons that had nothing to do with saving Josh or even spending time with him. His house was a place where I could drink, get laid and sometimes do a little cocaine, though less and less frequently. My sexual encounters became increasingly questionable with each visit. I almost always fucked someone, but I wasn’t usually attracted to him.

One weekend I came up for the World Heavyweight Championship between Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. It was a huge party. They’d bought stuff to barbecue, potato chips, soda, and some booze. There must have been 20 people in the house.

“White in this room, black in the other.” Kevin was giving a tour to me and the other new arrivals.

“Cocaine?”

“Um, no. Heroin, dear.”

I walked to 7-Eleven to get some crappy beer and a Slim Jim for Lucky. No one went to 7-Eleven without getting a treat for Lucky – especially me. He would show enormous disappointment in anyone who came back with a bag from 7-Eleven without a treat. It was the least I could do for the dog I’d raised as a puppy. Most visits, I got to the house early enough to take him for a walk on the beach. But not on this day. Lucky and I played in the yard for a while until the fight started. Everyone else worked on getting their high.

By the time I went in to get a seat, everyone had more or less begun crowding around the television. All that was left for me was a spot on the floor against the wall near the bathroom. Not even into the second round, I was the only one watching the match. Everyone else had nodded out. Now and again there’d be a little movement, and a few comments about the match.

At the start of the third round, I looked around the room and noticed that my friend Chris was turning purple I heard gasping and looked back at the screen in time to catch the image of Holyfield’s ear bleeding.

“Holy shit!”

I was grateful for the commotion, barely registering that Tyson had bitten a chunk out of Holyfield’s ear. I needed to help Chris.

“Hey guys, I think Chris is O.D.-ing.”

“Oh shit,” and one of them started slapping him on the face. He opened his eyes and took a breath. I remember going for a walk with Chris later on that night. He lived – at least that time.

I went back home the next morning and had this nightmare:

I’d been invited to a concert by a friend and wandered out into the night still in a towel from my shower. I heard a puppy whining and followed the noise until I found him, cut up and bleeding with a syringe sticking out of his neck. There was more crying and I found more dogs, half butchered, with syringes everywhere. I kept finding more and more injured dogs. I started calling out to all the dogs, gathering them around me and continuing to look for more.

They all followed me except one: Lucky. Lucky was rolling around and wouldn’t come with me. I could sense that whoever had been hurting the dogs was nearby and looking for us. I took off running, getting as many of the dogs to run with me as I could. Lucky stayed behind.

I felt so traumatized the next morning after this nightmare, I barely made it to work. My mind was filled with the images of butchered and hurting dogs, and I felt an enormous guilt over not being able rescue Lucky.

I never went back to Josh’s house after that horrible dream. I carried a lot of guilt for abandoning him, Lucky, and everyone else I knew.