Sick

By Jen Smith

Behind the suburban mom...
Behind the successful businesswoman...
Is a dark past you would never suspect.

Today, Jen Smith is a typical single mom in the ‘burbs, racing to pick up her son from basketball practice, preparing for Cub Scouts and volunteering at the school’s ice cream social. But fifteen years ago her life was a very different story.

With the income earned from her small time pot growing business, Jen spent her twenties happily following the Grateful Dead around the country with her beloved dog, JJ and a lively community of deadhead friends. Then she met Greg, whose charisma and swagger eclipsed his prison record. The two quickly developed both a whirlwind romance and a thriving drug operation. Savvy and unsuspecting, Greg and Jen became major operators with connections to powerful Mexicans, moving hundreds of pounds of marijuana across the country and amassing over a million dollars in a few years. Theirs was a high-risk, high stakes lifestyle and a daily adrenalin rush. Their wealth afforded them exciting, extravagant luxuries, like lavish vacations to Hawaii, Costa Rica and Jamaica. But there was a darker side as well as the two fell deeper and deeper into ravaging cocaine, meth and alcohol addiction, and as Greg became increasingly unstable and violent. When Jen gets pregnant and has a healthy baby boy, she knows she can’t continue on this dangerous and soul-crushing path. But knowing that and getting out are two different things. Especially when your crack-addicted boyfriend routinely points a loaded gun at your head.

Riveting and fast-paced, SICK follows Jen's harrowing descent into addiction and domestic violence and lifts the curtain to reveal a twisted world few of us could imagine. But SICK is ultimately a story of survival and resilience, of what happens when one woman says, enough and fights to change her life, for her sake and her son’s...before it’s too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jen Smith
• Release date: Feb 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780615600284

Jen Smith

Originally from Rhode Island and born in 1970, Jen Smith spent six years in California then Six years in Ohio where she began the journey of recovery. Jen went back to school obtaining a Bachelors Degree in Business and a Masters Degree in Economics.

Book preview

I was rummaging through my purse the other day and at the bottom with some change and an assortment of other small things, a shiny round medallion with the Roman numerals IX inscribed in the middle caught my eye. These ‘coins’ as we call them in the meetings of twelve step recovery programs, are given out in recognition of continuing lengths of sobriety. My gut reaction when I saw this coin in my purse was disbelief. There was an X on the coin representing ten years of sobriety. Whose coin was it? The coin was mine. I exhaled as my thoughts wandered to another time. Old feelings of fear and hopelessness began to encroach ever so slightly. That coin is a reminder of another life that I escaped, a life filled with violence, drugs, deception, and cruelty.

How does someone go from being a junkie drug dealer to a productive, law abiding, member of society? Is it even possible? Occasionally I’m asked to speak at twelve step meetings and I find it difficult to tell my story. I don’t even know where to begin there’s just been so much that has happened, so much insanity. It’s like it was someone else’s life, not mine. Those negative feelings brought on by the coin quickly dissolved as I brought myself back into the day. Today my life is amazing. In sobriety I went back to school and studied business then completed a master’s degree. I have a healthy relationship with a stable supportive wonderful man. Ten years ago I didn’t even know what a healthy relationship looked like. And most importantly, I’m a mother to my son.

A normal person might think, Of course you’re a mother to your son, but they have no idea how unfeasible it would have been in my former life to be the kind of mother a kid deserves. Junkie mothers don’t show up for school events or parent teacher meetings. They don’t read to their kids or make them square meals at regular intervals. Junkie mothers aren’t emotionally present for their kids. For the last decade I have been there for my son and have provided the best possible positive healthy environment I could. I have not just shown up for parent teacher meetings but volunteered to run ice cream socials and attended after school events. I’ve helped with homework, packed a lunch every day, been able to provide new clothes, sneakers, good dinners, and money for field trips. Above all else I’ve been emotionally present and able to listen. My son is grown and almost on his own now. Recently he was talking to my friend and called me his advisor. Wow! He respects my opinion and listens to what I have to say. Who would have dreamed a reality like this was ever possible for me?

How does someone who has fallen so far down, get lifted up to such a wonderful place in life? Many folks say ‘life is not fair.’ For me it’s in my favor that life is not fair. If it were fair I would be dead or in jail. No one pulled me from the gates of hell and plopped me into the Beaver Cleaver family. I worked for everything I have today. I clawed and fought my way out risking my life and sometimes even my son’s life in the hopes that maybe we could find another way. I never gave up, even when it seemed that everybody and everything was against me. After a while glimpses of clarity coupled with new found knowledge would lead me to places and people that could finally help me. The people in the rooms of twelve step recovery and the inkling of a belief in something greater than myself were key to a better life for me and my son. I tell my story with the hope that it offers inspiration. No matter how devastating or self-destructive your life may seem at any given point there is always a way out. I am proof of that. Maybe someone can learn from my mistakes and gain a bit of hope that they too can make their life better in some way, big or small. The coin I found rummaging around in the bottom of my purse represents that hope, that possibility for all humans to change their lives for the better.

CHAPTER 1

I was 17 when I first saw the Grateful Dead play. Four shows at The Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island in 1987, I had a ticket to the last show. My girlfriend Jamie knew about the Dead scene because her parents were Deadheads. She knew to get tickets when they went on sale because they would sell out quickly. I drove Jamie and I to the concert. I had a little burgundy colored Nissan 200 hatchback with a cool lever below the dashboard that made the music from the radio circle around all of the speakers in the car. That was a great effect when you were tripping on acid. Tonight though, so far at least, we had just smoked a few joints. As we got close to the Civic Center, hippie-looking people with long hair and tie-dyed clothes were everywhere. VW buses covered in colorful bumper stickers, cars overstuffed with people, music filled the air everywhere. It looked like something out of the 60’s. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

We found a parking spot and started walking around. Jamie immediately started wheeling and dealing. She bought some more pot. It was greener than any pot I had ever seen, and smelled better too. Then she traded an extra ticket she had for a sheet of acid. A sheet is one hundred hits! She only paid about twenty-seven dollars for the ticket. Then the guy told me I could buy a sheet for fifty bucks. Considering the going rate for a hit of acid at school was four dollars each, this was a steal. And if all of that wasn’t good enough, at the end of every row of cars in the parking lot there was someone selling beer out of a cooler. Good beer! New Castle, Bass Ale, Becks Dark, Sammy Smiths, and a bunch of micro-brews I hadn’t heard of yet. And the best part, no one asked me how old I was. I fell in love with the Deadhead scene that moment and the show hadn’t even started yet.

By the time we did go into the show I was pretty wacked and the acid was really kicking in. The music was flowing through the air like a mist you could feel on your face – a cool, clean mist that tickled your skin. Jerry Garcia’s guitar twangs were surrounded by methodic drumbeats and harmonizing voices, all completely in time to the rhythm of fourteen thousand heartbeats. Everyone was dancing.

The next day I opened the front door of my family home and slowly walked up the front stairs of our raised ranch middle class house. Hello, I called out even though I knew no one was home. The only person left living here was my Mom but she was working, as she did every weekend and in the evenings, selling furniture. I opened the refrigerator. Inside there was about a half inch left in the milk carton, a few pieces of poorly wrapped cold cuts, random condiments that seemed like they had been there my whole life, and a few other containers of things that did not appeal to me. I closed the door, and walked down the hall to my bedroom.

The oriental décor in my bedroom was left over from a time before my Dad died, when my mother and I shopped together and my much older siblings still lived in the house. There was an oriental red and black umbrella hanging in the corner that matched the red quilt with black oriental symbols, on my bed. I don’t know what the symbols meant. My oldest brother lived across town. My other brother graduated college in Maine not too long ago and was living and working near Boston. My sister, the closest sibling in age yet still nine years my senior, was on her own taking care of her new son. I rarely saw or spoke to any of them.

The Grateful Dead were playing in Worcester Massachusetts next, only about an hour and a half drive from my house. I was going no matter what. I asked Jamie and others but couldn’t find anyone to go with me. This was no deterrent. The night of the show I hopped in my trusty little burgundy Nissan and drove myself up to Worchester. As I got close to the venue the colorful hippies and music filled air, collected in my stomach like butterflies and heightened every one of my senses. The parking lot I chose was a grass lot with a railroad track going through the middle. No one was hanging out here and no one was collecting money for parking either. Darkness was falling as I stepped over the railroad track and heading into the cosmic cluster of drug enhanced happy people that drew me like a magnet. There was magic and mystery in the haze. This is where I wanted to be. I would pursue these people and this lifestyle with a fury for many years to come. There were no rules here, no age limits, and a bizarre dysfunctional, yet warm and fuzzy sense of family that I craved. Soon I considered myself one of them, a Deadhead.

Before long I had graduated high school and found other people who were attempting to pursue the Grateful Dead lifestyle. I finished up my shift at a convenience store then walked up the street in the trendy East Side if Providence to an apartment where a bunch of Deadheads hung out. The stairs up to the third floor apartment were dirty and narrow. As I knocked, the door opened since it wasn’t locked and was already a bit ajar. A guy named Cameron greeted me. His hair was frazzled and stuck out in a crazy way, this coupled well with his bright oversized tie die and pajama pants. He passed me a joint as he spoke to me, You’re here so much why don’t you just live here until we all leave for spring tour in two weeks? I had secured my spot in Cameron’s baby blue van with huge dancing bears painted on the side, and countless Grateful Dead stickers on the back. I was going on spring tour. We made mushroom necklaces out of fimo clay to sell at the shows in hopes that it would give us the funds to keep going show to show. I was quickly learning how to get on tour and stay on tour. When the day came to leave, we left our jobs and the apartment without any regard to our bosses, landlords, or families and didn’t look back.

About two years later, I was on tour with the Grateful Dead and dating a guy they called Shasta Mark from Shasta Mountain in northern California. Being on tour means we traveled around the country following the band city to city seeing as many shows as possible. We were in Mountain View California a day before the first show there when Mark got arrested. I don’t remember what he got arrested for and it didn’t really matter because he was already on the run from a Federal Marshal’s warrant for possession of an ounce of ecstasy and three hundred hits of acid. When he got picked up I knew it would be a long time before I would see him again.

Wouldn’t you know, all the money Mark and I had was in Mark’s pocket when he got arrested. Gone. Not only was all the money gone, but at the previous Dead show my clothing bag had been stolen so I had no clothes. What I did have left was a small packet of very special pot seeds that were given to Mark by a Humboldt County woman named Mica. Little did I know the easy living these seeds would eventually bring me. I drove my old Subaru station wagon onto the parking lot at the Dead show in Mountain View, California. I sat on the open hatchback of the car dressed in Mark’s clothes which were falling off me due to the fact that he was a big guy and I was one hundred pounds soaking wet, and began to think about how I was going to get myself to the Vegas shows.

My two puppy dogs were hungry but luckily I still had plenty of dog food left. Yup, that’s right, two puppy dogs. The first one was named Oso, which means ‘bear’ in Spanish. Oso was a full-breed Rottweiler that we had bought just a few weeks ago in Pennsylvania on our way across the country. It wasn’t a planned purchase but Mark had always wanted a full-breed Rottweiler and we were driving along in the country in western Pennsylvania when we saw a sign at the end of a long farm driveway that said Rottweiler breeder. Oso was a very beautiful dog. And then there was JJ.

JJ was a very special dog. Mark and I had bought him a few months back for twenty-five dollars off of a different Rottweiler breeder back home in Rhode Island. Some big yellow lab dog had gotten mixed up with one of the breeder’s prize female Rottweilers. The breeder was not happy about that. I’ll never forget the day we went and picked him out. It was stormy outside. JJ was a funny-looking little pup. He was a golden yellow color with a stub tail. I think the breeder may have been practicing tail removal on JJ and perhaps messed up because JJ’s little stub tail wiggled only towards one side when he was happy, and JJ was always happy. JJ loved to ride in the car and ended up being the ultimate travel companion and best friend.

A leash was out of the question and unnecessary when it came to JJ. He understood that it was important to stay close and to pay attention when we were on the road. When JJ was in the parking lot at Dead shows I never had to tie him up. He loved the lot scene. There were fresh half-eaten burritos and falafel sandwiches all around for the snatching. JJ was a garbage hound. He was all about ground-scoring a snack. That was his quest, his purpose in life.

I brought JJ to a lot of Dead shows and he became pretty popular to the point where people would stop me and say something like, Hey I saw JJ on Shakedown Street in Buffalo, New York. JJ had his own friends he would go visit in the Dead show parking lot. I loved JJ so much and he loved me more than anything else in the world.

So there I was, still sitting on my hatchback when along came two guys I knew. They were looking for a ride to the Vegas shows. Perfect. They paid for the gas and loaned me some money. They knew I was good for the money and would be able to pay them back after a little hustling in the Vegas Dead show parking lot. The first guy was Dan, from Minnesota and the second guy we called Dreamer. Dreamer’s very wealthy girlfriend, who used to completely pay for all the flights, hotel rooms, and everything else a Deadhead could possibly want, had just dumped him.

Dreamer was not happy about having to travel to Vegas in my beat-up old Subaru. He barely spoke the whole ride there. Before we left for Vegas I stopped by one of Shasta Mark’s friend’s house who lived in the area and gave him Oso. A full-breed Rottweiler, especially one as beautiful as Oso, would be difficult to take care of at the Dead shows because he would be an easy target for theft. JJ would be okay; he was still a bit awkward looking and was a mutt with no monetary value. Besides, JJ and I had already developed a bond and an understanding of each other.

On the way to Vegas I found an art supply store and picked up some fimo clay and colored hemp string to make mushroom necklaces to sell on the lot in Vegas. I could make good money selling my mushroom necklaces, easily a hundred bucks a day. I could trade them for anything: food, beer, nitrous oxide balloons, more beer, and clothes. I needed clothes, and I always needed beer.

When we arrived in Vegas we had to find a hotel room with an oven to cook the fimo clay mushrooms. Just as we were pulling into this dive that advertised kitchens on their front sign I remembered that I had some raw crystal acid in my glove box. Raw crystal is very, very strong acid.

Hey guys, wanna get high?

Sure, I’ll do some. Dan was always ready to party. Dreamer joined along as well.

I’m really hungry and want to go over to the buffet at Circus Circus up the street and eat before the acid starts kicking in, Dan said. Sounded like a good idea to me, so we stuck our thumbs in the crystal acid, got back in the car after checking into the room, and headed towards Circus Circus which was about a half-mile up the Vegas Strip. Usually acid takes about an hour to kick in but as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot I started feeling it. I pulled out onto the strip and all of the brightly colored lights everywhere started to look even brighter. Then the lights started blurring and combining and lightly jumping around and swirling, then the sounds of the cars started slowing like a record played on the wrong speed. I looked at the guys and it was apparent they were experiencing the same thing.

I think I would like to walk to Circus Circus, said Dreamer with a sparkling gleam in his eyes.

Sounds like a good idea, I’ll bring the car back to the room. You guys can get out here if you want. I’ll catch up, save me a place in the buffet line. The guys got out and I brought the car back to the motel. The walk up the Vegas Strip was amazing! If you’ve never walked the Vegas Strip on really good acid, I highly recommend it. Everyone should do that at least once in their lives. When I got to the Circus Circus buffet line the guys were there.

I’m not hungry anymore, Dan said, let’s go walk around outside….

A couple months later I found out Dreamer blew his brains out in a train station in Philadelphia. I don’t know why. Maybe the come-down to barely scraping by from living the high life with his wealthy trust-baby Deadhead girlfriend was too much for him. It’s really easy to get used to living the lifestyle of the rich and well-to-do, I would find out later.

CHAPTER 2

Grateful Dead tour can strip you of everything and leave you craving for more. Drugs will do this too. I made it back to the east coast with my dog JJ, thanks to my mom’s three hundred dollar wire, but I was broke again and had no choice but to go back to living with mom. By this time JJ had grown into a beautiful doggie. Being half Rottweiler he had that box-shaped face and was very strong with a huge muscular chest. He looked just like a Rottweiler except his coat was a rich golden yellow color. People commented on him wherever we went.

It had been a couple of years and my Mom now had her fiancé living with her in our family home. He was a rather quiet retired business man, large with grey hair and glasses. The small bedroom upstairs was turned into a sitting room with a TV. He sat in the recliner while I sat on the couch twisting multicolored fimo clay and forming it into little mushroom head shapes.

What are you making? He questioned.

Mushroom necklaces. I said without taking a break in my twisting, squishing, and molding motions.

What do you do with them? He continued inquisitively.

I know some head shops that will buy them in bulk. I sell them for two dollars wholesale at the shops and five dollars at the concerts. They only cost me twenty two cents to make. I’ll make a hundred sitting here tonight. I explained.

What’s a head shop? He questioned.

A head shop is a store that caters to hippies selling tie dies, Guatemalan clothes, and jewelry. I didn’t think adding drug paraphernalia to the list of things sold in a head shop appropriate in this moment. He just looked at me. I don’t think he was impressed at all, not that I was trying to impress him. He was a working man’s man and probably wondered why I didn’t just go out and get a job. I was determined to get my own apartment back on the East Side of Providence as soon as possible and it wouldn’t be long. Fortunately my mom and her fiancé weren’t nosey and never poked around my room. The mushroom necklace gig was making me some money but the real income was coming from a couple of pounds of psychedelic mushrooms that I kept in my bottom dresser draw.

When I went to concerts I would go around in the crowd saying mushrooms to see who turned around. Then I would hold up the mushroom necklaces and go check the people out. If I thought they were cool I would let them know I had real psychedelic mushrooms for sale. The profit margin was good on mushrooms. I could break an ounce up into eights, at twenty-five dollars a piece. That’s two hundred dollars an ounce, times sixteen ounces in a pound, that’s three thousand two hundred a pound that I bought for twelve hundred. That’s a profit of two grand and I didn’t eat mushrooms, the only drug I’ve ever disliked, so there was no risk of me eating all of my stash. So far my selling method was working. I hadn’t gotten arrested and I was making lots of money.

I picked up the key to my small three room apartment, then drove the few blocks to it and parked out front. JJ was with me ready to check out his new home. The square building was set back from the street and had four doors, two on each side, one for each apartment. Mine was on the bottom left. The key fit in the door and with a little wiggling the door opened. I had never had my very own place to live before and my head held high and my chest puffed out as I entered. JJ went ahead and gave himself a tour, sniffing around. I walked past the kitchen area and into the room off to the right, which was the bedroom. I sat in the middle of the floor and from my pocket, pulled out the small bag of pot seeds Shasta Mark was given when we were in Humboldt County, California. I held the pot seeds up to the Gods with both hands in a ceremonial fashion like the woman Mica did when she bequeathed them to Mark. This room would be my grow room. And I would call the pot Mica. California high quality pot always had a name for the strain, like skunk number one, blueberry bud, or purple kush. Since I didn’t know the name of this strain I decided to name it after the hippie chick that gave the seeds to Mark. JJ came in and plopped down next to me. I rubbed his ears and squished his soft furry head the way he liked. We stayed there on the floor for a while content to be in our own space.

The first time I tried heroin was at my friend Mitch’s apartment. Mitch was a culinary student that lived with two

Reviews for Sick

[pinkcrayon99 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

the grateful dead.drugs.domestic violence.buddy.Jen Smith was a drug addicted hippie-type chick that followed Grateful Dead tours all over the country. At the opening of this memoir, we find Jen to be this fiercely independent business woman taking ownership of her brand even though it was illegal. Jen was known for growing high grade marijuana. She also kicked her heroin addiction cold turkey. While hanging out with friends after a Grateful Dead show, Jen met Greg. Greg was her ticket onto a very bumpy rollercoaster ride.Greg was a drug dealer and an ex-con. Jen and Greg quickly became an item. Jen became a drug mule for him. Jen and Greg began to move large amount of drugs for a Mexican named Jose. Their business expanded. The money was pouring in. Jen and Greg were partying and taking all kinds of drugs like cocaine, crystal meth, pills, crack, and ecstasy. Greg soon became more and more jealous, controlling, and manipulative. Greg's behaviour soon birthed into severe emotional, physical, and vebal abuse. Jen got pregnant. Jerry Garcia died. Buddy was born. Greg got worse. Jen drank more alcohol and took more drugs. Jen never once went back to heroin.There were often times throughout this book that I had to remind myself that it was not fiction. They got away with so much. There was always money but never peace. I wanted to just reach my hand into my kindle and remove poor Buddy from this story. He was not neglected or abused physically but he endured emotional hardships right along with his mother. Greg was so unpredictable that Jen's main focus was keeping Buddy safe which left little time for nurturing. Jen breaks away from Greg's cluthches several times but always returned high on some mind/heart numbing narcotic.This story was a painful read for me. There were a few times I simply wanted to send it to the book graveyard. The writing was mediocare at best but that's not what turned me off. The drug that Jen was most addicted to was the luxurious lifestyle that she and Greg lived. Out of all the times in the story that she ran or got away she never ran for help. She ran to get high. No rehab. No shelter. Just more drugs, more alcohol, or another expensive trip. She was surrounded by friends that were enablers that she did not trust. She was estranged from her family. Greg weakened Jen down to a shell of a person. I honestly can't comprehend how she survived physically or health wise. By the end I was drained. The moments that I enjoyed the most were when Jen spoke about her dog JJ. I loved JJ.