Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

Nic is distraught to learn that a close friend has died in a motorcycle accident. When he calls his mother about this, she confronts him about his addiction and his relationship with Zelda. The conversation turns into a screaming match between Nic, Zelda, and his mother. Later, in a drug-induced craze, Nic suggests that he and Zelda break into his mother’s car and steal his stepfather’s computer. Nic reasons that if he has a computer, he can write and earn money. After he leaves Zelda in a grocery store to wait for him, he breaks into his mother’s garage. In the garage, he loses all sense of time and purpose and goes into a drug-induced psychosis, “just totally tweaking out” (272). He is found by Spencer, his mom, and his older half-brother. After this episode, Nic’s only option is to go to jail or a treatment center, so he resigns to going to Mission Community detox.

Nic undergoes a brutal detox at Mission Community. Unable to eat and while experiencing seizures, he writes that his “body feels beyond repair. It is sunken down to nothing” (278). Nic even begs the nurse to let him die. Zelda promises to visit him but is usually too high to manage. She promises to go into a detox program herself. Nic meets a fellow writer with common acquaintances, and this friendship helps him manage, but he refuses to consider a longer treatment after the short detox. His father, however, tells him that if he does not go into a treatment center he will go to jail.

Zelda visits Nic at the detox center. Nic notes that she must have been “shooting coke ever since I left” (284) and guesses that she tried to mask this by taking pills before her visit. The pills make her drowsy, so she sleeps for most of the visit and Nic admits to feeling embarrassed by her. On her next visit, she is more alert, and the two hatch a plan for Nic to serve a short sentence in jail and pretend to be gay. This way, he will be “put in a separate cell with a bunch of queens and […] just be able to watch TV and it’ll be totally safe and actually kind of fun” (283). Though Nic is ready to go along with this and tries to convince himself that he and Zelda can stay sober, when Zelda admits that she has drugs in her car, he backs out and chooses to stay at the center.

Nic’s mother and father force him into a treatment center in Arizona that specializes in dual-diagnosis treatment, meaning treatment for addicts with psychological disorders and severe trauma. Nic does not want to go, but he recognizes that he has little choice in the matter. Because the doctors at his detox center cut off all of his medications, as he travels to Arizona, his body experiences a range of problems, from insomnia and diarrhea to the feeling of surges of electricity to feeling as if bugs are crawling all over him. Nic is miserable and immediately dislikes Arizona, which he deems “desolate and ugly,” and is hostile and skeptical about the center. He misses Zelda and promises to come back for her.  

Despite his hostility, Nic establishes a daily routine at the treatment center. He goes to morning and afternoon sessions on “chemical dependency, codependency, sexual dependency, or men’s issues” (289), and he takes a class similar to yoga. He stays in contact with Zelda, and is horribly lonely and remains fixated on her. However, he also thinks seriously about the fallout from his relapse; it weighs heavily on him, and he sees yet another recovery as an impossible task. His primary therapist, Annie, angers him when she insists that he stay for three months, three times longer than the usual treatment. She also puts him on a no-female contract because Annie believes Nic “use[s] [his] sexuality to try to control and influence other people” (292). This enrages Nic but he acquiesces, feeling “utterly defeated” (293).