DB Maddox
Bio
These are pivotal excerpts from a gritty and explicit tale of survival in the wake of childhood sexual assault, and the devastating path I carved out for myself in striving to take back my own body—and nearly destroying it along the way.
Achievements (1)
Stories (13)
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Chapter 37: Just as the Sun Rises and Sets. Content Warning.
Relapsing was a terrible feeling but by now I had learned to forgive myself, where for years I had beaten myself up. Maybe I was simply destined to be a high-functioning drug addict, on and off, in perpetuity? Maybe, just as the sun rises and sets, I would relapse every single fucking time? It dawned on me that maybe this was just going to be my fucking life, where I stumble, pull myself up, and stumble again. But I knew someone or something out there was looking out for me, and I had found gratitude for the good days; in these moments of clarity, I realized that I had been in so many dangerous situations and had basically emerged fucking unscathed.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 36: Drug Dealers Are People Too. Content Warning.
I was deep in the throes of active addiction when I moved into the 1 bedroom in Prospect-Lefferts. Getting my shit was tricky, and I often took “lunch” at work to Uber it back to my old place and see Brenda. I still had Joe, but he became stolidly cash-only. It wasn’t long before I established 2 new connects in the neighborhood and was getting drugs on consignment again—and running up several-thousand-dollar tabs.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 32: I Am No Prude. Content Warning.
By the time I got the big railroad apartment in Bed-Stuy I had stopped turning tricks. I had a solid rapport with a couple of regular dealers and was making enough money to cover my $2K a week drug tab – usually. And when I couldn’t I got my coke on consignment, until I had an ever-running tab that my paycheck only put a dent in and which put me eternally behind the ball.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 27: Rite of Passage. Content Warning.
I was using the delivery service I knew from my Greenpoint days and was getting coke any time I could scrape together at least 17 or 18 dollars, which was the minimum, I discovered, that these guys would accept for a 20 bag. But I was exhausted from having to earn that 17 dollars, and all the networking and phone calls and texts and follow-ups.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 25: A Solitary Profession. Content Warning.
Not long after I relapsed and had steady work again and was back on my own, and living in a house in Kensington. I had bought a cheap twin mattress and put it on the floor in the corner. The place had ants so I bought ant-killer and sprayed the floor around my bed—that is, when I was lucid enough to notice them approaching.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 21: Businesswoman. Content Warning.
My first explicit deal took place the night of my 26th birthday. I met my dealer at the time – I think his name was Carlos, I have no idea how I met him but it was probably through someone I partied with in Greenpoint, or maybe someone at work, and he ran a delivery service – at some bar in the city. I had no plans that night, no one had asked me to hang out – not even Brian – or even knew or cared that it was my birthday. I might have grieved over this fact it if I stopped and really thought about it, or cared about anything other than getting my shit. So I was convivial and flirtatious, and told him it was my birthday.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 18: Toughening Up. Content Warning.
I had been with Rosemont Publishing, a small academic outfit in bumfuck NJ and my first job out of school, for about a year when my colleague and object of lust, Ben, found a new job. I must have applied for a job with the same company without realizing who they were because one day I came back to my apartment in Highland Park and discovered a message on my answering machine for an Editor position with LexisNexis. It took me a few conversations with Ben to realize it was the same place he was going.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 14: Slut-in-the-Making. Content Warning.
Toward the end of high school, I got a scholarship to go to Adelphi University out in Nassau County. I had also gotten a scholarship to an architecture school in Rhode Island, but Mother and Father pleaded solvency, claimed they couldn’t cover the remaining cost and made too much money to qualify for financial aid—and I was forbidden to take out student loans, and didn’t know that I didn’t need my parents’ permission to do so.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 13: Constellation of Pleasure. Content Warning.
I didn’t notice I had gotten big until that moment I awoke to a new body consciousness; but, once I did, it skyrocketed to the position of my single greatest problem, the biggest looming obstacle to my happiness. Paradoxically, on some level I perceived that the extra weight would render me unattractive, so that men – especially Father – would be deterred from commenting on my form. But eventually I came to realize: It didn’t work.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
Chapter 3: Betrayed by Biology. Content Warning.
I can’t remember where I was when Father got home that day. Probably, I was somewhere inside the house; maybe I was in the living room? Maybe sitting cross-legged on the dingy, frayed oriental rug that had tufts of cat and dog and probably human hair tangled in its tassels at either end; the rug that, like many of our possessions, was a relic rescued from my great-grandmother’s house when she died, and which had become gruesome, having been relegated from her elegant home that was filled with her art, and her piano, and whatever is the stench of the civilized class – to this ranch-style 3-bedroom set a little too far back from the road in a Suffolk County town that didn’t even have sidewalks. Maybe I was hunched over the old, beat-up chest that was our makeshift coffee table, haplessly engaged and playing with my toy horses and their little dolls, in their little horsey outfits – and just lost in play, constructing little horsey personalities to each doll according to their plastic expressions, making the horses pretend-gallop and race each other and even talk, sometimes.
By DB Maddox5 months ago in Confessions
