Sea, Swallow Me

By Suki Jones

In this dark, harrowing, and gripping memoir which details a drug addiction that almost killed her, Suki Jones writes with a raw immediacy and refreshing candor about not only being dependent on drugs, but keeping that dependency a secret from her family and friends. 

Set against the backdrop of the Bay Area in the early '90s, Jones balances motherhood and modeling with deft precision, but behind the scenes she was falling apart and roaming the night with punk rockers, metalheads, and sometimes even strangers, just looking for her next fix.

A ferocious memoir about broken family history, sexual abuse, and debilitating addiction, Sea, Swallow Me vividly wanders through the decade with a fiery resolve which ultimately reveals how Jones survived when she shouldn't have. Sea, Swallow Me is a powerful and redemptive tale of resilience and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Embers Arts Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215579961

Suki Jones

Suki Jones is a San Francisco Bay Area-based freelance writer, specializing in addiction and harm reduction. She has worked as a volunteer with the syringe access program at Glide Church SF and is involved in local community outreach. Her writing has appeared in Stereo Embers Magazine and Broke Ass Stuart. She enjoys long hikes to the beach, listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tower of Power, and everything in between. Sea, Swallow Me is her first book.

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Author’s Note

This story is true. It is written to the best of my recollection, and the recollection of those I spoke with regarding various events and details. Some names and characteristics have been changed and some characters have been blended to ensure they retain their anonymity.

Table of Contents — Mix Tape

1 Our Lady of Safeway 

Portishead All Mine

2 Omaha 

Dolly Parton Porter and Wagoner Satan’s River

3 Rehab 

Elton John Someone Saved My Life Tonight

4 Not in Kansas 

Gary Wright Dream Weaver

5 Bay Area 

The Scorpions Holiday

6 Morgan Territory 

Dio Holy Diver

7 La Casa Via 

David Bowie Life on Mars

8 Tower Records 

Siouxsie and the Banshees Swimming Horses

9 The Lost Boys  

This Mortal Coil Acid Bitter and Sad

10 The Stone 

Jane’s Addiction  Jane Says

11 Suburbs 

The Smiths Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

12 Berkeley 

The Avengers Car Crash

13 Oakland 

Sonic Youth—Covering The Carpenters "Superstar"

14 The Clinic 

Babyland Worst Case Scenario

15 Twelve Steps 

The Velvet Underground Heroin

Prologue

✵ ✵ ✵

Destroy your life; then put it back together.

Jerry Stahl

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The Cocteau Twins song, Sea, Swallow Me laps in my head: a hydrous soundtrack, ebbing and flowing with my life. They remain to quell me, but I’m always wanting more, more, more.

I was on Telegraph Avenue, coming from my dealer’s house in South Berkeley, when I saw the cop lights behind me. I had just fixed, and was feeling especially off-kilter from my overdose the night before. I was distracted — not thinking straight, and driving erratically would have been a notch up from where I was at. I swore out loud as I passed through not one but two consecutive red lights bookended a block apart. I swore again when I saw the police lights in my rear view mirror; the colors rotated across my dashboard like stage lights before a feature attraction.

Last night’s puke was still in my hair. It had dried and felt like hairspray, but smelled like bile. Honestly, that was the least of my concerns. I was bruised and abraded down the right side of my body. Parts of my skin looked like fruit retrieved during a dumpster dive. In my purse, I had heroin and cocaine and god only knows what else.

The previous day—in the morning, I had done a photoshoot and then I booked a suite for the night at the Claremont Hotel. In the suite I changed into a short, semi-sheer slip dress, refreshed my hair and makeup, and did a couple bumps before going downstairs to the Claremont’s Terrace Lounge to meet friends for drinks.

The lounge was a relic, a well-preserved time capsule. It was a sultry ode to the 1960’s, furnished in deep reds and lustrous dark wood. We opted for the bar over our regular booth and drank a couple dozen cocktails collectively before making our way to the party at a rockstar’s home in the Oakland Hills.

Red and blue lights were flashing insistently in my rear view mirror and the authoritative siren, beeping and whooping, was not helping me make a level-headed split decision. I began strategizing, wondering how I could make myself appear more like a stand-up citizen while wearing underwear as clothes and sporting what looked like a roller derby injury. Does everyone contemplate making a break for it when law enforcement is tailing them?

Maybe the lights aren’t even for me, I thought as I considered where I could pull over. They were, of course, for me—I had run two stop lights with a cop directly behind me. My pulse began to pound with exaggeration throughout my body, the arteries on either side of my neck drumming in rhythmic unison. The momentum built until I felt as though my heart was lodged in my throat and I might not draw a normal breath. My head reverberated with the sound of my blood coursing loudly through my ear drums.

What if I pass out? What if he asks about my bruises? What if I can’t breathe? What if they arrest me? My racing thoughts were then apprehended by the loudspeaker from behind me.

BMW, pull to the side of the road!

I was in the far left lane on Shattuck Avenue with a continuous row of early evening commuter traffic in the lane next to me on the right. To my left was the cement island, the median area. It was shaped like a Christmas tree cookie cutter, and it was wide open and inviting. I didn’t want to give the police any indication that I was trying to defy the law, not comply, or evade them, so I pulled over. I pulled to the left up over the curb, onto the concrete median, in the middle of the road, in the midst of rush hour traffic. As I pulled on it, the parking brake made that ratcheting, scraping sound that I found satisfying, even parked on the median under duress.

I watched in my mirror while waiting for the cop to exit his car, and I tried to summon the bubbly, outgoing, and charismatic side of my personality. I wanted to be the most pleasant form of myself when Officer Policeman made his way to my window.

My head felt fuzzy; I was both physically and emotionally hungover. I’d been at the party in the Oakland Hills all night. I had held my own with the Who's Who of the 1990's party scene but at some point in the evening, the night turned on me. I hadn’t even drank all that much. I had, however, done an assorted mix of heroin, cocaine, hydrocodone, and an ecstasy press-pill the color of a Flintstone’s chewable with a Mercedes Benz logo stamped into it. I had taken a couple of Valium much earlier in the day, but by evening those hardly counted.

It was a great party. The view, clear as a bell, was incredible. You could see the entire San Francisco Bay Area from the expansive redwood deck off the back of the house, the lights twinkling and shimmering like sequins.

I had a drink after the ecstasy hit. The details of the evening became a little warbly for me after that. Individual parts of the night increased and diminished in clarity as I attempted to recall them. At one point during the night, the novelty of the house's elevator had waned so I decided to take the stairs. More specifically, I took the railing along the stairs to the bottom floor. I slid down the high-gloss banister, gliding down like butter on a warm skillet, as I remember it anyway. At the end of the banister there was a raised lip, and I came down on it — hard. I hit it with such force that I bounced off of the banister and skidded across the marble floor. The impact hardly phased me at the time. In fact, I thought it was hysterically funny.

This is where I believe the night began to tilt away from my favor. At some point after the banister incident, some of my friends and I went back to my hotel suite. I remember absolutely nothing about our return to the hotel. It’s like I’m unplugged from the world until I feel a sudden shock of ice cold water on me. I have a sort-of-fused recollection of what happened next, a childhood memory conjoined with the actual occurrence.

I’m a kid and I’m with my parents at Grand Lake O’ the Cherokee in Oklahoma. The water is so crisp, it cracks when I jump in. When I surface my skin constricts, and I shiver uncontrollably. I can't stop. I can’t catch my breath. I’m looking around for the lake's familiar thick verdant vegetation and sharp gray shoreline rocks, but there aren’t any. Instead there are gleaming bathroom fixtures and sparkling pristine hotel tiles.

I was nauseous, sore, and undeniably disoriented. I threw up repeatedly while shower water pelted the raised, reddened contusion down my side. My friends, one on either side of me, were suspending me in the spray of water with a yoke-like hold. After the shower they toddled me around the hotel room like a limp, wet rag doll and plied me with coffee, which I also threw up. We laid together on the king-size bed, watching infomercials and syndicated television until the emergency had subsided and the sun began to come up.

In the morning we sipped hot coffee from room service carafes and my friends retold the events of the night, catching me up on what I’d missed while I was away. They recounted the difficulty in discerning whether my milky pallor was normal or I was actually cyanotic, my gray-blue Urban Decay nail polish further complicating the matter. It was when my breath became ambiguous and my pulse unrecognizable that they ferried me to the shower. My bruised body, and my brush with the hereafter, had already become anecdotal... like when Mike went through a plate glass window, or when Kasey was so loaded she impaled herself on a fence trying to climb it, or when Chris drove his car the wrong way through the Caldecott Tunnel. These were the souvenirs of our lifestyle.

After I checked out of the hotel, I went to my dealer’s place. In my car around the corner from his house, I had done a little coke and enough heroin to stave off dope sickness. I was on my way home when I ran the lights, bringing us here, to the part where I decided the median was a good place to park.

I watched as the cop, who looked like John Goodman playing the role of a cop, got out of his car. I rolled down my window in anticipation, pulled my license from my wallet and quickly fished through tampons, straws and Altoids boxes until I felt the paper registration at the back of my glovebox. 

He strode over to my car, shaking his head as he approached my driver's side window. In all my years I have never, ever seen anyone pull over on the median! What were you thinking? The cop said, as I began voluntarily handing him my license and registration through the window.

He went through a bevy of requisite cop questions:

"Why did you park on the median?

Where are you coming from?

Have you been drinking?"

I covered my face in a ‘I seriously can’t believe I did that’ look, and told him I have anxiety, which I did, and that I felt overwhelmed, which I also did. I told him that I had not been drinking and was coming from a friend’s house, which was also true. I regarded my dealer as a friend and I had not drank, I had only done coke and heroin that day. He asked me where I was going now, and I told him home. He grumbled something under his breath, handed me back my license and registration, issued me a solemn warning, and sent me on my way.

Chapter 1

Our Lady of Safeway

✵ ✵ ✵

––––––––

For all of my life I have needed more.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, More, Now, Again

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Portishead, All Mine plays on the car stereo, every note, every lyric uttered over Beth Gibbon's lips a distortion pedal amplifying my sentimentality.

Late November. It’s Saturday night in San Francisco. I drive down Church Street in the Castro District, on the hunt for an available parking spot. I’m convinced that finding a parking spot in San Francisco, especially on a Friday night, is mostly blind luck. Superstitious as I am, I roll my window down on my third pass rounding 14th Street and toss a quarter at the pavement in the same way I’d fling an oyster cracker to a gaping-mouthed bird in Golden Gate Park. My offering is accepted. I see an orphaned spot in front of the church as I turn off of Duboce onto Church Street.

I pull my car into the spot and turn off the motor. Looking up through the drizzle dusting my windshield, I can see the old Gothic church peering down at me from above with black iron fencing and a bumper of fog bolstering its foundation. This church is an accident waiting to happen, I think to myself, as I play out earthquake and fire scenarios in my head. I don’t know the actual name of the church but it is colloquially referred to among twelve step devotees as Our Lady of Safeway, because of its proximity to the Safeway that sits catty corner at the street intersection.

This is where I’m supposed to be at 8:00 pm. It’s 7:45, I’m early, and that is a rarity. I have ten or so minutes to kill, which I could spend by either sitting in my car or going inside and socializing.

So I sit in my car. I settle in, repositioning the seat in my Kia, my fingers fumbling awkwardly in the darkness. The experience is not unlike adjusting a chaise lounge. I turn up the stereo volume and lean back against the worn upholstery until I feel the seat catch.

Thick fog spills over the darkly iridescent oil patterns on the street. One Portishead song slips into another, undetectably. I watch a young couple approach the curb near the nose of my car. They have a junkie sway that I’m familiar with, and I am briefly concerned that one of them, or both of them, will vomit on the hood of my car. He is young and stringy, and she is attached to him like a wiry loose thread. Her arm is linked inside the triangle space between his shoulder and hip, like a carabiner. They are my ten-minute serving of people watching.

They teeter totter from the curb. I imagine I hear her ribs jangle like a cartoon xylophone as she bumps up against him. They begin to maneuver the distance to cross the street, their toes tapping stiltedly across the Muni tracks. Their clothes-hanger arms are tangled within one another while her free arm waves in the wind like empty plastic wrap. She slaps at the air for balance and stability, but can’t seem to find either. One of them is holding the other upright, but it’s hard to say which is which.

My own breath condenses on the inside of the windshield and washes the outside world in a darker filter. I smear at the glass with the palm of my hand to refresh my view. Streetlights and headlights silhouette the couple in an LED halo. I see the girl jump to the sidewalk with her counterpart in tow and feel a sense of relief, having hoped to see their safe passage. I watch them as they are slowly devoured by the night fog, eaten up, the fog replacing the space that their presence has left behind. I notice my clock closing in on 8:00. The numbers 7:56 pulsate red with mounting urgency, like a finger slammed in a drawer. I have not yet abandoned the possibility of being late.

I leave my car and stumble over the lip of the curb. For a saccharine moment, I feel gratuitously grateful. I think back to a time that I too was dope sick and belligerent, ushered by some handsome devil with a smile on my face. I stand on the curb and let others pass by on the sidewalk, wondering if some of them are going where I am. Many of them shuffle past me with indifference. Some of them stand at the open church gate with obvious hesitation. You can spot the newcomers by the telltale feral look in their eyes. They are riddled with paltry hopes and trepidations.

The regulars form a receiving line of unison smokers. They stand just outside the gate, a nest of smoke tangled above their heads breaking and then mending as people take leave to enter the church. I follow a small group chattering in incoherent mumbles as they walk up the stairs and into the church. Once inside the door we all scatter like disrupted ants in different directions.

The room, a large hall attached to the church, is a sea of 1960’s wooden folding chairs assembled into tight rows. I’m looking for the meeting secretary. I scan the blur of people in the room, trying to put a face to the voice I had spoken with one day earlier when I agreed to speak. I spot a young, frantic-looking tattooed blonde, her eyes and manicured brows widening and arching as she surveys the room. I wave as I walk toward her, making the assumption that she is either the secretary or will know who the secretary is.

Are you Suki? Are you my speaker? she asks, already