My Husband Pushed A Drug Habit On Me So I Wouldn't Leave Him
He wanted so badly for me to stay in Cambodia with him.
Engin Akyurt | Unsplash, Gagliardi Photography, manx_in_the_world | Canva Without a doubt, I was addicted to my ex. He was more of a drug to me than heroin. I worked for years to get him out of my system, and there were no clear endings. The truth floated, an oily film on water, changing shape and colors.
I didn’t just love Ken. I doted on him, knew every part of his body, his smell, his spiky hairs under his lower lip. I loved every bit of that man. I can see him in my mind’s eye now, his sapphire-blue eyes and golden-brown hair. Coming out of the shower, dripping wet. Sleeping next to me.
We were young married Americans when we left the USA.
When Ken made the “great geographical relocation of 1994,” I followed him. Grad school comprehensive exams hadn’t gone well. His solution when things weren’t good? Flee to a developing country and avoid all the BS of life in the USA. So we backpacked all over Southeast Asia and landed in Cambodia, the one country I swore I wouldn’t live in.
Ken always got his way. All he had to do was mope around and sound sad. I was a sucker for that, having grown up at the corner of Dysfunction Junction and Manipulation Street.
In the USA, we lived in a small rental house on the outskirts of hippie town, Eugene, Oregon. We had great friends, and I had a good job in social services. He taught at the university during grad school.
We always planned to travel after he finished his final exams. We saved money and got ready for a six-month trip — a trip that turned into nearly eight years for me. Twenty-three years for him, the rest of his life.
We ended up in Cambodia after backpacking around Southeast Asia for six months. Teaching English in Cambodia was going to be our new occupation. Our parents back home in the USA were concerned but not surprised. We made unusual choices. Mostly Ken did. I followed. He had been jumping the tracks for years.
- He quit high school because he was in trouble all the time.
- He had a first wife, but he got bored and ran off with a co-worker. His ex-wife was devastated.
- Finishing up a graduate degree with perfect grades, he was thoroughly shaken when professors asked him to rewrite a few of the exam answers. That’s why we’d left the USA.
As for me, I was smitten. Did I see red flags? Well, sort of. I stressed silently but swore to let him make his own decisions. I was not an active participant in our decisions and mostly let him take the reins.
Which no doubt explains how I found myself living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Not the life I thought we’d be having, but suddenly I felt alive.
Cambodia was dangerous, and I was on edge every second. Traffic, policemen pulling me over to hit on me, strange smells and sounds.
Everything was different. Pagodas, not churches. The women were so feminine, and the men courteous. The language was odd, with chops and dots and dashes. We were on high alert, and it was fascinating.
I miss it deeply; I don’t miss it at all.
The tragedy of falling in love with another country is that it’s never your home. When you are home, you miss the other country. It’s like having two lovers and being torn, like that insipid song.
Ken died in Cambodia in 2016.
I nearly died there more than once, but in the early days, it was an interesting life.
In Cambodia, he went to the Asian markets and bought kilos of ganja — big square clumps of dark green weed. Stems and seeds galore, it was sold for soup and my Cambodian friend Polly said the tasty broth hooked people on ganja, and they became addicts.
Ken loved finding such an abundance of weed in Phnom Penh. A daily smoker, he was now in his happy place. I didn’t care about being high. I didn’t like it much.
When we moved to Sihanoukville, on the southern coast of Cambodia, we ran the school there. He was the manager and I was the teacher. In our time off, we raced around on our motorcycles. We went to a French restaurant on Ochateal Beach and walked in the surf after dinner, although seeing a body on Sokha Beach nearby made us leery of walks at night.
Then a British pub owner, Chris, told us about a drug runner who had arrived in Sihanoukville. Ken was fascinated. I couldn’t figure out why he was so entranced. He talked about it nonstop.
The drug runner was sending shipments of heroin out on boats to larger ships, and rumor had it he was selling a little bit on the side too.
On the weekend after Ken found out about the drug runner, he asked me to go get heroin with him.
He wanted a small amount, to check it out. I didn’t question it. It was an adventure. It was kind of dangerous, but I didn’t want him going alone. He was going, whether I went or not.
It was nighttime, and dark. I got on the back of the motorcycle, and we drove. I don’t remember feeling afraid. If we were together, it was okay.
Photo: theendup / Shutterstock
We went on some backroads I didn’t know, but remembering back, we went north of town and then cut east. So, we turned right at the rice paddy and went on until we saw three large white pigs in a fenced area, and that was the place. Remember: This was Cambodia.
We walked into a small house, a wooden house. An African guy was there. He was friendly but didn’t speak much English. He gave Ken a small piece of paper folded up, a gram. Ken gave him money, maybe fifty dollars. Maybe a hundred. I don’t remember. I was nervously looking around the little house. Some big boss was using this African guy, and I worried for him. He was young, not more than mid-twenties.
The guy said we could hang out there, “Sit down. Try. Welcome.”
I don’t know why we didn’t just leave, and go home immediately.
The guy said, “Take little little, please. Strong. Slow slow.”
We sat on a couch with a coffee table in front of it. For some odd reason, a rope was hanging down from the ceiling, directly above the coffee table. We snorted a minuscule quantity, and immediately everything changed.
Suddenly the rope, previously an extremely boring visual, came alive with texture and movement as it spun. Ken and I stared at that rope for several minutes. Then we needed to leave. We both knew at once it was time to go. We were too messed up. We needed out fast.
The guy was pacing around the house. We were intruding, and suddenly paranoid.
“Walk, let’s go,” I said, “Let’s go.”
Somehow we made it outside. Standing by our motorcycle, we argued for five minutes. We weren’t using language well. We were slow, barely moving. Existing in a moment when we should have been home behind a closed door, watching a movie. Not standing on the edge of a rice paddy five miles away from our apartment, so stoned we could barely function.
Crickets chirped and cicadas buzzed. Otherwise, there was no sound. It was dark except for the glow of a lightbulb inside the drug house.
Ken said, “You have to drive.”
“Me? Oh, no.”
I was not someone who had ever driven a motorcycle, but he was that messed up.
Seriously, I’d never jumped on to kickstart, never cycled through gears, never used the brakes, and someone sitting behind me? What was he thinking? There was no cognition going on. He was stoned.
So was I, but I knew what I couldn’t do, and that was drive us home, on the motorcycle, on the pavement.
“No,” I said, “Absolutely not. Not me. We can push it back if we need to. Let’s go.”
We walked the motorcycle about a mile down the road. Then, he got on and fired it up. I don’t know how we got home alive; to this day it bothers me to think about it.
Over the next month, Ken asked me several times if I wanted more drugs.
“I can get more,” he said, “Do you want some?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of doing it because I worried I’d like it too much.
Ken feared I would leave him behind in Cambodia. I came to understand later that he did everything he could to make me stay. And I didn’t stay. After years there, I left.
I had to.
He fell in love with someone else. She was a tiny Vietnamese woman, everything I was not. Tiny. Young. Illiterate. Poor. His love and compassion for her suddenly trumped everything. In addition to two miscarriages that nearly killed me, all the gaslighting had taken its toll. I came undone.
I cried nonstop. I was angry and screamed when I was alone. I threw up, over and over, and sat on the floor of the shower. Sometimes the water was on. Sometimes it wasn’t. I didn’t care. I was a speck of dust in a big world, and I no longer mattered.
My weight dropped and my eyes sank into my face. When I stared at myself in the mirror, I saw a ghost.
It nearly killed me, breaking my addiction to that man I’d doted on. My first husband, with his ocean-blue eyes and honey-brown hair. In hindsight, I am quite sure he wanted me to become addicted to a drug I’d be able to acquire easily, in Cambodia.
He wanted so badly for me to stay.
Debra G. Harman is a memoirist and author. A publisher on Medium, she enjoys working with a team of writers. She's a retired English teacher and a world traveler.