I came back to my room from the bathroom one morning, and there she stood staring at a gun I had been keeping under the mattress. She had insisted on turning the mattress herself and found it. She was standing there staring at it like she would at a rattlesnake, and asked me what I was doing with that “awful thing.”
I sat down and said to her: “Mrs. Alexander, I bought that pistol to kill myself with in case I get physically disabled. You see, I’m a sick man. I told you I was a sick man, and I have a suspicion I am a consumptive. I don’t want to go to doctors and I’m going to let this thing run its course, but if I find I am down and out and done for I’m going to shoot myself. That’s what I have it for.”
She was all upset with sympathy. She said: “You’re no consumptive. You are only run down. You’ll be all right in a few months, with good food and care. Let me keep this thing. I’ll take it and keep it. Don’t get downhearted, you’ll be all right.”
Of course I had to let her take it. That night I went out and bought another one. I also bought a bag and a few clothes, and I was careful after that to lock the new pistol up in the bag when she was around.
So I settled down to fight it out with my opium habit, at the same time keeping on the watch all the time for the police.
I had been using opium steadily for ten years. For ten years I had never gone to sleep without taking it. I owed to it all the sleep, all the rest and forgetfulness and contentment I had had in that time.
Now I made up my mind to quit. Right away I found I had to pay back every second of sleep, every quiet, restful moment I had got from the opium in the whole ten years.
I was taking about five grains a day. I began to taper down slowly. I cut off a grain a week at the start, then for a couple of months I took only three grains a day.
It would have been a good deal harder to quit if I hadn’t had that fear of the jail always before me. That took my mind off the opium. The worst hold the drug gets on a man is the mental hold. It becomes a mental habit. A man has to keep a hard grip on his mind; he has to want to quit, first, and keep wanting to quit all the time, then he can do it.
I could stick the daytime out. I found something to do; I read, or ate, or walked around the room. I did not dare go out in the daytime, for fear I would be recognized by the police or by some stool pigeon. This worry was always on my mind, and in a way it helped, because while I was thinking of that I was not thinking about the opium.