Editor's note: Excerpted from The Shadow Man, copyright 2007, 2008 Karin Coddon; available at . Read Part 1 of this story here.

Funny; the divorce really didn’t change things that much. I still saw Maggie and Kat when I was more or less lucid, but the intervals between were growing longer. My parents were totally fed up with me and told me I wasn’t welcome in their lives until I got my act together. I was so broke that I took a job at an all-night convenience store in Hollywood. One thing about tweakers, we’re great on the late shift. I reconnected with Andy, my old surfing and tweaking buddy, and moved into a rundown little house in Silver Lake with him. He was in almost as desperate shape as I was, working at Kinko’s and living off a small trust fund enough to keep him in crystal but not much else. He was developing a bad case of meth mouth – his teeth were coming loose – and he was all paranoid about it, convinced his dental X-rays had been tampered with by the DEA. My teeth stayed in great shape, since by this time I was slamming it right into my veins.

We got our crystal from our neighbors right across the street, a biker couple who were the middle-men, so to speak, for a big meth lab out in Chatsworth. They were very businesslike about it. But one day they said the Chatsworth lab had been busted and the well was dry, at least temporarily. Andy and I were almost completely out of meth ourselves, and we’d become so dependent on our source across the street that we panicked.

It was my idea to break into Pete and Vicky’s house to scour the place for meth. Being tweakers themselves, they were sure to have set aside some of their wares for personal use. Andy was all for it, but he chose to serve as lookout from our garage rather than come along. Ten minutes after we watched Pete and Vicky zoom off on their Harley, I crept across the street, jimmied open a back window, and began rifling through their house. I wanted to make it look like a random burglary, so I threw open and emptied drawers and ransacked the kitchen, which was where I came across a nice clean bag of crystal, at least a good gram of it, along with a wad of hundreds. Pete and Vicky hadn’t used a lot of imagination in picking a place to stash the stuff; the drugs and cash were in a plastic tool chest, tossed in with screwdrivers, nails, and bolts, under the sink. I really didn’t want the money but took it, as well as their boom box, because as I said, I hoped they’d think this was a chance rather than planned burglary.

None of this mattered to the two uniformed cops who greeted me, with drawn guns, at the backdoor. All I could think was why the fuck hadn’t Andy called me on my cell the moment the cops drove up? Later I learned that Andy, in his paranoia, freaked out at the first glimpse of the prowl car and ran inside to barricade himself in the bathroom.

I mean, I was busted, and this time the cops were a lot less cordial than the ones in Albuquerque had been. Then they’d treated me like a dumb minor-league ballplayer with a little coke. Now I was garden-variety scum, charged with felony breaking and entering, caught red-handed. I spent three days in LA County Jail, up to then the most harrowing experience of my life, before Diana came through with the bail money and a decent lawyer. On his advice I checked right in to another 28-day rehab facility. I really needed help detoxing – in jail I’d scratched my speed bugs bloody and begun to hallucinate – but as before in New Mexico, I merely went through the motions with the therapeutic aspects. It just didn’t make sense to me, connections between my drug use and my own psyche. Nor had a lack of self confidence or peer pressure, other things the counselors stressed, ever been factors in my addiction. The way I saw it, I got high because I loved the way it felt, and I saw no point in psychoanalyzing it.

None of this is to say I wasn’t scared shitless by the prospect of going to prison. My lawyer kept requesting continuances, hoping to frustrate the hard-ass DA into cutting me a deal with no jail time. You can bet I was clean during this. As soon as I got out of rehab I moved back in with Maggie, who was now living with Kat in a rented condo in Manhattan Beach. It blew my mind that she still loved me, and she was as frightened as I over the possibility of my incarceration. We were too stressed out to be happy, but it was the first extended time I ever spent sober with my wife – ex-wife – and daughter together. Kat loved me the way Maggie did, without reservation. Kat was my light, and Mags, whom I’d burned more times than I could count over the years, was my ballast. “Come hell or high water you’re going to get through this,” she said, always adding, “as long as you stay clean.” She made me believe it too. Sober, I loved her and Kat so profoundly it was almost painful. I tried, too, to patch things up with my parents, although my dad repeatedly declared that he felt a prison term would be the best rehab program for an addiction as “stubborn” – his word – as mine. The ultimate Tough Love. Ha, little did he know.

As it turned out, he got his wish. My case pled out, but the judge was as hard-assed as the DA, and I was sentenced to a year in the Cal State prison system, of which I had to serve nine months. I went into emotional autopilot. Maggie was being strong for both of us. She promised to visit me every chance she had, and we even discussed remarrying so I could have conjugal rights. We were going to remarry, I vowed, but not under these circumstances. And I forbade her to ever bring Kat to see me in prison. I wouldn’t have that blistered into her memory. I entered the state prison at Lancaster determined to survive through self-willed numbness to what was happening to me.

It didn’t work – not the “self-willed” part, anyway. I was gang-raped in the showers my second day in the pen, fucked and beaten by a bunch of guys whose faces I never saw. I’ve had two HIV tests since then, and miraculously, they’ve both been negative. At the time, the prison guards saw it all and did nothing except transfer me to another cell block. Maybe not coincidentally, my new cell mate was this big, muscular tattooed guy serving out the second half of a two-year sentence for armed robbery and possession with intent to sell. Heroin. He acted as if some part of him felt genuinely sorry for me, but he was also an opportunist. “Look, dude,” he said, “a pretty boy like you is just fresh meat in here. You need to buy yourself some protection.” I was so shell-shocked I didn’t catch his drift. I told Ed that I didn’t have any money. But what I really wanted to know was if there was any chance of scoring some drugs in here. He seemed amused I was even asking. “OK, you need protection and dope,” he said. “I’ll provide both to you. In exchange you’re my punk.” He was kind of the kingpin on this block, he added; the other cons both needed and feared him.

I had only one question. Could he get me some crystal? Sure, he said, crystal, smack, weed, you name it.

An hour later I had my crystal. That night Ed cut me some slack and insisted only on a blowjob for my first installment on his payment plan. I was high and the whole encounter seemed unreal.

The prison grapevine is no fable; by the next day word was out that I was Ed’s bitch. The other cons snickered and shit, but didn’t come near me. Maggie visited me that afternoon. I told her the bruises were from a minor fistfight in the rec yard, and that I was doing as well as could be expected. I was a little reluctant to kiss her, because I kept thinking about where my mouth had been the night before and I didn’t want it to touch hers. I forced myself to give her a brief, close-mouthed kiss before she left. The crystal was wearing off and I was shifting rapidly into panic/depression mode. But just like a wish-granting genii, Ed drew me aside and gave me another really nice line. This meth was a higher grade than yesterday’s, and I was bouncing off the walls. And when the door locked us into our cell for the night, I was so horny from the speed that I probably would have fucked the very crew who’d attacked me in the showers. Mostly what I remember now is the sound of panting, heavy guy-breaths, and how I concentrated on those sounds because they seemed so incongruously private in this place where a big part of the punishment is the active denial of privacy. I remember thinking about Foucault and the panopticon. And I remember wondering if I’d get used to this.

God help me, but I did. It’s an aspect of what they call “prisonization.” I knew my goddamn Foucault and I still got “prisonized,” gradually swallowed by and incorporated into the culture, the surveillance, the prisoners’ hierarchy. My big mistake had been going in thinking I could decide the terms of my survival. Not my decision to make, any more than it was Ed’s or even the guys who’d raped me. We had all become cogs in the prison machinery.

Because I was college educated, I was assigned to work in the prison library. Talk about slim pickin’s. But even in my debased and drugged out state, I was moved every time I checked out a book to a fellow con. Any book. There’s something humanizing about reading a book. Someday I’d like to volunteer as a tutor for a prison literacy program.

Ed could always get me drugs, but not always meth. Sometimes it’d be heroin or crack. It was kind of fortuitous, because the arbitrary nature of my supply kept me from getting physically addicted to any one drug. That, in turn, helped me maintain the charade with Maggie, who visited at least once a week. Not that I painted everything as jack-dandy, but the main thing we discussed, at my request, was her life and Kat’s, lives that now seemed to me to be playing out in a parallel universe so remote from my own it might have been a dream. When I allowed myself to think about her reaction should she find out the truth of my prison existence, I became suicidal. Seriously. I’d try to pick fights with the gangstas or the neo-Nazis, and only Ed’s clout kept me from getting my throat slit.

I believe that Ed saw me as not only his punk but his project. He scored me my drugs in return for a nightly fuck, but weirdly enough, he seemed to want to take care of me, and that creeped me out even more than the sex. When he heard we were due to be released within a couple weeks of each other, he told me he’d keep me in crystal for as long as I wanted if I’d move in with him once we were both free. Taken aback by the suggestion, I kept stalling because I was afraid if I turned him down he’d stop supplying me with drugs.

But as time passed and my freedom was actually in sight, I began to freak out. Mags would come to see me with hope splashed across her face, talking about our future as a family, expressing such faith in me, such respect for having apparently weathered my ordeal. God, I loathed myself for all the lies I’d foisted on her, and for the lies I’d inevitably feed her again if we reconciled. The only way I’d held on to my sanity, if you even want to call it that, was through getting high. And I knew the only way I’d be able to endure the memories of how I’d gotten through prison was to keep using until it killed me. A few weeks before my release date, I snorted some meth before going to meet Maggie in the visiting room, because man, I needed my courage for one last gargantuan lie. I told her that Ed and I’d been fucking the entire time I was in prison and that I was going to shack up with him when we were both out – both of which were true. The lie, the one I knew she’d never forgive, came in the form of my informing her I was in love with Ed. I hadn’t miscalculated. The life seemed to literally drain out of her, leaving a ghost with huge holes of eyes, eyes black with disbelief, disappointment, betrayal. That image of her eyes will stay with me forever. When I think of it now it reminds me of Virgil’s description of the way Dido looked at Aeneas in hell.

But at the time, all I could think was that I’d finally lost her and it was for the best.

Now I really had nowhere else to go. Ed got out ten days before I did, but since he still had contacts in the pen, no one bothered me and I was at least able to get some weed. Ed’s house was a real dump in Echo Park that he kept in his ex-wife’s name so that neither the cops nor the lawyers could get their hands on it. His ex-wife was an alcoholic who lived in Bakersfield, and evidently they were still on decent terms. I had no idea if he was habitually gay, bi, or whatever. But something changed from the day I moved in with him. In the pen he’d really been into the power and dominance dynamic with me – not S&M, exactly, but he made our roles clear. On the outside, he started acting like, what, we were boyfriends or lovers. At first I put up with his hand-holding, and his almost – courtly – behavior. I was just so relieved to be out of prison and free to slam crystal into my veins for the first time since my time at Andy’s in Silver Lake. I was still pissed at Andy for blowing it as my lookout and I didn’t care if I ever saw him again. But I’ll say one thing for him as a roommate – he kept to his own bed and didn’t want to make out with me in front of the World’s Strongest Man competition on ESPN2.

Ed was leery about being busted again, but he was a dealer by trade and quickly resumed his business relationships with some very hard-core Mexican smugglers who trafficked crystal as well as smack. Man, did they have great shit. My first couple of months in Echo Park raced by in a fast-forward crystal meth blur. But by my third month I was growing convinced that there wasn’t enough meth on the planet to get me to tolerate Ed’s bizarre sentimentality toward me. I mean, he was telling me he loved me and shit. I planned his moment of disenchantment with a hell of a lot more calculation than I had Maggie’s. One day when he was down in San Ysidro to meet with one of his suppliers, I deliberately left his front door wide open, which in this neighborhood was tantamount to posting a big sign reading “Rob Me.” Then I drove around in the old Toyota I’d left at Diana’s during my prison stint, high out of my mind and blasting Alice in Chains. After several hours I went back to Ed’s house.

Whoever helped himself or themselves to Ed’s unintentional bounty had really done a job on the place. His guns were gone, his drugs were gone, his computer, stereo, and TV – all gone. Even the Jack Daniels and beer were gone. Ed had beaten me home, and he was in a state of complete rage. Obviously he couldn’t report the burglary to the cops. He may have thought he loved me, but I knew that what he really loved most in the world was his stuff. He missed his shit in prison more than he missed freedom. I pretended to have forgotten to lock the door, but at last he was thinking with his head instead of his dick. He shouted at me to get the fuck out and never come back. I took no chance he might cool off and change his mind, and of course, I’d appropriated all the crystal in the house myself along with some pills, leaving small amounts of crack, heroin, and weed for the neighborhood scavengers. I got out of there as fast as I could, almost as relieved to be free of him as I’d been to be let out of the pen. But like crystal this was an artificial, temporary high. When I came down the next morning I was tempted to crash my piece of crap car with me in it into the nearest concrete wall. I wanted Maggie. I wanted my daughter Kat. I wanted back the vision of us she had conjured again and again during her prison visits.

I drove to Manhattan Beach but for two days I was afraid to call or stop by. I used the showers and bathroom at the beach, forced myself to eat a meal a day at Jack in the Box, and slept, when I could, in my car. I’d pop a couple Oxycontin and just zone out for a few hours.

I finally found the nerve to stop by Maggie’s condo. Not surprisingly, she was still pissed at me, pissed and disgusted. It was her disgust that made me lose it; I broke down and cried like a baby. I was so ashamed of myself. I told her Ed had kicked me out but not how I’d staged it, which I suspected would sicken her further. It was clear how appalled she was at the whole thing, how betrayed she still felt. I begged her to at least let me look in on Kat, who was sleeping, and she grudgingly agreed. But something about looking at our sleeping daughter together must have softened Maggie a little, because she told me I could stay the night if I swore I’d go back to rehab the next morning. We ended up having incredible sex, which had always been our lifeline, and for the duration I meant everything I promised. I wanted to get clean so I could be with her and Kat, so I could be myself again. But by the next morning I was shooting crystal again, and I forgot and left the needle on the kitchen counter, where Kat could’ve spotted it. I don’t think she did. I hope to hell she didn’t. Maggie saw it, though, and that was it. She ordered me to get out and stay out, threatening to call the cops if I ever showed my face there again. She was beyond angry, even beyond disgusted. This was far from the first time she’d told me to get permanently lost, but she’d never sounded this cold, this done with me, before.

Yet – and it kills me to admit this – the keen self-hatred and despair I felt that morning were soon overshadowed by a much more urgent desperation: I was running low on crystal and virtually penniless. Crawling back to Ed was not an option, not even as a last resort. I decided to let bygones be bygones and drove over to Andy’s house in Silver Lake. He wasn’t home but his new roommate was, a skinny red-haired guy named Neil whom I quickly came to think of as “NBC” – for “Neanderthal Bozo the Clown.” NBC told me the biker-dealers whose house I’d robbed no longer lived across the street, which was a damn good thing. Maybe they’d gotten busted too, for having the meth I’d tried to steal from them in the first place. NBC spotted me a couple lines of crystal and I waited for Andy to get home from Kinko’s. He wasn’t as strung out as he’d been last time I’d seen him, and he claimed to be tapering off. He repeatedly apologized for getting me busted, and I asked him to prove it by lending me $500. I was sort of surprised by how fast he agreed. Either he had a guilty conscience or feared retribution should he refuse.

Or maybe Andy just wanted to be buddies again. I’d become so dishonorable by that point that I suspected everyone’s motives were as base as mine. Everyone except Maggie’s. I wished with all my soul I could rewind the tape and not have left that goddamn needle and spoon on the counter.

I ended up crashing with Andy and Neil for a few days, slamming speed and drinking vodka. It used to be that drinking and tweaking at the same time made me sick, the proverbial wide-awake drunk. Now I was both wired and emotionally all over the map. It was the vodka, not the meth, that gave me the courage to call Maggie, and when the recording told me that number was no longer in service, I freaked. I must have tried it a dozen more times, but always got the recording. I leaped to the worst conclusions. A serial killer had slaughtered them and their gutted bodies were lying in the apartment rotting, like Layne Stayley of Alice in Chains, who OD’d and wasn’t found for a week. I drove like a maniac to Manhattan Beach, saw that her car wasn’t there, and waited like a stalker for ten, twelve hours in hopes she’d return. I just knew their corpses were in there, stinking. Totally wigged out, I rang the next-door neighbor’s bell and asked the guy if he knew how I could reach Maggie’s landlord. I said I was her husband. The guy replied yeah, he’d seen me around last year. But Maggie had split, he said, just a couple of days ago. Loaded a bunch of suitcases into her car and just drove off with the kid and the dog. Far from feeling relieved they hadn’t been butchered by a crazed intruder, I got it into my head that either a kidnapper had been hiding in the backseat or that the FBI or CIA had “disappeared” them because Mags had an anti-Bush sticker on her car. Either way, something really bad had befallen them. And my mind was consumed by one thought that pounded in my head like a bad drum solo. I’ve got to find them. I’ve got to find Maggie and Kat. I’ve got to find them.

Kierkegaard wrote that purity of heart is to will one thing. By his standard I was purer than ether. I had to find them. I wound up at my sister’s house in Los Feliz, intending to hit her up for the money to hire a private detective to locate them. Diana was so hugely pregnant I almost didn’t recognize her at first. She heard me out and agreed to retain a PI – only since I was so fucked up, she said she’d better be the one to talk to the guy. She was humoring me, of course, but at the time I took her at her word. She conditioned her offer on one thing, though: I had to move into her garage apartment, let her or her husband Wes, also a doctor, check on my health periodically, and have none of my druggie pals on the premises. She pointedly didn’t include in these house rules a stipulation that I not use. I suppose she knew I wasn’t able to abide by that condition, but I did my best to cooperate with the other ones. She and Wes made sure I ate at least one meal a day, and even gave me money when they knew I was likely going to spend it on drugs.

But my obsession didn’t go away. I bugged Diana constantly about the private eye, and she assured me he was checking out a number of leads. The days and nights were running together again. Finally one morning, Di came out to the garage and told me that our PI had located Maggie and Kat. I was elated. Where were they? Were they OK? She said they were fine, but that she’d disclose their whereabouts if and only if I went back to rehab and stayed there for a minimum of six months. I initially refused – no, I’d go to rehab after I saw my daughter and ex-wife. Di wouldn’t budge and she wouldn’t bargain. Don’t you want your life back? she asked me. At that I started crying, not just over her question but also the way she’d posed it, with no judgment, no impatience, no disgust. It was hard to believe she was related to me. All I’d known – from my dad and myself – was judgment, impatience, and contempt for my behavior. Passive disapproval from my mom. How had Diana grown up in the same family and ended up so compassionate?

With no particular optimism I let Diana bring me here, and here’s where I’ve been for two months. I have no idea whether I’m making any kind of progress. I’m getting to know myself again, and that, frankly, has been unnerving. Maybe “again” is the wrong word. I still can’t connect what I was before to what I am now, or what happened to me as a kid, or in the pen, to much of anything. I wish I believed in the concept of a soul, if only as a rubric, some kind of metaphysical glue to hold all I am and all I’ve done together. But I don’t know how to turn my brain off outside of getting high, and my brain’s hard-wired me to be a strict materialist. How can I think about a “Higher Power” when my concept of power is as this impersonal mechanism of subjugation? Ugh. “Forget Foucault.” I can detoxify my body but if I detoxify my brain, what if there’s nothing left? It scares the fuck out of me.

I am struggling to keep my goals concrete and short-term – get clean, learn how to stay clean, see my ex-wife and daughter again (assuming Di didn’t invent the whole story about finding them as a way to get me in here). But even if I’ve lost them forever, I would like eventually to be the kind of man my daughter would be proud of if she ever gets curious about her dad. That’s something I can control, and something to live for.

* * *

The journal appeared to have reached its natural conclusion. Maggie was drained, devastated, as she tried to digest it all. Automatically she flipped the page, expecting to see blank blue lines and pristine margins.

Instead, huge black letters had been pressed into the paper with sufficient force to tear right through it:

“NO! LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!”