Shedding the Reptile: A Memoir

After years of drug and alcohol abuse, sexual exploits and destructive self-exploration, David finds himself curled up in the corner of a run-down, empty apartment, guzzling vanilla extract to ward off delirium tremens, and as he strains to hold down the medicinal extract, he wonders what went wrong and how he arrived in hell.

Twenty-something David Garcia wasn’t an alcoholic. “Alcoholics live under bridges and have nothing,” he convinced himself as he consumed beer after beer in the dimly-lit, lonely bar in “ America ’s Most Historic City ,” Fredericksburg , VA. His reptilian brain had begun stirring, prompted by the horrible realization that life had become unbearably stagnant. David gave the beast what it wanted--narcotics, alcohol, casual sex and violence--and it reciprocated by offering up delusions of sexual prowess, importance and power. Forbidden pleasures consumed David’s boredom and replaced them with cravings for more and more of what the cold-blooded monster offered until David became more and more the reptile. In his memoir, Shedding the Reptile, author David C. Garcia offers up a soul-crushing narrative of alcoholism, addiction and unadulterated immorality with the objectivity of a journalist and the emotional honesty of a frightened child. Written with an unnerving fusion of humor and tragedy, Shedding the Reptile dares to present an awful human reality without glamour or condemnation and asks if one can truly escape the hell of chemical dependency once he has arrived.