Sunday, October 30, 2016

The Wilderness Years- Hazardous Chemicals pt. 3

Chalk it up to being incredibly lucky or stupid or quite possibly both, my new favorite past time was sitting in my garbage-picked, cracked vinyl, baby puke yellow chair, at my equally shitty little wooden desk, the one with the word processor atop it gathering dust, the word processor that was gonna be used to write the Magnum Opus, the one that would one day be dipped in gold and placed in a museum or West Virginia casino lobby, and it was there that i would make my gear, it was also here that i could be periodically found naked from the waist down and attempting to rub one out while smoking coke because in my blissfully heightened state of pleasure seeking shall we say, i concluded that nothing would be better than exhaling a hit and busting a nut at the exact same time, an act i believe if it could actually be achieved (which my own very unscientific study deemed impossible), could tear the very fabric of the space/time continuum, but of course that episode has been covered and so we'll move along now...

This new past time usually involved me listening to Sublime records for some reason, it was late 96/ early 97 and all us kids thought it was really neat stuff, beachy-reggae-ish-white boy drug shit, no one has accused me of having fucking taste oh but taste i thought i had, needless to say it's strange how certain music will stick with you and remind you of the days spent doing the things you did when you listened to those songs, and so the ritual of making rock usually involved Sublime, as the ritual of snorting smack involved listening to the Dirty Three, those fucking rituals again, the ritual of acid usually involved the music of Manchester's many beloved sons, shrooms called for Jane's Addiction, and the Velvet Underground could be listened to with any or all substances because they are the fucking VU, easy enough! And everything seemed to be just hunkyfuckindory, or at least as hunkyfuckingdory as shit can be when you spend a good deal of your time fucking wrecked out of your skull...

And then there is modern chemistry and all those amateur pharmacists who give you all sorts of smart advice and then just so happen to have what you need for sale, like say Valium or Xanax, guaranteed to take the edge off or help you get to sleep or placate you when you didn't have the cash to blow on rocking it up... friendly advice i believe it's called... taken with a grain of salt it could be deemed somewhat useful just don't take it to heart cuz that shit could be fatal, i didn't need to be a Wallenda to prance upon the tightrope i was doing a right fine job on my own...and then one day i had an epiphany... or what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity, but it was enough to get my dumbass attention...

It was a brisk and sunny afternoon the day i rolled up to Hippie Jack's house and parked my roomies car in the shady industrial dry cleaner parking lot, they had closed for the day and i had managed to roust Hippie Jack up out of bed at the wee hour of 5pm, he was cranky and acting pissed and then he pulled out his plate and pipe and took a huge hit and faster than i could say "crackpipemotherfucker" he became a new man, his Jones had been fixed, the itch scratched, it was then that he handed the shit to me and i took a big hit and for the first time since i'd fucked with the stuff i thought "oh shit", like a bad scene out of Fear and Loathing i was walking a fine line of fucking myself good, the heart pounding, i took a few deep breathes and splashed some water on my face, it suddenly struck me that if  had i held that hit a little longer or inhaled a little deeper i would have been proper fucked, and if i was lucky, i would have been dragged out to the pay phone at the corner, the one right below the walkway over the busy boulevard and hopefully Hippie Jack would call 911 and ask for an ambulance before hauling ass back to his house where he'd lock the doors or better yet start hightailing it to the local bar, that was just how shit worked, i wasn't gonna be his boy if i was a corpse... soon enough the shit began to taper off as it does and i was thanking my lucky stars, grabbing my shit and walking to the car, i had just dodged a bullet, i didn't want to admit it but i did...

So that moment of clarity, okay maybe it wasn't competely clear but on that drive home i swore off the fucking rock for life, scared straight, at least for a little while, i still had some gear back at my place, rocked up and ready to go, i should have flushed it but i couldn't, i put it away and got back to the business at hand, dealing and partying, what's a little bit of mortality when you're immortal, ain't nothing but a thing, but it wasn't lost on me about Hippie Jack, he was getting heavy into some bad shit, i was right there fucking with him until that hit but now i was re-thinking things and it struck me that it might be time to put out some feelers as to new connections, it's a rough fucking gig this one, here i am hoping the Hippie drags me out of his place and calls an ambulance if my heart explodes and here i am plotting my strategy in case he fucks things up on his end, i always had people coming up to me and telling me about the sweetheart deals they could get or they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy and shit like that, Hippie Jack and i had been on this run for over eighteen months or so, it seemed longer, it felt longer but that was it, i had come to rely on the cash flow, i was saving money but i needed this income, it was how i survived, take it away and i was fucking broke or worse... and then came the day i walked to the ER... to be continued...




3 comments:

looby said...

Sex and drugs and rock n roll -- in various permutations do work very well. I remember a time when I was wanking at the peak of an acid trip. FFS, I could not believe how intense and long-lasting the pleasure was. I know it's a cliche of describing a trip (which is impossible, really) but the pleasure was just coming in wave after wave after wave.

I'm quite surprised that I've got to the age of 52 without having found a girl who'd like to do acid whilst having sex though. I'd have thought that the kind of women. I gravitate to would have been into that. So definitely something to work on there.

IKWYM about getting a bit nervous about the old heart. The stuff I like does make me tick over rather quickly and one downside of stimulants is if you get the timing and amount wrong and end up in bed with a thumping, racing heart. Still, have I learnt my lesson? No.

Looking forward to the next instalment, even if it does involve a hospital!

Kono said...

looby- i've had quite alot of sex while tripping my brains out...acid, mushrooms or both.. and the old PCP days provided me with a few unforgettable moments as well, like a girl demanding i read Bukowski while she straddled me all while dusted out of my skull, and it usually runs the gamut from good to fucking great with the occasional i don't know where i am or what's going on but it sure seems fun, if this was Yelp it'd give it five fucking stars!!!

and yes more absurdity on the way, complete with doctors and nurses and derelicts oh my, (that works best when sung to that song from the Wizard of Oz)

looby said...

Poetry and sex *sounds* a great idea but I think I'd like one or the other :)