I get these come-ons to post pieces for these various internet writing sites and I go for it every time. This was the result of using the words 'Hell Found Me' to start the piece and this is what my twisted mind came up with.
I neither explain or apologize, I just share. Looking for kindred souls is a full-time job.
Hell found me. Of course it didn't have to look very hard. I presented a most visible target. Everything about me in those years said 'easy out' to any demon that might have been on the lookout for a quick addition to it's resume.
If you've read any part of 'Joi to the World' you know my drug battle began in earnest in 1973. Some battle. I fell without a shot being fired.
I wasn't sure I wanted to include this in that book. It isn't pertinent and amounts to little more than the ruminations of one who saw Hell and most assuredly wants to remember what it looked like, just in case one should ever get that close again. And you never know. That much I'm sure of.
I surely don't want to sit on high and presume to hip you to my own personal wisdom either, but I would like to say a thing or two on the subject. Mostly because research for the 'Joi' project has brought to the fore any number of memories I'd not only like to re-forget but have no real interest in passing along. That makes this piece more for my benefit than the reader's. And that's as it should be. Writing as a process seems to be, for me anyway, as much about personal growth and enlightenment as anything else. Publish or Perish isn't part of my work ethic, if indeed there's a work ethic involved at all. 'Writing' and 'work' don't get together in the same sentence very often. Not for me anyway. You will never see me on 'Oprah's Book Club'. Ye Gods! Now that's when you know Hell has found you.
But that's just me.
The thing is, for ten years drug use was as big a part of my life as what outfit I was going to wear on any given day and as natural to me as the choice between meat and fish for dinner. I never saw it as evil and I never saw it as harmful. I wasn't alone in that misconception and it was only through extensive personal research that I was able to ascertain that everybody that held to those tenets was full of shit. And even at that it took some convincing. I was not what one would call a particularly brilliant student and had to have my hand thrust into the fire several times before I got the connection between 'heat' and 'blister' and 'Ouch, that fucking hurts.'
Drugs were everywhere in those innocent days. My friends and I were privy to and inclined to indulge in most every facet of them and had very little buyer's remorse as a rule.
My personal favorite's were pot and speed, though ' favorite' doesn't quite capture the deep affection I held for amphetamine sulfate. I never got into heroin or downers. That wasn't the way I was bent. I wanted action and I wanted to feel like I could move the world, with or without the proverbial lever. Speed was my drug of choice. You think by steering away from opiates I got off light, huh?
Wrong.
There were a few significant differences between what was available to us then and what passes for 'good dope' in these benighted days. Everything I used was 'drug store' and that meant USP and that meant straight from Pfizer, Merck and Smith Kline and French. (Now known as Glaxco) Manufactured chemicals processed under controlled laboratory conditions. Seal unbroken.
The difference between that and what I see out there now, say crack or x or whatever else floats your boat is that the last person that handled my stuff probably wasn't suffering from a scorching case of herpes or in the final stages of hepatitus. A divergence of time and place that probably has a bearing on my writing this on a Dell word processor in the comfort of my own digs as opposed to say, scribbling it with a crayon at a rest home somewhere in Phoenix. There is a difference.
I mention this only because of the possibility of secondary infections and long term hospital stays as your not-so-well-informed physician tries to decipher the many idiopathic quirks and diseases of unknown genesis that will come back to bite you on the ass, sometimes years later.
Not the big stuff. Not the stuff they have telethons for, but the little liver oddities that have no explanation, the heart murmurs that have no place in a normal, otherwise healthy body. The little maladies than in and of themselves won't kill you unless of course, you lump them all together over a period of time. Life might not be all that long but sometimes it can sure feel that way.
But that's just me.
I'm not trying to turn anyone away from drugs. It can't be done. I have no more expectation of success in advising somebody contemplating their first foray than I would have convincing Steven Hawking that my theory of how the universe was created was the correct one and his was all wrong. We are all our own keepers and consequently our own worst enemies. But these are the things I believe to be true as opposed to the out and out lies and lame scare tactics the public has been assaulted with over the years.
Everyone who gets into drugs has a death wish.
Oh, maybe not a full-blown, down to the wire suicide quest type of death wish but a wish to die all the same. You're pissed at something and you want to punish somebody for it. And it's not important what drug you choose to go about this business with.
The real problem isn't the drug anyway. It's the quick fix, instant gratification 'crutch' mentality that goes with it that makes things interesting. Setting yourself up to lean on something just to get you through the day. From coffee to heroin it's all about an inability to face the world straight. Not that coffee leads to hard drug use. Bad analogy. Any more than biscuits and gravy leads inevitably to fat thighs but it's the ultimate game of Russian Roulette and you don't even have to own a pistol to play. I've seen newbies stay loaded for weeks on end, commit any number of heinous acts and then just as suddenly put the shit down, walk away and never look back. Then there's folks like me who take one hit ( just for fun, don't you know? ) and become hooked instantly. In my case, speed did that to me. It was the thing that was missing in my lethargic, less than ambitious life up til then and one bump later, 'whammy!' 'Honey! I'm Hooome!'
Trouble is, you never know what chamber that bullet is in til you pull the trigger.
And there's one more thing that rather haunts one. They can get it out of your body, that's the easy part. But they can't get it out of your mind. Addiction has a long memory.
Heroin has a physical hook. It replaces certain body functions and makes itself impossible to live without. Speed, among other things, has a mental hook that is every bit as pernicious. In the end it all adds up to the same thing; Strung out is strung out.
Only Marijuana holds the 'no addictive qualities' title. I recommend it for it's medicinal use and see no harm in it except the fact that you can go to jail for having it on your person. Although you can buy all the 151 Anejo Bacardi you want at any package store.
I don't get it, but that's just me.
That brings us to another item in this less than brief drug rant;
The types you have to deal with to get the drugs.
More likely than not the folks you have to commerce with, people you wouldn't normally let lurk around in your front yard for God's sake, will be what brings you down. There are some pretty sick tickets out there and they will invariably be the very one's holding what you want. I think it's a rule.
Getting netted up in a drug sweep is no good way to spend a Sunday either. Especially when they weren't really looking for you at all. And the Zen to that is: You've been in the wrong place at the wrong time for quite a while now. It's just your turn in the barrel.
It's documented fact I never spent near the money on drugs that I spent on courts and lawyers. And I was one of the lucky ones. Go figure.
Nobody walks away clean. The scars may not be visible but they're there and they manifest themselves when you least expect them. Always.
And last but not least, that 'I hate myself, I'll die and then you'll be sorry' kick you were on at the jump? It doesn't pan out all that often. Most doctors will tell you that druggies and alkies die young. But I know a lot more old junkies than I do old doctors. ( I know, I know. It's an overworked adage, but what can I do? It applies.)
The thing is, like as not, you will survive. And then the sins of your youth will begin visiting upon you in earnest. En masse. It's no way to spend your middle years and here's the kicker : You didn't really want to die after all. It just sounded romantic at the time.
Now you have to spend the rest of the years left to you fighting savagely for a life that turns out to be pretty goddamned precious after all. Funny, huh?
Well, that and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Which, when I think about it, sounds pretty good right about now.
But, of course, that's just me.
