Woe to you my Princess, when I come, I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.
-- Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers
"$20... $40... $45... I have 45 bucks. Miles, you have $55?"
"I don't... well, uh... shit, hold on..." Miles furiously flipped through a stack of bills, bar tabs and credit cards in his pockets, throwing them in a pile on the card table in the kitchen.
"Yes. Yes I do," he smiled, slamming them down.
I looked at Jessica. "OK. Go for it."
I had to admit I was conflicted. It felt wrong on many levels. Jessica was too dumb to know better and fairly drunk to boot. Worse, she was absurdly attractive... the sort of girl you dream about fucking. She wasn't an Italian girl with huge tits and an ass you knew was going to explode around age 29. She wasn't the bleach blonde Tara Reid knockoff so common around Philly - the one who bloats into Carnie Wilson after she stops chain smoking and dying her hair. She wasn't a perma-sunburnt, half blonde/half redhead Main Line Barbie, with skin like pink beef jerky. No, Jessica was a real genetic freak... physically perfect. I'd normally roll my eyes at any girl telling me she was an underwear model, but not Jessica.
Jessica was about five ten, naturally blonde, with shale grey eyes and legs longer than three irons. Everything about the girl was chiseled, from the long, sinewy muscles in her calves to the high cheekbones framing her eyes. In the right light, with the right eyes, she was sculpted every bit as tight as any of airbrushed Victoria's Secret models you've ever seen.
And here I was, handing her $100 to shoot herself in the face with a taser gun.
Caveat emptor... No matter how hot you are, if you make an offer like hers, you'll get takers. It's an invitation to a circus act. How does anyone not plunk the cash down when anyone, let alone an underwear model, offers to taser herself between the eyes with a Stun Gun 300,000? Nobody turns that down. When will that offer come around again? Anyway, it's just a stun gun, not fucking Russian Roullette.
"Right here," I motioned to her, placing my index finger between my eyes. She looked at the gun. For a moment, reality crystallized through the vodka and tonic fog in her head. She stared into taser's tongs, sighed, looked at Miles and me, laughed and leveled the gun above her eyes. I gulped a glass of Bullitt and ginger ale. This could all go very wrong - William Burroughs wrong - very quickly.
I was certain she'd be fine, but I was also damned drunk, and had no appreciation for the physics of the thing. What the hell did I know of stun guns? She'd shot me in the leg with it earlier and I felt a sharp pain, but nothing dramatic. Was there a difference when you use it on the head? Would she go blind? Would she fry her frontal lobe, giving herself an electric lobotomy? Would we find ourselves standing around her, twitching, convulsing on the tile in the matter of seconds? Should we stop it?
These were thoughts for the minute prior, concerns for the moment before the cash was on the table. There's no pulling the chips until the bet's run its course. I glanced at my watch as she fought with the controls on the gun, staring it in the tongs like some dim trailer mama puzzled by a broken remote control.
It was 9:00, Friday... Another of "those" weekends.
* * *
It's been said that when you're young, you get sad, and when you're sad, you get high. When you're young, dumb and have the better part of a six figure salary to burn, you do blow. You don't look for it. You don't Jones for it. You might even run from it. But it finds you. A fool with wads of mad money in his pocket and the belief he's got the world by the short hairs will find himself in front of a mirror at 4:00 a.m., blaring "Three Days," barking gibberish to his bleary eyed comrades...
"I saw Janes at the Spectrum in 1999 when they had Flea playing bass. They had these fucking strippers in cages, running up poles and, and-- Hey, you know who I saw there? Who was that guy in college who played in that band and that used to play at that bar... You know, that guy with the goatee who used to throw up all the time when he drank. People said he was gay, but he wasn't. What the fuck was his naaa-- Jesus! Did you see the tits on that chick? Look at the TV. Fuck, you missed it. You really need to get Spice at your place-- Oh, shit... This is the best fucking part. I have to turn this up [pounding table with hands]-- 'Eeeeerotic Jesus... Lay with his Marys... all the Marys!!!'
...You wanna do another?"
I had a collection of noise violation warnings from building management for those sort of evenings. You just can't listen to "Kettle Whistle," "Siamese Dream" or "Lotus" at anything under 11. If you can hear yourself think, let alone talk, as the frenetic shedding of an amphetamine-laced mid-70s "Toussaint L'Overture" rips out of your speakers and screeches around your halls, it's not loud enough.
The Summer of 2003 was one of "those" Summers. I don't buy religion, but I am superstitious about certain things, and one is running hot streaks until they flame out. When the Fates hand you one great hand after another, you don't leave the table. You bet every hand bigger until It Pops. It's all house money, and we all get the same payoff in the end. The Ride's the thing. As the old cliché goes, "Did you have a good life? ...Enough to base a movie on?" Or at least that's how I rationalized it.
2002/2003 had been a long stretch of great hands. I could do no wrong. I lost fewer motions between Summer of 2002 and Summer of 2003 than I have limbs. Representing a company with a seven figure judgment against it (stemming from a nasty battle between directors), I'd swagger into court week after week, popping off some technical quirk on which the court couldn't take my client's money. It went on like this for months, to the point where I started believing myself unbeatable, unstoppable... infallible. There's a charisma you get when you think you know it all. Even if your argument's shit, your delivery - your certainty - is intoxicating. A judge or clerk who doesn't know better and has 30 motions on his docket after yours might have nothing else to go on but who sounds more assured of their position. When you're rolling, you can win on style.1
In retrospect, at that moment, I should have seen The Blizzard coming. Most people relate blow to the lowest point in their lives. That's revisionist horseshit, nonsense people spit to therapists, parole officers and talk show hosts. The bottom might be where blow put them, but it's probably not where it found them. They don't admit that, looking back, the early blow moments - before it became "maintenance" - coincided with the highest points of their lives, when they were locking on all 12 cylinders, at the pinnacle of their powers. They can't say that if you viewed their lives on a chart, blow use would coincide with the sharpest peaks of cash and confidence. Nobody pops off with a Peter O'Toole smirk, "To be choirboy honest, Oprah, the white tips of the biggest waves in my life have all been made of Peruvian Blue Flake." That's challenging the conventional wisdom about drugs. We don't do that in America. But anyone who's enjoyed coke will tell you, it's a high point drug. No casual user with his shit together wants to get wired when he's on a bad roll, and the party people who get wired with him don't want to be around him when he's down. Blow finds people on their A Game, winding its way through the crowd, straight up the nostril of the man with the biggest shit-eating grin in the place.
Why? That's simple. When everything's going right, you're on a rocket's trajectory. You feel like one of those vicious long drives that fire low off the tee, skimming barely above the tree line, then suddenly rocket north into the clouds about 100 yards out. You feel like you can, you must, go longer than 300 yards. You can do 330; you know it. Gravity's got nothing on you. But this is all bullshit. Every hot streak meets a ceiling. No matter how King Midas your touch, you can't try every case, argue every motion and grab every bonus dollar in the office. The system - the hierarchy - kicks in. You work in a group; the others own their piece of the pie, and you're not the boss. You have to stand down, go back to the office, and punch out the dull paperwork that keeps the cash flow going. When you're on a hot streak, this feels cruel, wrong, something you don't deserve. You feel like a caged animal. There's got to be more. You have to go further, higher. This is the only time you've actually enjoyed what you're doing. They can't take that away from you...
That's where the coke comes in. You're sitting in the Devon, off Rittenhouse, watching lawyers hit on personal trainers with bad tit jobs, sucking down vodka and steamed mussels with a friend, Frampton. After about four drinks, when the tiredness from the week is catching up with you, Frampton leans over and whispers in your ear. "Llello? I got a little llello." You smile back. "Perfect." The next thing you know, you're standing outside the stall in the men's room, picking the remnants of mussels from your teeth in the mirror, talking to your friend as he fiddles with a car key and a baggy behind the door.
"How'd you get this?" I spoke loudly to Frampton, letting him know there was nobody else in the men's room.
"You know Christian, the veterinarian guy?"
"He gets you this shit?"
Frampton coughed back between sniffs, "He just moved into the neighborhood. He's around the corner."
"How good's the connection?" I grasped the baggy from his hand as we traded places in the stall.
"You need my key?"
"No, I have one," I flashed my janitor's sized set of keys at him.
"The connection's good."
As I closed the door to the stall, I realized things were going to be different from this point forward. Blizzards only end when somebody hits the wall. I'm not talking addiction, suicide or shattered lives... Paranoia, exhaustion and Too Much Disease (those nasty breakdowns that have you mainlining whiskeys at 4:00 a.m. in the desperate belief they'll slow your ventricles to stave off the heart attack you're sure you're having) are more in order. That's just the nature of the drug. Scorcese didn't use "Monkey Man" as the background soundtrack to Henry Hill's coke meltdown in Goodfellas just because he liked Ry Cooder's slide work on the track.
I've found myself shirtless, shoeless and begging a pimpled cashier to sell me condoms at a 7-Eleven at 3:00 a.m. on a headful of mushrooms. "But I don't have a shirt in my car! Can I just throw you the money?" In that same frame of mind, I've found myself and a tan little brunette with impossibly perky tits lying utterly still, mid-fuck, in weeds, just off the side of a parking lot, waiting for a security guard making his sunrise rounds to pass. I've played Frisbee with dinner plates, seen grown men dance with six foot inflatable toothpaste tubes and had a jack of spades jump off the card and sing along with "Their Satanic Majesties' Request" in the throes of acid. I've lost a dozen credit cards, driven twenty miles in the wrong direction and argued for two hours about whether the 93/94 or 96/97 season of the Simpsons was better on a headful of dope. As mindless as they might sound, each of these experiences is revelatory. Though a weatherbeaten axiom favored by too many shit-for-brains neo-hippies, the fact is, once you've eaten a psychedelic drug, you are different. As Kesey noted, "You're on the bus." The systems around you become an experiment - a soundstage for your performance art. You'll hear you're excelling or failing in them. None of that will matter. Those are the systems' measuring sticks. You'll successfully manipulate the systems around you, gaining lots of money, getting you out of the system, off the stage. Or not.
The government treats psychedelics as Schedule One drugs, and will lock you up with rapists, pederasts and gang leaders for dealing them because they rip down The Curtain, shredding the necessary fictions - that what most of us are doing from 9 to 5 matters. If the collected citizenry of the United States took acid or mushrooms next Saturday, we'd wake up in a much different world Monday - a much shrewder one. People would chuck an awful lot of allegiances. The world would get a megadose of the actual "thinking outside the box" we like to applaud in each other. The problem is, without the armies of people thinking within the box, the believers, the cogs in the machines that keep the lights on and the roads paved would grind to a halt, or crack under the pressure of millions of seers suddenly manipulating the system instead of working tirelessly to support it.
Psychedelic drugs won't wreck your mind, but they will spoil it, in a very good way. I can't explain it here. I don't think anyone can formulate accurately all you see on them, and only a fool would try. Suffice it to say, they're the ultimate "red pill," and "hallucinogen" a very lacking description. The immediate understanding that you're playing a part on stage is not a hallucination at all. It's arguable what you see when you come down from those mushrooms that's the hallucination. Mushrooms or acid won't give you a blueprint for how to live your life, and only a fool would follow the advice he might give himself under them. What they do - the meat of a strong trip - is take the structures, the social strictures we follow, the false politeness, the talking around what we mean instead of being honest with one another, and feed it into a thresher. Post-"hallucinogen," you understand the necessity of playing your part so you can pay for your cars and home in the suburbs. But you also understand that it's just an acting gig - that none of what you do between 8:00 and 7:00 each day matters in terms of the larger picture... that's it's got as much to do with your self-actualization as what type of sausage you had with breakfast this morning. That is, unless you do something that means something to you. Once on the bus, you understand The Game as you hadn't before. Let's leave it at that.
Coke is the reverse, the 180 degree polar opposite of the psychedelic experience - the drug for people who don't want to look behind any curtains, but celebrate and revel in them. The notion of a cell in your fingernail containing a galaxy seems plausible and worth pondering in the highest pitch of an acid wave. At the peak of a coke buzz, Nicole Ritchie's anorexia, Brangelina or the wheels on your M3 are deep enough to carry a half hour conversation. You might drool on yourself or burn your shorts when your cigarette falls into your lap because you're laughing too hard or can't feel your limbs during the take-off phase of a mushroom trip. In a coke frenzy, your biggest concern is whether your new haircut actually looks as good as you thought it did when you were leaving for the evening. Coke is one of the few drugs, perhaps the only drug, with the capacity to make a person shallower than he already is. It's really nothing more than an amphetamine version of alcohol. But that's alright, because if you're on coke, so is nearly everyone you're talking to. You can stand around in a circle and debate the vexing controversies of our time, stopping every few seconds to swallow, just to make sure your iced numb throat is still working. "You're a fool, Bob. You don't know jack. If you have digital cable, LCD kicks the living Christ shit out of plasma!"
If this is opaque, try a simple analogy... Mushrooms, acid and pot are Woodstock; blow is Altamont. It's a "pro" level drug, brain juice for garbageheads and status seekers, a mean high for mean freaks and people who view thinking as a malady. We aren't the drug's biggest marketplace by happenstance. Malcontents chase blow for the same reason people buy long chromed German cars that go 170 mph to crawl into work in traffic jams from Levittowns of plastishit McMansions. Blow is a mythical drug, bringing John and Jane Doe the romantic promise of a Studio 54 life. To a person who doesn't understand the drug, it represents money, glamour, beauty and decadence... a night in Morocco partying with shipping heirs in a $250.00 baggie. But if you've seen how blow works, you know the myths aren't much more than that.
Blow is a Rich Person's Drug
Blow is a drug for the ambitious, the ultimate social climber's high - a perfect medication for the anxieties of Yeats' "Merchant Class." The sole purpose of the drug is to make the user feel better about himself, more energetic, alive, personable and attractive. If you're rich, and by rich I mean not having to work, you don't need blow. The media fixates on rich drug flame outs, but the rich I've known don't need cocaine. They'll use it occasionally, and buy good product when the opportunity presents itself, like any other recreational user. But most of them don't need an amphetamine Id laxative to prop up a flagging sense of self esteem. People who are used to having a bottomless wallet don't need to jam their skulls full of synthetic energy on Friday night. When they stroll into the bar, they're rested and ready from a week of having done nothing, and whether you like them or think they look good doesn't mean shit to them. They're not waking up on Monday at 8:00. However good you feel or think you look on coke, your life doesn't compare.
Blow's prime market is the treadmill runners. Anyone with a half decent job can afford enough of it to supercharge his weekend. In college, I had a high upper middle class friend, let's call him Jon, who cultivated the image of himself as a trust fund brat, and went to great lengths to let you know when he was using coke. He never did mushrooms or acid because, my suspicion was, he feared losing control and contradicting the tall tales supporting his constructed patrician persona. But he did copious amounts of the bad coke we used to get from the football fraternity. He also told stories about flying on the Concorde, seeing Linda Evangelista naked in a hot tub and running into Don Johnson and Tupac Shakur hoovering lines in the back of a Manhattan disco. If he were privy to these things, he wouldn't have been sitting with me in a dingy fraternity apartment, chopping rails on a cd case below a tattered Steal Your Face poster. But his was just accepted coke talk... garden variety bullshit. He wouldn't have said anything as unbelievable baked or tripping, but on coke, with his self-perception inflated to twice the recommended PSI, this sounded reasonable, the sort of romantic starfuckery Hollywood snow fiends might kick around. He was suddenly more than a well-to-do kid from North Jersey; he was a globe trotting high society gadabout. That's coke. Those that need to jump a caste.
To Be Continued...
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1 See: The last fifty years of elections.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 6:41 PM