Owen Cheese: You clowns are on dope!
Binky: You didn't see nothing old man. We're just five happy party clowns, sitting down to a plate of beef. White- powdery- beef.

- Shakes the Clown (1992)

Blow is a Great Sex Drug

This is the meanest of all myths about cocaine. Coke will give you brass balls and charisma, putting you face to face with the cutest bleach blonde nearby. It'll put your hand on her arm and give you a game face - quick nod, fat grin and kneejerk "yes" to everything she says, as though you're the only two people who've ever shared the observation. It'll pepper her with one liners and paint your face with a smitten glaze. This is all canned material, coughed like a reflex, sugared with some fleeting eye contact. But you'll be in a place like the Devon, off Rittenhouse - gold diggers deluxe - the sort of pick up joint where a robust vocabulary is a liability. She'll flip back her hair and smile.

"I represent companies of all sorts in all types of disputes... businesses fighting businesses. It keeps the bills paid. What do you do?"

"Is that a Ferragamo tie? My cousin bought one like that for her brother. They are so smooooth. I love the elephants."

Score.

You don't do coke looking for smart women. They'll spot the sweat on your brow and all those trips to the men's room. They'll catch you running your fingers under your nose, paranoid there's a Neil-Young-in-The-Last-Waltz white ring under a nostril. They'll see through the Cheshire Cat grin and rapid fire verbal deluge. A smart woman's not getting loaded in a stockbroker's skank gallery, listening to man flip off endless dialogue like a talking head on network news. An actual man fumbles. An actual man says the wrong thing. An actual man takes breaths between sentences. A smart woman will spot that you're far more animated and lucid than someone too drunk to avoid getting caught staring at her tits time and time again ought to be. She'll walk. And that'll be fine. You won't miss her. You're not looking for love. You're not even looking for like. Meeting women is just something to do. The concept of fucking - the violence of the thing; a strange set of tits in your face; an ass in the air; nails in your shoulders; teeth biting your lip; driving your hips in and out - seems ideal. Who you're fucking's near immaterial as long as she's within the realm of what's attractive on seven Stoli Os. You take what you get. Trying to pick up women on coke is deep sea trolling. Marlin's the target, but you're mounting whatever lands in the boat.

The problem with coke is, it'll land that killer opening kiss on her... the sort that'll turn her spine to jelly. It'll navigate your fingers up the back of her shirt, down the front of her skirt, unhook the bra strap, slide off the thong, slide the fingers between her legs, have your tongue ringing her nipples and put her on the bed in three minutes flat.

...At which point you'll find yourself sweating, wheezing, hard as a hot dog, barely able to do anything with her, wondering why the hell you're there.

Your asshole uncle's story about rubbing coke all over his cock before riding a smoking local with Selma Hayek tits through a wicker headboard in Acapulco in 1986 and your frat brother "Jazz's" tale about nailing his girlfriend for seven hours straight on a powder binge are as full of shit as they sound. "Cokedick" is a rotten curse no one admits. The media equates the drug with potency, which causes everyone who uses it to do the same. It is true that for some people, coke is a wild mix of Spanish Fly and Viagra. But for most people doing coke - people doing coke for the sake of doing coke, as opposed to sex addicts rubbing it on their cocks so they can fuck themselves raw - you're not really interested in fucking, and neither are your genitals. You've been chaining smokes and whiskey for hours. You can't feel your face, let alone your penis. On top of that, the grade of blow the average young professional can get his hands on is usually cut with ephedrine or meth, a mix the stimulant equivalent of Salt Peter.

The times I've had high quality coke it was a pleasant high, crisply, predictably segregated into a quick take off, half hour plateau and mildly annoying, but quick wind down. I didn't get nervous. I didn't get fidgety. I didn't need moremoremore. I was energized, but calm. Everything was right, clicking in perfect order. When it faded, it faded smoothly. Another would have been great, but I could live without it. A few beers, a joint, a conversation to get lost in and I forgot about it. I didn't stay wired into the morning, lying awake in bed, sweating, getting up to piss every two hours.

The chemical cousins ephedrine and methamphetamine, on the other hand, are brutal, unforgiving highs. Ephedrine is a train wreck of a drug - a bronchodilator that makes your scalp tingle like your hair's on fire, your heart slam away at your sternum, your hands go numb, your balls shrivel into your stomach and your penis near invert into your bladder. "Trucker Coke," Mini-Thins, "White Crosses," "Two Ways" - every one's a vicious, shitty buzz, 2 to 4 hours of nail biting, nervous chatter and an unnerving desire to take huge, deep breaths, the effect of every bronchial airway being blown open to twice its usual width. In college, a close friend of mine ate 30 Mini-Thin tablets at once. He lost his mind for the night - stumbling, dazed, staring aimless, a saucer-eyed Syd Barrett with crusted drool forming at the corner of his mouth, asking people to light his cigarette over and over. "I can't feel my legs..." Another took it night after night for weeks as a way to stay up into the early morning hours drinking. One weekend, in the midst of the usual Sunday Afternoon Bourbon Withdrawal Psychosis, he busted into my house, asking me if he should go to the campus infirmary.

"I can't come anymore."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"The bottle says not to use if you have prostate problems. Could I have given myself prostate problems? I mean, I think maybe I came... But it was clear." He was reading the fine print on the back of a bottle of "Mini-Thins."

"You sure you weren't peeing on her?"

He scratched his head and darted back out the door. His car peeled away. Ephedrine's no one's friend.

Meth's a little bit better - some of the same symptoms, but a bit less physically taxing, with a higher euphoric effect. Most coke and X users joke about meth as a trailer park drug, a low grade freak high for hopeless Appalacian inbreds who can't afford real drugs, ignorant of the fact that the drug they see causing Mable Louisa to clean her doublewide ten times a day on an "HBO Undercover" special is the same drug that caused them to piss away $1500.00 in blackjack winnings at 4:00 a.m. at the roulette table. That feeling you have leaving the roulette table is the same one you have, sweating, arrythmatic, watching Whatshername spit polish your member for half an hour to tease a hard-on out of it. You'll fuck her, but you won't feel a thing. Between the thousand drinks you downed while you were booze-proofed from the drug, and the general numbness attendant to the fight or flight adrenaline tsunami triggered by it, your dick has as much sensitivity as a frostbitten toe. You'll pretend to be finished, roll off Whatshername, slink to the bathroom and throw the condom in the toilet, destroying the evidence of your inadequacy.¹ You'll run to her kitchen, guzzle a beer and slide back into the bed. Lying there, you'll stare at the wall, praying for sleep, your limbs twitching in a spastic dance, half borne of nervous energy, half to avoid hearing the blood rushing through your temples and feeling your heart racing in your throat when you lie still. She's settling into sleep two feet away. You're looking at your clothes on the floor. Getting up, dressing and getting a cab seems impossible.

Whatever quality of blow you're on, the best part of a coke hook up is the next morning. The alcohol and extended high blood pressure leave every capillary in your body pulsing at the skin's surface. Every inch of you is electric, hypersensitive. Your mind is gone and all you know is the Big Pain comes soon. Fried far beyond any concern for freaking out Whatshername, and craving any temporary respite from the pain you're beginning to feel, you'll porn her with abandon. You'll try any kinky move that pops into your head, pouring toxic sweat over her and her sheets, exposing yourself at your lowest - burnt, nothing left to hide. You'll come like a nervous breakdown... total loss of control. But regret's all you'll feel as you leave... You wasted that on Whatshername.

You'll see a buddy that night and, after your fourth drink, when the sweats finally subside, you'll tell him about the insane coke sex you had the night before. He'll make a mental note. The myth rolls.

Blow is "Addictive"

Cigarettes, alcohol, heroin and cocaine are all technically "addictive" drugs, but that's an overbroad, absolute proposition, the sort you'd hear from a Phys Ed teacher or an FBI agent. Coke's a little different than the others... Yes, it can become addictive, as can Taco Bell, Jesus, internet porn, jogging and Dungeons and Dragons. Psychologically, a person can addict himself to anything. But the myth that coke quickly places the average user's grey matter in a physical submission hold is just that. The very last thing the average responsible recreational user - the person government studies pretend doesn't exist - wants the morning, er, afternoon, after six hours of blow the day before, is more fucking blow. Sure, a crackhead wants a hit first thing in the morning, but that's as much to blame on the scene he wakes to as the power of the drug. And I'm not writing about crackheads or incorrigible addicts. For the people I'm writing about - the millions of them roaming office corridors and smiling at you over the water cooler, sitting across from you in a meeting, smirking at their Blackberries, or operating on your hemorrhoids - cocaine is only addictive while they're on it or while they're bored. Cocaine's a lot like masturbation. I'll have masturbated countless times while writing this book. I'll be sitting, thinking about a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph... and then, suddenly, inexplicably, I'll think "I should jerk off." I could have just gotten laid, or be deeply engrossed in a chapter, but I'm still going to fire up the Lubriderm.

There's just no reason not to.

That same logic goes for blow. It's Friday, and I'm exhausted from the work week, and I'd like to just knock back a few drinks. Then someone offers me blow. My mind quickly processes the offer. It's here. It's fun. I might not get it again for a while, and I'm tired, but I don't want to go to sleep. I don't have to do anything but give the person with it some money. Why wouldn't I do it? Can you give me a single reason not to snort a line of white powder that's going to turn my mood 180 degrees and give me a huge burst of energy? I have one to pick myself up, which becomes three, which becomes going to somebody's house to get a fresh baggie, which becomes the desperate licking of the inside of the empty baggie at 2:00 a.m....

Dry. Empty. Done. Cashed. How did that happen? How did it go so fast?

The better question is how it lasted as long as it did. While you're on cocaine, it's wickedly addictive. Nothing's more pathetic than watching a first time user rip through line after line, bleating "God, why didn't I do this before?" or "How did I miss this in college?" He rapidly devolves to a jabbering baboon, wild-eyed, running around the party bumming drags off everyone's smokes and begging for More from anyone he thinks is carrying.² For a person who doesn't understand the need to taper off later in the night, or carry Xanax, Ambien or dope to knock the edge off the come-down, the end of a generic street coke buzz can be a black hole of depression beyond anything they've ever felt before. You want to shoot yourself in the face.

When you're wired, you'll do just about anything to stay that way. I've found myself and a buddy running past joggers as the sun came up, racing to shake a friend out of bed for his stash. I've almost been talked into driving the length of two states - long ones - at 4:00 a.m., to get a mythic cheap "monster score." Of course, this was when I was young and stupid and had nowhere to be the next morning. With age, and a grasp of the drug's tendencies, you learn to start mainlining scotch when the baggie runs dry. You learn not to substitute with Red Bulls or search gas station mini-marts for ephedrine. You accept The End. And once you accept The End, once the jitters pass and you're comfortably "down," you suddenly don't want the drug anymore. You feel like shit the next day and regret having used it at all. You don't even think about it until it's in your face again.

The problem is, coke comes in waves. If it's in your face Friday night, it'll be in your face Saturday night. You won't be addicted in the classic sense, but you'll on the train of endless "Why nots?"

Blow is Glamorous

The popular place to do blow in a restaurant, bar or club is the porcelain cap on the back of a toilet. A foot or two away, something else takes place about 50 or so times a day:

[T]he rectal walls expand due to the materials filling it from within, stretch receptors from the nervous system located in the rectal walls stimulate the desire to defecate... When the rectum is full, an increase in intrarectal pressure forces the walls of the anal canal apart allowing the fecal matter to enter the canal. The rectum shortens as material is forced into the anal canal and peristaltic waves propel the faeces out of the rectum. The internal and external sphincters of the anus allow the faeces to be passed by muscles pulling the anus up over the exiting faeces.

- "Defecation," Wikipedia, 2006.

The toilet bowl is the 800 Pound Gorilla in any cokehead-cramped bathroom stall. You have to either sit on it and turn sideways, kneel on it, or maneuver around it and lean over part it to reach the lines. Depending where you are, you also have to flush it, to maintain the fiction you're actually using it.

Though it's a black hole at the center of your universe - the eye in your personal blizzard - no one ever talks about the toilet bowl. Nobody rips a line, steps out of the stall and remarks to his buddy "Wow, somebody must've dropped a black bean enchilada loaf in there" or "Watch where you put your feet - there's a huge piss puddle on the right." If you actually have to urinate, you don't flip up the seat and do it. There's no multitasking of that sort. You wait until whatever's cut on the back of the toilet's done, or use the urinal nearby. It almost goes without saying you never, ever, actually defecate in the stall you're using. That's an unheard of taboo, the equivalent of Woody Allen's sneezing on a plate of rails in "Annie Hall." The stall's actual function is never addressed. This is the jet set. Nobody takes a shit here.³

Feces are just one of the many glamorous things you're likely to view up close on blow. You might see a midget break down in tears at 4:00 a.m., crying and wishing himself dead. Maybe you'll turn from a smoke in the kitchen and catch a glimpse of a crazed friend pile driving a large boned woman into your couch. Perhaps you'll talk to a topless hooker about Big Ten football in a suite at the W Times Square, politely declining a blow job every now and again. You might finally fall asleep at 6:00 a.m., only to wake up at 8:00 a.m., to a call from a hotel manager at the Embassy Suites about a fistfight and a shattered balcony door in a hotel room you rented for a buddy's bachelor party. You could get some really cheap shit, mostly meth, and after 36 hours of trying to drink yourself down with Boodles and Busch pounders, find yourself listening to cop explain why you cannot mow the lawn at 5:00 a.m. "Son, I don't want to know why. I just want it to stop." Or it might be time for your first blow induced Faux Heart Attack. You'll find yourself sunburned, dehydrated, standing on a deck, your ventricles pounding a ragged 120 beats a minute, staring at the ocean and chugging beers to pass out, drowned in panic delirium, certain you're pulling a Lowell George. "I can't die like this. It'd be so goddamned embarrassing."

I felt terrifically glamorous when an ex-college buddy caught me by the arm at my fifth year reunion and chortled through gin spit, "Hey, how's the [nods, smiles and pushes finger against nostril] treatin' ya these days?" The worst thing about blow is its derrrty derrrty stigma. Everybody smokes dope, and everybody knows everybody smokes dope. Using acid in college is also fairly common, seen largely as a right of passage - something you do as a crazy kid. Blow's got a nasty outlaw image. It's a dangerous drug - what "Scarface" did... the shit that sank Strawberry, Gooden, Farley, Belushi, Capote, Dexter Manley and Len Bias. People believe the government line about how one sniff can pop your aorta, or have you pimping your daughters in a matter of weeks. To the uninformed, it's a violent drug for sweaty, South Americans who'd take a chainsaw to your temple as soon as shake your hand. Amongst a fat swath of society, using it equates to not really giving a damn about your own life, meaning you don't give much of a damn about anyone else's. When your old pal who's now a stock broker in St. Louis taps his nose and grins, he's telling you that he figures you're a spineless addict, and still carrying enough to get the both of you good and goddamn high.

Well, he was kind of right... I didn't bring it to my fifth year reunion, and I didn't carry it or even look for it. In fact, at that point, I didn't even have a true connection for the stuff. But if it was offered, I'd do it. I don't care if you've scaled Everest, thrown for 300 yards in the Superbowl or cornholed Carmen Electra, nothing - nothing - feels better than the opening wave of coke rush. You walk taller and talk smoother. Your speech is silky, your movements lithe - you don't so much walk as slide through a room, around the bodies, like your limbs were made of mercury. Your teeth shine brighter than fluorescent bulbs, your chin's a chiseled granite slab, your shoulders are wider and your chest broader. When you look into the mirror after sucking water up your nose to make sure all the coke got absorbed into your sinuses or the back of your throat, Warren Beatty smiles back. The song is about you.

No matter how bad it is for you, no matter how dumb it makes you, no matter how stupid the conversations on it, or how atrocious the people you have to hang out with to get it, the fact is, if there is Nirvana, Heaven, Paradise, whatever afterlife you subscribe to... it feels like the first line of the night. You. Can. Do. Anything.

...Which is how you find yourself emptying your wallet to see a perfect blond drive enough volts to kill a terrier into her forehead.

"Put that down. You're not doing that," Frampton grabbed the taser from Jessica's hand.

"What the fuck is the matter with you?"

"She offered to do it," Miles muttered.

"Jesus Christ." Frampton stared at me.

"What?"

"Enough. Let's go." Frampton checked the lock on the kitchen door and turned out the light.

"We're going already?"

Frampton pushed me toward the living room. "To your place, dude. The air conditioning here sucks." In a moment, we were on the street.

"Wait... I left my shit inside. I need my--"

"What?"

"My briefcase... my sunglass--"

"For what?" Frampton laughed. Christian turned and marched ahead. Frampton shrugged. We all followed Christian.

Lisa and I lived around the corner from Frampton and Miles at the time, on the __th floor of an apartment building on the corner of ________ and ________, with a view overlooking Center City. The place was huge and airy. Lisa had decorated it with white furniture, light Oriental rugs and white curtains. It had massive jet engine air conditioning units which cooled it to refrigerator temperatures and four massive windows with panoramic views. The walls were thick concrete, absorbing all the but the highest volume from the Bose 301s and 20' Infinity subwoofer. It was a perfect, open space to get wired, blast tunes, smoke cigarettes and pinball gibberish back and forth between slugs of frozen Stoli and Jagermeister from the freezer. At the time, I was on a champagne kick, so we also had two or three bottles of that flowing - usually a Vueve Cliquot and one or two Piper Sonomas. Filling out the drink menu was the seemingly endless supply of Amstel Light and Yuengling Lager, a six pack of which every guest seemed to bring. This, of course, was the average drink menu. The bar could change in an instant, depending on who arrived. I'd woken up many a Saturday and Sunday afternoon and found cashed bottles of Cuban rum, Bombay Sapphire Gin or the odd forty of St. Ides... along with the usual mountains of cigarette butts, roaches rolled in Marlboro Light cellophane wrappers and, if it were an ambitious night, collections of spent nitrous canisters. The floor was always littered with cds: "Waiting for Columbus," "Let it Bleed," "Kettle Whistle" and Led Zeppelin's "BBC Sessions" were favorites, but depending on the character of the evening, scattered through the pile of cracked jewel cases and loose discs you'd find anything from "Paul's Boutique" to "Blondie's Greatest Hits" to "Highlights from Richard Wagner's Ring Trilogy." "Hey Ladies>Walkürenritt> Heart of Glass" has a groove all its own.

To be continued...

----------
¹ Or hers, depending on what eyes you're using.

² For some reason I've never been interested enough to look up, cigarettes seem to extend the peak of a blow buzz. This might explain why everyone who's on coke smokes, even if they don't. It almost seems wrong not to have a cigarette under those circumstances.

³ The amusing irony being, for many, that's a near immediate side effect of the drug.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 3:19 PM

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