Suburban Dopehead Blues
It's a beautiful sort of confusion, a feeling of drifting, dreaming, floating away. It comes up on me like a warm cloud, like a drug should, and takes me to someplace better. I start to feel like it's all gonna be ok, and I matter. That's how you get addicted. That feeling. When I felt it the first time, I knew I was done, gone. I knew I would never get free.
It was December of 1984, Christmas break from high school. My senior year. While my parents slept, myself and two friends, both future convicts, were doing cocaine on my mom's kitchen table. My friends, Jack and Ritchie, had arrived just before my parents went upstairs, thinking we were going to watch movies or some innocent bullshit like that. Instead, we had a pile of coke dumped out onto a cheap Heineken beer carnival mirror on my mom's kitchen table and were chopping it up with a hunting knife my fine and upstanding father had given me after taking it from the husband of one of his side pieces, after said husband tried to kill her with it. My father had not so much moved into our little suburban town as he had been unleashed upon it and his extra-marital exploits were legendary. He had already introduced me to violence, pornography, prejudice, and corruption, and drugs were the logical next step for me to take on my own. I could see that clearly, even if he couldn't.
We had already been smoking weed and drinking booze for years by then, but coke came around as we got older and the 80s progressed. It was, to us, a badge of adulthood, of stepping up into the world of big kid partying that would, in turn, get us ready for the full on debauched environment we looked massively forward to wading into post high school. All of us had grown up way too fast and we were stupid beyond our years. That's what made us so dangerous, mostly to ourselves.
I had done coke before, a little, but hadn't really developed a taste for it. I was mostly into weed and rock and roll, but this was the night to change all of that. Jack had brought the coke, so he was cutting it up with the hunting knife. We were so green that none of us had a proper razor blade. He chopped it up as best he could, and we stepped to it. It was only a few lines each, but my whole fucking face just FROZE! I had never experienced anything like that with coke before. It was a full on peak experience, never to be duplicated, one of a kind, one night only, and I loved every second of it. I literally couldn't feel my face and couldn't have been happier about it.
All I remember from that point is knowing that I wanted to feel like this again, even before the initial rush wore off. Looking back, this should have been read as a warning sign of my addictive personality, but no one thought about that stuff then. We were nice white boys from the suburbs. We would never end up tripped up on goofballs like the dope heads we saw on TV. Our parents trusted us. Boy, were they foolish. None of them would believe it, but damn near every nice white boy in my town was on drugs in the 80s, and I don't mean weed. Football players, kids from families who now have streets bearing their names, the kids of cops and the fire chief. There were no drug tests then and you could get away with almost anything. Coke, acid, speed, Valiums, all around and easy to get, right there in Mayberry.
We all have our own relationship with drugs and reasons for using. For me, they took the edge off of being a social also-ran in high school and gave me a peer group, an identity. I was a freak, a stoner. I'd spent most of my school career failing to make a dent with the kids who made up the right crowd so, when the wrong crowd came calling, I went right along. At least I got invited to parties then, which never happened much before.
This, I think, was really when I began trading pain for pleasure. I lived in pursuit of pleasure, of anything that let me forget who and what I was for a while. I saw drugs as a way to make my little corner of the world feel a little nicer, after an anxious, Catholic school upbringing, and that's what I did for a long time. I hid in them from my social awkwardness, from my fucked up old man and the constant tension he caused in my house, from my dislike of school, my own ugliness, and anything else that upset me. I had no idea how to deal with the conflict inside and around me, so I just got loaded and let someone else deal with it. Dear Old Dad died at the height of this tension when I was 21, and that was when I really went off the rails. It was big fun at the time, but I really did a lot of stupid, dangerous shit in my early twenties that I was fortunate to survive unscathed. The sheer amount of drunk driving I did back then and got away with should be statistically impossible to accomplish.
Now, I'm old, long off hard drugs and liquor, and done with those old ways. I still remember, though, how good that night was, how that stuff gave me a feeling I couldn't get from another person, how I knew I'd never be the same again. I know now that I was just seeking love and acceptance, and misfits always find each other out on the perimeter. I didn't know how to connect with decent people then, but I was never without a connection ever again.