This is something I read on another message board...wanted to share
Some Guy On Another Message Board Wrote:
This is something I wrote a few years back, describing my first dance with Mr. Meth:
Like many others in that place and time, my initial exposure to crystal methamphetamine was a case of mistaken identity.
It was the summer of 1989 and I had just turned 25. I was the nighttime manager of a popular Russian-themed cafe/brewpub just off Hollywood Boulevard six nights a week, but the night in question was my off-duty evening. I chose to spend it at a coworker’s apartment in Tinseltown, where a group of us got together to share a few drinks, smoke a few joints and just generally chill out in good company.
A couple of hours after my arrival, my buddy Carl pulled out a bag of white powder and offered it around. Normally it would have been my inclination to refuse such invitations. I’d had a bit of a problem with cocaine during my college days in the early ’80s, one that was ameliorated only by the drastic step of joining the U.S. Navy. Since my discharge two and a half years earlier, I’d successfully resisted all temptations to revisit my experiences with powder products. However, on this evening I’d had a tad too much to drink and didn’t feel like passing out right away, as there was an attractive young lady present whom I desired to know better. So, when the baggy was proffered, I was only too happy to take up the offer.
But even after five years away from the drug, I immediately realized that the burning sensation overwhelming my right nostril was quite unlike any I’d ever experienced. “What the fuck is this shit cut with?” I gasped. My benefactor shot a puzzled glance my way, asking what I meant. When I replied that I’d never had any coke burn up my nose like that, he started laughing uproariously.
“What’s so goddamned funny?” I demanded.
“Well,” Carl replied, a big, shit-eating grin plastered across his mug, “that’s not coke--it’s speed. You’ve never done it before?” When I said no, his grin somehow got even wider. “Well all right,” he laughed, “you’ve got quite an adventure ahead of you tonight--make sure to let me know how it went at work tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll be quite busy until then!”
“What, off of one measly line?” I retorted. “I don’t think so. I may have been away from this shit for a while, but I’m far from a lightweight. A few more drinks and I’ll be just fine.”
Carl simply smiled and disappeared back into the midst of the party.
Truth be told, I was already beginning to notice some differences between the drugs. Whereas the coke high, while intense, tends to fade fairly quickly, fifteen minutes after I’d taken Carl up on his offer my brain was buzzing, my heart was pounding and all thoughts of passing out had vanished. This shit was amazing! I felt like a twisted version of Superman, able to down limitless numbers of tallboys in a single gulp while producing more smoke from prodigious bong hits than any locomotive. My mind was racing and I was just killing folks with my rapid-fire responses and witty banter to any number of conversations that were going on, often simultaneously. I was to learn in later years that tweekers (as meth heads most often refer to themselves) don’t really engage in conversation so much as dueling monologues. I possessed the happy talent of being able to listen to and absorb up to five such monologues at once, generally making one contribution every five minutes or so--but one that was somehow relevant to all five conversations, much to the amazement (and more than occasional chagrin) of my friends. But I jump a bit ahead….
As the hours passed, I was astounded by the endurance of the high. I glanced at my watch and was amazed to find that over three hours had passed since I’d snorted the small line. Three hours…and I wasn’t even beginning to feel tired! I decided to go outside and see how my aroused senses took to the nighttime atmosphere. Upon stating my intentions, a couple of other guys decided to come downstairs with me.
It was a balmy early summer night--temperatures in the mid-seventies, the scent of Southern California’s myriad native blooms freshening the air with their essences. As we stood on the steps leading up to the apartment building, a few of the more adventurous partygoers had made their way to the roof of the four-story edifice. They shouted down greetings to us, which we heartily returned, no doubt rousing any neighborhood residents who were so foolish as to be attempting to sleep at 1:30 in the morning on a weekday. I remember the time well, because the folks up on the roof shouted that we were almost out of beer and needed to make a run to the liquor store. Since I was already downstairs, I volunteered to go and told the folks on the roof to send someone down with their money.
Though I would’ve most likely scoffed at the notion at the time, I’ve now come to believe that there are certain cruxes that we come to at various points in our lifetimes…and, as absurd as the notion may seem, there are often omens that help to point out the proper path to take. One such moment was about to unfold.
As I finished off my cigarette and prepared for the beer run, a shout from above caught my attention. My coworker Eddie, the party host, stated he was going to bring down the money, but not by some “pussy-ass stairwell.” No, he was young, drunk and, as I discovered later, also thoroughly enjoying his first encounter with speed. So, stairs weren’t good enough for him. He wanted to get downstairs, and he wanted to get downstairs NOW. As we bemusedly watched from the ground, Eddie clambered over the edge of the roof, his intention to swing onto the balcony of his room below. Unfortunately, his sense of equilibrium wasn’t exactly at its greatest, with the result that he overbalanced on his way over the edge of the roof, hit the balcony railing on his back, flipped over and plunged headfirst into the building’s sunken driveway, some fifty feet below where he’d started.
Even now, well over a decade later, I can recall with crystal clarity (pun not intended) the horrible sound that his head made hitting the pavement. It was very weird; it seemed that the sound was echoing over and over in my skull, but all other background noise--the screams from above, the shocked curses from my smoking buddies--faded into the background. Along with the two guys I’d been smoking with, I raced over to his prone form and immediately had my worst suspicions confirmed: Eddie was lying there motionless, eyes open but rapidly glazing and blood trickling from his nose, mouth and visible ear. I was certain that he was dead.
While one of the guys I’d been smoking with was screaming frantically for someone to call an ambulance, and the other was determinedly administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I found myself facing one of the most difficult moments of my life. Eddie’s Filipina wife, Carmen, who was three months pregnant with their first child, had raced down the stairs from the roof, screaming hysterically for her husband. Without really thinking too much about it, I instinctively grabbed her and refused to let her get too close to the scene, not wanting the sight of his prone, lifeless form to become her final memory of Eddie. I didn’t tell her my suspicions, of course. I simply told her that people were doing their best for Eddie, and she’d only get in the way at the moment. At first she tried to fight her way past me, but I used my size and strength to keep her away and, eventually, since I was Eddie’s boss, she took me at my word.
I’d just calmed her when a shout went up: “He’s still breathing! Get that fuckin’ ambulance here NOW!” I couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Though still unconscious, Eddie was somehow drawing in great, shuddering lungfuls of air. Within moments, the paramedics had arrived and, after quickly stabilizing Eddie and putting him on a backboard, roared off to the hospital.
Incredibly, Eddie was out of the hospital within 72 hours--and back at work within a week. No one that was there could believe it; Carmen was convinced that the Lord had stepped in to save her husband’s life for the sake of their unborn child, and who was I to doubt a miracle?
Nevertheless, there were still some disquieting signs. Eddie was never again the happy-go-lucky hellraiser he’d always been in the three months I’d known him prior to the accident. In fact, thereafter he was nothing at all like the Eddie I’d quickly come to consider a good friend. Although he may have made a complete physical recovery, it seemed that his brain had undergone a total rewiring. While a lot of that could no doubt be attributed to his close brush with the hereafter, it went a bit beyond. It was almost as if Eddie had been reborn at that moment he started breathing again. A brand-new Eddie, if you will, who for all intents and purposes looked like the old Eddie but was, in fact, nothing at all like him personality-wise. He would never again join our wisecracking group on break on the rare occasions that the restaurant slowed down a bit, and where his presence had always previously inspired laughter and jokes, an odd sort of solemnity began to take over whenever he walked by us. Nobody was very surprised when he abruptly quit the restaurant about six weeks after his fall. God save us, I believe some of us were even relieved.
I never saw Eddie or Carmen again.
But surely, after such a horrific experience upon my initial exposure to the drug, I immediately stopped doing speed, right? Even if one doesn’t have much faith in omens, there definitely comes a time when such things slap you in the face and almost force you to take notice, doesn’t there?
Wrong. Much as I had been entranced by cocaine during my college days, just one snort of speed was enough to trigger my receptors in such a way that I couldn’t wait to do it again. And that summer, working nights at the restaurant and afterward partying ’til dawn with the crew in the Cherokee Avenue apartment building that would quickly receive the nickname “The Crystal Palace,” I would have plenty of opportunities.
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