Lindsey and I made a temporary truce. She swore she’d never do such a thing again. My two-week trip to Canada also helped calm this upheaval. I knew she was going to sleep with Dave but that didn’t bother me. I liked him more every day, felt for his sad state, his abject shape and addiction. I admired him for his vast knowledge in spite of these afflictions. His strong mind had risen above his physical flaws. And in my long conversations with him I hinted at this admiration, stoked his self-esteem even, as we became closer and more intimate friends.
In January, coming back from the clinic, he crashed his Datsun ‘Z’ in a short tunnel in downtown Oakland on his way home. He didn’t call us and we wondered what happened, as he was so regular in his daily routine. Mid-afternoon he bursts in the front door all excited, saying: “I’ve got Demys. They gave me Demerols”, holding up and waving a pill bottle. His face was bandaged on one side and the dressings bloody.
We found out that he’d lost control speeding home and hit the wall of the short tunnel at high speed. He had a deep gash on his forehead and minor cuts. The police came and his quick thinking saved him, saying there was an oil slick in his lane and when he hit it he lost control. The police accepted this, one of them driving him to the hospital (ah the good old days), the other handling the tow truck and smashed car. The unwitting doctor at the hospital, after stitching him up, gave him a week’s prescription of Demerol’s for the pain. He was proud of this because he talked the doctor, who first prescribed Codeine, into giving him the far stronger stuff.
He enjoyed his ‘Demys’ over the week (like an appetizer to his usual fare) while his face healed and his car was repaired. I drove him to his clinic each morning and was able to witness the unusual scene, the women and their ‘spit-outs’ into his plastic bottle, hidden in his shirt, then his visit to Valium park. This was a small park in downtown Oakland with ten to twenty older Black men sitting on a row of benches, trading Valiums for hooch. They were the same set every day, his friends, and would part for him and offer him a seat. He would sit and socialize for a few minutes. The sight of him, his turnip shape, the only white boy sitting among a row of old Black men, all smiling, was too ludicrous to ever forget. But I could also tell after this week that he’d been shaken by the crash and knew he needed a change.
He did last out the month of February, long enough to fulfill his promise of teaching us one process, an extremely rare and clever one. But he also made the wise decision of moving back in with his parents and with their help reduced his dosages and recuperated.
I only saw him four times after this move but before I move on I’ll record what I can remember because he truly was a very unique individual.
“Dave told me today of a curious, morbid incident of his walking down Telegraph avenue as a boy of twelve and almost tripping over an apparently sleeping street person. But the man didn’t move after Dave just kicked into him and after a few more prods Dave discovered he was no longer a member of ‘this world’. He called the police to handle the matter. He also told me of a man he saw gruesomely crushed and killed trying to fix a flat tire on an incline and having the jack slip and the car roll back and squish him against a tree”.
Though Dave didn’t socialize, wrapped up as he was in his drug cocoon, he did agree, one Saturday night, to come out with us. We first went to John Seebach’s in the upstairs flat at Mike H.’s house for several hours of good conversation. He even condescended to do a few lines of speed, as John was being polite and passing around the mirror, (the only time I saw him try it). This kept us up late so we went on to ‘Receiving Studios’ a punk rock venue often packed with kids after midnight and open to five a.m.
The place was a former warehouse and had half a dozen rooms, some with bars, one large one for the bands and dancing. We bought beers and stood in one of the middle rooms and a large screen T.V. was playing some old, black-and-white war movie. We were in a sea of people a decade younger than us, many pretty girls in punk regalia. But this made us feel old. So I noted to Dave that we were like war veterans in this place, drug hardened like those battle hardened on the screen, in a group of innocents. He liked this analogy and laughed.
When you reach a far along, depraved stage of drug abuse you shed your friends. It’s now too selfish a state to allow them in. The fact that Dave allowed us into his life at this stage was a unique exception to the rule and a tribute to his rich intellect. I’ve seen a few couples who lasted deep into the pit of needledom. But never friends or companions. It’s much too personal a voyage.
Dave was in this phase but one evening he did have one visitor, the only one in the four months we lived there. She stayed no longer than ten minutes but was a sight it was to see. She knocked on our door at about six. She’d called Dave a half hour previous to make sure it was worthwhile. She was tall (six feet tall), blond, extremely beautiful and dressed to the max in expensive clothes. She was a lawyer in S.F. on her way home from a long day in court.
I thought at first they must have some legal connection but that wasn’t the case. She wanted the purest, cleanest, potent speed and that’s just what Dave had. He knew her habits well and after introductions went straight to the kitchen counter, pulled a bag from his pocket, (he’d rushed downstairs after the call to put on some clothes) and mixed some in a spoon with water, heating it with a lighter. Meanwhile, she, with equal dexterity, in the middle of our living room, had her shirt sleeve up, a tourniquet out of her purse and around her arm and a needle ready in her other hand, waiting for the spoon which Dave presented her. Then she shot up, all with unbelievable grace and smoothness of movement, almost like a magician performing a trick, her apparatus and the rest of the rather large bag of speed Dave gave her disappearing into the purse as fast as it had come out.
She showed no signs of the huge rush she must have felt, a truly professional veneer. She just stood there and bantered with Dave for a few minutes about old times and old friends. No money exchanged hands. Then she left just as quickly as she’d appeared. Dave turned to us and said: “I used to have some pretty important friends”. I’m sure the pride in that remark was payment enough for what he gave her.
One morning, as Dave was holding up his bottle of methadone to the light, examining it like a connoisseur, before he quaffed it down, (‘bolted the whole’ as Thomas De Quincey would say) he remarked to us two young innocents, that this dose was enough to immediately kill the both of us twice over, and that for us a goodly dose would be between ten and fifteen milligrams, not the two hundred milligrams he was holding. Lindsey said she’d like to try some if I’d join her. Dave agreed to keep such a farthing for us to try that evening.
I’d tried some, once before, five years earlier in San Diego, when the neighbor junkie girl began to frequent our house. But of that occasion I recall little, probably because she gave up so little to me it had next to no effect. Dave was more generous. We split what his practiced eye told him was about thirty milligrams and we both got ripped. But not right away. I felt nothing for a long while but then a sort of warmth bubbling up deep inside me and a sense of well-being. Mild stuff, I thought, as we watched his new T.V. (he shot the old set one afternoon point blank, being upset with the programming and couldn’t live without one so he bought a larger model within the week). The warmth increased over time and before midnight I was beginning to feel uncomfortably hot. Dave had gone to bed and Lindsey was sitting beside me on the couch, holding my hand and saying she felt fine.
I told her I felt seriously ill and needed fresh air. My breathing was labored and I thought I might O.D. Though it was dangerous to go out in that neighborhood, it was a cold February night and the streets were deserted. I stripped to my tee-shirt and the cold air was a perfect tonic. Lindsey held my waist and walked me around for an hour. This revived me.
We came home and went to bed and slept. The next morning I felt almost normal. But the best part of the trip was still to come. I took a nap mid-day on the couch and in the space of an hour had the most intense, bright, scenic, face-filled, dreams ‘a la De Quincey’. But that wasn’t sufficient recompense for the death throws I felt the night before, so that was it for me and methadone, experiment over.
In the following year heroin proved useful to me on one occasion, so much so I was glad I knew a junkie, probably the only time I ever did. When I look back on my youth, I consider myself fortunate to have never fallen under the spell of that addictive drug, or cocaine, considering how frequently I was around them. But I had one golden rule. I wouldn’t indulge in any drug that impaired my mental faculties, my reasoning abilities. So I never liked opiates. I detested smoking crack or speed (the few times I tried) or doing too many lines of coke. If it didn’t enhance conversation, it wasn’t for me. I sat in rooms filled with white smoke hundreds of times and hardly ever touched a pipe. My glass of rum and coke was the only thing in my hand. Several close friends of mine died of that addiction after I left Puerto Rico.
I’ve never felt the pangs of withdrawal. Speed has none, despite the false rumors. I quit completely after twelve years of on and off use when Sanita and I moved to Dallas in 1989. I’ve documented my use (and overuse) of it in great detail. In the years after the warehouse I had access to ounces at all times and in those years used it even more sparingly than before, having learned my lesson. I never went a day without drinking from mid-1985. But when I took a job through our union hall to a dry camp in 2011, the ‘Lake Detour’ gold mine in northern Ontario, near James Bay (so far north even the pine trees are stunted and half their size), I noticed no discomfort without a drink, for the twenty one day stints there, after twenty-six years of daily, copious, indulgence. I only noticed a craving for sweets at bedtime, which I never eat when I drink wine (which is every day).
Some people have what’s called an addictive personality. For them overeating can be a killer, with obesity, or couch-sitting and atrophy. But when I look back at it, none of my intellectual friends fell into the trap of addiction, or in a few cases, not for long. It’s as if intelligence provides a reason for living and an antidote against self-damage with drugs.
Coleridge and De Quincey came too soon. They had no precursors to warn them of the dangers of opium. But from reading their sad fates I was always extremely wary of opiates, years before I ran into any. To study hard takes a great personal effort, a care for self-improvement, an investment in oneself which can only stem from self-esteem. Those that love themselves take care of themselves, naturally. They don’t fall into harmful habits. Then there’s the ‘smart’ aspect. The smarter you are the clearer your view of everything around you. You see the consequences, examples, the effects of actions and the behavior of those around you and you learn to be wary, wise and circumspect.
