I never considered my relationship to alcohol until a few years ago, and even then, no real consideration. I’ve always been known for being a bit extreme in temperament, experience, mood, speech, habit, so on… The fun with drugs part fit in, I only moved within liberal groups in a few metropolitan cities. I was known for meeting some random person, who’d offer an invitation somewhere and the next day, I’d come across a friend; me unslept and recovering from whatever had happened and more than happy at it all.
The 4th of July weekend aside, and my previous post, I do tend to get a bit carried away by libations.
Drugs in general, not so much. Save a few of the explicitly illicit and illicit-due-to-someone-else’s-name-on-the-bottle, I’ve done everything. Some I immediately disliked [pot], some I knew I’d do many times again [not pot], but there was no time where I said to myself
“Self, you have to do this drug all the time.”
In fact, my favorite drug, cocaine, isn’t even on my list of things to do in the foreseeable future. It might be after the very last item “Train your own dogs for the Iditarod,” but I don’t know. It takes about an hour of scrolling down in my things_to_do.xls file to even get to that item, so I don’t have the patience to go further.
I first did cocaine with a good friend of mine in his apartment, then in the bathroom of the Miltonian Social Club. My taste for a drug is partially dictated by the method of doing it multiplied by the ability to do it in public. ({Straws, bills, bumps [off various parts of the body], keys} ∩ cocaine) x bathroom stalls ⊃ common tables = ZING. I cannot accurately count the number of nights I was duro. Nights spent arguing philosophy outside bars at 3am with a light snow storm falling around us. Nights considering taking a walk with the guy outside Welcome to the Johnsons who always offers to sell me blow, instead of calling up my delivery man. Nights aggressing, or starting fights, or being the asshole at the other table, or trying to have a conversation with a girl who wasn’t on yay and trying real fucking hard not to snort my brains out and calm the f down so she wouldn’t get all freaked out. Coke dick. Ah, the good times.
Then, I didn’t do it for a long time. It didn’t have anything to do with the pathetic last bump I did, or what I did after. (Not saying anything about this only because I can’t figure out how to capture everything involving that time.) It didn’t have to do with the money spent. I just stopped. Then I did it again about a year later, in a bar I promised my friend, the owner, that I would never do coke in. (Aside: After immigrating, he sold coke in Times Square.) It also had nothing to do with that friend dying a couple weeks later alone in his bed after speedballing. I was very shaken by that, and felt guilty, though I know my sneaking into the kitchen and cutting some lines had nothing to do with my friend’s death because… well, a speedball is pretty fucking serious and not something you just decide to do one day
like getting off the train a few stops early and walking home. It’s definitely not like that. It’s like deciding to walk home drunk after a bender through Koch’s Manhattan… oh, and you lived in the Windermere. (Or, if you decided to walk down the hall of the Windermere now, I suppose.)
I didn’t do coke again until a few months ago, where I found myself in a real ratty-assed bar, with a bottle of tequila under my coat and a beer in my hand and a buddy turned to me and said “If you want some blow, that guy right there sells it.” $120 later + a bizarrely large bag of pretty good yay = a good night with good friends cutting lines off, of all things, Twelve, in a park in East LA at 3am.
A couple nights later, with some other friends who share my affection for alcohol, (errata slip: In this instance, please replace the word “alcohol” with the term “Bolivian marching powder.” —The Editors) and I went to the Dark House and couldn’t get out for hours. My buddies were vibrating so hard, I doubted the bar’s balcony’s ability to remain intact. A coworker happened to show up and I was able to carry a reasonable conversation until one of my friends derailed the conversation. Then, my other friend, who taps his leg as it is, and I got into a heated debate about god and next thing I know, there are women and I end up having a nice get-to-know-you with a Christian. That, at least, pulled me all the way out of the Dark House, though she didn’t know what kind of Christianity she follows, nor that there are pesky things called “denominations.”
How is this about alcohol, you ask?
I meant it to be, I did.
How are you not a coke head?
Meet some of my friends and compare.
I tried to do some blow the night after, but the first bump didn’t sit well and I switched over to drinks and happily watched the degree of annoyingness my buddies reached. Fortunately, there were other friends and a girl’s birthday party for distractions.
And this is not to say the Dark House night had anything to do with stopping, just as the pathetic story I didn’t cover earlier had nothing to do with stopping. I, honestly, spent the {4th, day} x {beer, cyclobenzaprine} = {(4th, beer), (4th, cyclobenzaprine), (day, beer), (day, cyclobenzaprine)}. That ordered pair describes 13 hours of sleep and enough side effects to cause my semi-daily jog to quickly lead to a not all unpleasant light-headedness. I also recently spent a night floating out on norco and beer while meeting some other interesting people (refer to the people involved here).
Which should not involve the Mike Raahauge Range.
But back to alcohol:
That’s what I do find myself taken away by. (And if I think alcohol is more of a problem than what I hint at in my stories above, that might be an indication of the severity of the situation.) While strolling around, waiting for the showing of WALL·E on Sunday, I told a friend that I need to start cutting the alcohol supply to my face. She said, “Same with me, but when you’re an a__oho___ like us, it gets real fucking hard.” That it does. I can snort, smoke, eat all sorts of chemicals that make me anything from a
to a
or one of the
, but the next day, I can be
.
But I can get so carried away on alcohol, I end up
and worse. And I don’t know why I keep going back. The day after drinking hard, I don’t always get hung over, but I often have a torn up stomach and spend a lot of time on the pot. I also end up with a pocket full of credit card receipts and most of the cash in my wallet spent on booze.
|Drinks| + (-$) =
Tags: 1980s NYC, drinks, drugs, iditarod, maths, the Dark House
