This post was inspired by a coworker who asked me last night
about my very first time using meth, and why I had never written about it. I’ve
been thinking about the answer all night, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
It was the late 1900’s when I met the first girl I loved.
Her name was Ramzee. She was a beauty, and I was shocked that she wanted
anything to do with a burned-out stoner/pot dealer/high school dropout, etc… I’m
fairly certain it was because of all of those things, so we were off to a good
start. We met for the very first time at Mike Tambornino’s house when she was
with somebody who was buying a bag, and she later told me that she liked my
smile and my curly hair. I’m a boy, so I told her I liked her boobs, and we were off to the
races.
This was the point
right after my house on Selby Avenue had been raided for growing marijuana, and
I had quit smoking crack and doing cocaine for a while. We started spending a
lot of time together, and eventually she moved in with me in that very house.
Things were going well, except for the fact that I couldn’t keep my shit
together. I wanted to be a drug dealer, but I had to supplement that with a job
at Office Max. A quick side note, for our first Christmas together, she bought
me a pair of shoes that I really wanted. I bought her a Ferrero Rocher gift box
from Office Max that I used my once-a-year 20% discount coupon to purchase. I’ll
never forget the blank look on her face. Since then I’ve been good at gifting.
Time marches on and eventually we’re ready to move out
together. She wants to move to Richfield because it’s closer to her job at MN
Wine and Spirits in Bloomington, so I tag along and find work at Sherwin-Williams.
A side note, one night after buying a car, I got really drunk and drove it
through the store-front windows of that Sherwin-Williams in an attempt to steal
several paint sprayers, but I ended up leaving with nothing because I was drunk
and useless. I went to work the next day to show off my new car, and the boss
was shocked to see broken glass all over the bumper and on the wipers. I told
him the windshield had just been replaced, and somehow he bought it.
Anyhow, after a few months of living together, I developed a
raging alcohol addiction. I was unstoppable, and fueled by a thief that worked
in a liquor store. When I’m drunk, I’m prone to foolish behavior, usually that
meant buying crack, but I told Ramzee of my urges and she had another idea.
Back then it was called crank. It had almost the same letters, so I was interested.
She made a call, and a short while later, for $20, we had
enough speed to keep us up for days. This stuff was different than the shards
of ice you see today. This was bathtub, chunky, green, old-school biker crank,
and it was powerful. She told me she would make a light bulb functional for
smoking, and she got to work. She used a screwdriver to remove the black, glass
bottom part of a standard lightbulb by tapping on it until it broke. She
removed that, along with the filament attached and we were left with an empty,
but still frosted glass bulb. To remove the frosting, she poured in a
tablespoon of iodized table salt and swirled it around and along the sides of
the stem and base until it was fully transparent, and she poured it all out.
Next, she flushed it out with water a few times, and then used her hair dryer
to quickly dry the insides. The bulb was ready, so she took a standard Bic pen
and removed the bottom cap, and ink bladder and ballpoint top, leaving just the
hollow tube. This was the beginning of a whole new set of skills I would carry
with me through the rest of my life; we had a functional meth pipe.
She put in a chunk and showed me the ropes. She held the
bulb horizontally at the base and lit the underside with her other hand. When
the drug began to melt, she rocked the contrivance back and forth until a sick
haze began to form which she then inhaled through the tube she held with her
mouth that tunneled into the mist in the machine. Then she let me take a hit.
It took me 19 years to find what my life was for, and that
was the day that I found my perfect euphoria. From the first hit, I loved the
feeling that made my whole body tense up. From my eyes that became more alert,
to my teeth that were fused together every moment the pipe wasn’t in my mouth,
to my brain, now fully capable of having intimate, detailed conversation for
the first time in my life, everything about this drug made me feel like I was
normal. I could feel my hair growing.
And that’s where drugs really get you. That’s why I couldn’t
stop. From that day on, my life was never the same. Crank was all I wanted. I
could taste it when I didn’t have it, and smell it before it arrived. I needed
it to be complete. And I needed it more than I needed my job, my apartment, or
my girlfriend. That was the point of no return for a lot of things. And even
when I did quit for a while, my alcoholism became even more heartbreaking. I
couldn’t control the amount of anything chemical that I ingested, and I
spiraled down, literally in flames when I eventually started a fire in that
Richfield apartment. Then I only knew sadness, isolation, and regret. Alone in
a jail cell, not for the first time, I tried to piece together where I had gone
wrong. Unfortunately, I was blind to the root. I would need almost two more
decades of pain to finally grasp the concept of what beast lay within me.
Happy Thanksgiving.
