Optimistic Nihilism

by David Landers

  Adding to the uneasiness of it all, I would later learn that while I was unconscious, one of the other party attendees (whom I didn’t know beforehand) had proposed that they drag my body to the front yard and call 911, saying that they found me this way. I guess I couldn’t have blamed him; what difference would it have made? I’m glad it didn’t get that far.

  Perhaps the drug to which I felt most addicted, in the traditional sense, was methamphetamine. That’s right: speed … crank … The Devil’s Dandruff.

  Like many drugs, meth has been greatly misunderstood by nonusers. The subjective experience is much more about euphoria than velocity. It actually has very little to do with restlessness or the jitters—at least until you start to come down. I’ve done a lot of drugs, most of the main ones except heroin, and I gotta say the euphoria of meth is the best, next to, of course, aptly named ecstasy. Turns out, the A in real ecstasy, MDA, stands for amphetamine, the whole awesome word being methylenedioxyamphetamine. Yes, they are chemically similar, and meth does feel a lot like ecstasy, just not as intense. Unless you shoot it, from what I’ve been told, as I never went that far myself.

  You might also be surprised with whom I was using. One tends to associate meth with trailer parks in Missouri, with all their mullets and pit bulls and “professional” wrestling. However, the scene in Dallas that also did a lot of speed was comprised of wealthy, talented hair stylists. They were a well-dressed, attractive, hip, sometimes gay community that might charge over $100 or more a haircut, which was very pricey in 1990. They went to the fancy, upscale bars in Dallas and didn’t break many laws otherwise.

  After the cocaine fiasco, I eased my way into it because I didn’t want to risk another overdose or whatever the fuck that was. However, I had learned enough in school and so forth that meth, despite the bad reputation, is actually a lot less toxic than cocaine, at least acutely. It’s almost unheard of to overdose on meth, whereas people often die from cocaine. Cocaine can cause heart attacks, strokes, or seizures in susceptible individuals. The main threat from meth, if you overdo it, is becoming temporarily psychotic and acting a fool (which, of course, can also be dangerous).

  Besides euphoric, meth made me remarkably confident socially, which I now believe was a large part of why it was so reinforcing for me. I’ve always been lonely, but nervous about meeting people, especially girls. Meth just turned this upside down. Whereas I was Woody Allen when sober, I was Clark Gable on meth. And it wasn’t an illusion: Girls readily gave me their numbers when I was high on the stuff. Sadly, though, I’d rarely call because Woody Allen would set back in before I had the opportunity.

  One night, very late, I was so high that I got lost (in my hometown), stuck in one of these weird meth-obsession-things that can happen sometimes, where I refused to do anything but keep trying, only to realize hours later that I had literally been driving around in really big circles and not making any progress. Eventually, I got pulled over by a cop for a tail light or something. It was a woman, and she was real friendly to me, almost strangely so. I swear to God, for a moment I felt like I was in a porno, like she might push me around and make me fuck her in the back seat of her car. In reality, all that happened was that she gave me directions out of there … but she was smiling the whole time, having absorbed my infectious friendliness, just like everyone else did when I was high on speed.

  That’s all great and good, but the reason why meth doesn’t work in the long run is because—more than any other drug I’ve done—the crash is as at least as aversive as the high is wonderful. There is a host of uncomfortable physical symptoms and you become so incredibly anxious, a new kind of anxiety that you haven’t experienced before, a profound edginess combined with disorientation and hypervigilance that can morph into paranoia. You can even hallucinate a little, but the tone is more bad-trip than good.

  It’s hard to pee, and sometimes you leak a little. I’m not sure if it’s related, but yeah, your dick shrinks smaller than it has ever been, like when you’ve been swimming in an arctic ice-fishing hole. It’s so dense from the compression that it feels hard as a rock—or, I guess I should say, as a boner. Speaking of which, you can get so horny that it hurts. If you dare masturbate, your dick then becomes huge, now bigger than it’s ever been, making you feel like a porn star—a very proud one, at that. I’ve marveled at the size of mine during these adventures. Sadly, I never had a gal to share it with, so there were no witnesses, and these were the days before camera phones.

  But much more compelling than your mind-boggling range of dick size are the anxiety and disorientation. I recall one particularly distressing crash that started at a friend’s really cool high-rise apartment in downtown Dallas. Several of us had met there after a night of partying in Deep Ellum; actually, it had been the second consecutive night for some of us, essentially sleep-free heading into day three. We were watching Sunday morning TV, which had been fun until the final remnants of buzz gave way to the first signs of ick. Mine came on exceptionally fast, and I started having these peculiar hallucinations in which I couldn’t really tell what we were watching. It was definitely some sort of nature documentary, but precisely which part of nature they were showing wasn’t clear. The screen was full of flowing motion, and for a moment I was pretty sure it was a time-lapse sequence of budding flowers. But as I squinted and peered at the screen, my perception suddenly shifted and I could tell that it was instead turbulent ocean waves. The experience was not the least bit pleasant but quite alarming, so I kept it to myself. I was starting to feel physically weak around that time as well, like I might pass out if I wasn’t careful. I needed to lie down soon, but I couldn’t do it there with so many people around. I had to get out.

  I told my friend I was crashing hard, so he gave me the keys to his apartment which was a significant distance but not inaccessible. I staggered to my scooter parked on the street, wondering if I was gonna faint or otherwise fall before I could sit on it. It was sunny, and the world was bustling and loud and full of incredibly sober people, greatly intensifying the unsettling feelings I was having.

  I did sit down, and yes, started driving. I was feeling wobbly and like I was leaning more than I possibly could have been, which prompted me to consider pulling over a few times. I decided against it because I didn’t want to prolong the suffering any more—I just had to get to a bed, or even a floor, where I could just be alone and freak out in private. It was so goddamn hot wearing that fucking helmet; I felt like I wasn’t breathing very well, either.

  Amazingly, I did make it, and finally felt some relief when I opened that apartment door. It was quiet and there were plenty of places for me to collapse. My friend wasn’t even moved in yet so there was no bed or even a couch, but the carpeted floor would do just fine.

  I went to the bathroom to piss. When I unbuttoned my shorts, both those and my boxers just fell to the floor because I had lost a notable amount of weight over the weekend. I’m not exaggerating: You lose enough weight in even 24 hours while on speed that it’s visibly apparent. Sometimes your clothes no longer fit as they did when you put them on before you first went out. I took my shirt off to take a closer look in the big ol’ mirror in the bathroom, and saw a familiar sight: me, as lean as I had ever been. I can’t lie; you look kinda hot, like a competitive swimmer or Calvin Klein model. But there’s some creepy stuff going on, too. Your hair and fingernails are noticeably longer than they should be, which seems to corroborate the hunch you’ve been having that you’ve aged more like a week than the two or three days that have actually passed. In case you’re wondering, don’t get any ideas about tinkering with meth to lose some weight. The weight comes back with a vengeance because once the drug is totally gone from your system, you’re very hungry. Ravenous, like a castaway. That’s the best part of recovering from a speed episode, indulging your appetite when it finally comes back, and you realize you’re gonna live.

  Appreciating my emaciation and such hastened my desire to get my ass to bed. I’ll never forge
t that feeling: I didn’t really expect to sleep. It was more like I was preparing to pass-out, and I just needed to make sure I was lying down when that happened so I wouldn’t hit my head or something. I found a comfy looking spot on the floor whereupon to crash and curled up in the only blanket I could find. As I lay there, waiting for unconsciousness, something especially frightening began to happen. I would eventually lose consciousness, but each time I did, I would awaken suddenly, gasping for air, feeling like I had stopped breathing each time. A couple of times I awoke so suddenly and startled that I jumped up off the floor, as if the smoke alarm had gone off, but it hadn’t. Strangely, I was so tired and over the whole experience, the fear wasn’t even enough to keep me awake. I basically just told myself that I don’t care if I die in my sleep, I just want to be unconscious, regardless of the mechanism. This approach somehow calmed me, and I eventually stopped waking up gasping for air.

  The next time I woke up, it was dark outside, and I had no idea how much time had passed. But praise Jesus, I felt pretty normal, outside of ravishing hunger—which was reassuring itself, verification that it was all over. I found a quarter somewhere and called my mom from the pay phone down the street, still not knowing for sure what day it was; I assumed it was the same night of the gasping-for-air morning. When mom answered the phone, she wasn’t alarmed, confirming my suspicion that a whole other day hadn’t passed. Whew.

  One more meth story and we’ll move on. The incident was particularly momentous because it was the final nail in my serious-drug-use coffin, finally scaring me enough to make me call it quits. It took a delusion—a very pure, classic one that was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It literally lasted only seconds, but was so frightening I can’t imagine how I could have endured any more than that.

  I had already been awake for about 40 hours, having partied enthusiastically the night before and yet to rest entering the second night. For me, this was a “bender.” I could rarely make it all the way through that second night and into the third day, because of shit like this. I was always baffled at my friends who could stay awake on speed for four, five, or even more days at a time. (Which is nothing for someone who shoots it: Serious intravenous users will stay awake for weeks or even months on end, surviving on mere cat naps along the way.)

  On the second night of my little bender, I ended up hanging out with some folks who were more like drug buddies than friends, except for one, Dan. I really liked him, but he was so sweet and nurturing that it kinda made me uncomfortable. Paradoxically, he spent a lot of time with some relatively seedier people on the fringes of our larger crowd who just creeped me out. Some of them used heroin, which was a little more than I wanted to be around, and there were also rumors that some of them had a history of sneaky, antisocial behavior to get their drugs at times, which was also just not acceptable in my more intimate circle of friends. I know, methamphetamine ethics. Who would’ve thunk.5

  I had run out of speed but happened to have a hit of ecstasy, in a capsule. Dan wanted to get high, too, so we decided to split it but snort it. I remember worrying that this approach would waste the precious nectar but I ended up being surprised at how high it made me.

  A bunch of us were sitting around on the carpet, conversing enthusiastically, and someone was rolling a joint. I ended up sitting next to one of the creepy people, this guy who dressed like an 80s metal hair band idiot. He also made me nervous because when I had met him once before he had been smoking heroin. But I was sufficiently high not to care too much, so I engaged him. It didn’t work, though. I remember him seeming all grumpy and telling me something to the effect of “Dude, you’re bothering me talking about how high you are,” as if he was jealous and this was somehow socially inappropriate. I reckon it was, to a junkie who only has pot to smoke.

  I turned away, got into the pot circle, and took a few hits. Eerily reminiscent of my cocaine overdose many months prior, the pot smoking had an adverse effect, as I started feeling less high and increasingly uncomfortable. Like before, I got quiet and had no choice but to just see what would happen.

  The joint landed in my hand again, and I figured I would take a final hit, just to not be a pussy. It was little, just a token drag, so I could just pass it on. After I did to the person on my right, I looked across the circle to see Dan’s creepy girlfriend staring at me. Next to her was this other creepy kid whom I never quite understood but I always got a bad vibe from, and he was staring at me as well. They were staring at me together, not talking, but with clear expressions of anticipation on each of their faces. I started to hallucinate, subtly, but as convincingly as ever. Their faces were kinda bright, their eyes wide, and their mouths turned up at the ends in sinister grins, like the Joker from Batman. Sinister was the hallucination. Their faces were the epitome of it, grinning together, in cahoots about something, something about me.

  Then it hit me like a freight train: I was absolutely positive that they had poisoned me with the marijuana, which explained why I had begun feeling uncomfortable. They had been watching me, waiting for the poison to hit, and now it was. I had no fucking idea what kind of poison it was—it could make me lose my mind or maybe even kill me—all I was sure of is that I had been poisoned, intentionally and maliciously, for their sinister enjoyment.

  I leapt up from the carpet, saying something aloud like “Holy Shit!” and stormed from the room. Dan followed me to investigate, reflexively and with a calm resolve that somehow suggested he knew what I was feeling and that he knew what to do, which soothed me significantly, right off the bat. We ended up alone in the other room, door closed, and I was crying, pretty good, like I hadn’t in years. He had some Valium, the most precious asset of the habitual meth user, and gave me one, and it worked as advertised. I calmed down after a while and fell asleep, back on the carpet. For a third and final time, when I eventually awoke I was much, much better, but broken somehow.

  And that about ended my meth run; I think I was 20 at the time. In fact, that was about the end of all of my “hard” drug use. I did some things a couple more times over the next few years, as you do when kicking a bad habit, whether it be cigarettes or a girlfriend who isn’t working—but that was effectively the end, that night crying on Dan’s carpet, absolutely positive that I had been poisoned. The marijuana smoking also slowed to a crawl thereafter, but of course I kept drinking too much for a while, until the panic attacks started.

  * * *

  1 Gorodetzky, C. W. & Christian, S. T. (1970). What you should know about drugs (p. 50). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

  2 No, I’m not a big fan of the gateway drug hypothesis. I suspect many people have been like me, destined to do hard drugs regardless but starting with pot simply because it’s the most readily available. I’ve known a lot of stoners in my time, and the vast, vast majority of them have not used harder drugs, at least chronically.

  3 Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception (p. 21). New York: Harper & Row. Huxley actually took mescaline, a drug whose effects are very similar to those of LSD.

  4 Ibid., p. 17; 34-35.

  5 The term antisocial is one of the most misused in all of psychology, not just by laypersons but also by some of my colleagues. Antisocial means against society: dishonesty, irresponsibility, rule-breaking. If you like to spend a lot of time alone, you are asocial. Many antisocial people are actually very social.

  CHAPTER 5

  Candide, Dionysus, and Gravity-Induced Loss of Consciousness

  And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

  — Thomas Jefferson, “To John Adams,” April 11, 1823

  AS I SUGGESTED EARLIER, although I first began using drugs around the time my spiritual turmoil began, I honestly can’t assume that drugs caused that turmoil (nor that the turmoil caused the drug use).

  However, I did have a ground-shaking experience dur
ing high school outside of drug use that clearly did change my world-view, in a manner that put my faith on a more slippery slope than the mere chinks acquired during middle school via my labored attempts to study and understand the Bible. As part of an English class assignment—I think it was during my junior or senior year—we were assigned Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism (from 1759!).

  I had been expecting some boring Great Expectations or Scarlet Letter tedium, but instead ended up reading the whole thing in just a couple of sittings, laughing all the way. (Granted, it’s only about 100 pages, and small ones, too.) I would read it several more times over the years, its message soaking in a little deeper each time.

  Voltaire was at issue with Gottfried Leibniz, a philosopher/mathematician at the time, an optimist who championed the idea that ours is the best of all possible worlds because God would not create an imperfect one. In Candide, the philosopher Pangloss (representing Leibniz) has taught everyone in his master’s castle not to question the evil in the world, or even to be discouraged by it. The castle inhabitants live by the mantra that everything happens for a reason, which Pangloss has instilled in them well. All of his students roam the earth essentially brainwashed, taking the horrors of their lives in zombie-like stride. Here, the “toothsome” Cunegonde is telling her crush, Candide, about all of the goings-on since they were separated prematurely by disaster:

  I was in bed fast asleep when it pleased heaven to send the Bulgars into our beautiful castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh. They slit the throats of my father and brother, and hacked my mother to pieces. A great big Bulgar, six feet tall, seeing that I had passed out at the sight of all of this, began to rape me. That brought me round. I came to, screamed, struggled, bit him, scratched him. I wanted to tear that big Bulgar’s eyes out, little realizing that what was taking place in my father’s castle was standard practice.1