Drugs

by J. R. Helton

Norma handed me a vial of yellowish, white powder. “Here, take as much as you want.”

  “It just takes a tiny little bit,” Susan said.

  “It lasts a long time,” Norma said. “It’s very good.”

  They sat there and pasted and cut and sewed. I did out a little line on Norma’s mirror. I did half the line and my left eye immediately teared up and half of my head was burning.

  “It burns,” Norma said.

  I sniffed and wiped away a tear. “No kidding.”

  I did the rest of the line, cringed at the sensation and bitter taste in my nose and throat, and suddenly felt better than I had in days. My scalp tingled and I felt powerful and happy and wanted to talk. I gabbed with Susan and Norma for half an hour or so; I now appreciated the fine craftwork they were doing. I was very attentive, but the rush quickly wore off and I did out another big line.

  “Be careful,” Norma said. “It doesn’t take much.”

  “It’s not like coke,” Susan said.

  “Right.” I did the line. Yes, I was feeling much better. Much better. I’d regained my strength. I could do something now. My job wasn’t so bad. I could do it and do it well. I talked Susan and Norma’s ears off. I wanted to stay up, up, up. I was chain-smoking my Pall-Malls, gritting my teeth, and watching my fingers fly up. The more speed I did the less control I had over my hands.

  Around four a.m., Susan and I went into the bedroom and fucked. The crank stimulated my libido and helped me keep my erection forever, but it was difficult to come. I finally came and Susan went back into the living room with Norma and the Craft Fair. I lay on the bed sweating. I didn’t know if it was that last cigarette, the last little line, having not eaten for hours, or straining so hard at sex, but I was starting to feel very bad. I was much too wired and couldn’t slow down at all. I couldn’t stop moving and my heart was beating incredibly fast.

  I stood up, put on some jeans, and went into the bathroom. I looked in the mirror. I was gritting my teeth uncontrollably. My pupils were dilated. My hands shook and were numb and cold. I saw a small clock near the sink. I watched the second hand and took my pulse. Susan walked in and called me a hypochondriac. The second hand slowly moved. 149, 150, 151.

  “My pulse is 151.”

  “Actually, you don’t look so good,” she said.

  “I think it’s usually seventy.”

  “Just relax.”

  “Okay.”

  “You look kind of white. Do you feel okay?”

  “No, I do not feel okay.” A slow wave of nausea moved up from my turning stomach. “Just a second.”

  I pushed Susan out, shut the bathroom door and began to throw up violently. I couldn’t stop. There was nothing left inside of me but I kept on heaving, bringing up yellow bile. I struggled to stand up and rinsed some water through my mouth. It didn’t help. I started to puke in the sink.

  Susan knocked on the door. “Are you okay?”

  “Go away.”

  I straightened up and walked toward the toilet, a seemingly easy thing to do. I tripped and hit my head on the edge of the tub.

  “Are you okay?”

  My head was throbbing. I felt a bump on my forehead and saw a red smear on the tub. It took my mind off my stomach for a second. I lay down on the cold tile.

  “I’m coming in,” Susan said.

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m coming in.” She opened the door. “Are you going to be sick?”

  “I am sick.”

  “What should we do? What do you want me to do?”

  “I need to come down.” Back then I had always wanted to go up, up, up. I never kept any Quaaludes, Valium, or downers around to take off any sharp, lingering edge.

  “Okay, just relax.”

  Norma looked in the doorway and whispered, “We should take him to minor emergency. He looks like he’s having an allergic reaction or he’s overdosing or something. We should go now. Can you ride in a car?” she asked me.

  “Sure.”

  They both helped me up, put a T-shirt on me. Norma drove the LTD, Susan rubbed my back, and I dry-heaved out the window. The cold air felt good on my face. They helped me into the emergency room and Susan promised a nurse we’d write them a check. The nurse took me back into a partitioned area and a young doctor came in and talked to me.

  “Are you on something?”

  “Yeah, it’s no big deal. I’m gonna be sick, sorry.”

  He handed me a silver pan quickly and I tried to throw something up, but nothing came.

  “What did you do?”

  “I did too much crank,” I said. “I tried to do it like coke.”

  “Have you ever done speed before?”

  “Well, yeah, sure. I never really liked it, though. It always made me sick.”

  He looked at me earnestly. “Why did you do it again?”

  “I guess I thought I could handle it now. It’s been a couple years. My heart’s really beating. I feel like I’m having a heart attack.”

  “Just relax.”

  “Why does everybody keep telling me to relax?!” I yelled. “Huh? I need a shot or something.”

  “I’m going to give you one. We’re going to start an IV.”

  I lay back on the bed and a nurse came in and shoved a long needle into my hand over and over. She kept missing and blood was coming out over my right hand. “Your veins are rolling,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Finally, she got the needle in. The doctor was standing over me.

  “You’re dehydrated. I’ve started you on some fluids and a large dose of Phenergan. It will stop the nausea. You may hallucinate some, but everything’s okay now. Relax and be calm and you’ll feel better in a minute.”

  I was dizzy. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, Susan was sitting beside me. She lightly touched my forehead.

  “You’re all right,” she said.

  I stared at her face. She had black splotches growing on her skin. Large purple and black cobwebs were hanging from her ears and cheeks. I reached over and tried to rub them off.

  “Just lay still,” Susan said. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’ve got cobwebs all over your face.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got this black stuff on your cheek.”

  She rubbed her cheek and looked at her hand. “Did I get it?”

  “No it’s still there. Right by your ear.”

  She rubbed her ear and cheek again. “Did I get it?”

  “It’s like charcoal.”

  “Lay still. I’ll be right back.”

  I closed my eyes and opened them. Susan was beside me. Her face was now covered in a moving mass of grey smoke. I could only point, my mouth was numb.

  “Go to sleep.”

  When the IV fluids ran out, they woke me up. Susan and Norma walked me out of the emergency room and drove me home. I sat on the mattress in the apartment and watched the black puffs of smoke and webs move around the room and stick to the walls. Susan and Norma kept the Craft Fair open for another half hour and went to work.

  I’ve never done crystal since then. It is one of the nastiest most toxic and useless drugs on the planet and I would not encourage anyone to ingest it on a regular basis.

  -7-

  The last time I ever did the drug cocaine was one afternoon, several years later in 1990 in Austin. Susan and I had already divorced and I was remarried to a woman named Karen. We lived outside of Austin in a farmhouse on some acreage in the country her mother had left her. I was still working in construction, hard physical labor all day in the Texas sun. At the end of one particularly difficult day, an old friend stopped by the site who I had been avoiding for a year now. His name was Phil and he’d been a mutual friend of mine and Su
san’s. The three of us had done a bit of coke together over the years as well as get high at work many times. He was a nice guy but I didn’t want to be tempted by the psychological pull of cocaine any longer. I knew I didn’t have the willpower to turn it down if it was in front of me. He came up to me as I was getting in my beat-up ’79 Ford f250 to go home.

  “Hey Jake, hang on a second,” Phil said.

  “Hey man, what’s up?”

  “I came by here to see if I could buy your friendship,” he said and smiled.

  “You don’t have to do that, Phil.”

  “No, I do. I know you an’ Susan are split but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you wanna little bump or two?”

  I hesitated and he could see it.

  “Come on, man, don’t make me beg you.”

  I looked at him; he had an almost hurt, imploring expression on his face. Phil was an intelligent, successful, and witty individual. But he did a lot of coke. He knew exactly why I was dropping him and that it had nothing to do with my divorce. It wasn’t to make him feel better though when I said yes. I could feel my heartbeat quickening just seeing him take out a little baggie filled with coke as we huddled at the open door of my truck.

  Phil pulled out a Bic pen cap and dipped it in the bag and gave me a giant rounded bump for one nostril. “That’s good shit, it’n’t?”

  “Damn straight.” I could taste the bitter powder at the back of my throat and a surge of positive energy went throughout my heart and head.

  Phil did two smaller bumps for himself and then gave me another monster bump spilling off the cap that I did in the other nostril. I thanked him profusely then, and we joked a little about old times as I got in my truck to leave.

  “Here, take two more,” Phil said. “You gotta long drive out there to the boondocks now. When are you guys gonna invite me out?”

  I did a bump. “Soon, Phil.” I did one more. “Soon.”

  We said our goodbyes, promised to get together, but both of us knew that was it, the friendship was over. I drove south on i-35 and noticed that my hands were now shaking on the steering wheel, my fingers flying up a bit. It was strong cocaine and for several miles the initial dulled rush of euphoria still lingered in the form of energetic happiness and optimism. The mind races on uppers. Seeing Phil again, even just doing a few bumps compared to the grams we used to do, set me to thinking of my divorce, of happier times with Susan. Anxiety began to slowly creep into my chest as I worried about my job, my new home, my new bills, my new wife, or that I was still somewhat in love with my old wife, that I was still working in a business I hated, that we were always short on money, that I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, how could I make a living this way and still have time to write, how impossible was this becoming already? And this messy last wedding I’d just had, Jesus Christ, my father fighting with both me and my new wife, yelling, he and I threatening each other with blows at the reception, it was obvious this new woman loved confrontation, egging on my parents, plus neither of them thought she was good for me, and even worse, I knew this to be true already, that I had made a typical rebound marriage rookie mistake, I shouldn’t have done this, getting married, doing coke, why did I do it again? It only made me feel bad after the first rush which was . . . which was long gone now. It was one of the biggest problems with cocaine, the immediate want for the brief high as soon as it dissipated. It was chemically impossible though to feel the same level of euphoria as that first line, bump, or shot, no matter how many more you had. Once you started, you could chase the high all night, for days, until your supply ran out. As I turned off the interstate down a farm to market road I could feel my labored breathing. I could hear it accelerating, the breaths coming faster and shorter, my hands shaking, my legs shaking as I tried to hang onto the steering wheel. My vision was now fading, changing, narrowing, until I had genuine tunnel vision, everything before me reduced to a blurred circle at the end of a long black cave leading back to my mind.

  I was hyperventilating and I could barely see. I felt as though my chest was being constricted, two big hands about my sternum, rib cage, and spine, squeezing me tightly. I looked at the speedometer: 20 mph. I pulled over, put the truck in park and fell out of my door onto the hot and sticky asphalt, hitting the ground hard with my shoulder. This country road was fairly isolated back then with little traffic, so no one drove by. On my back now in the road, I felt as if a large fat man was sitting on my chest, driving the air out of my lungs, the life out of my limp body. Both of my arms had gone numb. I was passing out and feared that if I shut my eyes to sleep, I would die.

  The adrenaline that accompanied the fear made me even more anxious. I forced myself to get up, no matter what; up on my knees, I crawled off the highway and stood slowly in the gravel of a ditch. I started to walk, quickly, cupping my hands over my mouth to try to get some carbon dioxide to stop the hyperventilation. There was a dirt road between two fenced brown fields of grass that stretched to the evening horizon. I started down this road at a quick pace. Red and white-faced Herefords grazed lazily on each side of me. I swung my arms wildly up and down, walking back and forth, back and forth, moving forward but zigzagging from one barbed wire fence to the other, trying to calm myself down as I felt my heart beating rapidly in my chest. I stared at the cows and talked to myself in a rapid, ragged voice as I was still hyperventilating:

  “Take it easy, Jake. Take it easy. Breathe. Try to breathe. Calm down. Everything is okay. Just calm down. Breathe slowly. A full breath . . . Now, slowly let it out, be calm. Look at those cows, look at the sunset, look at all this good, tall grass, this good hay. This giant blue sky . . . It is good to be alive. It is a good thing to be alive. You wanna stay alive. You wanna stay alive. So just calm the fuck down and look at all these goddamn cows . . .”

  It was the cows that did it for me. For a brief instance, I was intrigued by how docile and calm they were, simply existing, chewing their cud, eating and shitting, again and again, so seemingly indifferent to or ignorant of the suffering around them. You could kill one in the herd and the rest would barely even look up . . . much like the rest of us . . . That was enough to take my mind off of whatever this attack was and it began to fade, my breathing slowly returning to normal. I stood out there between those two fields for ten minutes or so, my truck still running, the door open, barely off the road. Occasionally, a memory of my ex-wife, or one of Phil, or even Corky, would pop into my mind and I’d start to feel nervous. But again, I forced myself, I willed myself into the present moment by talking out loud, noting the types of wildflowers in the pasture, naming types of grasses until the anxious memory disappeared.

  Finally, I was able to get back into my truck and drove another ten miles to the farmhouse. I could barely talk to Karen about what had happened; I was still too rattled. I filled up the bathtub with water, took off my clothes, and got into the tub. She stood at the door and watched me as I sank down into the warm water. I was coming back to normal for good. It must have been a panic attack, I thought to myself; my heart was in good shape. Surely it wasn’t a heart attack. There was no history of those in my family. What was it then? Severe cocaine induced anxiety? I had never believed in or even understood panic attacks. Were they even a real thing? If so, then I now had the greatest sympathy for anyone who had ever suffered a true panic attack. It was nothing less than feeling that you can’t breathe, can barely see, and are being crushed—that is, you’re dying and it hurts.

  Karen was still asking me what had happened and all I could say was “I’m never doing cocaine again.” Which was, for the most part, true. I was roughly twenty-eight then and have had maybe two small lines over the course of the next eighteen years. Each one was more disappointing, the smidgen of euphoria brief and less satisfying than the pleasure of a self-induced orgasm. The chemical metallic taste
was worse than I’d remembered, like powdered diesel on your tongue. I’m never around coke anymore and have no desire to seek it out.

  -8-

  I started drinking alcohol heavily and seriously not long after I met Karen, my second wife. Up to that point, I could take or leave alcohol. I certainly never wanted to drink every day. As a child, I’d been exposed to this drug by watching my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, everyone in my huge extended family drinking on every occasion we were all together, which was often. There always seemed to be another big Irish Catholic family wedding for me to attend as a boy. My young brothers and I had our first drinks from champagne fountains, emptying our 7-Up bottles and filling them with another clear bubbling liquid. My older uncles would catch us, amused at the fact that we were getting intoxicated and take away the bottles. Or we would run around the living room in my grandparent’s house at one of their many parties in the 1960s and as soon as an adult set down their glass of alcohol, we’d sneak up behind them and take a sip quickly until we were caught and ran away laughing. It was all good fun . . .

  The first real intoxication with alcohol I ever experienced was when I was fifteen years old. I was with my high school classmate and best friend Dean Brown who lived in the wealthy suburb of Memorial in Houston in the 1970s. I was spending the night with him and got to hang out with his older friends in the neighborhood. One of them bought everyone a bunch of beer and we met up outside the neighborhood pool and clubhouse and drank it all that evening. Dean and I got into a drinking contest that I won by drinking thirteen beers. We were both thoroughly drunk by the time we walked home. We were also hungry, so before we went to sleep, both of us ate several bowls of Frosted Flakes in the dining room. Dean made a pallet on his living room floor and gave me some sheets for the couch and we passed out watching TV.

  I began to have a dream at some point of swimming under water and trying to reach the surface of a blue lake. I could just see the waving white sun shining above the water but couldn’t get there in time and began to choke. In my dream, I was sinking now, I was drowning, choking, spitting up . . . Frosted Flakes? I suddenly woke up and realized I was choking on my own vomit on Dean’s mother’s fancy couch. I sat up and continued to vomit, covering myself with sour milk, stale beer, and cereal.