by J. R. Helton
I don’t like crowds. Even one on one, people can be exhausting, but a room full of them was too much. In that pub though, with no room to even stand without rubbing against others, I felt no anxiety or irritation. I felt nothing but a complete and total happiness, the purity of which I had never felt, nor would ever really feel so intensely again. I was leaning against the wall listening to Schneider sing when Patricia asked me if I was feeling the “crush” yet. She said that she and her girlfriends would almost be knocked out by it sometimes if it came on too strong. “You are really smiling,” she said.
Because I had started out with half a pill, I didn’t experience this sensation, but I could tell the drug had completely taken over my system. Bob Schneider had finished his set and Guy Forsyth had come on to play his guitar, and his music—no music—ever sounded so good. Patricia and Melanie wanted a beer, so I pushed my way to the bar with Dean, and we ordered drinks from an attractive young woman. She was so polite and friendly I couldn’t believe it; we seemed to be connecting on some unspoken level of kindness and mutual understanding, and so I mentioned the fact to Dean.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“How’s that?”
“You really get back what you give sometimes. I’ve never seen you smile so much; you are exuding happiness and she is beaming it right back at you.”
“You think she’s X-ing too?”
“No, man, it’s not that. You’re just giving off this good energy now and it’s obvious and that’s a positive. You can be pretty surly sometimes, pretty negative.”
“I know, I know. But . . . I have never felt like this. Never. I guess this is what it feels like to be happy.”
“Amazing how chemical it all is. MDMA is the only drug known to instantly cure depression. You pop a pill, turn a switch, and suddenly all the world is right. Makes ya think don’t it?” he said and smiled.
I bought myself a water and took Patricia her beer. For some reason alcohol now seemed repugnant and all I wanted was pure, clear, and clean water. Patricia commented again on my smiling face.
“Your pupils are really dilated,” she said.
I made my way to the bathroom to look in the mirror. I began to laugh at my own absurdly overjoyed grin. My eyes were almost solid black with only a thin rim of blue circling the hole. I was also working my jaw and had started to grind my teeth. I found Patricia leaning against the wall watching Dean and Melanie out on the dance floor while Forsythe belted out “Mona.” We held each other tightly and listened to the music. Melanie was obviously too drunk now. We could see her slipping out of Dean’s arms. She was a tall girl and Dean was a tall, big man, but he was having troubles holding up her almost dead weight. He looked to us helplessly and managed to get her off the dance floor. Thinking she might vomit, he worked her out the door and into the Continental and came back in to check with us.
“Guys, she’s fucking passing out. She’s demanding a chicken sandwich or some such shit from Whataburger. I gotta take her. I’m gonna miss the music.”
I could see he was really disappointed. “I’m sorry, man. Just leave her out there in the car; fuck her.”
“Jake,” Patricia admonished. “Maybe she can take a little nap out there.”
“She says she just needs food,” Dean said and he was gone.
I can’t remember much of the rest of the night. At one point, the city fire marshal did come in and said that the entire half of the club in the pool room had to leave, right now. The bouncer we had fed took care of us again and made sure we were not included in that group. Dean had just made it back inside with Melanie when this happened, and they were allowed to stay as well. He had plainly soured on Melanie, and she was spoiling his evening. The X had no effect on her, and she seemed perhaps even more miserable compared to our continual rolling upbeat mood. Dean was kept jumping trying to get her drinks and keep her content out of his basic politeness, but also I suspect he still held hopes of fucking her back at the La Quinta.
Midnight came and went—a new year, 2003—and we left the pub. In the car, I was still rolling, but it wasn’t as intense. Dean pulled out a joint and he and I smoked it while Patricia and Melanie declined and continued to drink. As with mushrooms, Dean said that marijuana could bring back some of the intensity of the X, and indeed it did. This time, though the high was muted by the amphetamine-like properties of MDMA, and I was still grinding my teeth, though the sensation wasn’t as unpleasant or anxiety ridden as it was when I was using cocaine.
Back in the hotel room we drank some alcohol, all of us succumbing to the sweet tequila now; it was all we had. I had a few Xanax and Patricia and I both took 1 mg apiece in order to sleep. We separated into our rooms, and Patricia and I began to kiss and move all over each other on the large comfortable bed. I took off her clothes and looked down at that perfect body and began to fuck her. But the evening had worn both of us out, and we began to crash. I had to fight to stay awake, as did she. I wasn’t sure I was gonna make it as I pumped and sweated. She may have even fallen asleep there for a moment, which for some reason excited me just enough to finally come into her with effort. I fell to her side, exhausted, and the alprazolam went fully into my system and I slept.
The next morning we went to a nearby Denny’s for a big breakfast. There was tension between Melanie and Dean. I found out later that they had only kissed briefly until she passed out, and he hadn’t been able to fuck her after all that work trying to keep her happy. Dean and I smoked a roach in the car as we headed back to San Antonio, and it briefly brought back a mere shadow of the lingering happiness from the night before. I soon realized that I was back to my normal self. I felt a brief plunge of deep depression, much stronger than my normal everyday low level. I could see then the comedown from the drug was real, and steep, as the regular worries of my job and day-to-day existence flooded back into my mind for good.
-20-
I wanted to take the drug again. Dean was in Austin for an extended stay on business. He called me one Friday evening to come to his hotel for an early dinner and said he had a few hits of X as well. I said I would be there. Patricia was busy so I drove to Austin by myself. It was a nice, cool Texas spring evening. Dean was still in the old Lincoln, his father’s rarely used car, and we loaded into it to go eat. He dragged me to some fashionable sushi place on Congress where he quickly ordered a hundred bucks of fish bait.
I was nervous and only took half of my hit. He warned me again that I’d just want the rest in an hour or less. He also encouraged me to eat something at least, a teriyaki chicken and rice, as I would be without food for hours in a minute. I forced myself to eat some chicken and rice and then took the other half of the pill while we were still at the sushi place. Nothing much was happening to either of us but we had to run back to the hotel for something. Once there, we tried out a new vaporizer for marijuana called the Vapir which gave the user what Dean and I were calling the “executive high.” It was best to use high grade marijuana which was placed into a covered metal screened bowl inside the small electric hookah like vaporizer. After the pot was heated beyond 277 degrees, it produced a light, barely visible smoky vapor of pure THC. It was key to get those first few good, pure hits before the weed started to taste like spinach, which meant that it was dead and basically just hemp now, no longer useful for a high. The Vapir was especially helpful for those who had been smoking pot for years and who wanted to go easier on their lungs, and it did seem to be effective. It went through pot quickly, though, so again it was better to put smaller, but stronger amounts into the metal bowl to be vaporized. The pot kicked in the ecstasy, and we both became full of energy and left the hotel.
Dean was staying downtown so we just walked down to Fourth Street, Fifth Street and hit a few bars. We were both exuding goodwill now and were looking for a place where the music fit our moods, but it was difficult. A late cold front was moving in from
the north, and the wind picked up as we walked quickly down alleyways parallel and perpendicular to Congress, taking hits off a roach I’d had in my wallet. We ducked into the nearest club and an old Austin cover band that had been around for years was onstage, Ro-Tel and the Hot Tomatoes. The women had their hair in tall beehives and were belting out old superb Motown tunes that sounded so much like The Supremes and all of the other original singers that I couldn’t believe it.
Dean and I leaned against the bar and listened to the tunes from our childhood and teen years without nostalgia, just pure appreciation of the old sounds. I was still incredulous though.
“Man, those women must be lip syncing these songs,” I said, for the second time.
Dean laughed, “No, no, I’m telling you, that’s real. That is real. These girls have something.”
“They’ve been in Austin for years.”
“You guys do have good music here. This is easily better than the live music in Dallas.”
At some point, two girls, twenty years younger than either of us, began to speak to Dean and I, trying to start up a conversation. They were cute, but dumb and young, with little clue as to culture. This was understandable, as America’s culture had become so corporatized and commercial that little rang true or authentic anymore. Even worse, there was now this whole horseshit urban tough guy pose in their attitude that middle-class American youth had adopted. These two girls exhibited that same unearned cynicism of faux street cred survival, so tough and seemingly brutal, and thus cool, in their minds. But fashion was always for suckers. There was little I could say to the two young women who suddenly looked both hard-faced and desperate. They were trying to keep a conversation going with Dean and started in on the songs this older band was singing. This was a mistake as music was more important to him than nearly everything.
“When are they gonna quit playing this old crap?” one girl whined.
The band was singing: “Baby, baby, where did our love go?”
Dean tried to seriously inform the girls about this pop music from the past that both of us were remembering so well now as the MDMA mingled with good memories of a seemingly more innocent and simple time.
“So you actually like this?” the other girl asked.
“Well,” Dean said, “I don’t listen to it anymore but Motown produced a lot of good pop music for years.”
“Maybe they’ll switch to something newer,” the girl said.
“Or maybe we can go somewhere else,” the other girl said, mentioning some factory club over on Fourth Street. “Do y’all wanna go see the Dingle Berries?” she asked, or whatever the band’s name was. “They’re better than this bullshit.”
Dean and I were in a completely different mental state than these two and decided without speaking, almost telepathically, it was time to split. Dean leaned over to the girls and said, “Why don’t you come talk to me in about ten years when you’ve grown up a little and have been exposed to some different types of music. You don’t even know what’s good yet and what isn’t.”
The young women both looked pissed and we walked out, trying to find some music somewhere that fit our heightening mood of instant elation. We had been avoiding the more tourist and college kid-oriented 6th Street of Austin, but now walked up a block to the busy avenue that cut through downtown, lined with dance and music clubs and restaurants for blocks. We started badly on the far western end, where we had to stand in line, over my protests, to see some pretty smiling guy from LA that had a new album out that Dean had heard of recently. The club was the new location for Antone’s, the blues club in Austin when I had been in high school and college. It had been on Guadalupe Street just north of the UT campus in a crappy old fire trap of a building filled with smoke, humidity, and sweat, as well as sometimes genuine blues singers, old black men bent over a piano or guitar. Younger rock and roll white boys had played there, and occasionally a big star came in to sing as well. There was never anywhere to sit or really dance, which was fine with me, as I had usually leaned against a back wall by the old guy who shined people’s boots and shoes, stoned or coked up in my twenties, chain-smoking cigarettes.
The new Antone’s was definitely cleaner, but I immediately disliked it once Dean and I were inside. It seemed like a cavernous cafeteria, but it still filled up quickly for this new singer, who must have been popular. Before he began his set, he began to gab at length about what a rebel he was, how he hated Los Angeles and all the self-absorbed “posers” out there, but then he shouted out, “You guys need to go to my fucking web site where you can download this or that,” basically a short little commercial for himself. He also cursed excessively and awkwardly, like some do who wish to sound “tough,” reminding me of the two girls we’d just left. His little outsider act didn’t jibe with his major record label and promotion, and we quickly left before he even finished his first song.
We walked down 6th Street, not even needing to enter so many of the clubs. The X had heightened our sensibilities so the bad energy and vibration, mainly just noise for noise’s sake, drove us away from each venue like a magnet was repelling us down the street almost all the way to Red River. Then we heard something real coming from The Generic Bar, and we went inside. A skinny old heroin addict was on stage with his guitar, but he wasn’t banging on it, just playing some slow blues, not singing either, his hair greased back, his white t-shirt too short, not even trying to cover his tracks. We listened to a few of his songs, admired his talent out loud, and headed back outside into the cold night.
I’d been drinking water in every club, Dean margaritas, and now it was late at night. He told me he wanted to drive to his father’s ranch house out in the country about 30 minutes north of Austin near Taylor, Texas. We would both stay there, as Dean’s hotel room was too small, and he’d promised to help his father with some renovations to the wheelchair ramps attached to his home.
In the car, as we left the city, we talked about how similar our upbringings had been, both of us Golden Boy first sons of our families, big time “popular” jocks in high school who’d become disillusioned with sports and thus quit our promising athletic careers too early, much to our families’ dismay. Both of us had jumped off The Primary American Path at an early age and had never looked back. As we drove, we compared old coaches and friends, listening to the songs that emanated from the digital files on the computer hooked to the Lincoln’s speaker system and radio. At one point, an old Earth, Wind, and Fire song came on and both of us, without prompting, began to sing loudly over the wind as we smoked another joint, drank water, and felt the rest of the X kicking in one last time:
“Child is born,” I sang.
“Child is born,” Dean echoed in the singer’s low baritone.
“With a heart of gold.”
“With a heart of gold!” Dean yelled out in perfect imitation of whoever was singing.
“Way of the world, make his heart turn cold!” we belted out in unison, both knowing every last word of this old song from the ’70s, laughing at this fact, that two middle-aged men were so fully on the same silly experiential plane, down to the very last “Brother can you hear me now. . . .”
I suddenly had the incredible urge to piss: all that water I’d been drinking that night, plus X somehow fucks with your bladder or prostate, or at least it does with mine. I said pull over now, and both of us got out on the side of some back country road where I, for one, had the longest, cleanest, clearest, most relieving piss of my life.
I had to take two of Dean’s 10 mg Valium to come down enough to sleep that night at his father’s home. The next morning, after a long, restful night, I headed home to San Antonio, listening to some new Hotel Costes or Chilled Out Paris compilation Dean had made for Patricia and me, a tune called “Venice Beach Dub” by a band named Stuph. I had heard the song the night before, and in hearing it again this morning, the music and nothing else kicked i
n some of the same magical feelings from the past twelve hours, though mixed with a tinge of sadness now, just to the point that to this day, whenever I hear that song, it still evokes a feeling of good melancholy and contentment.
-21-
After my second experience with X, I noticed that the drug did act as sort of a super “antidepressant” one of these serotonin uptake inhibitors amplified times a thousand. It seemed to kick-start my often mildly depressed system and I noticed, after the first 24 to 48 hour comedown, that I felt better for days, even weeks and months after having taken the drug, especially if, again, one could mask the comedown with other anti-anxiety drugs like Valium or Xanax. I had tried Effexor, Prozac, Wellbutrin, a number of those drugs for depression that doctors gave out so profusely in the ’90s. I didn’t believe I needed any of them but wanted to try some just for the effect.
I did feel something when on these prescribed antidepressant drugs, a mild sense of vague, barely pleasant nothingness, but in the end, they are simply a dull, mind-numbing drug that is being pushed legally on a big part of the population in America, including teens and children, even though it is known that these anti-depressants can lead them to suicide. The drugs also had a bad way of interacting with other drugs, causing psychosis in some, or suicidal behavior, or simply death itself. A friend of mine died because he mixed one of the latest legal pharmaceutical antidepressants with a dose of Xanax. His wife and children found him dead in bed one morning from the lethal combo. This is something that would never happen to anyone using marijuana to cope with depression. The big drug companies like Merck and Pfizer were working an incredible con, convincing a population that normal everyday anxiety and depression—usually a genuine and natural response to our conditioning and status in society—was actually a chronic “sickness” to be treated and cured with their harsh chemicals.