Biopic Lense

I am knee deep in to the whole National Novel Writing Month thing, and haven’t got a lot of time to write new posts on the blog. Normally that means a rerun, but instead I have something newish for you.

I began writing an auto biographical story some time ago, but got cold feet. I have the introduction, which is the story of the last night I did drugs. Yes it is a true story. Yes it is emberassing as fuck. I am not this guy any more, and the night I wrote about was the night I started to become the person I am today.

Here we go, once more in to the breech:

I remember the night clearly; well it wasn’t really night when this story begins, more like that twilight time when the shadow people come out to play. That’s the dangerous time for any meth freak. That’s the point where the shadows start making faces at you and pretending that they care. It is a scary thing when the edges of your perception coalesce in to tangible sprites, most of whom do not have your best interests at heart.

That was the situation I found myself in at the time. Sitting in a folding chair at a folding card table, both of which were covered in a black plastic padding. I was peeking out the window, wondering if the random passersby knew what I was doing. They might have,  had they bothered to peek in and see; had they cared enough to take time out of their busy schedules to give me a second thought. I had window coverings, though I can’t rightly remember what they were now. I do remember leaving a corner folded up or whatever so I could peek out and make sure no one was taking an interest for real.

Oh and the sight they would have seen. Of course that sight wasn’t for them, it wasn’t for anybody. It was all for me. It was the ritual you see. All mine. Nothing for you. Just me and my addiction. Just me and my ritual.

Most addicts can tell you of the ritual, but few will reveal what it is to you. Some may not even realise they have a ritual or pattern; it may be subtle or seemingly unrelated. It is always a thing that must happen before the enjoyment of blissful ignorance. The ritual is the process most, if not all, addicts go through with their addiction. It is the start of feeling good, the start of the run or the binge or just the start of the average day. It is the required element to complete the entire process of escape from reality, of breaking away from whatever it is they don’t want to face, or for some it can be the part required to push down the shame of how far they have fallen.

I had my ritual, and since I lack the shame gene, I will share it with you. It was a simple thing really. It started with pulling a small picture frame down off the wall. I can remember it now, fake wood, maybe what they call Formica, I don’t even know what that means, and frankly never cared. It was not really even wood coloured, more that bright yellow they make fake wood in and pretend is wood. I doubt it was glass either, I never really knew. Inside was a small sign that read: In Case of Emergency Break Glass. Underneath the sign was a single cigarette, a match and a strike plate. I always found this an incredible irony and uproariously funny at the same time. The real emergency took place on top of the glass. That is where the magic occurred.

That is where I would spend a long time, sometimes even hours lining up the meth. The first line would take maybe 45 minutes. I would dump out maybe half of what I had; take the razor or card or whatever and just play! Push the powder around, crush it, form it, reform it. I would look at it from every angle. How could you not admire the beauty of it? It was always just slightly shiny, just slightly off white, just slightly singing to me in a sultry voice.

And thus the ritual would continue. By day two of the run it could take hours. By this time I would be clenching my jaw and talking both to myself and to it. By day four, and that was what this was, a day four without sleep, without rest, without reality, it could take forever.

I was down to maybe three or four lines, at best. This was always the time of great decisions. Should I do a big line to recapture the glory of the rush! Or should I do smaller lines and draw out the run some more. Escape from reality longer. Avoid me for longer. The joke was on me that night, because I imagine either choice would have led to me. The real me. Naked me, no clothes, no curtains no respect, no lies. Either choice would have ended in the unmistakable reality of who I was.

I choose smaller lines. Thinking back, I am not sure what I was using as a tooter device. It might have been a pen, a fiver, maybe just some cardboard…no it was a straw. I remember now because later there was a little blood on the end and I kind of went weird, but that part is getting ahead of myself. I put the straw up in my nostril, it was the left nostril because at the time my right was pierced, what a fucking chore that was, and I went to town. I took a short breath and let it out; there is nothing worse in that world than breathing on the damn dope. Then I leaned in and wham, into my head it went.

I am not sure if maybe I got a bad hit (there is no way, this was primetime one step from the chemist, mixed myself shit, and I never made mistakes, never!) or maybe it was just my time, but I knew right away something was wrong. The world did a small flip and there I was looking out the window, across the street at the little hill that made up the driveway to the Golf Steakhouse. I always found that ironic too. What probably amounts to the most expensive steakhouse in town nestled upon a hill overlooking the slum. Crappy low rent houses, the strip club, the biker bar, a Dutch girl store, nothing redeeming really. Ok it was near the river and there was a bunch of nature, but I could care less about that. I was a city boy away from his natural habitat. Ok wait I am doing it even now.

You see this is what happens when you do a line. All of the sudden your mind races and you follow tracks of thought that have nothing to do with anything, or your intended destination. Even now, after all these years, as I write about it, I am feeling it. I guess they are right, it never ever really leaves you.

Ok, so where was I, right me sitting, line dancing. I looked outside after the world changed and I was frightened for the first time in a long time. Fear gripped my heart with icy fingers, wrapping around it and clutching so hard I could not wrestle it away with the thought that I knew what I was seeing was not real. Reality didn’t matter. All that mattered is what I saw, and all that mattered were those blue fingers gripping my heart and turning it to stone hard ice. I can even picture the sublimating vapour rising off it in wisps.

I can see it as clearly now as I did then when I close my eyes. Outside across the street on that beautiful manicured grassy hill in the twilight were more than a dozen body bags. I can see the street lights glisten off the surface, see the headlights of a car too fancy to be local, shine brightly for an instant off of one of the bags. The effect that had was to show me that the bag wasn’t zipped up all the way, and in that brief instant of clear illumination I could see the face inside the bag.

I wish I could tell you it was my face. I wish I could say that in my drug fueled haze, combined with sleep deprivation my mind had tried to conjure an image that might snap me out of it and make me see what I was doing. I wish I could say that self-preservation had caused my mind to rebel against my diseased gut. I wish I could say these thing because I think then I might have been able to avoid what came next. In that avoidance would have been my own destruction, but at least I would never have had to live the rest of that night, never had to face my true being, my true nature.

That instant my whole body did a weird sort of reverse triple Lindy thing. People talk of stomachs doing somersaults, of hearts doing back flips and of minds doing back gainer thingies. What you rarely hear about is it all happening at once. Right then and there my mind, my heart, and my gut jumped up and screamed, hey buddy, what the fuck? I think now that this must be the soul; the combination of all things that make up the human existence.

The mind. The cognitive center. The true rational guide to all that we do.

The heart. Our figurative emotional core. The drive that sustains us in our loneliest, most desperate hours.

The Gut. Our instinctive center. The place that guides our survival and our base instincts.

When you combine all three in to one massive motor function, I like to think that is the soul, that is the totality of us, the Tao of me. And at that moment in time, the Tao of me was pissed. It was ready to fight back and call me to task for everything I had done.

The face I saw was Joanne. My first love, my strong love. My only love. And in that moment I was convinced I killed her. My mind raced. Thoughts, images, sounds, smells a kaleidoscope of moments in time careening across my cerebral cortex swirling in and out of focus. I was dizzy with the shock of it all.

Then everything came in to focus. A sharper focus than I had had in years. One thought came into my head. How had this happened? That led to me thinking, how had I gotten here? And then I remembered the beginning, and this is it.

So, that is all that I had written at the time, and my intention was to continue writing on two tracks, one of how I had gotten there and two, what all happened to me.

Right now I am going to quickly broad strokes the rest of my evening, and maybe someday I will have the courage to examine this story.

Over the course of that night I “looked” in to each of those bags, and looked at each of the faces. It was brief , maybe only half an hour, but that led to the negative self talk. I had convinced myself that I was truly responsible for all the bad things that had befallen all the people I had known. I convinced myself I was a cancer to all those I came near.

I knew what was happening, as I said. This was not the first time I had dreamed while awake on drugs, and it wasn’t even the first time I had a nightmare while awake.

What happened next was anouther play of the shadows. I looked over at the futon and saw what I thought was my dog, dead. Again, I had done it. Turned out it was just a brown cusion, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the actual dog staring at me after having called out his name in abject fear.

Then the voices came to the door. Look, I know this might be pretty scary to read, especially if you know me in real life, but there are a few things you have to understand, I was hallucinating while on drugs. I knew I was hallucinating. I have not hallucinated or heard voices since then. I am not “crazy” as it were, just messed up.

On that night I was a little bit nuts though. Various people, past and present paraded up to the door to tell me exactly what they had thought of me, and shockingly, it was not kind.

While I knew this was all a figment of my imagination for the most part, I had my doubts and had sneaked up to the door to peer out. Nobody was there, yet the voices continued.

I was chastised, barrated and belittled. As it continued I became more and more fearful. Eventually, when the voices were accompanied by shadows on the door, figures in the window I decided to hide.

I crawled under the futon. I was not so large back then. I huddled under the futon with a knife. At first, the knife was there to protect me. Then the voices started making sense. I was a bad person. I deserved to die. Of course they weren’t telling me that, I just inferred it.

Then everything stopped. I have no idea why, but the voices and the shadows receeded instantly and it was just me under the bed. My mind raced for a while and I came to the conclusion the voices were mostly wrong. I was a good person, doing bad things. I had to stop that.

I fell asleep resolved to change my life.

When I woke up, sore from having slept under a futon, I flushed the remaining drugs, then yadda yadda yadda I wrote this. Sorry the end was rushed, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging as to what happened. I am actually surprised I am going to post this as I am not sure people will inderstand or look at me the same. I have a lot of shame over what happened, but I moved on.

Ok, back to writing a story about a guy who is dead on the outside but alive on the inside and a girl who is dead on the inside and alive on the outside. You are going to have to pay for that story though!