2040-02-06 - 1:52 p.m.
The part of my brain that makes me want to write apparently lies directly behind my nasal cavity. I end the night in front of a keyboard, pecking at the keys in exhilaration and desperation, trying to record moments, as if by writing them down I could make the night last forever. But despite the speed of my typing I’ve never succeeded; I’ve always crashed into sleep and woken up the next day with the feeling of failure gnawing alongside everything else I’m feeling. Until now, if you are reading this.
Yet the would-be structure of these narratives leads me to question my own dugs-leading-to-weird/random/fun-social-interactions plot motif. Scoring and consuming the drug always comes in medias res, in the middle of some larger story of which the nasal stimulation may only play a supporting role, for usually I was already coursing with substance for writing when the white matter is introduced. This past weekend was no different, with the sheer randomness of the drug’s major role nevertheless making sense in the context of the action that preceded it.
One scene, without context or choices:
I was walking into third court at 4 a.m. for no particular reason, one of the wanderings that occupies me at walls, trying to look purposeful when having no place to go better than the water fountain. I was holding the collapsing bottom of the cardboard beer container and cursing it as I remembered the occasion the bottom fell out of it there when it was still mostly full. Someone I didn’t know caught up with me and asked me for a beer. Hesitating, it occurred to me that I’m driving home and I should probably get rid of it, I obligized him.
I thought, and the journalist in me kicked in, that I should take the moment to pump this random guy for information about himself and where he came from. He was visiting from Philadelphia. He asked me if I knew any house parties around here. I told him I didn’t think there would be any this late. He expressed disappointment, saying he needed to find a house party. Curious, I thought. A friend of his, who also was visiting, joined him, and they passed the beer between them, commenting on it and their need to find a house party. They came from somewhere around the Ringling School, were brought by someone else from somewhere around there, and needed to get back.
The friend, who turned out to be the dealer, asked me there standing in the entrance to third court if I wanted I wanted to buy some coke. He said he has $20 bags and $50 bags. It took me kind of by surprise – when wouldn’t it? – so I said sure, and took them into the third court lounge bathroom to arrange it. When we walked through the lounge they expressed surprise a place “for everyone – everyone who lives here?”
So there we were, staring at the mirror in this psychedelically painted filthy bathroom, the dealer, who looked like Slim Shady, his sidekick tony, and I. Shady brought out a large plastic baggy containing, I saw my own eyes go wide in the mirror just at the sight, dozens of these smaller bags.
“Straight from the Mexican mob – no joke – this shit will blow your mind,” he said. Yeah, it’s already done that, I though. He said something about it being sticky and that being a sign of quality, which I didn’t understand. “I’ll even give you a hit from my private stash. Do you have a card?” Having seen this gift ritual done in movies and having nothing to lose, I get out my wallet, and take out first my New College id, then get a better idea, and take out my mother’s platinum mastercard. He takes a corner a dips it into the baggy.
Someone comes to the door. I don’t see who it is, the door is swung closed again by the time my eyes depart form the white triangle in front of me, all I hear is “Sorry! We won’t bother you!” I think I recognize the voice, but it could have been anyone. “Sorry! Sorry!” quickly gets softer as whoever it is rapidly puts some distance from the bathroom.
“You’re supposed to block the door with your foot!” Shady says to Tony, who by now is revealed as the definite sidekick. Shady readies the card for injection, telling me to tilt my head back, and suck in strongly. I do so, and looking down I see a few small clumps of powder spilling across my chest. “You’re spilling it! You’re spilling it!” Tony says, looking enviously at my free sample, although come to think of it, the money and baggy actually changed hands before this. I dab the particles and try to send them back up my nose, with some success.
I give him a card with my phone number on it, although my past experience with drug dealers indicates that their enthusiasm for calling you not connected to the enthusiasm they display when they take your number. They tell me again that they need to find a house party – “I got to get rid of all this tonight,” Shady says. Uh, I think. “Back where I’m from in Chicago, you go down the street where the colleges are, you can just find the house parties.” It’s not like that here, I tell him. They say they have to get back to the place they’re staying near Ringling.
“You’re probably to drunk to drive?” Most definitely, I said – I’m drunk and I live here so I don’t need to. A lie on all counts, but even I’m not crazy enough to drive two strangers down US 41 half-drunk through a bad neighborhood to an unknown location with a massive bag of cocaine that I now happen to know about, as evidenced by the baggy in my wallet.
We leave, and they accost two girls who look like first years, apparently to give them the same pitch they gave me. I break away.
So much more to this. I'm glad I got even this one moment out, its excruciating detail perhaps making up for the lack of all context, because while totally separate, it actually referenced a handful of other moments before and after.
A final quote, for now: "Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder."
