text: So, all of a sudden I’m 48. I started doing drugs with my older brother when I was 13. He had a good hookup for hash (I think he was doing a small time dealer/metal head who worked at the local gas station). I didn’t even smoke pot for a few months, only hash. By eighth grade, a few kids we hung with were smoking crack, including my weed dealer. He sold me dusted weed, said it was fun. I didn’t find it fun. We lived in a real city and were upper middle class or richer. Our parents sent us to good schools, but it was the eighties. When you went for a smoke outside the school, you crunched crack vials under you feet. I drank, smoked a lot of weed, stole money from my parents and got codeine pills and perks whenever I could. Malt liquor and Tylenol 3 was my twist. At recess we sniffed a liquid called rush they sold in a local record store. You learned to sit down before you sniffed it, because most of the time it would make you fall flat. So, around 16 I had a best friend. Call her Meg. We both liked to get messed up in the same way. And she slept with lots of my friends, but me and her were just cool. You know when you meet someone who uses like you do and you just click? Like you ride a tandem bicycle called drugs. That was me and her. Plus, her mom was in and out of jail for fraud so she wasn’t really concerned if we smelled like weed. Their dog peed on the carpet and nobody ever cleaned it up. You just stayed away from that side of the living room. Meg was dating my friend “Paul”. Paul was a wrestler, loved The Who and would generally take two pulls and say “I’m good!” His dad had him start wrestling at age five. His neck was wider than his head and he had a cauliflower ear. So Meg said that this other guy, “Phil” has a big score. Phil was a cool kid from the magnet art school. He had a beard when we were in 8th grade and talked like he owned a gallery in Chelsea. He managed a band. Anyway, we get to Phils house and he unwraps the stuff from tin foil. Looks like hash but lighter brown than the really dark hash I grew up on. He said it was opium. We smoked it from a bong if I remember correctly. Here is what I remember. Phil’s room was painted black and had a high ceiling. He had a table and chairs, upright, attached to the ceiling. So when you looked up it was like you were five feet underground. He was artsy like that. I smoked, and from the very back of my skull, slowly forward to my forehead, pain I never realized had always been there, disappeared. It was like, there had not been pain, but now in this total absence of pain, I realized what a searing crown of barbed wire I had worn all my life. I couldn’t believe I never got to do this before, this was how god intended me to feel always and forever. I laid on the floor, so did Phil and Meg. We all looked up at the table we were under. Paul hadn’t smoked, “I’m good”, and with a gennny cream ale in one hand, he lightly palmed Meg’s boob in the other. I made fun of Paul, but honestly, I was in love with Meg and her boobs. I don’t remember how long the high lasted, but not super long. I scraped the screen and resmoked the resin to little effect. Phil said the opium was a gift and he could not get more. I called every person I knew for a week looking for some but never found any. I wound up getting clean and sober at 17 and have been ever since. Honestly, looking back I can’t even say why, other than that I knew I would die from it all one day. Which is, in itself, ironic. Try going through college in aa. Not a lot of fun. I’m basically a business guy of decent success these days with treatment resistant depression. I realized I have been thinking about killing myself since age 8, hence, the irony. Heavy, old fashioned antidepressants from before anything you have heard of work best for me. Because of them I only sleep an hour a day and if I eat the wrong thing I could give myself a stroke. I’m still here, which is kind of a shock. I’m even happy now and then, and I have no idea what to do with that. Phil went to art college in la. He filmed porn for a few years until he had some shows and now is a tenured art professor at a big state school. I ran into Paul at age 30. He had disappeared and looked like he had been on a desert island. Gone bald, long beard, dirty clothes. We hung out twice and caught up. He told me some crazy stories that involved fights, hookers whispering through brick walls and calming himself down by smoking crack. Whenever he tried to stop smoking crack someone would blow crack smoke under his door until the smell of it filled his apartment and he had to smoke more. Turns out he was/is schizophrenic. Meg went off to college and never came home for another ten years. She was always smart, and wound up with a phd in history and a rotten heroin addiction. She went through rehab eight times. A friend bumped into her in front of a methadone clinic in our city when we were about 35. Finally, she poured gasoline on herself and her dog and that was that. That shit will always follow me like Paul’s crack smoke blowers, I can’t get away no matter how hard I try. Would I have been her? Should I have been her? I did feel that brain cleansing high one other time. My sophomore year in college, the depression (then untreated) was raging and I started making an honest, logical plan of exactly how to kill myself the next day. Steps and details. I jerked off so I could get to sleep and had a dream. It seemed inconsequential at first, I was in a warehouse next to the ocean and the sun was low in the sky. The wall between me and the ocean crumbled away and the light of the sun became incredible. Then the light lifted me off my feet, and as it pulled me towards it, that same pain rolled away, from the back of my head forward. Euphoria. In arms of goodness. I woke up and went to a 1am aa meeting. I shared about killing myself and the dream. A guy named Florida Bob took me to a diner where we stayed until morning. His name was Florida Bob because there was already a guy in the rooms named Bob when he started going and Florida Bob had been to Florida once.