[Editor’s Note: Here at Ruthless, we take substance abuse seriously. In other words, “Don’t do this”. However, we also believe in The Godfather’s philosophy of drug use, and reporting the truth, without sugar-coating.]
If the Catholic myth were to be true that St. Peter awaits you at the pearly gates after you kicked the bucket off this mortal coil, and asks you what you did with your life, I would probably have to answer something like, “Sitting in front of screens, your honor. And doing a shitload of Drugs & Booze.” You see, there’s nothing better than to stuff your system full of narcotics, stretch out before any sort of screen and watch while wasted.
A little bit of heaven & a TV- I’m in a tiny room. I share this tiny room with three other people. The man who rents this room is called Dominic. He’s this friendly, longhaired, hippy type of guy that’s letting me stay there for free while I’m out on the streets. Then there’s his girlfriend; her name is Dorothea. She is this horrible-looking example of a human being, drinking cheap box wine all day long, lying in a bed that’s covered with six or so blankets and bedspreads, each one filthier than the next, while screaming incomprehensible shit. Like, all the time.
The third person is some dude that I met yesterday. Homeless as well and also staying here. During the day, he and I sit on a little couch, Dominic sits in his chair, and Dorothea resides in her nest. At night, we have to shove the furniture around just so everybody finds a place to sleep. Dominic cuddles up next to Dorothea; that dude is lying on the couch with his knees to his chin, and me, I’m lying on the floor.
It’s nighttime now. Everybody’s asleep, except me. Dorothea is snoring. The TV is on, but with no sound. And a single XTC pill I took an hour earlier, while in the bathroom, is now starting to kick in. And as I’m laying there, on the floor of that tiny room, surrounded by these strange, beautiful people, in the silent, black-and-white shimmering light of the TV, I feel myself slowly sliding into a little piece of heaven.
Blackouts & Speed, and Beer, and Weed, and XTC, and Ketamine– You’re awake. You have been awake for several days now. It’s hard to tell how much, exactly. When did you last sleep? You don’t know. Was there ever a time that you slept? You’re not sure. Everything is… out of whack. Reality itself feels… tilted. Like it’s running backwards and inside out, simultaneously, somehow. Or maybe you do. You sit in front of a computer screen, and you’re talking to someone, somewhere, online. You glance at the clock, and it’s 3:15 AM. What feels like just a moment later, you look again, and it’s 6:43 AM. You’re still sitting at your screen, but you have no recollection whatsoever of the past three hours. None. It’s just blank. Like reality skipped a beat. It’s then, and only then, that you think, “Right. Maybe I should get some sleep.”
Cheap beer & Big, Loud, Dumb movies-There’s something about alcohol (without any other drugs) that shuts down those parts of your brain that would normally go like, “Now, wait just a darn minute. What this director is trying to have me believe here is really, really stupid. The laws of physics go right out the window; any sort of logic or real-life resemblance is trampled upon with the muddy, bare feet of instant gratification, and I should now turn this drivel off and read some more Goethe.” Which makes it excellent, of course, for watching basically everything in the 80’s Action catalog. To hell with my liver and blow ‘m all up, Arnie. I will love you for it. Forever.
Doors of perception & Weed- Some situations have a feeling to them that’s almost too weird to be real. Especially when you look back at them later, through that strange warping tunnel of time that is your existence. Suddenly, there it is: the dim twilight of a room in 1992, where daylight was kept out by filthy black curtains. You were there with a bunch of people you hardly knew. The air was thick with the fumes of joints being passed around. The guy who lived here gathered you on this day for something special: you were going to watch The Doors, the movie, with Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison… On VHS, mind you.
These are the nineties, after all. And so you do. And you sit there, stoned as shit, in that dark room, and you learn for the first time in your life how Jim Morrison lived this incredible life of music, drugs, trance, euphoria, terror, deserts, poetry, and stages, and you think, “This is my hero, now. This man will serve as an example and an inspiration for the rest of my life.” And so he did. Hey, man, Jimmy, man. I miss you, man.
Endless & LSD– And so I sat there, in yet another tiny room, high on not one but two LSD trips, plus the aftereffects of the XTC I took last night. Nighttime, again. The room belonged to the best friend I’ve ever had. We did this together, him and me. The XTC, the LSD. We hadn’t seen each other since the time we both lived in the group home when we were twelve. Now, we are nineteen, and we found each other again, and it’s like I saw you just yesterday. You’re lying on your bed, fast asleep, and I sit here, still awake, watching how the entire history of the universe unfolds in this little painting hanging on the wall. It’s endless. And beautiful.
Feasting on Sleeplessness & Beer and Weed- While watching Monk. The TV show with the great Tony Shalhoub, you see, not sleeping, whether with help from amphetamines or just coffee and nicotine, always makes things a little strange and if you then, the following day, start drinking and smoking at about 12 in the afternoon, you are fairly under the weather by the time Mr. Monk comes around, which is around 3 PM, or something, and that’s great because Monk is just great. You know? just… great.
Greatest Drug of All- XTC. Or maybe weed. Or XTC. Or weed. Or XTC. Or love. Or weed. Or…
Heroin & Gas Station Robberies- So, there he sat. In my chair. With a needle hanging from his arm. Passed out…My next-door neighbor. He came knocking at my door earlier this evening and said, rather enthusiastically, “Hey, man! You alright? Yeah? Well, you’re going to be even better later tonight, because me and my friend, we’re going to rob a gas station, buy a bunch of heroin and come back here, and then we’re going to par-tay! Yeah? Yeah! See you later, dude!” And off he went.
And I went like, “Uh… okay…” And I went back to watching TV.
Several hours later, he returned. Alone, with no money. Sweat was pouring from his forehead. He slumped into my chair and started unpacking his shooting kit.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What happened?”, I asked.
And then it came, in one long stuttering monologue: “That insane bitch from the gas station started screaming like hell and throwing things at us, and we freaked, and we just ran away, and goddamn, I need a fix now.”
He prepared a needle. Rolled up his sleeve, put it in a purplish infected vein, and pushed the plunger. As soon as he did, his head fell backwards and his arm dropped away. He was just hanging there, in my chair, with that needle still in his arm. Out cold. And all that heroin was still lying there, on the table. So I went to the kitchen, got me some tinfoil, and smoked it all.
A few hours later, he woke up, took the needle out of his arm, gathered his stuff, and slouched out of my room.
I as in Ego & Shrooms– It just melts away, man…
Jimsonweed & MTV- Once upon a time, someone came up to me, handed me a little plastic bag full of big green leaves, and said, “You should eat this. It makes you stoned.” And since I was still very young and stupid at the time, I didn’t even ask what it was. I just ate the whole bag. Twenty-four hours later I found myself wandering through traffic, wearing just jeans, and talking to people only I could see. As much fun as this was, it was even more fun to smoke a joint, watch some MTV and watch someone else go completely insane while under the influence of Jimsonweed. A LOT more. Sorry, Deus.
Ketamine & Lost in Oblivion-There’s a black hole in the fabric of reality and you’re falling through it. Forever.
LSD & Space Jam-There are a few moments in one’s longstanding drug career that stand above all else. Things you saw, felt, or experienced that are so out of this world that Jim Morrison himself would smile and nod in agreement. When you later look back, they seem to shine like diamonds in that otherwise murky depth that constitutes your memory. One of these moments came for me in 1996, when I watched Space Jam. Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. In a movie theater. On LSD. Yeah. Exactly.
More, and More and More & Then Nothing- More drugs. More booze. More TV. And then you die.
Nicotine and Caffeine & Severe, Crippling Depression-Because I’m in prison. Again. Because I set my room on fire… Again. I’m all alone in my cell now. The TV is screaming without sound. It’s dark outside, and everything is quiet in jail. All the rapists and murderers are asleep. I alone am awake.
There are a few options here. I could hang myself with my shoelace. I could yank the cable from the TV and electrocute myself. But all that has to wait, because right now I’m too busy cutting myself with this thin little blade I managed to pry out of the disposable plastic razor they gave me. I think I’ll cut myself here…and here…
Oh, wow! & Akira and XTC- Oh, wow. This.
Paranoid & Horror Movies– I’m taking twelve now. Twelve XTC pills a night. Three at a time, every two hours. Tolerance, you see. You need more and more to get the same effect. So now I’m at twelve. Strange things start to happen when you’re on twelve. You take your bicycle out for a little nighttime trippin’, for example, and suddenly it’s three hours later and you’re lying in a ditch next to the train tracks, six miles from home, trying to drag your bike back onto the road. Shit like that, you know?
You’re walking — at four in the morning — through the tiny little shopping center in your hometown. Everything’s dark and quiet and you’re tripping out of your skull. And then suddenly, you see someone. Some shadowy figure, standing about twenty yards away, under the awning of a shop. You stop. You stare. Who is that? Why is he just standing there at 4AM? Why isn’t he moving? And is that a little chill creeping up your spine?
You take a step. The figure doesn’t move. Should you say something? Like what? “Who goes there?” Fuck that…
Another step. Still nothing. Then, eight-year-old you wakes up in the back of your mind and starts flashing little horror movie fragments on your inner screen. Demons. Poltergeists. The tingling in your spine gets worse. You take another step. Then, very slowly, things get into focus, and you realize, also very slowly, that you’ve been staring at a traffic sign the whole time.
Shit like that, you know?
Quaaludes & Patrick Melrose- I saw this show once. It’s with Benedict Cumberbatch, playing this rich asshole that uses all sorts of shit, including something like Quaaludes. And I thought ‘what?’ and I looked it up and apparently it’s this really cool drug and I thought ‘Damn! Isn’t it a shame, that they don’t make these anymore?’
And it is, you know. It really is.
Rock Bottom & Something Horrible- You are in the homeless shelter. Again. You’re tired. Your feet hurt. You have been out on the streets for days on end, using, freaking, and tripping, but now your money is gone. You sit here, on this horrible, smelly second-hand couch, while over there the TV is screaming something loud and unintelligible at you, and it feels like ten thousand needles piercing your skull. You look for the remote, but you can’t find it, and you think, “Fuck this. Coffee, now, first.” and you drink some of that delicious hot coffee, and you think, “Damn, this tastes good,” and you find the remote, and you turn the volume down, and then, finally, something like peace finds you… and then you feel it. A horrible growling, coming from your stomach. You hadn’t had anything decent to eat for days and instead, have been popping XTC and Ephedra capsules like they were candy, until your whole digestive system just stopped working.
But now it’s awake. And with a growing panic, you realize that that mug of coffee has awakened a dangerous amount of drugs that lay dormant in your comatose innards and that are now starting to spread through your system. Your heart rate goes up. You start to sweat. Breathing gets faster and shallower. You can’t sit on the couch anymore. You have to move. Right now. You stand up, walk with big steps towards the counter where one of the volunteers of the shelter is sitting, and you say, much too fast, “I have to go now I took a lot of drugs and they are all starting to work now and bye!”
And you go, outside, into the rain, and you walk and walk, faster and faster, and the thoughts in your head start racing, faster and faster, “this is too much I’m going to die I haven’t eaten I have to walk I must stop walking I can’t stop walking I have to or I will die this is too much this is too much I’m going to DIE” and you walk and you walk and you come across a bench and you sit down for two seconds before you start walking again and your heart is pounding in your chest and you’re afraid, you’re so afraid…
Two hours later, it finally stops. The drugs wear off. It’s the middle of the night and you shuffle through the city like a zombie. Your feet hurt so much you can hardly walk anymore. You are completely empty inside. Nothing of thoughts or feelings exists anymore. Finally, you settle down. You find a little corner somewhere far away in the darkness of the universe and you crawl into it. You brush aside some of the cigarette butts and try to ignore the pungent smell of urine. It’s still raining a little bit. You feel tiny droplets touch your cheek as you fall asleep.
Stoned & Stallone– Whatever you do, make sure you’ll never exist as a seventeen-year-old boy, in the year 1993, watching the Stallone-vehicle Cliffhanger in a mostly empty movie theater on a Tuesday afternoon, stoned out of your gourd… Because you will then watch, on a very big screen, that scene where that woman hangs on a cable above an abyss and her equipment starts to fail. She starts to fall, panic is setting in as Stallone attaches himself to the line and races across, and you sit there and think, “bwah, lame, he’s going to save her, hero-moment, yawn…”
But you’re wrong. Yes, Stallone races across the line and catches her just in time, but… he can’t hold her. She’s slipping. He can’t hold her, and she knows it. The panic in her voice reaches wince-inducing levels as Stallone struggles to hold on, but she’s slipping, she’s slipping… And then she falls. In slow motion. Her eyes widen, as panic is replaced by the sheer horror of knowing, with absolute certainty, that yes, you are going to die now. And she screams. And she falls.
Don’t do that. It will stay with you forever.
Towels and Lotion & Speed and Beer- Porn. Massive, massive amounts of porn.
Urine & Screening– Every two weeks, man. Because I’m under surveillance now. Because I’m insane.
V(an) Damn, I’m tired
Warped & Sober- Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
[Sometimes it feels like the operator running my simulation is on a break and set my world to a quarter speed.]
Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
Watching endless reruns on Discovery Channel.
E(X)cstasy- Not the drug, but the feeling. True, unadulterated euphoria, where all is heaven and you are God. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there. It’s real.
YouTube & Shrooms- If ever someone comes up to you and starts telling you how watching the same Goa-trance festival video on YouTube over and over and over and over again while under the influence of Magic Mushrooms is an utter and total waste of your precious time on this pale blue dot, you should punch him on the nose. Because he’s an utter and total idiot.
Zombie- Because this is the end.
Leave a Reply