My apartment became one of the hot party spots on the South Side.  My address book contained at least a hundred phone numbers of people who would buy dope any time, day or night.  I surrounded myself with people to stem my feelings of insecurity.  It was the fall of 1987 and I was in my last year of high school.
     Suddenly a girl I wanted to be with showed up on the front steps of my apartment as if she had been sent there by heaven.  Her name was Erin.  Erin wasn’t thin and she didn’t look like a model, but in a lot of ways she had a superior air about her.  Her figure filled out anything she was wearing in the most pleasant way.  Most of the time she wore pretty feminine things.  The way she swung her hips indicated she knew how to use them.  Her black, lustrous hair hung down nearly to her waist.  She had full, pouting lips.  Erin was a very sexy girl, and here she was right outside my door.
     She was brushing her hair.  I thought about how positive I was I had to be with her.  I asked her if I could brush her hair for her.  We talked for a long time while I ran the brush through her hair.  We went for a ride in her daddy’s suburban.  She told me about her life and showed me where she lived.  Not much later we were in the bedroom at my place.
     We made love.  I had done so many things.  I thought I knew everything.  When we finished there was blood all over me.  I had no idea where it came from; I was horrified.  Then she told me she was on her period.  I felt like a fool because of my ignorance.  Erin’s caresses and her soft sexy voice soothed away all of my insecurity.
     Every moment I was away from Erin I wanted to be with her.  Every second I spent at her side I wanted to get her back into bed.  The first three months we were together we made love all the time.  I became addicted to sex.  I truly loved her.  I wrote her poetry.  I painted for her.  I bought her things.  I felt I was owed sexual favors for all those things.
     Erin tried to tell me something was wrong.  She told me sex made her feel dirty because she had been promiscuous early in life.  I didn’t listen to her.  There was a lifetime without sex in my past.  I craved sex like an alcoholic craves a drink.  She could not find any way to reason with me.  I was obsessed.  One day she broke up with me.  It was the first move in what would become an epic end to the relationship.
     One morning I walked over to her house in Spanish Town.  I went over there to help her clean her room, and because I enjoyed the vibe in the ancient two story house.  We were on good terms that morning.  She and I had our problems, but I had faith that we could work through them.
     Erin went to the bathroom and left me alone in her room.  That was when I found the note.  She had written herself a note that described how she had an affair with her best friend, Alex.  When she came back from the bathroom I held the letter in my hands.  She burst into tears as soon as she saw it.  She told me she was sorry.  I forgave her.  At least I said I forgave her.  I continued my tradition of being dishonest about my feelings, or, to be more precise, not even mentioning my feelings at all.  It worked so well in my relationship with Amy I figured I would give the technique one more try.
     Throughout our relationship I sold drugs.  I did not do them very often because Erin didn’t like it when I did.  I decided I no longer cared what Erin had to say.  I drank half a vial of liquid LSD and smoked weed until I hit that peak.  That was when Erin came over to make up with me.
     I found myself unable to communicate with her at all.  She caused a huge scene.  I sacrificed the power to defend myself the moment I put the vial to my lips.  My trip took a distinctive turn for the worse.  It went straight to hell.  Erin understood the effects of drugs, so she knew what to say and do to maximize the power of her attack.  It was an attack.  It was an all out assault on my buzz.  The good feelings went down before the onslaught and burst into flames.  I wept hot tears and cursed the world for my existence.
     My “friends” decided it was the most terrible party they had ever been to.  They all relocated their trip to an alternate site, except for Nick.  As much as I hate to admit it, he was a good friend of mine.
     Nick said, “I have something that will help you come down.”  He held out his hand and showed me a small medicine bottle full of little yellow pills.
     “What are those, Nick?” I asked.
     “Pieces of the sky,” said Nick.  He took out two spoons and a pack of syringes.
     “I haven’t ever injected anything,” I told him.
     “It doesn’t take any extraordinary amount of courage or skill,” he assured me.
     He crushed up one of the pills in one of the spoons.  I later learned that is a terribly inefficient way of preparing dilaudid, but it seemed okay at the time.  He put water on it.  It quickly dissolved into a pretty yellow liquid.
     I tied off my arm and tried to insert the needle into my vein.  I was clumsy at first, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy to accomplish the task.  I pushed the plunger in.  Within a couple of seconds an explosion of pleasure blossomed inside my head.  It traveled from there down to my toes.  I couldn’t believe how good it felt, how dreamy.
     Outside the sun had just come up.  I eased myself lazily through my back door.  I meandered out into the back yard where I fell slowly onto a cushion of green, green grass.  Overhead the clouds smiled down upon my face.  I decided that the way I felt was the way I needed to feel all the time.  I peeled myself away from the earth and made my way back into the house.
     My grandparents both died the year I graduated from high school.  It left my mother devastated.  I responded in my usual way by medicating my bad feelings.  On the positive side I was given the opportunity to live in their now empty three-story house.  I immediately accepted the offer.  I only had enough furniture to fill up two rooms, but I loved the old house.  I took care to make even the empty rooms look nice.  Until I began shooting dope everything went swell.
     The kitchen counter soon sported dozens of empty syringes.  Garbage soon piled up all around the inside and the outside of the house.  Anyone with experience could easily discern the events unfolding behind closed doors at the former residence of two steadfast and devout Christians.
     My Uncle Steve was one of the people experienced enough to figure out what I was up to.  Soon he asked me to leave, and not very politely.  I have always taken exception to the way he accosted me.  He reeked of alcohol when he showed up to throw me out.  He had been an alcoholic and an addict for a long time.  I did not take kindly to a holier-than-thou attitude coming from him.  He wanted to strike me.  Steve bristled with aggression, and foul speech spewed from his mouth as he spoke to me.
     The fact that he did not attack me probably owed more to his respect for my mother and father than anything else.  It was very fortunate that he did not.  From the moment he showed up I itched to draw my gun on him.  I did not trust him, or even like him.  If he had struck me I would have shot him.  Every now and then I am reminded that there is a God in heaven, otherwise I would have been lost long ago.
 

***

     At this point I find it necessary to digress.  I find it necessary to explain the places I’ve been.  The apartment on State Street I moved into in 1986 only had three small rooms.  It was the basement apartment of the building.  The back wall of the apartment lay below the level of the street.  The front door opened out onto a tiny sunken parking area underneath two huge oak trees whose limbs formed a canopy over the lot.  That was the place in which I originally overcame my hang-ups and learned to enjoy sexuality as a natural function.
     The apartment next door provided a home to two groovy people named Arlen and Tauna.  They both attended L.S.U. and had a considerable advantage over me in terms of age and experience.  One night while Arlen was at a recital I sat around over there with Tauna and her friend Patti.  They were doing methamphetamines.  Patti asked me if I wanted to try it.  Patti was a fine little girl.  She was only about five feet two inches tall, and she was very petite.  She had firm breasts, however, and beautiful, shiny long red hair.  I could not see any cool alternative to hanging out with Patti and doing crystal, so that’s exactly what I did.
     I found myself on their sofa loaded out of my mind.  I became intensely aware of every part of my body.  As Patti spoke to me one part in particular kept drawing my attention back to it again and again.  She went on at length about the kind of relationships she liked to have.  Patti preferred men who like to crawl on their hands and knees, much like the boys referred to in the song by Lydia Lunch.  I felt myself become incredibly aroused as she told me about one boyfriend of hers who liked to be chained up.  I found myself strongly attracted to Patti, but unable to act on my urges.  Afterwards I concluded my failure to rush to an uncertain fate in the arms of such a dangerous and attractive companion was due partly to fear, but mostly to the overwhelming effects of the speed.  It had literally blown me away.  I must have done too much.  It probably saved me from a lot of pain.  I found out later that Patti liked to cut people up.
     I always think about that apartment I lived in on State Street as the one next to Tauna.  That may not mean so much to the casual reader, but to me it signifies not only a place where I lived but also a state of mind.  That was the place where I stopped liking average, run-of-the-mill people and started hanging with junkies, freaks and queers.  Queers bought more dope than anyone else did, and lesbians have always aroused me to the highest degree.  Maybe I’m going to hell, but at least I don’t have any illusions about the future.  I never can tell though.  God might surprise me as he has done in the past.  There is a God, you know.  There has to be.

***
     I moved from State Street to a second story apartment on Ivanhoe that overlooked the canal.  The apartment was only about a hundred yards from the previous one, but it was a major change.  My room was totally separated from the rest of the apartment by a hallway, and we had a lot more space.  The kitchen opened onto a roof balcony where we could sit and get high privately under the sun.  I spent a lot of time decorating the apartment.  My part of it looked quite handsome by the time I was finished.
     One night Gerald and I fell asleep in the living room.  We were both full of beer and weed.  An explosion woke me up.  I looked across at Gerald in the easy chair.  Another explosion right outside the canal side windows seemed as though it might break the glass.  I leapt up from the sofa and rushed over to look out at a small crowd of people gathered at the freshly built upper class condominiums on the other side of the canal.  They hurled one M60 after another at our apartment.  It took almost thirty seconds for me to become very angry.
     Gerald and I went down to my car, mostly because I told him he had to come along.  He knew I was crazy so it didn’t take much convincing to get him to ride to see the show.  I took my Walther PPK along with me.  I intended to turn the tables on the rich boys in a big way.
     I jumped into the car and opened the passenger door for Gerald.  After turning the keys in the ignition and revving the engine I gunned out of the parking lot and tore down the street to the stop sign.  I hooked one left and then another without slowing down either time.  That left me aimed directly at my target – the rich boy condominium complex.  One more left turn pointed me straight at the crowd of people.  They were still throwing fireworks across the canal, directly at my building.
     I stomped the accelerator to the floor, stuck the gun out the window and headed straight for them.  I fired at least seven shots before I reached the wildly scattering people.  I didn’t actually try to hit anyone, but if they had run in front of the car I would have.  The whole incident was over in a matter of seconds.  I walked back up to my apartment a few minutes later not the least bit worried about the police.  I tossed Gerald my bag and told him to roll us up a big, fat one.  Such was the nature of my insanity.
     The Ivanhoe apartment also hosted the scene with the naked burglar.  One night for some strange reason (probably stoned) I went to sleep with my gun locked in the car.  I woke up in the wee hours of the morning to see a stranger standing over my bed.  His face could only have been a few inches from mine as he whispered to me, “I am God, but you need not know me.”
     I came back to my senses with desperate quickness, long before the idea of fear entered my mind.  My hand slowly reached for the machete I kept on the floor by the bed.  The man must have seen me reaching for something because just as I got my fingers around the handle he bolted out of the room.  I tore the covers off of me.  Clad only in boxer shorts I darted after him with the machete in my hand.
     I heard a crashing outside the kitchen window as I reached the end of the hall.  When I burst into the kitchen I could see the window to the roof balcony was open.  The lawn table outside had been upended.  I heard noise on the roof above me.  I realized he was going over the roof to come down by the front door and the stairs to the parking lot.  I rushed to the door, but the deadbolt was locked and the keys were in my pants.  That’s when I thought about how crazy I was to chase a burglar wearing nothing but my underwear.  I ran back to my bedroom and got dressed.
     I didn’t have a phone in my apartment so I had to go out to my car and drive down the street to call the police.  They told me to go back to my apartment and wait for them to arrive.  When they got there they discovered the thing that got me just a little bit ruffled around the edges.  The burglar took off all of his clothes in the parking lot before he climbed over the roof and entered my apartment in the nude.  He must have been pretty messed up on something.  He left his wallet in his clothes.  The police arrested him at the address on his driver’s license a couple of hours later.
     I left the apartment not long after that, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the burglar.  It was in that apartment that Erin one day told me it was over for the first time.  It was also in that apartment that I first experienced mescaline.  I had gotten a gram of pure stuff refined directly from peyote buttons in a garage laboratory in West Texas.  While I was tripping out Amy came over and asked me to help her do her homework.  We were still friends.  We went to a nearby coffeehouse.  Once I got there I realized there wasn’t going to be any way for me to help her do her homework.  I had to leave the coffeehouse and go back to my apartment alone.  Amy couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.  While I sat in the living room and stared at the wall I understood one concept thoroughly: I had to stop paying rent to live there.  I had to quit giving my money away for a place to live when I could much more easily be living in one of my family’s places for free.  That was a decision I came to make on more than one occasion.  Soon after that trip I moved out.
     That brings me back to my dead grandparents’ house on Stanford Avenue.  Somebody told me once that three story houses are bad luck, but I can’t say that is true.  The second floor had stairs leading up to what was once the master bedroom.  In the later years of her life my grandmother converted the third floor into a ceramics studio.  My grandmother was an expert at glazing and firing ceramics.  She won many awards for her precision and beauty at that art over the course of her lifetime.  When I moved into the house that room was still full of unfinished bowls, vases and figurines.
     The house also flaunted a sizable back yard.  Crepe myrtles and morning glories punctuated the landscape, along with marigolds and a gigantic Chinaberry tree.  Live oaks lined the whole yard on the street side.  It felt as if the entire yard lay underneath a massive green ceiling.  It truly gave pleasure to the eye to behold.
     While I resided at that location I went down to New Orleans every weekend to stay with my friend Nick.  He had a private room with an extra bed in the UNO honors dorm.  Every other night that I was there we dosed and drew intricate psychedelic art on the walls.  A skeleton stepping out of a pentagram had been drawn just above the bed that I slept in.  I felt a lot like the skeleton.  I lived half of my life in one reality and half in another.  If you looked into my eyes you could see the hard edge that slow poisoning gives the pupils.
     At night we went to the head bars in the French Quarter.  In those days the city ordinance that banned loitering had not yet been passed.  That meant there were crowds hanging out on the street all night long, and crowds meant sales.  For the first time in my life I walked around selling doses to people I did not even know.
     One night while I was tripping in front of my favorite bar, The Crystal, a woman struggled to get up off of the sidewalk outside.  One moment she was an attractive young woman, the next instant her features became hideously disfigured.  A web of scar tissue stretched across her face and down her left arm to her fingertips.  She reached out her hand for my help, but I could not take it.  I crossed the street and sat down on the steps of a candy shop that had long since closed for the night.  It crossed my mind that I must have taken too much again.  I knew I needed to come down.
     The temperature dropped drastically when the sun went down.  I was cold.  I saw a man coming down the street.  He wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of shorts.  He was a really big man with long hair.  He walked past me quickly and with deliberation.  When he did I saw that he had tracks all over his arms and he was sweating profusely.  That brought me down quite a few notches.  Physical addiction makes a joke out of hallucinogens.  All of a sudden the only terrible thing I saw was a syringe full of dilaudid.  I picked myself up and hauled ass for the car.  One hour and forty-five minutes later I was shooting up in my bedroom in Baton Rouge and everything looked perfectly normal.

***

     I moved from the house on Stanford to a house on Picket Street in Southdowns.  Nick and I decided to share the expenses, which were minimal.  The house was part of a Section 8 area in the old neighborhood.  I managed to get the house only because my mother was a friend of the lady in charge of the project.  The house did not look as if it were for low-income housing.  It looked nice.  Still, there were some things about the house that I did not like from the beginning.
     One of the very strange things about the house happened long before Nick and I moved into it.  It happened to be very close to the house on Stanford.  One night while Nick and I were tweaking and walking we came across the vacant house on Picket Street.  As I stood on the front porch and looked into the empty living room I remarked that it felt like the house had a bad history.  Nick said it was possible the house had a bad future coming.  We talked about whether or not it was possible to feel vibrations from an event that had not yet taken place.  I preferred to believe that any glimpses that we might have of the future would be only possibilities.  Now I see that the vibrations we were picking up probably were from the future, my own very near future.  It was no time at all before we moved into that house and the negativity commenced going down.
     The house placed me less than two hundred yards from the playground where I tripped on LSD for the first time.  St. Aloysius Catholic Church and Elementary School was only a block away.  It presented me no small amount of nostalgia to live so nearby.  Of course by that time doses no longer held my attention.  Ever since Erin and I broke up for good I had been in love with the needle.
     Right after we moved into the house Amy showed up.  Somebody told her what we had been doing.  She had money and she wanted to try it.  Amy became one of the many people I injected with dope for the first time.  She pronounced it one of the finest things she had ever done.  We sat around doing huge shots of cocaine and crystal mixed with dilaudid.  Such a sweet combination, and who better to enjoy the fun with than your two closest friends.
     I always held out on the D’s because they were my favorites.  I went into the privacy of my bedroom and did an extra three.  I nodded off.  When I woke up I went looking for Nick and Amy.  They turned up behind the closed door to Nick’s bedroom where they were in bed together.  I apologized to them for the interruption and went back to my room to finish the dilaudid.  I guess they must have been embarrassed because they came out and made small talk.  I could not find the words to tell them that I was far beyond caring, and had been for quite some time.
     That’s how it came to pass that a couple of years after we broke up Amy and I came to see a lot of each other again.  She probably would have liked it better if she could have seen just Nick.  Since I had all of the heavy drug connections and she was hopelessly addicted she didn’t have too much of a choice.
     I mentioned earlier that I did speed with Tauna and Patti.  I neglected to report that soon after that I bought large quantities of the drug from their supplier, Paul.  I saw Patti regularly.  I grew to like her a whole lot.  She started to confide in me.
     Patti liked to play games with men, but what she really wanted was for men to play games with her.  She told me she had been shooting grays.  She hinted around about some guy she was seeing.  I considered her a friend by that time.  I felt the impulse to warn her, and I acted on it.  She thought my attitude was conservative, like I was frightened of dope or something.  I knew right then that she had met her match.  Not long after that she was twisted around his little finger, a creature of weakness and dependency.
     She came up to me in a bar.  Her hair was all messed up.  She didn’t look well at all.  She told me she was sick, but that Brad had gone to get them a fix.  That was the name of the walking pile of human filth that had managed to turn Patti’s life upside down.  “All a friend can say is ain’t it a shame.”
     I went back to my house to meet Amy.  We were going to New Orleans to score heroin from somebody I knew.  When she showed up her eyes exuded the same desperate need I saw coming from Patti’s.  After we got to New Orleans we went straight to my connection.  We were already late.
     My connection’s name was Moose.  He looked like the perfect stereotype of a hardcore criminal biker.  Moose always had a way of making me feel uncomfortable.  His size had a lot to do with it, but the look in his eyes made my skin crawl.  You could just tell he thought about evil things, violent things.  He got the most incredible heroin though.  I had immediately struck up a business relationship with him.
     He lived on Royal Street.  We knocked on his door and he opened it.  With a look that could either have been hatred or resignation he told us to come inside.  The apartment had almost no furniture.  There was a mattress on the floor of one room.  In what must have been the living room there was a cheap table with four chairs around it.  There were some old sofa cushions in one corner of that room.  A pile of blankets stretched from over the cushions onto the floor.  The table had a small digital scale on it, along with a Ziploc bag containing a smaller bag full of heroin.
     Moose was never anything but polite to me.  I considered his offer to us to test the goods to be a measure of professional courtesy.  Amy had never done any heroin.  In fact, she could not inject herself at all.  I had always done it for her.  I got her a “good” shot ready and then gave it to her.  It must have been very good because her eyes rolled back in her head and she seemed unable to remain conscious.
     I still don’t understand what could have possessed me to do what I did next.  It must have been the anger that built up inside me over the many years I had known Amy, anger that I had never been enough to keep her attention occupied.  All of the times when she slept with other men, most of them my friends, came crashing back into my awareness.  I paid Moose for the heroin and told him to take good care of Amy.  Twenty minutes later I was on the interstate back to Baton Rouge, without her.
     Nine days went by before I got a knock on my door.  Looking out through the glass I was surprised to see that it was Amy’s mother.  I didn’t think she knew where I lived, but there she was.  I reluctantly opened the door to find out what she wanted.  From there the whole scene went down like a bad dream.
     She kept crying as she asked me to please tell her where Amy was.  I told her I didn’t know.  She knew I was lying, and she told me so.  I wouldn’t give her a clue.  She finally left.  I knew I had to go get Amy.  Even though she messed my head up a bunch of times what I did was wrong, and I still loved her.
     It was Gerald and I who went out to the car with two pistols and a can of mace a half-hour later on our way to New Orleans.  Going up to Moose’s apartment armed was insane, but not as insane as going unarmed.  It was mid afternoon when we got there.  I wasn’t going in with guns blazing, but I knew that Moose wasn’t the type of person to be taken lightly.
     I knocked on the door twice before I got a response.  When I did it was Amy’s voice I heard coming from the inside.  I heard her ask, “Who’s there?”  I told her it was Josh, to open the door, but she couldn’t.  Moose had locked her in.  I kicked the door in without the least bit of hesitation.
     Amy had been raped, beaten and injected with heroin repeatedly over the course of the time she had been there.  She didn’t have any clothes at all.  It would have been hard for her to escape if Gerald and I hadn’t shown up.  I took off my baggy shirt and gave it to her to wear.  It hung down almost to her knees.  We got out of there in a hurry.  God must have been looking out for us because we didn’t see Moose.
     I took her straight to her parents’ house when we got Back to Baton Rouge.  She didn’t want to go home like that, but I couldn’t bear to see her the way she was.  She needed medical attention.  I was too spaced out to do anything to help her.  Her mom didn’t ask me any questions, but I felt the need to tell her that I found Amy in New Orleans.  I was paranoid that I might face charges for my actions.  That didn’t happen though.  They took Amy and left me alone to face the waves of guilt and regret that washed over me in a flood.
     Amy spent a few days in the Catholic hospital before she was transferred to a facility that specialized in psychiatric care.  A couple of weeks later I went to see her.  She kept crying and telling me that she had always loved me.  She just wanted to know why, why did I do it?  I wasn’t man enough to admit that it was because I was jealous.  I was too ashamed.  She spent nine months in the institution.  When she got out we were no longer friends.
     The negative Karma hung heavy in the air all around me.  It was far too terrible and powerful a force for everything to be hunky dory.  I knew the fall was coming.  I just had no idea how hard I was going to fall.
     The house on Picket Street and my friendship with Nick blew away like fragments of sand in a windstorm.  Nick must have cared about Amy because he showed me nothing but resentment, and he became depressed.  One night Nick stole two guns from my father’s house so he could buy enough dope to kill himself.  It didn’t work.  After the dope failed he shot up Comet and tried to drain his blood.  When I found him his arms were green and there was blood covering every surface of the room.  He was still alive, to our great disappointment.  When my dad found out the guns were gone the shit really hit the fan.  He told Nick's parents, who had Nick put away.
     My actions had left me ostracized from all of my polite friends.  I lost all of the sources of my drug sales.  Not having the money to support my huge drug habit caused me immediate problems.  With Nick gone I knew that I would have to go back to being dependent on my family for a place to live again.
     Things did not get better for me, they got much worse.  The only place I could move into was the small efficiency apartment behind Wilma Day’s house. The apartment was separated from her house by a paper-thin wall.  She came over to check on me all hours of the day and night, which put a nasty cramp in my lifestyle.  The worst part was that I no longer had to pay any bills.  That meant all of my money could be spent on dope.  I devoted all of my energy to getting laid and staying loaded.  That created the ideal environment for me to lose my mind.  I faced a long hard road into the surrealistic landscape of insanity, and I seemed to be on my way on a train with no brakes.

Continue to Interlude Two

Contents

Headquarters