Drugs

by J. R. Helton

  Drugs

  A Novel

  J. R. Helton

  Seven Stories Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2012 by J. R. Helton

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

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  Book design by Elizabeth DeLong and Jon Gilbert

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Helton, J. R. (John R.)

  Drugs : a novel / J. R. Helton. — A Seven Stories Press 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  isbn 978-1-60980-401-5 (pbk.)

  1. Helton, J. R. (John R.) 2. Drug abuse--Fiction. 3. Satire.

  I. Title.

  ps3608.e3925d78 2012

  813’.6--dc23

  2012000352

  Printed in the United States

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Most men and women lead lives at worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

  —Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

  Contents

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  -12-

  -13-

  -14-

  -15-

  -16-

  -17-

  -18-

  -19-

  -20-

  -21-

  -22-

  -23-

  -24-

  -25-

  -26-

  -1-

  I was born into a typical, white, middle-class family in Houston, Texas in 1962. My parents were hardworking, law abiding people. As a child, we lived in the city, and every year, the harder my parents worked, the more we would move up in society. Each house they owned, we would fix up as a family, sodding the yard, painting the house, landscaping, adding a deck so that when my father sold it, we could move to a bigger house. By the time I was a teenager, we were living in the growing subdivisions west of Houston in Katy, Texas. Within a few years, my father was finally able to fulfill his lifelong dream of living in the country. He retired from his real estate business at a young age, sold our big two-story house in the subdivision Devonshire Country, and we moved to a small town called Cypress in the Texas Hill Country.

  My father was a strict and often angry man. Beyond all that, from when I was twelve years old, he insisted I have at least one or two outside jobs in addition to schoolwork and my many closely monitored chores around our house. Most of these outside jobs were on construction or landscaping crews where I was thrown in with groups of older men when barely a teenager. I first tried smoking marijuana then on these work crews as a joint was often passed around before the day began or, after lunch, to make the mind-numbing labor more bearable.

  No one ever “pushed” marijuana or any other drug on me, ever in my life. To use any drug was a conscious decision on my part. For the most part, “drug pushers” are a myth, a product of television, movies, and the propaganda of the War on Drugs in the United States. Drugs have their positives, they sell themselves, and all I have ever met in years of use is simply people who wanted drugs and who asked other people to help them get these drugs, usually because they were doing the drug also, themselves. It was rarely ever “Hey kid, the first hit’s free,” but more like, “Hey man, can you get me any more of this shit?”

  It takes a while to ever get truly stoned on marijuana. To feel the full effects of the THC, one usually needs to try to get high several times. Besides those first construction and landscaping crews, I smoked pot only a handful of times from twelve to sixteen years of age, mainly on weekends with my fellow jocks, my white suburban friends living in the brand new Wonder Bread subdivisions of Katy. I was a good basketball player and also hung out with the black ball players at Katy who were the only other students who got high before our games. There were five guys, our best players, and I rode along with them in a giant 1976 Grand Prix that one of the older varsity players owned. I was the one white boy of the six of us jammed into that giant car, filling it with smoke, as we drove past some of the ramshackle homes which were literally across the tracks in what was referred to as “Niggertown” by my suburban white friends. In the end, it was always someone else’s dope I was smoking and I never was truly high enough to alter my normal tense and worried state of consciousness.

  The first time I was ever truly stoned then was at around seventeen years of age in 1979 when my father moved us to the Hill Country, to Cypress. I was working on another landscaping crew in a resort/subdivision called Briarcreek. The crew was small, just me and one other guy. His name was Kevin and he was about ten years older than me. The first morning of my first day, we drove around from the clubhouse to the golf course pro-shop discussing what we had to do.

  “We gotta watch out for D.H.,” Kevin said.

  “Why?”

  “He’s a retired colonel and in charge of landscaping and maintenance at Briarcreek. He lives out here, too.”

  “Is he the guy who drives around in that green car with the lights and siren on top?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Why does he drive a cop car?”

  “I don’t know. In case there’s a landscaping emergency. I get along with him, but he’s suspicious.”

  Around eleven a.m., Kevin pulled a thick joint out of his pocket.

  “Do you get high?”

  “Sometimes.”

  We smoked the joint and drove aimlessly around the subdivision. Sitting in the truck that afternoon, I could tell the THC had blurred my vision, intensified my sense of taste and sight, color and sound, while simultaneously stupefying me with a feeling of numbed, giddy euphoria. I concentrated only on the old music blaring from the truck’s speakers. The opening chords of a Jimi Hendrix song called “The Wind Cries Mary” reverberated from deep within my gut, in my chest, my heart and lungs, a visceral connection to the music that was whole and new and so pleasurable as to carry me away from the very real and normally all-consuming worries of my troubled teenage life. Kevin leisurely drove over to the Blue Well, a large, deep spring near one of the clubhouses. We went swimming in the clear freezing water and lay on the rocks in the sun. Kevin produced another joint and we burned it down. I began to relax even further, forgetting everything and everyone, fully into the moment.

  “I think I’m gonna like this job,” I said.

  “All we gotta do is a little work, and avoid D.H.,” Kevin said.

  And that’s what we did, as little work as possible, all summer before my senior year in high school. We mainly drove around in the truck all day smoking dope and talking, that is, Kevin did most of the talking and told me about his life. He was from Houston, too. He’d been a track star
in high school. I had been a track star at Katy also but Kevin was better than I’d ever been, winning the state finals in both the 880 and the mile relay in his junior year. He told me stories about running.

  “I used to run on acid all the time,” he said. “I won the Texas Regionals in the eight-eighty tripping out of my mind. I ran it so fast I broke the record.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, that record was like fifty years old or something. The best though, is running long distance on heroin.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Oh yeah. I did it all the time. I was in shape. Perfect condition. I could do things like that. I couldn’t now, but then . . . there’s nothing better. You float along and run, man. I mean run.”

  We went to Kevin’s condo and took bong hits every day at lunch. I noticed the more dope I smoked, the better everything seemed. Kevin’s pretty girlfriend, Vicky, was always zipping in and out. She taught first grade at Cypress Elementary and liked to take speed. She was thin and talked a hundred miles an hour. She was also an artist. Kevin showed me her artwork.

  “She does these paper things where she overlaps the paper strips and I frame them.”

  He showed me all of her framed works. They were strange. He showed me some notebooks full of drawings and little torn pieces of paper.

  “I kid her about this stuff. These are her speed books. Don’t tell her I showed them to you.”

  We’d sit there at noon, hot from our morning’s weed-eating or mowing. Vicky would breeze in. She and Kevin talked and joked. They were a pretty young couple and obviously loved each other. They weren’t married, Kevin said, because they didn’t believe in marriage.

  After lunch, and another bong hit, we went back out and drove around.

  “We need to be visible for a few hours,” Kevin said.

  We drove around, did a little work. I had a gas-powered, two-handled, industrial size weed-eater now. It made life easier. I was usually stoned anyway, and somehow, weed-eating’s more interesting when you’re high.

  -2-

  Kevin’s goals were simple.

  “I just want a little house in the country where I can grow my own food and dope and Vicky and I can do what we want, eat healthy, and live in peace.”

  He kept telling me his plans, track stories, and drug stories while we hid out in his condo from our boss D.H. I was extremely curious about drugs as they were so verboten in my own home. I often cajoled Kevin to let me try any drug he knew of and he would reluctantly give in, not wanting to “corrupt me” he said. Sometimes, we’d eat some of Vicky’s Dexedrine and talk and talk. I liked speed. It made my scalp tingle and I felt active. Occasionally, Vicky would leave some coke out for Kevin. He’d do it up in small lines and we snorted it all quickly. I liked speed, but I loved coke. A few seconds after that first line, I’d feel strong and happy, a short rush of synthesized enthusiasm. Powerful. Anything in the room was possible. I could take control and make things happen. Then, the rush went away and I did more. It came back, not as strong as the first, but it was there and I wanted to talk about world problems and what was wrong with everything and my own, personal, long version of the solution. But mostly, again, Kevin talked. He recounted all of the concerts he’d been to in the early seventies in great detail. The Rolling Stones were his favorite band. He’d even named his two big German Shepherds Mick and Bianca. He’d seen Mick Jagger so many times, he felt he knew him.

  I was over there at his condo late one evening, sitting on the couch. I was going to stay the night later at my new girlfriend Susan’s house and sleep on her couch, anything to avoid going home. Kevin had “Let it Bleed” on the turntable. Jagger was singing “Monkey Man.” Kevin was hopping around, reenacting some tour.

  “. . . and Mick put his hand, one hand up on his head, and the other like this and I have to say man, he really did look just like a monkey. Vicky’s got this picture of him singing it that year. It’s too hilarious . . .”

  We talked and smoked a joint. Kevin went on about running on smack and acid, how it was the ultimate. My mind was working at a different, teenage level. I asked him if his parents knew he smoked pot.

  “Oh yeah, I don’t hide it from them. I leave the bong out if Dad comes over. I’ll take a few hits in front of him and mom. They used to get pissed, but now, they don’t mind.”

  We started drinking some beers and got tipsy. Kevin stood up and walked to a bookshelf. “Come here,” he said.

  I walked up and looked. He pulled a white, Styrofoam box off the top shelf and opened it. A large, old, sturdy syringe was inside.

  “This is ol’ faithful,” he said.

  “You shoot with that?”

  “Oh no, not any more. I used to use this sometimes just for kicks. It’s a hassle though. Disposable syringes are the trick.”

  “Do you still shoot it?”

  “Not much. I mostly quit after Jane committed suicide. Maybe a little skin pop every now and then.”

  Kevin talked about Jane often. She was his old girlfriend and they’d shot heroin together. “She was always worrying and trying to kick junk. I helped her quit it for good one time and it was really painful. She was a beautiful girl. She looked just like Vicky. I had to hold her over a trash can while she threw up. It was terrible. She was sick for days and I was still taking Dilaudids. When she was doing a little better, I went out for a while and left a bottle with forty pills in it. I stashed it really well, but when I got back she’d found it an’ had taken them. Every fuckin’ one of ’em!”

  “What did you do?”

  “There was nothing to do. She was dead. She’d been dead for a couple of hours when I got there.”

  “Shit, that’s terrible.”

  “I know. I’ll never forget her.”

  “What does it feel like the first time you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Heroin.”

  Kevin looked out the window and checked the sliding glass door to see if it was locked.

  “You wanna smoke some?”

  “Sure.”

  “I just get a little now and then from my brother. He’s in the navy and stationed in Thailand. He gets a lot of China White and mails it to me.” He went into another room and came back with a little packet.

  I was very ignorant about the drug. “Will I get addicted?” I asked.

  “No, no, maybe you shouldn’t even do this, Jake. I just do a little bit. I’m not addicted. I stay on the edge. I don’t really shoot it much anymore. Vicky doesn’t like me doing it.”

  I was nervous. “What’ll happen?”

  “You might throw up.”

  I thought long and hard. There was nothing I hated more than vomiting. But I hadn’t eaten much that day . . . “I’ll try it.”

  “All right, we’ll smoke a little this time, but I don’t wanna mess you up. You’re still out there running, man. You’re still in real shape. Look at me.” He lifted his shirt and grabbed a handful of flab. “I’m starting to get a little roll here.”

  He poured out some of the powder, heated it up on a piece of foil and we inhaled it through a glass tube. Several minutes later, I became very dizzy and somewhat nauseous but the moment passed. I stood up slowly and then sat back down, sinking into the couch. Kevin left the room and came back holding a tissue on the inside of his arm at the elbow, having obviously run a line. He put on a record.

  “This is Traffic,” he said. “‘Dear Mr. Fantasy.’ . . .”

  I listened to the old music and felt my body tingling. It was like a warm, clinging blanket of velvet had engulfed me from my toes to my teeth. I felt an itch on my face. With great effort, I started scratching. Another itch on my side. I scratched and scratched. I didn’t know why, but it felt good to scratch. Like the itch was there only for me to scratch it and feel the pleasure.
The music went on and on. Kevin moved around and talked. I nodded in and out. I was truly melting and floating. I had never felt so comfortable and calm in my entire life, such as it was. Every once in a while, I’d have a pain in my stomach, but it would pass and a dark veil of contentment would cover me fully again.

  I never made it to my girlfriend’s house. I stayed stuck on Kevin’s couch all night. At some point, I fell completely asleep and dreamed I was fucking Susan and her cute, blonde friend Rebecca at the same time. They were both on all fours, their pale, round, white asses up in the air. I was going back and forth between them, in and out. But I couldn’t come. I kept trying and pumping, but nothing happened. I woke up late Saturday morning. Kevin was gone. He’d left a note on the door.

  Jake,

  Vick and I went into Austin. You looked pretty tired, so we let you sleep. There’s some black beans in the crock pot and tortillas in the fridge. Make yourself at home. If you leave, please lock the door behind you.

  See you later,

  Kevin and Vicky

  -3-

  I was a straight A honor roll student in Cypress High School, a serious athlete, the captain and leader of my varsity basketball team. There were many pictures of my attractive girlfriend and me—the friendly, smiling, charming guy—in the high school yearbook. When I wasn’t busy at school, I sacked groceries at the local store or cut firewood and cedar posts on a friend’s ranch, hauled hay, waited tables at Briarcreek, worked on my drawings in my room, or worked as a grounds man with Kevin. My parents were wrapped up in their own problems and never really seemed to notice when I was high on weed, though I was careful not to ever come home from work or a night out with Susan too stoned for it to be noticed.

  When the summer was over, I still hung out with Kevin to get high on his stash. Mostly though, I had begun to steal small amounts of potent marijuana from my girlfriend’s parents. They were both successful, wealthy, upper middle-class professionals who smoked pot daily. Susan wasn’t as interested in marijuana as I was due to the fact that she had been exposed to it through her parents for so many years; it held little of the allure or mystery for her that it did for me coming from such a strict household. I don’t think she had the same intense need to escape or alleviate her daily reality as I did either.