by J. R. Helton
I grew careless. Marijuana fogs and complicates your basic operational thought process when you smoke too much. Pot is best when smoked in small amounts, otherwise, the THC is essentially wasted, the high is dulled, and you might as well go to sleep. My parents eventually did catch me two times in a row on school nights, once getting out of Kevin’s truck completely wasted as he dropped me off at our house, and another time, coming home from Susan’s house having smoked too much to maintain. They thought something was up and blamed it all on Kevin. My father forced Kevin’s truck off the road one day atop a high hill outside of Cypress and pulled a gun on him, a little .38. He waved it at this harmless friend of mine and told Kevin to stay away from his son or else. It was months before I found this out, but it must have scared the hell out of Kevin and I never saw him again.
The next summer after my senior year, I started working at the Briarcreek Resort again full time to make money to go to college. Kevin was no longer around, so I worked for a guy named Peter. He was a Vietnam vet and a methadone addict. He set water mains and repaired PVC lines. He’d broken both of his feet not long before by falling down some rocks at the Blue Well. I was his shovel man. My first day, he almost got me killed.
“Dig a hole next to this box,” he said. He gave me a shovel and wrecking bar and drove off.
I started digging. It’s slow-going when you dig in the Hill Country. A lot of limestone, hard yellow caliche. I dug down with the wrecking bar and hit a plastic pipe. I looked and saw I’d broken the outside of it. There were wires inside of it and I’d almost broken them, too. I examined the big green box I’d been digging next to, unaware of its function. Peter drove up. He limped out of his van and looked in the hole.
“Shit! Did you break that conduit?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Man, that’s a power line.”
“I just hit it with a wrecking bar.” I sat down on the green box, shaken.
He examined the line. “Man, you were less than a hair’s width from frying yourself. That’s an electrical box.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You’d be dead. Jesus, I’m sorry man.”
“That’s alright.”
“No, no, I’m really sorry. Here, come on.”
We loaded the tools in the van and drove out to an empty field. Peter pulled out a small bottle of liquid. He put some of the liquid in his half empty cup of cold coffee and handed it to me. We’d gotten high together before, but this was something new.
“What’s that?”
“Just a little bit of methadone. I’m really sorry about that power line. Here you go, drink it. Have you ever done this?”
“No.”
I gulped down the coffee. It wasn’t as good a high as Kevin’s stuff, but it almost knocked me out. I got out of the van and staggered around in the empty field. Pete followed me.
“You okay, man?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I nodded in and out. I couldn’t walk. Peter helped me into his van and we went back to his house. His wife was a plump, pretty woman named Annie. We walked over to a cliff, sat down, and she talked calmly to me. I didn’t go home for hours, trying to get sober.
I started doing methadone with Peter every morning before work. We mixed it in with our orange juice or coffee and drank it. It took me a while to get used to it. I usually went down pretty hard at first. Pete sped on the stuff and talked a hundred miles an hour telling me outrageous stories of killing people in Vietnam, tales of parachuting, snipers, machine guns and explosives. He’d talk for hours. Then, one morning, I did too much and he and Annie couldn’t keep me awake.
“No more for you,” Pete said.
I went back to just smoking pot with him and have never tried methadone or even felt a remote desire for it since.
Eventually, Peter’s feet finally healed and he didn’t need me anymore. We had a little party at his house after work. He rolled up a couple of joints and sprinkled something in them.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“PCP. I put a little in these.”
“Doesn’t that shit make you wanna jump out windows?” I had been raised on shows like Dragnet in the sixties where there was always some wholesome all-American mom who smoked some pot and then accidentally drowned her child in the bathtub.
“No, no, no. This is a sodium penathol base. It’s real good.”
“Oh.”
We smoked a joint and got very high. Everything was moving, slowly. Annie was supposed to cut my hair.
“Do you want me to cut it still?”
I just nodded. I couldn’t talk. We went out by a cliff and I sat in a chair. All the trees, Peter, and Annie, all slowed down. When they moved, their bodies stayed in their former positions. When Annie moved her arm, there were suddenly five arms. Ten arms, twenty arms, like some blue Indian goddess. While she cut my hair, I watched Peter dancing around, drinking a beer. He moved and sunk with the land. Harry Nilsson sang from a stereo:
We can make each other happy . . .
We can make each other happy!
I became very aware of my head. How heavy it was. The way it moved. Annie’s scissors floated around in front of my eyes.
“Tilt your head back,” she said.
I tilted it back and it kept on going, farther and farther. I didn’t know my neck could bend that far. My head went all the way over and stopped in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. It was black and dark in there. I pulled with all my strength and my head came through my chest and out. But it wouldn’t stop. It kept going backwards, over and through my body, faster and faster, like a thick wheel of meat. Finally, I just grabbed my head.
I heard Annie from far away. “Jake? What’s wrong?”
I was talking in a tunnel. “It needs to stop. It needs to stop going around.”
Peter laughed and put his bearded face into mine. “What’s wrong man? What’s happening?”
I stood up holding my head. “I gotta leave. Go home.”
I staggered to my truck and started it. Somehow, I made it to Susan’s house. Her mother answered the door.
“Hi Jake,” she said happily, “what have you been doing?”
I couldn’t actually form words. “Uh . . . huh?”
She shook her head, disappointed in me. “Never mind. I think I know. Susan’s in her bedroom.”
Susan walked out. “Hi, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing . . . let’s go.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Let’s go.”
We walked down to the truck. The steps were hard to manage. I got inside and watched the steering wheel melt and jump. I kept trying to grab it and hold on.
Susan asked: “Can you drive?”
“It’s the steering wheel,” I mumbled.
“Here, I’ll drive. Where have you been?”
I slid over on the vinyl bench seat. Susan climbed over me and got behind the wheel.
“Where have you been?”
“Pete’s . . .”
“I don’t like that guy.”
We drove out of Cypress and up the big hill to my house. Fortunately, no one was home. I went inside and lay on the bed. I sank down into the mattress and watched the ceiling move farther and farther away.
“Are you okay?” Susan asked.
“Poisoned,” I mumbled and stood up with effort and went into the bathroom. I fell down and started to puke violently into the bathtub. I couldn’t stop getting sick. I could barely hear Susan.
“Should I call somebody?”
“Get out of here,” I said.
“Are you gonna be okay?”
“Please . . . leave.”
I shut the door behind her with my foot and started to get sick again. Then I passed
out on the floor.
I haven’t done either heroin or PCP since that time in the late seventies. I didn’t even know at the time that PCP was a horse tranquilizer, a foul poison for humans and essentially worthless as a drug for pleasure and escape. I liked heroin but it seemed to have too many negatives, the main one being that it was just too hard to get any as I knew no one who did it.
-4-
When I was twenty years old in 1982, I began a roughly two-year period of excessive cocaine use. I spent thousands of dollars on this drug which cost then about 100 dollars a gram, or 300 bucks for an eightball. I dropped out of college in Austin and married Susan. After our small wedding, Susan and I went to the coast. A friend of hers named Mahendra had a condo on the beach in Port Aransas. Mahendra was going to let us stay there free for a week.
We drove down there in Susan’s little Honda Prelude, climbed the three flights of stairs, and settled in. The last time Mahendra had decorated the place must have been in the early seventies. The walls were covered in garish, 3-d paintings of seascapes in wood, seashell, and cloth. The carpet was thick green shag. There were two couches, both wicker, with cold, lime-colored, plastic cushions. Two large recliners faced the gulf. Susan and I sat in the chairs and looked through the tall windows at the ships coming into port. The big tankers floated into the channel from all over the world. Blue dolphins jumped in front of their bows.
When we got tired of the ships, we turned the recliners around and watched Mahendra’s big color TV. There were no small mirrors so we took a heavy, full-length one (framed in seashells) and laid it on the floor. We sat on the shag, did the coke sparingly, and watched TV.
That first night was very cold and everything froze. We fell asleep and woke up around three p.m. We bundled up and walked down to the beach. Everything was dead out there. All the grass, the bushes. The palm trees were limp and falling over. It was like there’d been a heat wave instead of a cold wave and everything had melted. The beach was lined with hundreds and thousands of dead fish. They’d all frozen out in the shallow water and washed on shore. I don’t know what kind of fish they were, maybe mullet, but they were silver and shining and filled the beaches. With the wind coming in from the gulf, they gave off a powerful odor.
Susan and I stood quietly, looking at the calm water. The quiet, silver fish. I’d done a few lines when I got up and my throat was numb. I felt a little nauseous and had to keep swallowing.
“This is really beautiful,” Susan said and smiled. She was wearing a purple, knit cap and her long brown hair fell around her face.
We kissed there for a moment on the edge of the beach until the smell got to us. We ran across the brown lawn in front of the condos and over to some sand dunes. We played around in the dunes for a while, got cold, and went back to the warm condo.
The next day, we walked over and looked at the University of Texas Marine Science Center. There was a little building with some exhibits in it. Some stuff on whales and dolphins. We’d done some coke so we talked about how fascinating dolphins were and how smart they were and how smart we were and on and on. We went over to a small harbor and looked at the big, UT research ship. We checked out the yachts that were docked there. One was called The Yellow Fin and it was huge with very nice wood cabinets and chairs and decks. It was the best boat in the harbor. After admiring it for several minutes, we ran back to the condo.
It became even colder, so we stayed inside and did coke for the rest of the honeymoon. Early in the morning, Susan would fall asleep. I stayed up and watched CNN as well as what seemed like an endless series of religious telethons. The CBN Network was having one with The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson and some gray-haired distinguished-looking guy. At one point, they both stood and prayed at great length for some old woman’s big toe while a number flashed on the screen. Around six a.m., I called them up and gave a woman hell on the phone for over an hour. I yelled at her and she kept saying the same thing over and over: “I’m gonna pray for you, I’m gonna pray for you, I’m gonna pray for you . . .”
After a week, we climbed down the three flights of stairs and drove back north to New Braunfels, a small, picturesque central Texas town settled by Germans. Once in town, we stopped by to see Corky and his girlfriend, Jill, who were friends of a friend. They had a pretty house on the wide, green Guadalupe River. We didn’t have anywhere to stay and they said we could sleep in their extra room. Corky brought out a couple of grams and we sat around and did them that night. Corky was a tall, big person, an ex-Navy SEAL with a black panther tattooed across his back. He often went shirtless to give us the opportunity to admire it. Jill was cute, about our age, and majoring in journalism. Her father was a divorce lawyer in Austin.
Corky and Jill really liked us. I know, because they told us often. Corky and I would be sitting on the couch playing backgammon. I’d do a line with Jill and Susan. Corky would get up, leave the room, and run some coke. He’d come back talkative, a dot of red blood in the crook of his arm.
“You guys are the best friends we’ve got. I mean it, you’re great. We don’t have anybody we can talk to like you guys.”
Jill would agree wholeheartedly and then bring out her slides of Europe. She’d been to Europe several times and since she was a photographic journalist, she took a lot of pictures. We’d watch the slides, listen to the commentary, and do their coke.
We were in the den one night and Corky came home in a bad mood. He said three guys had been fucking with his white German Shepherd in the back of his car.
“I came out of the liquor store with some Pinch and saw three Mexicans poking Baron in the back seat with a stick. I had to kick their asses. I beat the hell out of them.” He seemed like he was embarrassed. “They really started it though. I caught a couple of them in the face with this pinky ring,” he said and displayed his knuckles which were skinned and bruised.
Jill and he had a pool table in the middle of the den. Corky kept asking me to play so I said all right. About halfway through the first game, which he was winning, he asked if we could play for a line.
I hesitated. All I had was the two grams I’d just bought from him. “I don’t know . . .”
“C’mon man, just one line.”
“All right.”
We played the game. Corky scratched on the eight ball and I won. He was very nice about it. A good loser. He did out a big line for me and one for Susan and Jill, too. We did them up and Corky insisted we play again. This time for half a gram.
“No,” I said, “let’s just play for five bucks.”
Corky pleaded and I said okay. I barely won the game. Corky was surprised, and a little angry.
“Let’s play again,” he said.
“I only have a couple grams, Corky.”
“Okay, we’ll play double or nothing.”
“Double or nothing?”
“Yeah.”
“All right.”
Susan and Jill walked up to the table. They hadn’t been watching before. I was having a rare good game and won a gram. I hadn’t looked at Corky while I was shooting, but I could feel his stare. He dropped his stick on the table and it made a loud noise.
“Are you hustling me, man?”
“What?”
“I can’t stand to be hustled. Did you hustle me?”
“Hey Corky, you asked me to play, right? I don’t even know how to hustle.”
“I find that a little hard to believe.”
“You’re the one who wanted to play for coke.”
There was a tense moment then, but it passed. Corky walked to the coffee table and made out some more lines. He did a rail and looked a little more lighthearted. “I still think you hustled me,” he said.
“Just relax,” Jill said. “Quit being a shitty loser.”
“Okay,” Corky said, and reached in his pocket and tossed me a small, sealed
plastic packet. “Sorry, man. Let’s play some backgammon. I know I can beat you at that.”
We gathered around the table, did some more coke from the bag he’d just given me, and talked.
At about one a.m., Corky had the bright idea that we should all take our clothes off and get in the hot tub. He kept pressing it. “C’mon, let’s get naked and jump in the tub. It’s real hot and there’s a lot of room. It’ll be great.”
Jill even chimed in. “Yeah, let’s get in the tub.”
Susan and I declined. We made up some excuses and went to bed early with our original two grams still intact.
A few nights later, we were back in the den doing coke and talking. Corky was selling to all of the fraternity boys and sorority girls in New Braunfels. He was in and out most of the night. When he dropped in, he walked around looking important and busy. He always had a cordless phone to his ear and somebody else on another line. Around eight in the evening, he left to make a run to San Marcos, about twenty miles up north. Susan drove over to her friend Rebecca’s house. I was left sitting with Jill watching TV. She crushed up a rock in a grinder and we did a couple lines. Jill stood up and said, “I’m gonna take a shower.”
She left and I did some more of her coke and watched Monday Night Football. Five minutes later, Jill walked into the den. She was wearing a blue terry-cloth robe and her hair was wet.
“That was a quick shower,” I said.
She rubbed her hair with a towel. “I’m quick.”
She sat down on the couch and let her robe fall open. I could see one of her breasts clearly from where I was sitting on the floor. We talked and laughed and I started to get an erection. I made up a line for her out of my stuff. She did it, leaned back on the couch and stared at the TV. Her robe opened up more and I could see a small brown tuft of hair between her legs. She looked at me and spread her legs a little further apart. I got up on the couch and we kissed a little and she climbed on top of me and fucked me very hard until we both came and she got off of me. We rested and did another line.
