Drugs

by J. R. Helton

  I could see Heather smiling at me in the blue light at the edge of the pasture. She took a bite from her apple and then offered it to me, both of us laughing.

  “The forbidden fruit.”

  “Just one bite . . .” she said.

  I took a last drink from my wine glass and tossed it far out into the pasture.

  “That’s how it starts . . .” I pulled her toward me. We began to kiss with a real and genuine intensity, built up from months of anticipation and thwarted desire. We were standing near a large, round concrete horse trough at the top of the pasture, pulling at each other’s clothes, moving our tongues in and out of each other’s mouths, sloppy and wet, slobbering all over each other. I was still drunk enough to have lost all thought of guilt or repercussion. It was, for me, a rare moment of complete and utter abandonment, a complete loss of control that was both fulfilling and exciting, the very opposite of the worry and enhanced anxiety that I had encountered in the past with too much cocaine. I simply didn’t care . . .

  Before I knew it, I had pushed Heather to the ground and was humping on her savagely like some enraged silverback gorilla. Both of us still wore our clothes as she wrapped her legs around me tightly, grinding back against my erection, moaning in the night. I noticed the tall grass around us which brought me back to reality. I suddenly remembered other times I’d tried to have sex with women outdoors and how it rarely ever worked out well. For some women, it was exciting or even romantic, exotic, to have sex outdoors in some scenic setting. In the past, I’d obliged as best as possible but hay or grass sticking in your back or bugs biting your ass or water going up your nose as a beach wave crashed over the intertwined bodies, mosquitoes biting your neck, rain falling down—something was always distracting me. Now, I preferred a nice, warm, clean and preferably king-sized bed. I stopped and picked Heather up.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing, let’s try the house.”

  “But Karen—”

  “She’s out for the night.”

  We began to kiss again and tried to walk, both of us still overcome with alcohol and want, unable to stop kissing or holding each other. Once inside the front door, Heather dropped to her knees, unbuttoned and unzipped my jeans, pulled out my erection and moved her mouth down eagerly over my cock. She began to truly suck my dick, so unlike Karen who, after we’d gotten married, usually only blew me reluctantly and poorly. Heather was sucking my dick like she wanted it, that long cock going deep down into her throat, her soft, wet mouth making a sucking, slurping sound.

  I heard a distinct noise, a floorboard creaking, and yanked my dick out of Heather’s mouth with a plop, quickly pulling her to her feet.

  Karen staggered into the dark room. “What’re y’all doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

  “We were out in the pasture,” Heather said, standing in front of me.

  “No,” Karen said, “y’all need to come to bed. Come on . . .”

  She stumbled back into our big bed. I followed her and lay down while Heather ran to the bathroom. Karen turned away from me and was snoring by the time Heather came back into the bed and got under the covers. She’d taken off her clothes and wore one of my T-shirts and black underwear. We began to kiss again, her tongue deep in my mouth, as I turned her over and pulled down her panties. I reached under her, ran my hand down across her labia and up between the cheeks of her butt. I was surprised at how hairy and wet her ass and pussy were as she seemed so cool, trimmed and delicate on the outside, but I liked it. I pulled out my cock and started to slip inside of her but she stopped me and whispered over her shoulder in that accent “I’m still on my period . . .”

  “So what?”

  I began to fuck her slowly while manipulating her clitoris, lightly and quickly rubbing the tip of one finger over it until she began to moan lightly. The alcohol and having already come earlier in Karen had numbed me some and I was able to hold back. Heather grew louder though and I reached up with my other arm from beneath her neck and clamped my hand across her mouth.

  “Heather, be quiet,” I said forcefully.

  She bit at my fingers and I worked them in and out of her mouth to keep her quiet until she came. I sped up and soon came as well. Heather turned around and we kissed some more, leisurely on my part, but still eager on hers. To my surprise she went down on me again, and seemed as much or more energetic as before, burrowing under the covers, taking my bloody dick into her mouth. Even though I could feel my cock thickening, she was making a lot of noise and Karen was beginning to stir. We were pushing our luck, asking to get caught, and she didn’t seem to care. I pulled Heather up and whispered, “We need to stop.”

  She tried to get up on top of me but I stopped her again, pushed her onto her back, and held her face with one hand so she was looking right at me.

  “No,” I said. “Stop. It’s over.”

  She put her arms around me and we kissed. I tasted something vague, the earthy semen and menstrual blood on her tongue.

  “I love you, Jake.”

  “Heather . . .” Her blond hair fell across her face . . . she was beautiful . . .

  She held me tightly and put her head on my chest and said it again. “I love you so much. I always have . . .”

  I didn’t say anything in reply because I didn’t really love anyone at the time except maybe one of my dogs, and, of course, that was different. When she finally fell asleep, I pushed her away and lay awake for what seemed like hours thinking about that wine glass I’d left out there in the pasture.

  -10-

  I was still in my early thirties and virile, or just more interested in sex as a daily respite or escape. If I didn’t have sex with a woman each day, I’d masturbate to feel that brief high of an orgasm, a release leading to some small, short relaxation, usually twice a day. Heather was still living with us and not long after that night in the blue pasture, I also began to have an affair with a young nineteen-year-old girl named Jessica who was working for me as an intern. Often times, I had to work late with Jessica, and she would have to spend the night with us out at The Farm rather than drive all the way back to her father’s house where she lived in Round Rock. Heather had taken to sleeping on another bed in the same large living/master bedroom where we all slept. Like Heather before her, Karen asked Jessica to sleep with us in our bed but, this time, I sensed a trap. Karen was more jealous of this cute, very smart and funny young woman than her friend Heather so I was careful not to touch Jessica in the night. It was extremely difficult to lie there only inches from her young, firm body. Instead, we would go to hotels during the day. Before we reached The Farm every evening, we would stop on some back country road and make-out like a couple of kids or I would go down on her in the back of the Land Cruiser. She had a Betty Page haircut with a dark black dye job, perfectly formed breasts, and a thick black mound of pubic hair between her legs that I would part, sucking on her labia and swollen clitoris.

  Karen’s brother Tommy came by on occasion to hang out, as he had convinced himself he was in love with Heather and her accent. She wasn’t very interested in him but she had overstayed her work visa in America for so long that she was talking to me more and more about the need either to go home or to find a man, any man, to marry in order to become a citizen. Karen, intoxicated on wine, had even suggested, only half-joking, that I could divorce her and marry Heather and then, once Heather had her papers, divorce Heather and re-marry Karen. We’d all laughed but I could tell Heather liked the idea.

  Tommy also began to bring his old outlaw buddy Denny Shaffer over to The Farm. Denny was a giant, tough, but mellowed ex-con in his fifties who was a sort-of de facto country drug kingpin for the whole adjacent, mostly rural county. This was mainly just because he was a user himself. He sold me a little pot once on a friendship deal, but his weed sucked. Plus, he kept m
y money too long in getting me a dinky little half ounce, so I shit-canned any future deals quickly. Denny still shot heroin and speed, if I’d wanted any part of that combo, but I didn’t. The AIDS epidemic was in full force then and I asked him one night if it worried him and Denny said, “Nah, man, that’s a bunch of bullshit. They’re just using AIDS to scare the shit out of everybody, to get ’em to stop fucking and shootin’ dope.” He held up his fingers pretending to hold a syringe. “AIDS dies immediately when exposed to air; you just gotta make sure to clean out the syringe. It’s actually pretty hard to get AIDS. You gotta either be fucked in the ass with no condom, or really sloppy when you shoot up, which can happen.”

  These two old cowboy-hat criminals, Tommy and Denny, mainly just wanted to get high, hunt deer or hogs or coons, drink whiskey, and hopefully get a little sex from their middle-aged girlfriends or wives while working for a living in construction in Austin and taking care of their teenaged children. They were good to have on my side, laid-back friends, though neither was one to cross. Both were on what seemed like perpetual probation for drug use, or, in Denny’s case, an occasional assault. Usually these assaults were justified, and he would tell me about them with the reluctance of a man who used violence selectively and purposely. I even ended up testifying for Denny in one assault case as a character witness—a favor he asked for shyly—after he had taken down one of the bigger assholes in his county who had stolen one of his prized hunting dogs.

  Denny and Tommy admired me unabashedly for the money I made, the drugs I scored, and the three women I had living with me now in a big old house out in the middle of a large, picturesque farm of rolling hills, gigantic oaks, pecan trees, and high coastal hay growing up to a cow’s ass in every pasture. Both men felt I had it wired, Tommy calling me a “pimp” and Denny speaking with genuine awe of my “harem.” They didn’t believe me when I told them that it was all starting to be more than it was worth. I can remember sitting there at dinner one evening, moving my chair back from the table to watch the dynamic of Heather, Karen, and young Jessica talking to one another, reading the easily perceptible jibes and jealousies and tension in their actions and words. Life with them was becoming more stressful than pleasurable, and ultimately, none of the three of us wanted this to go on.

  Rather than manipulating them as I’d initially thought I was doing, I felt I’d become an oblivious pawn, under constant stress from work and the now daily intoxicated fights that were breaking out between all four of us after hours-long drinking bouts, emptying bottle after bottle of wine. Late into one drunken night, Karen grabbed the keys of Jessica’s new car and drove it wildly across the pasture over ditches, bouncing and crashing into bushes and brush, scaring Jessica so thoroughly that she finally left. Heather could also see I wasn’t going to leave Karen, at least not yet, and after a bitter fight that ended with Karen threatening to call immigration on her, she fled back to England before she was caught and deported.

  Karen had run them all off. It was just she and I again, getting hammered daily. And the time passed, years, most of the nineties, which I spent in Austin or out of town on business. For half of our marriage, I wasn’t even there, and when I was, I was drunk on alcohol or stoned on pot.

  For a while, I even tried to grow my own pot to give me more to smoke to replace drinking. It is very easy to grow marijuana. Problem is, you only get the buds from a female plant and there was no real way for the inexperienced layman to figure that out early on. You just had to plant several seeds and hope for the best. I bought a book, tilled a large garden in a hidden, tree-covered corner pasture, planted some strong seeds I’d saved from California, and grew many females in the end. I dried them correctly but the buds were small and weak and I didn’t get much of a high from the pot. I had a lot of it though, several pounds that I didn’t want to unload on some dumb-ass. The stuff also hurt my lungs, given how much I had to smoke to get high, so I went on the internet and found a recipe for making hashish.

  I put the weed in denatured alcohol in sealed jars which sucked out the THC. After a few weeks, I poured out the sticky green liquid onto the biggest sheet of glass I had, an old framed movie poster of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and set it out to evaporate in the sun. I then took a razor blade and scraped off all the excess tar that was left as hashish. It wasn’t very strong, and I must have done something wrong, as it was difficult to smoke. I took to just eating the stuff, smearing it over my tongue and teeth, a foul, black, gummy mixture that never really got me very high. I ended up throwing all the hashish away as well as the bags of homegrown I had in my freezer. Karen had ridiculed me the whole time, and she rubbed it in when I got back on the bottle with her full time.

  She had an affair or two while I was out of town, and I did as well. Our once wild and carefree nights of alcohol and sex had now devolved into screaming fights with one another, usually after we’d finished the third large bottle of wine. It was around that time that my old high school friend Dean Brown tracked me down somehow, out there in the middle of the madness on The Farm. After just one night with us, Dean, a hard-nosed attorney now in Dallas, couldn’t believe the intensity of my marriage, saying to me before he left: “Man, I thought I was pessimistic and sarcastic. You two make me feel like Norman Vincent Peale. You’re like watching George and Martha in a perpetual third act.” He was right, but we were more physical than Albee’s pair. She threw things at me, busting my head with a heavy pewter candlestick one night. I threw a glass at her in return but missed. On another alcohol binge, after she’d slapped me repeatedly in the face, I slapped her back and found myself on top of her, pinning her to the concrete floor, my hands around her neck, choking her as she scratched at my eyes, screaming into her face, “Goddammit, don’t make me hurt you! Do not make me like my father! Don’t do it!” She tried to run over me once in my own truck in a drunken rage, a near miss that left me bruised. She pulled a shotgun on me another night, I called 911, and The Law came to The Farm.

  After one of our public drunken brawls, others called the cops. I took Karen with me out of town on business once in ’96, on location near the small Texas town of La Grange. Half of the La Grange police force ended up nearly arresting us both for public intoxication one evening just outside of our hotel during a screaming fight after Karen threw my car keys into a dark muddy field where they would be impossible to find. Right in front of five of my employees and many other coworkers, all of us in the same hotel, the cops cuffed Karen and I, admonishing us both for what sounded like our basically being two nice-looking, well-dressed, white, middle-class people who weren’t supposed to be doing the kind of shit that got poor white trailer trash or down beaten minorities on the show Cops. In the end, I was finally forced by extenuating circumstances to stop drinking alcohol and smoking pot for several months in a row. Once sober, I quickly left The Farm, moved an hour down south to the city of San Antonio, and divorced that person.

  I moved to an expensive third-floor apartment near downtown SA and only began to drink alcohol again gradually. After rent and bills, I was out of money and could barely afford to drink anyway. I’d usually have only one six-pack in my fridge and it would last several days. When I grew lonely at home, I went down to the Liberty Bar where I knew Mike, the bartender, who gave me a cheap deal on a couple pints of dark Bass beer on tap until I got back on my feet.

  After over twenty-five years of drinking, I am somewhat back to my long ago view of either taking or leaving alcohol. It doesn’t even give me a buzz or get me high any more. Even if I do drink a lot, it only serves to make me drowsy or nauseous, not relaxed and high. Mainly, I just drink now in order to enhance the effects of the opiates in my system, the many generic hydrocodone pills I take on a daily basis, also known by their brand names as Vicodin or Lortab.

  -11-

  The first time I took the synthetic opiate hydrocodone (HC) in the form of Lortab was while working out of town in West Texas. I had a bad sore t
hroat and cold and a medic gave me just one pill for my pain at the lowest strength: 5 mg of HC and 500 mg of acetaminophen, which is also known as Tylenol. The acetaminophen combines with the opiate to get it into your system more quickly so that it can reach the opiate receptors and block or mask the pain you are experiencing. The acetaminophen combination also can help cut down the excessive use of HC, as the former is more dangerous to your liver than the opiates are. Supposedly, a person is not supposed to go over 4000 mg of acetaminophen a day without beginning to damage his or her liver. That would be eight pills a day. Many people do go over this daily intake though—as have I—taking up to twelve, even fifteen pills a day, chasing that original euphoric high and the accompanying physical pain relief. Pills like Norco or Oxycontin are more popular than Lortab, Vicodin, or HC because of their lack of acetaminophen. All of these opiates in pill form are taken today by millions of Americans and are very profitable and powerful drugs to which many are also “addicted” or “dependent,” an important distinction that is usually printed out and explained at your local pharmacy, stapled to the product along with your receipt.