by J. R. Helton
“All right, but I’ll be X-ing also.”
“That just makes it better.”
We walked over to the sad, small florist shop set inside our little neighborhood grocery store that primarily served the working poor of the West Side. The aisles were filled with heavyset women, many with heavyset kids, filling their carts with crap. The majority of Americans who surrounded us in the grocery store that afternoon were obese. One woman and one man were so heavy that each was driving around in an electric motorized three-wheel scooter, filling the carts on the front of their scooters with mountains of processed food to chug home in their Suburbans and vegetate in front of Court TV and American Idol. I briefly felt smug until it occurred to me, beyond walking and my weight, I was more similar than different from all of the poor, fat bastards around me; yet another perpetual drug, food, water, gasoline and TV consuming machine myself.
Dean asked the grocery store florist if he had any more big balloons as we saw a number of Happy Birthday and Happy Mother’s Day balloons floating there with baskets of cheap gaudy flowers. The guy sold us a small bag of them and we grabbed the margarita supplies and left. We then had to figure out where to buy the nitrous oxide.
“We can go to a restaurant supply place or . . . do you have any head shops here?”
We did; a good chain of stores called Planet K, head shops filled with bongs, underground comics and books, glass pipes, and fake books and cans to hide your pot or other drug stashes. I drove us to the Planet K over at the edge of Broadway and Mulberry. We walked inside and Dean took over the place as he did when walking into any establishment. He was always friendly, personable, direct, and imposing, and he usually knew exactly what he wanted, which helps. He also always spread a lot of money around wherever he went, which also helps.
He started asking the cashier behind the counter for some whippets. He was a tall, thin, long-haired young white kid with two big holes in his ear lobes the size of quarters that he’d shoved some silver metal rings into. He and the other friendly young Hispanic girl manning the counter were both also covered in tattoos. The girl had a big ring in her nose and I thought it was cute. They were both cute, this new younger generation of drug users, the way they felt they had to cover their bodies in tattoos, put rings in their ears, punch holes in their faces, to express their rebellion against Corporate American Control. When I was a kid, all you had to do was have hair touching your collar to be a rebel, or maybe a pair of desert boots.
I was never into uniforms. They were dead giveaways, for one. Standing there in Planet K, even though Dean and I looked like two, big, hard-ass DEA agents in our sunglasses, button down shirts, and slacks (Dean still had his expensive suit, jacket and tie on from the airport), the skinny tattooed cashier was able to tell we were legit, perhaps from the way we spoke, our no-bullshit demeanor. It’s usually pretty easy to connect with fellow drug users on some quick, intuitive level, not so much by the language, but by your open-minded attitude and knowledge of the true effects of drugs themselves. The young man knew we weren’t police, but he had to cover his ass.
“Well, we can’t sell you ‘whippets,’” he said. “But—”
“Come on,” Dean interrupted.
“But we can sell you these whip cream canister chargers.” He put a box up on the counter that had two semi-naked women in provocative poses spraying and licking whip cream off each other’s bodies. “These ‘Triple X Platinums’ are pretty popular,” he said and rolled his eyes, “as chargers for whipped cream . . .”
“Like those bongs are for tobacco,” I said and gestured at two walls lined with every kind of glass pipe and bong imaginable. Usually, wherever you found anybody who blew glass, you often found some weed.
“Man, we can’t even say that anymore,” the skinny kid said.
“How’s that?”
“Can’t say ‘bongs.’ We have to say ‘pipes’ or we get shut down.”
“Jesus,” Dean said, “what’s the world coming to. Listen, we have these balloons but what would be nice is if you guys sold the actual whip cream dispenser itself. The large size.”
The kid was way ahead of him and set two different sizes on top of the counter. Dean bought the biggest canister for compressed air, a “four banger” he called it as it would hold at least four nitrous oxide gas canisters at a time. He also bought three twenty-four canister boxes of nitrous oxide. Before we left, I asked the kid if he had any salvia.
“Oh yeah.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Dean said. “Let’s get some.”
“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. Between the X and now this stuff and everything else, I don’t want to add smoking salvia to the mix. I’ve heard bad things . . . then again, you might like it.”
“It’s not that bad,” the kid said, “but you gotta be careful. You really don’t need that much. I just smoke a little pinch and it does me right. You do need a spotter though when you smoke it.”
Dean and I both laughed. “Why’s that?” Dean said.
“Well, let me put it this way,” the kid said. “We’re all standing here in this store in the middle of a city with busy streets and a Jack in the Box next door, but once you smoke that hit of salvia you will open your eyes and you might find yourself in the middle of a green pasture with a big blue river flowing through it. It doesn’t last long, you’ll only be in that pasture for maybe five minutes or so, but as your spotter, and your friend, I can’t let you go play in that river.”
We knew exactly what he meant, and Dean asked for pricing but I cut the deal.
“No way, Dean. I’ve heard nothing good from anyone on that stuff. Tonight is not the night. I can tell you Patricia is gonna give us shit already just for the nitrous.”
“We have sample packs here,” the kid said. “It’s good for two hits and it’s free.”
Dean shook his head. “No, you’re right.” He paid for everything with cash, the kid bagged it up, and we drove back to the house. By the time we got there, Patricia was dressed and having a glass of wine and a cigarette on the back porch. As I assumed, she started razzing us already for buying whippets, a drug she hadn’t done since she was in her teens and twenties, the age of most who did them probably. Dean put all the gear in his room, showered and changed clothes in the guest bathroom, and I did the same upstairs. Dean was keyed up and eager to get on the road so as to get good seats. I was worried it would be crowded as well but Patricia told us both we had hours to spare.
Before we left, I pulled out my pill cutter and chopped in half a couple of hits of X, grabbed several whole pills, 4 mg of Xanax, two 10 mg Valium, and put it all in a small pill canister in my pocket. I had already taken three of my Vicodin 10/500s for the day so I put three more Vikes in my pocket loose along with two muscle relaxants and a large Soma Dean had dropped in my hand earlier. I topped off my wooden box one-hitter with some strong pot. It looked like a cigarette pack, the one-hitter itself also like a cigarette. Dean insisted we leave so I drove us out to the edge of the Hill Country escarpment and through the heavy traffic of Highway 16 to the small suburban country town of Helotes, where we arrived at the Floores Country Store at 6:30 for a show that wouldn’t start until 9:30 p.m. at least.
We bought our tickets while Dean struck up a conversation with a big cop at the door. Floores was a quaint old Texas honky tonk where singers like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings had played before they were famous. Patricia and I went there to see local bands like The Gourds or even older bands like The Subdudes when they came to town. San Antonio was still something of a backwater city when it came to music, not having nearly as many good acts as Austin. Austin, though, was nothing like the small, cheap, laid-back city it had been in the ’60s or ’70s. The place began to overdevelop in the 1980s and was turning into a big city, full of yuppies, hipsters and posers to the point of the creation, packaging, and marketi
ng of what was once a genuine, creative, laid-back and cosmopolitan town. What was left of that was a whole Austin attitude, a pose itself that was being sold. That said, it was indeed still the one, “liberal” city left in Texas, whatever that word meant anymore.
San Antonio, even though it was a bigger city, was still a cheap place to live and was beginning to draw a lot of artists and good music to town. The city itself had yet to catch up and there weren’t enough good venues, or support for the music. The few places in town where a decent act would play like Casbeer’s, Sam’s Burger Joint, or the fire trap White Rabbit for heavier music, were all too small. Floores in nearby Helotes had been there forever and was still one of the best places to hear music. It was similar to Gruene Hall near New Braunfels in that way, the only other place we went to with regularity. Floores had recently added a new, large, outdoor stage for big shows, much like the outdoor venue behind The Nutty Brown Café near Dripping Springs, outside Austin. I didn’t like the Floores outdoor stage as the big audiences it drew for lame-ass, watered down acts were also filled with dumb-ass and drunken, watered down college kids fighting with each other over the port-a-cans.
No one was in the place yet for Schneider, so we grabbed a good table inside and decided to order some food. I had already taken one full hit of X and hadn’t eaten much that day. It hit me quicker than I thought it might. When our food arrived, Patricia and Dean’s plates were okay, but my chicken was a burnt piece of rubber, my mashed potatoes tasteless and cold. X in addition to making you grind your teeth, also makes it difficult to swallow. Halfway through my meal I was getting crushed. It was so difficult to swallow that I found myself just chewing and chewing, thinking: what am I gonna do with this stuff? I couldn’t spit the mush out so I downed it with difficulty with my iced tea. After they’d finished, Patricia and Dean both took a full hit as well.
We talked and caught up. Dean and I took turns going out to the car for hits of pot, waiting for the show. Unfortunately, after the first horrible opening act, a young woman singing in monotone who knew two chords on her guitar, Floores began to fill up with the same drunken college kids I’d seen at their larger shows. There were a few old-timers like us, but mostly, it was the standard twenty-five and under, Texas fraternity and sorority crowd. Even worse, when Schneider came on, he ended up doing his own standard, less creative and experimental, college crowd set. After the first two songs, Dean predicted every song he would play. Schneider himself looked bored as the audience sang along to the more raucous songs like “Tarantula.” He even blatantly shouted out in the middle of one song “Where’s the cocaine in San Antonio?!” and it didn’t sound like a joke. At some point, he went into a long series of laughably bad rap songs and lost me completely.
To make the night more interesting, I took a Xanax and another full hit of X. Patricia as well had been hit by the X by then and asked me for another half a pill as it wasn’t doing much for her yet. Dean had had one and a half, said he was fine, and we split. Back at the house, Patricia was being hit hard and said she regretted now taking that second half hit. I gave her a Xanax as she sat with Dean and I on the couch and he pulled out his nitrous gear. He put the dispenser together, and loaded three canisters into it. He took a few hits and started giggling and then filled it with gas for me. For music, I put on Beautiful People’s “If the ’60s Were the ’90s,” a series of Hendrix re-mixes that Dean said would be perfect for the nitrous, pot, and X.
“Now,” he said, “hold your nose and slowly ease the gas down into your lungs and hold it.”
I did as he suggested, though I had a little trouble with the dispenser trigger, unintentionally blasting out too much gas and wasting it. I got it down after a couple of tries and felt some relaxation and numbing but not much else.
“It’s all about interacting with the oxygen in your brain,” Dean said after taking a big hit from the canister. The super-cold nitrous gas freezes your vocal chords briefly. It was making his voice, and my own, artificially low, like a tape recorder running down its batteries. “It’s the exchange of oxygen and nitro that gives the high,” he said, sounding like the last gasps of HAL in the film 2001. “It is starving your brain of oxygen basically, so you don’t want to ever put a bag over your head with the stuff, or pass out wearing a face mask from a nitro tank, or you will die.”
It took a couple of canisters for me to get it right, but as the gas began to mix with my system, I slowly began to feel the nitrous oxide’s full effects. My fingers went numb, tingled, and a feeling of even deeper relaxation came over me. I opened my eyes and Patricia and Dean were watching me.
“Keep going,” Dean said, and quickly refilled the silver dispenser. “You’re not there yet.”
I took a big full hit, deep into my lungs, and suddenly it hit me, full bore. I briefly passed out and sank down into the couch, my head falling backwards on the sofa, a smile plastered on my face. I was sinking and swimming in a purple and blue and pink cloud of gas and ultimate comfort, completely disconnected from all concern or care beyond the bliss I was experiencing.
I heard Patricia say, “Jake? Are you there yet?” joking.
My voice low, all I could say was “Yes. I’m there . . . I’m completely there . . .”
I opened my eyes and took another hit of gas. Maybe two canisters filled my lungs, and my ears began to ring, as my teeth vibrated and hummed. The television was on but the sound was muted. My vision had been reduced to a pinpoint, all perception had been reduced to a point of humming and drumming light, sight, and sound with the music reverberating inside my skull, Jimi Hendrix’s voice repeating the same mantra over and over again:
Get your, Mind together, Mind together.
It’s all in your mind . . .
My body was gone. I was floating in such a state of pure unadulterated bliss that all I could do was start laughing. Before I knew it, within seconds, it was fading. Still laughing, I looked at Dean and he said, “That’s why they call it laughing gas, buddy.”
I took one last hit sucking whatever gas was left out of the dispenser which lowered my voice into a deep bass. “I understand now,” I said, my eyes closed, my mind drifting. “The Sleeper has awoken . . .”
“What do you call the mouse in the second moon?” Dean asked.
“We call that one . . .” I hesitated, my voice impossibly deep, “Maud’Dib.”
Both Patricia and Dean laughed as I came completely back to myself, but still buzzing, warm and numb. Dean was eager to get the dispenser back and started refilling it, inhaling gas, playing with his voice. He leaned toward both Patricia and me to slowly let a full, visible hit of steamy, freezing white gas seep out of his mouth and up into his nostrils and then collapsed backwards on the couch laughing so hard he was kicking his feet. All he could say was “It’s all a pin point!” and laughed even more.
We tried to get Patricia interested and she briefly took one small hit. She got a little buzz, but didn’t like it. “It tastes like an old tire tube,” she said, which was true. As she watched Dean and I now eagerly chasing the high and acting silly she stood up and said, “You guys are a couple of junkies. I’m going to bed.” I gave her a kiss good night and she went upstairs to sleep.
I saw we had already burned through an entire twenty-four canister box and asked Dean if that was okay.
“Oh yeah. This isn’t that bad. When I lived in New York we used to buy a whole bottle of this shit, the big ones that the dentists use with a mask for your face. We’d work on that whole bottle all night. You can tell when you’re doing too much when your lips start turning purple. Also, sometimes you start getting nauseous. We’d drive around town doing it but you need a designated driver for sure or you’ll wake up upside down in a fucking river. It’s supposed to be good for sex also but when my old girlfriend and I tried it, well . . . we had the big canister all loaded up and were fucking and just as we were both about to come,
we took a gigantic hit.”
“Was it good?”
“I don’t know. We both completely passed out. We woke up a few seconds later and we couldn’t even tell if we came or not. We were laughing though . . .”
It was about two a.m. by then and I was peaking on two and a half hits of good, pure X, 60 mg of hydrocodone, 2 mg of Xanax, 10 mg of Valium, one large Soma, 30 mg of Flexeril muscle relaxants, and several hits of strong Californian medicinal marijuana, all now topped off with large hits of nitrous oxide. This is a good recipe that I would only recommend to an experienced, serious user with a physical tolerance to each one of these drugs. Because I was able to control the intake valve on the compressed air dispenser, I was able to repeatedly teeter on the edge of unconsciousness and bliss. We went through another box and a half and soon the tiring effects of the nitrous gas amplified the effects of the Valium and Xanax, which were finally catching up to me. I began to crash hard at four in the morning. Dean was tired also and started putting everything up. I gave him the remote for the television and he smoked some more pot and began to watch TV in earnest while I went upstairs to bed with Patricia who was in a deep, exhausted sleep.
We were all hung over the next day. It’s not good to mix X with alcohol but Dean and Patricia had both had many beers and margaritas and wine. Patricia also mixed in nicotine by smoking more cigarettes than usual for her while Dean had smoked a big cigar at Floores. The nicotine and alcohol had made them feel even worse than I did. It takes much longer to bounce back from such highs at our age. After dropping Dean at the airport, still wearing my pajama bottoms and t-shirt, I came back home and curled up on the couch with my wife to watch DVDs all day. The MDMA and everything else had messed up my sleep cycle, my energy supply, and I dropped in and out of sleep and consciousness all day which was rare for me. I never took naps as they complicated my insomnia even more. But that Sunday, Patricia told me that, at one point, I’d closed my eyes mid-sentence on her and slept for two hours straight while partially sitting up.
