by Damon West
He was right. Brokerage houses did not play around with that kind of thing. My lifestyle was going to need to be rebooted. But how? I explained my dilemma, telling him that if I wasn’t doing rails of coke in the parking garage or bumps in the bathroom, I was down there sleeping in my car or under my desk on my lunch break. I admitted it was getting out of hand. And expensive.
“Dude!” he exclaimed with a huge grin. “I have the cure for you. Come on.”
We hurried into the elevator, where I followed him into the parking garage. He was getting visibly more excited the closer we got. The kind of anticipation I would get before my first bump or rail of coke for the day. So, that’s it. I figured we were going to snort some rails. I got that feeling in my bowels that coke addicts get when they’re about to get their fix. I liked that feeling.
“Where are you parked?” he asked.
“Over there.” I pointed. “The green Explorer.”
He said he would meet me at my car, but first he needed to grab something from his car.
No problem. I could follow orders well when I knew I was about to get jacked up. It was much needed. My day had stalled out before 8:30 a.m., and I felt like absolute hell.
I got in my Explorer, cracked the windows a bit, and lit a cigarette. Doing coke, drinking, and smoking all went together hand-in-glove. I smoked about half of a pack a day at that point. Marlboro Lights, in the box. Once situated, I began my pre-coke ritual. So much of doing drugs revolved around rituals. These rituals were just as addictive as the drugs themselves because your endorphins began releasing, getting you high, before the first grain of cocaine ever got up your nose. Your brain’s chemistry is pretty wicked like that.
Checking my mirrors constantly, I thought about all the things I could get done at work once I was high. Depending on how good this stuff was, I was probably going to be buying some of what James was holding. Seeing him coming in my passenger rear-view mirror, I began to get excited. Every addict knows this feeling, right before liftoff.
“Dude,” he said as he got into the Explorer, “you’re gonna love this stuff.”
This was exactly the news I was wanting to hear. I tried to hand him a rolled up twenty-dollar bill for snorting. It was his stuff, so it was only proper etiquette he gets the first rail. I was civilized about this.
He looked confused, puzzled by my gesture.
Ignoring my hospitality, he pulled a sunglass case out of his pocket, opened it up, and showed me the contents. He reached in, pulled out a baggie with what looked like chunks of salt. In his other hand was a glass pipe. In the case, there was also a torch-lighter, like the kind you would use to smoke a cigar. What the hell?
“James, what’s that stuff?” I asked. “And why do you have a pipe?”
“Damon, you’re about to be cured of both your nasty cocaine habit and your energy problems in one fell swoop. This is crystal meth. Ice. It is a miracle drug. Once you do it, you will never do anything else.”
“James!” I roared. “I’m not about to do that white-trash drug. What the hell is wrong with you? That’s trailer park dope. Where’s the coke? You brought me down here for some hillbilly crack?”
“Trailer park? Damon, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He extolled the virtues of meth as if it were a stock he was selling. Gram for gram, he said, meth cost twice as much as the “nasty” coke I loved snorting. He understood the affinity I had for coke; he was there once, too. Since trying meth, however, he said he could be in a room with a mountain of cocaine and wouldn’t even dip his pinky in it for a gummie.
“I mean it. Once you smoke this, you will never touch coke again,” he promised.
I thought about that for a second. How many times had I wished I was not addicted to coke? The answer was, every single time I ran out and had to come down. The come-downs sucked on coke. Not only that, but I couldn’t even have sex on the stuff anymore, which was the most self-defeating aspect of it all. I wondered if he was for real.
Desperately I asked, “James, what’s this stuff like? Will I freak out or anything? You always see people on Cops acting crazy on that stuff.”
“It’ll give you instant energy,” he said calmly, “with no negative side effects.”
“You sound just like my little brother. Almost verbatim.”
That made him laugh. “This stuff is amazing. You’ll see. Ready to launch?”
I nodded in affirmation. I was ready to launch. I needed something new. Maybe Grayson was right all along. There was only one way to find out.
My gut started bubbling with anticipation, a sure sign my brain was already getting me high.
“Smoke this,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”
I took the pipe in my left hand and reached for the torch-lighter with my right. He did not give me the lighter.
Since it was my first time, he said he’d light it, because if I burned the dope, it would ruin both my experience and, more importantly, it would ruin his dope. “Hold the pipe a little bit away from your lips. It’s not like smoking weed. You don’t want to suck in too hard because you’ll create a vacuum, sucking the dope down the stem of the pipe and possibly into your mouth. It would be quite the chemical burn. Easy enough. Let’s go.”
I raised the glass pipe to my mouth, made sure there was some space between my lips and the glass stem, gave him a thumbs up with my other hand, and watched him apply the heat of the torch to the bowl. The solid lump of meth started to change its state, becoming a liquid.
Having smoked more than my fair share of bong hits, I was able to relate well to his instructions. It was a smooth, almost sweet taste. Then I started to feel it. My brain began firing like crazy.
Oh!
My!
God!
Every hair on my body stood up. My eyes popped open. My ears felt like they opened too. Whatever was going on inside me was so euphoric I felt like I was transforming. It was intense to the point James noticed it. He removed the heat from the bowl and told me to keep taking the hit in, to clear the bowl out. How long had I been inhaling? Ten seconds? A minute?
When the bowl cleared, James pried the pipe from my hand. My grip was tighter than he expected, or maybe it wasn’t. Pipe in hand, and a huge grin on his face, he said, “Okay, Damon, exhale slowly. Feel it travel out of your body.”
My entire body was tingling. I felt semi-aroused, even. It was as if all my nerve endings were on fire, in a good way. My fatigue was instantly gone, replaced with an alertness I had only experienced during football games or times of great fear. James was smiling a smug look that said, “I told you so.” He was justified in his feeling. That was by far the best feeling I had ever experienced doing any drug.
“Okay, you were right,” I said. “That was amazing. James, I am wired. Not the wired, edgy feeling from coke, but alert, with nothing clouding my vision. Just like you said. Just like my little brother described to me. I stand completely corrected.”
He was about to say something, but I cut him off.
“Can I hit it again?”
He returned the pipe to my hand, gave me the torch, and walked me through the ritual one more time. My attention to detail for this was at a premium. Nothing interested me more than doing all things necessary to remain at the high I felt that first time. I would never again need coaching to smoke meth.
After an extremely productive day at work, James and I went to a head shop in the Deep Ellum neighborhood, so I could buy my own pipe. The options were limitless. They came in all shapes, colors, and sizes, ranging from cheap to outrageously expensive. I felt like a kid shopping for a new Little League bat. New equipment in hand, I set off for my apartment in Uptown with a bag of James’ meth. Or, as he called it, ice.
After christening my new pipe with its first batch of ice, my first order of business was to call Grayson. I was going to eat some crow about all
the things I had said about his drug of choice, which was now my drug of choice. At a minimum, I was going to come off as a hypocrite, but that was nothing new. His reaction was not what I expected.
“Grayson, you’ll never guess what happened to me today,” I said.
I told him all about my new experience, and I admitted I was completely wrong about the way I judged him for doing meth. He was quick to shake it off. He hopped in his car that night and drove from Austin to my place in Dallas to try my batch of dope.
In my addict world, this seemed like the most normal thing ever. What brother wouldn’t share something so great with his sibling? Looking back on it now, I realize how dark, twisted, and evil it was to want to share something so toxic with my own flesh and blood. I was sick, and so was he. This was that first commodity I wrote about earlier, misery. Meth was about to open up a whole new version of misery in my life and the lives of so many innocent others.
As stated earlier, misery is only one of two commodities that are important. The other commodity is time. It is antithetical to misery. Where misery is in abundant supply, time is precious and rare. In fact, time can never be recovered once it is gone. It is the great equalizer, affecting every person—young and old, male and female, rich and poor, black, white, and everything in between—the same way. All the money in the world cannot purchase you one more second of time. It is worth more than gold.
The introduction of meth into my world would be an education in both misery and time. Misery would be heaped on by the tons, while time would be siphoned away by the days, weeks, months, and years.
Speaking of days, I was up for four days that first time I smoked meth. Four days. That’s about one hundred hours. The maintenance was minimal, having only to hit the pipe three or four times each day. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I felt like I got so much done. In reality, I was spinning my wheels, but I was no longer grounded in reality.
My position with UBS became more tenuous. Staying up for days at a time came with a big price. Sleep debt. Sleep came on whichever day of the week I finally crashed. Obviously, as James pointed out the day he gave me my first hit, missing work as a broker-in-training was not going to be conducive to me maintaining my position. My time at UBS was limited. Even I could see that. No matter, my love of the vices was exacerbated on meth. I could drink all I wanted on the stuff and never get drunk. I could party all night and work all day. It was an aphrodisiac.
Studying for the Series 7 became more difficult, not less, on meth. After failing to pass the test on my first attempt, I was fired from UBS I felt indifferent to my firing because I was going to meet my dealer at noon. Singularly focused on scoring more dope, I exited the building with security, left that fateful parking garage for the last time, and never looked back. With my morning suddenly free from obligations, I called my dealer (James’ dealer) to see if he could meet me early. It was time to get high(er).
With meth firmly in the driver’s seat, I became a passenger on a never-ending bender. I was a slave to that drug. On the rare occasion I ran out, the life was completely drained from me. I was useless, often having trouble holding my head up during the brief interval of being awake. My body had to have the drug. As Grayson described to me in Austin, it became my energy.
Soon, I discovered the downside: running out. Like every addict before me, I made a firm resolve to never be without the drug. Money was quickly being depleted from my bank account with no replacement in sight. It was time to collect my thoughts and focus on ways to earn some money. I wanted to get rich quickly, so I had begun to dabble in the world of brokering deals, trying to become a middleman, and draw a percentage of each deal I could put together. For lack of a better term, I was a con man. But hadn’t this always been the case while in my addiction?
My new “job” was finding real estate and business ventures looking for investment capital. There was the sale of the Superconducting Super Collider in Waxahachie, Texas, for peanuts out of the billions the government wasted on the project, that got the attention of some studio executives in Hollywood.
There were restaurants and clubs in Dallas that always needed funding, and my connections were good enough to guarantee me a free tab some nights and the freedom for my friends and I to walk past the velvet ropes and lines in which everyone else waited. So many different deals. Dallas was like a playground for a young, decent-looking guy who could talk a good game. Emphasis on the word “talk.”
Casino
Meanwhile, I was trying to get together with the MGM Grand as a casino operator, along with some former NFL and NBA stars as partners to build a casino in Philadelphia. The project combined the political side of my life, bringing Mauro and Schechter in to run the government and lobbying side of the deal. Of all the balls in the air, this one was the biggest, worth millions for everyone involved if I could close it.
Despite the opportunities I was creating, and the potential for wealth that awaited me, I could never stay focused. This is the dilemma of the addict. Women, drugs, and alcohol called me each day like a siren’s song. I was a slave to the vices of the big city. With too many balls in the air, dropping one or two was inevitable. While these balls dropped one by one, I kept telling myself it would all be okay as long as I could close the casino deal in Philly. Looking back on this event with sober eyes, I realize the absurdity of my logic.
Within a year, the casino deal imploded. Among other things, there were questions of legalities concerning the vote for casino legalization in the Pennsylvania Legislature. To the others, it was just one of many potential deals on the side of their legitimate careers. To me, it was an existential nightmare. I’d gambled on the casino and lost.
My life began spinning out of control more rapidly now. All my “friends” came from the dope world. My contact list in my phone became a line-up of criminal underworld suspects. Almost everyone around me was into something illegal. No matter, I continued to rearrange the deck chairs on my Titanic.
Going out in the Dallas scene usually required me traveling with a glass pipe and some meth. While my Dallas clubbing buddies were in the bathrooms doing coke, I would steal off to my car and smoke the pipe. Increasingly, I was having to smoke more and more of it to get high. I needed to find some better dope. I needed to go straight to the source, the country white people who made their own and the Mexican gangs from East Dallas who got it straight from the cartels. I found connections into both worlds.
By the summer of 2005, my apartment in Uptown was host to some very nefarious characters. The neighbors had to be suspicious of all the Hispanics and rough-looking backwoods white people traipsing around this trendy, upscale enclave. If I was concerned about it, I had a strange way of showing it. It got to the point that the Mexican gang-bangers were bringing their batches of dope into my apartment to break it all down, cut it, and distribute it. The entire second-floor apartment never slept. My logic was that since so many in Uptown partied and did drugs, it just looked like more of the same. Except for the fact that it wasn’t.
All the disgusting crimes you associate with the meth underworld (theft, identity theft, credit card fraud, drug dealing, etc.) could be had at my Post Uptown Village apartment.
Gato
My roommate and I got in pretty deep with a Mexican gangster named Gato. This guy was pretty ruthless. When you run up massive debts with those types of people, you get extorted to death. On more than one occasion, Gato brought people in there who were bound and gagged. These were the ones who owed him money, but had no apartment to barter for their tabs. He would put them in my shower and beat them with a rubber hose or burn them with cigarettes. Eventually, he got himself a Taser, which he loved to fire up on anyone at any time. I despised Gato, but I tolerated him because he had the best dope, and I owed him thousands. At this point, only an act of Congress or an act of God could get him and his crew of thugs out of my apartment.
I received th
e latter.
In September of 2005, my parents called to let me know their home had sustained severe damage as a result of Hurricane Rita. It would be uninhabitable for months. The housing situation was so dire in Jefferson County that my father stayed with his good friend Barry Warner in Houston, while my mother lived at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, out of her office, in Beaumont. Until the repairs could be completed, they needed me to care for my eighty-four-year-old paternal grandmother Marge and their boxer Bogey. They thought I was successfully working a job engineering deals and had no idea what was going on in my life. Otherwise they would have never trusted me with such responsibilities.
The news of my father bringing over my grandmother and a dog cleared out the apartment of thugs and drugs. Gato and his boys understood my middle-class upbringing; they knew my father would call the cops if he saw such shady characters as them. After driving over thirty hours to Dallas in bumper-to-bumper evacuation traffic (a trip that normally took six hours), my father arrived at a clean, normal apartment, and dropped off his precious cargo.
He pulled me aside and relayed to me that something terrible was happening to my grandmother. He suspected the shock of having to move suddenly was shutting her down. He said this sometimes happened to older people when crisis occurred. I needed to watch her closely, he told me. Then, he handed me one of my grandmother’s credit cards and some cash, looked me in the eyes, and told me how much he and my mother appreciated me stepping up and taking on this responsibility. He said this was what family was all about. I felt like Judas taking his thirty pieces of silver.
Upon moving my grandmother into my room, I realized she was, indeed, not herself. She was incoherent and didn’t even remember who I was.
At first, I was attentive and capable. My roommate helped out as well. I fed her three times a day and got her snacks, her cigarettes and the ice she loved to crunch. She was able to go to the bathroom and shower herself, so thankfully I did not have to offer any care in those departments. She slept most of the time, rarely watching the TV shows she loved. From time to time she had lucid intervals where she would be like her old self, and we would discuss some history.
