The First Time I did Meth

So there I was, sixteen years old, a little fat in the places most boys my age were not (this, due to a skull-shattering BB gun injury that left me bed-ridden and eating ice cream for several weeks of my 12^th summer on Earth). I was sweating, watching the video of my first real band play its first real show. Eternal Unborn, live at the Xanth. It was a Goth club most days of the week, but sometimes they hosted metal shows, and we were that: A terrible black metal/gothy/confused orgasm of teenage angst that wouldn't mind getting laid by something other than our hands.

I couldn’t believe that was me on the screen, head-banging with a double chin that would have given Slimer from Ghostbusters a run for his money. To think I walked around puffing my chest with adolescent abandon, trying to appear aloof whenever I thought some girl was watching... was mortifying. All these years I’d believed my mother—You’re so handsome— and there I was, with long black hair to boot, the answer to the long-wondered question  of what would happen if Marilyn Manson had fucked Mama Cass. The world must have thought I'd been raised on deep-fried Spam in some Shaka-Bruddah Hawaiian fat farm.

I had to do something. So I called Jon, my friend since second grade, and asked, “How do I lose weight? I mean in a hurry.”

“Work out,” he said.

“Fuck you, Jon” which meant who the hell do you think you’re talking to, here?

               

“Alright. Well…” He stopped to think. I imagined him holding his chin, looking off into the timeless ether in which all teenagers search for their leaps of intuitive brilliance. “You know, Shelby lost like fifteen pounds in ten days.”

               

“Shelby isn’t fat.”

“That’s what I’m saying. And he still lost that much…”

               

I stared at my man-tits in the mirror, an idea spreading its roots along my neocortex. “Then imagine what it’ll do to me.”

So it was that five days later, after innumerable calls and verbal melees, we were able to convince the neighborhood leg-breaker to sell us a poisonous, over-cut, over-priced baggie of Crystal Methamphetamine. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited. I was. I felt mysterious, as if I’d just wandered into the back room of a club, hypnotized by prurient whispers, cigarette smoke, and clinking crystal glasses; by the dazed immortality shining from each patron’s eye, a thing that filled me with a need to understand and explore that empty bliss for myself.

We were in my mother’s office, at the front of the house, a living room, dining room, and hallway between. Plenty of space to announce her approach. I took out a Dead Kennedys CD case, and Jon used my ID card to crush the shards into a fine powder. He cut it into lines—terrible, asymmetric things that looked like the trace bursts of a ghost's ejaculation. We stood there for a second, hunched over the desk, two boys ready to open the cover page of their first PENTHOUSE.

“You first,” I said.

               

John shrugged and sucked it through a straw. His face flexed, and he took two steps back, eyes watering, bottom lip trembling as that living fire I would know so well carved a path into his brainstem. I waited to see if his head would explode, if I’d have to rush to the kitchen to fetch sponges. But no explosion came. He only flexed his forearms, like he was uncoupling a few million potential babies into his underwear, and leaned against a file cabinet with a contented sigh. “Go ahead, man. It’s all you.”

I shoved the straw into my nose so far I thought I would bleed. I felt like the reverend’s son stealing his first kiss, using too much tongue or not enough, unaware of what to do with his hands. After the sharp pain receded, I listened for my mom. She was on the phone,  a chattering sparrow in that world all parent’s live, oblivious of their children’s evils.

One … Two … On three I pressed my other nostril closed and sucked. It seemed in the moment I inhaled that I could feel the drug tearing into my mucus membrane. A Claymore detonated behind my eyes. I stood bolt straight, some fat vampire risen from its crypt, all of my inconsiderable muscle mass at full seize, my eyes bugging, my lips peeled back from my gums. 

After it passed, I jumped a full three feet and pumped my fist (don’t make fun of me, it was 2000, and Jersey Shore was a yet un-manifested social parasite) in victory.

It was a molten arrow of consciousness, wired with barbed tethers, dragging its way down the columns of my spine, condensing my stomach into a hot boulder of pressure, and filling every pore with vibration. My bones were clinking wind-chimes. My muscles danced and rearranged themselves. It was an instant injection of evolution—30 million years compacted into a single bar-room punch. I felt as if I could fell God with an uppercut. That I could stomp my foot and send a shock-wave through the earth that would tear apart some Chinese village, rice-paddies and all.

I was hooked. And though I can’t tell you all of my adventures here—the dark, and painful snapshots—I can say with some certainty that I’m grateful for all of it. To have survived it, and come out the other side with the wisdom to which all sufferers are heir.

I’ll write more when I should be working. This will all be read some day. And my agent will kill me for telling you bastards so much about me. However, I live by Twain's maxim: The softest pillow is a clean conscience.

I've paid my penance, and have nothing to hide.