dinner party

So I guess i'll start this off with a story of simple blindness...

it was a tuesday afternoon in summer.  after waking up around 1 and going skating for a few hours by myself, and burning the shit out of my hands on the metal ramps that had been sitting in the blazing sun all day, i went back home and layed in front of the fan in my bedroom for a few minutes before making my way into my desk...
My dad built me this desk for my room YEARS ago, and through all the fights, and staying up all night getting geeked out of my skull, it had slowly turned into looking more like one of the lunchtables from high school.  band names, every fucking curse word in the book, wierd lyrics from sonic youth and bad religion songs carved deeply into the wood my dad took weeks sanding, staining, and coating relentlessly with laquer over, and over again...
the desk was great because the top hinged up so you could have little compartments to keep paper, pens, stamps....or in my case, photographs, drugs, pipes, tinfoil, lighters, and stupid little fucking keepsakes from my years of doing drugs...we all had 'em...little fucking pins, ticket stubs, stickers.  pointless garbage dispensed from the quarter machines outside grocery stores at 3 am while on some 4 day binge with a running buddy that we just "never wanted to forget".
so i dug through my desk while simultaneously holding all the shit that was stacked on TOP of it to the tilted surface, and found my little black tinted bags filled with what always seemed to be the ever-dwindling supply.  ripped the cap off my usual pen-tube, got out my shell gas card that had 63 cents on it for the entire 4 years i had it, and cut 3 skinny little rails right there on my gouged-out desk, being careful not to slide any of the brownish/white powder into the etched lyrics to "youth against fascism" by sonic youth...

6 minutes and an eternity later, john pulls his blue monte carlo into the driveway of the house i am hardly EVER at anymore and honkys the horn...somehow he always knew when things were going well with the family...cause i'd have the same phone number for more than a week.
i drag myself, shuffling, down the stairs and slump myself into the passenger seat of his car in silent elation...staring bugeyed into the blue sky mumbling along to the stone temple pilots as he whipped through town driving past any girl with shorts above the knees TWICE on the way to the only liquor store that would sell to his dumb ass.
45 minutes [that felt like an hour and a half] in blistering humidity and parking lot traffic later, we arrived at his dad's vacant house [he was always on some trip with his newest girlfriend...since being divorced, he made it a point to stay away from his children] with a warm case of Icehouse, and whatever was left of a small bottle of Jim Beam he picked out to "impress" his "friends" at some high school party later that evening with his hard-liquor/cowboy drinking skills...
I immediately turned on some music and b-lined for the greenhouse off the back entrance to the house...
this time was different, johnny boy followed me...and being as blown out of the sky as i was already, i couldn't exactly make a quick getaway...and besides - it WAS his house. [not too mention, john had quite the affinity for knives and guns - getting smart around him in an empty house was almost always a bad idea]

i set about opening my smokey colored bags on a wooden stool in the middle of the room, and carefully unfolding the tin foil being sure not to dump any of the precious resource carelessly onto the floor.

john sat ever so patiently on a stool to my left at the table...watching my every move like a child seeing an ant hill for the first time. almost grinning and the simplicity of the deadly relationship between drug and user that was unfolding before him in, of all places - his dad's greenhouse.
between the second and third pass with my pen tube, he asked an obvious question, and i gave him some form of the vaguest answer i could drum up.  consumed with my actions..or rather, reactions.

the next 3 or 4 hours are a blur, really.  i don't remember doing anything but watching john cut something with some samurai-jack knife repeatedly...and he seemed entertained, so i wasn't really worried.
i do remember driving all the way across town to his mom's boyfriends house, and the whole time him nagging at me and questioning the qualifications of my appearence and demeanor to actually sit down with his family and hold a conversation, let alone eat a meal.
All i remember of dinner was briefly looking around to see everyone wearing nice clothes.  and quickly realizing i had my sweatshirt on inside out to hide the blood stains covering the sleeves.  this threw me a bit off tilt, and i started gazing emptily about the room observing all the differences between their happy home, and the places i usually had tuesday night dinner.  [ i was a regular mooch at several friends houses, and the 7/11 by the highway - the guy would let me use the microwave for my ramen and shit ]

I slowly convinced John to leave after dinner, and as soon as we got in his car, i started pulling my bag out again to bump a little while we were driving downtown....as soon as he saw it the questions started again..."FUCK MAN, you really need more?!  i don't want you doing that shit in here - lemme pull away from the house first, christ."
the chastising was quickly followed by praise for "behaving" during dinner...he couldn't believe how normal i seemed with the amount of drugs i had injested before his very eyes.  which for some reason, i wore as some scum-bag fucking joy-band on my arm....a teenage pride - being better at dying than your friends.
and at that instant...it hit him for the first time, the same way it hit me years ago-

"do you do that much all the time?"
johnny boy finally came to his senses and realized the "normal" me he'd known for years now was on so much heroin on such a constant basis, that i couldn't function otherwise.

this was the 2nd to last time i saw john.