GIRL

Like all cheese-ball, fuckhead stories...there is always ONE.  One girl who left a mark, a fingerprint on the person i would come to be in the years following a departure of sorts.  That girl, was J.

To keep this from running to an absolutely absurd length, i'll shorten certain parts to keep it bearable.

I had been busted the final time.  Facing 5-7 years in prison at the age of 17 wasn't looking like a fucking vacation to say the least.  So needless to say, my day to day spirits weren't exactly of the "jolly" nature.  I had stopped calling my PO, and my NA sponsor [i was also mandated to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings on a daily basis.] hadn't heard from me in weeks.  So after a tortuously quiet week in school planning how i was gonna jump the train downtown and spend the weekend escaping in to the wonderfully dark and familiar hole i had dug with a needle and spoon, it was FINALLY time to break the schedule that had been set for me.

I walked out of the school door nearest the parking lot [the first and only time i had ever done this] to find my sponsor sitting on the school stairs waiting for me.  "What a fuckin prick" i said to myself staring at him in a mass of High Schoolers swimming towards their parents cars.  He politely informed me [more like forcefully dragged me to his car] we were going to an NA convention across the state line for the weekend.
Great...fucking great i thought [out loud] not only do i get to NOT GET FUCKING HIGH, but i get to spend an ENTIRE WEEKEND SURROUNDED BY SMELLY ASSHOLES LIKE YOU IN SOME DINGY HOTEL CONFERENCE ROOM WITH WALLPAPER FROM THE 80'S, SHITTY COFFEE AND VENDING MACHINE FOOD!
I made it a point to remind him of that the entire drive there...looking back on it, it was kind of ridiculous.  A grown ass human being bitching, moaning, and crying for a 3 hour drive in a shitty Saturn sedan.

After an awkward nights sleep at a relatives house, we arrived and my sponsor left me a little slack on my chain.  He was popping in and out of hotel rooms, drinking pots of rancidly black coffee...If you've never been to an NA convention - it's basically an incestuous gang bang of brainwashed adults acting like greedy, sex depraved infants...fueled by truckstop caffeine.

I sat next to the indoor pool chainsmoking and staring at the mobs of instinct-suppressed-humans throbbing around the lobby.  Then i noticed HER.
Stupidly enough, she was playing ping pong with the only other guy i recognized in this whole human zoo.  Matt.  Matt was into metal and covered in tattoos.  I sheepishly walked over and sat down on a bench next to the table, acknowledging him as i did so.
He came over after a few games with this GIRL in tow, asking if i wanted to go out to her car and listen to some metal CD's and smoke more cigarettes for a while.
I quickly gazed at the GIRL standing in front of me and was immediately awestruck.  Pink and orange hair, there must have been 20 piercings in each of her ears, various neon articles of clothing, and knee-high black platform boots.
I struggled, and eventually a quiet "yeah" slipped through my lips as i stared into her gorgeous blue eyes, blushing like a pre-teen meeting a hot babysitter.
We went outside for an hour, them in the front seat, me sitting alone in back....listening to ear piercing black metal at blood curdling volume levels, staring into the rear view mirror at this punk-goddess.  Matt eventually got bored and asked if we wanted to go inside.  She told him we'd be inside in a little while.  So we sat outside her car on the 10 foot wide strip of grass between the parking lot and the highway this hotel called a "lawn" for 6 hours talking about everything we'd been through and done, bands we liked, our friends...giggling and trying to avoid eye contact the entire time, but being too enamoured with eachother to not look up "one more time".  Literally until the sun went down.
About this time her sponsor came out and was ready to leave [she had driven them both, along with Matt], J asked her if she could give me a ride back.  She and my sponsor obliged, and we went careening down the freeway at 95 until reaching the far west suburbs of the city. [J always drove this fast...and in doing so managed to flip her, AND her father's car within a week of eachother]

I leaned over her seat from the back seat and kissed her on her cheek on the drive home.  We stared at eachother in the rearview mirror the whole way back.  I've never felt that way since.

We started a love-smitten "hang out" session that quickly turned into seeing eachother every day i could make the 45 minute drive to her house after school, rehab, and a meeting.  A week after we had met, i held her hand as she threw the last 4 syringes of Demerol into the sewer at the end of her driveway.  We colored on her walls and made out for hours.  We literally couldn't stop holding eachother.

One night on the way to an NA meeting together, she pulled in to a school parking lot and told me to get in the back seat.  We fucked on her leather seats for 2 and a half hours until both of us were so exhausted we couldn't go anymore.  The windows fogged up while our sweaty skin stuck together as we lay breathing heavily onto eachothers chests, resting for a while before heading home to tell our parents about a "great meeting".

The next 3 years of my life were spent in that general fashion.  Every waking moment i possessed i spent with J.  We did everything...we were like children discovering things for the first time again.  We went on long meaningless drives just listening to our favorite records, we walked around the city chasing eachother through the parks, we'd dress up in winter clothes in the middle of August and blow bubbles in the middle of the street.  She would paint, and i'd play guitar until dawn when we'd fall asleep holding eachother in her bed watching tank girl or some shit.  We'd wake up at 4 in the afternoon, have INCREDIBLE sex until 10:30 at night, get more tattoos, and drive to my best friends house and watch horror movies all night and talk about particle physics until the coffee shop opened in the morning.  All the while, inching through my last year of school, graduating from rehab, going to NA meetings 5 times a week, and slaving off my drug charges in community service. 
I think it's safe to say i was walking the thinnest tightrope i'd ever been on, and loving the pressure and stress of it.  Life is much more fucking exciting when your freedom is constantly being threatened.  The, "this might be the last time i feel the hot sun on my back" approach definitely gives your daily mood a little lift.

Life was fucking horribly perfect.  Then came college.

I never had any inclination to go at all, but J's parents were rich and hell bent on her not only GOING to college, but succeeding. [and they made it very clear they "didn't want her to be with me...AT ALL"....i quote]  And when i say rich, i mean RICH.  Like 3 Audi's, 2 lawyers, 1 Son preparing for the bar-exam, and an ex-drug addict punk/artist/rebel Daughter RICH.  Picture perfect suburb, right?

And that's kind of where it ended.  She fought her parents for show...to make it look like she cared about me, and wanted to stay.  But behind closed doors, she accepted their money.  She was too scared to fight for the life we had dreamed of in California.  Didn't want to put in the effort, and bailed on me.
She took her parents money, bought a bunch of china white [a mutual friend of ours informed me a few weeks after our split she was "back on the shit"] and ran off to art school in Los Angeles....our plan in the first place.

Not a lot of closure to that story huh?  That's how i feel too.  It still keeps me up every few weeks, thinking about her, where she is, what she's like.

That is my GIRL story.  The one that fucked me up real good.  For weeks i slept all day, i was scratching my self until i'd bleed, and my arms and legs were covered with finger-wide lesions that stung like hell when i'd get in the shower, stick to my clothes - and the scabs would have to be peeled away every morning after i woke up.

I will never understand why things wound up that way, or how a person could be so lazy to just "give up on a dream"...It's actually a pretty large flaw i have.  I've yelled and screamed at friends of mine for settling for less than they dreamed of as a child.  I just don't get it.

I just don't get it.

Methamphetamine

I've never done it.  This is the only drug i've heard of that I can consciously say i have never ingested.  That statement carries some sort of arrogant pride in my ears.  It's terribly embarassing nature makes 98 percent of people i know, stand up human beings - wish they had never met me....While for some sick twisted reason, i carry the weight of that statement proudly.  There's a glare in my eye as i mention it to you, and i can see your face reacting to it over, and over again.  As if i was saying "top that, fucker".
The reason Methamphetamine became a part of my heroin soaked puzzle isn't because it's the only thing i've never touched.  And to say i've never set a finger on it would be a lie.

About a year and a half into my heroin addiction, me and my running buddy came to a quick realization.  I say quick only because it seemed to occur to both of us simultaneously one fall afternoon.  If we had jobs, we wouldn't need to steal all this shit to buy more dope.  A genius thought, i know....
This thought was then followed promptly, and abruptly by several realizations.
1) We can't get any job that would drug test us
2) We can't get any job that would cut into the time we spend getting high
3) We can't get any job that wouldn't pay us at LEAST 400$ a week. (Our current running MINIMUM for how much tar we'd smoke in 7 days)

This narrowed down the job market considerably, and obviously - wasn't the best way to find work.  But we found one job we knew wholeheartedly we could succeed at, and would flex to our "busy" schedule.
We'd decided practically overnight we were going to cook, and sell Meth to pay for our heroin habit.
A seemingly very logical leap for a couple of junkies in need of dope money, yet unable to land a respectable job.  So this is where our "logic" lead us...

Believe it or not, we did know our chemistry.  In fact, my running buddy [who will obviously remain unnamed] is currently finishing up his degrees in Nuclear, Chemical, and Civil Engineering while maintaining an astounding 4.0 GPA. 
So we printed off every legitimate copy of directions for manufacturing Methamphetamine we could find, cross referenced all of them, and then multiplied the amount of ingredients by 10, so our batch size would be large enough to cover our dope habit, and leave enough room for purchasing supplies.
Turns out we weren't done stealing shit quite yet...Why would we spend the little bit of money we had on supplies when we could just steal them, and then make nothing but profit?  So off we went, scavenging for everything on our shopping list like a soccer mom making a pasta dinner.
We were horribly paranoid of someone catching on, so we convinced our friend Charlie to let us borrow his mom's van when we made our trips to the store.  That way, if there was any security footage of us stealing all these ingredients to cook meth and they ran the plates on the van, nothing would come back to us...["sucks for Charlie's mom" was our credo at this point]
So, hooded sweatshirts and backpacks we went, in and out of every grocery store and ace hardware within 20 miles of Charlie's house.

*and yes, it's that easy.  EVERYTHING you could ever need to manufacture Methamphetamine in mass quantities can be stolen or purchased from your neighborhood grocery + hardware store.


After a few long, freezing cold nights in the garage off the alley of my running buddy's house, with a space heater, lots of stolen chemistry equipment from the lab at school, and a few packs of Camel Lights - we had a rythym, and a schedule. 
After leaving school [early most of the time] one of us would jump the train downtown to drop off a batch of meth at a dealer's apartment, and take the money we made to OUR dealer's apartment and buy more dope.  The other one of us would get the rig going, completing the first half of the cooking process by the time the other returned.  Then we'd get high while the glass was slowly being chemically seperated from the toxins that DIDN'T make up the disgusting product. [I say disgusting because once you see what goes in to making something like meth, you wouldn't find it as attractive as tweakers do, trust me]
This cycle went on for about 4 months. 

We didn't go to the movies, hang out with friends...hell, we didn't even watch tv.  We just worked to get high. that was it.  The only form of entertainment that had any point in existing to us was the shitty radio we kept on in the garage all day and all night.
It'd be 3 AM on a Wednesday night, and instead of doing our homework and going to sleep like most kids our age, we'd be listening to the "Love Advice" segment of some awful/across the state line/late night radio program, laughing our asses off chain smoking Camel Lights cooking up hundreds of dollars worth of Meth.

Eventually we got too paranoid that the stores we were stealing from had caught on, and that there was a SWAT team of Safeway employees waiting outside the garage door with semi-automatic weapons ready to shoot us apart piece by piece, bullet by bullet, until all that was left were a few eye lids and a whole lot of stolen school property.  The mental storm of stealing things out of people's cars in the middle of the night was easier to weather than walking out of a flourescent warehouse with a backpack full of cold medicine they ID you to purchase.  So we went back to what we knew best. 

Being a junkie is easier than being a chemist.