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She left the school, and I fell in with a gentler group of goth girls. They were cheerful, and into building their own working versions of Brion Gysin’s dream machine out of stereo turntables and poster board. One of them was obsessed with the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, and the New Jersey Devils; her bedroom walls were papered with pictures of Blixa Bargeld, and hockey players.

I papered my own walls with pictures of Keith Richards and Lou Reed. Heroic junkies.

I had a lovely beer binge. We drove to a bar just past the New York border, to elude the Massachusetts blue laws; I went in with somebody’s brother’s ID to pick up a case of Rolling Rock and emerged giddy, arms laden. We drank the beer, and I transformed into some kind of magical celebrity-roast emcee. We wandered the dorms having magnanimous exchanges with everybody; I chatted amiably with people to whom I’d previously been scared to speak, shook hands with the hippie dudes skulking around the girls’ dorm, flirted with girls in sweatpants sitting in the hallway doing homework.

Beer, I thought, is the ANSWER.

The next day I awoke with my first hangover, and swore off liquor. If you hang around twelve-step types, you’ll hear tales wherein an alcoholic wakes up with a hangover, swears off booze forever, and then is drunk later that same day; a bleak joke repeating itself throughout her or his drinking life. But when I swore off booze, it took. I knew alcoholism was rampant in my family, and that I didn’t want to become a drunk. It was weird for youthful rebellion, to give up drinking as a fuck-you to your family. I got snooty about it, and when kids who were drinking asked me if I wanted a beer, I’d tell them, theatrically, that due to genetic misfortune, I was an alcoholic.

I started smoking weed. I realized that I’d found the solution to my genetic dilemma: I could satisfy that innate urge to get messed up by using something that, as every honest person in America knew, wasn’t addictive in the least: wholesome, in fact. I was writing songs and hating them; when I was stoned, they sounded amazing to me. I could love my own mind.

Weed, I thought, is the ANSWER.

I discovered cigarettes. I got two packs of Benson and Hedges that I smoked in one night, one after the other, staring at my sexy, smoking self in the mirror. Soon I was shoplifting cartons of Marlboro from the Price Chopper. Smoking rings that little bell in your head that the rat in the clear plastic tank, with the wires in his skull, is compelled to ring when he gets that signal, use use use use. But it doesn’t enact fucked-up-ed-ness. It’s using-lite. And it makes you look incredibly cool.

When I was nine years old, I read a comic book meant to scare kids away from drugs. One panel showed a kid looking, in terror, at trees and houses with scary faces.

That looks amazingly great, I thought.

I’m reminded of an ad campaign against meth: teenagers are shown with scabby faces going into motel rooms to prostitute themselves with sinister middle-aged men, robbing elderly people, overdosing hideously. I find the campaign inherently cynical, because it’s specifically targeting one drug. If the guys at the ad firm have any awareness, they must know that a kid prone to meth addiction is prone to addiction in general and might very likely end up, say, an alcoholic. Meth is a tremendous societal drain; the ad campaign isn’t about why a kid would become an addict. It’s designed to mitigate that one particular civic problem.

The tagline is: NOT EVEN ONCE. If you use meth once, you may end up one of those scabby-faced wraiths. In some of the ads, the humiliated, sick addicts return, like the ghost of Christmas future, to the very party where their past selves are about to get high for the first time and beg them not to start towards this inevitable fate.

They’re pretending not to understand that what they’re really saying is: Don’t take this, you’ll love it.

Here’s a message I prefer: If you try meth, it’ll