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By Root 960 0

glue in ninth grade and found nothing much to it outside of dizziness and nausea. You reeled around a little, and you threw up. During the next two years he got into cough syrup and grass. The cough syrup was a down, and while there were still times he seemed to require it—especially during bad times with Gretchen—he had never much liked it. Grass was good from the beginning, and for a long time he thought grass was never other than good, until one day he was in a bad mood and smoked a lot and freaked completely. He had never stopped doing grass, it was a part way of life, but there were times when he knew it would be a bad idea to smoke just then.

Acid was nice. He’d tripped ten times in the space of about two months and was glad he had done it and equally glad never to do it again. It took him to some interesting places and showed him some important parts of his head, but it also scared the hell out of him. He saw how easy it would be to let go completely and just stay inside there with all the pretty colors. What seemed most frightening of all was that he might like it there and want to stay there, and he did not want to want it. Besides, while it taught you to get out of linear paths it also did odd things to memory and perception, and he decided he could live without it.

He could also live without scag, which he had snorted once, and barbiturates, which he tried four times in an effort to discover something pleasurable in them. There was no difficulty finding pleasure in scag. It was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that he knew once was enough and twice was too much, and when something felt that good it would be very fucking easy to acquire a jones and very fucking hard to kick it. There were a great many things he did not want to be, and a junkie was high up on the list.

Speed was beautiful, cocaine best of all. One time after he and Gretchen had been living together for a couple of months she came home with a couple of twists of coke. They each snorted one and jumped into bed. They didn’t get out of bed for sixteen hours and didn’t stop balling for more than five minutes at a time in all those sixteen hours. It was a supergood sex trip but the stuff was expensive and hard to find, and he thought it was probably just as well, because you could literally screw yourself to death on it. It wasn’t supposed to hit everybody that way. It certainly hit him hard, though.

Other speeds were good, if not sexy. Your brain worked better than ever and you were all ego, absolutely on top of everything. For a while he and Gretchen had been doing a hell of a lot of speed, and it was no good because the stuff had to get to you sooner or later. You lost weight and began to fall apart physically. That part of it he had always been able to control. He took heavy doses of organic vitamins and made sure he ate decently whether he felt like it or not. But Gretchen wouldn’t take the trouble. Even if he put the vitamin pills out for her she wouldn’t get around to swallowing them. And even the vitamins couldn’t protect him from the mental effects of too much speed, the occasional blackouts, the desperate need to crash, to sleep, counterbalanced by the utter inability to turn one’s mind off and escape from consciousness. Finally they both got off it, balanced themselves out with tranquilizers and worked their way clean. He had stayed off, Gretchen had not. He would drop a pill now and then when he had a reason to but he would not ride the high, would not take another pill when the first one ran down. He seemed capable of staying on that plane, but he was still not entirely sure of himself; it was like heroin, you had to be terrified of anything you liked that much.

By that line of reasoning, he didn’t have to be terrified of alcohol. He sipped now and then at his screwdriver, wondering as he did so how anyone could prefer the taste of it to that of pure orange juice, and when the glass was finally empty he let himself be talked into a second.

He was enjoying himself, the drinks notwithstanding. He was pleased with the way the show had gone,