-3-

I was a straight A honor roll student in Cypress High School, a serious athlete, the captain and leader of my varsity basketball team. There were many pictures of my attractive girlfriend and me—the friendly, smiling, charming guy—in the high school yearbook. When I wasn’t busy at school, I sacked groceries at the local store or cut firewood and cedar posts on a friend’s ranch, hauled hay, waited tables at Briarcreek, worked on my drawings in my room, or worked as a grounds man with Kevin. My parents were wrapped up in their own problems and never really seemed to notice when I was high on weed, though I was careful not to ever come home from work or a night out with Susan too stoned for it to be noticed.

When the summer was over, I still hung out with Kevin to get high on his stash. Mostly though, I had begun to steal small amounts of potent marijuana from my girlfriend’s parents. They were both successful, wealthy, upper middle-class professionals who smoked pot daily. Susan wasn’t as interested in marijuana as I was due to the fact that she had been exposed to it through her parents for so many years; it held little of the allure or mystery for her that it did for me coming from such a strict household. I don’t think she had the same intense need to escape or alleviate her daily reality as I did either.

I grew careless. Marijuana fogs and complicates your basic operational thought process when you smoke too much. Pot is best when smoked in small amounts, otherwise, the THC is essentially wasted, the high is dulled, and you might as well go to sleep. My parents eventually did catch me two times in a row on school nights, once getting out of Kevin’s truck completely wasted as he dropped me off at our house, and another time, coming home from Susan’s house having smoked too much to maintain. They thought something was up and blamed it all on Kevin. My father forced Kevin’s truck off the road one day atop a high hill outside of Cypress and pulled a gun on him, a little .38. He waved it at this harmless friend of mine and told Kevin to stay away from his son or else. It was months before I found this out, but it must have scared the hell out of Kevin and I never saw him again.

The next summer after my senior year, I started working at the Briarcreek Resort again full time to make money to go to college. Kevin was no longer around, so I worked for a guy named Peter. He was a Vietnam vet and a methadone addict. He set water mains and repaired PVC lines. He’d broken both of his feet not long before by falling down some rocks at the Blue Well. I was his shovel man. My first day, he almost got me killed.

“Dig a hole next to this box,” he said. He gave me a shovel and wrecking bar and drove off.

I started digging. It’s slow-going when you dig in the Hill Country. A lot of limestone, hard yellow caliche. I dug down with the wrecking bar and hit a plastic pipe. I looked and saw I’d broken the outside of it. There were wires inside of it and I’d almost broken them, too. I examined the big green box I’d been digging next to, unaware of its function. Peter drove up. He limped out of his van and looked in the hole.

“Shit! Did you break that conduit?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Man, that’s a power line.”

“I just hit it with a wrecking bar.” I sat down on the green box, shaken.

He examined the line. “Man, you were less than a hair’s width from frying yourself. That’s an electrical box.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“You’d be dead. Jesus, I’m sorry man.”

“That’s alright.”

“No, no, I’m really sorry. Here, come on.”

We loaded the tools in the van and drove out to an empty field. Peter pulled out a small bottle of liquid. He put some of the liquid in his half empty cup of cold coffee and handed it to me. We’d gotten high together before, but this was something new.

“What’s that?”

“Just a little bit of methadone. I’m really sorry about that power line. Here you go, drink it. Have you ever done this?”

“No.”

I gulped down the coffee. It wasn’t as good a high as Kevin’s stuff, but it almost knocked me out. I got out of the van and staggered around in the empty field. Pete followed me.

“You okay, man?”

“Yeah, sure.”

I nodded in and out. I couldn’t walk. Peter helped me into his van and we went back to his house. His wife was a plump, pretty woman named Annie. We walked over to a cliff, sat down, and she talked calmly to me. I didn’t go home for hours, trying to get sober.

I started doing methadone with Peter every morning before work. We mixed it in with our orange juice or coffee and drank it. It took me a while to get used to it. I usually went down pretty hard at first. Pete sped on the stuff and talked a hundred miles an hour telling me outrageous stories of killing people in Vietnam, tales of parachuting, snipers, machine guns and explosives. He’d talk for hours. Then, one morning, I did too much and he and Annie couldn’t keep me awake.

“No more for you,” Pete said.

I went back to just smoking pot with him and have never tried methadone or even felt a remote desire for it since.

Eventually, Peter’s feet finally healed and he didn’t need me anymore. We had a little party at his house after work. He rolled up a couple of joints and sprinkled something in them.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“PCP. I put a little in these.”

“Doesn’t that shit make you wanna jump out windows?” I had been raised on shows like Dragnet in the sixties where there was always some wholesome all-American mom who smoked some pot and then accidentally drowned her child in the bathtub.

“No, no, no. This is a sodium penathol base. It’s real good.”

“Oh.”

We smoked a joint and got very high. Everything was moving, slowly. Annie was supposed to cut my hair.

“Do you want me to cut it still?”

I just nodded. I couldn’t talk. We went out by a cliff and I sat in a chair. All the trees, Peter, and Annie, all slowed down. When they moved, their bodies stayed in their former positions. When Annie moved her arm, there were suddenly five arms. Ten arms, twenty arms, like some blue Indian goddess. While she cut my hair, I watched Peter dancing around, drinking a beer. He moved and sunk with the land. Harry Nilsson sang from a stereo:

We can make each other happy . . .

We can make each other happy!

I became very aware of my head. How heavy it was. The way it moved. Annie’s scissors floated around in front of my eyes.

“Tilt your head back,” she said.

I tilted it back and it kept on going, farther and farther. I didn’t know my neck could bend that far. My head went all the way over and stopped in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. It was black and dark in there. I pulled with all my strength and my head came through my chest and out. But it wouldn’t stop. It kept going backwards, over and through my body, faster and faster, like a thick wheel of meat. Finally, I just grabbed my head.

I heard Annie from far away. “Jake? What’s wrong?”

I was talking in a tunnel. “It needs to stop. It needs to stop going around.”

Peter laughed and put his bearded face into mine. “What’s wrong man? What’s happening?”

I stood up holding my head. “I gotta leave. Go home.”

I staggered to my truck and started it. Somehow, I made it to Susan’s house. Her mother answered the door.

“Hi Jake,” she said happily, “what have you been doing?”

I couldn’t actually form words. “Uh . . . huh?”

She shook her head, disappointed in me. “Never mind. I think I know. Susan’s in her bedroom.”

Susan walked out. “Hi, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . let’s go.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Let’s go.”

We walked down to the truck. The steps were hard to manage. I got inside and watched the steering wheel melt and jump. I kept trying to grab it and hold on.

Susan asked: “Can you drive?”

“It’s the steering wheel,” I mumbled.

“Here, I’ll drive. Where have you been?”

I slid over on the vinyl bench seat. Susan climbed over me and got behind the wheel.

“Where have you been?”

“Pete’s . . .”

“I don’t like that guy.”

We drove out of Cypress and up the big hill to my house. Fortunately, no one was home. I went inside and lay on the bed. I sank down into the mattress and watched the ceiling move farther and farther away.

“Are you okay?” Susan asked.

“Poisoned,” I mumbled and stood up with effort and went into the bathroom. I fell down and started to puke violently into the bathtub. I couldn’t stop getting sick. I could barely hear Susan.

“Should I call somebody?”

“Get out of here,” I said.

“Are you gonna be okay?”

“Please . . . leave.”

I shut the door behind her with my foot and started to get sick again. Then I passed out on the floor.

I haven’t done either heroin or PCP since that time in the late seventies. I didn’t even know at the time that PCP was a horse tranquilizer, a foul poison for humans and essentially worthless as a drug for pleasure and escape. I liked heroin but it seemed to have too many negatives, the main one being that it was just too hard to get any as I knew no one who did it.