We had made a trip out to visit one of my brothers in Colorado Springs. There was talk of moving my father there in an effort to take better care of him. He was too old to be left alone. It would also alleviate some of my father’s financial issues. He wasn’t feeble, but he was older and sedentary. I was just relieved to have this mini-reprieve from always being with him and seeing him in this state.
Just when we seemed to have come up with a plan, my brother said I needed to go to the hospital. Apparently my father had suffered a stroke. I was filled with fear as I rushed to his bedside. Once there, I looked down at him and saw he was out of it. I was at a stage in my life when I could have used a strong father to pull me from the ash can of self-destruction, yet he was in a condition where he couldn’t even help himself. I thought that day might be the last time I saw him alive. In a way, it was. Though he lived until his early nineties, he recognized me less and less. Each time, I felt sadder and, selfishly, angry at the way life had treated him and was treating me.
One night I somehow found my way to a house party with a bunch of people in their twenties. Everyone was talking and the music was loud. I was sitting on the floor in the living room, a glass coffee table in front of me, and I remember noticing the carpet around me was pretty dirty, though that fleeting observation was usurped by the methodical way a guy seated next to me was cutting something up on the table.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the worst thing in the world,” he said. “But it’ll make you feel like you can do anything.”
Sign me up, I thought. He presented it to me, and I hovered over the table and snorted it. One thick line went up my nose and my entire world shifted. Everything I had ever known or even cared about was gone. This wasn’t just some marijuana. It didn’t relax me and drop me into some chill vibes with these partygoers. Whatever it was I snorted put me on a whole new flight path. I was immediately trajected into a whole other universe, fast. I didn’t worry about anything or start asking the little worrisome questions about my life, as pot sometimes caused me to do. It was go, go, go. My body was left behind and my mind flew.
Later that night, after I got back to the apartment where my family and I were staying, I didn’t bother to unfold the couch in the living room where I was supposed to sleep. Sleep wasn’t in the equation. I opened the window. I pondered the entire universe. I questioned my entire existence. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. I scribbled my life down into pages that would never be understood by anyone who hadn’t entered this alternative world.
A world of meth.
With the first light of morning, I slowly returned to this reality. Knowing I hadn’t slept a wink, I realized I was probably going to look like shit, and I wasn’t fully aware of whether I had been as quiet as I tried to be through the night. All I knew was that I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone where I been or what I had done all night. I didn’t know how to explain it, either.
Oddly enough, I was grateful that I didn’t know anyone in LA who did meth and that it was going to be a one-time thing. Because holy shit, it really was, as the guy said, the worst thing in the world—and way, way, way too good.