It wasn’t long before I was spending a lot of time on the phone with Sean. Then I went out to his place on LA’s Eastside. An attraction had built on the phone, and in person it was irresistible. As we were kissing and fondling each other, he took my hand and led me to the side of his house and into a carport filled with everything but a car. We sat at a table in the far corner. There he took a glass pipe out and asked me if I’d “ever done it.” I didn’t know what he meant by “done it,” but he seemed to be referring to meth.
Since I had only ever cut it up and snorted it, I shook my head no. He flashed the devilish grin I had seen when we first met at the rave and then put a little white rock in the pipe, grabbed a lighter, and lit the outside of the bulbous pipe. I watched him take a deep hit off it, similar to a bong hit, and then he exhaled the largest plume of white smoke that I had ever seen. I’d never watched anyone do that. Grinning, he said it was way better than snorting it. He promised it would be the greatest high of my life if I wanted to try it. Though I was apprehensive, how could I resist when he offered the pipe to me? I inhaled as deeply as I could, exhaled, and almost immediately my reality shifted. I’m surprised I didn’t die that day. That moment. I had never been so high in my life. I felt like my brain had melted and I lost not just my sense of self, but my whole sense of being, like I was existing before I came to be. Seeing that I had the weightlessness of an untethered balloon, Sean started making out with me, and we sat there for a minute grabbing at each other feverishly.
After a while, though, I decided that I needed to leave and got in my car to go home. For some reason, I felt the need to be in motion. My brain was caroming through multiple dimensions. I can’t believe I didn’t die on the freeway that day. It’s a miracle I didn’t kill someone else. While speeding around the loop-de-loops of the downtown interchange, I faded from one dimension into the other, my mind projecting me outward into some unknown place and then ricocheting me back to reality in just enough time for me to stay in my lane. But I missed my exit and ended up totally lost and driving for a couple hours even though it turned out I was only fifteen minutes from home.
The next time I heard from Sean, he was locked up and calling me from LA County Jail. He had been driving with a friend of his and gotten pulled over by the police. The cops searched the car and found drugs and a whole bunch of meth and guns in the trunk. Sean wanted me to know he was set to go to trial and looking at time in prison. I corresponded with him briefly and we spoke a few times over the phone. I even wrote down the info I might need for a Greyhound escape, but once he went off to jail, our lives seemed like they were going in very different directions. And the few times I later asked myself if I was that kind of girl, I shuddered from the horror of recognizing that I might have been, without realizing there were still ways my life could and would get worse.