TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 85

Sun Dec 10 08:06:10 PST 2006

December 10, 200000000000000000000000006

Dear Gang of 200,

	Damn!  I woke up again at six thirty on a 
day when I could have stayed in bed until ten. 
Just lay there hoping I would fall back asleep, 
but I could already feel the engines firing up 
and the million homunculi hammering away inside. 
Then I heard the shower going.  Meyshe was 
already up himself, and taking a shower.  As soon 
as he heard me turn off my fan and my noise 
machine, he knocked on the door.  "Oh!  You're 
up!  Did you hear the shower?"  "Yes, I did." 
"Do you know who took a shower?"  "Well, let's 
see. . . . Your hair is wet, and you smell like 
soap.  I wonder who it could have been.  Hmmmmmm. 
Hmmmmmm."  He laughed.  Now he's downstairs 
eating his breakfast and pacing back and forth. 
Lately, I've been asking him when he's pacing, 
hopping, groaning, "Meyshe?  Are you aware that 
you're pacing back and forth and making big 
noises?"  "No," he'll say, invariably.  He's 
said, "Yes", only once.  The idea is to bring it 
to his conscious mind.  Then he can control it. 
That's what the shrink says.  In fact, that's 
what shrinks do.  They make the  subconscious 
mind available to the conscious mind, so that we 
can alter our behaviour and adapt our feelings. 
And does it work?  Look at all the healthy people 
out there, and there's your answer.

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The Hermit's Drug

	Joe Terry Smith was a good ol' boy from 
Kentucky.  He had his southern accent and his air 
of gentle familiarity, and he had his gardening 
business.  He came to work on my mother's yard 
when I was living there in my early thirties.  He 
talked to her about the front yard, with all the 
stairs and the tiered flower beds, and he talked 
to her about the back yard with its wild growth 
and undisciplined hedge.  He talked to her about 
the two side yards: one long strip on the north, 
and a broad band of trees and sickly looking 
shrubs on the south.  They arranged for him to 
come work on all of it.  His company was called, 
Magic Gardens, and he had a truck to prove it.

	He stood in the front hall talking to me 
after my mother had gone back to the kitchen.  He 
put on all the charm he could muster, which was 
considerable, and after a few volleys of 
conversation and wit, he asked if I'd go out with 
him.  "Fraternizing with the employee," was how 
he put it.  I agreed to fraternize.  So we met 
one evening in a café.  We talked amiably, and 
he, probably going on those subtle cues druggies 
give each other, offered that we could go back to 
his place and do some cocaine.  This was, in 
fact, exactly what I wanted.  I didn't have any 
of my own, relying completely on the hospitality 
of others.  I  didn't know where to get the 
stuff.  I wasn't that involved with it yet.  I 
followed him in my car up the curly roads into 
the precarious Berkeley Hills, where the streets 
are like a diagram of the convolutions of a human 
brain.  I can't remember what street he lived on, 
nor could I retrace my steps now, which is 
unusual for me, and probably has something to do 
with the state of my human brain when I visited 
him.

	He had the lower portion of a house with 
his own side entrance, and a lovely little garden 
leading to the door.  There was a small lantern 
emitting a soft yellow glow over the lintel.  His 
place was a studio apartment.  It was dominated 
by his bed which was all sheathed in Indian print 
bedspreads and lined with photos of various 
global Buddhas.

	"Are you a Buddhist?" I asked him while 
he went into a side room to fetch the goods.  He 
came back in with a little bag of white.

	"When I want to be," he answered.

	And that just about summed up Joe Terry's 
philosophical and spiritual quest.  When it 
served, he did, and if it didn't, then he didn't. 
He chopped up the cocaine very fine, offered me a 
fresh straw and let me go first.  I snapped up my 
two lines so fast it could make my head spin. 
Then he did his, but he was just refreshing his 
previous high.

	"So you met me revved up on coke?"

	"Yes, I did."

	I never experienced the famous, "rush", 
that one is supposed to experience with cocaine. 
Instead, there was just an obvious difference 
between not being stoned, and then suddenly when 
it took effect.  But there was never any of the, 
"I could conquer the world," or, "I am just the 
cleverest fellow 'twas ever your fortune to 
meet."  Usually, I was finding, I felt like being 
alone and playing music, writing, composing, or 
making art work.  It was as close to a hermit's 
drug as I could get.  And this was deeply 
rewarding, because I'd always been terrified of 
being alone.  I didn't have to be in proximity to 
the other persons in the house, just so long as 
there was another living breathing soul on the 
premises.  With the cocaine, I didn't care if I 
never saw anyone else again, as long as I had 
myself.  This hermetic attitude, in part, has 
stayed with me even decades after I last inhaled 
cocaine.  I now treasure my solitude, and require 
a great amount of privacy.  And before it, there 
was none of that.

	There I was, with Joe Terry, stoned 
together and not wanting much company.  What to 
do?  So we made love.  Now, why is that? 
Wouldn't you think that would be the most 
intimate activity you could do?  No.  In fact, 
sometimes, love making is like separating 
yourself into a far off island, big enough only 
for your own two feet, cut off from every other 
living thing, beyond care or hope, fallen from 
grace where you are with your private fears and 
disturbances, alone, without language or voice. 
This is how I felt as Joe Terry exerted himself 
and put me through a number of tantric positions. 
We moved towards each other and away, towards 
each other, and away, as my mind unravelled my 
inner thoughts having not much to do with Joe 
Terry.

	I can feel the darkness and remember the 
delusion of my own will to be there.  There 
really was no purpose in it, other than the 
cocaine.  And what was the purpose of the cocaine 
if it brought me such blindness and isolation? 
Isolation and a pounding heart.  What was the 
allure of the white powder?  But it had its 
allure, because I had an appetite for the shadowy 
bliss of alienation.  After a life of abuse and 
fencing with sanity, it was a relief to court the 
aloneness instead of yearning for something else. 
Why fight the inexorable?  We are alone and 
remain alone in spite of popular rumours to the 
contrary.  That is how I thought and felt and 
lived in my early thirties, bulimic and drugged 
on top of it.  The nightmare visits me still when 
I am least prepared to recall it.  At that point 
in my life, I was off of suicide.  I'd ruled it 
out as a romantic exit, so my depression was 
complete and safe from the mark of crisis which 
at the very least changes the balance of the 
psyche, churns it up so you can start afresh, 
grateful for life instead of wearied to death of 
it.

	My affair with Joe Terry was sustained by 
the convenience of his being a drug dealer.  I 
was not distracted by perseverative dreams of him 
as some love object.  I had no love object.  I 
had my creativity, my eating disorder and my drug 
of choice.  This occupied my days and nights and 
left little room for contemplations of self 
improvement.

	I owned a house that I'd bought before 
the real estate boom in California.  My three 
bedroom craftsman hovel in Richmond Annex, 
northwest of Berkeley.  I lived in my mother's 
house and rented my house out to solid, reliable 
tenants who always paid their six hundred bucks 
on time, and caused no damage to the property. 
My habit grew to be expensive, and eventually, 
all I did was collect the rent and hand it over 
to Joe Terry in exchange for seven or eight grams 
of coke.  When I bought in quantity, the price 
came down considerably.  And each month, the 
cocaine lasted me less and less time.  When I had 
the drug, that is what I did, going through one 
gram in a couple of days and going through the 
whole stash in half a month.  Then, I was dry for 
two weeks or so and spent my money instead on 
food which I consumed and purged, consumed and 
purged.  I tried not to think about the whole 
thing too much.  Life was depressing enough 
without having to face myself.

	Joe Terry and I had our relationship fine 
tuned.  I saw him sometime soon after the first 
of the month.  I prepared for my journey up into 
the hills by converting the rent check into 
hundred dollar bills and inserting a well armed 
diaphragm.  One month I'd done a few handwriting 
analyses at $75.00 a pop.  That gave me two 
hundred twenty five extra dollars to spend on 
coke.  I called ahead and made my reservation 
with Joe Terry.  He said he'd be ready for me. 
And I steered my car up into the windy streets of 
the Berkeley hills, parked outside and walked 
down the path, anxious to break my fast.  I 
knocked and heard, "Come in".  When I entered, 
Joe Terry was stretched out on his bed, 
unclothed.  I took out my wallet and found the 
eight hundred dollars in eight hundred dollar 
bills.  I came over to kneel by the bed and 
arranged the hundred dollar bills one at a time 
down Joe Terry's chest and among the clutch of 
his pubic hair.  One bill for his penis and one 
for each of his testicles.  He gathered up the 
money and tidied it into a neat pile, which he 
put in his little Buddhist lock box.  He handed 
me eight one gram packets of cocaine.  I put the 
bindles in my purse into the zip lock bag I'd 
brought for just the purpose.  I offered to treat 
him, but he had some cocaine all set out on a 
mirror.  We sniffed it up and made love.  Then I 
cleaned up, thanked him for the ride, went out to 
my car and wended my way back home.  By the time 
I got upstairs to my room, the coke had worn off 
and I opened a fresh bindle.  This round kept me 
up with open eye fever for another couple of 
hours.  And finally, when I was ready to turn in 
for the night, those awful birds were chirping 
and the terrible sun was coming up.

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-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net