The Breathing End of Oblivion

For Brooke and her other aliases circa 1993.

Disarming not discerning, she softly cracks me wise.

I open melting repose in the corner, rising.

Fallen among the throng in this Passyunk go-go dive,

I drink away the dank and the military industrial blood on my hands.

Drowning out the shipyard with a chaser, warming.

She tends bar usually, though sometimes she dances;

always wry with her musing (bloody hands of her own, stained merely by her presence).

And with all that, her jukebox selection is singular, defining.

Wondering around her reflection in Absolut refraction,

a wide eyed drive toward desolation foregone, yet not begun.

I order another round silently, flying.

We share unlikely sensibilities: musical, political, magical, destructible;

cynicism burning us alive, aspirations chilled to the bone.

 She slides me one on the house, smiling.

We find we're both hiding from who we are, what we do to get by;

our ideals beyond reach, beyond our reason.

Reasoning it's for the best, swallowing.

She's post-modern Center City mostly: college and Revival, Khyber hipster friends;

in fear her South Philly ballet weeknights will come to light to them:

grunge-lit on-high disapproval.

She locks up for the evening, transposing personalities; shifting.

I live in her vicinity, in trepidation;

my workaday hypocrisy spilling into the rest of me.

I found her in one masquerade, she led me to the other, city weekends both wondrous and fleeting.

We were taut to tearing from the get-go, nervously.

It can't, doesn't last; turns to sand in my fingers, into dust.

Across the divide from Darien back to Monroe alone, empty; shivering.

Compromises personified, potential anesthetized;

she's at long last transcended these things, living.

I still languish within, haunted;

balancing off a bar stool on the breathing end of oblivion, waiting.

Waiting.

Torn & Sewn on Fabric Row

July 11th, 1993.  I'm walking double-time toward the pay phone on 4th and Bainbridge, around the block from my hovel on Monroe.  This particular summer night finds the heat and humidity particularly oppressive, soaking my T-shirt with sweat just a few steps out the front door.   Emerging from the arctic climate of the apartment's central air, the swelter hits my body like a freight train and I buckle.  But I'm off to the races again after a curt pep talk. Holed up in my little 3rd floor walk up the past week, there's clearly a powerful need to replenish.  In fact, I thought it was Thursday afternoon until I stepped outside into the darkness.

I live in the heart of Philly's Fabric Row, just a few blocks off the busy strip of bars and restaurants on South Street, which means the roads are usually lined with cars looking for parking on a Saturday night.  Night?  Clearly.  Unless I'm losing my vision. Saturday?  That's what the ATM receipt says.  Where did the week go?  Where it always goes for me these days. A short reflexive pause to survey the landscape and then I'm back into tunnel vision mode: my mission, the score.

The roll of twenties in my pocket is slick with perspiration as I race to the rendezvous point around the corner past the Famous 4th Street Deli.  I don't recognize my connection but nevertheless make her out at once, not far from the pay phone.   Her expression - her demeanor - makes it clear she's no South Street reveler gearing up for the clubs; she's a courier, my Sherpa's intermediary, and her body language says as much.  Tonight, she's my lifeline and I love her more than she'll know.  (Random trivia note: Denzel Washington uses this very phone in one of the scenes from the movie Philadelphia.)

I walk up quickly but nervously to my new love, with an eye peeled always for the cops.  My paranoia unbounded, everyone smells like Five-0 out here tonight.  And there's a good chance they are, heightened fears aside.  So the exchange is made fast: currency for goods.  Two thumbnail plastic baggies chock full of lumpy white bliss pressed into my palm and my bank roll likewise into hers, passing the baton without acknowledgement in this felonious relay race.  She blinks, tucks it away, then picks up the pay phone and dials.

Having scored the primary supplies for the evening, a rush of relief radiates through my fingers.  A wordless au du to my new lost love in a rush, I quick-step across Bainbridge's double wide expanse to the north, veering left a bit in order to sneak through Leithgow, the side street that splits 4th from 5th.   Swinging into Phila Deli around the corner on South, a prescription is filled for several six packs of beer constituting the oh-so necessary brakes that'll slow my heart down to earth once I run out of blow.  I've long ago learned that waiting until the need arises to buy alcohol often leads to wild heart palpitations crawling out of your skin when you first glance at a clock and it reads 4am, long past closing time.  My connection's still glued to the pay phone gabbing obliviously as I pass her by again, this time lugging two large grocery bags of booze back to my humble abode.

How will this particular ride into heavenly oblivion distinguish itself from the countless journeys that came before?   Simply put, it was to be my last for 14 months.   I'd stumble thereafter just once again, in September of 1994, but this trip would effectively put to bed my particular cycle of addiction to cocaine.  What follows is a sketch of the events and my state of mind that finally put the kibosh on this slow motion suicide carnival ride.

I shove the key into the outside door and hurry up the two flights of stairs to my place, the "penthouse" of the three units in this converted multi-family house.  Back into the deep freeze, chilly sweat soaks my skin.  It was actually the nicest apartment I ever rented, narrow but deep with high ceilings, central air, and my own mini-washer/dryer unit to boot.  I also had a private staircase in the apartment itself that led up to the roof where I could sunbathe with a view of city hall and much of the rest of the city.  All for $525.00 a month from 1992 - 96 with no rent increase, two blocks from the heart of the South Street action.   The one downside?   It was so narrow that getting furniture of any size up the stairs and in through the door proved challenging (I ended up having to sell my larger couch prior to moving in).   Still, it deserved better than me, at least better than the me who inhabited the joint the first couple years.  In those days it was merely my cocoon, used to wall off the world for the drift into madness.   Other than being stumbling distance to a plethora of bars and restaurants with take-out beer and the fact that it served as a kind of midway point between the cocaine meccas of Chester and Kensington, I might as well have lived on the North Pole for all I availed myself of its vibrant surroundings and culture.

I rush into my place and toss the beer into the fridge.   That's just medicine, needed later to come down safely from the mountain.   But who wants to entertain such notions now?  It is time now to climb!  The cocaine experience started out socially for me with a dysfunctional sub-culture from which I learned much things I'd rather have never known.   As Jim Carroll would caution, they were a "constant warning to take the other direction."   In the end, it degenerated into isolation, much as it would later with alcohol.  Grabbing a CD jewel case already scratched/sticky from the counter, I get to work.  The door to my bedroom closed?  Check.  Blinds closed?  Check.  My body flailed out on the mattress?  Check.  Okay, we're ready.  Next, the contents of the first baggie are dumped out on REM's Reckoning (or some equally random case), the chopping begins, the separating, the lining up.  Finally, the snorting.  Eventually, the bleeding.  Rinse and repeat for the next 20 hours, with an occasional beer break mixed in to keep the blood pressure below bursting.

My highs are euphemistically described elsewhere in this blog as wired wakefulness and concentrated bliss.  They were certainly all that, but also something more.   It sounds so awful as recounted here (and believe me, I've held back the uglier details something fierce on these pages; my candor has its limits), but in the moment it was wonderful beyond description, all happening away from the horrors, up in the serenity of my head.   No other drug has ever come closer to bringing as much happiness to me.  It always arrived with a truckload of misery, to be sure; however, not nearly as much as alcohol eventually rained down on my life.   On balance, the happiness was artificial and short lived, the misery real and persistent.  Still, if that was all there was to this equation, I never would have stopped.   Happiness is happiness, who is to say what is artificial or real?  And long or short-lived, it was better than the alternative.  No, the kicker in the mixer that kept me clean was simple biology, chemistry.  I would be dead pretty quickly continuing down this path.  Cocaine isn't compatible with biological life, not for long, not for me. And of course, there were the finances.  You plunge into coke, you don't end up working a whole lot at a time when you need that income the most to keep the white stuff coming (well, you can work a shitload for long stretches at first, but not too effectively).  All that to say, it's expensive.   So coke didn't work for me chemically or financially.  But I digress, so back to that day ...

By the time the sun goes down on Sunday, the coke is history.  I'd licked the last of it off the jewel case, the baggies long since torn asunder in hopes of finding some long lost morsel hidden in microscopic crevasses within.  Without luck, of course.   It was then time to turn to the come-down beer in the kitchen fridge with gusto, slugging three in rapid succession just to slow the heart down to what I surmised was a safe jack hammer pace.  Thank you, Her Doktor!  That was an hour or so ago.

Two beers further into my come down routine now, bent over on my sofa in the living room.  Thinking about things.  Left my full time job back in March.  I'd been with that company for seven years but the consulting position I accepted paid a lot more and I could make my own hours, could choose when to work and when to "relax" (all dangerous things for someone with my proclivities).  Of course, I haven't been with a client for several weeks now, what with the marathon blow binges and all.  They really eat into one's productivity.  So, no real savings, no discernible cash inflow to help stem the outflow.  The result is that my phone will surely soon be shut off for non-payment in the coming days.  Next the cable.  Then the electric.  My credit's fucked.  I am almost 31 years old and have not yet begun to live life, afraid in fact of trying.  These ruminations reach a crescendo over my psyche and I stew.  The reason for this reflective mood?  I'd switched on the tube to kill time coming down and the movie Clean And Sober happened to be on HBO.

I tend to enjoy irony and often watch movies such as Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses while drinking, fully understanding - even embracing - my condition and yet at the same time never giving thought to rectifying things.   I always figured heretofore that rectification for me would be death and death would be here soon enough.  This time, though, Clean And Sober is really getting its hooks into me. It's not a particularly wonderful flick.   You never get to see the protagonist on his slide (he's already pretty much bottoming out when we first meet him).  You do, however, see the consequences of his addiction pretty starkly.  And Michael Keaton is great in his first dramatic role.  All told, right movie, right time, right tone.   I don't believe in fate, or that I'm somehow special, an omnipotent being arranging this fortuitous chain of events just for me.  It is a happy coincidence.  In fact, the movie has been showing pretty regularly of late on cable and I'd caught pieces of it earlier in the week, coked up and drinking down just as I am this evening.  But it didn't strike me then like it's hammering me now.  An hour into watching, I feel light headed and look down to see a rapidly spreading little pool of blood on the carpet.  My hand goes up instinctively to my nose, warm sticky wet. I dash into the bathroom with my head tilted back.  Then I drop to my knees in the john and cry.

Cut to Monday late afternoon and I'm attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.  I have a sponsor before I leave.  Thus begins the first year of real sobriety for me as an adult (hell, the first month).  I re-join my old employer within a week and stay put there for another seven years.  I stabilize.  For a while, anyway.

I'd stick with AA for a few months but the spiritual aspect of the program eventually had me searching elsewhere, eventually reaching out to Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). I've maintained my ties with SOS to this day, now with a successor organization, Lifering.   AA is great but there is never only one way to anything, including sobriety (if something works for you, keep at it).  My biggest misstep during this stab at sobriety was that I didn't get professional help for depression.  When I slipped in 1994, I quickly righted myself when it came to the coke (once and done, clean now for 15+ years).  Ironically, the only reason I drank again was to come down from that coke episode but the cork wouldn't fit back into the bottle.   No, the come-down booze that coke spurge necessitated was my full fledged plunge into the briny deep of chronic, progressive alcoholism over the next dozen years.  I think I've documented that swim and subsequent arrival back onshore sufficiently elsewhere on these pages.

This aspect of my experience has been exhausted here.  It's certainly exhausted me.  Perhaps it's time I attempt to dredge up some happy days for prosperity next.  It could happen.   But that'll take digging deep to find.  Until then, silence will reign on this blog.  With maybe just a bit of bad poetry to bridge the gulf.

Cement Dreams

Cement dreams of a drippy cold faucet and filthy back alley keep me up at night.

Jittery flat on the ground staring skyward, cheek to gravel in the alley behind my childhood garage, a black boot heel lodged in my left temple. The assailant remains cloaked in my subconscious, gray as the sky and just as abstract.

The leaky faucet is connected to our hose, soaking down the elongated sheet of clear plastic that serves as a homemade slip 'n slide. But it's me who's doing the soaking and the sliding as a kid in our backyard. Though sunny there, a hard sleet rain beats down on the alley where "I" lay a mere twenty feet away. And the garage separating us is translucent (or at least becomes so when I strain my neck to see through it).

So who is this person lying bloodied in the alley, the one through whose eyes I now see? And the gray ghost with the foot upside this person's head? I strongly suspect they're both me at different points in life, just as the slip 'n slide boy is me as a child. All of me out of phase with time, location, and state of mind.  I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.  Who was it really that opened their mouth (me, me, or me)?

The slip 'n slides we'd construct as a kid invoke joyful memories of childhood. On par with flying kites, "poppin' wheelies" on my bike, and building fortified compounds in the foliage around the neighborhood. There is no dysfunction marring these happy times in my memory, so why do I introduce it in my dreams now? Why pollute that which has no subtext of angst when I have boatloads of memories that do? I'm by no means a Freudian and rarely have what one would call "symbolic" dreams but these certainly seem to qualify. What exactly they might symbolize remains to be seen.

The alley on our block served as a kind of social nexus for my friends and I growing up.  It was our "motocross" race track, the thoroughfare around which we'd construct our forts in the bushes that lined it, and the front line in snowball and squirt gun fights.  After watching Evil Knievel on TV, we'd run out to the alley and fashion makeshift "motorcycle ramps" from sheets of plywood and cement bricks.  Sort of like the picture on the left, except we were in the alley, didn't have helmets and our bikes were far more groovy (see above).  More than a few times I found myself on my ass with the bike on top of me in that alley; that I broke no bones is a testament to dumb luck.

But I'm not a kid and have no bike in this dream.  Well, I am a kid in my backyard, but he's me in third person. I'm pretty sure this is true of my ghostly oppressor as well, the being who has me pinned to the ground with his boot.  Sigmund would have a field day here.  Fuck Freud.  He might have had some keen insights into the human psyche but he also thought cocaine was a panacea with the potential to cure any number of neuroses.  Then again, so did I!  Neither of us struck gold in that vein.  Anyway, back to the dream.  My unholy trinity of selves aside, the neighborhood is eerily silent.  No family and no friends.  Just sundry manifestations of me.

Not much happens in this dream.  It starts with me pinned and bleeding, my kid-self hosing down the slip 'n slide for a minute, going for a slide and then repeating this over and over. My oppressor stands silently over me, digging his heel into my head but remaining otherwise obscured from view.  And I watch from my vantage point in the gravel.  The end of the dream is always the same and is perhaps the most bazaar: the backyard melds into the back of a curtain, which then rises to reveal an audience of elementary school kids and parents.  I'm dressed as a monkey in the play that we students wrote and staged at Whittier in the 4th or 5th grade (I wrote the lines for my character, Mickey Monkey).  The play is over, the audience applauds and I wake up.

I've had this dream several times in the past two weeks and can't for the life of me figure out why.  I'm hoping that articulating it here will help purge it from my system.  It's tops on my list for discussion when I next see my shrink Monday ....

Stucco Green

Blue-black thoughts down the hallway,

stucco green bleeds to braided frayed through smoke and sunflower prints of the front room.

As decaying paternal, maternal afterthoughts meld into the yellowed fabric, smoldering drowned.

I walk through with my head bowed.

The dining room spins 78 revolutions of hard plastic music playing holiday meals while jig saw puzzle pieces cover the table almost done.

I walk through with my head bowed.

The kitchen coffee pot boils avocado on the burner percolating over meat loaf

dying in the oven while government cheese lies waiting on the counter near cookie dough raw for lunch.

I walk through with my head bowed.

Breakfast nook misnomer, dinner occasionally and beverages more often.

I walk past with my head bowed.

Through the telephone hallway ...

... Past the door to the basement stairs - pungent with jarred pickles, peaches, pears;

heavy with homemade beer and wine, vacuum packed fermenting foretells of drunken harvests to come and cub scout meetings gone by in back.

... Past the master bedroom - king sized cocoon of festering parental psyches and Johnny nightly through the walls.

... Past the bathroom - haunted by the ghosts of childhood croup humidification and stroke-forged handicapped baths for Mom.

Past all that and up the stairs to suffocating sanctuary.

Tangerine shag with Farrah Cheryl Clash plastering walls stained of summer heat.

Eight track punk salvation and Royal keystroke catharsis feed my aspirations a feast of anthemic illusions, hard bitten fidelity.


Carroll Bangs Thompson summer nights awake in bed devouring to bursting words come to life and love of language unbounded.


I lay down with my head unbowed at last.

Traces of Life in his Cognitive Dissonance

He lurches at me, yellowing eyes rolling in delirium, cane in hand as he rises from the couch, a distended disheveled shell in olive workman's slacks of fury staggering my way. I run through the kitchen down the back stairs, slamming the hallway door to the basement shut. 


"You goddamn sonuvabitch, you little shit!" 


Wham!  Dad falls against the door and throws it open, but I am already down the stairs and out the back into the yard. He is in no condition to follow - he couldn't even make it down the steps without collapsing; he knows that, even in his feverish state.  In the backyard, the rain soaking me through, I look up at our breakfast nook window and his face appears. "You stay out there, you bastard!" And then he's gone.  Back to the sofa and his bottle.


I don't remember what set Dad off in this particular instance. I might have turned the TV on or slammed a door or otherwise somehow disturbed his stupor.  He won't remember it in another hour.  It is the spring of 1977.  This cycle will repeat itself a couple more times over the next few months, the last of his life.

By the time my Dad lifted off this mortal coil in August of '77, he'd long since departed in all the ways that really matter.  A Francis Bacon painting congealed into jaunice-tinged whiskers, my Dad bled degenerate exhaustion onto the fabric of his couch.  The sheer energy of dying a slow death had finally caught up with him.  Only when whipped into confused fury directed my way did he perk up.  Perhaps I represented in too sharp a focus all those he'd disappointed.  Maybe in his feverish moments he foresaw my future and it reflected himself back like a mirror, unleashing his anger for the poisonous pieces of him that were to engulf me.

I look back fondly on those times Dad chased me enraged through the house, for at least in those moments he seemed coherent at some level, even if the cognition he displayed reeked of cognitive dissonance.  Still, he was awake, showing traces of life. After all, he didn't live much in 1977.  Not really. Until he wasn't alive at all.

A Thousand Innocuous Admonitions

A child's eye view of life's possibilities is expansive beyond boundaries at first, a vision bright enough to blind an adult's perspective long since relegated to the shadows.

But then slowly the light dims, the vibrant colors grow flat and muted; the edges sanding smooth, blending in.  A thousand innocuous admonitions handed down through generations combine to form an unseen family heirloom of dysfunction we all carry inside to greater or lesser degree.  Growing.  And choking.  Sewing a web around your dreams in translucent chains, hiding hideous across the expanse of your life.

Young childhood.  The unfettered joy washing over me with my hands on a new book, or a hot water heater cardboard box, or a kite.  The exhilaration in flying my bike up a plywood ramp over an overturned garbage can.  Happiness that trumps the best high I ever had as a grown up.  But it was a drug in itself, the flame we chase our whole adult lives, whether through workaholism, or alcoholism, or religion, or sex.

It's ironic we're so absorbed on tasting the pleasure again for ourselves that we end up unwittingly extinguishing this very ability in our children, our own chase futile thanks to our parents' rendition of the same sad song a generation ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.  Adam raised a Cain.  It's as old as history's introduction of the first vestiges of neuroses upon us in the form of predators, famine, drought, whatever.

The genesis of this particularly self indulgent screed was a mother standing in line at the supermarket today, yakking about some sort of marketing campaign on her cell phone out of one side of her mouth and telling her kid to shut up out the other side.  Maybe the child will emulate type-A obsessions the likes of dear ol' Mom one day, or perhaps he'll cultivate a drug habit instead, before he kicks that in favor of a fundamentalist bent aimed at beating down some target demographic vulnerable enough to curry his misdirected rage.  Now maybe Ma's just having a bad day and the kid'll emerge relatively intact from his youth.  Or it could be the brat's a born sociopath who deserves whatever tongue lashing he gets, though I'm not sure Mom even knew what she was yelling at him about.  In the end, I gotta bad feeling about this particular mother and child (re)union:  I think she's into herself pretty intently, he's mostly left on the outside looking in, and the prognosis for him isn't on the sunny side of life.

This parental watershed flashed me back to my childhood days.  My folks liked to try and put on a stylish face to outsiders, even when their world was obviously collapsing around them.  They remind me now of the Bouvier-Beale gals of Grey Gardens fame, all consumed with manners and close-ups and seemingly oblivious to the death, filth and smell that surrounded them.

Mom and Dad's plastered-on-smiles paranoia in mind, I was always told to shut up whenever we had company over.  In case I might point out to strangers the fact that Dad just finished his usual morning dry-heaves into the family vomit bowl an hour before their arrival. Or, "hey, didya know that isn't coffee Mom's sipping from her mug!?!"  In fact, when one of my friends spoke up out of turn in this setting, I would be the one who would be told to shut up even though I hadn't said anything.  It was comical in retrospect.  As though I'd developed expert ventriloquism skills and was throwing my voice.  Consequently, I've rarely spoken up in casual conversation from then to now.  I have a lot to say but am compelled to keep it to myself.  I make up for it with the written word, I guess, but my verbosity here does not translate to other forms of communication in my life.

If I had kids, would I have visited an innate shame of one's own opinion upon them?  Probably not.  My particular dysfunctions would likely have resulted in some other psychological damage, as unique as a snowflake up close and as depressingly similar from afar.  Some things aren't meant to happen, thankfully.  If Shirley McLaine is right, I guess there is some lucky soul out there who was spared my particular brand of self-absorbed parental neglect.

Or maybe I'd be a great parent.  It could happen.  And might happen still.   It's this last possibility that really gives me the chills.

The Mark of Catharsis

September, 1975. Dad lies stupefied on the couch, the foam padding exposed from rips in the cushions absorbing his sweat and bourbon-laced run-off spittle. The television in the corner talks to no one, some random game show host babbling on about the wonderful parting gifts. Mom is likely engrossed in her wine and a book on the love seat at the other end, but then occasionally and persistently calling to the dog for no particular reason. I feel bad for our mutt. Leave Snooks in peace, Mom; she's just trying to block this all out like me. I can hear these sounds faintly but still irritatingly clear, arriving with the smoke through the heating duct upstairs into my room. My Dad's wheezing under the game show noise is oddly comforting in its disturbance, letting me know that all is "normal" in my world. My world, where the horrific is soothing simply because anything else would imply abandonment. I aspire to Brady Bunch and Leave It To Beaver familial bliss only in the abstract, with the dysfunction I've come to depend on always bleeding through to balance my equilibrium (hence Leave It To Bitcher).

I'm lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. Trying to write smooth my barbed feelings with a number 2 pencil. It doesn't help. Bad poetry. Awkward imagery missing the mark of catharsis. Maybe I'll move to the desk and my typewriter; things always flow more easily for me from the keystrokes than they do by hand. I slug down the last of the cold coffee on the nightstand, jump up to flip over Meet The Beatles! and drop the needle on side two. George Harrison drowns out the sounds of slow death downstairs with his lead on the first track, Don't Bother Me. How appropriate, I think. And I smile.

I found Meet The Beatles at the Salvation Army Thrift Store two days ago and have pretty much been playing it non-stop ever since. I have memorized the liner notes (35 years later, I can still recite most of them from a usually faulty memory). It's as though they are a brand new band with a wholly new sound, exposing to me the doldrums that otherwise constitute the mid-70's music scene, at least as I was aware of it through Seattle radio up to that point.

I stumbled upon the Fab Four quite by accident, so in a very real way I am just now meeting the Beatles, though they broke up almost six years ago (and Capital first released this album to US consumers nearly seven years prior to that). It is a bit scratchy in spots but is a revelation to me nonetheless. And it will soon lead to the rest of their catalog, then to Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Ramones, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash and Elvis Costello (the crew that would collectively constitute my pantheon of rock and roll).

My rock and roll pantheon would later lead me to a promised land of musical magic, filled with thousands of artists coming from bluegrass to hip-hop and everywhere in between. But right now, in September of 1975, at perhaps the lowest point emotionally of my childhood, it is the Beatles alone who have saved me from bubblegum purgatory and early 70's "classic rock" hell. And in some ways helped to save me from myself.

Musing on Claustrophobia in a Snowstorm

She's soft like pastels in a water color muddle,

determined to the fault line;

cracking open, tearing closed.

She's breaking, then crying,

then sobbing with anger.

Then a commercial for Lenscrafters

as I bear passive witness on the couch.

My walls breathe down on me;

sponge-painted, closing in.

Snow bound and fear bound and thought bound

and wound taunt to tearing.

Fury.

Seething.

Shaking.

The tectonic plates shift beneath

a calm disposition as I smile, agreeable.

Seething.

And strapped into distraction from all that,

watching Aquos and Macintosh

play substitute for life.

Dopamine Unhinged

1990.

I clear my sinuses and swallow hard, leaning back with a smile as my throat goes numb. My brain is humming with good feelings and peace of mind; all is right with the world. I look around and admire this fine apartment, the bright and vibrant television on with a tape of Platoon in the VCR. This is a masterpiece; maybe the best movie ever, I think to myself. I am subjectivity, my own inner voice. I am intoxicated with concentrated happiness, itself a loan paid for with the torrent of sickness and misery to come. The interest on this loan is compounded by the minute with its dopamine drain, but payment isn't due quite yet. And nothing else matters "in the now."

You see a shaking man-child hunched over a rapidly diminishing mound of lumpy powder that lies on the CD jewel case before him. You observe him chopping up his happiness intently with a credit card, carefully partitioning off three thin lines and hoovering them up his nose with a blood-streaked rolled up dollar bill. You catch him occasionally mopping up the crimson dripping from his nostril with a matting of toilet tissue, the roll spilling out onto the living room carpet and the used wads littering his feet. You smell the stench of the place and feel the filth crawling. His hair waves wild and soaked with sweat. A damaged VHS tape plays on the TV, occasionally skipping over mid-scene, picture and sound coming and going unwatched, unheard. You are objectivity, the unseen fact collector; steely eyed sober, equally unaffected by life's ying and yang of morality and depravity.

I admire the costume I've assembled in the mirror: Charlie Manson, complete with fake beard, hippie wig and jailbird striped jumpsuit. I'm in the bathroom at my friend's Halloween party, a damp finger dabbed ever so slightly into the thumb-size baggie and then up the left nostril, white and anesthetized. I breathe in hard and deep through the left with the right pinched closed. But quietly! Flush the toilet; mask it! Ahh! An instant blast of life-of-the-party and contentment shoot through my toes and up into my eyeballs, closing the loop with a wonderful tickle around the inside of my skullcap. Be sure to check the Manson beard and make sure it's clear of tell-tale residue, I remind myself. Looking good, indeed! Now, back into the party! For once, I can nurse rather than chug my beer. And I can gab! I'm king of the small-talk, master of the back-slap, a gadfly personified. Conversation after conversation, I enthrall them with ease for hours. Oh, need to get some fresh air and blow my nose. Then it's time to reload my beer and my brain!

You see the wild eyes flashing from beneath his Manson get-up, all deep black pupil drowning out the white. The rat-a-tat-tat of his speech is aimed at no one, the telltale repetition of his thoughts in close proximity apparent to them all. He mingles staccato wired for sound and bouncing off the walls like a pinball. You bear witness to his sniffles growing more pronounced by the hour, an equation of addiction multiplied by bathroom breaks and tissue paper. You catch him dash to the back porch holding back his head, tissue pressed against the geyser exploding red above his lips. You hear him mutter, "Time to switch," as he stumbles for the bathroom. The left is shot for the evening, time to reload through the right.

And so it goes. Facts in clear-eyed 20/20 hindsight seem altogether different from their counterparts in the moment, wearing rose-colored glasses with dopamine unhinged.