August 13, 2002

• I’ve
  been neglecting to inform those of delicate sensibilities that my blogs
  are often offensive.  This warning goes for the whole
  collection, since it’s the inoffensive ones that are the rare
  exceptions.  Now to the latest installment of my memoirs:

  
  

  The few times, no more than a
  handful, that I shot myself up with meth while I lived with VW, it was
  a painful, frustrating, difficult process. My veins have confounded
  doctors, nurses and military medics on two continents. They’d poke at
  me a few times and then call in whoever it was that they called on for
  the difficult ones. Sometimes when they’d find a vein, it would split
  and collapse, leaving a big infusion contusion thing that was colorful,
  ugly, and sore for a while and left a slight indentation under the skin
  when it faded.

  These same things happened for me until I
  moved in with Hulk. As soon as we got those 3 ounces of meth from Steve
  and distributed it to the teeny-boppers for sale, except for three
  quarters of an ounce we kept for consumption and friendly distribution
  of samples, we went home. Under the mirrors, The Incredible Hulk (whose
  nic, before that fateful psychedelic day in the U of O fishbowl, had
  been Dr. Feelgood) painlessly and without the slightest apparent effort
  hit me up with more than a quarter of a teaspoon of crank. His
  technique was better and his touch surer than that of any charge nurse,
  or Senior Master Sergeant with combat experience, that I’d ever known.
  It was more speed than I was used to doing at a single hit, abundance,
  at my request, up to what my resident expert believed to be safely just
  this side of OD.

  I wet my pants. I swear it felt like I did,
  but there was no puddle. It was just the sensation, that sweet feeling
  of relief, of melting inside, combining orgasmic sensations with every
  other bodily sensation of blessed release. As soon as the rush was over
  we embraced and fell back on the mattress together. We tangled our
  limbs in various configurations under the mirrors and eventually set up
  another mirror against a wall at mattress-level, the eye-level view. We
  discovered that each of us had a copy of the Kama Sutra, and neither
  had ever had a partner who took an interest in sexual magic. We
  consulted the books, and broke up, dissolved in laughter when we
  glanced up at the ceiling mirrors at the two naked redheads reading
  side-by-side. Practicing the techniques and positions from Kama Sutra,
  and our exploratory improvisational sex play, was a hoot. We laughed a
  lot, at ourselves in the mirrors and at the insights and sensations we
  were sharing. And sometimes it was all so poignant and fleeting that we
  wept together and then we’d do another hit and do it all again, except
  it was never “over again” it was always all new and fresh each time.

  When visitors came, we didn’t dress. I’d
  pull up the sheet, and Hulk got up only long enough to unlock the door
  after finding out who was there. By the time they came in, he was back
  under the sheet with me, and the guests would sit on the floor cushions
  lined up in an L-shape seating arrangement along the wall in the corner
  of the tiny old garage opposite the corner where we’d placed our
  mirrored mattress. We’d pass a pipe or some joints, and maybe transact
  some business. The guests would glance around, up at the mirrors, at us
  under the sheets and get the hell out of there fast… most of them.
  Few ever really joined the fun, but a few of them did urge us not to
  let their presence inhibit us from our fun and they watched for a
  while. One of these voyeurs was Smacky Chuck, Eugene’s best-known
  heroin addict, a former associate of Lou Reed. Watching him hit up and
  nod off leaving the ‘fit bobbing in his arm, and seeing the hash he’d
  made of his arms was almost enough to put me off the needle… almost
  but not quite.

  Under Hulk’s tutelage, I was becoming
  expert at injecting myself. We’d found that my ankle veins were easiest
  to use and least likely to collapse. Actually, I’d told Hulk that,
  based on what I’d learned from some of those expert phlebotomists who
  had been called in on the various occasions when I’d needed IV
  medication or nutrition, or had to give blood for testing in the lab.
  *No blood bank would ever accept my blood for transfusion. Ughh. No,
  friends, you wouldn’t want my blood, especially if you were ill or
  injured. Huh, uh, no!* I told Hulk I had some good veins down there, he
  found them, and showed me how to hit them.

  One
  day, on one of our meth fueled walks (probably the same day I took this
  picture), he looked down at the top of my head, and at the hair there
  mingling with his bushy beard as he embraced me and pulled me into his
  armpit, and said, “It’s incredibly great having a girl to match my
  beard.” If I’d been a bit quicker, I’d have quipped, “…and to match
  your narcissism, too, Love.”

  L’esprit d’l'escalier is one of my most
  prominent and least appreciated talents. I tended then as now to keep
  most of those quips, when they occur to me, to myself. When I don’t,
  they tend to be labeled as zingers. My very best jokes pass, marked
  only by tiny chuckles as some comic connection crosses my mind and I
  just chortle and keep it to myself. It’s much simpler and easier that
  way. My jokes, when I tell them, tend to draw blank stares as they sail
  over a few heads. Sometimes… only sometimes, it is fun to hear people
  explaining one’s jokes to each other. Just the other night Greyfox and
  Doug and I were talking about how the three of us get the joke. We’re
  that kind of family. It’s a fun kind of bond.

  But to get back to Eugene in the summer of ’69:

  Hulk and I had been… noticed, notorious,
  if not to say legendary, each on our own. Together, we were over the
  top. We loved immersing ourselves in each other, and we shared a joy
  and appreciation for the responses, the feedback from those near and
  dear to us as we rode our exploratory wave of carnal love. It was an
  intense and public love affair. One day, a day full of sunshine and the
  smells of ripe fruit and brushfires there in the Willamette Valley, two
  special people showed up at the door. Not that our little coterie of
  teeny boppers and weirdos like Jim Fate, Surfer Roy and Smacky Chuck
  weren’t special in themselves, but Page Browning was my personal hero
  for helping me escape from the bikers, and Ken Kesey was a cultural
  icon.

  They brought in a Quaker oatmeal box. It
  was about three quarters full of sinsemilla, homegrown from some
  friends of theirs at Big Sur. It had come in the mail that day, a
  wedding present for Page and his wife-to-be. I think her name was Faye,
  same as the name of Ken Kesey’s wife, but I’m not sure. Her daughter,
  Pleasure Bell, (who rumor said had been fathered by Kesey) was
  everyone’s living doll among the Pranksters and others who hung out
  around Kesey’s farm. Kesey and Page were there to invite us to the
  wedding and to trade some of their homegrown bud for acid. We just
  happened to have some excellent “strawberry barrels”, thick red tablets
  with a well-earned reputation for potency.

  Hulk and I had been all sweaty, aroused and
  preorgasmic when they got out of Page’s truck and knocked at the door.
  They walked in, inhaled deeply, looked at the mirrors, sat down and
  urged us not to let them stop us. So we finished the cycle and met not
  just our two but all four glances in the mirrors at the climax. Then we
  all toked on some bud and did a hit of crank together and made the
  trade, seventeen hits of acid (all we had, less our two hits for the
  wedding) in exchange for an ounce or so of the best bud of North
  American origin I’d had to date.

  Ken Kesey was another redheaded Virgo. I
  had met him just once before that day he walked in, sat down and
  watched me in ecstatic orgasmic bliss. It had been during the week I
  had VW’s VW bug, right after Steve called on us to test and sell his
  first batch of crank from the kitchen-lab of the room downstairs from
  his sweet little old gray-haired landlady. Since we had the wheels and
  there was a surplus of crank, Hulk wanted to drive out and turn Kesey
  and Page onto a hit.

  Page wasn’t around that day. Few people
  were around at all. The psychedelic bus named Furthur, and most of the
  Merry Pranksters, were on their way to Woodstock. This was just days
  before the festival. We sat in the old chickenhouse that had become
  Mountain Girl’s room when she lived at Kesey’s farm. Ken had his
  guitar. It had been cloudy when we sat down and hit up. Then he picked
  up the guitar and noodled a little and the sun came out, as if by the
  magic of the music… and the meth. We laughed, a little circle of five
  or six freaks in Mrs. Jerry Garcia’s old room.

  Then Faye Kesey stepped into the sunny open
  doorway with an axe in her hand. She demanded to know whose VW bug that
  was out there, and who we all were, the four of us (if memory serves it
  was Hulk and me, and Surfer Roy and Baron Peter von Olin). She wanted
  to know if we had brought methamphetamine out to Ken, and Ken confirmed
  to his wife Faye that he indeed had done a healthy hit. He kept on
  strumming the guitar.

  Faye said she would count to ten before she
  started hacking on the bug unless we were in it and on our way off her
  property. Kesey hugged us and we scrammed. Then, weeks later, there he
  was with the oatmeal box of Big Sur homegrown weed and an invitation to
  a wedding in the Pranksters’ dance hall at the farm, in the absence of
  the Woodstock-bound Pranksters. Hugs all around as they left, and then
  back onto the bed for Hulk and me, but not under the sheets that time.

  I’ve been telling this in flashbacks. I’m
  telling it as it comes. At some later date I’ll reread and possibly
  rewrite this into chronological order, if I can. In memory, it is a
  jumble of flashbacks just like the narrative. My chronology is
  confused, though each fragment of memory is bright.

  The first five days we had crank in
  embarrassing abundance and consumed it in wretched excess, Hulk ate and
  slept about the same as anyone. I neither ate nor slept those first
  five days. Then one day, Hulk was atop and inside of me and he says it
  struck him that the skin on my face looked like it was just stretched
  over a skull. He cocked his head to one side, rolled off and knelt
  beside me and looked me up and down, then looked up at the ceiling to
  get the full mirrored effect. He asked me how long it had been since
  I’d eaten. I couldn’t remember, so we figured out what day it was and
  what day it had been when we had last shared a meal. Five days… He
  made me get dressed and reluctantly leave my sweaty little nest for a
  walk to Arby’s. My first Arby’s sandwiches, ever, chosen because it was
  close by, and consumed with more enjoyment, once I had overcome the
  amphetamine-induced revulsion at the thought of food, than Arby’s has
  ever held for me since then. I seldom stop in Arby’s any more (the last
  time was in Sedona, seven years or so ago) but passing one in Wasilla
  or Anchorage always reminds me of the summer of Woodstock in Eugene.

  So much happened in the three months that I
  was actively, daily, excessively and addictively shooting speed that it
  will take at least another whole blog to tell that story adequately. We
  didn’t stay in the little house on the alley the whole time. When our
  two paid months were up, the landlord wanted us out. He and his
  neighbors didn’t like the traffic in that alley after word got around
  where the Hulk lived. There was even a small pass-through window in the
  wall facing the alley and Smacky Chuck one time pulled up beside it and
  honked to order his carryout crank. That was the last straw for our
  sweet old gray-haired landlord, and the next day he gave us notice.

  Another flashback:

  While we lived there, early-on, one
  sleepless night while Hulk slept, before I got to the point of being
  able to sleep on speed, I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, with the
  added neurochemical enhancement of a hit of acid. I read it all in a
  single sitting overnight, could smell, feel and taste the dry air of
  Arrakis and the spicy moisture in seitch, could hear the Fremen
  rhythmically calling the Makers. I still can, oh, yes I can… oh,
  my…. The movie with Sting, and the later TV miniseries didn’t do it
  justice.

  We found a nearby place with two bedrooms
  and a convertible sofa and shared it with some friends from the
  wholesale-level dope dealing community, including Jeanne, the girl we
  had healed on our first night together. She had recently dropped out of
  normal upper middle class life and a bus.admin. education to deal and
  do speed, and she did it well, learned fast.

  While we had been in our alley hideaway,
  I’d been “wearing out” some of my better veins. Hulk told me that heat
  brought the veins to the surface. The best way to get that heat: bubble
  bath, of course… what else? We tried it tandem but he was too huge to
  be comfortable alone in a standard tub, much less sharing one. It was
  better when he just parked on the lid of the john and tied off his own
  arm and got off while I got off first on the speed in an ankle vein and
  then slid down under the water and got off that way as well. There was
  a hearty streak of voyeurism in The Incredible Doctor Feelgood. We were
  made for each other that way.

  I knew from a couple of hospital stays when
  the phlebotomist had been forced to extreme measures, that there was a
  deep vein on my inner ankle that was accessible, big and sturdy. The
  new place had a bathtub, and the hot baths let me get at that vein and
  get off with much more ease, and no more need for Hulk to hit me up. By
  then he was feeling uncomfortable doing it, anyway. I was ‘way
  overdoing it to my quite evident detriment.

  That was the first lovers’ spat between us.
  I stupidly opted to see his reluctance to inject me with speed as his
  wanting a bigger share for himself, but he soon let me know that it was
  because he hated seeing what the speed was doing to me. My hair was a
  frizzy halo, and fell out in bunches. Sometimes, everything hurt, the
  same old fibromyalgic hurt of the youthful “growing pains” and the
  disabling chronic thing yet to come. Speed made it worse in a
  descending spiral, and I kept wanting more in a paradoxical urge to
  make the pain go away.

  One of the nights when the mix of drugs
  included speed, weed and acid, my flesh was so ultra-sensitive to touch
  that I couldn’t stand or sit still. Any part that bore my weight would
  hurt. I fidgeted from feet to knees to seat to lounging on my side, to
  ultimately standing on my head, to the amusement of all present, while
  we listened to the Beatles’ Abbey Road album for the very first time. 

  • 4:17 pm
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