August 14, 2002

•  

  I was looking freaky with the frizz, a huge red afro from hell.
  There was intense pain if I tried to brush it, and lots of it fell out.
  I let it frizz, wild and natural. Jeanne and some other people
  including Glenn and Surfer, didn’t like my dark biker outfits, so they
  gave me what they wanted to see me in: bright flowing caftans,
  hip-hugger pants and crop-tops, broad straw hats and tall moccasin
  boots. Anything just too groovy for words but a touch too over the top
  for comfort on one’s own body, give it to Kathy, to Coyote’s
  crazy-as-a-coot sister, and watch her flaunt it to maximum effect.

  Flashback time again:

  When I fled from VW to the Hulk’s house, I went without shoes. It
  was hot midsummer and next day the sidewalks were like a big griddle.
  Hulk bought me a pair of sandals. We were on Willamette Street, and I
  did a few little barefoot hops on the hot pavement, and Hulk led me
  around a corner and through a shady alley to the Salvation Army and
  bought me a 50-cent pair of brown leather sandals. Nothing ever felt
  better on my feet except Mother Earth and Father Sky. I was
  pathetically grateful, and when I saw it reflected in his eyes, I saw
  how far down I’d been with the bikers and how much farther up I’d
  already come since my liberation.

  I was so free, so looose… let that Freudian typo stand. Hulk,
  jaded old doc Feelgood who had perfected his craft at both dealing
  and injecting amphetamines in Phoenix on a mission for the West Coast
  speed syndicate, the same bunch of guys who had been selling big flat
  white-cross bennies in quantity to the Bay Area Hells Angels, this
  weird Incredible Hulk said that seeing the world through my eyes gave
  him a fresh perspective on it. The feeling was mutual, because his
  presence and actions and the people and events and methamphetamine
  hydrochloride he brought into my life and my bloodstream, not to
  mention all the endogenous endorphins and dopamine and such, engendered
  by our incessant sexual indulgence, had given me a grand new view of
  the universe. Epiphanies coming in bunches, peak after peak after peak,
  processing high-level data at ‘way above the speed limit. White light,
  white heat.

  Late nights, when most people slept, Hulk and I liked to walk. Then
  we decided to ride bikes. We found a couple of bikes leaning against
  the sides of houses or lying in a driveway. We would ride one until we
  spotted another unsecured bike and then swap. We randomly left little
  kids’ single-speed bikes where we picked up new ten-speeds and vice
  versa. For about four or five nights, we did that, until it became
  harder and harder to find unattended bikes left out, except for the
  worst of the worst that we’d dropped on some disgruntled bicyclist as
  we took his ten-speed. The good bikes grew locks and chains or
  disappeared behind closed doors. Thus robbed of our fun, we found a new
  game to play, a novelty called sleep.

  When we slept together on speed, we shared dreams. Our experience
  with the nitrous oxide and acid combo at Page Browning’s wedding had
  been similar, only the shared part there was waking thoughts and
  sensations, not dreams, and it had been a circle of people sharing them
  all, not just the two of us. But neither were the shared dreams, it
  seemed, just between the two of us. One morning Jeanne was telling the
  household about her dream and Hulk and I exchanged wowed expressions
  because we had just been comparing notes privately about a dream with
  many of the same elements. Speed accelerated my psychic development,
  the shamanic unfoldment and metaphysical initiation triggered by my
  studies and the psychedelics. I was illuminated, which is the origin of
  “Catherine”, the root source of my name. Bright, hot white light,
  consuming me.

  One day one of our roomies brought home someone I could have sworn I
  knew from somewhere. When I said to Zodiac, a roadie for the Grateful
  Dead, that I thought I knew him, he looked closer at me and then said,
  “Yes, I knew you in a past life.” I didn’t know about that.
  Reincarnation was something I’d heard of but didn’t believe in, but I
  liked Zodiac a lot. He drove an old sports car with no top and rust
  where the paint used to be. It was some kinda classic car, British I
  think. [Memory blip:  Jaguar!  I'm pretty sure Zodiac's car
  was an old Jaguar.]  Guys drooled over it. The car was okay, and
  Zodiac was a lot of fun. He had some functioning brain cells, he read
  books, and he liked to talk about issues, all of which I found
  refreshing.

  He liked to shoot speed, but he had the same vein problems I did. He
  didn’t need much persuasion to join me in a hot bath after several of
  us assured him that the technique worked, made veins come closer to the
  surface and relax, become larger, easier targets. He kept glancing at
  the Bob Weir poster, said it was a little creepy, but after we both got
  the speed into our veins, and when the party that was going on in the
  front of the house started crowding into the bathroom with us, I think
  he forgot about the poster. That party stands out in memory as the last
  of the relatively carefree times for us, before things started falling
  apart.

  That summer, a bunch of our friends who lived on a commune outside
  town, a place called Crow Farm, got busted spectacularly. If I recall
  the numbers correctly, three helicopters and five carloads of cops
  arrested eight adults, took five kids as wards of the court, rounded up
  several dogs for the pound and impounded a bunch of other livestock.
  This was talked about a lot, and there was a general atmosphere of
  paranoia.

  Steve had always been cautious verging on paranoiac. He was pretty
  freaky over his brother’s death at the time he moved into his garage
  apartment with the landlady upstairs and started cooking meth in his
  kitchen. The first batch was a success, but then he got sloppy and
  produced a batch that came out brown, and another that was blue-violet
  in color. Surfer tested them, and got sick. I was lucky enough to have
  been otherwise occupied, or I’d have been the one who got sick.

  Then we didn’t see Steve for a while. He took off expecting to have
  the police after him following a little mishap in his kitchen. The
  chemical reactions in meth manufacture produce heat. The retort (in
  Steve’s kitchen it was an old thick green glass 5-gallon bottle from an
  office water cooler) has to be kept in a cooling bath and the
  temperature of the reaction needs to stay within a certain range: too
  low and the product isn’t right; too high, it runs out of control and
  blows up.

  The two bad batches that made Surfer sick had probably been a result
  of Steve being overcautious about letting the reaction heat up. His
  next attempt, he must have overcompensated. It got too hot. In an
  heroic act to save his landlady upstairs and her property, he had
  grabbed up the big hot bottle using curtains as potholders, hurried to
  the door with it and dumped the chemicals into the flowerbed beside his
  stoop.

  When we saw him again, Steve said he had been certain that the smell
  alone would get him busted, so he just stuck the more incriminating
  items out of sight of the windows, locked up the place and took off.
  After some time, he came back. The only remaining evidence of his
  chemical spill was a sunflower in that flowerbed by the porch. His
  landlady called it to his attention when it grew so tall it was looking
  in her second-floor window. By the time we saw it, it had grown beyond
  her window, and was heading for the roof. It topped out somewhere over
  15 feet tall (around 5 meters). The other sunflowers in the yard
  stopped somewhere between two and three meters, around 6-8 feet.

  While Steve was gone and Eugene was in another speed drought, it
  seemed that everyone in town was coming around either looking for speed
  from us, or if they knew about the situation, trying to get us to chip
  in with them and make a trip to Portland to cop. At one point, the
  Free Souls (the outlaw bike club that had been Black Ravens in
  Vallejo)  must have gone to the Bay Area for a supply, because VW
  pulled up to our curb one day, with peace offerings of meth, saying he
  understood how rough it was in a drought. I was so glad he wasn’t still
  pissed off at me. I do hate being hated.

  Eventually, we decided we’d have to make a run to Portland for
  speed. The first step was arranging transportation. It ended up being
  Glenn Vaughn’s old canary yellow Chevy. He drove us around town, seeing
  all our old customers, promising speed tomorrow for cash in advance
  today. A lot of people wanted the speed but very few wanted to risk
  fronting us money. We spent an entire day getting together about $360
  in small bills. We had contacted the dealer in Portland and set up a
  meet for sometime in the wee small hours.

  It was someone we’d never dealt with before and the person who was
  our go-between had said he was a tough guy, carried a gun, and had been
  known to burn people he didn’t like: take their money and not deliver
  any speed. It was important to Hulk to make a good impression. He had a
  gun, but we’d all prefer to just dazzle and befriend the man. For
  starters, we wore our best clothes. For Hulk, that always meant the
  black Stetson with the silver and turquoise concho hatband. I was
  resplendent in a turquoise and green paisley caftan and big hat. Just
  before we left town, Hulk pulled the wads of small bills out and said
  we couldn’t go to some big time dealer with that mess. We needed to
  turn it into some hundred-dollar bills, to show some class.

  Okay, sounded like a good idea. But where could we get hundred
  dollar bills in the middle of the night? A bored waitress in an
  all-night cafe seemed happy enough to exchange the only hundred in her
  till for a wad of fives and tens, and then the troop was off in search
  of more big bills. We finally walked into the Western Union Telegraph
  office, Hulk and I and three of our friends. The clerk showed a flash
  of pure panic when Hulk boomed in his deep voice, “Do you have any
  hundred-dollar bills?” Then we assured him that we didn’t want to rob
  him, and showed him our crumpled wads of cash. He provided two more
  engraved portraits of Ben Franklin, and we were off to Portland.

  It was a grueling all-night cluster-fuck. The man wasn’t where he
  said he’d be. When we found him, he didn’t have enough for our needs
  and we had to wait for someone to run down some more. Then, it turned
  out to have been walked on, adulterated. It got us off, but it took
  more of it to get there and it left nasty metallic tastes in our
  throats, made our sweat smell really weird, and I got sick on it, got
  nephritis, kidney inflammation.

  That lot of meth didn’t last long, was actually all sold before we
  even got back to Eugene with it. The lousy quality left us with
  disgruntled customers and no alternative suppliers. We started sleeping
  a lot and nobody was very happy. Hulk was in the back room asleep one
  day when his old girlfriend, the one whose betrayal led to his earning
  that name, knocked on the door. She said she knew about our being out
  of speed, and had some heroin that she wondered if we would want. It
  didn’t sound interesting to me, and I didn’t like her, so I didn’t even
  invite her in. I just said no and good-bye, and shut the door. When
  Hulk woke up, I told him and he beat me up. It was the only time that
  he ever was violent with me. And it was one of the worst beatings of my
  life. I lost teeth from it, one by one over the years, from “trauma
  cracks”, as my dentist called them. Hulk was contrite and apologetic. I
  understood, really I did. I had always known he was volatile when he
  first woke up. I have since learned that it comes from low blood sugar.

  At the time, I thought my heart was broken. A lot of the luster was
  off our shiny new relationship, fershure. I simply assumed that this
  was to end up being the first of a series of beatings until either he
  killed me or I left. As he was punching and kicking me, I was huddled
  in a ball in the corner of our mattress in the back bedroom, arms over
  my head, screaming and sobbing. When he wound down and cooled off, he
  left the room for a few moments, then came back with a wet cloth and
  cleaned the blood off my face. He held me and we cried together. He
  laid me down and tucked me in like a baby.

  I stayed in that room until the facial bruises faded and cuts
  healed. Neither of us wanted my face to be seen, but our housemates did
  see it. The whole story got told and Tree and Glenn were indignant,
  shaming Hulk until I came to his defense. I know they all thought I was
  nuts. I can’t argue with that judgment, but I knew that Hulk loved me
  and I certainly loved and still do love Hulk. Nobody understood that.

  But Hulk looked after me. He waited on me, helped me to the bathroom
  until I could make it on my own power. He kept me fed and the house
  clean. When speed was available, he brought it home to me. Each time,
  he would tell me I was poisoning myself with the stuff, but he wouldn’t
  keep it from me. He did try, but I begged and he relented.

  After I’d gotten too ill to move around freely, with hepatitis and
  nephritis in addition to the fibro and whatever general toxic
  conditions existed as well as aftereffects of the beating, one time
  Surfer came over, mostly to check up on us, on me, solicitous,
  affectionate friendly concern. He looked deeply into my eyes and
  something clicked, locked on. He hugged me and left and, too weak to
  move, I willed myself to go with him. The next time I saw him, I told
  him about his walk, the route he had taken, first to the Odyssey Coffeehouse
  and then a sweep of the fishbowl before hooking back toward his house.
  I told him who he met on Willamette Street, and who he stopped to
  stare after as she passed on the U of O campus. I told him how he had
  felt as he lay down to sleep and thanked him for the concern that had
  been preoccupying his mind for much of his walk home. He acknowledged
  the whole thing with a tear in his eye and then exchanged an odd glance
  with the Hulk.

  Everyone was looking at me and speaking to me in a way that said
  clearly they didn’t expect me to survive. More than a few, even some
  friends who were bikers, groused and said something should be done with
  that rat, VW, because he had knowingly given me hepatitis with a free
  hit of speed in a syringe he said was clean, freshly sterilized. It was
  at his bury-the-hatchet visit after I’d been gone a couple of months.
  Then he had gone and boasted about it. Bury that old hatchet right in
  silly old Ms. Coyote’s thick skull, yes indeed.

  My saviors came in the unlikely guise of a young pair of newlywed
  speed freaks. These kids from Newport or Tillamook or somewhere on the
  coast, had gotten married after high school graduation and had come to
  Eugene to be hippies. Speed got them and they had been dealing with our
  gaggle of runaways and older delinquents for a while. When they left
  our house after copping a baggie of crank, they got busted. For a deal
  on their prosecution, they gave up their contacts. My direct salvation
  came in the form of a dozen or so cops, in uniform and in plain
  clothes, males and females and a couple of dogs. No knock. Just heavy
  steps on the wooden porch, a shout of, “police!”, and the door kicked
  open.

  Tree was in the bedroom when they hit the door. Thinking fast, he
  dropped the household stash out the back window, a cigar box with
  everyone’s ‘fits, most of them eye-dropper glass with the rubber bulb
  from an old-style pacifier, a few insulin syringes, and our communal
  supply of crank. That window, due to the hill the house was on, opened
  onto a vertical drop down a bluff equivalent to a two-story house. A
  dumpster in the lot of a gas station was where the box landed, and the
  kids were able to retrieve it later. The only other dope in the house
  was a skinny partial lid of weed that Jeanne had just brought in and
  Hulk had stashed temporarily in an old empty purse of mine under a table in
  the front room. That was what they busted us for. Hulk went in because
  he was already on probation and because the house was rented in his
  name. I went in because the purse belonged to me. Everyone else walked.

  • 1:21 pm
  • 10 Comments