August 18, 2002

• I’ve just read a comment Mystical2 made to my latest blog before, in which she said she was amazed at my energy to “write something interesting” daily.  I wouldn’t feel right taking credit for something like that.  In the months I’ve been blogging here, there was only one entry that I felt like I had “written”.  It was the piece of fiction I inserted recently.

  
  

  When I’m sharing some news story, or the search (now successful, in case anyone missed that blog) for my long-lost middle-aged “little boy”, or ranting on any old subject, I don’t feel as if that is really “writing”.  I wrote a limerick for a contest that was announced but never judged… now THAT was writing!  Making my words rhyme and scan is like sweating blood, a quantum jump higher even than the stretch I have to make to produce original fiction.  But when I’m doing memoirs, I’m just remembering.  The writing there is the easy part.

  
  

  I learned to type on a very old manual machine.  I still hit these sensitive keys harder than necessary, but it takes very little effort.  During the years from 1987-1993, I was doing psychic readings by mail.  At that time, I became adept at automatic writing.  I’d just go into trance at the keyboard for a while, then I’d read what I had written to make sure my fingers hadn’t strayed from home row, and to correct my many transpositions (Liz Dexia strikes [keys] again!).  Memoir writing is a lot like that automatic writing–which I happened to mention in the piece below, that I produced last night on Schpeedy Trackbawl:

  
  

  Sarah commented that I had “fast tracked” the last blog. She has a valid point there, as I will address below. Greyfox calls it “informationally dense” when I write that way. I love it when he talks brainy.

  
  

  I was away from the house for a while today, which in itself is a novelty. Until recently, our family only had one functioning car and it being the old fart’s place of business, I walked or stayed home unless he was here. “Lassie” is still Greyfox’s Last Stand, and now “Streak”, a Subaru wagon almost as old as Lassie, has joined the family.

  
  

   I’ve got wheels. Whee. But, I digress….

  
  

  I think I’ve been fast tracking this whole memoir thing, even though it has sometimes taken me several days and many virtual pages to get through a few months that seemed to fly by in real life. The speed freak summer was like that: an instant to live, forever to tell the tale. Other parts seem to go faster in the telling. Writing these memoirs is very close to automatic writing. I don’t start thinking about what I’m writing until I’m done and start editing. I just remember, and let the fingers do the rest.

  
  

  I have been looking at what I’ve produced, thinking about stylistic differences from one blog to the next and things like that. I can see that the time of day when I write makes a difference in my style. It may be as simple as the difference between caffeine and cannabis, or there may be some other explanation. I’m still in the process of critically examining my writing, so it’s still largely a mystery to me.

  
  

  Anyhow, driving down the highway this afternoon (Saturday: it is evening now and I’m on the bed with the laptop), I remembered that there was a big chunk I left out of that time between when I was detoxing and convalescing in the county jail, and when I went into the state prison. Memory is a vexing thing, unreliable, tricky, and elusive at times. I ended the last blog on my way to prison in Salem, but now I’m back a few months before that, in Eugene again, tying up loose ends, flashback fashion.

  
  

  Placing this slice of memory in the correct chronological slot is problematic. Weather was cold and I didn’t have a job, so it is most likely to have been before I went to work at the taco place. There were a few weeks when I spent a lot of nights in an apartment upstairs over a bar in a seedy part of downtown Eugene. Three young men lived there. I recall that, but I only clearly recall one of those men: Jesse Boone. The others were officially the renters of the place, but Jesse and I, and a few dozen other people wandered in and out of there. At night, there were sometimes nine or ten of us stretched out on the floors, snoring to the sounds of hillbilly tunes, crying-in-your-beer music, coming up from the jukebox downstairs in the bar.

  
  

  Jesse was a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, but most of his ancestors had apparently been Native American. He had an infectious grin and irresistible sparkling dark eyes. Jesse was a red-freak, a freaky redskin, but that’s not what I meant. He liked “reds”, Seconal, secobarbital, a highly addictive drug that was overused, overprescribed before doctors started overprescribing SSRIs. I was very useful to Jesse and his red-freak friends because I didn’t do downers at all. They liked to hit these things up, but they were sensitive to the potential for overdose.

  
  

  It was tricky, getting just enough to knock them out, without going over into a potentially lethal overdose. The nod-off, the loss of consciousness, was the goal. If it was done right, they would awake in a few moments, breathing normally, euphoric for an hour or so. The tricky thing was that if they injected themselves coordination went out before consciousness and they could either run too much into the vein or drop the works, blow a vein… there was a range of accidents that could happen. This is where I came in.

  
  

  Jesse would sit down on the side of a bed, so he had something to fall back on. Then he would tie off and I would very slowly inject the barbs, watching his eyes. As soon as the lids fluttered and the eyeballs rolled back, I’d pull out the needle. Then I would be there to watch and make sure he woke up within a reasonable time. We never had any mishaps, though every time we played that game it was an anxious time for me. I guess anxious is an appropriate state for a person in my position there.

  
  

  The reds were street drugs, in capsules, readily available and not very expensive. During this time, Jesse or one of the others introduced me to a gay couple who worked as orderlies in a hospital. They had vials of pharmaceutical injectable Nembutal, called “yellows” when it came in capsules. Their stuff was preferable to wetting down and cooking up the contents of capsules, for reasons of convenience and sterility, but also because they gave it away. Their house was always open and there was usually a party going on. I wondered then and still wonder how they got away with stealing such a variety and quantity of drugs from their jobs. I don’t think they got away with it for very long, because the parties came to an abrupt stop.

  
  

  One of the drugs they stole ended up in my hands, and later in my veins, because no one else wanted it. It was sodium pentathol, AKA “truth serum”. The dopers were afraid of it… afraid, I suppose, of the truth. I guess it was an ego thing, a fear of making a fool of oneself. Pentathol had figured in the plots of a few B movies where it had been grossly misrepresented as an aid to interrogation. I think the pharmaceutical classification for it is “hypnotic”. Maybe the unwillingness to try it was just ignorance: the fact that this was not one of the common street drugs, an unknown.

  
  

  I ended up with a little carton of twelve 5cc vials of it. I didn’t know the correct dosage, so I had Jesse hit me up the same way I did with his downers. Whoof, what a trip. Euphoria, U-4-E-aah. This might well be the reason that I almost left out that chunk of the memoir. It does produce amnesia for what goes on while you’re under its influence. I recall being handed the full box, and looking at the neat little rows of tiny bottles. I recall preparing my first hit of it. I don’t recall how long the supply lasted, who I might have shared it with, or much else about the time around then, except for a general sense of calm and pleasant well-being. Oddly, as I’ve been writing this, all of my teeth have started to ache. They used to do that on speed, and they do it on nitroglycerine, which I’ve taken for angina. Hmm, as I said, odd….

  
  

  One of those transients who drifted through the place over the honky tonk was different from the rest. He was an old guy named Archibald Yow. He arrived one gray morning in a green station wagon loaded with clothes and other personal items. When he came in, I was in the bar, having a pickled egg and a Coke for breakfast, listening to “Here Comes the Sun” on the jukebox. How the Beatles got in there with all that old country music, I don’t know, but that’s how I remember it. Archibald was a writer, poet, playwright–had publication credits, showed us some of his poetry. He moved in upstairs, got his portable stereo out of the station wagon, and his record album. He had one pair of vinyl LPs: Tchaikowski’s Pathetique Symphony, to which he listened continuously. There is one string passage from it that comes to mind now, and frequently gets stuck in my mind for days and days. Someone once gave it lyrics and recorded it as a love song: “Oh let my love be strong enough for two….” It might have been in a movie.

  
  

  We were all pretty sick of Archibald and his music and his poetry and his egotistical reminiscences and paranoiac political rants by the time the guys in white coats showed up. He had walked away from a “care facility” somewhere, but they eventually tracked him down and took him back. We applauded them as they led him out. Archibald turned and took a bow.

  
  

  I’ve mentioned Fred, who salvaged my I Ching from our house when Hulk and I got busted. That winter, he took me to several concerts where he helped do the light shows. He’s one of my soulmates, I now realize, though at the time I knew nothing about soulmates. Moments with Freddy were golden. We relaxed in each other’s auras. He told me his life story, and I probably told him a lot of mine. I remember him talking, me watching his beautiful face and expressive mouth. I loved him totally and he scared me shitless. He was too good for me, inaccessible. That beat up old yellow copy of the Wilhelm Baines translation of I Ching is still one of the most precious books in my library as much for the marginal notes Fred added to it as for my notes or the original text. *sigh*

  
  

  Then there was Ken. I think he came to town the following summer, after I lost the housekeeping job. I was back at the place above the bar a lot then, too. Ken was from a big and prominent California family. He was in Oregon because the Bay Area got too hot for him. Whether it was drugs, theft, violence, or draft resistance or what, I never knew. He was a redheaded Leo (my favorite sign, Doug’s sign). I loved him totally, too. I was falling in love a lot around that time. Like Hulk always said, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Lucky I did a bunch of it then, because there wasn’t a lot of opportunity of the masculine persuasion for the next year or so after that. I was pregnant by Ken when I went to prison.

  • 2:52 pm
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