Drug Stories Part I

by Noise Pollution

Writer’s Note: Some names in this story have been changed. Some bits have been slightly censored so that I’m not just straight-up giving people instructions on how to get high. This is not about that, this is me sharing a piece of my life, and getting specific about certain details about certain substances is a necessity for my writing. Do not try this at home is basically what I’m saying.

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Over the entire course of my relatively-short existence, I have found that there’s no story quite like a drug story. Sure, there are other types of fascinating stories; there are war stories, there are fantasy stories, there are horror stories and there are love stories, but nothing compares to a drug story. A drug story is the only story that takes place in both reality and fantasy simultaneously. Every part of a drug story is interesting, from the acquisition of the product to the post-debauchery life-repair that comes afterward. I thought I’d share some of mine.

I’d tell you in detail about the very first time I got high, but that story isn’t very interesting. I’ll just give you a bit of a play-by-play for context. I grew up very morally opposed to the idea of drugs and drinking and smoking and whatever. Then I had my first breakup. That didn’t quite do me in, but the horrific failures of my next two attempts at romance did. One girl lead me on as I fell hopelessly head-over-heels in-love with her, and the other girl broke up with me after a week. At that point, I was done caring about things. I was done caring about myself, mostly. So when a friend asked me if I wanted to ditch class to smoke pot with him, I said, “fuck it,” and went. The actual experience itself wasn’t all that exciting. It wasn’t crazy, I don’t even know if I got all that high or not. Maybe I didn’t inhale properly. I felt mostly normal. but I had gotten over that hump. I could smoke weed now.

It’d probably be a funnier story if that experience of feeling almost nothing led me to becoming a hopeless pot-head, but that wasn’t the case. I just wasn’t all that into it. I’d smoke when I was ditching class, which wasn’t all that often at that point. And I never bought my own shit. I just smoked when other people offered. But people offered kind of often. Apparently people love watching newbies get high. I guess I wound up enjoying that too, at some point.

But anyway. It wasn’t until I got my first taste of alcohol that I started to see why this whole “substance abuse” thing was worth getting into. I was staying over at my best friend Jake’s house. I believe drinking was on the itinerary – that it was part of the plan going in, but I guess I don’t fully remember. I was fifteen. It was a long time ago. Anyways, he and I started with a shot of… something. It was a dark alcohol, not a clear one. I don’t know what it was now. He told me how to drink it; he told me not to let it touch my tongue and to just get it down my throat as quickly as possible. I attempted to do that, but failed miserably. It tasted like fire, but honestly, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. I had an extremely easy time with hard liquor initially. That would eventually come to a halt, but not until later. We then had one more, followed by a contest to see who could take one shot the fastest. I actually won, due to my not-yet-deteriorated tolerance to the taste of booze. I beat my experienced friend in a drinking contest of sorts. I was pretty proud. I would never best him again, but I do have that one time to look back on.

Anyways, three shots isn’t too crazy. Jake is a good guy. he didn’t get me shitfaced. He got me to the enjoyable level of mild drunkenness and then we hung out, laughing and writing songs until I eventually fell asleep on his couch.

Yeah, we had kind of a bromance. Fuck off. Jake is my best friend.

Anyways, when I woke up hangover-free (due to the small, small amount we actually drank) I knew this was the life I wanted. I wanted to fuck off at school, get drunk and have fun. I was done with success. I was going to have no future. I would be punk as fuck.

And so I spent another few weeks doing the same shit. I was smoking intermittently and not really enjoying it along with drinking occasionally and mildly enjoying it. My friend circle expanded greatly at that point, which I was pretty stoked about. And while it had expanded, the inner circle of this high school clique consisted of Jake, My friend who we’ll call C, my friend who we’ll call T, and me. C was a delinquent in every sense of the word, and I was down with that. While I was personally morally opposed to theft and violence, C was not. C would procure money and drugs and I wouldn’t ask how he obtained them. I just participated. And with my desire to be punk as fuck, I wasn’t upset about his methods, either. Anyways, there was a period of time where C had a very large collection of various unlabelled(!) powders and pills, of which the four of us would partake regularly. I learned how to raid my family medicine cabinet, eventually finding a years-old bottle of some sort of allergy pill, which I stole and split with my friends. It wasn’t too crazy, aside from the fact that we all got pretty high, rolled each other down a hill in a stolen trash can, went home separately, and then proceeded to fall asleep at literally the exact same time, without any coordination.

Things would stay on this path for a little while, with me doing various crushed-up pills and whatever whenever C brought them along. Well, they stayed like this until one very eventful day. Man, that fucking day. You see, we got word from T that you could get high off of M*c*n*x, which they sold in large quantities at the grocery store down the street. He had heard this from one of his own longtime friends. We all thought he was full of shit, but he insisted that is was crazy and we should do it. We all laughed, considering it a “pussy drug” but eventually caved. We showed up at his house, and he had already bought the stuff. [Now, we didn’t know it at the time, but the thing about M*c*n*x is that while it did totally have the stuff in it to get you high, it also contained a substance that when taken in high doses caused extreme sickness. This would go on to be a big deal later.] They eventually started ID-ing for it at that store, which led us to.. uh, well, stealing it. Which I hate to admit that I did, but I did. But anyway.

We were told that if you take six of these pills, which came in fourteen-packs, if I remember right, you would get high as fuck. I took seven, Jake took eight, and T took six. His other friend was there too, who took six and was stoked to see us get high. He warned us that we were going to fucking puke, though. We waited around for a long while for it to kick in. We were eating shitty snack food and playing some video game or something, talking about dumb shit like teenage kids do. Eventually, I started to feel a little something, and we started spinning people around in this office chair, and had them stare at the ceiling. It was mildly entertaining, but since I had very little exposure to getting really, really high, I thought it was pretty great. [Yeah, all those powders and pills C had weren’t all that strong, in retrospect.] After spending some time fucking around, I got sick. I puked out a swiss cake roll. And when I say that I puked out a swiss cake roll, I mean, like, a whole one. Intact. Practically dry. It was fucked. Everyone wound up having a round of puking and eventually Jake and I decided it was time to walk back to his place. T’s basement was getting boring, the drugs were wearing off, it was all kind of whatever. We step outside, and I walk into a fucking wall. No, I didn’t actually walk into a wall, but the effects of the drug hit me like a goddamn battering ram. As it turns out, the puking was not a sign of the end of the drugs effects. They were a sign that the drug was about to kick in. All of that shit at T’s house? That was nothing. Pot? Nothing. Booze? Nothing. This was the real fucking deal.

I was high.

And Jake was, too. My vision was blank. I was blind. Well, sort of. It’s very difficult to describe. I could see fine. But my mind was suddenly devoid of context for any of these images, and I couldn’t process any of them. This is a phenomenon called “chaotic vision.”

Here’s how it works. You see, when you’re born, your eyes work fine, but you actually can’t really see yet, not the way that you see now. For the first little while of a baby’s life, they may as well be blind. Their brain is incapable of interpreting all of the information that the eyes are sending it, so all of the data from the eyes is kind of a mess. All of the objects are there, and visible to the baby, but they have no context for what that data means. It takes a long time for our brains to make certain associations and without those associations and connections, a lot of inputs don’t output the correct data. After a while, the baby will piece things together and the brain will start to automatically cross-reference the things it has learned which makes all the data it’s processing make more and more sense, until eventually it realizes that the things it’s seeing are “colors” and “objects” at which point vision starts to actually mean something. It’s a gradual process, and it’s totally fascinating. And if it sounds like bullshit, look it up. This is how eyesight works. If the brain doesn’t process the data from your eyes properly, then you aren’t seeing properly. While in a child, this manifests as actual blurriness, in my particular case, opening my eyes was like looking at an abstract painting. You can see everything clearly, but there’s nothing to look at. There’s nothing that your brain can identify.

When I found out both that bit of information about the development of eyesight and combined it with the knowledge that the drug in M*c*n*x is something that keeps certain parts of your brain from talking to each other, I figured that this “chaotic vision” was the fault of the information from my eyes not being processed at all which led to me being able to see perfectly clearly and not at all at the same time. I guess I have no actual factual evidence or studies or anything scientific to prove this explanation, but it’s the conclusion I came to after kind of a lot of research on the subject.

Moving on from the biology lesson, this “chaotic vision” shit was crazy. With the help of my friend, who was not quite as gone as I was, and the very, very vague sense of direction I had from being able to technically see, we eventually made it to his place, but not without any stupidity along the way. We waxed poetic about how cold the air was, had extreme difficulty with curbs, and spent about twenty minutes at one particular intersection because I was afraid to jump over the small amount of water in the gutter.

“Jump, Parker, jump! You can do it!”

“I, I can’t do it! It’s too far, I’ll drown!”

“I believe in you!”

“I… can’t… see!”

“Do iiiiiit!”

*jumps*

*lands exactly in middle of puddle*

*continues onward as though nothing had happened*

When we got his place and I lied down, I couldn’t sleep. Everything was literally spinning. I was euphoric. My body felt incredible, and when I moved my head, the entire world would change shape in front of me. I told me friend that night, “I get it. I finally get it. This is why people do drugs. I’m in. I’m in all the way on this.” And I was. That night was the night I changed from someone who would get high but not so high he couldn’t fake being sober into a goddamn pill-eating machine who didn’t give a fuck who knew.

I’ll stop there for now, as this is a long-ass post, but I’ll continue writing these. It feels good to get it out of my system, and I have some far more entertaining stories to tell then these ones.