speed

i usta hit it hard in Philly when i was imagining myself as an architect. having been accepted by the Yay-ul Architecture School on a full scholarship i was thinking, well, i'm sort of an artist on the inside, but i need to make a living so maybe something like buildings and shit would do the trick and balance the inner artist with the outer realist. to find out for sure i got a job with Vincent G. Kling and Associates in downtown Philly where i labored over floor plans and carefully etched toilet designs. at night, however, i'd get high on anything i could get my hands on - hash, weed, lsd, mushrooms, peyote, sunflower seeds, meth. loved the double life. a favorite junket was to drop a pill, drive to the airport, park at the end of the runway behind the chain link fence and watch the planes take off and land. the big bellied sky whales lifted your hair and crushed your eardrums. it rocked. or we'd hit up the Electric Factory (a small venue at the time) where i lucked out and saw Hendrix ride a greased pig onto the stage. or Iron Butterfly zone off into a San Francisco twilight. or even Three Dog Night with their hairy chests screaming into the mike. i traipsed up to the skinny androgynous bassist from the west coast band, Spirit, shake his limp hand (a forefinger grazing my palm in code) and gaze like a teenage girl into his mercury eyes. all this got me into the margins at work where i'd sketch 4x8 foot posters (faux Peter Max) and color them in with a fist of psychedelic magic markers. all this led up to my first bad trips on meth. i loved the initial rush, the humorless solve-all-the-problems-of-the-world edge, my heart beating like a bitch in heat. it was great until the inevitable crash. i would denounce to myself all the hot ideas that had only minutes ago seemed brilliant. i hated the sound of my voice. my skin crawled with invisible bugs. my eyes dried out. the only solution would be, though i didn't have any in those days, a sedative or wicked strong weed. more often than not i was stuck sweating it out, long hours of self-loathing and suicidal panic. it did help on cross country drives. who needed sleep? after a brief incarceration in a Santa Barbara jail (for shoplifting) my friend Harlow (flown out from Philly by my infuriated dad) and i drove back to the east coast without a wink, miles high on meth. i don't think we shut up for the entire trip. we solved all the problems of our love lives, poverty, war, inequity on the 2.5 day jaunt. ghostly, skeletal horses galloped alongside my blue panel truck at night. a sabre tooth tiger leaped from a cave, snarling and drooling across the hood. red necks in rest rooms gave us the evil eye. once home, we napped, helplessly fucked up in a 100 mph daze. i gave the shit up soon thereafter only to replace it down the rock n roll road with a coke addiction. it was more glamorous than speed. it was sexy to do, the cutting, shaping, snorting, encrusted mirror. the horny rush would subtract all moral code and inhibition. but that too, like it's white trash pal, would induce a grotesque fall from grace. good and bad times they were, those dark days of infantile fear and loathing.