So I can write about anything I want. I’m old enough, close enough to retirement that maintaining an upstanding moral image isn’t really needed as much now. When younger and still trying to build a financial life, I suppose I would have to suck up, comply and conform as a reputation needs to be protected if I were to move up. Now, it’s so less of a concern. Another reason is that the more distance from adolescence you have, you lose that desperate need to belong. When you get much older, you really do not give a fuck what other’s think of you.
So I will talk of cocaine.
I was never an addict. I had probably spent, in my lifetime, less than $100 purchasing it. I did however, have an acquaintance who was one of the major dealers of it in northern Rhode Island. Crossing paths with him (who shall remain nameless) was easy. I was one of the many who hung at the “One Way” in Slater Park in my teens and very early 20s. The One Way was an open air pharmacy, much like a farmer’s market, where, as you pulled your car into that parking lot, teen dealers with every kind of substance would run to your car to be the first to sell you their wares. It became outrageous for a good year and half, perhaps two years before the local police shut it down. Why they waited so long is another story in itself. Prior to it’s zenith, it was just low level dealing that garnered no attention from any law enforcement, but it got way out of hand eventually.
**
I remember the date I first saw cocaine, December 24, 1979, Christmas Eve. I was 15 and my brother and two of his friends from the band came into the house and ran upstairs to his bedroom. I followed. They stood around my brother’s desk as one of them cut the lines onto a mirror. I sat on the bed like the hanger-on kid brother, just wanting to fit in, be part of it, but there was no way in hell would they share that expensive stuff with a 15 year old highschooler who’s never felt a girl’s titty.
“Damn, in three months, I’ve lost two pant’s sizes.” say Nick, while tugging at the waistband of his jeans. I interpreted that as coke ramps up your metabolism, a high society weight loss drug! I watched as my brother snuffed up two long lines of it, stand up with his eyes slightly bulging and smiling.
“What’s that cost?” I ask.
“More than what you have!” retorts Nick, making sure I knew my place as the kid brother. Twenty minutes later, they had left he house to hit a party on a side street next to Providence College, which, to this day, is notorious for over indulging frat antics and girls puking in the neighbor’s yards.
Now let’s move forward nearly 10 years to about 1988.
I had met P from a small bar in North Providence called “Rolls Touring Company.” It was a snug, comfortable bar owned by a 30 something couple. They sold every kind of beer manufactured in the world and for some reason, just served German snack food sandwiches like bratwursts. He once showed us the 9 inch vertical scar on this chest from a triple bypass operation he had at 32. 32? Wow! Once fully recovered, he had applied his dream of owning a place like this, figuring his brush with death was a good enough reason to start living now. I enjoyed the coziness of the place as it was more of a salon than some neighborhood watering hole.
P was biochemist. His Dad was one as well employed by one of those major biotech firms on 128 outside of Boston. P. was rich, knew other wealthy types of his age and lived in Dighton in a home that made me think mine was pig shed. He was married to sort of bland girl, Racine, who had a similar bland personality. She was nice enough but I couldn't figure out why he was with her. After the two got to know me better they admitted they were in an “open” relationship and were fine about it. I then wondered if they were toying me with an inviations. That fact didn’t want me to try Racine out for a ride as I wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, no matter how available she was.
Others I knew, along with P., hung at the bar for perhaps two years before everyone drifted away into their own changing lives. P floated away as well.
I had never had a line of coke yet. I had only seen it once years before.
2003
I had come across P. again at house party over by Brown University, where my brother was friends with an Art professor there. I found it an odd event and wasn’t entirely comfortable to be hob-nobbing with Ivy League types. I was in no way an idiot, I could keep pace with the conversations there and even fire off witty, sardonic jokes but there was an air of exclusiveness as I was not a part of it as I was a from a lower middle class upbringing. Born a pig, always a pig.
P was there and I didn’t know it till he came to me. “Ron! Wow! Haven’t seen you in the longest time.” says P. He looked different now. Older, for sure, but also red faced, fatter and w/o Racine now.
I had asked about her and he said, “Oh her? We’re divorced. She was boring anyway and only was with me for one thing only.”
I joked to him, “What one thing? Your big dick?”
“No...the coke.”
I had suspected he was into that but didn’t know the extent of it till later.
The party had shifted from Brown U. to a home off Blackstone Blvd and I got to see how some of Providence’s wealthy live. It was an eye opener as I began to realize they were just as fucked up as any white trash family from West Warwick, only with nicer clothing and a Mercedes in the driveway.
After that, P invited me to follow him home to his house in Dighton. How do I describe the house….think of an out of place hacienda stucco mansion from Sedona, Arizona weirdly located now in cold, Puritan Massachusetts. It did not fit the neighborhood of other New Englandy homes at all.
We went upstairs to his den where we was at his computer and spoke of the old times at Rolls Touring and people we had known. He then pulled the desk drawer open, takes a small packaged out and cuts two very fat lines of cocaine on the desk and says, “You’re OK with this...right?”
“Sure, I’m OK.” Free coke? Sure...I’m way ok with that.
About every 20 minutes, he cuts more lines and we snort them up. 1AM becomes 2AM which becomes 3AM and we’re still doing it. During the time I had just sipped two beers as to kill the cottonmouth I had but was fried mainly on the coke. We were talking a mile a minute about every subject that came up and then sub-referenced those as details of them made us turn a corner to another idea. What subjects? Girls. Marriages. Jackson Browne. My asking where the Civil War artillery shell that was on a table nearby came from. Anything and everything. I learned that cocaine is a wonderful drug for conversations. I just wanted to talk and talk and talk.
The sun was finally rising and I had gotten up to use the bathroom because I felt nauseous. I knew it wasn’t the two beers over 4 or 5 hours, it was all the coke that I was swallowing from it dripping down the back of my throat from my nasal passages.
I get to the bathroom downstairs and puke hard. Afterwhich I feel better and return upstairs but the sun is up and the night’s revelries are over.
There’s a hard knocking on P’s front door and he leaps up, swipes the coke, tubes and mirrors from the table and shoves them in a filing cabinet. He runs off saying something about a Probation Officer.
He finally returns with two women in their 40’s and introduces them to me as his cleaning ladies who had an appointment at that time to fully clean his house. That’s all they were. I wondered, “What probation officer?” he had mentioned. Apparently he had been busted with possession, again and had a probation officer visit him at any time he wanted too.
I drove home and the worst of luck I ended picking up a Pawtucket cop on my tail. I was one of the very few out that early in the morning and I think, if he pulls me over, he’ll see that my eyes are just slits and I’m acting weird, He tails me for a good couple of minutes before he finally turns off. I figured he thought I was perhaps an early commuter on my way to work, ran my plates to see what came up, which was nothing at all.
I get home, pull off my shirt and dump it on the floor and try to go to sleep as it’s 6AM. I can’t. I lie there, with my heart racing from the other effects of the drug as the fun part is gone now. I’me left with the residue and my body is reacting to it. I finally collapse to sleep and wake up at 3 in the afternoon.
I sit up, and reach for my shirt and put it on and there’s this weird smell. I swear it smells of my dentist’s office, medicinal. I then shove my nose into the front of it and really pick up that scent and realize that it’s the coke that had fallen from my nose or whatever and is now in the shirt.
“Holy shit! How much did we do last night if it’s in my shirt?”
For about a month in that winter of of 2003, he’d invite me to his house for overnight snorting festivities every 4 to 5 days. One night, a bunch of black guys show up, all wearing red bandanas, red silk pants and the whitest sneakers I had ever seen. P. left to go upstairs with one of them for a bit, then comes back down and we party for a hour before they leave.
“Who where they?” I ask P.
“The Latin Kings, some of them, from Providence.” he tells me.
“I’m thinking, Jesus H Christ. How many weapons were they carrying while I yakking away to them while they were here.?” P knows some too interesting people I think. Well, the coke had to come from somewhere and probably not from 128 biotech companies.
By January of 2004, he and I were at a media event he was invited to in a restaurant over by the old Last Call Saloon down by the party district in Providence. He had fed me a line before we went in and after the initial rush had come and gone, I felt an incredible crash of tiredness, mood and it felt like gravity had amped up three times the normal pulling me into the floor.
I had heard of this, the “crash” people spoke of who did this regularly. It also hit me this was the first step to addiction. In order to remove the low feeling, you do another line.
I didn’t when offered. I had reached that “point” and knew enough was enough
As the weeks of January went by , I offered lame excuses for not hanging out with him till he he got the point. That was 20 years ago and I haven’t snorted a line since. I don’t say that as a happy ex-druggie in recovery, proving he’s clean. It’s just a fact. It’s also more of a fact I’m too damn cheap to buy it anyways. This happy miser likes $ more than coke.
That’s it. My lone month of snorting a bucket’s worth of cocaine. My only longish term experience with it that lasted 30 days. I met a lot of interesting, screwy rich people over by Blackstone Blvd, learned of a major chain, semi upscale restaurant in downtown Providence where some of the waitresses were dealing it to the customers who knew (I won’t say the place, I’ll get sued). I met a few Latin Kings and up and coming 20 Something professionals of Providence’s banking, art and media types who were into this...more than a few I can tell you, all well dressed with degrees from better known colleges.
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