[Author’s note: This segment was written ten years before the rest of this book.  At the time I only wrote it so that I would not forget the events.  No other account of this period of my life exists.  Because of that, and because I do not remember the period very clearly, I decided to include the original account rather than write a new one.  I apologize for the mismatch of style.]

     Early in the fall Nick and I were on the street in an effort to make the rent.  That was when I met Brian.  He and I could tell from the very beginning that we would be friends.  We both enjoyed getting high and having a good time more than any other activity.  We originally met up because I had the stuff he wanted.  Later I discovered it would be easier to score through him than spend the vast amount of time it took to get something while Nick and I were together.  The weather was perfect for running around on the street.  Brian and I ditched Nick and began to raise hell.
     The fall semester had started not too long before, so there were plenty of women out.  It never entered my mind that what we were doing would be a source of concern to anyone.  It didn’t occur to me that chasing skirts and losing touch with reality could be considered a moral emergency.  It must have been, though.  The next weekend the president declared war on drugs.  With the war on, and with the evening looking so beautiful, we decided to invite every pretty girl we met back to Brian’s place.  It was right around the corner from Chimes Street.
     Brian graduated from one of the schools on the East End.  He had been too involved with the fun scene to make the grades he needed to get scholarships.  That would have been the only way for him to go to college.  After he got out of high school the first thing he did was move down by campus and become involved in the action on the street.  Many people would call what he did stupid, but Brian had never been stupid.  He was a victim of the society in which he had been brought up.  He had made the decision to lead that life, but he had never been told what would happen if he chose that path.  He had not been given the chances that more privileged children had been given.  The schools on the East End were like gang war zones anyway.  That was part of the reason he couldn’t make it into the university.  He told me he sometimes got depressed because he hadn’t learned all that he wanted to.  No teacher had ever taken the time to make sure he was picking up everything she told him.
     The president, like I said, declared war on drugs.  The whole street thought that was hilarious.  In a celebration of the new conflict Brian and I invited a bunch of girls back to his apartment for an illicit drug party (parties like that were extremely common at the time).  I had never been inside Brian’s apartment, but I knew it was close by.  Minutes later we were standing in the living room of a distinctly average plaster walled one bedroom place with regular, carpeted floors.  There I met Jennifer, Brian’s roommate, Aaron, who I knew from school, Kristie, Aaron’s girlfriend, and a couple of girls whose names are lost for eternity.  I was astonished to find myself in the same room with so many people into the same things as I was.  We had so much fun.  It became clear that we were all meant to be there.  God had arranged the party so that we could all have a group to be with.  It was cool that nobody took exception to anybody else there.
     Before long I established a regular connection through Brian so that I could make money without taking the sort of job I would have been able to get.  The only jobs open to people like me were ones involving pain and humiliation.  It didn’t look like I would be working for quite some time.  I had to do something, so I decided to make a living off of the people on the street.  At the start of the drug war it didn’t seem like there was any pressure on the street that hadn’t been there before.  The dealers down there already knew to run if a patrol came down the block.  There were so many people it wasn’t even obvious to the police what was going on.  A few people were daring enough to make a whole lot of money out in the open.  It was just my luck that I was one of them, and I knew most of the others.  Not only that, the connection I opened through Brian was the largest supplier of street level dealers in the area.  I was too young to know that the authorities would come down hard when the bureaucratic machine got rolling.  Right then the only thing I was worried about was what I was going to spend my five hundred percent profit on.
     Conservatives scream about the fact that honest people can not make money the same way as drug dealers.  They say it must therefore be thievery.  If they only knew the difficulties associated with making a profit off of the investment goods they would be less inclined to call that easy money.  Maybe the older, bigger connections had it easy, but anybody out on the street had to be quick or the game would be over, no refund.
     For a long time I acted as if the whole dealing scene was new to me, as if I didn’t know very much about it.  Sometimes I would catch heat from Brian’s friends because they thought I was too new.  I let them go on and think that while I made as much money as I could, as quietly as I could.  I worked out of Brian’s apartment so I wouldn’t have to go all the way downtown every time I had a sale.  My father became suspicious if I popped in and out over and over, which was a great incentive to deal out of someone else’s place.
     One day while I was at Brian’s I met Parish and Dean.  From then on things changed.  When I started running around the street scene had been a holdover from the sixties.  The scene had become much more organized by the time I met Parish and Dean.  Gangster music was hitting it big.  Guns and street fights were more common than front porch love-ins.  The big boys had heavy cocaine connections.  When they hit the street in their fast wheels the action became intense.
     First Parish would roll up at the apartment not too long after dark.  We would all drop and crank up the music while we waited for it to take effect.  When the freak began to settle in we would watch MTV to our own music.  Brian liked Depeche Mode, but I liked Ministry.  Parish would be on the phone constantly hooking up deals.  After he had set up all of the buyers at their homes he would go pick up the stuff and take it to them.  Dean would show up before that though.  Parish depended on him for back up.  By that time I wouldn’t even be thinking about money.   I never broke the rule about dealing and using at the same time.  Whenever I did the stuff I would lose all material interests and get all spaced out.
     Early on I decided I liked Brian’s apartment so much because of the pretty girls I could meet there.  The first night Parish and Dean came over to set up their deals I met some neat little chick.  I can not remember her real name.  I have always called her the puppy girl, not because of her preference for sexual positions but because of the way she wore her hair.  It made her look like an attractive cocker spaniel.  We had a good time playing with each other that first night.   I found out Parish had tabs.  I took two.  I knew that I was horny, but I could not speak.  Puppy girl and I could not keep our hands off of each other.  Everybody laughed when she and I took off all our clothes and started getting it on in front of the entire apartment.  When I planed out I realized everybody was gone. Puppy girl, who hadn’t been rolling, was asleep.  All the things they say about having sex on ecstasy are true.  It was fantastic.
     Parish and Dean had left to go do their thing.  Brian showed back up momentarily.  He smiled at me and asked me how I was doing.  Even planing on ecstasy I had to blush.  We hit the street.  I convinced Brian to hook me up with some of his friends into the heavy scene, but that wouldn’t be until much later.  We went to the X bar so I wouldn’t waste my plane.  Aaron was there.  Aaron sold fifty-one hits and several ounces there one night.  It always took me a few days to sell that much.  Between Aaron, Brian, Chris (our big connection) and I, we had the X bar sewn up as our territory.  Everyone in the place knew everyone else, and no one liked the drug war.  While I was there I nearly lost my mind.  That was the bar where the sexiest girls would go wearing their sexiest outfits.  On a plane like the one I was riding it could be a maddening experience.  That was why I liked it so much.
     When Kristie left Aaron at the bar to give a warm welcome hug to a large black man I was puzzled.  I found out it was Big Chris, Brian’s connection.  It had been a long time since I had tasted the stuff.  I became excited about the evening, and so did the rest of us.  Our group formed a large closed circle in a corner of the bar.  If you weren’t already sitting there with us you would never be able to sit there with us.  The dangerous part was the recognition we got from everyone in the bar.  They were the people who had bought our drugs with the money we were spending.  The next rung up on the ladder was far wealthier.  We dealt in hundreds of dollars.  Big Chris dealt in thousands.  That was why he never did anything in public.  He had too much to lose.  The same thing went for little Chris, but since he knew the owner he sometimes kept a stash in the office of the bar.
     When the place closed at 2 a.m., what seemed like an eternity later, we all went back to the apartment for one of the heaviest things I have ever done.  With the place full of people we began breaking up the eight balls.  While everyone crowded around the table I showed them how to cook the stuff up.  We all took turns putting insanity into our blood streams.  When it was my turn I couldn’t handle it.  I took off in fear.
     All of those people, my friends for the moment, thought of me as a newcomer to the scene.  I didn’t tell them I was an old junkie.  I didn’t tell them I had hung out at apartments all over the area for years, and that they were really the newcomers.  At one place our action had become too open, and the authorities found out.  All of my friends got busted at once.  I narrowly escaped by backing out of a major drug deal because of my paranoia.  On my way out I had taken a lot of angry criticism because my money had meant a difference in price for everyone.  I was too uptight to care.  Our connection was incredibly punctual.  When he didn’t show on time I got the hell out of there.  Twenty minutes after I left Sheriff’s Deputies kicked in the door.  The flashbacks I got from the experience lasted for years.  A lot of times I was criticized because people thought I had no basis on which to be paranoid.  I never told people about the things that happened in my life.  My new friends were too stupid to realize the cops were watching loads of people, not just us.  They were too stupid to realize the cops had contacts in all of the most popular clubs, and had for year before they had ever showed up.  That night when I cooked up in front of a room full of people they weren’t the only stupid ones.  I displayed an even greater ignorance.
     Luckily nothing of consequence had yet reached the ears of the narcotics division.  During the days at school I would have incidents of frozen time. During those moments I would feel as if I were falling through space.  Time would race suddenly.  My face would flush, and I would shake.  Later on I found out that anyone who saw me like that knew what I was involved in.  That was probably the subliminal perception that caused me to have a sick feeling deep in the pit of my belly.  That was the sort of thing that caused Brian to start calling me crazy all the time.  As much as I wanted the feelings to stop I was too involved with the group to quit having fun.
     The street scene changed.  Getting high no longer had anything to do with peace and love.  It was a war thing now.  One night, not long after our group got together, Parish and Dean pulled up in an alley on the street.  They were bumping “Fuck the Police” so loud you could hear it two blocks away.  We all gathered around the car and enjoyed the feeling of power we felt, some more seriously than others.  I always did what I did to protest my own poverty.  Dean sold drugs also, but for completely different reasons.  He was a power drinker.  He did what he did because he liked feeling powerful.  He was into the violence of the evolving scene.  That made me very nervous.
     That night was Halloween night.  While we all hung around in the parking lot doing occasional deals the freaks in costumes began to come out.  I walked down the street to a more secluded spot to give somebody the stuff they bought.    I walked back to the alley, but before I could get there I realized a fight was erupting.  Some asshole dressed as Freddy Krueger had pulled up in a hearse.  He decided to act like a bad ass in front of Dean, who was in gangster mode to the gills.
     Freddy took about five punches to the face before he disengaged.  He jumped for the car and pulled out a ball peen hammer.  Dean yelled at me to take the hammer away from him.  I couldn’t move.  It didn’t matter.  Dean turned the guy into ground meat until Freddy managed to break free and run.  He ran for the Shell station across the lot.  Kevin got a baseball bat when the guy pulled out a hammer.  Freddy was in real trouble now.  The entire crew was out to get a piece of him.  Police sirens streaked for the vicinity.  Freddy sprinted from the Shell station to his hearse.  I suspect he only made it because we could all hear the cops coming.  He gunned the engine and took off just as the police arrived.  The cops chased him.  He tried to jump the curb to cross Highland, but he got stuck.  Five cop cars surrounded the hearse as we all jumped into cars and made for better parts.  We all got away.  It was our territory and we knew what to do when the cops came.  Freddy must have been from Livingston Parish, or some other center of ignorance.
     We spent the rest of the evening at the X bar, and then at the Zoo.  The Zoo had women who were even finer than the ones at the X bar.  We stayed there until dawn.  While we were at the X bar Dean showed up, still with blood all over him.  The owner of the bar had been looking for some muscle to handle a few things.  The blood all over Dean convinced him that we were the power group in the area, and that Dean had the muscle he needed.  Even I started to enjoy the power of being friends with people who were so successfully violent.  Power corrupts even the most peaceful of people.
     Everything was quiet for a long time after that.  One night  I saw Freddy Krueger’s big fat wife at the Library Bar and Grill.  She was with some people I knew.  I asked them what was up with those people.  They told me that Freddy had raised hell to the cops about a street gang after they arrested him for evasion.  That helped to explain the patrols that had been making the block every five minutes.  I decided that no one, especially not Dean, was going to ruin my piece of the pie.  When I told Brian what I heard he called me crazy, like he always did.  He didn’t think the shit we were doing was dangerous.  Maybe he simply didn’t care.  Either he was stupid after all, or he was crazier than I was.
    As winter approached the good times kept going strong.  Sometimes the action would make me feel dirty, the way Erin had confessed she felt during any sexual intercourse.  It was the dirty feeling that led me to drift away from the group.  I not only felt dirty about selling drugs, I felt dirty about messing around with all the young girls I did not know at all.  They were always around because we always had drugs.  It could not be a good thing to supply somebody’s daughter with dope in exchange for sexual favors.  It could not be a good thing when the cops come closer and closer to busting everyone.  Everything seemed wrong.  No one had anything to say that would make things seem like they were working out.  In fact nobody had anything good to say to me at all.
     During that time the illegal trade kept going full tilt.  I moved my trade from the street to inside the bars.  When a dry period slowed the flow of weed to a trickle I saw a golden opportunity.  Chris couldn’t score quantity anywhere.  Brian, Aaron and Matt were all in the market for quantity weed.  I made three hundred dollars in twenty minutes because an old friend of mine came in with a garbage bag full.  Aaron and Matt claimed I had shorted them on the weight.  That wasn’t what happened.  I quoted them a price, they paid me too little and I had to ask them for more money.  Nevertheless, they were sore about it.  They made several threats, but I didn’t care.  I wasn’t holding anything.  The fact that they were upset did not mean that I was in any danger, but I decided to lay low for a couple of days anyway.
     Everyone ran out of weed very quickly.  I wouldn’t help them find any because they had accused me of doing them wrong.  They went out and found a supplier.  They set up a deal in Baker for a few pounds.  The night they were supposed to make the deal I stayed home and went to sleep.  Kevvyn and Monique woke me up.  They wanted me to donate some money to get my friends out of jail.  I had already spent all of my money on coke, so I couldn’t.  I got depressed thinking the police had finally broken our circle with an undercover narcotics agent posing as a dealer.  Our coveted secrecy had been utterly shattered.  I also knew that no matter how low profile I made myself it could make no difference.  The police had targeted our group.  That indicated they knew what was going on in the campus area.  The police weren’t nearly as stupid as I had always thought they were when I was younger.
     The difficult part of quitting all of the things I had gotten used to doing freely had nothing to do with the headaches or feelings of dread.  The hard part was that I would never have quit if the people around me had not gotten busted.  The entire street went into hibernation to avoid the same kind of trouble.  I had no choice but to lay off.  No one would come within a hundred feet of me without pretending they were the most law-abiding citizens in America.  That was the way things always went on the scene.  Don’t touch the hot potato.
     When Brian got out of jail things weren’t at all the way they had been before the bust.  Jenny forbid us to bring anything into her apartment but a little marijuana.  She was tired of worrying about the heavy stuff.  Brian was angry.  He got it into his head that it was my craziness that led to his arrest.  I guess he couldn’t cope with the fact I had been right all along about the police.  Aaron and Matt continued to insist that I owed them money, which I continued to ignore because it was a bald faced lie.  I felt alienated from the people I kept personal relationships with.  We were all too wrapped up in our own bullshit to try to help anyone, even ourselves.
     Scott and I began to hang around together.  We always had the best of times with Sean, a fixture of the nighttime world.  We would drop after it got dark and sit in Sean’s apartment in the ghetto until we lost our minds.  Then we would walk around on campus or scout the area for action.  It wasn’t too long before we all started to feel that losing our minds was no joke, but something real that was happening by the moment.  Scott and I quit dosing.  We both agreed that it would be better to fry our brains on substances that had vaguely organic histories.  At least cocaine wasn’t cut with strychnine.
     Scott got together with Kevvyn one night.  They worked out a solution to the boredom problem that had plagued us since our friends got busted by Delta Force.  Kevvyn knew that no one had informed on him, because they for sure did not want to be dead.  He knew his action was still a secret.  The goods were beyond belief in quality.  Right from the beginning Scott and I knew it was the beginning of something big.  It was not only the purest stuff we had ever been able to score, it was also a lot cheaper.  After we made some money the investments started to grow.  The ghetto was the perfect place to hide it too.  We could do deals with people on the street and have their dope instantaneously.  Sean’s apartment was a virtual rat’s nest of hidden compartments and refuse piles.  No one could have the stomach to look for drugs in that mess.
     It was the beginning of summer, right around the time of my birthday.  One night I took a time out from Scott and Sean’s crash warren to go visit Brian.  He moved into an apartment with Matt and his girlfriend.  They still had parties all the time in true defiance of the power of the law.  It was my birthday so I had a few drinks.  Brian got drunk too, but I had a larger pile of empty cans.  I started slurring my speech about Aaron, probably because I knew he had lied about the weed I sold him not being up to weight (I never could just drop a subject).  Brian lost his shit.  He jumped on top of my intoxicated heap and got his elbow around my neck, cutting off my supply of oxygen.  I had to yell uncle before he would let me go.  I got sort of angry about this set of events.  I left with a vow that I would get revenge for being humiliated on my birthday.
     The next night I tried to find Brian, but he had gone off in a limousine with Big Chris and Kevvyn.  I waited around for them with Scott, not too anxious to fight but still steaming from the night before.  We saw the limo pull up across the street from the apartment.  Scott and I were walking towards them when three police cars surrounded the limousine.  To our surprise they weren’t dragged out of the car.  The police got out and began fixing the limo, which had broken down.  Scott and I thought that was too much of a head trip.  We took off.
     Later some things that Brian said got back to me.  I gathered together my old friends from limbo.  I led Biff, Greg and Mike up to Brian’s apartment with a big stick in my hand.  I wanted to be sure to hurt him.  Brian thought it was a joke at first.  Then he got mad.  He tried to provoke me into hitting him with the stick.  I really did not want to do that though.  We had been friends.
     The fight escalated from words.  Brian threw a heavy plate at me as I backed down the stairs leading to the apartment.  It caught me on the upper arm and left a mark that was visible two weeks later.  The fight moved to the parking lot of the shell.  I tackled Brian, thereby ending our friendship.
     Scott arrived for the last part of the fight.  He said he felt bad that Brian and I could not get along.  I was too stubborn to admit the things I said when I was drunk were provocation enough to make anyone attack me, not just Brian.  I later regretted ending my friendship with him.
     Scott and I began a campaign to get drunk and twisted as often as possible.  This went on for several weeks.  We had discovered a new poison called Cisco.  We rode around drinking until we were able to score.  One night we decided that Cisco and tequila would be a good mix.  We set off to empty a fifth and a couple of sixteen ounces.
     On the way back to Scott's apartment we ran into a couple of guys who were looking for a fight.  It was obvious from the way they yelled insults at us and flipped us off when we drove by.  Unfortunately our destination was across the street from the people.  They saw us pull into the parking lot and crossed the street to intercept us going into the building.  I walked over to them to sort out the confusion, which would have been impossible due to the alcohol level in my blood.  We exchanged words, and then we both drew knives.  I realized that I was too drunk to stand up.  Instead of engaging with the knife I ran for the car where I kept my gun.
     I popped the trunk and got out the gun, still in the holster.  When they saw the gun in my hand they started screaming bloody murder.  I invited them to follow me inside so I could kill them.  All the noise brought the police over from the little grocery store where they spent all their time drinking coffee and doing nothing.
     I understood there was about to be a problem with the law so I ran back to the car.  The tequila won out, though.  I put up the gun so I couldn’t get busted for that, but then pulled out a machete so I could chop them into little pieces.  The police ran up as I brandished it and locked on target, the fat boy who started the fight.  The police all drew their guns.  There were six of them.  I was confronted with overwhelming odds against my survival if I were to chop up the fat boy.  I backed down.
     The weird part of the incident was the police didn’t arrest me for being drunk.  They had to have smelled the alcohol on my breath.  Instead they charged me with assault.  It was a trumped up charge probably brought on by their familiarity with the area.  They would have let me go with a summons, but I had gone berserk.  I cursed the fat boy for all he was worth.  When I wouldn’t shut up the police finally put me into a car.
     After my arrest on the assault charges I became very cautious.  The charges, it is true, were set aside because of a lack of credibility on the part of my accusers.  It had been an act of self-defense, after all.  Scott ran off before the police got there.  There was a high probability the charges had been brought against me because they had not been able to get witnesses against us in drug matters.  The reasons didn’t make any difference to me.  I decided I wasn’t going back to Parish Prison for anything.
     While I laid low my friends on the street pulled together and beat the crap out of the fat boy.  He started a fight with another one of my friends.  John caught him at the fast food place across from the Shell station one night and smashed out his car window with a chain.  The police hunted for John until they found him.  They took him to jail for harassment.  I could care less by then.  I was sober.  I blamed myself for my trouble, and as for John’s troubles, they were all his.  I could do nothing about it.
     For a couple of months after that I had only sporadic phone contact with Scott.  Brian disappeared because he skipped bail.  The rest of the goons were obviously less my friends than idiots.  I learned a lot of things about the ignorant life I had been leading.  I made a solemn promise to myself to change.
     That year and a half, counting from the first party at Brian’s house to after my arrest on assault charges, left me with the impression I had fallen into a bottomless sinkhole of sickened morality.  I could only escape through a long process of separation from the erroneous ways of my past.  A lot of trouble went down.  Dean got arrested for attempted murder.  Parish kicked out his own car windshield.  I could see that all of this had to do with our lack of respect for any authority, our scorn for traditional values and our ridicule of preexisting standards of behavior.  Without the guidelines from the past one can only live through mistakes that have already been made.  The lesson of the time dealt with violence and imagined superiority.  I allowed myself to become as violent as the people around me.  That had never been the way I lived my life.  I vowed I would not go on like that a second longer.  I have been a peaceful person ever since.

Chapter Five

Contents

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