When I lived in the apartment behind my grandmother’s
house I poisoned myself on a daily basis. It became my new favorite
hobby. I dropped acid and ecstasy, or trolled, regularly. I
snorted, smoked and injected cocaine and crystal all the time, at least
when I wasn’t too busy smoking weed. I did all of those things when
I was drunk or I just didn’t feel right. My body eventually reached
a maximum inundation point, and my mind couldn’t handle it. That
explains what happened in very simplistic terms. It would be foolish
for me to ignore the things I saw, felt and heard when that happened, so
I have recorded here my best recollection of the series of events.
I hallucinated like a victim of a high fever,
delirious from illness. These hallucinations gradually took on sinister
overtones. One of the first bad trips I ever went on involved mushrooms
and an outdoor concert at Louisiana State University’s parade grounds called
“Groovin’ on the Grounds”. I converged on the concert with a substantial
number of deadheads I was associated with. We brought along several
two-liter Coca-Cola bottles full of tea made from psilocybin caps.
I drank the greater portion of one of the two-liter bottles by myself.
As the drug turned my insides into burning hot coals I knew that I had
done too much (I always do too much), and that it had been very strong
tea. The first thing I lost was my shirt, and then I lost my shoes.
When my skin burned under the hot Louisiana sun I went to look for my car.
That was when I discovered I had not only lost the car, I needed to use
the bathroom. I could not figure out where to do that. I wandered
into the Middleton Library. I found the bathroom and came out before
it sank in that I was in the campus library, sunburned and with no shirt
or shoes. I got out of there as fast as humanly possible. I
suffered from intense fear that the police would be called because of the
stunt I had just pulled. I ran. I ran all the way across campus
and down Highland Road, south to my apartment. When I arrived at
my home my serenity was so destroyed, my spirit so restless, all I could
do was lie down, get up, pace the floor and lay down again, ad absurdum.
At last I managed to remain in bed, but the room started to spin. As the
room spun a painting directly in front of my bed increased in size until
it was all I could see. It transformed into a giant rotating sphere
as I lost consciousness.
Every time I took acid from that point on
I got the freakish sensation I was being boxed in, like I was being flattened
between the pages of a book. The sensations got worse. Eventually
I could not turn the lights off when I was under the influence of any mind-altering
chemical because it would feel as if the darkness was out to get me, as
if it would swallow me alive. I imagined millions of red eyes peering
at me from out of the darkness. The head doctors have said that hallucinations
are products of the subconscious mind. If I had to testify I would
have good evidence that they are correct. I studied all things darkling
and occult. I became intensely interested in the supernatural, the
paranormal and the black arts at an early age. By the time I lived
in the apartment on Highland Road my fascination had deepened into an obsession,
an obsession that was reflected in my writing and my artwork. I believed
strongly in alternate realities and otherworldly powers. One night
I embarked on a trip from which I found myself unable to escape.
Throughout the entire period I continued to
mix drugs. When I mixed crystal, cocaine, acid, weed, pharmaceutical
speed, dilaudid and alcohol I went far, far away. The first thing
I felt was a falling sensation. I fell through an endless vacuum
of space, all the way from the farthest depths of the universe into my
body. When I fell back into my body reality went haywire. The
clock floated right off of the wall. The numbers came off the face
of it and scattered to the four winds before they disintegrated into dust
and vanished. The room disintegrated next. I lost my body again,
this time for the duration of the trip. My awareness sailed across
a vast gulf of darkness towards an immense structure in the distance.
As I neared I could see columns and spires of frozen green flames, a gargantuan
city of frozen fire. Winged creatures flitted among the fantastic
structures. From somewhere I heard, or rather felt, the vibrations
of a beautiful and alien music drifting on the cosmic wind that carried
me upward on its currents. My speed increased until I whipped past
windows and courtyards, gardens and ice palaces. I strained to focus
on the structures, and more importantly on the beings I could plainly see
inhabiting the city, but I was going too fast to make out their features.
Nothing looked anything like Earth, but even that fact escaped me at the
time. I was caught up in a sensory rush.
I have always believed that the place I went
to was too incredibly complicated and external to have been a mere product
of my imagination, no matter how far fetched my ideas and fantasies may
have been at the time. My spirit left that place and returned to
a place of darkness, but not a place of evil or discontent. I felt
that the place that I went to beyond the frozen city existed at the end
of time and space. Many wonderful things were made clear to me there
by a being I perceived to be benevolent and very powerful. The agony
I felt when I returned to this reality can not be formulated into words.
It felt akin to being given a glimpse of paradise only to have it yanked
away. I can recall with concrete clarity only one thing the being
told me. It said, “You are not ready to know these things.”
I was made to forget. My conscious mind suffered a crushing blow
when I took that trip.
I felt that many things had been revealed
to me, but I chose to ignore the lessons I could have learned. I
continued doing stimulants, so much so that when I ran out of opiates I
didn’t even notice. Then I reached that back day in July of 1989
when I could no longer think rationally, or even speak. I heard voices.
I could no longer control my paranoia or my fears. My mother came
to see me out of worry and concern. I remember she wept because I
could not find any way to communicate with her. That was on the fourth
of July. I trudged on with my self-abuse, shooting crystal without
any rest at all for at least another six days after that. When I
ran out my need became desperate.
I watched television. It spoke directly
to me. I heard instructions on how to collect a large sum of money
from the local affiliate of the network. The message came at exactly
the same time as a visit from my father. He had come to tell me that
he was going to bring me down, as he had become painfully aware of my activities.
I did what any sketched out psychotic junkie would have done. I ran.
My father chased me as I fled north across
campus. I lost him for a little while when I hid to catch my breath.
He found me again on the long stretch of Nicholson in front of Magnolia
Mound Antebellum Home. He kept trying to get me into his truck, but
I wouldn’t get in. My father had never been physically abusive, but
I was still afraid of him. I knew that he had authority over me.
I knew he wanted to rearrange me, to fix things inside my head. That
would mean I could not do anymore dope.
I made it all the way to the CBS television
station. By the time I got there I didn’t know what the hell I was
doing there. My dad stayed outside, aghast at my behavior.
When security at the station called the police he was still there.
He loved me so much. He would not leave me to be arrested.
He even talked the cops into letting me go with him. I was less afraid
of the police than I was of him, so I got into the police car.
The police took me to the downtown holding
tank. While I was handcuffed to the rail I somehow managed to get
all the way out of the handcuffs. I concentrated intently on being
free, and a few seconds later I was. I tried to get out of the building.
A motorcycle cop stopped me at the door with a hard kick to the stomach
that knocked me onto my back. When I looked back the handcuffs were
hanging over the bar, wide open. I know I did not hallucinate the
experience because days later I still had a large shoe shaped bruise on
my abdomen.
My parents got together to make a decision
about me for the first time in many years. They called the coroner
to have me examined for psychiatric confinement. If I wanted to gloss
over the incident I could say that I was diagnosed as being in a drug induced
stupor, and that I was released in twelve days. I am not going to
leave it at that though. This story has not been written for the
purpose of providing you with candy coated bullshit. It is meant
to dish it out raw.
When the cops moved me from the holding tank
to the coroner’s office the clouds in the sky began to build. By
the time I left to be transported to the mental hospital a magnificent
storm had blown up. I once heard the later Romantics believed that
storms accompanied momentous occasions in the lives of great thinkers.
I remember thinking about how gorgeous it was. I hadn’t the faintest
idea of what was really going on. I was so damaged by the dope I
couldn’t even formulate understandable words or phrases. I had a
nervous tic, and I kept drooling on myself. I smelled exceedingly
bad. I was afraid of water after I had been awake a few days, so
I did not bathe or shower. My clothes were also filthy. I looked
sick. I was nothing but skin and bones. I had tracks all over
the insides of my arms, which even in that state I kept hidden. When
I got to the hospital they put me straight into the acute ward.
Not long after I got there the nurse told
me it was time to take my medication. I shook my head and backed
away. I was very out of it. I did not notice the two goons
standing right behind me, waiting for me to step out of line. The
two men in white uniforms grabbed me and dragged me to a padded room with
a rolling table in the middle of it. The table had straps all over
it, and in seconds I had been immobilized on its surface. In the
first few seconds I lay there I remember thinking how my mother had followed
the police car to the hospital. I remember the hospital people asked
her all kinds of questions while I sat next to her and cursed her for all
she was worth. And then I was on the table as they injected me with
something that made me go to sleep. When I woke up my whole body
was on fire. They made me shower, which was ice cold but did nothing
to alleviate the burning.
I still felt like I was on fire when one of
the orderlies escorted me back to my room. The room furnished nothing
but a bed and a bathroom. I lay on the bed, but for a long time I could
not get any rest. I got up and turned the water on in the bathroom.
I needed noise to take my mind off of the constant mental anguish I was
experiencing. When I slipped out of consciousness again I had awful
nightmares. I dreamed about the beautiful women I had been with.
Each of them in turn pulled my intestines out of my stomach and dragged
them across the floor. They smiled at me in the prettiest way.
I loved what they were doing to me. I loved the pain and the revulsion.
The only sensations that reached my mind during that long hideous nightmare
were pain, stench, suffocation and perversion. Everything was wrong.
I could see it all with superb clarity. I tried to wake up out of
it for a very long time, but I didn’t think that I ever would.
Finally, blissfully, I did wake up.
It took me a few minutes to get my bearings and remember why I was there.
The bed was soaked from the sweat my body had poured out in an effort to
cleanse itself. Fresh vomit covered an area of the floor next to
the bed. When I walked up to the nurse’s station I found out that
forty-eight hours had elapsed since I had been admitted to the hospital.
I might not have been asleep the whole time, but I had no memory of that
two days at all. All I could think of was the nightmare still replaying
itself in my head. When the nurse told me the date it meant nothing
to me. My time sense had been destroyed during the long ordeal I
subjected myself to. It took me a “long time” to figure out why all
of that had happened. I figured out that I had been a total idiot.
I medicated myself into a stupor in which I had been dangerous to myself,
if nobody else. Now I was locked behind closed doors.
I talked with the psychiatrist and the counselors
about some of the delusions I had. I kept the worst parts secret.
I worked very hard to convince them that my condition resulted because
of an isolated and singular experiment I conducted with drugs. I
lied in every statement I made to make myself seem more innocent and inexperienced.
I succeeded at hiding the magnitude of my drug problem. They never
noticed I had tracks.
The medication the psychiatrist gave me continued
to make my skin burn. Every now and then I felt like I would pass
out. I told my mother about it, and what I was taking. A couple
of days later I was released. I found out my mother had checked on
the prescriptions and discovered they were directly contraindicated.
She had called the doctor and threatened to sue him, or kill him, if he
did not let me go. My release was all that I cared about at the time,
and that is what I got. The whole thing is ironic. My mother
worked very hard to get me released because she felt sorry for me.
Unfortunately I was released so quickly I didn’t learn much of a lesson
about my drug use. I started using drugs again not long after I was
discharged.
***
I moved from the apartment on Highland Road
to my friend David’s house in a bad part of mid-city. The house had
once belonged to David’s grandfather. Old Man Grouchy (pronounced
Grew-shay), or so I guess they called him, had died of starvation in the
house. He broke his hip when he fell down in the living room one
night. No one could hear him cry out for help in the isolated house.
Thirst and hunger stole away with the last of his already diminished strength,
leaving him a husk on the hard wood floor. One look at the house
would reveal the presence of spirits to even a mildly sensitive person.
Shortly after I moved in we all expressed our belief that the house existed
in limbo. That’s what the house was called from then on - limbo.
My fascination with the occult and the arcane
advanced rapidly in limbo. More than ever I believed in alternate
realities and ethereal entities of all kinds. I studied the works
of Crowley. I refreshed myself with the works of the Shelley’s, Dunsany,
Keats, Coleridge, Poe, and Lovecraft. To me these authors advanced
insight into hidden worlds. I believed anyone could become aware
of these worlds with enough knowledge and discipline.
I still don’t know what part of “drug induced
schizophrenia” I did not understand. This could have been the story
of an educated and self disciplined author who achieved fame and fortune
early in his life, but it is not. This is the story of a tortured
soul who allowed his sanity and his health to deteriorate in a haze of
chemical abuse. This is the story of someone who lost every single
thing in his life that he loved and cared about, but it also plots the
upward growth and development of a mind that could have been great.
At the time I lived in the Grouchy house my friends and I played role-playing
games. I wasn’t one of those people who got caught up in the role-playing
craze and became even crazier than I was before. Instead role-playing
allowed me to develop parts of my conscious mind that visualized imaginary
people and places. The negative part (there is almost always a negative
part): the things I learned became tainted by the drugs I felt compelled
to do despite all of the things that had already happened to me and all
of the warnings I had received. I understood for the first time what
it meant to be an addict.
The bad trips started again in limbo.
I often turned on the stereo and the television and the stereo at the same
time. I put on pornography and turned the television upside down
to watch it. That’s not what got me though. Because of my addiction
to hard drugs, cocaine at the time, and because I managed to get people
around me addicted everywhere I went, our financial obligations never got
met. The lights got cut off. There was nothing to eat.
All of my friends left, even David. I was so eaten up with the evils
that inhabit a junkie that no one could bear to be around me for very long.
When I got on that trip, alone in the dark house, I had no one to help
anchor me to reality. The voices returned, and waking nightmares.
This time I became frightened enough to ask my father for help.
I recall the visions in that dark house that
caused me to leave for good. I had visions of creatures from some
other place. They were neither male nor female, but a combination
of both. They appeared to suffer great pain at the hands of some
unseen force or entity. It looked as if they enjoyed it a great deal.
They moved around on the periphery of my sight in the dark so I could not
focus directly on them. I have never been stupid. Right then
I decided these were projections of my own subconscious identity and not
aliens from another dimension. That was the realization that scared
the hell out of me. The truth made me back all the way out of the
house and into the car. I never stayed in the house again.
Bad vibrations from the house amplified my fear. If you had seen
the same thing I doubt you would have been left with the ability to laugh
it off, to take it lightly.
My father took me in and gave me a place to
stay. I moved into the apartment behind his house on St. Phillip
Street. My life up to that point had been nothing but games children
play. Very soon things became real, very real, and hard, like the
sweet life we have been given on this earth. I am anxious to move
on and describe the turns my life took after I moved downtown. Before
I can do so I must wade through a few boring details, for the sake of clarity.
I did very well in high school. I got
scholarships to go to college. I sold out my hopes and dreams for
economic convenience and went off to college at one of the state’s branch
universities. Northwestern State University is in Natchitoches, Louisiana,
or, in other words, way the hell out in the country. Although my
attendance was based on enrollment in an extremely liberal honors curriculum
I did not like it there. I could only find two bars, and I was scared
to go in one of them because it had a parking lot full of rednecks and
cowboys. I had long bangs and a bowl shave. I probably wouldn’t
have fit in. To say that I lost my scholarships because Natchitoches
only had two bars is not entirely accurate, but it says a lot. Since
I moved out on my own I had relied on the club scene to make a huge profit
off of selling illegal drugs. I had grown accustomed to going out
every night by the time I got to college. Natchitoches was an incredibly
boring place. There were no drugs (except the ones I brought in),
no drug addicts, no punks and no lesbians or queers (at least not out in
the open). It was a huge collection of cow pasture conformists.
The worst part was that Erin was in Baton Rouge. I quit school and
moved into my dead grandparents’ house on Stanford Avenue. I tried
a semester of L.S.U. while I lived on Picket Street and on Highland Road,
but I was doing too much dope to focus on anything scholastic. I
dropped out again. It wasn’t until I moved into the apartment on
St. Phillip Street that I became serious about college. I went back
to class in the fall of 1989 and continued to attend classes until I graduated.
That made my life a lot different than it had been before.
Around the time I moved down by my father’s
house I became close with a lot of new friends and business associates.
I quit injecting hard drugs, but I found a new connection for quantity
acid and tabs. I spent all of my free time in the bars by campus,
making deals and looking for love. Even though I surrounded myself
with people I remained a lonely person. I have previously chronicled
the activities of the first year I spent downtown as an adult. That
story follows this chapter as a supplemental tidbit of information.
Suffice it to say I became involved in a drug ring, and we had a few battles
and a few soap operas. That story focussed on external events.
This story serves to relate the private, inner journey I embarked on, and
on which I still travel. That is why I have not integrated the two
tales.
I studied whenever I had an exam or a paper
to do. The only thing I required myself to do was write. I
spent hundreds of hours in front of my typewriter attempting to break through
into another world. All of my fascination with the occult and dark
romanticism culminated in the gloomy poetry I produced during that period.
I wrote about magic and mysticism until even I could stomach no more.
Every single piece of work I did lacked insight in message and attitude.
I created nothing more than a monument to negativity and evil. I
failed to understand that the patterns of my thinking were self-defeating,
that wrong only brings wrong. I could not see that my devotion to
the black arts brought me closer and closer to disaster every day, but
that was exactly what was happening. I often heard people tell me
to be careful what I wished for. I never listened.
I thought that I had left the bad trip behind
in limbo. At first everything appeared to be secure in my new home.
I went back to taking a lot of acid. I took more than I ever had
before. I smoked more weed than ever. I dosed especially heavily
on special occasions. I asked myself, “What could be more special
an occasion than Halloween?” So I took sixty-six hits that night
(mainly because I didn’t have six hundred sixty-six).
The sane mind probably quakes at the idea
of flirting with such powerful notions as demons and ghosts. I can’t
say because I have never been too sane. To me the number of the beast
was sort of a joke. I have never been a Satanist, and I have never
had any respect for any of the devil’s trappings. I was a devout
witch, though. I soon found out that it is very difficult to be one
without running headlong into the other.
I began the night with my crystals and a straw
mat. I often formed a pentagram with quartz points and candles so
I could sit in the center and meditate. Quartz can be used to focus
your psychic energy. That was exactly the reason I used them in my
meditations. Because the focus of my concentration centered on conjuring
the metaphysical I chose the pentagram configuration. In all of my
readings the pentagram held protective powers for the practitioner of magic,
especially in conjuring. I intended only to summon the spirit of
murky creativity that frequently possessed me to weave a few vain lines.
I never meant to bring evil to life. Nevertheless, that was what
happened. I must grudgingly admit that this may all have been a figment
of my already demented imagination.
Thought and reason flounder in the onslaught
of the surreal and the fantastic. Never in my life had I attempted
to cast a spell or summon a demon. I considered myself a follower
in the faith of the goddess. That night I discovered that all of
those things can be real. Demons and spells only have to be real
in your mind to be dangerous. I cast a spell on myself, and I summoned
my own personal demons.
To you, my reader, I must apologize because
I do not stand up readily to the task of explaining what happened.
The event was horrific, but just to say what I saw and felt would diminish
the impact of what I must relate. I have to tell you about my secrets
or you would never understand.
When Patti and I spent time together two years
earlier she had educated me about the philosophical ramifications of sadomasochism.
Patti got her Master’s Degree in philosophy. Most of her work involved
the application of pleasure and pain principles to the flow of everyday
life. I learned that most of the things she told me were true.
The world was based on masters (or mistresses) and servants, pleasure and
pain. My interest ran even deeper than that.
When I was still a very young child I suffered
from nightmares. In the dreams complex and sinister machines tortured
me in caverns deep beneath the surface of the earth. The dreams were
vivid, the details were exquisite and they came to me repeatedly.
At that age, no more than six or seven years old, my mind had complete
awareness of what it felt like to be tortured. The dreams absolutely
did not come from anything that happened in my life. Believe me,
if they had I would have considered it good material and you would be reading
about it right now. The knowledge and the repetition of the experience
caused me to have extremely painful migraine headaches. To this day
I have only told one person about the horrors that brought on my migraines.
When I reached puberty I took a perverse interest in thinking about being
tortured. I became masochistic by association, even though I was
not the least bit interested in acting on my fascination. When I
met Patti I strongly considered taking that step, but shyness and highness
prevented me from doing so. Still, the obsession from my early years
never left me.
I began to study the occult and mysticism
on an adult level after I met Patti and the rest of my “sexually liberated”
friends. When I learned what it meant to worship the goddess I dove
into wicca as if it had always been my destiny. After I matured enough
to grasp the idea that submission in no way pertained to masculinity, really
in no way pertained to sexual prowess or any other macho cliché,
I was ready for the tenets of my new religion.
The goddess gave birth to the heavens and
the earth. The power of nature receives nourishment from her bosom.
The moon memorializes her wondrous power. All of these things testify
for the beauty of wicca. I never focussed on the positive side, though,
so I don’t know too much about it. I carried around deeply rooted
obsessions with dark sexuality in my head. That was the only reason
I involved myself with worship of the goddess. All of my reasons
were wrong. That got me into a lot of psychic trouble, as you will
soon understand.
Most of what I learned about sex I learned
from pretty young witches. They taught me how to stave off my sexual
release until the orgasm mounted into a tidal wave. Through concentration
I found that all of sexual intercourse could be as pleasurable as the climax.
My first little witch girlfriend, Connie, educated me on ways to place
the pleasure of the woman before my own so that in the end my pleasure
would be even greater. I was so ashamed of my innocence, so embarrassed
of my inexperience. The hardest thing for me was to relax and allow
myself to become an instrument of sexuality. My friend taught me
that love had very little to do with sex. I had always fallen in
love with my sexual partners until I met her. She showed me that
physical pleasure often widens by using your partner in a contemptuous
way. She wanted to go further, much further, but I still wasn’t ready.
She sighed that night when my body signaled resistance to her advances.
If I had loved her we might have done wonderful things together, but I
did not. Neither did she love me. In my opinion that was an
even greater barrier. Such was my introduction to witchcraft.
It was stilted and two dimensional in many ways. Connie was sometimes
shallow. She had a one track mind. Whenever things did not
go her way she would turn to her cards. Her whole being would become
engrossed in the reading. I must compliment her on that. She
was good with the cards, and she was a good little witch. She was
a slut, but she was a good little witch.
After that brief interlude with tantric sexuality
I redoubled my efforts to contact another plane. Like I said, I dosed
big and meditated on my straw mat with the pentagram of crystals and candles.
I felt a strong current in the air. Everything I touched carried
with it an electrical charge. I heard noise and detected movement
out of the corner of my eye.
One thing I knew about meditation before I
became a witch, knowledge which I borrowed from yoga and Buddhism, was
to clear my mind completely, to feel the energy all around me flow in and
out of my essence, and to focus through complete serenity. I forced
all of my thoughts to be silent. The motion on the periphery of my
vision became something I could examine. I saw that it was not movement
at all, but an ever-widening tear in reality. I reached into the
slit with my consciousness. I swam deeper and deeper into it until
all the light went out of the world and darkness swallowed me up.
When I once again had the ability to see I
was paralyzed. Before me stood an incredibly beautiful woman.
She was very tall, much taller than I was. Her eyes were black.
She wore nothing to cover her nudity. The sight was breathtaking.
Fear struck me like a bolt of lightning as she turned her gaze on me.
I saw a long black whip snake out of her right hand. I have never
before felt such helplessness. When she spoke to me she tormented
my soul. She told me I was hers, all hers. She flicked the
whip and it coiled around me like a flame. I saw that I was naked.
All of my body twisted around to her to present an easy target. The
pain was mind boggling. In my thoughts I wept for my decision to
seek a new sexual plateau. Every part of me yearned to be released.
As she walked towards me I could feel a serpent twist up through my insides
and then bite, once, twice, and then too many times to count. She
touched me in my most private places, setting all of them on fire.
She told me forever. I knew only sheer terror and unbearable agony,
but more than anything I felt a desperate need to escape from that place.
The torture was more than I could handle. Inside my body, wherever
it was, I could feel my heart beating. I struggled to reach the confines
of my corporeal form with every ounce of strength I could muster.
She laughed as she let me go. She promised I would see her again.
The ordeal was far from over. I found
myself back in my body, but my surroundings were totally unfamiliar.
I could still hear the evil bitch laugh. I felt the old sensation
that everything was flooding down on top of me. I felt I was suffocating,
drowning in sensory overload. Outside a heavy storm struck.
The entire building shook beneath the deluge of rain. I fled out
into the downpour. It looked like the water was falling from the
earth to the sky. Every part of reality turned upside down.
Earth flowed out into the heavens. I don’t know what possessed me
to think I could get out in my car, but I tried anyway. From the
moment the car started forward I plunged down a long shaft full of falling
water that was totally devoid of light. Very shortly my vision fogged
over with strange writing and symbols. When I grasped what it all
meant I got out of the car screaming. The whole vision was about
going to hell. I can say with absolute certainty that I saw a little
piece of damnation that night.
The physical details of what happened next
are of little consequence, but here they are. The police came to
the scene quickly because my car was blocking Highland Road directly in
front of the law building on campus (ironic?). I wanted to run, but
I was too messed up. They took me into custody. I kept asking
them if they could see those things, the writing and the numbers.
They just shook their heads. They wanted to know what was wrong with
me. I lied. I told them I overdosed. I couldn’t tell
them I was in hell. They might have been able to put me away for
a very long time if I had. As it was I had to spend seventy-two hours
under psychiatric care at Our Lady of the Lake hospital. I was told
it was the law. Within an hour after I got out of the hospital I
sold every hit of acid I had left at a huge discount and bought cocaine.
I decided never to trip again.
The truth was something I could not allow
myself to face at the time. Even today I think the vision was too
real to have been a product of my imagination. The fact remains,
however, I only saw what I saw because I wanted to. I wish I could
chalk the experience up to bad acid, but that’s not what it was.
As I meditated in the pentagram I recited a litany to myself. “Goddess
I give myself to you. Please bring me before you so that I might
become a vessel for your pleasure.” At that moment my heart’s greatest
desire was to be shown proof that all of my beliefs were founded on truth,
on the existence of the goddess. I honestly desired to give myself
to her. Whether or not it actually happened, in my mind she heard
my worship and came for me, much to my dismay. I never knew a hallucination
could twist you inside out and make you beg for mercy, but that is what
transpired.
Many of you probably found this story disturbing.
I have no problem telling you the whole thing upset me immeasurably.
I had been brought up a Christian. In the Baptist church they said
once you embrace Jesus you can never turn away or your soul will be lost
forever. Years later a beautiful female devil tortures me at my behest
and tells me I will be hers forever. It shook me up. I refused
to believe that all hope was lost in the experience. I vowed that
I would prove her wrong, that I would escape from her agonizing embrace.
With ultimate clarity I could see that God must exist, for how could there
be a hell without God? It occurred to me that I never should have
stopped believing in Him. I knew that I could never be a normal Christian
again. By their standards I was damned to hell. I would have
to come closer to a God of my own understanding. I am not ashamed
to admit that I sought forgiveness for what I did. I am not ashamed
to admit that I have sought to repent for nearly ten years now. If
only I could have stopped putting myself through a material hell things
might have gotten better for me when I let God back into my life.
The problem was I could not stop. The worst part of the ordeal that
night is that it haunts me. From time to time I call out to the goddess
and ask her if she still wants me. I do not want to speculate on
the future of my soul after death. If there is anything I am sure
of it is that eternity makes no promises.
***
This is a story about love. The young
witch Connie who educated me sexually plays a very important role in this
story. I met Connie in the ghetto on Chimes Street. From the
moment I saw her I was attracted to her. She was seeing my friend
Sean. I knew that Sean wouldn’t care if he found out that I was with
her. I introduced myself to her. I found out that she also
lived in Beauregard Town. That was exactly the excuse I needed to
show up at her apartment on Grandpre. Connie had long, naturally
blonde hair. She was nine years older than I was. The fact
she was in her sexual prime was something I could not ignore. I could
smell it coming out of every single one of her pores. Her breasts
were large, but they defied gravity with an argumentative tilt to the sky.
Her skin was the color of peaches, and she smelled like honey and patchouli.
In her living room it was hard for me to speak. I was so drunk from
her allure. I finally came out and told her she was everything I
wanted. She liked that a lot. She came very close, rubbing
her breasts up against my chest. Her lips brushed my ear. We
made love on the living room floor (we didn’t want to waste the time it
would take to move). After it was over she made me herbal tea.
We smoked fine indica, and she took out her cards to give me a reading.
Connie had an overweight Persian named Samantha.
Sam was a very friendly kitty. She came over and rubbed against my
leg as Connie told me things looked good for love, but that everything
else would be constant tribulation. I scratched Sam’s ears, and she
purred. My greatest desire was to stay there making that kitty purr
all night long.
As I have already said Connie and I did a
lot of things in bed, but I never found love for her. As horrid as
it may sound I used her for knowledge and experience, just as she used
me for her own pleasure. I knew the relationship could not last.
After my vision of the goddess and damnation I pulled away from Connie
as if she were a viper. She did not seem surprised when I did.
The most important thing about Connie’s presence in my life wasn’t about
Connie at all. I met a woman named Joelle at Connie’s apartment.
Joelle was Connie’s best friend.
I did fall in love with Joelle. She was by
far the most beautiful woman I have ever been with. The story of
how she and I came together, and split up, marks my descent back into the
abyss ruled by the seven headed dragon that dwells in the poppy flower.
My father suffered crippling back pain.
For that reason he became addicted to painkillers. Some of his associates
in the Banditos Motorcycle Club robbed a drugstore the year that I met
Joelle. My dad bought all of the morphine, dilaudid and percocet.
It didn’t take me more than a couple of days to talk him out of some of
the morphine. I didn’t inject it. I thought I had learned my
lesson about shooting up. I merely ate it.
I was driving my car across campus. It was
my senior year of college. I was loaded on morphine and it felt like
I was on top of the world. I saw an incredibly eye catching woman
with long black hair walking through the North Gates. As I slowed
down to get a better look at her I realized she was the woman I had met
over at Connie’s a couple of weeks earlier. I stopped the car on
the curb and called her over. At first Joelle didn’t recognize me,
but then she remembered who I was. I asked her if she wanted a ride.
She said yes.
When she got into my car I smelled the unmistakable
fragrance of honeysuckle. I did not fall in love with her at first
sight like you read in books or see in movies, but I immediately wanted
to be with her. We made small talk. I told her Connie and I
were finished. When I told her I was loaded she became very interested.
She asked me what I had been doing. When I told her I was on morphine
her eyes lit up. She told me she would really like to do some with
me. I got her phone number and let her out of the car at the Student
Union.
Normally I would have waited a few days to
call so as not to seem over eager. This was not normal. I was
very interested in her, and I wanted her to know that. I called her
that night. She was so nice to me on the phone. Joelle and
I made a date to get together the next Thursday night. I got very
excited thinking she wanted to see me. Thursday night was all I could
think about for the next couple of days. I got some morphine and
a bag of good weed to take over to her house. I also bought a bottle
of fine Cabernet Sauvignon.
I was so nervous when I left for her apartment.
She answered the door wearing a flimsy little halter-top and extremely
short shorts. Joelle was so fine it hurt me to look at her.
I knew I would never make it through the starting gates if I wasn’t honest
with her. I told her off the bat I was very nervous because she was unquestionably
the finest woman I had ever been in the same room with. She blushed
and thanked me for the compliment. From the beginning it was
understood we weren’t going to leave her apartment. We popped open
the bottle of wine and took the hundred milligram grays with our drinks.
We sat next to each other on the couch and talked for the next few hours.
After a few glasses of wine and a couple of joints I became acutely aware
of how close together we were. I could feel her warmth on my flesh.
I reached out my hand to touch her, and she drew closer. Our hands
were all over each other as we kissed. She tasted so good.
Being with her was even more of a wonderful thing than I thought it would
be, if that was possible. We held each other for a long time after
it was over. I hadn’t fallen in love, though. That was yet
to come.
We began to see each other almost every day.
Every time I got a couple of pounds of weed I would sit at her kitchen
table and smoke with her while I broke it up. I fell in love with
her when she smiled at me, and when we laughed together. I fell in
love with the look in her eyes when I knew she was happy for me to be around.
I should have known it couldn’t last. We were just too perfect in
bed together.
Joelle liked to do drugs. I had reached
the point where I didn’t mess with most of it. I no longer touched
speed, or hallucinogens, and downers had always rubbed me the wrong way.
I made very good grades the semester Joelle and I were together.
I made the Dean’s list. I was trying so hard to leave the bullshit
behind, but I couldn’t. I had to sell a lot of weed to maintain the
exorbitant lifestyle I had grown accustomed to. Then Joelle revealed
to me that she had been a junkie before we got together. I rekindled
an old disease that slept inside of her when I gave her the morphine that
first night. She never stopped craving opiates from that point on
in our relationship. I managed to get them for her for a few months.
After that things got complicated between us.
When we first got together Joelle always made
time for me. When the opiates at my end dried up all of a sudden
I could never find Joelle anymore. I had grown up enough to know
she was dissing me. I had a long talk with her. She told me
she had been spending a lot of time trying to score. I guess I believed
her because I didn’t want to believe she was lying. I didn’t want
to admit I was losing her.
I assumed she was telling me the truth.
I assumed she had been out scoring dope instead of seeing someone else,
as I suspected. I told her that was fine, that I wanted to do it
too. I wanted to see where she was coming from. I cared a lot
about her. I even loved her, but I did not trust her. I knew
better, and this is why. When we first got together she withheld
information about her psychotic ex-boyfriend who was still obsessed with
her. She didn’t tell me he had tested positive for HIV. After
she tested positive she hid that fact also, at first. I guess at
some point she started caring about me because she finally told me the
truth. Any woman who could take me inside her without telling me
it could eventually kill me could not be trusted. I still felt love
for her, but I saw too much of my own evil inside her to just go with the
flow.
I gave her some money to go ahead and score
some dope we could shoot together. We split up in the parking lot
of her apartment complex. I didn’t hear from her until twelve days
later. When I was younger it would probably have hurt my feelings.
It probably would have made me cry. By the time she ripped me off
I had been through too much hardship to let anyone hurt me so easily.
What she did manage to do was make me very angry.
When she finally called me she was crying.
I had made up my mind not to let her get to me no matter what, but when
I heard the sound of her voice I could not resist the urge to help her.
She told me she needed me to come over right away. I burned rubber
to get to her. After I got there she explained what had happened.
She told me she thought I probably knew she had been seeing Brad, which
I did not. Brad was the same piece of trash who had extinguished
the light in Patti's eyes. I contained my shock over that revelation
while she went on to explain that Brad had gotten busted with a couple
hundred valium. The ignorant bastard had been caught shoplifting
with the pills in his pocket. She told me she was going to bail him
out. Joelle told me she had all of their morphine and some more valium
on her. She wept as she told me I was the only person she could trust
to hold their stash, that I was her only real friend. I didn't let
my anger or resentment show in any way. Instead I comforted her and
told her I would be able to do that for her, no problem.
We arranged to meet as soon as she was sure
that everything was safe. I hugged her and kissed her. I assured
her that everything would be okay. Then I took off with the dope.
Five minutes later I was at David's rental house in the Garden District.
I owe Mike at least a whole chapter in this book, but this is not a good
time to digress. I had told David all about morphine, and he had
expressed interest. As soon as I walked in the door I informed David
that he and I were about to take that trip in a big way. To begin
we each ate five grays and five valium. When we didn't feel anything
thirty minutes later we decided to take more. Joelle had given me
twenty grays, but and hour and a half after I left her apartment they were
all gone. I had several large cups of coffee to wash away the taste
from chewing the pills. The taste would not go away. As the
drug took effect the taste made my whole mouth feel like a big, numb sponge
full of dope. I kind of got the idea I had once again taken too much.
Sleep was coming over me like a tidal wave. The coffee allowed me
to hang on a little while. Before I passed out I could not move my
arms or my legs. I could not move any part of my body, including
my lips. All I could do was blink my eyelids, which were getting
harder and harder for me to lift back up by the second. It happened
at a bad time because David's roommates, and two of our good friends, Aaron
and Sean, got into a fistfight while David and I were incapacitated in
the living room. It was not a good scene.
I returned to consciousness on the floor.
David was shaking me. Thirty-six hours had elapsed. I woke
up with the alarming knowledge that I had jacked Joelle. I had gotten
her really good. I also woke up feeling incredibly ill. My
stomach felt like I had swallowed a whole bucket full of gasoline.
The first thing I needed to do was get back to my house, my life.
After I convinced David that I was fine to drive I took off. When
I got back home there were notes from Joelle plastered all over the door.
Each one sounded more frantic than the last. The very last one, on
the very top, said, "Call me motherfucker."
I took a deep breath before I went inside
and did exactly as the note instructed. I called Joelle. I
felt nervous and guilty despite the fact she had messed me over first.
When she answered she told me she was getting very dope sick. She
asked me if I still had her stuff. I told her that I didn't have
any of it. She asked me if I could give her some money. I told
her I didn't have any money, which was a lie. Instead I offered to
give her a bunch of compact discs. I went over there and threw a
big bag full of singles out the window at her. She was sitting on
the corner and looking really bad. She wanted to talk to me.
I didn't want to talk though. Even if I believed she was sorry about
what happened I could not let that matter. I tore up out of the parking
lot at about seventy miles per hour. That was the last time I ever
saw her alive.
Joelle moved to San Francisco. She went
there to get the best medical attention available. She came down
with pneumonia there. She never got over it. I cried when I
found out she was dead. I have always been as weak as can be when
it comes to a pretty face. I marked Joelle's death with another HIV
test.
A couple of months before our relationship
ended I sat in Joelle's living room breaking up a pound of weed.
A pretty little thing from Austin, Texas came over. Her name was
Susan. She had a whole lot of light brown hair. It was curly,
but it still hung down to her lower back. She wasn't skinny.
She was very healthy. She had a sweet face and ice blue eyes.
One of her best features was a posterior that was so fine I wanted to eat
it up. She had a sexy way of talking to me that I liked a lot.
Even before Joelle and I had come to a bad end Susan had given me her phone
number. She said she didn't want to have to score weed through Joelle
anymore, but she winked at me. As soon as I kicked Joelle to the
curb I called up Susan and her sexy ass. I probably shouldn't talk
about her like that, but I can't help it. Susan looked good.
That was the first thing I noticed about her. As usual I didn't fall
in love until later.
***
I have to take a deep breath every time I think about the things I did and said in those years. Some of the memories are so painful I close my eyes and rub my temples, praying to whatever gods there may be to take the awareness away. I know the things I feel don't amount to a hill of beans in a world ruled by money and power, greed and lust for more. I wish I could say I care about that world. The truth is I will laugh and smile and laugh again if I ever get to see it go up in flames. I don't mean to be bitter. I try to let it go, but the bile rises up in my throat again. I lived my life like a ball of fire. I was hell on wheels when it came down to the crunch. I don't know where I'm going, but I still remember where I came from. If you see me coming at you the best thing might be for you to step aside. This train doesn't have any brakes, my friend, and the damned thing is stuck on full tilt overload. Think what you will. I am on my way.