Black Beauty
» My Life is an Open Blog
Last week when I posted a couple of notes about my young love of psychedelics and my experiences with datura stramonium you had no idea that I was leading up to telling you about my lover's crack addiction. I sort of wanted to establish my bona fides as it were in the lore and life with drugs. An unusually dry preface to a confession that I've found myself living with a crack addict. My icy side, a part of me that some people have recoiled from when they felt the depth of it, helps me keep going in this uncertain interval.
I sampled many pharmaceutical highs. Reds, Seconal just put me to sleep. As did quaaludes, the gay bar drug of choice in my youth.
Speed, I mentioned earlier, left many young men with attractively scanty waists, though they looked like ambulatory corpses.
Long before rednecks were manufacturing methamphetamines in their outhouses I did speed once. Nothing injectable. I had a junkie pal put a needle's worth of THC in my just to have had a needle in my arm – again this was before AIDS. I took a Black Beauty, the hippie amphetamine of choice.
Whew! I felt so luminous with clarity, a weakness for me that orgasm are for most of you. Potent beyond routine mortal capability I knew I'd be able to understand everything. The universe was so cheery and upbeat. Life could never be more exalted.
So I never took another Black Beauty. The drug was so exhilarating I knew that somewhere between the third and tenth pill I'd be lost. Too long viewing life from such a idiotically lofty vantage and I wouldn't be able to climb down.
My late, unlamented daddy was a drunk. I guess I owe him for providing an object lesson of the danger of a select species of excess.
Really I'd like to do a Black Beauty again. But only one.
Comments
Richard,
Despite your pain and loss, you continue to write with such candid emotion and prose. I have forwarded your link to a friend whose TB is also addicted to cocaine, with the hope that he gains strength from you.
Posted by: Epicurist | August 24, 2004 12:32 PM
Don’t know that it’ll do him a lick of good but I do wish him and his friend the best of luck with recovery and coping.
Posted by: Richard Evans Lee | August 24, 2004 1:34 PM
My youthful indiscretions with Black Beauties weren’t nearly as enjoyable as yours. In my teen years I worked at a fast-food place at the local mall. Christmas season would see the mall, and hence the restaurant, packed, with people stacked at the registers, from morning to night. Working 8 hours at such a pace would have been nearly impossible…but we had a connection who got us some Black Beauties and Christmas Trees (how appropriate!) to help us get through the day. I never had feelings of exhilaration or clarity — I was just happy I could work the entire shift and still be on my feet.
Now I feel cheated :-(
OAS, you continue to be in my thought as you go through this experience with TB.
Posted by: Mark | August 25, 2004 2:57 PM