Tag: Straight Edge

Unconscious Drug Fiction

berniebleakLeave a comment

It doesn’t really make sense to put a time and place in the title this time around because the things I’ll be talking about technically never happened – not in the waking world anyway. I’m going to write up a few thematically related dreams. I did this before in a piece called Chicago 2001 : The Dreams in the Red House but that one fit pretty neatly into a time and place based narrative I was already in the process of talking about.

This time around there isn’t any specific “real life” anchor that would be beneficial to tie any of this to.

Dreams aren’t a thing that I’ve studied academically or kept up with the latest research on but my basic understanding is that it’s the brain’s way of practicing the serious work of mapping everything it knows about the world around us to help us survive and succeed. A little bit like how going through a period of “baby talk” is a precursor to acquiring language but instead of having temporally distinct periods of practice and application it’s a constant cycle between the two. The waking mind sits in the navigator chair and reads from the latest maps while the sleeping mind just puts itself through cartography exercises to become a better map maker.

I don’t think all dreams fall under the category of fiction or story telling but those are important methods for sharing and digesting structural data about the actual world. Kind of like how people who have never been to the United States construct a concept for themselves about what living here must be like based on television shows and movies. It isn’t totally accurate information but it also isn’t “no information”. I’ve had access to fiction my entire life so it makes sense my unconscious mind would take inspiration from the rhythms and structures it finds there.

Drugs weren’t a thing I had to think about much as a child. My parents were into alcohol and marijuana but these things didn’t negatively impact my life or challenge my physical security. Most of my dreams at this stage were roughly based on fairy tales: castles, witches, cannibalism and unnatural entities demanding periods of servitude. Technically speaking I didn’t have to worry about these kinds of things either but they were the stories I gave my unconscious mind to play with.

On a side note I just watched what will probably be Hayao Miyazaki’s final film today, The Boy and the Heron, and the structure probably came closer to the format of these dreams than any other fictional work I’ve had access to. I was going to go into specifics but avoiding spoilers feels more valuable than whatever that might accomplish.

As I got a little older the stories I was reading started to include drug stories and I began to realize that was something I’d be dipping more than a toe into. It had nothing to do with pursuit of pleasure or trauma – I just really liked the stories. My unconscious mind started experimenting with stories about drugs too: long before I ever used any and after they became parts of my waking life.

***********************************************

Yesterday I Cut Off My Left Leg…

I had a dream where I got my hands on a medical scalpel and impulsively decided to sever my left leg from the rest of my body. I was feeling extremely anxious and apprehensive about this decision until the moment the blade first pierced my skin. The moment it broke through a preternatural calm came over me as if my movements were being guided by the invisible hand of instinct.

I realized immediately that I could neatly avoid every nerve and blood vessel in order to sidestep any pain or bleeding. At the same time I realized that through an artful cutting pattern I could cause my remaining leg to become perfectly centered beneath my torso like the mythical creatures thought by the ancients to inhabit the antipodes. I tossed the severed leg into the corner of my room and began to experiment with locomotion.

The moment I began to move I was hit with an unexpected realization. Propelling the body forward was not something that both legs contributed to equally but instead the right leg was responsible for propulsion while the left acted as a counterweight or ballast. Now that my right leg could work unencumbered I was capable of traveling any imaginable distance in the blink of an eye without any sensation of fatigue whatsoever.

After racing back and forth across my neighborhood for a while I hit upon a convoluted plan to entertain myself: I decided to go to the nearest shopping mall and stand next to the escalators pretending to look despondent. Essentially I was reveling in complex feelings of superiority. When strangers looked at me with expressions of pity I’d laugh internally at how foolish they were for regarding me as a cripple when they were the ones restricted from reaching their full potential.

Eventually the afternoon wore on and my confidence sank with the setting sun. I suddenly realized that the paradigm I’d been using to interpret the compassion of outsiders might be overly simple minded. I’d assumed that the emotion invested in these piteous glances was incompatible with detailed knowledge of my present condition but it suddenly occurred to me that it could have just as easily been based on impending consequences I was hitherto unaware of.

Many of the people looking toward me in this fashion were clearly older and more experienced than I. What if they were acutely aware of the thrill of discovery I was currently experiencing but at the same time privy to downsides that would only manifest later? I suddenly thought of my left leg – wasting away in a neglected corner deprived of blood and oxygen. I’d assumed it useless on the evidence of a scant few hours but any hidden function it held was about to me lost to me forever.

In a panic I rushed home and threw the limb over my shoulder then made for the nearest hospital. Rather than waiting around the reception I explained the situation to a passing nurse who agreed to reattach it for me in an unused examination room. She was working fastidiously with a needle and thread when I thought back over the day’s events and mused aloud on the possibility of installing a threaded socket so that I might repeat the adventure whenever I wished.

The nurse paused in her sewing to fix me with a significant stare:

“You should develop a drug addiction. That will take your mind off of things like that!”

*******************************************

The Era of Brain Pops

Out of every dream I’ve ever had this one was the most specifically curated to a single aesthetic. I was living in an inner city but everybody was dressed like the child actors in a Charm’s Blowpop television commercial that played incessantly in the brief window where the ‘80s became the ‘90s. I threw a screenshot above for reference – lots of baggy sweaters in primary colors and big scrunchies and sideways ponytails.

In this dream I was working as a teacher but when I experienced it I was still a High School student and wouldn’t have necessarily known this would be a future career for me. In the dream there was a huge social craze over a new style of candy called “brain pops” – white chocolate molded into the shape of the human organ, tinted pink and impregnated with pop rocks. As the chocolate dissolved in your mouth the fizzing candy would pop against your tongue.

My character in this dream had something of a Cassandra Complex – I was campaigning to turn public opinion against this candy for what seemed like an obvious pitfall. I thought that people were losing sight of what it means to think. To simply allow the candy to pop against one’s tongue was, in essence, passively receiving sensation but I was convinced everyone was mistaking it for a mental process due to the shape of the candy and the fact that it was taking place inside their heads.

I was worried that everyone was forgetting how to think for themselves.

Somewhat ironically my dream persona fell heavily into the “white savior” trope. This teacher character didn’t have any concrete evidence that popular enjoyment of this candy was truly indicative of deteriorating mental faculties but viewed it as a conspiracy by the candy makers everyone else was frustratingly blind to. It seems incompatible to both want people to think for themselves and to already have a conclusion in mind as the natural destination for all independent thought.

It wasn’t until I returned to consciousness the following morning that I realized the entire dream could be regarded as a heavy handed metaphor for the crack epidemic.

***********************************************

Pasta Basuco

Crack wasn’t something I had any first hand experience with until I’d already made the decision to enter hard drug subculture. Actually there was one day when, at fifteen years old, I realized that every person at a specific bus stop except for me was either buying or selling this drug but I henceforth avoided this particular stop and didn’t see it again. It was a strange day – I took the SAT and got bitten by a spider.

Once I’d decided to pursue heroin by experimenting with “gateway drugs” at every opportunity I came across cocaine at the Brooklyn bar Kokie’s Place. Considering how much time I spent downtown in San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland it seems almost unbelievable that I never would have stumbled across anyone using this drug in any form but I don’t think I did. My first night with it was largely underwhelming.

At El Rancho crack was starting to be around but I can’t remember if I tried it before or after getting my hands on heroin. It would be a few months before Nick Feather would come to town and teach me how to dissolve it in acids for injection so I must have smoked it the first few times. Consumed in this way the drug is absolutely overwhelming but feels like nothing much of anything at the exact same time.

It’s a bit like inhaling nitrous oxide or just hyper ventilating until you pass out. Something happening in your brain is obviously the action of the drug on dedicated receptors but it feels something like laying a thick copper wire across the two terminals of a car battery. The energy released in that moment must have been inside you from the start but the sudden release with accompanying heat and sparks couldn’t happen in the drug’s absence.

When I was getting ready to write this piece I thought that crack might have some intense sounding chemical formula name I’d never heard before but it really is just cocaine minus the hydrochloride with a side of baking soda. I used to think that the act of smoking it was sublimation, the process of converting a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid state, but now that I’ve paid a bit more attention I realize it does melt. Sublimation has an almost mystical sound to it – it’s because it comes from the word sublime.

Because the crack does become liquid you are only vaporizing it – far less exciting.

This stuff is whatever you make of it. I know some people have gotten super into it and let it become their entire worlds but I’ve only fiended out in short, punctuated binges. Not the end of the world but nothing to be proud of either. While trying to remain human in the throes of its powerful rush I used to marvel at the caustic nature of the smoke and how it would leave my mouth feeling like the inside edge of a porcelain toilet.

I had a simple dream one night. I was smoking some crack from a pipe and jogging down the street as this was happening. Holding the smoke in for as long as I could I was overcome with destructive manic energy and realized an old woman was blocking my way on the sidewalk. I suddenly leaped into the air over her and released my smoke in a powerful stream that I blew through my legs. When the smoke hit her body all flesh instantly dissolved and she became a skeleton.

I grabbed onto the bony shoulders for a final forward roll that landed me on my feet, running forward and packing the pipe for the next blast to come.

*******************************************

The Cult of the Forgotten Junkie King

This dream happened after I’d been using, and injecting, heroin for at least a month or two. There was an ancient figure known only to us – the followers of his rites and we had certain methods for embarking on such pursuits in his image. To the nonusers outside our sect many thought of him as little more than a myth but we had both artifacts and practices saying otherwise.

Every initiated user carried a finely made hinged mold that allows the preparation of these drugs in the very form of this shadowed ancestor. Adding just enough moisture to the powders in question creates a kind of clay – then tinted and pushed into every open space within the mold. Once dried a shabti figure of the king himself appears.

First molded Shabti

This beautiful shabti is unfortunately dry and will not reach full potential until allowed to soak in surrounding water at mild temperatures until the shabti is tumescent. It has come time for the faithful to extract the final form of his majesty’s gift. The shabti is now spongey in texture and gives off small yellowish drops.

With a single syringe the faithful pierces the breast of the shabti and begins to extract. A nice 45 degree angle entry for the needle tip and excess flesh falls away in the form of extracted liquid. The liquid in the barrel is a perfect gold. The shabti returns to the shape it held before becoming impregnated with moisture.

One final move: the celebrant pulls a little farther back on the plunger to reach this perfect end. As every trace of liquid departs the small body what looked like skin is suddenly shrinking against hidden forms within that can only be described as skeletal. Staring into tiny molded eyes the ancient king is ….. emaciated, insane, on the very edge of death. Snakes and spiders now make their forms known beneath this skin.

His regal face stares forward with the sardonic gaze of a death’s head.

A chamber full of beautiful gold and yellow liquid, shimmering in the night. A quick injection and the celebrant relaxes into a state of repose. The unused bits of powder, liquids and partially molded artifacts are put aside until that moment we might crush everything back into the molds and start afresh.

***********************************************

San Diego 1999 : “At first I was stoked, but I still wasn’t primed”

berniebleak1 Comment

The classes for my second semester at San Francisco State were finally going into finals and I had definitively figured out that I was not ready to be going to college. The International Baccalaureate program I’d been enrolled in for my last couple years of High School was roughly equivalent to taking college courses early and I was burnt out and needed a break. I still didn’t drink alcohol or use any drugs but I wanted to live in punk houses, travel, go to shows, explore forbidden spaces and just generally use my creative energies for my own enjoyment instead of anything the established world placed value in.

The situation in the Japanese style house we’d been living in near the Berkeley-Oakland border had progressed from rent strike to all out war with our landlord. In a way we were probably looking for structure and boundaries but the milquetoast we’d been paying rent to had demonstrated that no matter how excessive our behavior became he would never find the strength to inflict actual consequences. We had spray painted a message calling for his literal death on the side of the house and shot at him with a bow and arrow but he continued to meekly knock on our back door to beg for rent or inform us he’d been digging through our trash.

Me and Francois were the last ones left – Jonas, Chris and Little Four had already moved on because a house without a roof, phone or electricity wasn’t even worth living in for free. We held a yard sale with all the remaining appliances and furniture that came with the house in our driveway but only a random truck driver showed up as our neighborhood was desolate and devoid of human life. We traded him the microwave and a black leather bean bag Chris used to sleep on for a ride with our bags to the Greyhound Station.

I don’t think it was the beginning or end of any month and we didn’t bother to tell Mark, our long suffering landlord, that we were even leaving. Whether the things we sold at the yard sale had been bought by him or a previous tenant they certainly weren’t ours.

I’m trying to figure out why I never tried to move into The Manor myself and the best I can think of is that I’d either already arranged with Brandi to move back to Chicago with her at the end of Summer or that I’ve flubbed the timeline and this was actually the Summer of 1998 [Note: I did, it was] and I’d be moving up to the Bay for college soon. It’s possible that neither of those things were true and I was just broke, socially awkward and content to hang around and occasionally sleep on an old couch that sat on an outside porch.

Like a lot of these stories the specific year isn’t especially important outside of placing these events in the years leading up to 9/11.

The Manor was a very large either Victorian or Craftsman style green house on the end of E Street in Golden Hills. The block ended on an abrupt diagonal cul-de-sac caused by the 94 Freeway and The Manor only had heavy vegetation instead of neighbors on the back and left hand sides which no doubt made it easier to have large parties where nobody complained or called the cops.

The kids who rented it were close to my age and had mostly gone to Point Loma High but I knew everybody from social stuff and shows. To the best of my recollection it was Nina Amour, Lhasa, Erica Redling, Dan Bryant, Ramon, Badger and Steve Lawrence had a little spot in the attic to paint and keep his records. I could be leaving somebody out or conversely saying someone who only hung around actually lived there – the house had a lot of bedrooms and I only ever passed through the ones that wound around to the bathroom and the ladder to the attic.

[I just got some corrections on minor details: Steve was in a nook in the living room, Badger shared the attic with Martina and Ramon did not live there.]

Steve and Badger were a package deal by that point, maybe had been for a couple of years already. I think they had both lived at the apartment above the Golden Dragon in Hillcrest where Rory had supposedly pushed a girl off the balcony. They were constantly making up bands and working on music together – Cutewood Mac and one I’ll go into detail about in a minute here called Stimulated Emissions.

I’m not sure how they had gotten the rocket motorcycle – maybe it was in the classifieds or they had just seen it sitting in somebody’s yard with a free sign but they’d brought it over and dumped it in the side yard by the driveway. Somebody had taken sheet metal and put it all around the body of a motorcycle so it looked like a missile with a rounded nose in front. Whoever made it might have gotten parts from the actual shell of an ICBM or something because everything was symmetrical and well shaped.

Of course it didn’t run at all when they got it and neither of them knew anything about working on motor bikes so it just sat out there collecting rust. Then me and Francois and Paul brought the bumper boat. We had just done The Natural Museum of California where we’d stolen the skeleton of a beached whale from one of the colleges and strung up the spinal column between two trees on the archery range in Balboa Park.

Everyone we’d shown that too thought it was really cool so we were pretty eager to find our next “prank” or “caper”. I wouldn’t have guessed that our next big thing would also be theft themed but Paul was the one who had cased things out and come up with the idea in both situations. It wasn’t like all of our stunts only centered on stealing things.

When the Republican National Convention came to San Diego in 1996 we had dressed up in old suits and sunglasses like the ones in The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video and made cryptic protest placards based on the Eightball graphic novel called Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Pictures of the Mr. Jones character and snatches of text like “Value Ape” and “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?”.

That last phrase has a bit of history: in 1986 a mentally ill man who thought television networks were broadcasting directly to his brain posed the question while attacking newscaster Dan Rather outside the New York studios of NBC. Along with the reference in the Eightball comics it was used as the title of an REM song around the same time in 1994. We got some newscaster attention but none of them understood the references or what to make of us.

One of them asked me if “Value Ape” was supposed to be a kind of statement on “ape values” – maybe something like an earlier iteration of the “Reject Human Return to Monke” meme. Eventually I got bored and tried to sneak into the actual convention which earned me a brief detainment by the police. I’ve inherited an indelible streak of anti-authoritarianism from my father and when an officer asked if I had a last name my first instinct was to saucily poke his chest and say:

“Not for strangers!”, in a sing-song voice. Moments later I had my legs spread and my head slammed against a wall as I learned the first of many lessons that would have come sooner if I’d been born with a different skin color. Now I’ve had a broad enough range of police interactions that I’ve written several essays on the theme of cop psychology.

Aside from the absurdist faux-protest our usual entertainment was trespassing but when we did steal things it was never for any kind of profit or something’s monetary value. Paul had driven past a run down independent Family Fun Center spot in National City and figured out the bumper boats were unsecured and would be easy to get over a short fence. The plan was to try to ride it as far as possible until the fuel ran out in the open ocean.

When we were loading everything into the van Paul borrowed from his parents we accidentally spilled some of the gasoline from the motor. Paul made up a cover story that we had been flying miniature airplanes and his dad seemed to buy it – the stolen bumper boat didn’t end up on the news or anything. We tried to pilot it around Mission Bay but the momentary inversion had flooded the motor and we weren’t able to get it going again.

At the end of the night we brought the boat over to The Manor where the large ring shaped flotation segment was turned into a tire swing for the side porch. The fiberglass section ended up uselessly leaned against a wall and the motor met the same fate as the rocket bike – broken down with nobody with the know-how to get it going again. Between the two vehicles and the yellowing grass in the yard I used to joke that it looked like a white trash version of Batman’s Bat Cave – a bunch of busted crime fighting tools that were only gathering dust.

I just made the connection now that the Bat Cave was underneath Wayne Manor in the comics and the house was called The Manor. The coincidence makes the whole thing a little more amusing but I’m not sure how funny any of it is a quarter of a century later. It’s funny to me at least.

Me and Dan, or Nad as Steve called him, had gone to Junior High together but this was my first time seeing his impressive record collection he’d amassed in the intervening years. I had a lot of interesting oddities from Thrift Stores, library book sales and bargain bins but I hadn’t had the knowledge or money to get into very much contemporary stuff. Dan had a ton of it and he let me spend a couple of days digging through it to make myself a mix tape.

I’d just heard of Cat Power somewhere so when I saw the Psychic Hearts 7 inch on transparent colored vinyl I was excited to throw the first side on my tape. Over countless listens it became one of my favorite songs but without either the liner notes or the internet I didn’t know any of the background information – most importantly the fact that it was a cover.

A couple of years down the line I was in New York checking out a hip basement record store on the Lower East Side, maybe Bleecker Bob’s, when what I know now to be the original came on the sound system. It sounded overly aggressive to me compared to the understated quiet rage of the version I’d fallen in love with and without thinking I blurted out:

“Who’s the dick screwing up the Cat Power song?!”

The record didn’t screech to a stop like it does in the movies but every pair of eyes in the store, employees and customers alike, did whip around to fix me in a withering gaze. I got thoroughly schooled and of course I now know that the song was both written and originally recorded by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I really like the cover art on his version of the record but I’ve still probably only heard it a couple of times.

Sonic Youth is one of those bands where while I’m aware they were hugely influential to a ton of the music I’m into I haven’t gotten around to listening to nearly any of their actual output. Another one would be Black Flag – when I think about it now the only song I actually know of theirs is TV Party. I’m not avoiding either band in an effort to seem cool or anything, I just didn’t happen to come across any of their tapes or records in the formative years where I was listening to a lot of tapes and records.

For some reason I was attracted to their green covered experimental EP Slaapkamers met Slagroom while flipping through Dan’s records and I put a song on my tape and bought my own copy when I came across it in a Reckless Records new arrivals bin in Chicago. I just listened to it again and it instantly sounded recognizable as I’ve probably heard it more than any of the band’s other work. I’m sure they have a ton of other songs that I’d recognize if someone played them for me just from being in rooms where they were playing.

During the time that I was hanging out at The Manor Steve and Badger seemed to be taking a break from hard drugs and created a set of Stimulated Emissions songs inspired by our friend Nick Feather relapsing. Or maybe they were getting high the whole time they were writing all of it – it’s not like I would have recognized the difference as I didn’t do any of that yet. They played in the living room of The Manor and made a bunch of copies of a tape called Future of 88.

The band’s name is a reference to the word laser which is actually an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, something I knew from writing a paper on lasers in grade school, but it was also intended to share the initials for “straight edge”. The songs were short, catchy and rode the line between being a total joke and absolutely serious:

“At first I was stoked but I still wasn’t primed

Then I was primed but I still wasn’t honed

Now I’m honed and I’m gonna kick your fucking ass!”

I might be mixing up the order on those and the year in the title. It seemed like everyone had a copy of the tape for a minute but now we’ve all led chaotic lives and moved around and lost stuff and there doesn’t seem to be a copy uploaded to the internet anywhere. It went amazingly well the last time I mentioned not having the tape for a semi-jokey San Diego genre band from this era so I’ll try it again.

Anybody got a copy they wanna put up for streaming somewhere or send me? That would be cool.

Whatever year this was the Summer at The Manor was when I first met and became close with Andy Panda. Everybody called him “jailbird” at the time because he’d often wear a black and white striped prisoner costume. I thought that was cool because I had been wearing the same thing to sneak off school grounds after San Diego High changed its open campus lunch policy to closed in my senior year.

I’d run around downtown and pretend to run and hide from cops who would gamely pretend to chase me – it was a lot of fun.

I had just graduated but Andy was still going to El Capitan High School in El Cajon. He’d been selling weed at school and was nervous because the following school year was supposed to introduce drug sniffing dogs. He also had a heavy sounding punk band called Heathen Azure with Jose and Fern.

We would spend a lot of time on the side of the house playing a simple game called “bread ball”. There was always a lot of rustic looking bread that was going stale – I think Badger was working as a delivery driver for Bread & Cie in Hillcrest and brought it home after his shifts. We’d take turns tearing it into little chunks and lobbing them in the air for the other person to hit with a plastic bat.

When it was starting to get hard and dry out it would explode in a really satisfying way. Eventually the game was moved to the side of my parent’s house and the bread was switched out for little dried up tangerines and occasional rubber bouncy balls. If you got a good swing on one of those it would disappear into the air above the cul-de-sac and most likely you wouldn’t be finding it again.

The whole thing was super simple without any attempt to keep score or add complexity with any rules beyond the joy of sending easy underhand pitches flying with a bat. I hadn’t really played games like this growing up and it was powerfully bonding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There’s probably a lot to this that I can’t just explain with words in the place of lived experience but you should get the general idea.

I don’t really remember a lot of crazy parties at The Manor. For a couple weeks there always seemed to be a circle of suburban skater kids getting stoned in the living room. I didn’t pay much attention to it but there was a day when one of them was waxing philosophical and said:

“I wonder how many tokes are in a joint?”

Lhasa had been hanging out but she suddenly stood up in disgust and sarcastically said:

“I don’t know, I’ll go ask the owl!” before storming out of the room. Eventually they got the hint that nobody that lived there was hanging out with them anymore and took it to one of their own houses or somewhere where people were actually into an interminable smoke session.

There was the night that Adam got naked. Adam is a goth DJ who goes by Deadmatter now but at the time he was in a band called Thomas and the Tiddlywinkers. I don’t think they were playing that night – people just mentioned his band because as the naked guy he became the subject of conversation. Someone was also mentioning that he’d just come back from Europe as if that would somehow account for his behavior.

He got insanely drunk and lost all of his clothes around what must have been the bathroom as he’d managed to rip off one of the glass shower doors and was carrying it around to cover himself. He was so far gone that he hadn’t seemed to notice that it was just regular glass as opposed to frosted or printed glass and wasn’t doing anything to hide his nakedness – it just made him look more ridiculous.

Maybe if it had been fogged up like he was taking a hot shower it would have done something. He wasn’t taking a hot shower though – he was carrying around a perfectly transparent glass door that only emphasized his nakedness and drew more attention to it. Now that I think about it he was probably the first “naked guy” I saw at a party and as such he set the bar pretty high.

I saw a lot over the years and eventually ended up as the “naked guy” at the party a few times myself but nobody ever topped the bit with the glass shower door.