Amateur Insanity

Strangers in a Dark room

 

That first speed was advance payment for accepting Ziggy as a roommate and I used its stallion energy to clean up the fire mess down to crumbs in crevices. I didn’t take meth again until nearly a year later in the summer of ’67 when Christine’s one-night stand paid me off at the foot of Hippie Hill.

Later that morning I really didn’t know how much to take as I stood before my kitchen sink with the paper containing his meth unfolded on the counter. I was about to take a cautiously small amount, then hesitated: I knew speed freaks who took a whole spoon at a time. If I couldn’t take that amount, did that mean I somehow wasn’t up to the cut? Did it mean that in spite of living in and around the Haight for a year and a half, I wasn’t hip enough?

I didn’t choose to be the scornful nonconformist, I was driven to it. I desperately tried to conform in that redneck mill town but failed. I picked up the paper and chuted the powder into my mouth, gagged on the bitter, metallic aftertaste, then washed it out with quick glasses of water. Later, I would estimate it to be six to eight times as much as would have been safe for me. I had just stepped through a trapdoor into an intermittent nightmare lasting years.

Tim was still sleeping off an acid trip and, while I waited for the speed to come on, I drifted back over to Christine’s kitchen. Though it was now afternoon, the same people were passing in and out. I sat at the table and joined the conversation, and soon noticed that whenever I spoke someone would interrupt me. So consistently was I interrupted that it eventually occurred to me that it might be deliberate.  But then something else happened.

“Hey I was at this pad over on Waller and Steiner,” I said, “and they said they had the lead guitarist for Big Brother and the lead singer for the Doors over there a couple nights ago and I know Blue Cheer lives down there somewhere too and god man at the Fillmore last week I was watching Blue Cheer and there was this chick you know how loud they play this chick was leaning her head against a speaker on the stage and sleeping god man . . .”

“Wanna beer?” Danny asked me, the open refrigerator glowing behind him.

“No,” I replied and the room fell suddenly and conspicuously silent.

Danny, Don-Ed, and Christine all turned toward me with surprised, defensive expressions. I was shocked.  They seemed to be reacting to a tone in my voice that I wasn’t hearing. Danny became defensive and moved about the kitchen warily. Gradually conversation resumed.

“We’re out of peanut butter,” Christine said then licked the last of it off a spoon, bent over and placed the empty jar in the paper bag under the sink.

I saw an opportunity for an apologetic gesture and offered, “Take some of ours.”

Again a chilly silence fell on the room. Don-Ed gave a sharp cough and adjusted himself in his chair.  Danny shot me a sidelong glance, quick and accusing. Christine suddenly straightened up and stabbed me with the pain in her eyes, then quickly looked away.  It was as if she had been hit by a sniper. Again, I couldn’t detect in myself what they were reacting to. My entire body was vibrating and I finally realized the speed was coming on.

Conversation resumed and after awhile a lull developed. I hadn’t spoken in some time. It was clearly my turn. The lull was an invitation. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t trust myself. I withdrew far into myself, sitting still and rigid, both the clutch and the accelerator to the floor. It seemed I should have been able to just open my mouth and speak. Come on, there’s nothing to it! But I couldn’t. The only sound I made was an occasional loud, tense gulp of saliva.

One by one everybody finished their business in the kitchen without speaking and left. I was certain that my vibes had driven them away. The torrent of energy created by the speed was funneled into my mind as I analyzed and re-analyzed and re-re-analyzed everything I had said and done while in the kitchen.  My body was ringing with tension while my mind ran in circles like a dog biting a bullet in its haunches. I seemed to be exuding an emotional force-field that warped everything passing in and out. I don’t know how long I sat there, ten minutes or sixty or two hundred.

Afternoon became evening and it was dinner time yet the kitchen was empty except for me. I knew there were any number of explanations for the emptiness that had nothing to do with me, but as I sat there, alone, in near-dark, I couldn’t resist feeling avoided, quarantined.  Throughout my childhood, it was communicated to me in countless subtle ways, from family and peers, that there was something, unnamed but clearly sensed, wrong with me. I couldn’t help wondering now if the drug hadn’t simply highlighted or exposed an innate and ineradicable repulsiveness.

Cookie came into the kitchen and turned on the light and went to the phone and read a note from Don-Ed.  She looked up and noticed me with a start.

“Oh, hi …” she said.

I said nothing. I was afraid to. She went back to the note and then started out the door.

“Cookie. . .” I said. She stopped and looked at me. I was desperate.  “Uh, have you ever taken a lot of speed? Too Much?”

She studied me for a moment, trying to figure out what was behind the remark. Then she discovered it and answered, “No,” and walked out of the room.

It finally, belatedly, occurred to me that I would be safer in my own apartment. I waited through Cookie’s bootclomp down the stairs and the closing of the street door, then I crossed the hall and closed my apartment door behind me. I could feel my heart thumping and my skin was clammy and I ached to piss and I was amazingly thirsty. 

But when I entered the dark livingroom I noticed two human figures on the couch silhouetted against the dusklit window and I could just make out they were both male. I heard Tim clanking in the kitchen. To the confused, tentative “Hi” from the couch, I muttered a syllable, made a sharp right, and almost ran to the kitchen.

“Hi,” Tim said looking up from a chuck steak sizzling in a crusted pan. Occasionally he treated himself to a shoplifted one. “I met those cats on Haight Street, when I was coming back from the store,” he said gesturing a fork toward the living room. Then he added, “They obviously needed a place to crash.” He poked the meat. “I was hungry, so I’m fixing something. Want some?”

“There’s something wrong,” I began. “I took some speed . . . And my head . . . I, I can’t. . . Everything’s, uh. . . It’s like… my vibes. . . I can’t control them and everybody gets offended by everything I do…”    

“That’s self-consciousness,” Tim said, then turned back to the steak. “Just… don’t pay attention to it.”   

“No, no. . . you see it’s. . . it’s taken over. . . I mean, my vibes are… infected…”    

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said with a shrug. “Just try not to think about it.”

I realized I couldn’t penetrate Tim’s indifference and I looked down the hall to the living room which was totally dark now. He said it was all in my head. There was nothing wrong, no unmentionable defect, no disfiguring personality scar visible to everyone but me. Just ignore it and it’ll go away. I could feel that the speed had peaked. I decided to go down that hall and rap with those cats, just like normal. I walked down the hall. After all, what’s to fear in a dark room with strangers? 

“Hi,” I said into the darkness as I entered it.

“Hi,” two voices said.

“I better turn on the light,” I said as I felt the wall for the switch and flicked it on.

Typical of Tim to leave guests in the dark while fixing himself a meal. They were ordinary freaks, about my age: one lean, clean-shaven, and blond with shoulder-length hair; the other cherubic with a wiry scribble of dark hair and dense beard. Their backpacks were on the floor at their feet.  As I crossed the room toward the empty side of the couch, I caught from the corner of my eye, their faces crumpling with helpless panic as they scooted deeper into their side of the couch. I sat down, telling myself I was misinterpreting that. Then I scrounged for something to say.

“Uh. . . wha. . . what happened on Haight Street today?” 

Both sat looking straight ahead. The one farthest from me, the lean blond cat, leaned forward and as lightly as possible met my glance and then looked away.  

“Not much,” he said. “It was kinda windy and cold.”

I sensed their fear subsiding to wariness. Judging by their reaction and the reactions in the next door kitchen, I was radiating a threat. But, my god, I didn’t even know these cats!  There was phlegm in my throat but I didn’t dare cough or gulp or move, not even scratch my nose, for fear of sending a hostile signal. I eventually had to gulp down the phlegm, and simultaneously, both freaks coughed. I tried talking again.

“Where’re ya from?”

The pudgy dark-haired one, closest to me, crossed and recrossed his legs, while the other readjusted himself on the couch and coughed sharply into his hand. Tension had downshifted.

“Ohio,” said the lean one who spoke before.

This time, he scornfully looked down his nose at me. He had just figured me out. I realized there was no chance of undistorted human contact, so I sank back into myself. Eventually, Tim came into the room and sat in the broken wicker wheelchair and rolled a joint while talking to the guests. I moved my head slightly from side to side when offered the joint. Though I felt sealed off, paralyzed, I monitored everything said and done, picking up double entendre quips, with exchanged loaded looks, crypto-comments on my weird vibes. A couple times, Tim tried to draw me into the conversation, but all I did was look at him and smile weakly, as if I didn’t speak the language. Anything I said would be taken wrong.

Finally, it dawned on me that I could leave the room. So I got up and, without looking at anyone, said, “I’m gonna crash,” and went into my room and shut the door. On my mattress on the floor I listened to the conversation and stared at the light under the door, reliving, reexamining the day until about 4AM. I was trapped in that day for weeks.