Cocaine
1
I have to agree with CanadaSucks; my experience with this drug was similarly unpleasant. I had all kinds of opportunity to try cocaine during the 80's and refrained. For all my excesses over the years, I always had a certain self-preservative instinct; my feeling then was that if I tried cocaine and liked it, I'd never be able to afford it (this was before the days of cheap crack). It was safer, and more affordable, to pretty much stick with what I knew...alcohol and pills. But I kept hearing how great cocaine made you feel (someone told me it was like Vicodin multiplied by 10) and finally gave in and decided to try it. I had friends (I use the word advisedly) living in NY and they had a "safe" connection. We had a few beers in a tavern while waiting for the connection to arrive (shades of Lou Reed) and then, as we headed back to NJ, we took turns doing lines in the car (Recklessly stupid? Insanely irresponsible? Absolutely.). I immediately began vomiting out the window as we passed near the Holland Tunnel. One of my friends, analytical junkie that she was, looked at me carefully before telling the driver, "He's ok. He'll be fine. Just pull over somewhere when we hit Jersey." By the time we did reach NJ, we parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Jersey City that was run by Sikhs and sat talking for a good hour or more about everything under the sun. By that point, I was feeling quite good, euphoric even. In time, I began talking my head off, speaking of personal things I wouldn't have ordinarily. One of my friends began arguing politics with me (she was a right-wing junkie), and I remember thinking, "Can't you just shutup and let me enjoy the buzz?" When I got home, I couldn't sleep. By then, of course, the buzz was gone. I lay in bed with a pounding heart and watched the dawn creep through my curtain with gritty, gummy eyes. That morning, I was supposed to meet someone I knew in Passaic and drove first to my local bank to take out some money. The bank clerk looked at me oddly, and as I drove away, I checked myself out in the rear-view mirror and noticed a crust around my nose of coke residue, mucus, blood, and God knows what else. Disgusting? For sure, and painful too. Upon reaching Passaic, I was in the grip of a full-blown paranoia. I remember walking down the street, expecting a squad of cops to jump out at me any moment. Passaic isn't a particularly safe city to walk around in under the best of circumstances, much less when under the influence of cocaine-induced paranoia. Ironically, I was more fearful of cops than I was of any rapacious strong-arm criminal. That evening, I had to give myself a hefty dose of Vicodin in order to sleep. I decided then and there to never use cocaine again. For me, once was more than enough. The high, for as long as it lasted, was admittedly very nice, but the aftermath was awful. My nose hurt for days. Maybe we just got a bad batch but, in retrospect, I think that was a good thing. Some months later, 2 friends of mine were doing crack (or free-base; I was not enough of a drug-sophisticate to know which). One of them, my buddy Jim, kept saying, "This is the best feeling I've ever had in my life." Once again, I was tempted, and asked him how long the high lasted. "Fifteen seconds," he said. That was the end of that temptation. At that point, I felt I was too old to risk my health for a 15-second high. A few years later, Jim, who was only in his late 30's, was dead from a massive heart attack.
