Late 1996 – Somewhere West of the Mississippi and South of the 42nd parallel

Jeff puts some of the “C.R.” I brought over, into a spoon on the tattered, scarred brown dresser. A nice little mound of dirty, stinky, chemical laden “crank”… The kind that wreaks of an odour not unlike cat piss, but only if you had tried to clean said cat piss with a mix of acetone and some other undefined chemicals, and cover up the odour with the smell of fresh cut grass… It is such a strange, undefinable smell. One that most would find horribly offensive and borderline putrid… The type of odour that to anybody unfamiliar with it just screams “Danger! Danger! Get away from me as fast as you can!” But to those in the know, it is a comforting scent… A scent that builds up anticipation, and that will immediately cause the guts of the most iron of stomachs to immediately gurgle, and the most empty of bowels to immediately need to find a toilet. Any serious drug addict worth their habit will understand the bathroom reference. In this case it is methamphetamine just waiting for a nice home to make it’s final resting place. “Pick me! Pick me!” My heart would have cried out, if given the chance. With the expert precision of a swiss clockmaker and the demeanor of a man about to do something he had done thousands of times, Jeff draws some water into an insulin syringe from a little shot glass that permanently resides on the old dresser, not too much though, as you want the mix to be thick so the rush hits harder… The grizzled middle aged addict expels the water from the syringe onto the speed in the spoon, and with a quick flick of his wrist that syringe is suddenly upside down, and he is using the plunger to crunch up and mix the chemical concoction in that misused eating utensil… The drugs mix with the water very quickly, and satisfied we are good he drops a small piece of cotton, torn from the tip of a cotton swab and rolled between thumb and forefinger into a tiny, neat ball, into the solution and begins drawing up the thick, yellowish liquid… Looks at it in the light, pushes out any sign of air bubbles, flicks the syringe with his middle finger, springing it off of his thumb while still holding it to the light and satisfied that the masterpiece is ready he motions for me to give him my arm… In my sixteen year old naivete I offer the limb in hopes of a good return, and like a seasoned lab tech he finds one of the elusive veins in my forearm… Veins that I would thoroughly abuse in the years to come… He aspirates, a viscous liquid that is a dark shade of red suddenly begins to infiltrate the yellowish contents of the syringe, the sight that every junkie desperately yearns to see, the light that tells them it is time to go home… Pushes the plunger in on the back of the syringe, waits a moment and satisfied the job is complete, removes the syringe just as a thick chemical vapour fills my lungs and a brief moment of anxiety gives way to everything that feels good on Earth all at once… Now, many people refer to their first shot of heroin or the first crack hit they smoke, or whatever their drug of choice is, as the best one, the first one is always IT… THE ONE… The high they chase forever…

In my case, it wasn’t the first one, as I had already dabbled with this some in the previous few months, if there was one I chased it was THIS ONE…  Even though as the next few years went by, I injected a lot of meth… A LOT. OF. METH. Everyday if I could, multiple times a day, including in the coming years, shot after death defying shot of pure crystal meth, stuff that looks like busted glass drizzled in oil, the kind of stuff you can smell outside of the baggie, that you think you can smell when it is in your pants pocket… oily shards of chemical glass that are destined to take you to whatever version of heaven you are chasing at that time… but regardless of the potency and insanity of later blasts, this one, in this little apartment bedroom, of dirty ‘ole C.R., was thick, it was strong, it was good, and as it hit, it gave me life and ruined my life all at once… It hit like a freight train going through a thin standing sheet of ice…  Shattering my mind, my thoughts, my feelings, my very existence. Killing the old me and simultaneously giving birth to a new me, one that could feel everything good all at once, that was capable of giving everything they had to this one moment, that was capable of anything and everything… and everything was good, it had to be, there was no way anything could be bad in the whole world when a feeling like this existed… Why wouldn’t everyone want to feel this way all the time? Why hadn’t I felt this way before? Why would I ever deliberately not feel like this ever again? That one shot of meth was all I ever wanted, and all I could ever fathom wanting all at once, it was THE most amazing feeling I could ever comprehend… In fact it felt so good I couldn’t even comprehend it… I remember saying, out loud no less, something to the effect of: “It feels like I’m gonna’ bust in my pants”… I literally felt like I was about to have an orgasm from something that in and of itself was completely non-sexual. This was the beginning, and the end. The greatest and the worst. I was reborn, but not in a good way. I just didn’t know it yet…