Chapter 18: Meth in the Glades

In terms of hard drugs, the worst shit I ever touched, worse than PCP, worse than cocaine, was crystal meth. No drug ever fucked me up more than that.

I’d been on binges with coke, where I’d be up for three days at a time, no sleep, just snorting coke, smoking cigarettes and weed. I wouldn’t eat much during these times and lost a lot of weight.

Meth, though, the first time I did it, and the only time, had me up for almost a week. And as luck would have it, this was around the start of the school year, my second year, at the little Quaker school.

To start the year, we’d go on this camping trip, one of a few we’d do annually, at a park way out in the Everglades.

It was splendid out there in the Glades, so scenic, such serene tropical beauty. Of course, we were too young to appreciate, or care much at all about the nature, and on these camping trips most of us would spend the whole-time fucking, drinking, doing drugs and basically being degenerates. For punks like us, a trip like this was bliss. Disneyworld for juvenile delinquents like me and my ilk.

I almost didn’t make it there. In fact, it would have been better if I hadn’t gone...

I’d been on a coke binge for a few days and had finally gotten to sleep when I awoke to my friend, Jimmy, banging on my door.

We had to go on the camping trip, he told me. I’d totally forgotten.

I got myself together, somewhat, and we headed out in my car, smoking weed from a small metal pipe as we drove there.

On the highway, being so fucked up, I almost lost control of the wheel and hit a road sign. It was a good thing Jimmy was alert enough to grab the wheel and right us, saving us from a terrible collision. Thinking back on that, since he saved our lives, I really should give him a pass on fucking my ex-girlfriend...

I was selling increasingly bigger quantities of drugs, around then, and had quit a part-time job I’d had at a record store (since it was starting to cost me money, being at that job, making me miss opportunities to sell drugs, though I did at least get lots of free CDs from the store, which was rad).

Realizing the lucrative business opportunity of being on a camping trip with a ton of young drug fiends, I prepared accordingly, and before leaving, I’d packed a shitload of small bags and a pound of weed, a few grams of coke, and brought a tiny bag of meth, which I’d not tried, but was looking forward to experimenting with.

When we got to the campsite, I sold the weed, at lightning speed, to my classmates. One of them was this girl, who’d lived near me and was going to ride to school with me that semester. Her dad had talked to me on the phone before I began taking her, I guess since she was a year or two younger, and I guess he wanted to see if I was “okay.”

I don’t remember any word of the conversation, except that it happened.

Having had his introduction to his daughter, when I met her at the campsite, I’d found quickly that she liked smoking weed, and we smoked together, in the girls bathroom, and she blew me in there and we fucked a couple times in the woods, her standing at a tree, her arms hugging it as I fucked her from behind, no condom, but I’d pulled out, came on her ass. (I’d learned my lesson about busting wads, rawdog, up in girls... )

(She, like the psychiatrist’s daughter, also had a tiny, flat ass, and wasn’t as pretty, had a slightly blockish, masculine face and short pink hair. But like the psychiatrist’s daughter, she was blessed with jiggly juice tits, and was sort of tall, like 5’8, with long, slim centerfold legs, and I liked that about her. Her pussy was tight and exquisite, shaped like a flower in bloom.)

A new friend I’d made, Peter, and I smoked and snorted the meth, the first night of the camping trip.

It completely jolted me, the meth. Reminded me of coke, but stronger, more intense. I’d didn’t sleep a wink that night.

The next day I remember this idiot spastic kid who’d always wear an L.A. Dodgers hat and overalls. He’d declared proudly that he’d smoke cigarettes the entire camping trip, chain-smoke them, smoke every single minute of the trip, and the next morning we saw him carried away on a stretcher, from having nicotine poisoning, and as he was being put into the ambulance, we laughed and pointed at him, earning one bespectacled elderly female teacher’s forceful condemnation of our thoughtlessness.

That second night, we had a campfire, and the meth I’d been smoking, along with weed and sleep deprivation were hitting me like slaps to the face and while I sat by the fire with my new drug friends and the tree-hugger girl, I began to see intense hallucinations in the fire.

I saw a cop car, on fire, smashing into a high-rise office building and blew up, and then people were being shot, people in business suits, being shot dead. I was seeing these businesspeople gunned down in streets around Brickell, Biscayne Bay by machine guns and handguns that were held by invisible forces, just guns floating, cutting through the air, shooting and blasting off randomly, the bloodied business people’s bodies dropping, piling into city streets. It was vivid, like the fire flames were a crystal ball...

I don’t remember anything else from that night. Other than being back in the girls bathroom, fucking the tree girl again, in a stall, her spread eagle atop a toilet.

The following morning, after breakfast, the headmaster of the school pulled me aside, behind a cabin, for a word in private. The headmaster was a rather creepy, squirrelly old fellow with these perpetually askew, narrow black-rimmed eyeglasses and always with a look on his face like he was trying to lift something heavy. I remember the old bird’d wear corduroys and flannel shirts no matter the weather or location. He usually was rather meek, so it surprised me when he approached me, speaking forcefully, with eyes of rage.

We stood in the shade, behind the wooden cabin, and he lashed out, spittle forming in the corner of his tiny mouth as he told me, directly, that he didn’t like me and didn’t want me in his school and that the only reason I’d been asked back was that a few of the teachers liked me.

Not a wonderful thing to say to a teen. Especially an “at-risk” teen.

(It really was doubly off-putting, upsetting in that he was generally so non-confrontational and quiet. So for him to act out, so out of character, act that way, it totally took me off-guard.)

I didn’t react well to it. Was quite shocked he’d said such words to me. At first, I didn’t say a word, didn’t know how to respond. I just stood there, behind that cabin, feeling like I got hit by a truck. It saddened me at first, to hear a teacher say what he did. But the sadness quickly shifted to anger. And I decided, fuck this shit, and gathered my things, went to my car and began to leave.

The headmaster saw me leaving, saw I was pissed and saw me telling the tree-girl about what’d happened, telling her that I was going to split. He called me over, possibly to smooth things over, but I was beyond reproach at this point. I was incensed, and I cursed him out, got in my car, spun the wheels loudly, cranked up the Gravediggaz’ “6 Feet Deep” and sped off, bass booming through the swamp.