Letters to Collette

More? O.K. In our room, before breakfast on Sunday, Carla asked me how I felt about the events of the prior evening and I told her that the experience was wonderful and I hoped that she felt the same. She said that she would not have expected to feel that way, but she did.

We were scheduled to stay in New Orleans Sunday night, also. Gary was leaving on Monday. Carla and I ate breakfast and fooled around while he was in his convention for a couple of hours and got together around three in the afternoon. We stopped at several French Quarter bars, again drinking chardonnay and generally having a good time. The Gary did something that I wasn't really happy about. He asked me if I wanted to do a little cocaine. Gary was not a druggie, but I knew that, on rare occasions, he would toot a little coke. He had a couple of grams with him that he had gotten from someone at the convention that morning. I did not approve of this. I quit using drugs of any type long before and told him that I did not want any and cautioned him not to get carried away with the stuff. He promised that he would not and, from past experience, I knew that he could be trusted. But - - - he did offer some to Carla that afternoon. She had never tried the stuff, but she had indicated to me before that she was curious about coke and would like to try it just once to see what it was like. She kind of looked at me and said "What do you think?" I told her that she had to make her own decisions. Well, she did and she and Gary went off and did a toot. We went to several bars and she and Gary did a couple more small toots from his spoon before going back to the hotel. We were going to swim. It was a warm afternoon and we all needed refreshing. We were all joking that this time we were going to make it to the pool.

I could see that Carla was tipsy, but not really as much as the day before and she was not spaced out on the coke. We picked up a bottle of wine to drink in plastic cups at the pool and took it to our rooms to change. Carla and I put on our suits and Gary came to meet us. Before he got there Carla and I had a glass of wine. She was feeling good, but still looked fine. The radio was playing jazz, softly. When Gary came in, he laid out some nice sized lines and offered Carla some. This was not something that I was happy about, but I was not in a position to stop this. We all sat down with a glass of wine to let them level off with the drug that they had ingested. Needless to say, I was watching Carla closely. I will say this, she got quite uninhibited, but at no time during the evening did she seem out of control nor did she seem to get so spaced out that she had difficulty comprehending what was going on. On the contrary, she the drug seemed to heighten her awareness. But her inhibitions were shattered.