It was the sixties, and everybody was doing drugs. Most of us were doing harmless stuff like smoking shitty Mexican grass that had been cured with sugar. It was like smoking sandpaper and it took a whole joint to get a little buzz and then the headache came. It was crappy pot almost always but it only cost twenty for a lid. We did other stuff like mushrooms and acid which I feel actually had some redeeming social value if used properly. I was a hung up kid with absolutely no confidence in myself until I ate some acid one night. It was a terrifying experience. A bad trip. I have to admit I was scared. I couldn't deal with the shit coming out of my head. The next morning, my best friend, John Turchi, was sitting next to my bed as I woke from my night of terror. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Okay,” I said. While I was saying that, he slipped a piece of window pane in my mouth. “What was that?” I said, and reached into my mouth to find what he had put there. Too late. It had already dissolved. “Acid,” he said. I was immediately pissed off. “Why did you do that?, I said. “You need to get back on that horse and learn to ride it. Last night you were afraid you wouldn't come down again. Now you know that was bullshit, that you will come down again, so you have nothing to be afraid of.” He was right, besides, the stuff was in me. I had no choice but to buck up. This time I didn't let the fear get the better of me. I wasn't afraid of the hallucinations, I knew what was real and what wasn't. I was able to see the possibilities around me that I had never seen before. That's when I began to write and learn music. Acid opened a whole world to me that I'd never seen before. The thing about acid is that once you see the possibilities, you don't need to take acid any more. Once you've seen the light, the light does not go out. Sometimes you need a little reminder and take some more, but acid isn't like heroin. Your cells don't scream for more. It isn't a drug of physical addiction. It's a drug of the mind. It wakes things up, turns things on that were dormant before.
We also ate speed and downers and drank a lot of booze and listened to a lot of music and it was a time of discovery. For all they say about the sixties and seventies, the world evolved, progressed during that time. But there were other drugs that weren't so enlightening. Heroin and cocaine were the drugs that caused all the real trouble.
My friend John Turchi did a tour in Vietnam and came home strung out on heroin. He was shooting the stuff and he has smuggled a good amount of pure Vietnamese heroin back with him in his duffel bag. When he ran out of the good stuff, he started buying local heroin which was about ten or twenty percent as strong. He couldn't get high on domestic stuff and quit. But John was an IV heroin user. He quit heroin, but he still had the thing for needles. Then Mike Collins started selling grams of cocaine.
Cocaine is a much different drug than heroin. A completely different animal. A shot of heroin is cheap. When you first start out you can get very high for five dollars and it lasts six or eight hours and you come down nice and slow. It's deceiving. It sucks you in. Soon, five dollars worth doesn't do the trick any more and it doesn't last as long. Then you find that without it you are sick and the only way to feel better is to do more and more and it gets more and more expensive. Cocaine is different. It doesn't try to trick you. The first shot is truthful from from the beginning. As soon as it enters the vein, it laughs in your face, ha ha ha, I've got you. The rush of cocaine in the vein is like a thousand orgasms all at once and it lasts just about as long. You need more right away and now you have to double the dose or you won't even feel it. A gram of cocaine costs about a hundred dollars, and you can go through that in about two hours and then you need, NEED-NEED-NEED, more right now.
John scored a gram from Mike. It set him off. John had a good job as a bartender. He was making good money. He had some savings. Before the night was through he had gone through all of it. He showed up at Mike's bedroom window throughout the night. Knocking on the glass pleading for more. He handed his stereo through the window piece by piece and left with more cocaine. Then he was back with his camera, then a guitar, then finally he had nothing left. The next day we learned from Mike how crazy John had been the night before, showing up at Mike's window. Mike felt terrible but John was pleading. None of us were shooting the stuff at the time so we didn't understand what John was going through. Then no one could find John for three days. His mother and father called my house several times asking what I knew. I couldn't tell them about the cocaine. When three days had passed we were sitting on Rose Bernstein's front porch. Mike was there, and John's brother Walt, and Lee Smith.
We were discussing what could have happened to John. Then a car pulled up in front of the house.
It was a nice car. Fairly new. An elderly woman was driving. John was sitting next to her. John got out of the car and she drove away. He walked toward the house with a sad and embarrassed smile. He told us the story of his last three days.
After spending his savings and trading away all of his stuff to Mike for coke, John took off looking for more money or more coke. I don't remember where he got the gun, but somehow he got his hands on a 22 pistol. He hid in the woods along a road that ran through Manor country club. When he saw a Cadillac driving slowly up the road he jumped out in front of it with a paper bag over his head and held up the pistol. He was going to carjack the man and take his money for more coke. The guy saw John, the paper bag, the pistol, and stepped on the gas. He hit John who rolled on the side of the road holding his leg. The guy got out of the car and walked around to John. He was a big guy and he was going to kick John's ass, but John managed to hold onto the gun. He raised it up. Took the guys money and made him toss his keys into the woods. Then John hobbled off. I don't know how he got away, but this was before cell phones and such. He hitched a rid to the local shopping center where he followed a woman with her groceries to her car. He helped her load her groceries and when she got in the car he jumped in next to her and pulled the gun.
“Give me your money.” He said. The woman just looked at him. “What's wrong?, she said.
“Don't fuck around,” he said. “Give me your money or I'll shoot you.”
“Tell me what's wrong,” she said. “You aren't going to shoot any body.” John started to cry and told her everything. Finally, she drove John to lake Frank, and waited while John threw the gun into the water, then she dropped him off at Rose's house. There were a few more binges ahead, but John finally became a Jehovah’s Witness, quit hard drugs, but not pot or alcohol, and got married. The marriage didn't last, but John stayed clean. He now lives alone in a trailer on a piece of property he bought in Remington Virginia. He had a couple old horses and a lot of guns. He hunts and fishes and generally lives the life of a hermit, although he did develop an interest in astronomy. He has a telescope, and he even teaches a few astronomy classes. I talk to him by phone about once a year or maybe less.
Mike ended up in New York playing drums for Mick Taylor and later, Otis Rush and finally Chuck Berry. As for me, I had my own adventures with heroin and cocaine which I'll tell you about sometime.
For the most part I find drug stories to be a waste of time. No one learns anything from them, not that I have anything to teach. I saw the harm those things can do to a man and I still got into it. I think I needed to understand first hand what it was all about. There is only one way to know, after all.