speed bump
i usta hit it hard in Philly when i was imagining myself an architect. accepted by the Yay-ul Architecture School on a full ride i was thinking, well, i’m sort of an artist on the inside, but i need to make a living so maybe something like designing pretty buildings would do the trick and balance inner artist with outer realist. recon: i got a job with Vincent G. Kling and Associates in downtown Philly. i labored over floor plans and carefully measured toilet floors. at night, however, i’d get high on anything i could get my hands on — hash, weed, lsd, mushrooms, peyote, sunflower seeds, meth. loved the double life. a favorite junket was to drop a pill, drive to the airport, park at the end of the runway behind the chain link fence and watch planes take off and land. big bellied sky whales lifted your hair and crushed your eardrums. or we’d hit up the Electric Factory (a Rat-sized venue at the time) where i lucked out and saw Hendrix ride a greased pig onto the stage in front of a crowd of 20. or Iron Butterfly zone off into a San Francisco twilight. or Three Dog Night with their hairy chests scream 1 Is The Luckiest into battered mikes. i traipsed up to the skinny androgynous bassist from the west coast band, Spirit, shook his limp hand (a forefinger grazing my palm in code) and gazed like a teenage girl into his mercury eyes. all this hurled me into the day job cell block at work where i’d sketch 4x8 foot posters (faux Peter Max) and color them in with a
fist of psychedelic magic markers and pre-dated my first bad trips on meth. i loved the initial rush, the humorless solve-all-the-problems-of-the-world edge, heart beating like a hummingbird. it was awesome until the inevitable crash. i would denounce to myself all the hot ideas that had only minutes ago were ‘genius’. i hated the sound of my voice. my skin crawled with invisible bugs. my eyes dried up. the only solution would be, though i didn’t have any in those days, a sedative or put- you-to-sleep weed. more often than not i was stuck sweating it out. long hours of self-loathing and suicidal panic. it did help on cross country drives. who needed sleep? after a brief incarceration in a Santa Barbara jail (for shoplifting) my friend Harlow (flown out from Philly by my infuriated father) and i drove back to the east coast without a wink, miles high on meth. i don’t think we shut up for the entire trip. we solved all the problems of our love lives, poverty, war, inequity on the 2.5 day jaunt. ghostly, skeletal horses galloped alongside my blue panel truck at night. a sabre tooth tiger leaped from a cave, snarling and drooling across the hood. rednecks in rest rooms gave us the evil eye. once home, we fell apart, helplessly fucked up in a 100 mph daze. i gave the shit up soon thereafter only to replace it down the rock n roll highway with coke. more glamorous than speed, it was sexy — the cutting, shaping, snorting. the encrusted mirror passed back and forth with a one-time-only persuadable across the table. the horny rush would subtract all moral code and inhibition. but that too, like it’s white trash pal, would induce a grotesque fall from grace. good and bad times they were, those dark days of infantile fear and loathing.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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