Powder Diaries II: rituals and initations. The beginnings of a fuck up and yeast lord

First time doing coke:

I was drunk living in a party house in a college town with four roommates. All but me and the influist were sleeping. We had been drinking and playing cards (I think gin or gin runmy? Whatever one you play to 500 and have sets of cards to get the points. Fun game.) 

I knew my roommates occasionally did blow, but due to the strength of the pot we smoked I was always passed the fuck out as they merrily hit the nose slopes. 

But not this night.

It was me and my roommate Derin. She was my friends girlfriend, a former college softball star, student and Fred Meyer employee.  I don't know how the conversation went but basically she said, hey we got some coke for Angie's birthday, you wanna do some? I said no but she pestered me, I was depressed and my life was shitty. I was failing out of a post baccalaureate journalism school stint and massively in credit card debt. I was having fun living in a house with  friends from back home but I just felt like I was fucking up in a bad way. Anyhow she convinced me.

My only drug up to that point was pot, and once I told some people I had an old hydrocodone bottle from getting mono and they said pain killers and booze make you feel magical. (Turns out they do, I went to a comedy show and the whole theater had a rose tinged halo to it, and I laughed more than I should have and felt great.  A forty and a vicodin is a good time.)

She brought out the coke and I am trying to remember what it looked like but it was white little powdery rocks in a plastic back.  The snorting part of coke was the first thing I liked about the experience. 

The first time I snorted something was at a frat party when I was in high school playing a show at my older brother's school. Some guy had some snus, a powder tobacco inhalant, and as an at the time non tobacco user it was a good head rush. (Ok take that back, snorting pixie sticks in grade school was my first snorting experience and pixie sticks burn just like coke does when you first do it, before your nasal cavities get eaten away and hey, you might even have a hole connecting your nostril cavities!)

Second time was crushing up the hydrocodone and snorting it off a Waylon Jennings vinyl sleeve. Turns out vicodin and hydrocodone have like 500mg of acetomenophin, which is what makes up almost all of the pill. So yeah. Have fun snorting that you big dummy.

I don't remember much about that night but the thing I remember most was enjoying the ritual. Preparing the coke, chopping up the lines.  BUT!... THE VERY BEST THING AND MY FAVORITE FOR QUITE A LOT MY COCAINE ADDICTION..............

COCAINE CIGARETTES!

I had recently become a habitual smoker and to make smoking even cooler was her showing me how to make a cocaine cigarette. In the Denzel Movie Flight John Goodman calls it a coco puff.  The way she showed me how to do it is you lick your cigarette in four places with the end of your tongue making wet lines on the shaft. Then you lick the end of the cigarette and dab a liberal amount of cocaine on the end then roll the cigarette in a line of powder where you licked it. Let it dry and you've  got a thing of beauty. Besides a few times of trying to smoke foils, (Cocaine and water dabbed on aluminum foil then dried, and using a bic pen as a straw inhaling the smoke, being carefully not to heat the coke too much.) this was most if the coke smoking I did.  It tasted chemical like and smelled that way too.  I am not sure if these coke cigarettes even make you high, and I had forgot about them til now but I think they might have been my favorite part of my fucked up times doing coke.

As for the rest of the night I don't remember much but for the coke cigarettes.  I did not have a come down or a need to do more. I woke up next day mostly feeling like I had sunk to a new low in my fucked up life. Alas, my friends, that was just the beginning of another era; (if you can call it that) a fucked up can't keep a job max out credit cards doing two and three day benders of sniffing lines and the overly anxious dry high and hassle of being at the whim of the one guy you can get drugs off of trying to figure out how to go to sleep, maybe painkillers, wish I could have gotten some Xanax, and I was  basically a human vacuum for as long as the ride lasted.

And then just a poor fiend.

And later putting my life back together...

Years later writing this and the last blog and a bunch of internet searches and finally some social networking will lead me to another entry tentatively called the 500 dollar five day blizzard.  Hopefully my last ride into hell,  chasing my demons  while my past dark nights of the soul overtook me. Cue

Cocaine,
YOUGODAMMNEDSONNUFFABITCH!