Читать книгу Wake Up and Smell The Beer - Jon Longhi - Страница 10

Sunny Friday afternoons in the Haight I would come home from work early. The radiating low sun had not yet been snuffed out by the roaring fog. Mist piled up like ominous mountains on the edge of the neighborhood, mountains moving slowly but irrevocably forward on a snail's viscid trail, its chill marine breath just beginning to infect the dry dusty afternoon air. It would be eighty-five degrees and suddenly a slow sullen breeze thirty degrees cooler would coax shivers from your skin.

Lots of evenings the dividing line between light and fog was Divisadero Street at the bottom of the hill. It was the borderland. I'd ride home from work with the sun shining on my back but when I hit Divisadero the light would turn gray and cool. As I rode Haight Street up the hill past its intersection with Divisadero, I'd often ascend into a chilly cloud. Fog hugged the top of the hill like a damp head of matted hair. As the road leveled out into the Haight, my helmet and leather jacket would get slicked down driving through water droplets just hanging in the air, hovering dewdrops thick as an insect swarm. Most nights the Haight had a semi-liquid sky.

In this twilight zone of moistures I would arrive home on a Friday afternoon at 666 Ashbury and snort two fat lines of speed hoping it would lead to something holy. Even though my drug-fueled searches for truth usually only led to detours, even these diversions were valid destinations in and of themselves. You can only appreciate heaven after exploring all the hells, and I always loved the energy the powder gave me. It was the false enthusiasm for many a wild night.

On near toxic amounts of amphetamines and LSD numerous satoris were induced. Gushing spasms of stuttering hallucinations attacked like an epileptic's fit at 4 a.m. on Saturday nights. A drooling shit-faced sage, I'd eat peyote or yage, puke my visions into a toilet bowl and examine the chunks to try and divine signs of the future. My reasoning was so soaked in Burroughs, Castenada, and psychedelic substances that I fancied I could actually travel to other dimensions like some new wave hipster version of Doctor Strange. I heard voices in my head and believed they were prophecies or murmurings of the dead instead of the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. Somehow it worked quite well for me.

After the lines, I'd be buzzing with a frenzied electricity. Instant Energy. I loved the idea of ingesting immediate inspiration. Why wait for it to occur naturally when there are pharmaceuticals? Many a painting, song, or short story rose up out of these drug hazes. But speed seemed to generate equal amounts of madness and creativity, and if I didn't know when to stop the chaos side effects would overwhelm all rational thought. Depending on how well I gauged my lines and hit my mark, I ran an equal risk of a good meth high turning me into either a prolific artist or a homicidal maniac.

Sometimes I'd ride my motorbike up to the top of Buena Vista Park and smoke a fat one. From the top of the hill I could see the whole Bay Area laid out before me like some enchanted land in a pulp fantasy novel. The fading afternoon sun made the distant interlocking towns and cities across the Bay glow golden and warm. The Pacific was a fluffy bed of cotton spilling slowly inland. I'd stand there watching the fog steadily infest San Francisco, a huge obliterating urban virus. Close on the retreating heels of the sun, the ocean woven mist slowly erased the city. I'd watch one neighborhood after another disappear. The pot I sucked into my lungs was like a smaller fog spreading through my body. Some nights I'd stay there till the cold wet cotton completely swallowed the sun and the skies grew dark. By that point the hilltop I stood on was little more than an island in a cool white sea. I started my motorbike and dove in.

Friday nights often had an underwater feel, and it wasn't just because I frequently drank enough beer to fill a swimming pool. Large doses of psychedelics made me hallucinate I was navigating a liquid world, humidity growing so thick the atmosphere had coagulated to water, the Haight transformed into a big aquarium where drug-addicted amphibians like me navigated the waterways and sunken bars in search of big fish and kicks. Maybe that's why my hangovers the next day left me feeling like a hooked carp flopping around airless on the splinters of a dry dock.

Every day degenerated further into a constant state of fear and paranoia. Small gray and white tingles of light shimmered in the edges of my sight. Speed was like a parasite slowly eating my mind, a white worm chewing away at gray matter. A deadly virus ingested line by line. The jams down in the basement lasted for hours. We'd go in there in the afternoon and by the time we came out again the sun had risen on the next day. Of course, the symphony of chemicals in our veins was almost as loud as the noise we were creating: orchestrations of beers, joints, speed, and hallucinogens—a trembling, sleepless reality.

After four hours, another four rails, and a steady creek of beers you couldn't even feel your fingers or the muscles in your arms anymore. The thing is, those twelve to eighteen hour jam sessions always seemed so short, like it was all just one ten to fifteen minute explosion of sonic fury, the sound waves splashing, a Technicolor sea of roaring hallucinations and music. There were times where I wasn't sure if I was generating more visuals or audios. I just kept strumming away, generating colors in empty space. The sound made the light and the light made the sound and it was all one big cosmic circle. I wonder how many pieces of my brain are still down in that basement, stored back in the moldy darkness with the mummified cats, squirrels, and blown-out old amplifiers that were fried at all-night jam sessions and parties.

We inherited more old music equipment than a pawnshop. Our basement jams were a steady parade of drunken strangers and one night stand musicians. People would say they'd be back to pick up their amp the next day and just never return. Some of them were probably so fucked up they couldn't remember the address of where they'd played, others were so drunk they couldn't even remember that they had jammed and from their point of view the musical equipment had dematerialized and just wasn't there anymore. Maybe they reported it as stolen when it had simply been misplaced. This kind of idiocy supplied us with quite a collection of noise-generating machines for nearly nightly sound orgies.

There was one year at 666 where I did speed every day, sleeping no more than four or five hours at a stretch any time during that entire year. In my constant speed freak existence sleep had become a series of short catnaps, never getting down deep enough to reach the depths where the schools of dreams swim. As a result, life was an endless consciousness, an immortal alertness till everything became boring and gray. But eventually my dreams (such persistent things) began to worm their way back into the drug's maniacal rationality. I began to see things, imagine things. The world felt filled with vast conspiracies, all out to get me. Life became surreal and creepy. It took all of my mental strength just to keep it together. Every day was an increasing struggle against madness and paranoia.

Speed had once been so productive and now I just couldn't get anything done. Days at a time were spent locked in my room doing lines, jacking off to pornos on the VCR till my penis was bloody and raw, fantasizing that my body was so polluted that my liver was swelling like a balloon full of pus. I imagined it bloating out my abdomen and any day it would explode, spraying a hail of pus loogies on hapless passersby. My liver was so full of drugs that after I died, dealers could cut it out and sell it by the gram on Haight Street. Chewing on a chunk would give the user a variety of highs, tripping and speeding at the same time. In fact, the more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that the tissues of my liver were probably so rarified that they'd be the perfect drug. On desperate nights when I had run out of weed and speed I was tempted to cut my liver out and eat it myself. If nothing else, it would be a good way to recycle the drugs I had taken the week before.

Such a drug-filled existence had its share of strange characters drifting through, never hanging around for too long before moving on. Most only stayed as long as the latest stash lasted. It was like 666 was just a weigh station for people on their way down and out. A one night stand for the chemically deranged, quickly hurrying on in search of their own personal abyss.

I don't think I ever saw Fast B.J. Eddy and his sidekick Dave Streak when they weren't on speed. They buzzed around our apartment like hummingbirds for one six-month period that went by in the blink of an eye. Any room they were in had white lines being chopped somewhere. Meth followed them around like an infestation of fleas. One night Dave Streak chopped a half-gram into two monstrous lines that he sucked up each nostril in a single snort. In a single night Dave and B.J. could do a pile of speed that would keep anyone else flying for a month. They were always excited, rushing about in a frantic state, engaged in a number of minor projects that were always abandoned for newer more important projects before a single original project was completed. They left behind a complicated, half-assembled wreckage.