ILLUSTRATION BY SANDRA HOOVER Advertisement



Columbus Day almost killed me.

I woke up avalanched under a junkyard of pain, my body a trap of torn nerves and trashed organs. An oily rash of sweat had soaked through my pillow and into the mattre[ss. I was coughing, confused and crazy with anger. A throbbing, deep-pink chemical sunburn covered my face; my bowels were spitting hot mercury. I slid out of bed and dropped to the floor, the weight of a snarling mountain gorilla bearing down on me. I saw myself in the mirror as I fell. I looked puffy.

Outside, the sun was terrifying, while the hiss from a neighbor’s dancing sprinkler got in my head and pissed me off so much, it felt as though my blood had become flammable and would ignite at the next insult. I made it to the car and somehow drove one block down to the mailbox, expecting the Priority Mail package from my eBay dealer to save me.

Nothing.

I hobbled into the car and drove back to the house, used the bathroom and looked on the computer. The U.S. Postal Service Web site tracker verified that my box of poppies had been delivered to Reno at exactly 10:32 a.m. Well, where the hell was it? I typed a threatening e-mail to my supplier but didn’t send it.

Then I got back into the car, reeling and jumpy, went back and opened the mailbox.

Nothing.

I closed it. Locked it. Waited a second and then stuck the key in and opened it back up.

Still not there.

I got back in the car and decided to wait it out. My head whirled with psychic errata—miscalculations in the synapses. As though faced with gravity for the very first time, I struggled to hold the horizon line, like an infant with an iron skull. I wanted to ram my head straight into the dashboard but feared the airbag might blow and deliver the knockout punch. Or, worse, I’d miss and hit the damn horn.

Everything hurt, but the pain came in slow motion and actually seemed to stop to register with each and every nerve. My pulse rattled, and my heart seemed to sizzle.

Maybe my package had been intercepted by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Good, I thought. Maybe they’ll be able to get me off this stupid homemade junk.

I sat there for less than a minute. Maybe I sat there for an hour, I don’t know. But something had to be done. I stuck some Klonopin under my tongue and drove over to the post office, expecting to turn myself in. Give up. Take the 15 years, if they would just give me the fix. But the door was stuck. I pushed, pulled. It wouldn’t budge. No, it was locked. Closed for Columbus Day.

Columbus Day.

No wonder everyone hated him. That tabard-wearing bastard had been dead for 500 years and was still causing trouble.

I took a dozen allergy pills to make me drowsy but couldn’t sleep. I lay awake in bed for the next two days before the shipment finally arrived. The postman had decided to make a long weekend out of the cheap-ass holiday.

I should’ve stayed in bed and ridden it out. I had put a price on my head in the form of a box-a-day addiction but already had endured the worst part of the withdrawal: the first 48 hours. But then the box arrived, and I was a helpless slave. I ripped it open by its pull string and dumped a dozen poppy pods onto the bed, trying to eat one whole. I then made a quick, crude tea, drank it and started to feel a rabid glow of health return in seconds.

What had all the fuss been about?

ILLUSTRATION BY SANDRA HOOVER



In better days, I used to crack the dried poppy pods over the blender like eggs, little rivulets of blue-black seeds rushing out as I shattered the crowned pods. Sometimes I’d commandeer the kitchen and make a big production out of the whole thing, as though I was hosting some kind of lowbrow cooking show, doing stupid cockney accents while explaining the preparation process to the viewers.

Start with a clean, chemical-free stock of dried poppy pods. Pulverize in a blender and scald with water. Don’t boil. Don’t burn. Don’t vaporize. Just scald. Blend on low for about a minute and then add a dash of lemon juice to taste. Add a cup of fine, aged brandy and then strain through an old T-shirt to remove lingering lumps.

Not only did the brandy serve to recreate that loose-laudanum effect, but also a swig baby-sat the senses while I waited the few minutes for the infernal teapot to boil.

I had a whole list of fuel additives I’d researched on the Internet to intensify the tea experience: tyrosine, ascorbic acid, allergy medicine.

After downing a few bowls of tea, I’d lie down on the bed and watch the ceiling fan spin until my body felt etherized and free again. Ready for the imminent rapture.

But that was the first phase. And it didn’t last very long.

On a field trip to Washington, D.C., Nancy Reagan promised us third-graders that there were people in the world who actually wanted nothing more than to give us drugs—for free! Free crack. Free cigarettes and beer. Free grass. Free coke. Free PCP and LSD. At the time, I remember thinking this notion carried the vague backing of Mr. T.

Back at school, they showed us a video of the circumstances and places these drugs might be obtained: playgrounds, especially while playing kickball; from ice-cream trucks; in restrooms at parties.

I played lots of kickball, but no goon in a trench coat ever trapped the ball under his foot and asked me if I wanted to fly. I bought ice pops and Fat Frogs from every Good Humor truck around but never got anything but chubby. I obviously was hanging out with the wrong crowd—something I distinctly remember the first lady warning us about. My friends couldn’t score a Jolt cola, let alone a bump of nose candy. It was probably for the best. Had someone handed me a rock of crack, I think I would’ve put it in my mouth and eaten it. I couldn’t even get a beer. And New Year’s was coming up.

The only other place to get free stuff was the library. My mother dropped me off like it was day care. Me and the damn bums. I looked for books with naked people. I read through investment magazines. Finally, I found the fiction section and a book called Beowulf. I liked it. The Vikings drank this stuff called “mead.” It was an alcoholic drink made from honey. I looked in the card catalog and found a book on mead. It even showed how to make it. I was 12. The librarian had her hair full keeping the bums from falling asleep on the newspapers. She stamped my books and sent me away.

The recipe seemed simple enough. I rode my bike to the supermarket and bought a bear-shaped jar of honey and some Fleischmann’s yeast.

I kept my mead in a pair of empty plastic Coke bottles. Every day I’d have to twist the cap off and release the carbon dioxide, or the stuff would explode. On New Year’s Eve I poured my first glass. It was warm, almost hot. It wasn’t sweet at all—it tasted like some kind of milky lard. I couldn’t drink it at first, but I made myself chug the stuff. I’m not sure what happened, but all of a sudden it was dark outside, I thought I heard Dick Clark talking about his balls, and I couldn’t stand up.

Because my neighborhood had failed me with its lack of blight, I began to see the supermarket and drugstore as potential drug dealers. I drank bottles of cough syrup before I knew what dextromethorphan (DXM) was. I ate catnip and didn’t feel anything. I ate nutmeg and felt everything. There was no Internet to guide me and nothing in the library about morning-glory seeds. My mother just happened to have some Heavenly Blues in the junk drawer. I had never seen the carpet move like that before. I tried everything in the medicine aisle and everything in the bulk food hoppers. I became a Spiceisle junkie. McCormick was my dealer.

I got my first pain pills from my friend’s dead grandmother. I liked them. I liked them so much I started hanging out with my own grandmother. Just checking in on her every now and then.

By the time I was driving, I still hadn’t found out where to get anything stronger than pot on the street. But they had just opened a whole-foods store about 20 miles away. Also, there was this damn new thing called the World Wide Web. There were whole pages on “legal highs.”

Go to kola, don quai, couch grass, cramp bark, slippery elm, saw palmetto. They sounded like mind benders, but the online “trip reports” confirmed they were no good. But I ate that San Pedro cactus in the living-room planter. I bought psilocybin mushroom spores and grew them in mason jars. Other sites led me to strange legal chemicals like 2CT7. I found recipes for crystal meth using children’s cough medicine. There were chemicals out there, but I was an opiate man.

At the health-food store I looked at the huge bins of sesame seeds and fennel seeds and poppy seeds. The page on legal highs had said that trying to extract opium from poppy seeds was ridiculous. You needed pounds of the stuff.