Subject: ASP-PRE1-I Should Have Known Better (1) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:03:48 GMT Well hopefully these five segments will post. Wrote them up about 2 or 3 months ago, when the muse hit again. Unlike the original 45 plus or so "Adventures Of Smacks Past" that I posted way back in 1996, these segments of which this is 1 of 5, are meant to be the lead-up finale to my first step into the world of drugs. As someone mentioned a few months ago, I think the original 45 or so posts I did were are being hosted at a website for a while. I have not bothered to check if that web-page is still there. Actually I planned on/plan on adding much more to these PRE-Adventures of Smacks Past, because there's a lot of good stuff both related and not so related to all the shit I had to go through later. What's that line "child is father to the man?" Something like that. Well enjoy folks. P.S. Any apparent discrepancies in the storylines from adventure to adventure is purely beyond my scope. After all, I'm doing this all from memory, some liberty with time and dates, etc. But the basic content is fairly accurate. Probably in the 95 percentile. So enjoy. Copyright Gizmo 2001 ______________________________________________________ I Should Have Known (part 1) I should have known I could become a junkie. There were signs long before it became a reality for me. As far back as the 8th grade, I remember sitting, listening, transfixed to these incredibly strange but stupid tales that our 80 year old 8th grade religion sister would tell us. Yup, I did say 80 years old. Hell, she may have been older. I think I even heard 85 or 90 years old. That's the cool thing about religion, especially the Catholic Faith. At least back then. You never retired. Even though she was deaf in one ear and couldn't hear out of the other, on she went, teaching 6th, 7th and 8th grad religion class. According to her there were three things that were at work in the world of evil. 1.) Communism 2.) Satan 3.) Dope That summed it up. According to her the commies were trying to enslave America (and the free world governments.) And you had to keep a sharp eye out for them, because the agents of communism were "out there." They were everywhere. In politics, in business, in secret meetings being held by communist sympathizers, on street corners and in five and dime stores. In pornography etc. That was interesting and I guess she was just echoing some of the post McCarthyism of the 50's. I was definitely on the lookout. Once I think I saw a communist trying to "liberate" a lot of bubble gum at Blackman's Soda & Candy store on McLain Avenue in Yonkers where I went to grade school. Then again, maybe not. He was only about 8 or 9 years old, probably a little young even for one of Joe Stalin's recruits. But he did fill his pockets with lots of Bazooka Joe's & Double Bubble gum. I figured he was on a mission to show how the communistic system worked. Steal from Blackman and than freely distribute it to the masses. Of course I never actually saw him do that. Hmmm, for all I know he might have just kept it all for himself. Then there was Satan. Being a catholic nun and an old nun at that, she had the inside dope (no pun intended) on Satan. For some reason, I didn't buy it though. Even though I had been exposed to religion since my 1st grade and went to Catholic Mass on Sunday and Confession on Saturday. Even though I had read and heard all the great parables and fables from The Bible, I just didn't ever see it or buy it. To me as a little kid growing up in the Northeast Bronx, life was kind of fantastic and wonderful. I didn't see all that much evil, growing up, much less Satan. So even though she laid it on us hard and thick, I just kind of nodded all that info out of my head. But Dope! Now that was a different matter. She also warned us about dope. She warned us about it a lot. And she had this most fantastic pharmacology to go with her warnings. She of course told us that "dope, heroin, goof balls etc." would make you feel wonderful. But she told us that after just one try, dope would dry up your blood! Duhhhhhh!!! But that's what she said. She told us that if you took dope, that it would make you feel great, but that it would dry up your blood and the only thing you could do of course, was more dope. I guess to keep your blood flowing and to keep it from drying up completely. The implication being that you would die from these blood drying withdrawals. Wow! She also told us to watch out when we went to the candy store for lunch. She warned that while sipping on a Malted or a Soda that we had to be on our guard because you never knew when some dope peddler would sit next to us and "scratch our arm and then rub some dope into the wound." Once that happened, we would get hooked and it was just about all over according to her. That story fascinated me for the next three or four years until I actually tried dope. I would remember what she said and I would kinda fantasize about it. I imagined what it would be like to get some "dope." At that point I did not even really know what "dope" was. That is, I did not know that it was heroin. I did have one encounter just before finishing grammar school with a "dope peddler." Actually it was this guy who had been "left back" to repeat his school year a couple of times. His name was Jimmy. We all knew him as a "bad guy," obviously cause he had been left back not once but twice. So he was a couple of years older than the rest of us. If we were all 11 or 12. He was 13 or 14 or so. One day in the school playground, he pulled out a small white box and asked me if I wanted to buy a few "goofballs." I remember looking at the box. It did not look anything like the way I saw barbiturates or any pills for that matter a few years later. It was a small flat white box, that sort of slid open. Kinda like the kind of boxes that they sell "Pepto-Bismol" tablets in today. Anyway I remember asking him what they were and I remember him trying to explain it to me. But mostly all he said is that they were "goofballs." "You want one" he asked? I was too scared to try any so I declined. But I still remembered that 8th grade nuns dope stories. Even though basketball, young girls and shortly after music were to occupy my time and energy for the next couple of years, I would think about what she said from time to time. And my curiosity was growing. I guess it should be mentioned that from about the 5th or 6th grade I developed a huge fascination with chemistry that was kicked off by a "Gilbert Chemistry Set" that I got for Christmas. I was instantly hooked. (No not on dope! Hell even in the 50's they were not putting narcotics in kids chemistry sets.) I just fell in love. Maybe this was one of my first loves. Because from the 5th grade on, I just graduated to bigger and bigger chemistry sets each year, each birthday. By the time I was a Freshmen in High School, I had a fairly well equipped lab in my parents basement. My dad was convinced that I was going to study chemistry when I got older. I was convinced I was going to study chemistry when I got older. In a way that was true. But for now back to my story. By the time I got to my first year of high school, I again would think about dope/drugs again from time to time. For some reason or another, I was hooked on knowing more. I remember looking up dope/drugs in one of these household medical books that my parents had around. It was just a thick paperback book that talked about diseases and medicine. I found myself fascinated by syphilis. The story about how that bacteria worked, the long stages it would go through and the way the symptoms would go away for months or years at time in between each stage. The story of how a "cure" was found, thrilled me. There was a movie I saw as a kid, with of all actors, Edward G. Robinson called "Dr. Erlichmens Magic Bullet." It was the story of syphilis and the discovery of a cure. I guess from my prior long years of fascination with chemistry I really enjoyed reading about it. But the subject that really got me turned on was drugs. There on the brown edge pages of that 1960 medical book, I was first acquainted with the words Cocaine, Heroin, Morphine, Barbiturates and Marijuana. The descriptions were brief and didn't amount to much, but they were fascinating none the less. Till the day I die, I remember reading, "At first Cocaine will make a person feel energized and euphoric. The person will feel like Superman! But after a while the user becomes plagued by ever more increasing moments of nervousness, paranoia and depression." Just reading that, would play over and over in my head. The there were the descriptions of Heroin. These were even more fascinating. How it would make a user feel the first few times he tried it. How addiction would set in after about 3 or 4 weeks of daily usage. All these words were being imprinted indelibly on my brain. There was even a brief discussion about marijuana, which the book was correct in saying was not physically addicting. Even pot fascinated me. And all this was long before the "60's" explosion would hit. I just had to know more. In my spare time, I went to the public library in my neighborhood and in my high school and dug out whatever books I could find on drugs. I didn't find any 1st person accounts of addiction. Mostly all I would find were "medical type books" that went into a bit more detail than the one my parents had at home. I became more and more fascinated with drugs as the pressures of early adolescents and school work started hitting me. If I didn't have music and basketball I would probably have gotten into them sooner. Copyright Gizmo 2001