From: pez@manhattan.com (Gizmo) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past (Part 31) Rituals & Rites Date: 1996/10/25 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST (PART 31) RITUALS & RITES In the United States anyway, and probably wherever heroin and cocaine are illegal, the entire drug game often turns into one ritual after another. From the lowly street addict, to the local pusher, to the bigger distributors, the entire lifestyle is cultish and layered with slang, rituals, clandestine meetings, etc. Take the ritual of shooting up. The whole thing is so entirely fascinating, that you get hooked on the ritual as much as the effects of the dope you're using. After you purchase your dope, you can either go home and do it or you can go to a "shooting gallery." Anyone who's ever been inside a shooting gallery will never forget the experience. In New York, they were all over the places where heroin was sold. Usually one or two addicts "ran the place," in exchange for a small taste or a few bucks from each person that couldn't wait to go home and do it. In Harlem, in the 70's there was one I was in a few times on 101st Street, and Morningside Avenue. This was a classic. The place was run by a husband and wife, affectionately named "Ma & Pa," like it was some old corner candy store. The place was a second floor walk-up, dimly lit, foul smelling, sparse furniture, and poor. At any given time there might be as many as five or ten people there, shooting their shit. You walked in, and after paying your tithe to Ma or Pa, you sat down at the kitchen table and got to choose from dozens of "sets of syringes" that were sitting inside cups of water. Some of them were clogged, and needed to have a copper wire run through them to clear them out. All of them had been previously used, several times over. "Cookers," were also sitting there on the table, replete with residue from the last person to use one. You cleaned out a set, grabbed a cooker, dumped your dope in, and made the best of it. All around were people who were waiting to get off, or were already stoned. Here you got to see all the worst horrors of addiction. Here, you got to see people with scars, skin ulcers and infections. This really sucked. You also got to see people with "blown hands." For anyone who's never seen a really blown hand, it's a sight that will make you stop and think, at least for a second or two anyway. There was one guy who's hand was blown so bad, they used to call him "gorilla paw." Literally, his right hand was about 10 times the size of a normal hand. His thumb was the size of a normal size wrist! No chance of putting that sucker in his pocket! I've had "blown hands" a few times along the way. It happens when you miss the vein you're trying to hit in your hand and the dope and cut get under the skin. For some reason the hand is particularly sensitive to this and the result can be anything from a decent swelling in one area, to the entire hand blowing out, with the fingers looking like big fat cucumbers attached to a central mass of hand. It can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, or months in really severe cases, before it will get back to normal. And that's only if you don't try to get anymore hits there. The insanity of shooting drugs into the same area of your body over and over again, is pretty fucking weird. I've known folks who always took care to never hit the same area twice. They always switched from one spot to another. But the temptation to use the same spot is connected with the feeling of safety of knowing that if you've hit it over and over again, you're going to be able to hit it another time, easily. This does work, until you either collapse the vein or you end up missing the shot and get a skin ulcer. At your local neighborhood shooting gallery, you get to see it all. You get to see the folks who need help getting hits. You get to see folks who shoot up in the veins in their neck, their forehead, under their tongue, even the vein in their penis! This is no bullshit. It's a common occurrence among the people who frequent shooting galleries. Best advice on this one is, stay away. Unless you like surprises. Then there's the rituals of the local drug pusher. I have rarely ever met a dope dealer that didn't get into the ritual of doing a power trip with his stuff. It takes many forms, from not letting a buyer go short on cash, to making you wait longer then necessary. That's the one that killed me over and over again. You would call a connection and say you wanted to make a buy and the son of a bitch would make you wait. The dealer would tell you he's bagging up, or he as to re-up, or whatever bullshit he wanted to pull. Usually a real classic one would be that you're standing in front of the mother with your money. He's standing there stoned out of his mind, and he taunts you. He makes you wait, until he does some more dope himself. This is the power play, pure and simple. I knew this one "methadone" dealer, that used to get thousands of milligrams of pure meth from a hospital connection he had. You would call him and he would never answer the phone. His answering machine would come on, but everyone knew he was home all the time. He shot more meth than a dozen people I've known. After finally having got through to him, and him finally letting us into his apartment, he would sit there with a huge horse syringe, and fill it with over three or four hundred milligrams of methadone and shoot it! I couldn't believe it. He would then take a few barbiturates to "enhance his high." Shit, this guy was so fucking stoned, that when he went into a nod, he'd be gone for hours or days sometime. Also, he blew up like a balloon. I watched this 6' tall man go from weighing about 180 lbs..., to weighing over 350 lbs. Yea, you guessed it, eventually he died at the age of 35 or so, from heart failure. This was the game. This was the chase. This was the excitement. Getting your dope. Finding a place to shoot it up. Sometimes it was in the car. Sometimes a gas station bathroom. Personally, I got a kick out of going into a restaurant bathroom and fixing up. There was something neat about it. Sick, eh? You betcha. Oh well, life's a ritual. Why should the dope life be any different? Copyright Gizmo 1996