From: Gizmo (pez@manhattan.com) Subject: The Adventures Of Smacks Past, ASP48-Yet Another 1967 OD Story And Other Cool Stuff Newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard Date: 2001-06-22 14:24:15 PST THE ADVENTURES OF SMACKS PAST, ASP48 YET ANOTHER 1967 OD STORY AND OTHER COOL STUFF _________________________________________________ Most junkies experience an overdose. Sometimes several of them. I never did. At least not personally. At least not that I know of. And for sure not the kind that required that someone either revive me or call 911. I think I came close. But I was always careful. I always knew the potential for fluctuations in the quality of street smack and I had a little formula that I used just about every time. It was this: Once I got a shot ready and hit the vein, I would send only a few drops in and wait a few seconds. If the dope was dope I knew that I should feel something. If there was almost no sensation, it was garbage. If it was of good quality, I should feel something stronger. As soon as I felt a bit of anything, I would wait another ten seconds or so to see if it was intensifying and only then start sending more in. By the time I injected * of the shot I had a more intimate knowledge of the strength and purity of what I was shooting. After that the rest of the shot was routine. And this worked almost every time. The closest I personally came to an actual overdose was, after being clean for a good while, getting my hands on some real "China White." I was turned onto it through my old pot connections. These guys were not heroin addicts at all. In fact they would hardly even qualify for being occasional users. But from time to time, thanks to whatever high level marijuana connections they had, they would get their hands on some amazingly pure Cocaine and Heroin. The dope was from Thailand or China and the coke was direct from Columbia. This was 1973/74. The quality of street dope in NYC around 1971/72 through 1979 was the worst it had been in years. This is the time period when Governor Nelson Rockefeller instituted one of New York's most draconian set of drug laws, making possession of even a gram of marijuana a felony. Actually that was not too weird, nor was that the worst of it, but along with the new laws they created one of the first large scale and now familiar mandatory minimum sentencing protocols. Plea bargaining got tossed out the window unless you TSE. Another Mac Wopper was they even created a legal environment that allowed anyone to turn in a drug user, drug dealer, junkie, friend, someone you hated etc., just by calling law enforcement! Parents were turning in their kids. Spouses turned in each other etc. The cops could act on the informant's tip and raid your crib and force you into the "Rockefeller Program," a mandatory 18 month rehab in a converted upstate NY prison. You could consider this a dress rehearsal for what everyone has now become a national set of legal parameters. I wrote about some of this in adventure #30 entitled "The Great Panic Of 1972. In that year the quality of street dope dropped like a rock from an average good bag being between 5 and 20 percent pure, to under 2%. White dope in NY vanished. Where did it go? Back to China? I'm not sure if anyone really knows. The most reliable information that I was able to glean was that a large part of the existing Italian Mafia did not want to directly handle it anymore. The new laws were much harder to beat and negotiations dragged on over the next five or so years to see how they could still control their imports, processing plants and trade routes without getting their hands dirty. Meanwhile other newer entreprenurial types started creating their own pipelines that relied on weaker, but easier to get brown Mexican and Golden Triangle stuff. Whatever the reason, that's what we got. Weak brown shit. Basically it was Mexican No. 1 or No. 2 heroin, dried out, ground down and than cut with a bunch of white procaine, lidocaine, milk sugar etc. that gave it this speckled salt and pepper look. It burned your veins going in and burned your asshole when the poor excuse for a chemical rush hit you. The problem was that there was not nearly enough "pepper" in it. Horrible stuff. Genuine shit. A lot of junkies quit, got on Methadone, whatever. I got clean and stayed clean for a couple/three years. However one afternoon when my pot connect called me and said, "come on overŠ.there's a new shipment of Columbian Gold ready and a special surprise, I was in my car and over his pad in a flash. This time he had a gram of 80% pure smack from Thailand. And to mix with it, he had some super Kerosine/Gasoline/Gasahol/Turbo charged rock from Bogotá. I knew these guys were well connected. Fuck, they would get 50 lb. To 200 lb. shipments of primo Gold or Red Columbian herb every couple of weeks or so. But that's another story, right? This was about the little special perks that came with being a high level marijuana dealer. So I get to sample the goods. No hypos. Was not allowed. But he mixed me up a bit of both powders and we both took a one on one. In a minute or two, I felt all of the best Cocaine and Heroin highs I ever felt again. And all this from a tiny one on one sniff. I laid down on the rug, took a hit of a joint of some primo Thai sticks and went into never never land for the next three or four hours. This was my re-entry back into doing dope again. At around 7 P.M. I started coming around and asked him to give me some to take home. He was reluctant, but finally he put a half a match head into a small piece of white paper and gave it to me. I didn't tell him, but I was anxious to jack it. I had to wait until the next night, because I was way too fucking high to do anymore that night. So the next night I got ready shoot it. This I did and probably came about as close as I ever did to a real overdose. I may have written about this in another adventure, but basically I retreived an old spike set I had stashed away years ago, (is that a dopefiend move or what?) threw the dope into the cooker. Put water on it and before I could even think of cooking it up, it instantly dissolved. Using the above mentioned, cautious method I squeezed a drop or two into my bloodstream and waited. Nothing! Sent in another drop or two and waited again. Hmmm, still nothing. I started to think he just did not give me enough and that whatever I sniffed at his house the night before must have been more than he gave me to take with me. I started thinking, "maybe it's not as strong as I thought it was." So coming upon this scientific fact, I finally sent the rest of it in. I put the gimmicks away and started watching TV. And the next thing I remember was waking up out of a dead nod at 6 A.M in the morning, stoned out of my fucking mind, with nothing but static and snow on the TV screen. I even missed the flag, damn! I thought, "fuck, wow, whoa. I didn't even feel that hit me. What a blast." I heard that uncut dope has no rush and since I only sniffed it the night before, it seemed true enough. Later experiences with stuff this pure proved that to be more or less correct. The rush is more from the chemical cuts than it is from the dope. And that was as close I ever came to actually buying the farm from an overdose. But was that an overdose even? Perhaps it was. You decide. My man never did get or give me anymore China White, but a month or so later, his partner called me to tell me he had some Ricko Rocko! I couldn't tell from the phone conversation if he meant Coke or Dope, but I figured I needed to get the fuck over there and find out. It was uncut Mexican or Chinese Rock as it was called. Very nice quality stuff. Again, no doubt it was probably a No. 1 or No. 2 grade dope, but uncut and therefore primo shit. A gram or so of this stuff, which I was able to buy from him two or three times and I was hooked again. More bad times were a comin. But on to the main story line. The main story involved one of my friends and it happened seven years earlier in 1967. So where back to the fabulous psychedelic sixties right? Yeeeaaaahhhhh, kind of. Me and most of my friends that year and the year before had already done the psychedelic thing, having sampled LSD a number of times before it was made illegal in 1967. But we had all began using more and more heroin through the mid to late 60's and this night was no exception. And even though this story is about a heroin overdose, LSD does actually play a part in the story. From the mid 60's through 1970 I had 3 main friends, or running buddies who I hung with, got high with and two of whom I was playing music with as well. We had a locally very successful band we were playing with from as far back as 1965. I guess we were like minor rock stars. It all fit, by god. Of so we liked to tell ourselves anyway. And even though we were all doing more and more dope and getting hooked, there was still something pretty magical in all our antics. I don't know if I can even convey what it was like. But if you've read any of my adventures from this time period you probably got the flavor of it. Well picture this: Four guys. The 60's with all the explosion of drug shit that hit the nation like a 1,000 megaton bomb. Tim Leary. The Beatles, Dylan, William Burroughs, Haight Ashbury & Berkeley California. Charlie Manson, The Vietnam War, the Race Riots, Woman's Liberation, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, landing on the Moon! A lot was happening. And in the Northeast Bronx were we were, it was just as intense. There were so many teenagers, over a 1000 of us, in a ten square block radius on these suburban Archie Bunker style streets and houses. And there was JUNK. Still kind of clandestine. Still sort of hush hush. This was capital D O P E. The big H. The White Horse. Babania. It was interesting, to understate it a bit. And we thought we were so cool having progressed from early experimenting, than copping locally to finally "hittin the big time" by going down into the real dope neighborhoods of the South Bronx and Harlem. Oh yeah, we were so cool. Bunches of white kids, driving or taking a train down to Fox Street, Home Street, Cypress Avenue and 138th Street to cop some product. It felt like we were on a mission each time we did it. Some mission! Did we have overactive imaginations or what? Or what? It was fun. So on this one night all four of us drive down to see one of my friends high school pals named Ron. Ron and his brother Keith both went to the same high school as my friend Larry. And Larry had been getting some amazingly good heroin through them for about a year or so now. Ron and his brother Keith both lived right near 145th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. We loved going down and meeting them there. We were all white kids and this was an all black neighborhood. Some of our less experienced or straight friends thought we were fucking crazy to be taking a subway train down there, but the bottom line was that almost none of us ever had any problems with being stuck up or hassled at all. Well we had already called and put in our order and as usual Ron met us on the corner of 144th & Lenox. First we get him in the car, pay him and look over the nice fat $2.00 deuce bags. Next it's like it always is with Ron. It's old home week again. There's none of the vibes that most of you probably go through with most scores nowadays. It's almost like nothing illegal took place. We're joking and laughing and slapping each other on the back, the five of us now stuffed into mothers old Ford Tempo. Even the straight black folks from the neighborhood have seen us before, know what's going down and rarely give us any grief. Maybe they think it's a good thing; Crackers comin to Harlem and buying dope from one of their brothers. Remember this was years before the open air drug supermarket atmosphere that's common in all the big cities dope spots today. Things back then were still quiet. Mostly deals were done in someone's apartment or house. Nothing outlandish done on the streets. No hawkers, no touters, no lookouts, no "Five O," no "Aqua" etc. Even getting busted could be a civil affair. NYC cops still carried 38 revolvers and even the "bad guys" still carried 32's or 38 snub nose pistols. No Glocks, No Mac 10s, No Oozies. Different time, different scene. Only the dope and it's inherent heaven and hell remained more or less the same. Now I should mention here that before we all got into the usual jive talk BS that we typically did when one or more of us met up with Ron, I asked the usual, "Hey Ron, how's the shit man?" Ron tells us that it's exceptionally good today. He also adds that we should be very careful with it. (Does a dope dealer ever say, "hey man...this shit sucks?") Well the stuff from Ron has always been good, and sometimes awesome. He used to tell us that his brother knew the big dealer and because him and his brother went to school with Larry, we were always getting better stuff than what was put out on the street. Based on what I had experienced with his dope, I believed it. So I also believed it when he said it was extra good that day and that we should be careful. So we head on back up to Dennis's parents house in Yonkers NY. Even this was part of our ritual. There was a stupid vague comfort in the knowledge that we were going to take our dope back home to the seeming security and luxury of a nice house in a Westchester Suburb. We talked amongst each other about this from time to time, so I know it was not just me who had this sense. It was like, "yeah, sure we were going into the slums, the badlands, the ghetto. Sure we were. But once we copped our shit, we were out of there. We were going back to the safety of our parents middle class world." So it gave us something that made us feel safer than we had any right to feel. Cause years later, we were as fucked over by heroin as anyone. Dope is an equal opportunity fucker. It fucks the lives of rich and poor alike. No discrimination there. But at the time it was sure nice to dream. So we get back to Dennis's parent's crib cause he tells us they're out until about midnight or so. Pulling into the driveway, we're all ready for our ritual. And it was more ritualistic back then. You have to remember that back then nobody worried about things like AIDS. We used a spike which was just a #25 or #26 stainless steel needle that was fitted onto a standard eyedropper by means of a thin strip of a dollar bill which acted like a collar to hold it onto the dropper. And as I relayed back in adventure #25 you used the rubber band to rope over the top of a baby pacifier instead of the little black bulb that came with eyedroppers. Then you were good to go. Sometimes it was necessary for 2 or more user to share one rig. Sharing needles! AIDS or no AIDS, we were fuckin idiots. But usually we our own. We all had our own set that night. I'm sure one of us put Hendrix on Dennis's mother's stereo console. I went into the hallway bathroom and took off. I could usually do two of Ron's bags and get very stoned, but because of his warning I only put one of them in. I also did my usual cautious slow injection and good thing too! Because I could not finish the entire shot!! I had to pull it out when I had gotten only a little more than half of it squeezed in. It was that fucking good. I came out and told everyone else to be careful. Reggie went in next and when he came out he echoed and slurred out the same warning. The one friend of ours that we were a little worried about that night was David. David was a great guy. Very smart, A+++ student and had been accepted to every college he applied to. But he was very hung up on this one chick. She looked very much like Michelle Phillips of the Mama's & The Papa's, so we understood why. He was crazy about her. David had been through the ringer with her and was shooting more dope than normal because of it. Plus he kind of had that sense that life was not worth much anyway. Well me and Reggie double warned him. Specifically we said, "David, do not try to do more than one bag at first, okay?" Okay. Well he goes into the bathroom and we're all sitting in the living room nodding out, when one of us noticed that David had not yet come out. We wondered and then concluded that it must have been more than 15 minutes. Almost immediately we head to the bathroom door and start calling his name. Louder and louder. No answer. Then we start banging on the door. In a minute of two, Reggie, who's parents owned this house started to freak. Now we're all beating on the door and yelling his name with all our strength. Fuck! All I could think of was what happened to me with Glenda earlier that year at my mom's house. Well with panic taking hold in earnest and the prospect of another parental intervention, Reggie and the rest of us started undoing the hinges on the door. In two minutes we had them off and we pushed the fucking door open. Surprise, surprise. There's David slumped onto the floor, the spike still in his arm, blood dripping all over his forearm, his clothes, the tile floor and YUP...the green shit coming out of his mouth. Just like happened with Glenda, we started slapping him, lifting him, putting ice under his balls, throwing ice cold water on his head and yelling at him. But it did not look like he was breathing. As though all this was not weird enough, one of us noticed the cooker that had fallen down on the floor. And one of noticed how many two dollar bags were opened and poured into that cooker. None of us could believe it, but there were FOUR ripped open bags on that floor! Now we were really freaked. Both me and Reggie told David and our other friend Larry not to try to do any more than one bag and even that might be too much. So it was quite clear that David was out to kill himself. Gee thanks fuckhead. What a friend. Fuck, if he's going to OD, at least do it alone somewhere. Now what? Now what? You guessed it...more panic. We quickly cleaned the floor up and flushed the rest of the shit that he had down the drain. We were about to decide what to do next, when...YUP....you guessed it again.....Reggie's parents come through the front door. Now picture the scene. David passed out, probably dying on the floor. The bathroom door hinges removed and the door pushed open and hanging up against the wall. Nice décor. We go through the usual confrontation with Dennis's folks. "What the fuck is going on here? What have you done? Is that David? What's wrong with him? Reggie, you son of a bitch....have you been getting high again?" Etc., etc., etc. Immediately Reggie's father runs to the phone and calls 911. What do we do know? Panic even more of course. As nonchalantly as we can, we try to answer Reggie's folk's questions, while at the same time continue to look for telltale evidence of what we were doing thirty minutes ago. Reggie's mother is in the bathroom trying to give David mouth to mouth and screaming in anger and disgust over what they just walked into. I'm betwixed and between. "Should I get rid of the other 3 bags of smack I have? No firkin way, I'll just stash them for awhile. No that's no good, what if they are found? What if they are not found, but I can't retrieve them later? Cause after this shit, I figured I would not be welcome to ever come over to Reggie's house again. Besides, if I tell Reggie to retrieve them, I'll probably never get them. No doubt, he'll give me a line of shit about not being able to find them, while nodding out over the phone telling me about it!" Nope, I took my chances and just shoved them down my balls. It seems that Larry thought the same thing, cause I did not notice him trying to ditch anything. Every chance we had, when Reggie's mom was not in the bathroom, we tried to go through David's pockets to make sure he did not have anything else one him. It looked okay. We had flushed his cooker, spike and opened bags down the toilet bowl. We bought a total of a "half a load." Fifteen two dollar bags. We all got four each except for Larry who bought three. So we figured all bags were accounted for. David tried to shoot all four of his. So we're pretty sure he does not have any dope left. Unless he had some from some other day? No way we figured and we were right. You have to remember that back then, things were different. Today, you call 911 and when the Paramedics show up along with the Police, everyone is going to get searched and if found with anything, busted. But back then that was not certain at all. The 4th amendment still had more meat on the bone. So we all tried to play it cool and in a moment the ambulance shows up, followed shortly by the cops. They got there in less than 4 minutes. We were figuring David was done for, but Reggie's mom said he was breathing, however faintly. Well the Para meds came in and got oxygen going for him and after hooking up an IV, asking us some questions which we fumbled through, they rushed him to the hospital. The cops asked lots and lots of questions. But none of us were searched and none of us got busted. In the interest's of a chance to save David's life, we did tell the Para meds and the cops that we thought he had taken some narcotics. Of course we also tried to front off that we never did anything like that and were as shocked as ever to find him locked in the bathroom. Yeah right. I'm sure we looked real convincing and straight. Well the night was over. We sat down with Reggie, Reggie's parents and our other friend Larry and went through the 3rd through 20th degree. I think we finally told his parents the same story we told the cops and Para meds. We told them that we were only smoking weed, but that David was doing harder drugs. I'm sure they did not believe it for a NY minute, but it ended the night thank god. Once or twice Reggie's mom tried to call over to Yonkers General Hospital to see if she could find anything out. It was too soon and we went out and me and Larry got into our cars and headed back home. What a fucking night. What happened to David? David lived. We found out later that night. Reggie called and told me they brought him around, but that there was other trouble. "Oh no," I said to myself. "What fucking now?" It turned out that David was found with 50 hits of LSD in his wallet!! Apparently he had been selling it. The police were called back to the hospital and he was charged with possession of a hallucinogen. The damn fucking thing about this, was that LSD had just been made illegal. A few months earlier and it would have to be tossed out of court. But he took a bust for this. I think it was a Misdemeanor and he did get probation. But it was the beginning of all of us starting to have trouble with the law. Actually I had already had one or two minor busts. One got tossed for illegal search and seizure and the other a conditional discharge. But it was a new milestone. From here on out, things were going to get uglier and uglier and uglier and sometimes brighter. So much for our stupid false sense of security and privilege of living in "the burbs." Copyright Gizmo 2001