Coke adds strife

Way back when I was just an innocent little lamb, I had a very sweet boyfriend we'll call Chico. I'd met Chico in the midst of a one-weekend stand with his roommate Bobby. I'd had my eye on Bobby for a while—he was the closest thing I'd seen to Stiv Bators and, yes, I considered that a very good thing indeed. I went home with Bobby, and we walked in on this foxy brown-eyed guy with a shaved head jabbing a hideous tattoo of the Grim Reaper into his calf using a safety pin and a bottle of ink. I was smitten.

After my weekend of debauchery with Bobby was over, I made it a point to look around for Chico anytime I went out. One Saturday night I found him. We fell in punk-rock love and ended up living together for a couple years. One of Chico's major shortcomings was that he was AWOL from the Navy, and thus he couldn't hold a legitimate job because paperwork meant getting nabbed and tossed in the brig. Of course I didn't want that to happen, but I was supporting both of us by delivering auto parts to gas stations! I wasn't exactly in a position to be anyone's sugar mama, so I pressured him to find alternate means of employment.

Whereas I'd figured he would do something like mow lawns or wait tables, Chico had other plans. A friend of his mom's gave him a bunch—and I mean a bunch—of cocaine to sell. No strings attached—he could pay him back whenever he sold it. Chico was very excited about his new career as a big-time drug dealer. We celebrated by doing a couple lines; then a few dozen more. His first order of business was to borrow some cash off me to buy a scale and some little baggies. We showed restraint the first couple days, but we didn't really know anyone who did coke (besides his mom, her friend, and now us), so building a client base proved problematic.

It was nice having cocaine around the house. I'd come home from work, and instead of dinner on the table, there'd be a couple lines. But one day I came home, and there weren't any lines. He'd done the rest while I was at work. I was furious! I ranted, I raved, I may have even thrown something. He sat on the sofa and looked doleful. I wondered if he was pulling the sad face because I was pissed or because we were outta coke. I suspected the latter. Halfway through my tantrum, I realized that I was screaming at someone I loved because he hadn't saved me any coke. Suddenly I felt like a bad after-school special.

Flash ahead a couple bazillion years. My current boyfriend grew up in a bumfuck town in the middle of nowhere, so until he moved here, his exposure to drugs had been limited to the occasional homegrown joint. Me, I grew up next door to the biggest city in the world, so I've seen 'em all and tried most. I'm (mostly) over them. He's (mostly) not. So when I went to meet up with him a couple weeks ago, and he told me he wanted to go to the scuzzy after-hours club down the street and do coke instead of coming home and doing me, I was bummed. Let me make it clear that I'm not moralistic about drugs; I think they should be legal and available to any adult who wants to use them. But I also feel that if you're gonna do drugs, they should at least be good drugs—not the gasoline-flavored baby laxative that this joint attempts to pass off as blow.

Calling into play some utterly illogical logic, I told him that I was going to make him see firsthand how irritating it was to be around someone on coke by doing it with him! If you have any experience with this drug at all, I'm sure you can see how ludicrous this idea was. First of all, if you're high, you don't get annoyed by other cokeheads; you're too busy waiting for your turn to talk. Second—well, there is no second. It was a stupid move on my part. Then last week a friend rolled into town and offered me more. We ran into my man. He got cranky that I hadn't saved any for him. I saw a rerun of my after-school special, and boy, does it suck.

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