Buying the High, Selling for More, Leaving it...

Buying the High, Selling for More, Leaving it...(L DOUGLAS ST OURS) BUYING THE HIGH, SELLING FOR MORE, LEAVING IT THERE


Evan knew where he was going.
And no wonder, he was two years older than me and he had the connections,
I eagerly tagged along.


We drove 150 miles north to a gray industrial city
he moved from more recently than me.

Evan took my five spot, got out of his dad's car, then walked into a garage.
I remained at shotgun as I watched Evan dicker with a Bermuda short guy dealer
ensconced in the clutter of garden tools and garbage cans. Concealing our purchase, he got in the car and we hit the road.

He tossed me my nickel bag...how cool...it looked like pipe tobacco.

Evan steering the wheel carefully obeying all traffic laws
"you know what we scored?"
"Yeah man about a half pound of sweet as ass grass!"
"No, you butt ream...you're holding five years in the state pen!"
No sixteen year old wants to deal with that bummer...so when I got home
I stashed the weed in a sock and then still fearing discovery
I taped the sock to the bottom of my lowest chest drawer.
I mean shit I was still sharing the bedroom with my younger brother.

There was a sense of safety in the fact that no one in that local yokel high school
knew what it was or how to cop it, including me, until Evan came around.
Precious as gold we smoked it sparingly...harsh on the throat
but the easy laughter rolled on and on in a river divine. We once unwrapped it
in front of a couple of clueless girls who speculated that
we were too cheap to buy brand name cigarettes.

As my confidence and swagger blossomed I even turned a profit selling my leftovers
to track and field stars behind the gymnasium...by then I had progressed from grass to hash.
Little cubes of hashish offered an enhanced high...instead of smoking it wrapped in paper
you inhaled it through the tin foiled bowl of a stunted pipe....passing it around and around...giggling...and me coughing the hot brick out of the pipe...hysterical laughing till my belly ached watching the other heads burning their fingers desperately trying to pick up and save the magic cute for another bang and rush.

At eighteen I graduated to acid...purple haze pills...drops of orange rush...and mellow yellow dots on plain white paper that all you had to do was lick to make everything in the universe zig and pulse and fade and glow in richly rewarding repeating replicating entertaining madding visions...a single paddled ping pong ball slowed to a meandering queue of one hundred balls exploding into your face...hallucinations cloned a thousand fold coming to life as meteors streaking across rainbow ceilings as I walked across the room...to crash in a chair...and then turned and followed the rest of me making it across the floor to join all that was left of me swaying to the peacock beat in that musical magical chair...and best of all it was odorless and impossible for a drug dog to sniff...we never got busted...even when we started peddling the stuff to hitchhikers...because for all their tricks and disguises narcs never thumbed...I would use half then selling half for what I paid for the whole.

First year of college I met Seth where our focus of study was on the highs...we enhanced our acid experiences by ambitiously knotting nearly 100 plastic bags and hung the scraggly thread to the ceiling light fixture in his dorm room...after dropping the LSD we lit the tail of the bags to the music of the Beatles White album...turned off the lights and meditated as the plastic snake flared, melted dripped and strobed psychedelic sounding like a zilch into a waste basket which of course caught fire in the days before smoke detectors were invented...never a bum voyage in a miasma of happy trails.

But through it all drugs were nothing more than recreation...a fun way to get your head on a crazy roller coaster with thrilling dips, amazing twists, sudden blurs, and wondrous colors and best of all the laughs...a roller coaster can only f**k up your life if while you're on it you think the ride will never end...but I never craved drugs and would consider them an ignorant and silly thing to die for...though the true freaks celebrated your trip as your first real birthday...cult devotees who saw a second chemical coming of age, a dawning to a loftier plane, a glorious new age, exalted philosophical turn off tune in drop out to Eastern mysticism merger of third eye seances...gurus and swamis...shining enlightenment...and man these cats were taking this shit too seriously.

All told my indulgences amounted to some good times from delightful encounters through hilarious episodes that in no way altered my consciousness which was probably why it was so easy for me to walk away cold turkey by the time I turned twenty...like a kid does when he grows out of his toys.

by L Douglas St. Ours
October 2011