One evening I stole a velvet painting of wild horses from a Chicago coke dealer. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll know that I’m generally not a criminal. I can see however, by how my writing tends to meander, that you might think I have a cocaine problem.
That’s also not true. I’ve never touched the stuff. Raised on the fictional Bolivian marching powder shenanigans of Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney characters, I always wanted to sample it of course. But, a family member, in their best child-rearing moment, once told me how she tried to stab her best friend hopped up on LSD, and that’s all it took to keep me away from a life of hard drugs.
But, three in the morning, soaked in Makers Mark and Coca-Cola, as I often was back in the mid 2000s, watching my friends binge lines at parties, I was resentful that I was not having that kind of fun. I remember one night we ended up at a dealer’s house. At one point the dealer looked up, snow clinging like a tiny snot-cicle from his left nostril, asked me if I was sure I didn’t want a taste. I shook my head. “Pussy!”, he coughed, and went back to hunching over the back of a Dave Matthews CD, hoovering up powder with a grungy dollar bill.