We Wiped Up Every Speck of Cocaine.
One night, Bonnie and I went into a bar bathroom together – as we often did – and discovered a white, powdery substance lying neatly in a line.
It was on the toilet tank, as if someone had forgotten to snort it.
Bonnie and I saw it immediately; we both stared at the powder.
“Do you think it’s for us?” Bonnie asked, incredulous that something so valuable would be lying there forgotten.
“I don’t know!” I said. “Maybe?”
“Let’s just do it right now!” She looked at me for reassurance. I wanted it so bad but ….
“Wait,” I said. I was worried – not about the repercussions of doing someone else’s coke, but about the possibility of death. “What if it’s not cocaine?”
Bonnie had already pulled a dollar bill from her jeans pocket and rolled it up. She snorted half the line, and handed me the rolled-up bill.
“It’s cocaine,” she said.
I snorted the rest of the line before I’d had time to think too long.
Then, as though we were using a thousand-dollar mirror enameled in gold instead of a toilet tank, we wiped up every speck of cocaine from the back of that toilet. We used our fingers to make sure we got it all – then wiped the excess coke on our gums, as is customary, and licked our fingers.
When we were sure there wasn’t one dust speck left on that toilet tank, Bonnie and I started to walk out of the bathroom – and then remembered we’d gone in there for a different reason.
As Bonnie used the toilet she said, “Let’s act like we didn’t see anything; we don’t want someone getting mad because we did their coke.”
“They’re going to know!” I whined, paranoia from cocaine creeping in.
“They won’t know it was us,” she said, confident. Bonnie always believed she could get away with anything – and I felt better when she felt better about things. She was never afraid.
“Okay,” I said, taking my turn on the toilet. “We’ll just act like we were in here using the toilet.”
“We were in here using the toilet,” she said. “See?” She laughed at me, literally using the toilet while fretting.
And that settled it.
No one even looked at us as we ventured back into the bar. We’d gotten free cocaine from who-knows-who, and no one was the wiser.
That night, Bonnie and I wandered into the bathroom several times. We only got the one free line, but we kept checking anyway. It never happened again.
But this led to a pattern of bathroom usage that haunts me to this day.
Every time I went into a public stall from that day forward – for many years, in fact – I locked the door behind me, knelt down on one knee, and checked to see if there was any cocaine on the toilet tank.
Sometimes something would be there.
I could see, through my drunken vision, that there was a powdery substance there – sometimes in a pile, sometimes more spread out, as though someone had blown the line around on the back of the toilet.
So I would take my fingers and wipe up every tiny bit of that “powder,” licking my fingers until I was sure I ingested whatever was there – in case it was cocaine.
For years, I did this.
I am certain that what I was licking up was dust, dirt, dead skin cells, clothing fibers and whatever else might make its way onto an extremely unclean toilet tank.
But I wasn’t taking any chances on missing out on leftover cocaine remnants, just in case.