We’d All Just Be High.
To my knowledge, Gregg had two friends, both of whom were drug dealers.
Steve was a rail-thin wrinkly guy who looked like he’d been dragged out from behind a dumpster. He had filthy blond hair, two rows of top teeth and very few teeth on the bottom of his mouth. Steve occasionally showed up at my apartment with marijuana and sat there for hours while we passed joints around.
Steve’s brain appeared to have rotted from all the drugs. He had nothing interesting to say, ever, and he provided nothing – other than the marijuana – to add to my day. Steve laughed at things that weren’t even there. He did not take a hint when I wanted him to leave my house. He’d drink the last beer, then sit there saying nothing, smoking cigarettes and staring into space, too high to move.
“I’ve got to get more beer,” I’d say, but nothing would happen. Nobody would leave. And I wasn’t leaving Gregg and Steve alone in my apartment. Nor would I send Gregg and sit with Steve. We’d all just be high. We did nothing. Eventually Steve would roll another joint and we’d sink further into the muck.
I wanted Steve to leave and never come back. I think Gregg begged Steve for pot – but Gregg likely owed Steve a whole bunch of money. Steve’s awful presence was Gregg’s way of providing the marijuana for some of our evenings.
Pot was good for a hangover, but as an evening of entertainment I found it more than slightly lacking. And now that I was drinking and doing LSD, I didn’t need it.
And the LSD was newly awesome, which is how Gregg’s other “friend” emerged. Al lived in an attic room in his parents’ house and had a consistent supply of LSD available.
Al often traveled with us during our all-night walks in the woods, laughing when I bumped into a big rock, or demanding I keep moving, even after a raccoon came screaming down the trunk of a tree, whooping and screeching and making such a fuss that I was unable to take another step forward.
The three of us walked hundreds of miles, tripping our brains out, consuming the night as though it were a giant bowl of pudding. We’d start in the suburbs and walk miles into the city on park trails, feeling like warriors and explorers and creatures of the night.
On cold nights, we’d sometimes trip inside Al’s attic and listen to Frank Zappa until I thought my head would explode. I’d run down the dark stairs and out into the streets of Wilkinsburg, Al’s neighborhood, where I thought I was safer than I’d been in the attic.
One night I did LSD and watched Platoon, which was a bit too realistic for my state of mind. I left Al’s house convinced that I was actually being hunted. Every noise sounded like a gun shot, every random shout a war cry. In the middle of the night, I raced down the sidewalks, sidling up to houses, diving behind bushes, crawling on my stomach on the sidewalk, terrified the whole way home that I was going to be shot. I wholly believed that I was being chased by fictional soldiers.
I didn’t even realize at the time that Wilkinsburg has one of the highest crime rates in the country, with violent gun crimes always on the rise.
I didn’t particularly like Al or Steve. And I remember thinking that Gregg needed some new friends.
It never occurred to me that they were the only people I knew, too.