TWEEKERLAND – Meth Speed Bumps

Skating on Thin Ice

This story is going somewhere. This story is convoluted, this story is twisted, and this story is, in many ways, a story about more than one person.

The problem, though, is that the story is only about me, so that makes the above statement a bit confusing.  For anyone who is an addict, my guess is that the confusion is less “Dramatic.”

So, skating along past the days of naive encounters with sick men and into high school, I got introduced into a new “Village of Subcultures” that we called “Logan.” That was the name of my school, and it was in a S.F. Bay Area City, in a district known as “Decoto.”  This was the same school that my genius brother graduated from; it was also where I learned how to use drugs.  The difference between my brother and I is that as adolescents, we obviously viewed achievement in very different ways.

He saw Achievement as something that occurred over time, that required work and dedication, and something that would last into his future.

I saw Achievement as the ability to get my immediate “Needs” met by any means necessary, and didn’t concern myself with the future. 

Getting my immediate needs met required work too – but the kind of work I did and the kind of work he did were based on very different “Rules of Conduct.”

As an addict in recovery, I can look back and see that I have never considered “The Rules” as an “Absolute,” nor as a set of guidelines that applied to me (Except when it was convenient, of course.)  “The Rules,”  quite honestly, were an obstacle a good deal of the time as far as I was concerned – So I became a very different person once I got some “Goals” in my life.

The most important goal, of course, was to fit in with a particular group of people, and the means to that end was to do what they were doing. Drugs. It started with buying joints – you could buy a joint for a dollar – you could buy a great joint for three dollars.

You could buy a “Four finger Lid” for ten dollars. Nobody weighed pot back then. Nobody weighed meth - we bought it by the teaspoon – or “Half tea,” or Quarter Tea.”

Until this very moment, I totally forgot about the “Quarter Tea” of Crank. There were no Ziplock bags. You got your crank in a bindle, or in foil. Usually coke came in a bindle made from this paper called “Sno-Folds” or something like that, and it had a picture of a snowflake on it. Otherwise it was in a square piece of shiny magazine paper – but you didn’t really see that until almost 1980. In the 70’s, Head Shops were everywhere, you could buy pipes, bongs, straws, “Concert Kits,” and whatever else you needed. You could get most of that stuff at the Record Store. Papers were yellow - joints were yellow a lot of the time. Or Strawberry pink. Or rolled with a paper that looked like a hundred dollar bill.

Crank was oily  and it melted really easy, so you got that in foil, and sometimes tied in the corner of a baggie tied so tight that only a tweaker could untie it. Crank and crosstops came in the corner of a lunch bag… Hash was ALWAYS wrapped in a little cube of foil.

Acid came in sheets, or “Barrels,” or on sugar cubes, or as “Windowpane.” Sometimes people put windowpane in their eye. This one idiot put blotter acid (Paper soaked in LSD) in his eye to impress us.

We used to steal that guy’s car a lot. He was always there when we came back. He robbed a Donut Shop with a Fork one time.

“A Quarter Tea.” 1976. That was 33 years ago. That’s when I first saw a quarter tea of meth. That’s also when I stopped going to school, started fighting, started getting arrested, and when the rules stopped applying to me.