What My Mother Never Knew #22: A Walk on the Wild Side

It's hard to say when things shifted from being really crazy to really bad. Maybe they always were. The thing is, I was getting closer and closer to the razor's edge that separates risk taking from self-destruction.

I woke up one morning with a wet spot on my pillow. Somehow, I decided that my Himalayan cat had puked near my face. It was clear and smelled mildly of fermentation.... yet rather than admit to myself that I'd vomited in my sleep, so intoxicated the previous night that I could easily have asphyxiated, I adopted the explanation that it had been my cat. Years later, the truth came to me suddenly, like a Newtonian discovery: I had actually lied to myself and totally believed it!

There were other questionable uses of my brain. One night we were out and about for a street festival downtown. My friend dragged me over to a small grove of trees and introduced me to someone she used to know. The girl was a few years older than us, maybe 17 or so and had obviously not been raised in the middle class neighbourhoods we came from. She pulled from her dirty jean pocket a small packet of white powder that she was trying to sell. "Coke?", I asked, getting a feeling of panic and exhilaration at the possibility of trying cocaine for the first time.
"No", she said. "It's exactly like coke though, just a man-made version, synthetic cocaine. Only 10 bucks will get you guys high all night". And so it did.

We ended up at a party in a ritzy neighbourhood and before I knew what I was up to I had stripped down to my bra and panties and jumped in the outdoor pool. I think that although we technically were crashing the party, they let us stay just for the amusement. By the end of the night, the booze I'd consumed negated any euphoria induced by the mystery powder. I guess it didn't put me into the hospital or anything but it just seems so asinine looking back - taking something unknown from someone unknown, without pausing to think about the risk.

Another day, we ended up hanging with a guy we'd met downtown and he invited us up to his apartment to smoke some dope. He was wiry and depleted, like someone who'd just been released from a concentration camp. When we got to his 'apartment', we found it to be a single room in the "Royal Hotel", which was really a cockroach infested dive providing only the bare necessities for the most destitute. We walked through the dark hallways with Marcel and up three flights of squeaking stairs to a 5 X 7 room, with a hot plate and bar fridge, take out containers on every surface and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and old socks.

We played it pretty cool since he was the one buying the dope but I'd never seen anything so sad. We should have been buying the drugs if this was all he could afford. Sitting there passing a hash pipe around, I looked out the two foot square window down into a small courtyard. It wasn't open for residents but since the four sides of the building encased the small open space, you could look out and see windows of other tenants. Most curtains were drawn or apartments empty but a movement caught my eye. An older woman lying in her bed looked right at me, an oustretched hand reaching, asking for help. I thought I heard her moan. My new friend Marcel shut the curtains, said that the woman was crazy and redirected us to the process of ordering Chinese food. By this point we all had the munchies pretty bad, despite the somewhat nauseating surroundings.

We ate, I gave him a massage and Lori cleaned up his room and washed the table off. It was the first of July and we planned on heading down to the park where the Canada Day fireworks were to take place. But before going, Marcel explained that he was diabetic and needed some insulin. He leaned out the window, slightly out of view and injected himself. We let him relax for a bit and then headed down to the park. I'd agreed to take Marcel's syringes of insulin in my purse, under strict instructions to only give him a needle every two hours. Any more than that and he would run out too soon, he explained.

Navigating the crowds to a spot on the grass, we waited for the show and smoked a bit of weed. I suddenly wondered if my mom and brother had come down too and decided to try to keep a low profile. Before we knew it, the show was over and we left to find a beach where there was supposed to be a party happening.

Marcel asked for a syringe. Only an hour had passed since his last one and I pointed that out. He pressed for it again, and, trying to be helpful, I said "No way - I'm not going to be responsible for any diabetic seizures tonight." He grabbed my wrist hard and with an icy tone, through clenched teeth, he whispered loudly "It's not insulin... Give it to me now." I immediately handed him all of his syringes and breathed a sigh of relief as he moved to some bushes to shoot up. The battery-acid taste of fear stayed in my throat for an hour though. I'd never seen anyone with that violent look in their eyes before, especially directed at me. Lori and I decided to boot it out of there and let our junkie friend find his own way.

That night, I feel like I slipped one or two notches down the innocence scale, as if I were clinging to one of those greased poles at the country fair. And I also had a startling glimpse of what lay waiting at the bottom: filth, degradation and despair. The people I'd met that night were like empty shells, souls left behind in some bus station locker somewhere. Well, I certainly wasn't like them - was I?