WHAT PEOPLE WHO WERE NEVER ADDICTED DON’T UNDERSTAND. You did not do this shit for pleasure. You did it for relief. (Plus the voices. Did you mention them? How you’d miss them when they were not around?) But when it was working and you felt good and you flipped through the days like a two-legged defibrillating heart in constant love—when that shit was going on, it was…it was…it was…it was…
Shoot enough and the world whooshed to quiet, and you were content just to sit, maybe drool a little, calm as a hyperactive toddler after his first lick of a Ritalin lollipop. When that happened, you never thought: “I am only this optimistic and one-with-the-cosmos because I’m on amphetamines.” When a drug works, you don’t feel like you’re on a drug. You’re just focused and vaguely orgasmic. Body and brain in stunning sync, running full-throttle. One cunthair from complete loss of control, but perfectperfectperfect.

WHAT A GOOD DRUG DOES. Is make you believe perfection is what you are going to feel forever. Then take it away… Throw you out of the cushioned fun-car onto a rocky shoulder. Shrink your 900-page thoughts back to garble. De-Dorian Gray your brain. Which makes you go from want to need. (“Maybe things weren’t moving fast, or maybe things were moving too fast. I don’t even remember any more. I had it made. And I woke up. One morning. I looked down. And fell off my life.” Paul Newman, WUSA. Screenplay by Robert Stone.) This is what’s making crashing so…uncomfortable. So disappointing. So—
ARE YOU STILL TALKING? Remember the fake punk in Berlin who bit off his finger?

Be honest, Sparkle-pony, how’s your life going? Really? Have you looked in the mirror lately? No, really looked. Good for you. Hold onto that magic.

(Of course you have ADHD. It’s not like there’s not a medical reason to stand in a puddle and stick your finger in a socket.) You were talking about—what was her name? Not Lurleen, now that you think of it, it was something showbiz… Dee-Lay! Dee-Lilah! Dee-Neero, maybe? One of Dee-Neero’s through-the-pantie shots ended up abscessing—giving her what she called “cauliflower vagina.” “That’s pretty good,” you said. And she said she had a degree in English, but they didn’t pay her to talk about Chaucer with her thong pulled sideways. Which—it made sense at the time—led to her splashing the customers way before the “Squirt Craze.” Which you found out about thanks to the social elixir that was quality trailer-park methamphetamine. Which—are you going to do this all fucking night? Speed never made you smarter. It just let you be what you already were longer. It turbo-charged stupid. (The weird thing about Dee, you just remembered, was that she wanted to have a stroke. “Like, if I can shut off my whole left brain, it’d be just fucking BLISS.”) Her sometime boyfriend, Donnie, who might have also been her brother, but said he was her agent, spent five hours explaining how he actually thought up the “Squirt” concept in your dealer’s doublewide; a model so spectacularly lush it had a hot tub. Donnie was one of those Valley porn guys who had gone into “lawn care.” Strictly legit. But still. Drunk, with some crank flecks in his Magnum, P.I. crumb-catcher, he’d go all misty-eyed. Sigh right at you over the tub-scum frothing his chin. You weren’t supposed to get into hot tubs on amphetamines. Guys got heart attacks. So Donnie told you. A little too enthusiastically. “Time it right, you go right to the edge, kiss a coronary on the mouth…” Then, wrapped in a beach towel, he’d pull out his wallet and unfold a yellowed issue of the long defunct L.A. Reader. (He did this more than once, pretty much nightly.) Once he unfolded and smoothed it, he’d let you see the picture of him, the cover story, young and smiling, wearing the same hair as Harry Reems, posed in a Hawaiian shirt with his arm around what may or not may not have been an underage Tahitian woman. In the photo her red nails were visible, fingers wrapped around a swirly-glassed green bottle of Squirt soda pop, pressed to her lips blowjob-style. The headline’s in BOLD LETTERS over his Reems hair: “NOT YOUR FATHER’S SQUIRT.” Under the soft drink, in smaller print, the kicker: Is it marketing if my new wife does it? Below that—and you remember, because you knew the guy whose uncle laid out the cover, a total crankaholic whose aorta was going to pop on a bus in three years—below that, in the so-small-only-speedfreaks-would-notice thought balloon
superimposed over the Belle of the South Pacific: “Would you believe it, my little Roxy can write her name on the ceiling!” (There is a world of secret messages when you’re really hitting the pep pills. Reality is a crossword puzzle you can solve in your head—until you forget what words are.)