So is that in your doctorate your Mom asked, from time to time. The professor ignored her, caught up in his fantasy of adrenal gland, “Listen, when you talk about the people who came to Dr. Max’s, you’re talking about a secret history of the American Elite. Amphet-elites. Uncle Max said he had the movies to prove it. Right here. I’ve got copies. I Maltese Falconned copies.” But when the professor showed us his movies—the glamorous speed years—there is something off. It takes a moment to see what’s wrong. So obvious. It is the professor in every role. Somehow he filmed and edited himself onto the faces of the celebrity speed dead. Dietrich, Kennedy, Tennessee Williams. Even Mother Theresa, with three-day beard and scarf. (You were getting tired of his amphetas, but they were all he had. He even gave you a Greek Salad and when he served it, announced with a flourish, “Am-feta cheese!”) His paunchy face was wholly recognizable in every character. Despite eye shadow, despite wigs, despite bras or cravats. The professor, who lived on marshmallow crème and Mars Bars, was an amole: a chubby speed freak. The kind who liked the feel of squish in his mouth. (But never has sex.)

With enough speed you could make your own history and live in it. Dream standing up and awake. The Professor got cosmic when he passed the Three Day mark. No doubt the universe itself was the dream of the Almighty Tweaker, up for eons, and we the creatures he believed he created. The Almighty Tweaker, forever taking the universe apart like a ‘57 Impala and crashing before putting it back together. So the Chevy just sits there, bushings and grommets and master cylinder and sections of steering column scattered in the front yard, with all the other discarded vehicles in various stage of outdoor dis-assemblage, hood open like the maw of all the Lord’s unfed creatures.

The beauty of his own construct—the dopamine-flooded inevitability of it—made the Professor cry. He spoke through sheets of pinkish tears. Sob, happy; sob, distraught; sob, absolute sheet-soaking one hundred and four degree fever intensity. What if the universe is just a vacant lot in front of God’s trailer, full of rotting and abandoned projects begun by their Creator and cast off when He staggered off and crashed on his half-drained waterbed, the one with the little dead rats floating in it, trapped when the Almighty passed out on them after a nine millennium run, asphyxiated before they could chew their way out, snuffed by the Divine accident that is eternity, but oddly peaceful in eternal repose, their faces human as faces in a class picture, all staring the same direction, directly at nothing.

“Look at me,” the Professor said. “I’m thinking.”

TIMES SQUARE

“HAD A SCANDAL INVOLVING INHALERS.”

So begins the first, punchy sentence of the first—and first forgotten memoir ever devoted to amphetamine. I’m Not Tired, Jim.