For You, The Stars
Chapter Five: Paid in Full
Installment 3
We liked Todd’s three-foot bong so much we went out and bought our own. We named it Max. You actually had to have someone else light it for you.
I was really enjoying having a girlfriend who was as into partying as I was, although it also felt a little unnerving at times realizing that I wasn’t the crazy one in the relationship. In the past I had relied on whomever I was with to hold the reins and suggest that maybe we should tone it down a bit. It felt weird being the relatively responsible one.
Cecilia had an ecstasy connection in Marin and we started doing some nearly every weekend. Usually we’d go out and dance at a club. I had tried x in college, snorting it painfully, but had mostly stuck to acid and mushrooms. I remembered PJ O’Rourke describing ecstasy as “St. Joseph’s Baby Acid.” It was a good dance drug, though. I had to give it that.
She liked to flirt with the doormen and bouncers at clubs. She knew the guys who worked the door at DV8, mostly huge black guys, and they didn’t act all that happy to meet me when she introduced me, even though she was vague about our relationship. She called me her friend.
This was part of the openness of our relationship. When we went out dancing we agreed that we could mix with other people and cruise around, although every time we seemed to end up sticking together at the end of the night. Also, she went out dancing with her girlfriends sometimes so she had had a chance to get to know this scene - and the guys who worked the doors at all the clubs.
I think she led them on terribly. One time she got us a ride with a bouncer name Wayne from one club to another. It was a two-seater Corvette, so Cecilia was on my lap. Wayne flirted with her shamelessly in front of me.
“When am I gonna get a little ‘legroom’?” he asked her, parting his massive thighs.
She just acted like she had no idea what he was talking about.
Wayne had driven us to a new club that had just opened. Cecilia was always trying to scam her way in without paying the cover fee. She could lie shamelessly and I think she wanted to feel like part of the “in” crowd.
A few weeks before she’d met some folks from LA while out with her girlfriends and one of them had said that he was the part owner of a new club down there. She was really taken with that idea and got it into her head that I could pretend to be a co-owner of that new club to get us both in. I was reluctant to do this because it just seemed so obviously false to me. She didn’t have that same inhibition or sense of embarassment.
We went up to the door and Cecilia introduced me. “He’s one of the owners of Celestial, that new club in LA?”
The guy at the door seemed bored and unimpressed.
“Tell them,” she said to me.
“Tell them what?”
“Oh, forget it.”
One weekend when we were hanging out at my place, we were curious about how it would feel to mix mushrooms and ecstasy. It turned out to be a pretty interesting feeling. More psychedelic than the typical MDMA trip but also more cozy and “safe” feeling than the typical hallucinogenic escapade.
We were also having beers, so we had to be real careful about not getting dehydrated.
About three hours into it Cecilia declared that she felt “perfect.” She perched on the back of a chair in the and said, “I don’t need to do anything. I’m perfect just like this.”
She did look radiant. Her face was beautifully blissful, turned toward the slanting rays of the sun filtering in though the living room windows.
Seth was hanging out with us, tripping too, and he seemed to get a real kick out of Cecilia’s perfection. He considered her eye candy and was always complimenting her on her looks, so having her frozen in front of him like a bird of paradise suited him just fine.
We never ended up mixing those two drugs again. At first Cecilia really wanted to. She couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be at that pure peak of experience, but she knew she had liked it better than anything. I was less sanguine.
I was thinking about drugs like heroin that made you feel so good that you’d inevitably get addicted. It just seemed to me that a feeling that made you want to sit there and do nothing and feel like you’d already accomplished all you wanted was too much of an illusion.
Somehow I convinced Cecilia to let it drop.
We thought about maybe dealing some of the x. A lot of people were looking for it and although it wasn’t hard to get, we could easily have become steady suppliers for people looking for a reliable source. Apparently one of Cecilia’s friends in Marin got it from her dad, who was huge drug dealer. There seemed to be a lot of nouveau riche drug barons up there.
I did the math over and over and couldn’t find a way to make any more than a pittance at the rates we were being charged. Either we’d have to mark up the pills ridiculously, in which case even our friends could probably get the ecstasy cheaper elsewhere, or we’d have to put up with a lot of legwork and distribution hassle for almost no profit.
Even getting our own drugs for free made it too expensive for everyone else. I realized that we weren’t far enough up the food chain to make it worthwhile and I didn’t really want to devote that much energy to being a drug dealer. It sounded great as a lucrative sideline, but I already had one annoying, low-paying job.