Portland 2/2015
Portland 2/15/19 [date written, not date of experience]
Lucas was in Portland. He told me he was in Clackamas with his family, but…Lucas and his family had come in on a plane. He decided to get drunk (and when Lucas gets drunk, he means business. He won’t drink unless he’s planning to black out) and ride freight back to Arizona, while his family took a plane home…
Sidetrack, Troy’s brother, was also down in Portland. We’d picked him up in Utica, NY and transplanted him to the west coast. The west coast chewed him up and spit him out. He was back on heroin; in Portland, the heroin is so cheap, and it’s fine. A bad place for a guy like Sidetrack. And the meth, too. It’s a shooting gallery.
I wasn’t doing anything in Seattle. Just living in my Dad’s basement and drinking, smoking and listening to Dopethrone’s Hochelaga album over and over. So I packed up my green alice pack, with a metal frame, my favorite kind of backpack. Besides my sleeping bag I took a pint of rum I’d boiled with opium poppies, some quality maeng da kratom, some weed and rolling tobacco - Peter Stockeye.
The opium rum was mainly for Sidetrack. Heroin’s alright, but poppies, actual dry opium poppies, are in my opinion, the best opiate in terms of experience. I wanted Sidetrack to try it.
I’m a poppy thief. I usually start in July. I hit all the local gardens and pea patches, and people’s yards too.
This year I hit the motherload. Near my house there was a big pea patch. I’d seen it being tended by old asian ladies. I saw a few poppy plants. But I browsed some more and inside what looked like a patch of purple corn was a plot of poppies. Some were uprooted and on the ground. They were heavily scored — bled for opium. The holes in the pods from the razor were crusted black with opium resin. They looked like an infected orifice. Alien.
I came back that night with my dad and we filled a sac with as much opium poppies as we could. I take the whole plant — because I use the leaves too.
I got into my blcak overalls and took a bus down to P-town.
I got off the bus, texted Sidetrack, rode the lightrail to the end, and met up with Sidetrack at a motel. There was some weird guy in the motel with Sidetrack. He was weird because he didn’t look right, next to me and Sidetrack.
Sidetrack was white and had raggedy ass dreads. He wore a t-shirt and shorts. He had a massive beard and was skinny like a dopehead. I had ‘kempt’ dreads down to my ass, and a beer gut. This other guy, he had basketball shorts, a t-shirt, and he was bulky, clean and healthy looking. He looked like the kind of person I might spange. I know I’m stereotyping him but it was weird, ‘cause he looked different and he acted different, he WAS different.
But oh well, I figured his association with Sidetrack had something to do with a mutual appreciation for hard drugs. Hard drugs will bring anyone together. For the common goal of hard drugs, the heroin-addicted lion will lay down with the heroin-addicted lamb. They transcend politics and beliefs.
I poured myself a little less than half of the poppy rum, knocked it back, then gave the bottle to Sidetrack. I offered some to Guy, but Guy wasn’t interested. Then I went to the gas station and bought two Camo Black Silver ice tallboys. This beer tastes like the anal secretions of the mucskrat, but it’s 14%, and costs only $1.75 in Portland. It puts me to bed more efficiently than a fifth of 80 proof. Something about the calories.
At the motel, we watched TV and drank. A while after finishing the poppy rum, Sidetrack admitted that he was fucked up. Possum 1, street drugs 0. There’s a lot of morphine in poppies, and codeine, which is demethylated into morphine. Poppies last a long time. So I was pleased that my homebrew “laudanum” was able to break through the tolerance of a person with a habit.
In the morning, I gave him some kratom. He said it helped the sickness a bit. I went to the DSHS to get my EBT card replaced and Sidetrack went out to score some of that p-town tar.
At the DSHS, there was a dirty kid. We both recognized each other as people we’d met before, but couldn’t place each other’s names.
“Let’s smoke a bowl after this,” he said.
I expressed apprehension, and in response, he looked at me and peeled back his phone case, Behind it was a whole sheet of acid. “Oh,” I said. Ok. In my life, I don’t find acid. Acid finds me. “Look,” I said. “I can’t pay.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re one of us.”
I was? Well, I guess I was. Whatever.
To the outside observer, I must have looked like One of Those People.
The mark of the psychedelic beast never washes away.
Anyway, I love L-O-V-E love to do acid. I love the feeling of it, I love the buzz and the fry. As a psychedelic, it’s ideal. Mescaline is good but that’s phenethylamine territory - there’s a price. Mushrooms are more ponderous and basically less recreational, to me. Nothing like a good hit of LSD. So I was pleasantly surprised with my fortune.
This kid’s name was Adam. He was older than me. West Coast guy. Not a housie but, I can tell these things: he was anchored to the West Coast. He liked the Grateful Dead.
I DO NOT like the Grateful Dead. But that’s ok. Some sins can be forgiven.
The DSHS lady said she’d mail me my EBT. I know they could have printed me one right there because they did it before, but she said No Sir, we don’t do that here.
With Adam I rode the light rail to the stop near Hawthorn. Under the bridge here, there was a shooting gallery. Even I didn’t have the nerve to go look. Me and Adam smoked behind a generator outside of the shooting gallery. There was some other kid around we smoked with. Adam gave me a hit of acid. I ate it. “If I had a hundred dollars right now, I’d spend it on some of those tabs,” I said.
“It’s okay,”said Adam. “It’s hard to sell psychedelics anymore. Everybody’s on meth. It’s fucked up.”
Adam told me about how his baby momma in Portland was a heroin addict. He was on a bummer.
A meth guy stumbled out of the shooting gallery and showed us an ordinary rock. “Look at this cool rock I found,” he said.
“Yeah man. Nice rock,” I said. We smoked weed. then we walked to Laurelhurst Park. Adam always walked into the road, cutting off cars. “Right of way,” he said. “Fuck these asshats.”
Adam was in a huff on the way to Laurelhurst Park. The acid was kicking in. It was good shit. Not that amber crap.
We got to a spot by the pond. There were ducks. I sat between two trees.
“I think I’m just gonna sit right here for a while,” I said.
I drank the pond with my eyes. Children were being pushed in strollers, soccer moms were power walking, bums were drinking cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and here was I, melting in front of the pond. It was strange that I was allowed to do this. I felt so good that it seemed obscene in the face of the good citizens of Portland’s day at the park. But people in Portland are used to seeing, and turning a blind eye to, much worse things than myself in their streets.
Inevitably, Adam turned on some flowery jam band crap. New Riders of the Purple Sky, he said. Not my choice, but in my lysergic state I was powerless to stop him.
I talked with Adam. He knew Carolyn, I found out. Carolyn is an ancient psychedelic crone. I lived on her land by the Erie Canal in New York for a while. Sidetrack had been there, too.
“Wait, so you know Darcy?”, I said.
“666 million dollars. That’s a Devil Check!”, he said, in an imitation of Darcy’s voice.
Darcy is a whole ‘nother story, but Darcy is Carolyn’s son who drank 240 hits of liquid acid. He never returned. He used to flashback and yell “BALD!? Naked?! Melting! NO MOSQUITO NET, OH SHIT!”
I was impressed that we both knew these people. Maybe he wasn’t such a West Coast kid. Small acid culture, I guess. Carolyn was a Jesus-worshiper, and the tabs we dropped with her had tiny angels on them. She called it “brain cleaner”.
There’s no such thing as a ketamine culture. Ketamine is unspeakable. Like Cthulhu. I say this because I am a ketamine addict. There’s acid culture, there’s a stoner culture and whiskey culture. But not ketamine. Ketamine is the Great Beyond. It is unspeakable. Ketamine is the shadow in the soul of man, the unknowable dimensions unavailable to normal, rational beings.
By and By, Lucas showed up with a fifth of gin. I stopped staring at the lake and gulped down about a fifth of the bottle in one go.
“That looked like it hurt,” said Adam.
“Just what I needed.”
I drink when I take acid, but only to maintain, and never wine. Liquor. I can’t get drunk on L, so I don’t try. But I needed this for my nerves. Sidetrack showed up with some fatboy who needed to use his scale to weigh out some meth.
“Aw come on,” I said.
Bla bla bla meth is bad said Adam. I agreed. He was right…
“You didn’t care in New York, Possum! Why now? He was right. Meth was bad, but so was I. Bad Possum.
“I don’t know”, I said.
Come to think of it, the first time I did meth was at the end of an acid trip. And I’ve combined the two more than once. Probably in San Fran Psycho.
Fuck. That which cheapens the blood.
Night was falling and the gin was gone. We were still at the same spot in Laurelhurst. Adam gave me 20 dollars and told me to get a fifth of Ancient Age. Alright. Lucas came with me.
At one point we walked past a shirtless old man who was teasing his nipple, directly in our path.
“Wooooo!” he said.
I took this gruesome sight in with open eyes.
“Wow,” said Lucas, “You’ve got great anti tweaker spray. You just stared that guy down and he backed off.”
“Did I?”
It was a long walk. It always is, on LSD. At the Safeway, we were too late for liquor, but not beer.
“We can’t go back empty handed,” said Lucas. This is one of the golden truths of the alcoholic street kid, the career alcoholic. Never go back empty handed.
We got a 30 rack of PBRs.
But they were some chickenshit little brats. Portland kids: a whole different flavor of lame than the kids I went to highschool with.
Lucas and me grabbed some beers.
People started grabbing cans, and pretty soon it was gone.
It was night. At some point, Lucas left. I went to go find a cigarette. The only people on the street now, the majority, were tweakers. People were going to sleep…some bums had a tent set up right by the sidewalk. There was a pack of cheap hot dogs. Their shit was all in a row. I approached a bum.
“Hey, can I buy a cigarette off you?”
“KICK ROCKS KID!!!”
“Jeez. Chill out…”
Portland had become a bummer. The SCUM was just moving north from ‘Frisco. I remember, in Troutdale, i was looking for a burger in the trash, I looked in and there was a needle full of yellow liquid. At least the cap was on.
“I would have shot that,” said my road dog Tapatio.
Fuck.
Yeah, it’s not like I didn’t shoot up but…seeing society shoot up was something else.
Welcome to the Pacific Northwest, where old while ladies smoke meth.
“I’ll take off these dentures and rock your world, sonny!”
It was a hell of a time to find even a snipe. I went back into the park. I sat down next to a guy on a bench in front of the pond.
“Is that a yacht on the lade,” he said.
“I’m on acid and even I know there’s no yacht.”
“I haven’t done acid in years.”
“Follow me,” I said.
The park center was closed, but the lights were on.
Music was playing. New Riders of the Purple Sky. Adam’s weed jar was smashed on the cement walk. I picked up the weed.
“What’s wrong man?” i asked.
“In the end, it’s all just drugs. I’m just a drug dealer. And I can’t even do anything to help my k id. I’m a deadbeat dad.”
Damn. Well…I’ve never been good at comforting people. He gave the guy with me a tab and we smoked. They talked about The Grateful Dead. I said, “Thanks for everything Adam. I hope you feel better,” and went off to go find a hiding place to bundle up for the rest of the night.
I set up in some bushes. But I didn’t sleep. Dark nebulae cascaded across my mind’s eye.
[NOTE: yea, I was still tripping all night. Maybe when I revisit this (if I do) I’ll write a more drawn-out ending. For now, I’d rather go on to another story. -P]