I have to tell a story. I just found out that some1 I used to know died on Saturday. We'll call him "Chad" because the story I have to tell could hurt his family, and I don't want that. I just want to get this heavy feeling out of my chest & this is the only way I know how to do it right now.
My most vivid memory of Chad is Mardi Gras 1999. This particular period of time was probably the "highest" point of my addiction. Pretty much everyone that I interacted with on a regular basis (including & especially myself) was taking loads of drugs 24/7. "Cocaine is just like air" was a quote I recall thru all this haze, and that was really an understatement. It was plentiful & so was everything else. Designer drugs in abundance: Special K, & so many different types of XTC pills I couldn't keep track of them all, not to mention gel tabs of mescaline, paper LSD, etc etc etc. We got high on every alphabet of the letter, as another friend (just one "r" from "FIEND") once said.
Anyway, so Mardi Gras 1999: My immediate coterie had our party HQ just about 2 blox from Bourbon & St Ann (the heart of Gay New Orleans AKA The Bourbon Pub & Oz). This means we had some clothes & drugs stashed up in this house that we were in & out of all weekend. (this all sounds so stupid & dangerous as I'm typing it) So that Saturday morning, my snaggle puss tranny roommate & I came downtown around noon & the bar scene is JUMPING. We were well supplied & just about immediately when we got to the club we popped some X and just as it's kickin in, here comes Chad. Please understand that Chad was very much a label whore: Gucci especially. I remember him always blinging that Gucci Belt & how sassy he felt in someone else's matching sunglasses. But I digress. So Chad comes into the bar with this crossed out look on his face, wearing a hospital scrub top & some designer jeans with that damn Gucci Belt on. Being that it's Mardi Gras, I just take it for granted that he's high as Claree & go over to say hello. He looks at me kinda blankly & I really can't make out if he's saying anything or not but he pulls open the scrub top to show me that he has electrodes on his chest. This is when I notice the hospital bracelet on. I shouted over the music: "Great Costume!!!" and I just danced on.
It wasn't until much later that evening, when I caught up with Chad @ the Party House, that he told me that he had flatlined @ Charity Hospital & come to on the table with a buncha doctors all round him. He was pissed off that they'd cut his Versace T-shirt off but he'd managed to grab his shoes & sneak out while they weren't looking & since he hadn't had any ID on him when the ambulance picked him up, he said, he didn't have to worry bout it. He even showed me the bracelet that said "John Doe." A few hours later, I went upstairs into one of the bedrooms of the place and there was Chad, laying on his stomach on one of the mattresses on the floor with like 8-10 little ziplock baggies of various colors & sizes. I thought I knew mostly every body's color codes but this bitch had baggies I'd never seen in the gay bars. But again I digress. So he is in there, shoveling stuff out of one baggie after the next with his silver plated coke straw (I had one too) & up his nose like he was just sniffin a Vick's inhaler. I yelled at him about it but I didn't dare take his shit away, I'm crazy, not stupid. My highly evolved response was to take a bunch of drugs myself & not manage to flatline, but to sit around bemoaning how little of a "family spirit" we had in Gayland. After my friend Swervella & I took some gel acid & took it to the next level (i.e. we were incapable of speech due to plenty of drug abuse of our own & were relying on LSD telepathy & hand gestures) we decided that fleeing the scene was better than feeding the fiend.
So we kept dancing wildways & began to make jokes about "Zombie Chad" coming back to life & wanting to eat brains but settling for drugs instead. Oh, we probably said so many snarky things about Zombie Chad but after a while that's all he became to us. I think we had to make a joke out of it because we felt powerless to do anything to make him snap out of it. At least that's what I'm telling myself when I'm not thinking I could have should have done more.
But so fast forward to earlier tonight, February 24, 2011. I get 3 phone calls from Swervella while I'm in class & when I call him back, he basically tells me that Zombie Chad crossed over one last time & didn't come back. I honestly hope that doesn't sound as crass as I think it does. I felt really--surprised? I guess I kinda thought by now he was OD-proof. The last time I saw him was at a Big Freedia show. He thought it was a Sissy Nobby show but then again he had clearly been up on drugs for DAYS. He was walking around Oz on a Tuesday night w no shirt on & no muscles, just wasted looking flesh & that same haunted look in his eyes that I remembered from Mardi Gras but somehow there was something not there. Or maybe something I couldn't look at. Something I was afraid to face. I think maybe I was afraid that look on his face was too much like the one I used to see in the mirror, peering back at me on one of those early morning/late night conversations with myself in the bathroom when no one else could have made sense of what I had to say anyway.
I wish I had a nicer story to tell about Chad, so I could use his real name, but I don't.
It didn't have to be like this.
There should have been another way
