Fascinated & Amazed & Unafraid

Crazy Things I Have Done. Pt. 1ish

            So when I was about 22 and a half, my Dad bought me a car. It was a mid-90s gray Nissan Sentra. The next day, my transgendered friend Alexxus Luv asked if I would drive her from New Orleans to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico to buy $1000 worth of liquid Ketamine (AKA Special K). We were working for a mystery man known only as Swervella. Also along for the ride were the Jesus Junkies, Danny and Mikey, a cute gay teen couple, and some straight guy named Robby. Did I mention the Sentra was a two-door car? The 10 hour drive out there was no problem for me. We’d been furnished with enough disposable cash to do a substantial amount of shopping so we would just blend in with the other tourists buying souvenirs. What I don’t think occurred to any of us is that 3 gay guys, a drag queen and a skinny sexually ambiguous looking guy all looked like what we were—kids out looking for trouble. We parked my car on the US side of the border in a mall parking lot & walked across the bridge. This was all long before 9/11. You just walked right across, no one checked your ID, you didn’t have to change your money over, nothing. Immediately when we crossed I noticed a lot of young kids running around trying to sell chiclets and other little candies (Mexican Now-and-Laters, from the looks of things) and several men of varying ages coming towards us asking if we need to see a doctor, they all knew one that could take care of us. We walked a few blocks and the one the stuck with us the longest got our fare & his fix. I think he was called Pedro. I knew enough Spanish to ask about a veterinario for some ketamina as well as the pill smorgasbord that the Jesus Junkies and their straight friend were looking for. Turns out Pedro drove a cab and he took us to this woman’s office. She had a football style hairdo that she had tried to bleach but only ended up with that weird coppery shade of red that Mexican girls get when they don’t use any toner on their bleach work. I wasn’t really involved in any of the purchasing, she knew enough English to let the boys know that Valiums were like $30 for 90, etc etc but the whole time I she really didn’t take her eyes off the TV screen that was playing some intense telenovela. I remember going to the restroom for a pee & noticing an industrial size pump bottle of KY Jelly. I was glad I wasn’t the one trying to cross all those pills. I think this woman wrote prescriptions so we wouldn’t get in trouble and then someone showed up with all these bottles of pills. The boys emptied all the pills into a few sandwich baggies and then headed into Miss Bleach Head’s bathroom. After we got done with her, we got into Pedro’s cab to head for the vet’s oficina. Just as he started driving, he had Alexxus hold the steering wheel for a second while he injected morphine into his arm at like 35 mph down streets with more potholes than the worst post-Katrina street in all of New Orleans. Somehow we made it to the vet’s place and his English was not as strong as Miss Bleach Head’s so I had to make him understand that we were trying to get 40 vials for $25 each. He kept trying to make us pay 30 per vial but we held fast. We told him $1000 for 40 vials or nothing. Please understand that each vial would yield 5 bags of pure K that retailed for $30 each. Once the vet came up with the vials of K, we had to open all the vials and pour the contents into an empty bottle of water we had purchased when we’d first arrived. The bottles were sealed with little metal circles around the top of them and the vet furnished us with X-acto knives to pry them off with. This led to a certain amount of finger cuts and absorption of K through those membranes as the 5 of us transferred the liquid of our salvation/damnation from a bunch of small glass bottles into one liter sized water bottle that we all knew better than to drink out of. Especially after we walked out of the vet’s office & went shopping in the many flea markets to be had in Nuevo Laredo. We shopped like crazy people in those markets. We bought clear quartz pyramids, Aztec calendars, carved weed pipes of varied shapes and sizes, a riding crop, a whip, oh I don’t know what all. I was feeling wondrous and disconnected from the Special K I’d absorbed through my fingertips when all 5 of us noticed that the loudspeaker for the radio that had been playing mariachi sounding stuff til then was playing “What’s Going On” by 4 Non-Blondes. Then the singing began and it was in Spanish. We were like, “Wow” in the way the only K-heads can be. Fascinated and amazed and unafraid. If I had to pick 3 words to characterize this time in my life, those would be the ones. Before long we realized it was about to get dark and since we didn’t have a room in Laredo, we crossed the border with a minimum of fuss. I suppose we had to show our ID cards but I think that was it. They may have looked at our shopping bags but all our drugs were either up those guys’ buts or in one of the many water bottles we were carrying (we each had one) and we just played it as cool as we could. We got into the car and about 20 miles from the border it began to rain like crazy. Little did I realize this torrential rainstorm was our salvation. As we approached the checkpoint at the 50-mile from the border mark, the guards or cops or whoever mans those things just waved us on through because of how heavy the rain was. Pretty soon after this point everyone started clucking for drugs. We hadn’t done any drugs since we’d smoked our last joint when we’d gotten on the road around midnight the previous night. We stopped in some town and Alexxus went to a pharmacy and even though she couldn’t get the pharmacist to sell her a 10-pack of needles, she at least got one fresh needle, some bleach, and a gallon of distilled water. As I drove, she administered the shots in a very specific order: Bleach once, spray out, fill & spray out with water, fill with K then inject intramuscularly. Everyone got their fix but I was just buzzing out on these IF-Anorex diet pills Daniel had scored for me for the drive back. I let everyone enjoy their moment but eventually I was like, OK hoes, someone else has to drive. There was a water bottle cap full of liquid K on my console when we pulled into this gas station parking lot where I opened the car door and proceeded to fall out of the car into s very Ab-Fab style pose. I pulled myself back together and Michael got behind the wheel while I got into the passenger seat. My boom-box was on the floorboards and while Robert got my shot together I put in Keoki’s Disco Death Race 2000 CD. I watched him prepare it in the correct order, then I unbuttoned my pants so I could give myself the shot in the ass I was craving. Just as I pressed the plunger down and pulled the needle out and the first wave of lovely K-ness washed over me, I hear this dude say “Did I just give him a shot of bleach?” but as I was trying to tell him “No” everything just seemed to fall away and I found myself again in Nuevo Laredo, with Cuatro Non Rubias singing again. These were the moments I loved. Just letting go of it all. The pain, the memories, the guilt. I could feel those things loosen their grip on me and I became something malleable, something that didn’t hurt all the time or have to remember every time someone spit in my face and called me a fag or a queer or a smartass or punched or kicked or berated me under their breath mostly just because they knew they could.

If this were a movie or some cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs, the needle would have been full of bleach. Or the car would have been crashed while I was in that K-hole. But no. The needle was only full of what I was looking for and Michael somehow got us back to the House of Luv on Annunciation St (just a block from the St. Thomas Project). The sun was coming up. This was the first road trip I took to Mexico for Special K, but not the last. Like I said, in a movie, we’d have died or killed someone else or something suitably grim but not this time. We all lived through this one, and many more besides.

God looks after Fools and Little Children, I suppose, could be the moral if you insist on having one.