9. Kiss the Kook

[My buddy] Matt soon introduced me to my poison, crystal meth. I had never tried it before, being from New York the drug is almost unheard of there. We only knew 1 dealer with it. The first time I did it was snorting it. It was the most amazing experience. The tingling in my body, the energy, the motivation. It was great and I was hooked from the start. I soon began shooting it. This led to all my money being drained. So Matt and I had a novel idea. We began cooking it ourselves. …

Eventually, old friends of mine began telling me that my mind was slipping and I was going crazier and crazier. Matt too. But still, neither of us cared. Until one binge that finally ended it all. Matt and I had been up for almost 14 days. Our minds were far-gone 5 days before this point. The apartment was trashed. I was covered in dirt and blood. I couldn’t even tell where I was bleeding from. I was home, and I didn’t even know where I was. And to top it all off, the last batch was fresh out.

Matt began yelling at a pile of clothes on the floor, thinking that a demon was hiding under it. This scared the hell out of me. Not because he was losing it, but because it awakened my fears as well. Finally after a brief screaming match at the laundry, he reached into a drawer and grabbed a gun that I had no clue he ever owned. He began firing at the clothes, and finally turned the gun around and fired it into his mouth. I was in shock. I didn’t know what the hell was going on around me, much less what to do. The gunshots soon attracted the police who arrested me and took Matt’s body away.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

10. Skin

I had delusions. Especially when I was hot. I would take the hottest showers I could stand, for hours, trying to clean the cysts I now had under my scalp full of the gritty black shit, and it was difficult because I couldn’t use soap anymore, it got under my skin and burned and bubbled in my eyes nose and throat for hours afterward. I couldn’t drink soda either, same reason. I had delusions that my dealer was poisoning our dope because he wanted it all for himself, which in comparison to my other delusions makes sense. I had delusions that the black shit in my skin was some new form of dope only producible by the human body and my dealer was selling us tainted dope so my body would make it because he was going to come harvest this shit from me and turn me into a slave he would keep locked up and just feed meth to in order to obtain this new drug. I figured my dealer was doing this to lots of people, and that he’d keep me enslaved until I died from the meth. I knew it was killing me, I didn’t care…

And we didn’t want to quit.

We were banned from the sauna at our apartment complex because no one else could use it. Our sweat smelled so strongly of ammonia it burned the eyes, it was caustic, and it burned our skin too. We had to cope with just taking really hot showers, which didn’t work as well.