I am really a drug agnostic. If you want to murder your braincells that’s your deal, just as long as you’re not harming other people. I think that is one thing I learned from my father’s warning to only drink at home. (See SotD post: Half Breed)
California is known for its drug culture. The thing is, there is not one drug culture. California is far too big and diverse for that. Certainly there are threads that cross regional and socio-economic boundaries. Like a lot of places, alcohol was pretty ubiquitous. Marijuana use was also big and cocaine is more prevalent in some places more than others.
Okay, I know, you’re going to now ask, “So, Will, how much drugs did you use?” To steal a line from a friend a lot time ago, “Not enough.” Seriously though, my drugs of choice now are sugar, chocolate and coffee. Sure, I experimented with altered states a little. My drug use was significantly lower than many of my peers. I was always wary of “the hard stuff” because of my parents. Not because I would get in trouble with them, the excuse used by a lot of rebellious teens, but because both my parents had been drug users, and I am a self-described “drug baby.” I never wanted to get addicted to anything serious because I wasn’t certain that I would be able to dig myself out of the hole I would most likely dig for myself. So, I often used the expression, “I’m the designated drunk,” because of course I couldn’t drive. So, compared to a lot of people I went to high school and then college with, I was a featherweight.
I had friends with marijuana plants growing in their living rooms, their bedroom and had greenhouses full. This was not exactly normal, most people kept to growing theirs in hidden rooms or spots hidden on public land. None of my friends were the big growers though, no attack dogs and patrolling their properties with assault rifles. Those were further north in an area of California called the Emerald Triangle.
Of course, then I go to university where I’m told that a significant percentage of the student body was alcoholic. I had friends when I lived in the dorms who might be caught crawling around in the bushes on campus looking for the hallucinogenic mushrooms they were trying to grow. This was a practice I totally did not approve of though because there’s jerks out there in every culture where stealing your stash might be the least that they do.
One Saturday afternoon, some friends and I had procured one of those cheap folding card tables and placed it in the center of my dorm. It was one neighbor who was studying accounting and who liked to play “Flight of the Bumble Bee”, on LP of course, to annoy the local Metallica fan down the hall, then there was the roommate of our local drug dealer who everyone called “King” because it was his last name and me, the awkward computer nerd. King and someone else were in using the dry sauna, and someone decided to not only crank it up too high, but that it would be a good idea to throw some water on the rocks for steam. So, King runs it, yelling, “I need some water!” He grabs my nearly full 32 ounce cup I had from some fast food place and was out of the room faster then I could formulate a response. We three looked at each other and one of us said, “This is going to be bad.” After a moment, it was. I would like to describe the smell but I can’t. I have no experience expressing what that odor was but it wasn’t caused by water. Seconds later, the resident hall monitor walks in and we explained what happened. I had to admit to him that Mr. King did not throw water on the rocks. It was Sprite and vodka.
Of course when I went to work in music for those three short years, I heard more of the stories from some of the people who lived them. The worst that I had experienced in my time though was one of the shows that I really wish we had stayed away from. Ron White. Bill Cosby nearly falling asleep on stage was sad, but Ron White drunkenly yelling at the audience was just maddening. Was he the most intoxicated entertainer we hire? Maybe not. Was it part of his act? Yes. Was it the kind of show I wanted to be associated with? No. Not in a thousand universes. It was not only embarrassing, it was sloppy, the awkward kind of sloppy like waking up in a stranger’s bathtub with a completely different stranger passed out on top of you. (Story shared to me by a dorm mate who’s self-appointed nickname was “The Greasy Mexican”)
The cocaine stories that I was told were some of the worst though and I am glad I was never involved in them. The music industry was, even at the time when I was in it, rolled and dusted in cocaine. Managers got some artists into using, performers sometimes got their own fans hooked, directly not through hero-worship, and it travelled even all the way down to radio DJs getting hooked on cocaine brought to them by record promoters.
That’s getting into the dark side of it though. Most of the drug use that I saw and participated in was social. I’ll end with a little ritual which we had at the promotion company. Since many of us liked a different sort of booze, the crew all decided on a little exchange program. Each person would choose a single liquor type. The VP chose vodka, our chief of security chose cognac and I was going to do bourbon. I forget the others. The game was that we would buy a cheap bottle, two mid-range bottles and then an $80 bottle, or their out. No one was supposed to go much above that. After each show, we’d all take a shot of the bottle of the evening. One shot, one show, starting with the cheapest and working up. Pretty mild as drinking games go. Still, you could really learn the difference between different prices of liquors this way. I haven’t had $80 vodka or cognac since but I know now that I really, really never want to drink the cheap stuff. However, cheap vodka works great for making bugspray.
