I’m forced to temporarily merge a couple of different threads of this disordered narrative that is my abysmally ludicrous existence, because there is an unavoidable correlation between my disastrous love life and my final bit of drug binge debauchery. I told you already about my roommate (the former waiter) and I stumbling upon a steady supply of methamphetamine shortly after the time that I’d forced a wonderful woman out of my life for what I told myself was her own good.

It was entirely recreational use at first, a nice way to compensate for the occasional fog that I experience as an unmedicated insomniac in addition to boosting creativity and productivity quite a bit. Even casual use tends to have a fairly profound impact on emotional stability and thought processes though, and the next half-year or so was most certainly influenced by that chemically altered state of mind I was fostering.

After The Chemical Toilet did what she does best by disappointing me and disappearing, I was in a position to actively pursue other women, even though I wasn’t inclined to actually do that. I did however begin catching the occasional ride home from a girl I worked with at the local NBC affiliate, a girl who happened to be the cousin of my roommate’s best friend. One night we ended up sleeping together quite unexpectedly, the girl and I, not my roommate’s best friend and I…just in case there was some ambiguity in my statement.

That incident felt far more intense and meaningful to me than it probably should have, almost certainly more than it would have if I hadn’t been indulging in the specific substance that I was…or maybe it would have. Fuck if I know if things would have been different if I had been sober at the time, and I have no way of comparing it to a sober iteration of me because this wasn’t a god damn experiment with a control group included, though that prospect does intrigue me and I would love to have gone through my life precisely that way, with a control me insulated from my less brilliant decisions. That’s entirely beside the point, what I do know is that I felt an intense attachment to the girl in question, and she supposedly reciprocated.

We began a relationship together and it wasn’t a bad one while it lasted, I don’t think. She was sweet and affectionate towards me and I apparently treated her better than any other guy had previously. Some of our coworkers were skeptical of our relationship and even poked fun at me for being involved with her, because they were assholes and because they didn’t happen to think much of her…but I didn’t give a damn what they thought because she made me feel good, which was something I most assuredly needed.

A couple of months later she ended up taking a trip to visit some family in North Dakota and ended up returning home entirely broke because she had taken one of her cousins and that cousin’s boyfriend along with her on the road trip and those two had managed to do the exact opposite of contributing. Finances were a bit tight for my roommate and I, but I did have my bass guitar that I wasn’t actively using much. I took my bass down to a nearby pawnshop and collected a decent bit of cash so that I could help her get by until the next paycheck.

She began growing distant towards me shortly after that, spending less time with me and not coming around even at times when she said she would be. Things went on like this for a couple of weeks until one of my days off she called me to let me know that she wanted to come by and talk with me after the 10:00 news was over.

I knew what was coming, and I dreaded her showing up around 11:00 that night, but I sat there waiting for her to let herself in. As I had predicted, she only wanted to talk to me for the purpose of ending our relationship face-to-face…I can respect that. At least she didn’t try to end it over the phone or something silly like that.

As soon as she left I made the decision that changed things from that point on, I made a call to obtain an address I hadn’t previously wanted to know, I put on my coat, and I walked to the house where my roommate and his friend (the now ex-girlfriend’s cousin) were hanging out. This house was the proximate source of the methamphetamine that we had been using for the past couple of months.

That night was when the transition from recreational use to something far more extreme took place. Until that night I had never really tried to consider the sort of quantities that were available in order for my roommate and I to enjoy the free or damn near free surplus that we had been receiving…but it became difficult not to think about that sort of thing when faced with it, and good lord was there quantity. It sometimes felt like there was a lifetime supply readily available to us right there, which could be an accurate assessment if we actually did consume all of it.

The methamphetamine was higher quality than anything I’d experimented with previously, with an almost perfect glass-like clarity…which stood to reason, being trafficked (as it was) up here directly from Guadalajara, Mexico by various Mexicans including a Mexican fellow I actually happened to like, enough so that I began working on developing some degree of conversational Spanish in order to better communicate with him.

I may be making light of the situation a bit more than is justifiable, because these were the sort of men who carried illegal firearms along with them as they illegally crossed the US/Mexico border with massive quantities of high quality methamphetamine and occasional cocaine. These were dangerous men who were members of a dangerous organization…and I couldn’t possibly have cared less. Being closely involved with organized crime wasn’t the sort of thing that tripped alarms for me like it probably should have. Maybe we could casually place the blame for that indifference on the drugs, but it really seems like a bit of a stretch if not an outright copout…in reality I just happen to suffer from a bit of moral flexibility which makes proximity to dangerous criminals the sort of thing I didn’t even consider to be an issue worth worrying about.

These Mexican fellows were arriving here with their cargo, setting up a base in the home of a former police officer, and distributing their materials outward from there. My roommate and I had hit the jackpot simply because his best friend was staying with said former police officer. This placed us right there near the epicenter of the action…and we both milked it for what it was worth.

My state of mind was not the greatest during the succeeding months, as one might suspect…and that was exacerbated by the fact that my recent ex-girlfriend arbitrarily decided to show up over the following three months or so, sometimes for sex and sometimes just to spend the night with me. She would appear at work when my shift was ending just to give me a ride home (and often stay with me) or she would show up somewhere along my path during the walk home to pick me up for the same purpose. Her appearances weren’t the sort of thing I could count on or predict with any efficacy, but it was surprisingly frequent from someone who had broken up with me just a short while before.

The only thing that could be predicted from her during that interval was that she would once again disappear if I even suggested us being together again or if I questioned the fact that she would have left me in the first place just to continue behaving as if we were still in a relationship of some sort.

Between the drug use becoming steadily heavier and this girl seemingly delighting in torturing me and promoting a state of near constant confusion…I’m surprised I managed to come out the other side with anything approaching sanity. Before you interject, let me just say that you should shut up because this is my fucking story and I am sane if I say that I am. Your job is to listen, not to be a backseat narrator.

This seems like a reasonable place to stop, before I go into further detail on the experiences over those months. I have a thing or two to discuss before we get there anyhow, because I clearly have a coherent plan in place regarding what I’m sharing with you, if you couldn’t tell. Bear with me, it won’t be long before we’re back on track. You can deal with the brief hiatus, or you can just stop reading now.