How can you just leave me standing alone in a world that’s so cold

The night ended like all nights, with the dawn. But this was like no other, that first night in Erie, Pennsylvania. The rugby player Grundy drove me to my rental apartment by the university. The house looked fluorescent green. I looked at Grundy to see if he was seeing what I was seeing and he laughed, yeah it’s green! And then the cops came, the state patrol which was even worse, and the flashing lights felt like everything I’d tried so hard to escape, the real world.

There’s not much I remember from my college years but this is one of those nights. And just a handful of people share the same memory: each with our own unique puzzle pieces buried someplace dark.

I saw my old college roommate John at a high school football game and we reminisced about that night. I’d gone away with my fraternity brothers and come home in the early morning right when the cops came. John said they thought it was me and my brothers who’d vandalized the house, the kind of messed up thing fraternities do. Someone splattered the whole house with paint—an awful mint green toothpaste color—then put garden hoses in the cars and cranked up the water. Seemed a past renter had a vendetta with the landlords, who lived upstairs. Who cares. It was a bummer way to end an otherwise perfect night when all I wanted to do was sleep.

It’s not the kind of thing I’d talk about with most people, especially my kids, but Lily and I were driving across the state and got on the topic of drugs. By the age of 19 she talked about her exploits the way people in their 40s might: with a “been there, done that” attitude. I wondered if she got into it through something handed down from me. And what precisely that was, and why.

Maybe I’m just too demanding, maybe I’m just like my father, too bold

My fraternity was the TKE house and we were the guys with the black and red jackets with the skulls. The jackets were bad ass. The jackets were the best part. You went through all the pain and suffering for the jackets because of the skulls. There was some lore we had to memorize and recite that justified the skulls but it was all bullshit. Ronald Reagan was a TKE, so was Elvis. I’d joined a franchise of assholes and fit in just fine.

People had nicknames and behind the nicknames there were stories. Knowing the stories gave you a sense of belonging. Squirrel was in my pledge class, the Beta class, the first batch of pledges behind our brothers, the Alpha class. I have no idea why they called him Squirrel and never knew his real name. Squirrel was ex-military and older than the rest of us with a pair of nerdy-looking glasses. He always wore a baseball cap. He had hearing loss from firing guns when drunk without ear protection and so he talked too loud, and talked in an excited fashion, like the words were hard to form with his lips, and often spit by accident, especially when he was fucked up, which was often. We were all in the business of getting fucked up in a game to outdo each other and I guess that made us feel like winners despite the fact that deep down, we were all losers.

Squirrel was an Erie local who’d gotten into college on some veteran thing but didn’t belong there. I think he joined the fraternity to land a girlfriend but never did. Instead he was one of a core group of drug dealers and always got the best stuff. For me, at 17, I’d never taken acid but on this September night in Erie at Squirrel’s parent’s creepy Victorian house I did, along with my fraternity brothers and our would-be girlfriends.

This is maybe where things started to go south for me, looking back. I’d taken a 400-level course on James Joyce and an otherwise light course load on creative writing (poetry, fiction). We sat in circles reacting to each other’s work. Our professor was a hippy named Diana with ostrich feather earrings who dated a philosophy professor with an eye patch. I discovered the nearby river gorge and a network of trails traversing the woods. Away from home for the first time, everything seemed brand new, open wide. Drugs became my gateway to it. A way of exploring the world by leaving it.

Maybe you’re just like my mother, she’s never satisfied

Everyone was in different rooms with the lights off because everyone was into black lights and painting themselves with neon acrylics, or getting their faces painted by a girl, or twirling their fingers like idiots, fixed on the trailing effects, frozen afterimages blurred in the air. And each room had a different record playing and it was in this room they were playing Prince when I went into the closet. Prince didn’t line up with my image of the fraternity and what music they should be playing (he was too MTV) but somehow it was perfect in that way everything is when you’re tripping. It’s either perfect or it’s terribly not and there’s nothing in between.

And so for some reason I went into Squirrel’s parent’s closet in the master bedroom and it’s there I got tangled up in a mound of socks that acquired cartoon faces and voices like something from an obscene Sesame Street skit, some horrible crack opened in the recesses of my brain, an almost-Narnia moment where time and space dissolved into a world of amplified merriment or horror, and what I must have looked like in there giggling and talking to myself (to socks actually), had someone opened the door and turned on the light.

It was thirty-six years ago. So there’s this scene and one other, that’s it. Squirrel had a chessboard set up in one of those Victorian-style rooms with a conical roof, the kind with a polygonal corner tower that juts out of the front of the house and looks spooky. I found myself drawn to that room for some dark purpose, to the chessboard, where I got lost for a period of time with the figures. Something about the white knight spoke to me: not in a goofy cartoon way like the socks had, but in a more profound manner that seemed to yank at my soul. The knight wanted me to take him, for keeps. The knight wanted me to pocket him. The knight, that can hop over anyone in an L-pattern and fuck you sideways, was nothing more than a no-nonsense horsehead but on this particular night, this knight was charmed. It wanted rescued. So I gripped the knight and kept him in a special place for 25 years until we bought our first house in West Seattle, where I displayed the knight on a shelf in the bathroom beside other trinkets as my little secret, a Horcrux to a past version of myself who died in that closet, the stuff dark wizards do to stay immortal.

It rankled Squirrel that someone took his knight. He confronted us in intimate settings more than once demanding a confession: who took it. And it felt like he was on to me by the way his eyes scanned ours and paused over mine. But I held firm: I didn’t know a damn thing about that chess piece. It was a dick move, but one I don’t regret. I was into saving things. And as with all good trips, I wanted a souvenir. Maybe to prove to myself I hadn’t imagined it, that it was real.

Why do we scream at each other? This is what it sounds like when doves cry

Lily and I talked about acid not in a way of advocacy but more abject horror at what we’d done to ourselves. Yet there was a propensity for this kind of reckless behavior we shared. I couldn’t tell her about that night because it would sound like I was glamorizing drugs but the truth is, I don’t regret any of my trips. I tried desperately to remember what I could of them because there was something so unreal and magical about those moments. But there were people I knew who had done too much acid and it was a pity to see what it did to their brains.

I got an email from the Holistic Psychedelic Nurses Collective about some new psychotropic therapeutic program (“Warm Autumn Equinox blessings!”) because I’d inquired about ketamine therapy once and a part of me was still drawn to that form of release, the same part of me from thirty-six years ago that was willing to step off the real world into the unknown. It was dare-devil, thrill-seeking behavior. Perhaps something of an addict’s mind too, the same mindset that sunk me into thirty years of drinking and pot smoking. The same guy who fit in fine with those skull jackets and dipshit fraternity brothers, cut from the same cloth.

I’m not working now so I’ve spent the past week in the garden moving things around, tearing stuff out. And there’s this English ivy in the front bed that’s burrowed beneath the rock wall I’ve been trying to yank out. Drugs and addiction are like that too. You can cut back the vines but the roots still wait in the dark for the right moment to return.

I look back at myself on the couch in one of those rooms with the blacklight wondering what the hell I was doing. We were what you’d call blissed out, perfectly in tune with the ecstasy that was Prince at his prime: that guitar and his squealing, the corny synthesizers and drum machine so 80s, so right for the time. It was actually the perfect soundtrack for that night, to be cut open and bled out like that, to feel something real. In a time well before smartphones we were all right where we wanted to be: numbed over, removed. Absent, but together. Maybe I was just trapped in my own mind and wanted a view from the outside. Maybe I was bored with the real world and felt like it wasn’t enough. But over time that attitude can lead to a life of chaos. Lily had that figured out by the age I was when I started to go off track.

I kept my fraternity jacket in the back of my closet, where it belongs. I didn’t respond to any of those emails about reunions. I never related to those people anyways. I never paid my dues. Not in the figurative sense, or to the brotherhood.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Addiction, Creative Nonfiction, drugs, humor, Memoir