Scared Straight

Quitting anything cold turkey is never easy. I have tried numerous times to quit smoking cigs and pot at opposite times but always end up leaning hard on the other in order to quit, it never works.

"Just imagine how much money you will save when you quit smoking."

"Just imagine how much more I'll be spending on weed to help me get over it."

Not exactly the best strategy, this I know, but it always seems to be the only way I can fight it. It hasn't worked once, seeing as how all I can think about right now is leaving this air conditioned boredom factory, get to my car, light up a Camel, go home and light up a blunt with Brian Williams and the cast of NBC Nightly News. Yes I know my life is not exactly Requiem for a Dream shit, but to me this matters. What matters even more to me is the powder going up my nose, or lack there of. It wasn't a preplanned occurrence, it was all about one event, one of those moments where you get to see yourself in a situation that you know you should never be in. It was like watching a movie, albeit not a great one.

It was 12:30 am, Mike was about to get off work and I was to meet him outside the bar/restaurant where he worked. $1100 in my back pocket made my ass go numb sitting on the bench waiting for him. People were looking at me strange as I smoked cigarette after cigarette wondering if I should go inside and get him. About 1:15 or so he emerged, drunk, "Great," I thought, "I guess I'm driving." We got in the car and sped north for Dayton about 60 miles north of Cincinnati. After stopping twice for him to piss we made it there at about 2:45. I had smoked a pack of cigarettes since I went to meet him and my knuckles were white. We got out of the car, coughed a bit and walked inside.

The scene was not a good one. The place stank like a mixture of sweat, skunked beer and drugs. Drugs have a smell and I'm not really sure if it is the narcotics themselves that smell, or just the situation around their usage. There were people in various states of decay spread out across the disgusting room. One girl was so comatose that she could not get the tourniquet around her arm to shoot up her speedball. It was the kind of place that makes you itch, not only from their furniture, to get the fuck out of there asap. We walked in past the wasteland and back to the kitchen to meet Manny.

Manny is a fucking grade-a scumbag, I mean he is a real piece of work. In the roughly six months I have known him, I've seen him; shoot up while driving, smoke crack while driving and shove a loaded pistol down someone's throat. Like I said, this guy is trash and yet, here I was sitting in his kitchen talking about the Stanley Cup finals of all things.

I was too scared to ask him to weigh the ounce of cocaine we were picking up even though I knew it was short. Mike made the mistake of saying it wasn't all that good...big mistake. Manny flipped, he absolutely flipped, but I guess thats what happend when you are up snorting blow for 3 days. There it was, silver and shiny, with the hammer pulled back and from the angle I was sitting I could see the bullets staring out at us through the holes on the revolver. He wasn't going to rob us, I was pretty sure of that, but I was seriously thinking he was going to put a hole in Mike's forehead for, "disrespecting his niggaz." I thought, "what niggaz is this psycho talking about," all he did was say it was some shitty blow. I was literally about to piss my pants.

He ended up kicking us out with our drugs after about 30 minutes of talking in circles with a spun out gun-wielding maniac to get him to let us leave.

"Don't ever be comin back here niggaz."

Are you fucking kidding me? I mean seriously, was he kidding. Who the FUCK would ever walk back into that house again, honestly. We drove back and actually laughed about it as we snorted lines off my Amy Winehouse cd case. I walked back in about 5:45 and tried to go to sleep, the whole time sniffling and wondering what the hell I was doing with myself. I kept thinking how fucked up it would have been to be pulling pieces of Mike's skull off of my shirt trying to convince Manny that I wouldn't say a word. "I'm done," that was all I kept saying, over and over. I sold the rest of the blow a few days ago and didn't do any of it, which was shocking. I lost a couple bucks on the whole deal, it was short, but escaped with a lot more. That was it, the last straw, I was scared straight.