Wake Up and Smell The Beer. Jon Longhi

Christmas Eve, Sultan had pneumonia. I watched him sit in our kitchen and do 135 bong hits in a row.

      I hadn't heard from the Sultan of Stone for a couple months so one afternoon I went by his apartment to see if I could buy some weed. He was passed out on his back porch. It turned out that he had been awake for a few days on meth. When the sun rose that morning he decided to lay out and catch a tan, promptly passing out. Never did bother to put on any suntan lotion. He had been lying in the sun for ten hours straight when I woke him. The skin on his face was bright red, flaking, and blistered. Since he had passed out on his side, the burn only covered half his face. The other half was pale and white.

      In the weeks that followed, Sultan kept his drugs in a little black tin box which he carried with him at all times. He'd wander through the trash-filled hallways of his apartment in a daze, a sticky ring of heroin tar congealed around his lips like some kind of death lipstick. I went by that winter and he was just a snuffling, coughing little worm wrapped up in rags. The apartment had dunes of garbage undulating across beer-stained carpets cratered with cigarette burns. A burn hole the size of a bowling ball was at one end of the couch, where Sultan had passed out with a lit joint in his hand one night. Every surface tingled with the static of roaches. No one had cleaned the place in over a year; the only housemates who still lived there were just as crazy as Sultan. The heat and electricity had been turned off long ago.

      “What could I do?” Sultan joked. “The power company wouldn't let me pay off my bills with quarters of crystal meth.”

      The Sultan of Stone had become a shrunken little weed weighing about ninety-eight pounds. To protect himself from the apartment's chill, Sultan wrapped his head and arms up in strips of cloth that looked remarkably like bandages. He was a dingy little mummy sitting there on the couch, already dressed for burial. Sultan didn't once make eye contact with me during my entire stay. I couldn't see his face, but what peeped through the bandages looked like some mollusk that had been squashed on the beach. I left wondering if the roaches would eat him while he slept one night. After that visit, I didn't see Sultan for years. He became another ghost in my life.

      Most of my ghosts are technically still alive. It's just their minds that are gone, the bodies still walk, Frankenstein monsters lobotomized by hard drugs. Even though I've done my best to escape my ghosts, they still appear to haunt me every now and then. Manifestations on street corners in the drizzly fog of a Mission Street night. Every now and then one of them will walk up to me at a party, standing there all gangrenous and numb, and even though we had hung out for a year, they can't remember my name anymore. Leaving a path of fried neurons, these ghosts wander ever deeper down rotting streets. One day I'll probably find one of them in my garbage can, some crack gang's warped version of recycling.

      Because my ghosts are still among the living, they make the hauntings real. Even the undead can get strung out on ectoplasm, but these wraiths have found even more potent poisons, toxins which outdo the spirit world because their effects are tangible and in the here and now. That's the difference between the madman and the drug addict: the addict realizes that his dreams actually are real; in order to sustain his delirium he must constantly obtain more of the chemicals which create that madness. All of his reality is based in the acquisition of a material substance. His addiction is a pure form of materialism and supply-side economics. This is entirely rational behavior according to the cultural laws of our consumer society. Even though all the addict seeks is delirium and chaos, what he actually finds is a twisted form of rationality and logic.

      6

      Sunny Friday afternoons in the Haight I would come home from work early. The radiating low sun had not yet been snuffed out by the roaring fog. Mist piled up like ominous mountains on the edge of the neighborhood, mountains moving slowly but irrevocably forward on a snail's viscid trail, its chill marine breath just beginning to infect the dry dusty afternoon air. It would be eighty-five degrees and suddenly a slow sullen breeze thirty degrees cooler would coax shivers from your skin.

      Lots of evenings the dividing line between light and fog was Divisadero Street at the bottom of the hill. It was the borderland. I'd ride home from work with the sun shining on my back but when I hit Divisadero the light would turn gray and cool. As I rode Haight Street up the hill past its intersection with Divisadero, I'd often ascend into a chilly cloud. Fog hugged the top of the hill like a damp head of matted hair. As the road leveled out into the Haight, my helmet and leather jacket would get slicked down driving through water droplets just hanging in the air, hovering dewdrops thick as an insect swarm. Most nights the Haight had a semi-liquid sky.

      In this twilight zone of moistures I would arrive home on a Friday afternoon at 666 Ashbury and snort two fat lines of speed hoping it would lead to something holy. Even though my drug-fueled searches for truth usually only led to detours, even these diversions were valid destinations in and of themselves. You can only appreciate heaven after exploring all the hells, and I always loved the energy the powder gave me. It was the false enthusiasm for many a wild night.

      On near toxic amounts of amphetamines and LSD numerous satoris were induced. Gushing spasms of stuttering hallucinations attacked like an epileptic's fit at 4 a.m. on Saturday nights. A drooling shit-faced sage, I'd eat peyote or yage, puke my visions into a toilet bowl and examine the chunks to try and divine signs of the future. My reasoning was so soaked in Burroughs, Castenada, and psychedelic substances that I fancied I could actually travel to other dimensions like some new wave hipster version of Doctor Strange. I heard voices in my head and believed they were prophecies or murmurings of the dead instead of the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. Somehow it worked quite well for me.

      After the lines, I'd be buzzing with a frenzied electricity. Instant Energy. I loved the idea of ingesting immediate inspiration. Why wait for it to occur naturally when there are pharmaceuticals? Many a painting, song, or short story rose up out of these drug hazes. But speed seemed to generate equal amounts of madness and creativity, and if I didn't know when to stop the chaos side effects would overwhelm all rational thought. Depending on how well I gauged my lines and hit my mark, I ran an equal risk of a good meth high turning me into either a prolific artist or a homicidal maniac.

      Sometimes I'd ride my motorbike up to the top of Buena Vista Park and smoke a fat one. From the top of the hill I could see the whole Bay Area laid out before me like some enchanted land in a pulp fantasy novel. The fading afternoon sun made the distant interlocking towns and cities across the Bay glow golden and warm. The Pacific was a fluffy bed of cotton spilling slowly inland. I'd stand there watching the fog steadily infest San Francisco, a huge obliterating urban virus. Close on the retreating heels of the sun, the ocean woven mist slowly erased the city. I'd watch one neighborhood after another disappear. The pot I sucked into my lungs was like a smaller fog spreading through my body. Some nights I'd stay there till the cold wet cotton completely swallowed the sun and the skies grew dark. By that point the hilltop I stood on was little more than an island in a cool white sea. I started my motorbike and dove in.

      Friday nights often had an underwater feel, and it wasn't just because I frequently drank enough beer to fill a swimming pool. Large doses of psychedelics made me hallucinate I was navigating a liquid world, humidity growing so thick the atmosphere had coagulated to water, the Haight transformed into a big aquarium where drug-addicted amphibians like me navigated the waterways and sunken bars in search of big fish and kicks. Maybe that's why my hangovers the next day left me feeling like a hooked carp flopping around airless on the splinters of a dry dock.

      Every day degenerated further into a constant state of fear and paranoia. Small gray and white tingles of light shimmered in the edges of my sight. Speed was like a parasite slowly eating my mind, a white worm chewing away at gray matter. A deadly virus ingested line by line. The jams down in the basement lasted for hours. We'd go in there in the afternoon and by the time we came out again the sun had risen on the next day. Of course, the symphony of chemicals in our veins was almost as loud as the noise we were creating: orchestrations of beers, joints, speed, and hallucinogens—a trembling, sleepless reality.

      After four hours, another four rails, and a steady creek of beers you couldn't even feel your fingers or the muscles in your arms anymore. The thing is, those twelve to eighteen hour jam sessions always seemed so short, like it was all just one ten to fifteen minute