Wake Up and Smell The Beer. Jon Longhi

the sound and it was all one big cosmic circle. I wonder how many pieces of my brain are still down in that basement, stored back in the moldy darkness with the mummified cats, squirrels, and blown-out old amplifiers that were fried at all-night jam sessions and parties.

      We inherited more old music equipment than a pawnshop. Our basement jams were a steady parade of drunken strangers and one night stand musicians. People would say they'd be back to pick up their amp the next day and just never return. Some of them were probably so fucked up they couldn't remember the address of where they'd played, others were so drunk they couldn't even remember that they had jammed and from their point of view the musical equipment had dematerialized and just wasn't there anymore. Maybe they reported it as stolen when it had simply been misplaced. This kind of idiocy supplied us with quite a collection of noise-generating machines for nearly nightly sound orgies.

      There was one year at 666 where I did speed every day, sleeping no more than four or five hours at a stretch any time during that entire year. In my constant speed freak existence sleep had become a series of short catnaps, never getting down deep enough to reach the depths where the schools of dreams swim. As a result, life was an endless consciousness, an immortal alertness till everything became boring and gray. But eventually my dreams (such persistent things) began to worm their way back into the drug's maniacal rationality. I began to see things, imagine things. The world felt filled with vast conspiracies, all out to get me. Life became surreal and creepy. It took all of my mental strength just to keep it together. Every day was an increasing struggle against madness and paranoia.

      Speed had once been so productive and now I just couldn't get anything done. Days at a time were spent locked in my room doing lines, jacking off to pornos on the VCR till my penis was bloody and raw, fantasizing that my body was so polluted that my liver was swelling like a balloon full of pus. I imagined it bloating out my abdomen and any day it would explode, spraying a hail of pus loogies on hapless passersby. My liver was so full of drugs that after I died, dealers could cut it out and sell it by the gram on Haight Street. Chewing on a chunk would give the user a variety of highs, tripping and speeding at the same time. In fact, the more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that the tissues of my liver were probably so rarified that they'd be the perfect drug. On desperate nights when I had run out of weed and speed I was tempted to cut my liver out and eat it myself. If nothing else, it would be a good way to recycle the drugs I had taken the week before.

      Such a drug-filled existence had its share of strange characters drifting through, never hanging around for too long before moving on. Most only stayed as long as the latest stash lasted. It was like 666 was just a weigh station for people on their way down and out. A one night stand for the chemically deranged, quickly hurrying on in search of their own personal abyss.

      I don't think I ever saw Fast B.J. Eddy and his sidekick Dave Streak when they weren't on speed. They buzzed around our apartment like hummingbirds for one six-month period that went by in the blink of an eye. Any room they were in had white lines being chopped somewhere. Meth followed them around like an infestation of fleas. One night Dave Streak chopped a half-gram into two monstrous lines that he sucked up each nostril in a single snort. In a single night Dave and B.J. could do a pile of speed that would keep anyone else flying for a month. They were always excited, rushing about in a frantic state, engaged in a number of minor projects that were always abandoned for newer more important projects before a single original project was completed. They left behind a complicated, half-assembled wreckage.