Noah's Ark

It’s good to be clean again. It’s been awhile. When I get clean I can focus better. My head seems clearer. I can actually think straight, and when I’m not actively thinking my mind keeps going. My memory comes back to me in tangents now, I’m remembering things from the past that I haven’t thought about in years. Just now I was thinking about that one time at the Metrodome.

My mother’s business had rented out the entire Metrodome, where the Minnesota Twins play, for a family work function. They had all sorts of entertainment for kids, huge brightly colored county fair stuff. I brought my friend Noah with me, and he brought a bottle of vodka. We were rollerblading around the outside of the stadium, where all the concession stands stood, closed for now. I don’t know about Noah, but I was drunk. I was swerving on my skates, crashing into walls. We overturned trashcans and destroyed condiment stands. The usual stuff kids my age did. We rolled in circles always coming back to the same spots, the same dark concession stands.

After a while Noah slowed his— our pace. It was not out of fatigue but from interest. It was a kind of interest I had yet to grow accustomed to. The girls were dressed in low cut shirts of pale pastels, which seemed sort of off compared to the matching black makeup they wore. I don’t really remember their names, they both started with M though, Mary or Maggie or something.

I usually avoided girls. They didn’t relate to anything in my life really, except maybe alcohol, because everyone drank. In the narrow world of adolescence I lived in then, girls didn’t really have a place. But Noah lived in an increasingly different world, one that my father would warn me about, or threaten me, depending on how late it was. He always would give me these long diatribes against people who smoked cigarettes, and stayed out late, against people who wore or were black.

Noah flirted with them as we rolled slowly along, less destructive now. He smiled, asked them questions, and looked them in the eyes. I stayed stiff, my fingers fidgeting. I would catch the occasional glance from one of the two girls, but would always quickly look away. I answered questions and picked up on Noah’s queues, but otherwise remained in the background.

I was happy when Noah suggested we stop skating and move into the dome. The air was always strangely fresh and perfectly calm, trapped under the whiteness of the canvas covering. Noah and I were always fiercely competitive, especially when it came to drinking or basketball, but everything else as well. One of the blow-up structures was an obstacle course. There were two identical paths for two different people. You dove through a tube, climbed over a tangle of nets, swung by a rope over a pit of multicolored squishy squares, climbed a wall and claimed victory with the push of a button.

In competition with Noah, I felt more in my element. I waved at the girls, promising them victory, and winked at the smaller one who had taken a liking to me. Noah and I prepared to race. I was readying myself to dive through the tube; I had to get off to a quick start if I wanted to win against Noah. I imagined we were on the field and it was October 27^th, 1991; Game Seven of the World Series against the Atlanta Braves. The entire stadium was packed and cheering. They were all watching us.

My dad and I watched Game Six together. I still remember John Gordon announcing the final score: “Puckett swings and hits a blast! Deep left center! Way back! Way back! IT'S GONE!!! The Twins go to the seventh game! Touch 'em all Kirby Puckett! Touch 'em all Kirby Pucket!” My dad was overexcited and overturned the plate of snacks my mom had arranged so nicely on the table. He opened two beers and handed me one, it was the first drink I ever had. Somehow he got us tickets to the next game and we witnessed history as two of the myriad of fans filling the stands for Game Seven.

And as the attendant blew her whistle, I imagined that crowd cheering me on as I dove through the first tube. However this is where things changed. The tube was designed for smaller children, I guess I was getting too old for these kinds of things, and as I dove through the rubbery tube it grabbed my pants and boxers, pulling them to my ankles. When I scrambled to my feet there was a brief moment of recognition before I was able to pull up my garments. The air seemed cold instead of fresh, and I could feel a breeze where earlier there was none. The two girls laughed hysterically. Once I got my pants up the race was already over, Noah was too far ahead to catch up to. But I finished the race anyway, struggling to get over and thru the obstacles with one hand holding up my pants. Noah didn’t realize what had happened until the two girls told him. The smaller of the two, made a remark about the size of my recently exposed parts. I felt a pang of pride rise from the embarrassment and defeat I was feeling. I smiled and blushed, looking down. She gave me a kiss on the cheek.

All four of us snuck away after that, I was embarrassed and didn’t want to look at anybody and they just didn’t want anybody looking at them. We explored storage areas beneath bleachers and took turns taking slugs of vodka. We found an unlocked door, and roamed the private hallways of the player’s facilities. Eventually we made our way to the Twin’s locker room, finding refuge from the distant guards patrolling outside. We drank more, inspecting the contents of the player’s lockers. We found Kirby Puckett’s honorary locker, the same locker he used when they won the World Series. Years later I learned that they replaced his locker with another, the image of a great man with one case of sexual harassment on his record too much for the franchise to handle. Noah’s father had had similar trouble, but he didn’t face up to the law but to a marriage.

As I picked through lockers, looking for something of worth or interest, I smelled the sweet fragrance of burning flowers. I turned around and Noah and the girls were lighting a joint. This was the first time I had seen weed being smoked. Noah had once shown me his parents stash and I was unimpressed by the pile of dark green. My first instinct was to think of my fathers threats. Then I thought of the relatively new feeling of being noticed by girls, of myself standing exposed atop a giant blown up bubble, and of the kiss on my cheek.

Without words I took the burning paper and plant that was handed to me and took several drags, passing the joint to the left. I managed to not cough the first time, the girls didn’t even know I had never smoked before. Noah smiled at me knowingly. As we passed around the joint, the smoke rising and expanding, my head spun in circles as well, as if I was rollerblading around my brain, overturning trashcans and destroying condiment stands.

That’s when it all started. People say weed is a gateway drug, but that’s bullshit. People are the gateway. I was introduced, more often then not by Noah, to various circles of people whose daily activities were centered around drugs. Every one of these groups had their own personality, most of the time characteristic of the drugs they used. The kids who ate prescription uppers, and later the methheads, were always on top of everything, falling apart physically while their minds raced, along with their mouths, spouting off facts and stories that somehow seemed to hold significance in the aura that surrounded them.

Once I stayed awake for over a week. I had to take five Ambien and drink a blended fruit smoothie with half a bottle of Zanax before I could stop trembling and fall asleep.

The people that liked hallucinagens were an unpredictable bunch. You never really knew where they were, or what they saw when they looked into your eyes. Some were so far gone that their bodies had begun to hate their minds. Some were still holding onto reality, even if their perspectives were twisted, often lost in the depths of their minds or in the middle of conversation. These people never lasted too long, they either got out or took the plunge down the rabbit hole. The group was more a composite of individuals, while they occupied the same physical space, their minds were often in different dimensions entirely.

One time I tripped shrooms so hard I couldn’t piss because I thought my dick was a monster.

Another time I hooked up with some older guys, who fed me reds and blues, artifacts of a previous drug generation, along with too many tabs of acid. I was driving them across the country, and the road began to pulse with my breathing, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of my lungs. When I dropped them off we smoked a bowl of some crystalline substance they called DHT, which was like nothing I had ever experienced, I became the room and looked down at myself and the others from every perspective imaginable. Later they told me this particular drug mimicked a chemical that is only released in the brain when you are born, when you die, and when you give childbirth.

Every time I met a new group of people and shared with them their drug of choice and the experiences that resulted, I felt I was becoming more aware of myself. All these circles of people brought out different part of my personality. Noah always seemed to be one step ahead of me though, he always knew everyone I was just meeting, and he already had tried all the drugs I was being introduced to.

One time I woke up, found my entire bottle of pills, an extensive collection, gone with my memory of the previous night. My nose and throat were coated with crushed chemicals, and my mind reeled.

One month I snorted so much ecstasy that I got two black eyes from all the abuse to my nasal passageways. From what I remember it was the best month of my life.

I tried a lot of drugs and developed my tastes. I tried more pharmaceuticals than I could name, found out which ones worked in what situations. I moved from weed to hash oil, coke to crack, Adderol to meth, Vicaden to Oxycotin, and opium to heroin. But I was never a fiend; I cooked my own crack from pure, always washed my crystal, and always smoked black tar while everyone else mainlined. I knew I never had a serious problem because I never had trouble quitting when I had to. For example, every spring while I was in high school, baseball season, I would quit everything for the team. Mental clarity was necessary in this game, especially because I never wore a cup; sometimes I thought it was more out of fear more than commitment.

I remember the regional championship of my freshman year in high school. Through a series of flukes I was starting. It took a torn ligament, an academic probation and a last minute car accident, for me to be playing in that game. I was in way over my head. Varsity baseball was a completely different game. They told me I was playing as I lackadaisically dressed in the back of the locker room, that our first baseman had been in an accident on the way to the game and that I would have to take his place. Fortunately I hadn’t yet partaken in the usual flask Noah and I shared before each game where we sat on the bench after warm-ups.

The whole game I played well, without errors, although I struck out every time I went to the plate. The game came down to the last inning, we were up one and had to hold our lead. There was one out, a man on third and on deck the best slugger in our conference. He had already hit a home run this game, and I could see from where he was warming up that he was itching for another.

I was in a situation where I knew I was the most inexperienced player on the field, my mind raced as I thought of every possible situation that could occur, what my responsibilities would be. I had a heightened sense of clarity, both mental and physical, as I pounded my fist into my glove. It was almost like a drug, an altered state of mind, the importance of the game and my unproven position among my senior teammates that I imagined were just waiting for me to mess up.

When the ball came to me, I was ready for anything. The curveball came in unusually slow, the batter waited and at the last minute swung. At the crack of the bat I dove to my right. The ball was not much more than a streak of white in my mind when I made the decision to throw myself in the air. It was one of those picturesque moments when the body hangs suspended just above the ground, completely outstretched. The ball slammed into the back of my glove, two outs. The man on third thought he saw the ball go through, as did everyone else, and took off for home. When he realized his mistake he turned back in a flurry of dirt. I don’t remember exactly how I got to my feet, but I did, and fast, fast enough that when I threw the ball as hard as I could, it beat the runner sliding back into third. Third out, game over. Everyone cheered, watching me as I ran off the field, followed by the entire team. That was the best moment of my entire life.

It’s good to be clean again, to be able to think back on my life in this way. Usually my head is never clear enough to remember anything. My thoughts, when altered, seemed to focus on the future; whatever drugs I was on steering my thoughts to the present and beyond. When I think about the past it’s usually a past that didn’t happen, but could have. When I smoked a lot of weed I thought about the past in this way, then I switched to hash oil.

But thinking back, all these drugs have really structured my life, how I interact with people, how I judge them, I would even go as far to say who I know as well. For example the only person from my high school baseball team that I am still in contact with is Noah, and coincidentally he was the only one on the team who dabbled besides me. Another example would be the love of my life, who I met through some people I know who distributed weed.

Noah and I were hanging in a back alley, waiting. Lynn, who I didn’t really know at the time, was waiting as well, mediating a meeting between Noah and I and some friends of hers. We were just sitting in the alley on the hood of my car, looking at the stars, smoking bowls. Noah and I were often a good theatrical team and we started a conversation about weed and how much we smoked. We told her that we only smoked about a half eight between the two of us every week.

“Damn, that’s crazy,” She said, I still remember the exact words, “I smoke like a half eighth a day.”

Which was really nothing, we probably smoked a quarter or more between the two of us every day. We let the joke run for a while though, until after Lynn’s friends came and went. When we finally told her she was in disbelief, she kept laughing and saying how everything made more sense now. Before she left, at Noah’s urging, I walked up to the window of her car and asked her for her number.

After a while, once I got into harder circles and Lynn pulled herself out of them altogether, I would always have to come back to that first joke Noah and I played on her. When I would come back to our apartment all fucked up I would usually lie to her about what and how much I did. When she would find out what actually happened, and she always did, I would pass it off as a joke. “Just like how we met,” I would say.

Thinking back on all this is really a lot to handle. Now I find myself pulling up Lynn’s number on the phone, staring at it. Sometimes I’ll press ‘call’, but then ‘cancel’ before it actually goes through. I’ve been drinking pretty heavily lately.

Memory is a tricky thing, it attacks you when you least expect it, it sooths only when you don’t really need it. Clarity and cleanliness only makes it worse sometimes, forcing memories of the past when I could be giving in to instant gratification, losing myself in the present. Now I can’t stop these thoughts from assaulting my mind. I can’t stop my mind as it searches for memories, and I definitely can’t change my memories as they have already happened.

But it’s okay, as I fiddle with my phone, pulling up Lynn’s number again and again, Noah calls. He’s on his way here right now. He just made the trip up north we used to make together. His trunk was full of every drug you could imagine, pairs of each for each of us to try, a veritable ark of altered thoughts. Enough of this sobriety, I’ve had enough of the past for a lifetime.