Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent In terms of hard drugs, the worst shit I ever touched, worse than PCP, worse than cocaine, was crystal meth. No drug ever fucked me up more than that.
I’d been on binges with coke, where I’d be up for three days at a time, no sleep, just snorting coke, smoking cigarettes and weed. I wouldn’t eat much during these times and lost a lot of weight.
Meth, though, the first time I did it, and the only time, had me up for almost a week. And as luck would have it, this was around the start of the school year, my second year, at the little Quaker school.
To start the year, we’d go on this camping trip, one of a few we’d do annually, at a park way out in the Everglades.
It was splendid out there in the Glades, so scenic, such serene tropical beauty. Of course, we were too young to appreciate, or care much at all about the nature, and on these camping trips most of us would spend the whole-time fucking, drinking, doing drugs and basically being degenerates. For punks like us, a trip like this was bliss. Disneyworld for juvenile delinquents like me and my ilk.
I almost didn’t make it there. In fact, it would have been better if I hadn’t gone…
I’d been on a coke binge for a few days and had finally gotten to sleep when I awoke to my friend, Jimmy, banging on my door.
We had to go on the camping trip, he told me. I’d totally forgotten.
I got myself together, somewhat, and we headed out in my car, smoking weed from a small metal pipe as we drove there.
On the highway, being so fucked up, I almost lost control of the wheel and hit a road sign. It was a good thing Jimmy was alert enough to grab the wheel and right us, saving us from a terrible collision. Thinking back on that, since he saved our lives, I really should give him a pass on fucking my ex-girlfriend…
I was selling increasingly bigger quantities of drugs, around then, and had quit a part-time job I’d had at a record store (since it was starting to cost me money, being at that job, making me miss opportunities to sell drugs, though I did at least get lots of free CDs from the store, which was rad).
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent Realizing the lucrative business opportunity of being on a camping trip with a ton of young drug fiends, I prepared accordingly, and before leaving, I’d packed a shitload of small bags and a pound of weed, a few grams of coke, and brought a tiny bag of meth, which I’d not tried, but was looking forward to experimenting with.
When we got to the campsite, I sold the weed, at lightning speed, to my classmates. One of them was this girl, who’d lived near me and was going to ride to school with me that semester. Her dad had talked to me on the phone before I began taking her, I guess since she was a year or two younger, and I guess he wanted to see if I was “okay.”
I don’t remember any word of the conversation, except that it happened.
Having had his introduction to his daughter, when I met her at the campsite, I’d found quickly that she liked smoking weed, and we smoked together, in the girls bathroom, and she blew me in there and we fucked a couple times in the woods, her standing at a tree, her arms hugging it as I fucked her from behind, no condom, but I’d pulled out, came on her ass. (I’d learned my lesson about busting wads, rawdog, up in girls…)
(She, like the psychiatrist’s daughter, also had a tiny, flat ass, and wasn’t as pretty, had a slightly blockish, masculine face and short pink hair. But like the psychiatrist’s daughter, she was blessed with jiggly juice tits, and was sort of tall, like 5’8, with long, slim centerfold legs, and I liked that about her. Her pussy was tight and exquisite, shaped like a flower in bloom.) A new friend I’d made, Peter, and I smoked and snorted the meth, the first night of the camping trip.
It completely jolted me, the meth. Reminded me of coke, but stronger, more intense. I’d didn’t sleep a wink that night.
The next day I remember this idiot spastic kid who’d always wear an L.A. Dodgers hat and overalls. He’d declared proudly that he’d smoke cigarettes the entire camping trip, chain-smoke them, smoke every single minute of the trip, and the next morning we saw him carried away on a stretcher, from having nicotine poisoning, and as he was being put into the ambulance, we laughed and pointed
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent at him, earning one bespectacled elderly female teacher’s forceful condemnation of our thoughtlessness.
That second night, we had a campfire, and the meth I’d been smoking, along with weed and sleep deprivation were hitting me like slaps to the face and while I sat by the fire with my new drug friends and the tree-hugger girl, I began to see intense hallucinations in the fire.
I saw a cop car, on fire, smashing into a high-rise office building and blew up, and then people were being shot, people in business suits, being shot dead. I was seeing these businesspeople gunned down in streets around Brickell, Biscayne Bay by machine guns and handguns that were held by invisible forces, just guns floating, cutting through the air, shooting and blasting off randomly, the bloodied business people’s bodies dropping, piling into city streets. It was vivid, like the fire flames were a crystal ball…
I don’t remember anything else from that night. Other than being back in the girls bathroom, fucking the tree girl again, in a stall, her spread eagle atop a toilet.
The following morning, after breakfast, the headmaster of the school pulled me aside, behind a cabin, for a word in private. The headmaster was a rather creepy, squirrelly old fellow with these perpetually askew, narrow black-rimmed eyeglasses and always with a look on his face like he was trying to lift something heavy. I remember the old bird’d wear corduroys and flannel shirts no matter the weather or location. He usually was rather meek, so it surprised me when he approached me, speaking forcefully, with eyes of rage.
We stood in the shade, behind the wooden cabin, and he lashed out, spittle forming in the corner of his tiny mouth as he told me, directly, that he didn’t like me and didn’t want me in his school and that the only reason I’d been asked back was that a few of the teachers liked me.
Not a wonderful thing to say to a teen. Especially an “at-risk” teen.
(It really was doubly off-putting, upsetting in that he was generally so non-confrontational and quiet. So for him to act out, so out of character, act that way, it totally took me off-guard.)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I didn’t react well to it. Was quite shocked he’d said such words to me. At first, I didn’t say a word, didn’t know how to respond. I just stood there, behind that cabin, feeling like I got hit by a truck. It saddened me at first, to hear a teacher say what he did. But the sadness quickly shifted to anger. And I decided, fuck this shit, and gathered my things, went to my car and began to leave.
The headmaster saw me leaving, saw I was pissed and saw me telling the tree-girl about what’d happened, telling her that I was going to split. He called me over, possibly to smooth things over, but I was beyond reproach at this point. I was incensed, and I cursed him out, got in my car, spun the wheels loudly, cranked up the Gravediggaz’ “6 Feet Deep” and sped off, bass booming through the swamp.
(I’ll never forget the look on the headmaster’s face, one of shock, anger and helplessness. I remember his jaw quivering. He didn’t have the guts to speak back to me and had been cursed out in front of several students, which I’m guessing had probably never happened to him. The tree-hugger girl also stood frozen in shock, unsure of what to say or do.)
I was completely blitzed, driving off, to where, I didn’t know. I hadn’t slept much in weeks. I was angry, sleep deprived and fucked up on weed, coke, and meth, and, being a teen behind the wheel of a car, driving fast, on a twisting, small gravel road in the far reaches of the Glades, it wasn’t a good combination and didn’t augur to much of a positive outcome…
I didn’t get far before I crashed into a palm tree, putting a huge U-shaped dent in the front of my car.
One might think this was a bad thing, and it was, but it could have been far worse.
Another guy from the same school, years earlier, had also been driving fucked up on the same road (not sure if he also had an argument with the headmaster) but he’d skidded off the road and not hit a tree and instead his car plunged down into the swamp. He died.
Unlike the girl from my class earlier, who died from hitting a tree, this tree, likely, SAVED my life!
Incredibly, too (the Japanese sure can build an automobile!) my car was still able to be driven, and I made it to a service station next to the highway nearby. Right
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent as I pulled into the service station’s lot, the hood began billowing smoke and the car died.
I got a tow, about two hours from there to my house. The redneck truck driver and I didn’t say a word the whole time. I listened to the Gravediggaz’ first tape on my Walkman the whole way home. That and Bone Thugs were my favorites at the time…
When I got home, my mom, seeing the totaled car, completely flipped out, screamed at me so much that I stomped off, and I spent a couple days sleeping off the meth in my friend’s backyard (he was out of town). For a couple days, I lived like a bum in his backyard’s thicket of bamboo trees, palm trees, grass and flower bushes.
(During those days, I’d lived on a diet of donuts, McDonald’s, and had drunk urine a couple times, the first night I was there, when my sleep deprived, diseased mind told me that a demon named Saul was living inside me and that drinking piss would set it free. Once I’d finally slept, though, the voices silenced, and I didn’t drink any more piss.)
I came back home later and discovered that I was kicked out of the private school.
My mother had been forced to withdraw me or she’d lose the tuition money.
The school thought I was too out-of-control and couldn’t be part of the community there.
They were partially right, but I was upset to find out later that another kid, who’d gotten in trouble, equal amounts, more, even, though never argued with the headmaster, was given second chances, third chances, fourth and fifth, after being caught in many situations by the school, a couple involving him being found with drugs in his possession.
(I think, in reflection, I was truly an “at-risk” kid, and the school should have tried to help me. Sent me to rehab. Done something to intervene. Instead they simply turned their collective backs on me, probably out of spite from the headmaster for cursing him out. Obviously, I was in the wrong, but as an adult, looking back on it, that school failed me, failed to help a youth who desperately needed its help…)
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent I found out later, though, the reason the boy with a million chances had had all those chances. It was because he had been snitching out people to the headmaster, which is why a couple people the year before got expelled for various infractions.
And soon after I was kicked out, the snitch was again caught with a bag of weed, by the school, and told on everyone. I guess they demanded more names. The administration went in hard, too, several people were searched, kicked out of the school, and it seemed like the administration was a step ahead, knew way more than we’d have expected.
But the remaining stoners there smartened up. They stopped smoking weed at lunch, stopped bringing drugs to school. They’d instead smoke weed before and after school, or pop pills, drop acid, do drugs easy to conceal. It really is nearly impossible to stop a determined drug user. You’d think the world would have realized that by then, certainly by now...
The snitch, we discovered was a zit-faced ginger kid named Phillip, and he’d confessed his snitching to this chubby girl he was banging, who told everyone else later, after he’d stolen money from her.
(That chubby girl had gone to our school, but left after she had a baby, at home, in her bed. She’d hidden the pregnancy from everyone, and since she was plus-size, I guess it was easy for her to conceal the baby bump. Fortunately, she and the baby survived the ordeal, that bloody, morning mess of placenta and chaos, but she never returned to the school after that. I don’t know what happened to her. I did hear the baby was placed in foster care… And I don’t know if the baby was Phillip’s…)
Phillip’s idiocy didn’t stop at stealing money from girls and snitching on classmates, he’d later gotten caught selling weed at an Oasis concert, then snitched on his supplier, to avoid jail.
The supplier was a super-rich kid, this nerdy guy, who’d gone to our school. Based on his White Urkel appearance, I’d never have expected him to sell drugs, especially large quantities. This guy’s sprawling mansion got raided by the cops over Phillip’s snitching. But his parents had the cash, connections to get the case
Buffalo Bangkok: Juvenile Delinquent thrown out on a technicality, the mountain of weed the cops found inadmissible as evidence.
In the days following the raid, Phillip’s luck ran out. A crazed attacker in a ski mask ambushed Phillip in a parking lot, and beat him, savagely, nearly to death, with a baseball bat, left Phillip paralyzed from the waist down, in a wheelchair for life.
(I can’t say I know for sure it was the nerdy rich kid who hired the attacker, but I think it was... Although it could have been random. Or it could have been another person Phillip snitched on. But I suspect the nerdy kid since it happened immediately following the raid of his house, and because he easily had the cash to make it happen. Not to mention his family had the police connections to know who snitched. However, again, I can’t be certain, but for Phillip, as much as I hated him, I didn’t wish that on him. That incident definitely altered the course of his life, for sure…)
Soon enough, my house got raided by the cops too, but not because of Phillip.