The Book of Drugs Read Online Free PDF

things Sekou said in class:
    â€œDo you talk to yourself? You should.”
    â€œYou speak to the poem, and sometimes the poem says, ‘You’re trying to build a house, but I’m not a house, I’m a bird.’”
    â€œThis poem is a life-support system for one killer line. Lose the poem, use the line somewhere else.”
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    I walked in the graduation ceremony, but never got my diploma: I owed the library $11. I thought it was more poetic to not get your diploma for being $11 short. Plus, I needed the $11. My bank balance was usually under $10, which meant I couldn’t get money out of the ATM, so, humiliatingly, I had to go up to the teller’s window and withdraw $4.50. At least once a week I had to decide between a pack of cigarettes and a container of hummus. Usually I chose the smokes and stayed hungry. I figured out that if I could just fall asleep, I wouldn’t be hungry when I woke up the next day.
Sometimes I gave in and bought a sandwich, but when I was sated I would be overcome with buyer’s remorse.
    Seth and I considered doing the dine-and-dash at a tourist trap known for its tub-sized blue drinks and signature charred mass of onion rings, but we argued for an hour about which one of us would get to stroll out of the restaurant first, and anyway, we got lucky, and were taken out by a girl from school with a credit card. She bought us Indian food and two packs of Marlboros; she wanted friends.
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    I fell in love with a girl named Betty with a superabundance of red curls. She was my idea of perfect. It wasn’t so much ardor as a feeling that I’d arrived. At last, I was with an unimpeachably beautiful girl! I meant something in the world! But there was something about the keenness of my love for her that freaked her out; she dumped me the night before we went on a trip to Jamaica with her two roommates.
    â€œThanks for the great sex,” she said, offering a handshake.
    The four of us went to the evil little tourist town of Negril; me and three beautiful girls. We were broke: what we didn’t spend on marijuana and a windowless one-room, two-bed shack we spent on a single shared plate of french fries each day. The two roommates slept in one bed, Betty and I in another. Lying there, blasted on the cheap weed, it was torture to feel her presence. I felt as if every tiny budge I made in the tiny bed was followed by a tiny budge from her, shifting away from me, as if it disgusted her to brush against my hip bone.
    We spent the days drinking mushroom tea, tripping, wandering the beach; hustler dudes came up to the three girls and me, singsonging to me in gorgeous Jamaican accents, “You have t’ree! Give me one!”

    Negril ran on two grey economies; one involved selling stuff on the beach to people who were too high to protest. They’d grab you by the arm and pull you towards their little stand selling shell necklaces. Fat ladies on the beach would grab the hair of passing white girls, starting to braid Bo Derek braids without a prompt. If the girl tried to pull away, they’d cry something like, “You have no respect for the Jamaican people!” There were a lot of white girls wandering around the beach with Bo Derek braids.
    Dudes with intense gazes would block your path as you were strolling and say, “I come from the hills. I got the good bud.” The weed was generally terrible—dry, yellow, and stemmy. We smoked a lot of it anyway, rolling massive spliffs of shitty pot that we told ourselves was the world’s greatest, we’re in Jamaica, right?
    The other industry was kids who came down from the hills to fuck middle-aged tourist women. The women rented them scooters and bought them clothes. These were less pure sexual transactions than sham romances; you’d see a flabby German tourist walking hand in hand with some washboard-abbed, nineteen-year-old guy pretending to be a Rastafarian. How desperately did they