The Book of Drugs Read Online Free PDF Page B

need this, that they’d buy into the fantasy?
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    (Years later, I came back with my friend Sally. We told everybody we were brother and sister, despite the fact that we looked nothing alike, so she could fuck Jamaican dudes without suffering questions. She charged everything to an American Express card that her mom had gotten her strictly for emergencies. Every morning at 7 AM a girl claiming to be the sister of the fake-Rasta she was sleeping with—and renting a scooter for—would knock on the door, claim that she worked at the place they ate at the other night, and will you please sign this AmEx slip again, I messed it up again, please sign the slip again or I’ll lose my job?
Blearily, Sally always signed. She discovered a month later, when she got the bill, she’d been taken for five grand.)
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    I had gotten a job driving an ice cream truck. It started on Monday, so I came back a Sunday earlier than the three girls. I decided to smuggle some of this terrible weed back in my sock.
    At JFK, we deplaned into a hallway. The cops told us to stand single file. A flight from Lithuania landed right behind us, and its passengers ambled down towards customs unmolested. In the furthest reaches of this endless corridor, a door opened, and a cop with a tiny dog came out. The panting terrier scuttled down the line, stretching the leash to its utmost. The dog passed me. Stopped a few feet behind me. It barked.
    â€œGood boy!” said the cop.
    The terrier bounded a few yards ahead of me and barked again.
    â€œGood boy!” said the cop.
    They let us through. I was almost tearful with gratitude. I went to pick up my guitar at baggage claim and went up to a cop to ask where the luggage for the Air Jamaica flight was.
    The cop was leaning against a wall. When I said, “Excuse me,” he straightened up with a start. He pointed towards a carousel, looking me directly in the eyes.
    I was chatting with a middle-aged lady about where I went to school when a fat guy in a black t-shirt, flanked by uniformed cops, walked up to me holding a badge. They took me into a side room.
    Good vacation tale for that tourist lady, I thought. The teenager she was chatting with turned out to be a drug smuggler.
    I envisioned myself getting raped in jail.
    They opened my rucksack and shook the contents out. My guitar case was bound with silver duct tape; they took a box cutter and cut through the tape, slicing the clasps off with it. The fat guy
in the black t-shirt patted me down, grabbed my balls. As his hands moved down to my ankles, my sight went blurry. The bag of weed had gathered in the arch of my foot.
    â€œTake off your hat,” he said. He shook it out, smelled it.
    â€œTake off your shoes,” he said. Banged them against a table to shake whatever was in there loose.
    A long blank space of fear. Then:
    He didn’t ask me to take off my socks.
    â€œThe dog makes mistakes,” he said.
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    Delirious with my luck, hugging the guitar case with the sliced-off clasps so the guitar wouldn’t fall out, I went back to Betty’s place, where Seth was crashing. She lived on East Tenth Street, which at the time was an open-air market for dime bags of weed. On every stoop were four guys whispering: smoke, sinse, smoke smoke, sinse, smoke.
    Seth demanded the weed. We packed it into Betty’s roommate’s bong and allowed ourselves to believe it was the best weed we’d ever smoked.
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    That summer, I’d get up at 5 AM and drive the delivery truck, heading up First Avenue as the sun came up, listening to the Stone Roses, or Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston . I was bringing gourmet ice cream to restaurants before they opened.
    Heartbreak, new to me, was surreal. I was in tremendous pain, which I regarded in disbelief. How can this be happening to me? Can something really hurt this much?
    When Betty got back, she and Seth split on a bus trip, traveling through the South, then