J. T. Hilltop
The moment I saw the shit eating grin on Kens face I knew he had scored something special. My heart was racing even before any kind of chemical assistance would kick in. Will it be some opium streaked black hash? Some wheelchair gold weed or Thai stick? Whatever it was I knew we were about to embark on an adventurous ride somewhere. “Yo, JT. Check this out Bro, my cousin Jerry just came from Brooklyn with this.” Ken passed me a small tinfoil package, “Here man lets do a line.” I opened up the packet and noticed a familiar white powder, but it seemed almost wet. “What is it man, some super coke or something?” Ken chuckled, “no no no man, this is fucking powdered THC, Jerry just calls it T. Its like all the good shit from weed all packed into this powder without smoking. You and me are gonna see just how powerful it is.”
Ken used me as a barometer for his drugs because like him I have like a natural ability to metabolize drugs and can normally handle at least a half a hit more than most kids. If someone did one hit of Blue Cheer we did two. So if it freaks us out he dials it back or warns his customers how far to push it and if it doesn‘t get us jazzed he knows its weak shit. Carrie and I had been doing a lot of coke lately and frankly I wasn’t really digging it that much. I’d rather smoke a joint, eat a couple of ludes, and then just have sex or something. But everyone was chasing the coke high. This new T powder could be a welcome change, a new drug. I took the square piece of mirror from the table, poured out the powder, then went through the awesome ritual of chopping and forming two thick and two thin equal sized lines of the powder. Ken passed me a rolled up twenty dollar bill so I placed one end up my nose and bent over sniffing the first line like professional Dyson. Tilting my head back I dipped my fingers in my beer and dripped some into my nostrils forcing the residue further into my sinus cavity. It burnt a little bit and had a kind of chemical taste but it walloped me instantly at the back of my head turning it numb. I repeated the same processes on the second line passing the mirror to Ken. My nose hairs probably disappeared running away in flames but my brain would not be registering any pain. I felt it going right to the back of my cranium tickling my cerebellum.
It took about fifteen seconds for the inside of my head to explode. A mushroom cloud erupted in my brain forcing my skull to grow like five inches to compensate for the euphoric growth. I imagined my forehead like a Cro-Magnon. Dead brain cells were being piled up in brain cell body bags by the endoplasmic reticulum synapse police as what was left of my sanity began triaging the remaining frazzled yet live cells. I got up to walk but my feet and legs had filled up with helium so I couldn‘t feel the ground. As I closed my eyes and tilted my head back I visualized walking, or rather floating in someone’s garden. The garden was beautiful full of running streams, fruit tees, and flowers. It seemed as though it should be familiar but I couldn’t ever remember being there before. None the less I wanted to walk through it until I noticed the paths were lined with what I thought was cooked spaghetti. The pasta began slithering and hissing as it morphed into snakes. It felt like two people were watching me and I began chuckled thinking I must be in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve wondering who the fuck I was. I did however realize I was tripping and needed to master this new high so I focused as best I could. I opted to try and negotiate a walk through the garden. The helium continued to fill up in my legs. It was as though I needed to be tethered like the balloons at a Macys parade or I may float away. I took a few steps forward without feeling my feet on the ground but going forward on complete faith that I still knew how to walk and the floor would happily meet my unfeeling feet. Everything looked distorted to the point of surrealism. Dimensions came and went or piggy backed on each other leading to total confusion. On top of that apparently some of the helium was escaping because as Ken spoke to me he sounded like Theodore or Alvin from the old Chipmunks cartoon. The world had morphed into slow motion, or maybe stop motion it was hard to discern.
A squeaky mouse voice whispered in my ear, “JT, I’m too fucking high man. I can’t fucking move.” Then the squeaker began laughing. I looked over at Ken and his mouth was laughing but his eyes were like fixed, open but staring into nothingness and registering no emotion. He was seated in a multi colored cushioned rocking chair that was hovering a foot above the floor. Except for his laughing mouth he looked like he was frozen solid. Somehow I made my way over to him, “Are you okay Bro?” I think I was swaying, like a weeble that wobbles but doesn’t fall down but I can’t say for sure. Ken stopped laughing, “I think I’m a wax statue.” For two seconds that seemed like sixty we both thought about what he said and broke out laughing. I laughed so hard I had to sit down, if only I could figure out where a chair was. It took us somewhere in the vicinity of forty five minutes to regain our composure. Or maybe it was two days, that was how high we were.
Once I was able to maintain a lucid thought I realized all the hallucinating I had been doing. Ken was back in that green recliner, I had legs, and I had visited the Garden Of Eden. Best hallucinations ever, we found a new drug and it was beyond groovy. But this shit was definitely way strong so it had to be cut with some mannitol. I knew instantly our entire town would put the cocaine on hold and get into this new THC.
TBC
Epilogue. T became the new drug of choice, it was like being more stoned than you had ever been before without falling asleep. After about six to eight months reports of kids being hospitalized after using powdered THC and becoming paralyzed, like frozen. It seemed someone had adulterated the chemical by adding something far more dangerous and it quickly fell out of fashion. Much to my dismay cocaine once again became to drug of choice at bars. I didn’t dig coke too much because you only got one good rush from coke on the first hit then spent the rest of the night trying to relive it until your mouth hurt from grinding your teeth. Not to mention the paranoia it caused. None of that however deterred me from putting as much of it up my nose as I could afford. We invented snake lines which were the longest white powdered lines possible but it still had people going crazy looking for more. I continued snorting even though I didn’t particularly care for coke because it was still a drug and the rush of doing illegal shit was addictive. The shrinks later on would tell me I suffered from an addictive personality disorder but I still think like most kids I was just always looking for kicks, I just had a bigger sweet tooth for the forbidden than most. Either way my mantra back then was most definitely “I wanna a new drug.”
Terrapin - The Journey 