An avid user from the start, I now was truly committed. My behavior became reckless and spiraled quickly toward a life that matched my ideas of existence in terms of heartless insanity. In other words, my response to being overwhelmed by the deep void was to leap into it. I’d traipse back from bars in East St. Louis, alone, drunk and stoned, in the early hours of the morning. Several weeks were spent in a housing project with a group of locals I had nothing in common with except an appreciation for freebase cocaine (this, in the days just before crack), while “their” women and children hung
...more
