You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Drugs.”
The job sounded perfect: bartending a gay sex party in a private loft in Tribeca. If I had to be stuck in New York for New Year’s Eve – a very depressing thought after having spent four New Year’s Eves in Cape Town - then I might as well work, earn some money, and just maybe have some fun. There [...]
It was a chance encounter a few years ago in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side where I peeked into the shadowy universe of the “junky.” After the meeting I invited Harry to my office to continue to tell his story which goes back thirty years when the island on 72nd Street and Broadway was known as “needle [...]
Six months out of college, with an undergraduate degree in English literature and still operating on the assumption that my real life had not yet begun, I was offered a job conducting interviews for a market research company. The firm occupied a converted warehouse in a Garden City industrial park, but most of my assignments were to be "random intercepts," [...]
We are driving in from the country, out where we go to school, a little town in a valley and a school on the hill. We come in from the west, over the Bridge with the sun sliding around the tip of lower Manhattan, mocking the Lady’s little torch, basking in its own reflection off the river. It’s autumn, an [...]
So I found myself on the corner of 45th St and 8th Ave, having arrived ten minutes ago in New York City, October 4th, 1986. I was pretty much sitting in the center of the biggest glut of seed you could find per square inch in any city in the world. Wide-eyed crack heads floated past after scoring at local [...]
The bouncer pulled the door. Daylight, quite a shock. How long were we unconscious, the Important Visiting Friend and I? We squinted our way out into the day, me very reluctantly, him, I recall, more bravely. He wanted to see a movie, as usual. Had he planned to see this film, memorized the location and times the day before? Or [...]
The story starts with two things about me. First thing: I love coffee. I drink coffee every morning. When I gave up caffeine for several months last year, I brewed myself a mug of decaf every morning and called it my "coffee." Second thing: I habitually run late. Not catastrophically late, just late enough to feel a little pressured. These [...]
Day talked about those skintight hologram jeans for weeks. It was 1978, and they'd look nice for shooting heroin in the basement lavatory at CBGB, especially in the snazzy lilac color with the lime iridescent overlay, and they'd look nice later--complementary--when she turned blue outside on the sidewalk. The jeans cost $65.00, a considerable sum for 1978, and they were [...]
My mother's narrow little medicine chest is a joke to her. It's quaint. It's for amateurs. She keeps her medicine in the kitchen cabinet and the kitchen drawers and the candy dishes. Her canisters for coffee and flour and sugar are filled with Lipitor and Propranalol and Prozac. She could collapse from overmedication at any moment, anywhere in her condo, [...]
June 14th 2006 3:30 pm Philadelphia "Who are these fucking people? They've been following me for years. Why the hell are they bent on exposing me as goddamned fraud?" I did a little research of my own and was disturbed to find that they were not only my closest friends, but my family as well. I called New York from [...]
Jake's girlfriend broke up with him, so he started driving and turned up eleven hours later at my apartment. We were the kind of friends who'd been close once but who didn't speak often anymore, owing not to any particular falling out, but to the passage of time and a mutual inability to put any effort into the maintenance of [...]
In high school I was friends with two identical twins named Dan and Guy. They had long hair and beards and Dan played the Harmonica. They both did many drugs and sold drugs and got sent away to rehab a bunch of times. I was a little in love with both of them, Guy especially. He didn't say much and [...]
They are like a set of bees fighting over a flower. The waitress waits as long as she can before taking our orders because she knows there is an order to everything, that I was the sort of homecoming queen who slept with half the football team before a Saturday night game. Used as I am to this sort of [...]
What if books are the new crack? In the 80's, Bed-Stuy had crack. Now, we've got literature. The New York Times publishes plenty of articles on the fluctuations in Bed-Stuy's crime rate, and on the neighborhood's gentrification, but they are not reporting on this: literature. Perhaps it's not fit to print. I make my modest, recent-college-grad home in good old [...]
Heather stopped and pulled down her pants. Adam and I stood in the shadow of a large building on the still Brooklyn street, allowing no person to see. Urine trickled down the contaminated sidewalk as we left. The journey commenced, and on we walked to the worst place in New York to buy coke, Kokies. After being permitted to enter [...]
That morning I got up in the afternoon. My friend Micki came from 204th/Post Avenue, from her man's crib complaining about his small penis saying, "My baby brother's got a bigger dick than his!" And I had to get up and shower, leaving her in my room and I took the loofa with me because I scrub the dead skin [...]
1973. Marvin was the photo editor at the Brooklyn College student newspaper. I liked him a lot, and when, in 1997, after I had an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, he saw it, and trying to locate me, called my mother, he described himself as an “old friend.” Yet I recall hanging out with him only in [...]
Middlemarch was a bitch: all lace and wayside chapels and conversations hissed behind gloved hands. Eliot's prose was denser than a Dorset garden, and we were all lost. All except for Todd, the grinning mook genius in British Lit class, who would interrupt the torpor with irreverent debates. We craved the distraction. It was the Spring of 1980 at Syracuse [...]
One of the sayings where I work is that we see them all. Creaky old dope fiends with nine lives and wrecked veins, skinny young Africans with silky French accents, and lots of distracted crack smokers with rattling lungs. We also see the occasional sweet matronly mami from Puerto Rico or a doe-eyed young innocent from Harlem. But for the [...]
Department of Open Minds The William Alanson White Institute, founded in 1943 by Clara Thompson, among others, is known for its interpersonal approach to analysis. The interpersonal approach suggests that the patient is part of a complex social network that includes the therapist, and therefore the patient’s relationship to the analyst is less formal and more intimate than traditional approaches [...]
My girlfriend, Amanda, and me, and her friend Heather were at Nacho Mama's, drinking. It had just gotten cold. My friend Sal came in. He had been drinking, too. Heather brought up liquor, how old it had become, how tired she was of it, and asked him if he had any drugs. He said he had some K up in [...]
Mr. Chancellor at the Algonquin bar in New York, before Amsterdam’s influence set in. I am much embarrassed to reveal that in 60 years I have never tried pot. I remember about 30 years ago being at a supper party in Rome when the person next to me at table passed me what I thought was a lit cigarette. I [...]
In the summer of 1968 I had an apartment on East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. The rent was cheap, and it was on the top floor of a tenement which meant there was a sooty patch of skylight in my bathroom and a tub with feet where I could sit and contemplate the black starless sky. Decorating [...]
Twice Told Tales is a feature that asks authors to revisit previously published pieces and write a brief introduction from their current vantage point. Cycles of Love, Sin, and Redemption at the Corner Bistro was originally published in September, 2000. The introduction, below, was published in May, 2018. You get to a certain age and many of the most vivid moments [...]
Junkies are ghost-slinking around the block, looking for their man, banging on window gates and ringing doorbells. I scan their eyes for some glimpse of what their lives are like, staring at their rumpled, smack-hunting clothes, matted hair and mottled skin. They only care about taking care of business, up their nose or in their arms, legs, eyes anywhere there's [...]
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