Blow Me: An Examination
of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Cocaine
Dan can never remember when he falls asleep,
and this bothers him. If I don’t know when I fall asleep, he thinks, how do I
know I ever did fall asleep. And if I
never did fall asleep then how do I know I’m waking up in the real world? And
if the world around me isn’t real, then why the fuck can’t I fly?
When Dan woke up this particular morning, he
decided things would be different today. He didn’t make his bed. He didn’t
brush his teeth. He didn’t even give the ol’ life-sized emperor penguin statue
the ol’ cursory head rub. “Today,” Dan decided, “I would really like to try
some cocaine.”
Dan, after receiving advice from his friend
who was decidedly knowledgeable about this sort of thing, walked up the stairs
to the dealer’s suburban Chicago house. It was a nice house, particularly
undruggedly, and entirely devoid of that faintly bitter smell of blow Dan
imagined it would have. He thumped the knocker five times in quick succession, and
then twice more, each after a long pause.
This was, Dan’s friend had told him, code for “I have 300 bucks and need
a gram of coke,” but was probably closer to “please screw me over because I
have no idea what I’m doing.” A gram is usually only $60, and Dan’s friend
wasn’t a very close one. A business man, with his hair slicked back and face
clean-shaven, opened the door and invited him in.
Inside, Dan shifted from foot to foot,
glancing around at the expensive vases, the exquisite mahogany mantel, and the
various pieces of paisley patterned furniture. Dan himself was wearing a
Paisley tie, which made him vaguely uncomfortable. Both the furniture and the
tie were purple.
“So I, uh, heard you sell some drugs, I think,
maybe?”
“Yessir, we have acid, we have molly, and if
you really want an adventure, we even have some DMT. But the knocks said you
were here for coke, right?”
“Mmhmph!” Dan made a sound one would make if
one just vomited inside one’s mouth. He nodded and smiled, too, like the sound
and/or the vomiting wasn’t such a big deal.
“Well, I’m gonna let you in on a little
secret, but you have to promise not to tell anyone, alright?” More head
nodding, more smiling. “Okay, well a gram of coke is usually 300, but for a
limited time only, we have a special deal for first time customers: half off!
So, how much do you want?”
After a few more minutes of obligatory but
awkward conversation and long pauses, Dan walked out of the house with what he
determined to be roughly ten grams of “pure” cocaine.
The basement of Dan’s house was a dark
place, but he liked it: that’s where he kept his bedroom. He would say it was
warm in the winter and cool in the summer and, most importantly, there were no
windows. There were two main benefits to this; the first being that no one
could ever see into the basement and the other being that Dan had complete
control of the lighting. He tends to change the lightbulbs fairly often, from
one color to the next, such that one day the basement might look like a photographer’s
darkroom and the next be lit by blacklight, making seemingly everyone but Dan
self-conscious about the amount of glowing white on their clothes. This
particular morning Dan’s basement was cast in a ghastly orange glow. The glow
gave the cocaine a sort of caustic emphasis, momentarily making Dan
apprehensive. It might not be the lighting that makes the coke look dangerous,
Dan thought. But then he noticed that the life-sized emperor penguin statue,
too, became menacing, and decided that if something that adorable could look
that scary in the glow, the cocaine was probably a perfectly okay thing to do.
Pure euphoria was the only way you could
describe it. Dan’s heart rate shot for the stars, his hands were numb and
started aggressively vibrating, and his mouth became the Mojave. But he was
happy. So happy he could cry. So happy he didn’t care about the fact that he
would never be this happy again without the cocaine. Dan started running.
He ran down the street, whooping and
shouting and jumping and smiling at everyone he passed. He ran far longer than
he ever could have otherwise. He ran past the birds, past the homeless, past
all the garbage lying in the street. The air was thick and soupy; it was
difficult to breathe, but Dan just didn’t care. He kept running.
He kept running until he got to the bridge.
It was a tall bridge, hundreds of feet above the water. “I can do anything!” he
thought. “I can finally fly!” And so Dan jumped off the bridge.
Dan slid through the air, falling towards the
water, but to him it felt like floating: just a weightless sensation of hanging
there. He spun, orienting himself head down like a dolphin about to enter the
water. Wings sprouted from his arms, white wings, new and pure and white like
an angel’s, and they began to catch the air. Less than a second before Dan was
to hit the water, he pulled out of his freefall and flew.
He flew higher and higher until he could see
the gridwork of the city and all the people looked like little tiny ants,
scuttling around and bringing food to the rest of the colony. Dan laughed and
flew ever higher. “Icarus was just another ant, even when he had wings,” Dan
thought, so he flew until the sun tanned his wings to a pleasant brown and
there were clouds all around him. And in the clouds he found his house, resting
atop a particularly fluffy one. Dan entered his cloud house and, floating above
the floor and stairs treading air, hovered into his basement bedroom. The
lights were all bright and yellow now, illuminating the room and expunging even
the tiniest bit of shadow.
Dan settled onto his bed and, finally, falls
asleep happy.
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