“Do you bump?”
The question dangled like a guillotine, mid-air, slicing through the haze of my thoughts and snapping me back, suddenly, to my immediate reality:
I was in the bathroom with a stranger, and she was kind enough to offer me her cocaine.
Her question had taken me by surprise, but shouldn’t have. I knew it the moment I saw her: talkative, bouncy, hyper, fun, and tiny. There was not an ounce of fat on her petite frame, but she didn’t look sickly. She looked like a functioning coke addict, the kind of woman you fall in love with, but you know will never really be yours. Her spirit belongs to something else, another ethereal, drug-driven force.
I watched as she neatly, meticulously inserted the bottom ends of two red cocktail straws into a small, clear pouch. Then, she inserted the top ends of the straws into her right nostril, and took a deep, quick sniff. She looked back at me in the mirror.
“Do you bump?” she asked again, holding up the pouch and gesturing with one red straw.
“No, thanks,” I smiled. “I’m good.”
“Okay,” she smiled back, shrugging.
I leaned forward, legs crossed, biting the right corner of my lower lip. Vaguely, I became aware of the cool, smooth edge of the toilet I was clutching. I let go.
In a moment, the words of her question had not only splintered my slight drunkenness but had sauntered – like her dancing pelvis earlier that evening – their way to my sobriety. In that moment, my thoughts were transported back to an unfortunate evening nine years earlier, to a fortunately failed experiment with the snowy substance.
That night, a warm evening in the early fall, I met Cocaine for the first (and last) time. After drinking at a few bars with my cousin and a longtime friend, we met with a group of guys my cousin barely knew, and we were invited to their “after-party.” We headed home to someone’s apartment and continued drinking. Everything was fine, carefree, and uncomplicated until one of the guys began to discuss making a phone call to get some “stuff.” Twenty minutes later, the “stuff” arrived.
Perched awkwardly on the edge of a toilet, with an overly friendly stranger in the bathroom of a bar I had avoided for years, I wondered why I had ever tried it at all. Was it because I was the child of a long line of deceased drug addicts, greedy gambling addicts, and hardworking alcoholics? Was I destined, then, to dabble in their shenanigans? Was it because I wanted to test the limits of what I could tolerate? Or was I simply young and stupid, and craving new, “surreal” experiences?
Of course, in the bathroom of the apartment belonging to one of the guys, I tried the “stuff.” Soon, I was using rolled-up dollar bills like a pro. Bump after bump, hit after hit, line after line, I felt nothing. So, I continued to shove the awful mixture up my nose, until at last I felt something. I was hovering, in an out-of-body experience, watching over my real self. I could choose to stop, and let the feeling fade away, or I could continue, and exit my body as I knew it.
I did not want to go back. I took another hit, and drifted away from who I was entirely.
Hours later, I couldn’t stop. Snowed under a hunger I could not fast enough feed, I simply had to have more. I had no choice. But it was 7 am, and we were 20, and I had a responsibility to return my cousin, my friend, and the others whom we had collected along the way, safely to their homes in their respective neighborhoods. Being the only one with a vehicle, I piled everyone into my car and drove, one-handed, 70 miles per hour in the pouring rain, left-laning it all the way. What I was doing was dangerous, but the intensity of my level of concentration made it a breeze. Cliché though it was, I felt like I was flying: I felt like I could do anything, as long as I had my coke.
With everyone home except my cousin, I proceeded to the house of someone I had never met, whom I was told would have what I needed. My cousin and I entered his dreary basement apartment. The hours that followed are now a whirling blur in the storm of my memories, interjected by images of a snotty blue towel, and fellatio. (Nothing in life is free, right?)
Desperate to escape the scary situation into which I had delivered us, but reluctant to leave me behind, my cousin finally made a choice, taking my car keys and calling her parents. It was too late; I didn’t care. In the hours that followed, I continued much the same way as I had started hours earlier at the party: as evening turned to morning, and morning progressed to evening, I took hit after hit, bump after bump, line after line. I don’t remember how I got home; my cousin must have told our family where I was and what I was doing, and someone must have come for me. I only remember lying in bed, worn and wan. My car keys and driving privileges were revoked indefinitely by my mother. My best friend came over on Sunday evening and yelled at me. She forced me to walk to the bathroom and to look at myself in the mirror.
“Look at you! Look at yourself!” she roared. “You look dead,” she concluded in utter disgust. She was right; I resembled Beetlejuice, with his graying skin and matted hair, much more readily than I resembled my usual olive-toned self. She told me that if I ever did this again, we would no longer be friends. My hands did not stop shaking for five long days.
Tonight, the tiny dancer stranger and her cocktail straw concoction brought me back to a place I did not need to go to, a place I had said both hello and good-bye to nine years ago. A place that was hard to remember and hard to forget. Yet, though it was easy to remember the agony that my chemical experiment had caused, it wasn’t so easy to say no. With chalky fingers, Cocaine had permanently left its powdery grip around my neck. I knew then, that as it did the tiny dancer, cocaine would forever possess me, if I let it. It was terrifying, and I accepted it.
Once more, the tiny dancer asked if I was sure. I was. I jumped off of the toilet seat and smoothed first my hair, and then my pants. She washed her hands thoroughly, and we left the bathroom, heading back to what she had transformed into a reggaeton dance floor, safe and secure in my knowledge that I did not and would not go bump in the night.
the price of broken glass 