My sister and I spent summer weekdays with a dozen other kids at a woman’s house in Upstate New York until the moment I witnessed the woman’s husband launch a rat snake into the sky with his homemade catapult — the shiny black serpent’s white belly glinting in the sunlight as it soared higher and higher before disappearing into the branches of a tree — and murmured “Fuck me,” a little too loudly.
We were henceforth shuttled to the home of my Taekwondo instructor and his wife where no one seemed to mind nine year olds speaking like two-bit Staten Island mobsters. The couple had a son Jimmy a grade above me and a daughter Celeste a grade below my sister. While my Taekwondo instructor spent his days as a Correctional Officer at a local prison, his wife spent hers with a couple of friends on a floral-patterned velvet couch in a smoky, dark living room.
None of us children were permitted in the house during the day except for one bathroom visit apiece. To escape the sun, we hung out in an old, windowless cabin on the property. No matter how much we swept that floor, Celeste’s bare feet always seemed to find splinters and errant slivers of glass. Since the girl refused to wear footwear and her big brother was punished when any harm befell her, Jimmy and I performed small, secret medical procedures on the regular. I always volunteered to fetch the first aid supplies because that was the most dangerous part of the operation, and I needed Jimmy to know I was tough.
“Hey, kid .” Once my eyes adjusted to the dim room, I could see that Janice was alone on the couch. Although we didn’t agree on much, Jimmy and I concurred that one of his mom’s friends looked and sounded just like Janice, the lead guitarist of The Electric Mayhem on The Muppets. We called her Janice, and she was our favorite.
“Hi,” I said and quickly blurted an excuse for why I was exceeding my daily house allowance. “I have to take a shit.”
She threw back her head, laughing heartily and at length. I continued on to the bathroom where I gathered the components of our tried-and-true, pocket-sized medical kit: a pair of tweezers, bacitracin ointment and a bandaid. I didn’t have to defecate, so I snooped through the medicine cabinet for the amount of time I felt was appropriate to achieve a bowel movement.
“Hey, kid, did you take a shit?” Janice was still there.
“You’re goddamned right I did.” She fell back on the couch and kicked her legs in the air, shrieking. She was the first person to find me funny.
I described the encounter to Jimmy while we tended to Celeste’s wound. It was just a matter of time, I told him, before Janice would invite me to sit on the couch like Johnny Carson did with his favorite comedians. Jimmy’s face flushed with jealousy. First of all, he informed me, I wasn’t actually funny. And, furthermore, he said I could just forget about getting any couch time because his mom and her friends were doing cocaine on it all day.
“Cocaine is medicine you stick up your nose,” he boysplained to me.
“I know what cocaine is,” I snapped. “I’m not a baby.”
But his definition planted a seed. I’d been plagued by a chronic ear infection that summer, which my parents attempted to combat with antibiotics. I hated swallowing those large pills and so that night at the dinner table, I covered both my mouth and nose with my hand and managed to stuff the erythromycin capsule up a nostril. I excused myself to the bathroom where I promptly blew the vile pellet out of my nose and into the toilet, then flushed.
This system worked for a couple of days until a pill got stuck up my nose. I tried to coax it out with tweezers but ended up pushing it further up my nasal cavity where it began to melt. By the time I confessed and pleaded for help, it was too late. I’d simply have to wait for the pill to dissolve.
It felt like my nose, throat and eyes were on fire. I howled in agony between bouts of vomiting so that my parents could fully realize what they had driven me to do with these horse pill antibiotics. And I knew right then and there that I’d never do cocaine, not even if Janice herself invited me to do so on the couch. My nose would remain exit only for the rest of my life.
Two decades later, while in line at a deluxe Las Vegas buffet, I eavesdropped on the chic pair behind me as they sniffed from ornate coke vial necklaces. I held my breath when I heard the man ask his companion to describe the most self-indulgent thing she’d ever put in her mouth.
“A loaded Colt Python,” she responded without hesitation.
I turned my head slowly to sneak a peek at the duo and found the woman staring straight at me with gleaming black eyes — her dilated pupils so large and reflective, I watched myself reaching for more crab legs in them.
“I’m talking about a revolver, honey,” she said, not once blinking.
“Oh,” I said nonchalantly, though of course I was impressed.
“How about you?” The man asked me.
I, too, knew the taste of cold metal. After my stunt with the pills, my parents switched me to liquid amoxicillin. If you were sick and a child in the ‘80s, you’ll likely remember that delicious, bright pink, bubble-gum-flavored elixir. We kept it in the refrigerator, and I liked to chill my spoon in the freezer before imbibing.
My parents left me home alone one afternoon, so I grabbed an icy spoon and a bottle of the cold pink stuff and put on my VHS copy of Labyrinth. I just wanted a taste. But the next thing I knew, David Bowie was seductively fondling his crystal balls before using them to cast a sexual spell on a 16-year-old Jennifer Connelly and a 9-year-old me, and the bottle of liquid magic was empty. To my surprise, it tasted even better coming up in tandem with the pint of vanilla ice cream I’d also consumed — a decadent, frothy Bubblicious milkshake.
“A deep-fried Twinkie,” I lied. There’s just no competing with a loaded gun, so why even bother?