Secret Stash

Wendy hadn’t used crank in more than ten years. She quit at age twenty when she dropped to eighty-five pounds from her normal weight of one twenty-five. She didn’t go to rehab; she didn’t seek professional help. She did sweat profusely and continuously in bed for ten mostly sleepless nights and then didn’t leave the house for the succeeding month while she ate her way through her mother’s kitchen regaining some of the precious pounds that had melted away after years of drug use. But she came through it all right in the end, moved on and never touched the stuff again. Years later she gave birth to Gwen, her beautiful baby girl. To all of us around her, she was a completely new person. Once, she told me that it felt like the whole experience, all those years of partying and running around, seemed like nothing more than a hazy dream involving a totally different person.

She recently moved from Seattle to Portland after a bitter divorce and was unpacking some things that she had brought with her. Box after box was opened and unloaded. Some of the things inside were a decade old or more. Memories flooded back to her as she examined old pictures, nick knacks and possessions from a lifetime. In one box, she found an old purse that she had once dearly loved. As she was looking it over she felt a lump in one of the inner partitions. She looked inside and unzipped the compartment.

To her astonishment, she found a cellophane bag which contained ten bindles of speed. Some of the drug had gone bad: it was lumpy from moisture that had crept in over the years. A couple of the bindles, however, contained perfectly intact powder ready for an instantaneous snort, smoke or shot.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she related. “Obviously, the stuff came from when I was dealing. I often had that much dope, but was usually selling the majority of it so that I could do my couple of grams. I simply don’t know how I could have forgotten it. I must have been really high.”

No doubt. And I reflect with wonderment and curiosity at the strange story of those ten little bindles traveling with her wherever she went, by her side, unknown, unwitting companions, a tiny, powdery, illicit piece of her history, tangible even though the past from whence they came had dissipated into the ephemeral yesterday.