Original Impressions

I was twelve or thirteen the first time I gambled in a casino. My friends and I already had a regular after school poker game going, we played blackjack in the bathroom stalls between classes and the older kids took our bets on sporting events, manipulating the spread to such a degree that it was almost impossible to win. But when my parents took my brother and I to the Cal Neva Hotel Casino on the north shore of Lake Tahoe during a summer vacation I experienced the lights, the sounds, the darkness and the action of a live casino first hand. I put a few quarters into a slot machine and gave it a whirl: no luck. I tried again and also failed. My mother noticed my activity and pulled me away. But I was hooked. I knew then that this was a place I wanted to be. It felt warm, comfortable and familiar despite my standing as a youthful neophyte. The lake? I can’t remember a single detail of it from that trip. That great, deep, mysterious, dark blue jewel in the bosom of the Sierra Nevada mountains is a forgotten detail in a memory of a dirty casino floor.

I was fifteen and attending a very expensive, exclusive private high school. I’d drunk alcohol before, but only sips, little tastes out of curiosity. Some buddies – basketball teammates, actually – and I went to a party that was hosted by some beautiful girl in my class that was dating a junior. I guess I felt socially awkward, but I can’t really remember. It was exciting when somebody handed me that first beer: I knew I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, but everybody was doing it and I wanted to be a conformist. Soon, I’d had three or four and all that social anxiety had slipped away. I was soon blissfully drunk, feeling for the first time in my life that I hadn’t a care in the world. It was a sublime sensation, freedom from all oppression and doubt. Soon, some of the other guys noticed my condition and passed me a can that had chewing tobacco spit, cigarette butts and a splash of beer in it. I drank from it heartily before I coughed up the rancid contents. They all laughed. Still, I didn’t care. I had been given freedom from all concern. When I tiptoed carefully into my bedroom that night, I knew I’d be drinking again soon.

It was only a few months later when I tried marijuana for the second time; the first time a couple of years earlier I had intentionally not inhaled out of fear. But this time I did and the effect sent me floating up into the clouds on the wings of some magnificent bird, my heart and soul soaring with wonderment and exploding joy. I was truly changed at this moment, and I can recall thinking, “I want to feel like this for the rest of my life.” For the first few months, the feeling persisted and recurred every time I smoked the stuff. It was a glorious time.

LSD then entered the scene and again, everything changed. It wasn’t so much the high, I think, but the way the drug made my mind wander and seek out new discoveries. It was my belief that the starfish-like tapestry pattern that covered my field of vision and breathed, controlling the movement of what some called “hallucinations” was in fact the way the world was truly constituted. It was, I believed, a revelation to be on the drug and the true hallucination was our day to day lives. Soon, however, my tolerance for the drug became so high that I could no longer see the pattern. By college, my interest in the drug had completely waned.

There was this dude, a guy maybe a couple of years older than me. He worked at the BP station down the street from my house. He said that BP stood for “Baked People” and somehow at sixteen years of age I thought the pun really amusing. We smoked out pretty regularly. It was convenient for me, because I could tell my folks I was just taking a walk, go get really high and be back within half an hour. One day, he offered me a line of cocaine. I liked him so much and wanted him to like and respect me, so I snorted it. The high I then experienced can best be described as an intensified nervousness and I wanted it to go away. It’s a riddle how this of all the illicit “hard” drugs has stayed in my life for so long, but I know, of course, that it has a great deal to do with my excessive drinking.

There have been many other drugs and many other vices: but these are the ones that formed my current existence the most. More than anything else, I’ve been driven by these original impressions, chasing that first high ever since. They talk about gateway drugs. I think that whole concept a fallacy. The drug, drink, cigarette, gamble: that doesn’t create anything, doesn’t in fact open up any new world, even though that is how it feels at the time. They do, however, reveal us to ourselves in all our beauty, sincerity, compulsion and imperfection. There’s something people almost always forget: we get high for many reasons but one of them, perhaps the most important, is because, for a moment anyway, we feel more ourselves than at any other time in our lives.