6:48 a.m. - Tuesday, Mar. 18, 2003
Ms Leslie's Shakes a Monkey from Her Back

I can�t decide which to write about first: The dentist or the drugs. See, to me, they�ve become inextricably entwined. Like poor Pavlov�s dog, who drooled to the sound of a dinner-bell, when I think of the dentist, I smell the new rubber of the laughing gas mask and feel myself getting a little woozy. Let�s go with the drugs.

Before we, Craig and I, left for Vietnam, while we were still living in our little pup tent in the autumn fields of Kentucky, Craig�s cousin sent him a little envelope with marijuana in it. We called it marijuana because we didn�t feel comfortable with the word �grass� or �weed�, and we really didn�t know any other names for it. It was, after all, only 1967; The beginning of the rogue cannabis wave that was about to sweep across our shores.

In our tent, with the flaps buttoned closed, we shook the tobacco out of a Marlboro and stuffed the crumbly greenish matter into the cigarette paper. When we lit it, it smelled good. It smelled fragrantly sinful and rebellious, but it didn�t get us high. We, neither of us, understood what the fuss was about. We threw the crumbled leaves away. That was the first time either of us ever saw any type of illegal drug.

The second time came when we were newly arrived in Cu Chi, one of the larger U.S. bases in Vietnam. I was walking alone, behind the mess hall, close to a small sandbagged bunker. I saw three black soldiers there, hunched over what appeared to be a dusty, scraggly weed. I could barely hear them, but what I heard was enticing. I saw them pluck some leaves and then hurry away. Based on my massive experience with illicit drugs, I correctly assumed that they were harvesting some wild ganja. I waited discreetly until the very microsecond they departed before sauntering over to the spot. Sure enough, there were a few sickly, dried out weeds, with most of the leaves already stripped away. They looked like they had been sprayed with weed killer.

I was still curious about the whole marijuana thing. Even more so as I had stood and watched the excitement of the three black soldiers a moment ago. Surely I was missing something. And for me to miss out on anything.. well, that would never do. I sat on a sandbag and right there in the sun, I emptied another Marlboro and began trying to stuff some of the leaves into the empty paper. It wasn�t a complicated thing, but it was a bit tedious. It took just enough of my attention that I didn�t notice the returning soldier until his shadow fell across my labors.

�Boy?..�. whatchew doin� there?� he said with a rich, deep chuckle. Startled, I dropped my guilty handiwork and spun around. He didn�t really need to ask what I was doing. He already knew. Grabbing the fabric near the collar of my jungle fatigues, he pulled me to my feet, still laughing.

�You never smoked weed before, did ya?� My embarrassed eyes told him the answer. �Well, c�mon then�, he said. �We�re gonna show you how to do it�.

They lived in the hooch next to the one I slept in. When we walked in, there were several other soldiers already there. The air was filled with tobacco smoke, beer fumes, laughter, and that sweet sinful aroma. They crowded around me and showed me how to inhale deeply and hold my breath. That�s the last thing I clearly remember. That, and the fact that I was suddenly in a party mood. It was great!

The engineers had graded what passed for a street, or road, alongside our hooches, and directly across from them, they had erected an outdoor theater with a small screen and some wooden benches. Behind the benches, right where any civilized movie-goer would expect to see a snack bar was�. A snack bar! At dusk, they would show old movies. There seemed to be a real preference for John Wayne movies. The movie would run while G.I.s crowded around the wooden counter of the snack bar, where they could buy a can of warm beer for ten cents.

I describe the outdoor movie theater because that�s the next place I remember being. I was there, trying to push into the crowd to buy some beer. I was barely eighteen. I was a soldier. Here was the one place in my life where I could buy a beer and nobody cared. Except I couldn�t buy it. I was too loaded from my first experience with pot. I was laughing and pushing, trying to weasel my way up to the bar. The other guys, irritated no doubt, kept elbowing me back to the back of the crowd. For some reason, I thought that was hilarious.

But then, as if I suddenly owned the universe, everyone just went away, as if they had all lost their thirst at once. I found myself standing before an empty snack-bar counter, looking for whoever was to sell me that beer at last. But nobody was there. I hit the counter with my hand.

�Hey!����� �HEY!!!.. I want a beer!�

Looking around, I realized that the whole area was deserted. Then I became aware of a siren wailing somewhere, and some muffled thumps that seemed like they should be familiar, but weren�t quite. Slowly, like finally understanding a new principle of algebra, it dawned on me that there was danger. At the same moment, I saw the first bright blue-white flash of an exploding shell. It burst just behind the little movie screen. It was, to my red and dilated eyes, quite beautiful. It bloomed into a thousand streaks of white light and smoke. Before the flash had even faded from the back walls of my eyeballs, there was another, closer and even more beautiful. Part of me didn�t appreciate the beauty of this one so much though. That part of me began to wrest control and move my feet, taking me toward the long sandbagged trench dug next to my hooch for protection in this exact kind of emergency. I didn�t run, I walked across the road. As I did, I saw a third shell explode in the same road, just to the left of me and really.. not far away at all. Suddenly I WAS running. I ran and dove head first into the entrance to the shelter. I landed on a lot of other guys who were already in there. As they shoved me to my feet and made some room for me, I heard another shell explode, followed by screams of pain and fear from the trench by the neighboring hooch. It was a direct hit through the entry to their shelter.

My first real experience with drugs was also my first experience with combat. Well.. not combat exactly. There was no fighting, only fear, blood and dying. It was when war started to become real to this teenager, your writer. I didn�t smoke marijuana again while I was in Vietnam. Neither did Craig, although he was not part of this little adventure of mine. We both realized that we were not in the right time or place to addle our senses, even temporarily. Besides, we were soon to become much too busy to think of such foolishness.

The drug culture wasn�t a part of my life again until after I was wounded and had been shipped to the army hospital in Denver; Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. There, after my third surgery, I was put in traction in a bed at one end of the orthopedics ward. I laid there for most of six months. In all that time, my feet never touched the floor. It was horrible. It was lonely. Until I found the red-headed marine with the missing leg who was dealing hashish all around the hospital from his wheelchair.

Actually, it was still horrible. But the horrible-ness took a break on Friday nights, when we were issued one bottle of cold Budweiser per person by the powers that be. I was given Darvon in a little paper cup a couple of times each day. I never took the pills. I saved them for Friday night. I also persuaded our female corpsman, �nurse� Lee, to give me the two or three bottles of beer that were refused by the nondrinkers on the ward. I loved nurse Lee. I think she deserves her own entry, and she shall have it soon. So I had my handful of Darvon, my three or four beers, and I would have a little sticky brown piece of hashish about the size of a cube of sugar. I smoked the hashish on most nights. How I wasn�t caught, I�ll never know. At the time, I thought I was pretty slick. The marine, Tim, had provided me with a pipe and some tin foil. I formed the foil into a little bowl inside the bowl of the pipe and poked some holes in the bottom of it. In that way, I could break of a little piece of hashish and incinerate it on the foil with a match while I inhaled all of the smoke at one time. When I exhaled, I was done. I could put the pipe away and sink back on my pillow, gazing with unseeing eyes at the little rented black and white TV by my head.

On Friday nights, I didn�t need a TV. I took all of the Darvon at once, washed down by a bottle of beer drunk quickly. Then, before the alcohol hit my blood, I would smoke one or maybe two pieces of hash. I would then drink whatever beer I had left until lost any awareness of where I was. On Friday nights, I took a vacation from the army hospital. I didn�t hear my neighbor across the aisle sobbing at night over the loss of his legs. I didn�t hear the moans of my neighbor next to me who couldn�t find a comfortable way to lay on his still healing burns, and I couldn�t feel my own guilt over having only a shattered femur and the loss of my thigh muscle. I had found a use for drugs.

I didn�t put them away until late summer of 1969. By that time, I was discharged from the hospital and assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington to while away the remaining months of my enlistment. I didn�t realize at the time that I was kept in the army in order to avoid the expense of being medically retired� with pension. I was too dumb to appeal. By 1969, I was smoking pot daily. On weekends, I was staying at a house in Seattle occupied by a group of speed and heroin addicts. I tried everything, but my drug of choice for the weekends was, and always will be, opium. Opium was friendly. It smells wonderful, like flowers. It tastes magnificent, and it turns a person mellow and content, without any sickness or pain. I loved opium.

I had been arrested once for possession of marijuana, when my company commander was no longer able to ignore me. I and a couple of friends were selling pot from the barracks and keeping a bag of the stuff in our lockers. The CO sent us a signal by holding a surprise shakedown inspection and sending us to battalion headquarters to see what was to be done with us. I didn�t realize it at the time, but these officers were being kind. They had to protect their other men and their own careers, but were not interested in ruining my life either.. unless I forced them to. Since this was a first offense for me, they did not court-martial me. I received a battalion article 15 and spent the next 45 days scraping wax from a long hallway floor with a single edged razor blade. I didn�t mind. I was loaded.

I was picked up a second time, not long afterwards. I had taken some mescaline and was walking down the runway of a small airstrip on Fort Lewis, thinking I was on a most wonderful sidewalk. The tower sent a couple of MPs out in a jeep to pick me up and they took me back to the airport office to wait for transportation to the MP station. They took my ID card to discourage me from running away.

I was almost out of my mind with hallucinations and fear, yet I managed to appear somewhat normal on the outside. However normal a person can be who has just been found using a runway for a sidewalk. I managed to tell them I was taking a shortcut, which resulted in a lot of shouting, but apparently no suspicion. SO I sat on the wooden bench, waiting to go to jail. I had a pocket full of pills and pot. I really couldn�t afford to be searched. I sat there paralyzed for what seemed to be hours. Maybe it was. I have no way of knowing. But finally, I asked if I could go to the bathroom, to which they replied yes. I was amazed and gratified not to be accompanied. I was able to use that time to flush everything I had down the toilet. Everything except, and this is to illustrate how messed up I was, a few capsules of mescaline that I shoved down the barrel of a fountain pen. I was in the hands of the MPs, yet I couldn�t bring myself to be drugless.

When I was taken to the station, I was regaining some sobriety. I stood with my hands on a big brass rail before the sergeants desk, looking up at him while he railed at me. I was railed. He was railing. Get it? The thing that saved me was, according to him, that they didn�t have any room to put me in a cell. No room at the inn. So he unleashed a loud and scary torrent of invective at me to convince me what a bad idea it would be to appear before him again and��. Released me!

It was that evening.. standing under a hot stream of water, watching the showerhead growing and shrinking in time to my own heartbeat that I realized where I was. I was not at any fork in the road. I had chosen my fork already and was a long way down the path. Suddenly, I saw my future and it didn�t look especially good. It occurred to me that I had few chances left to make a U-turn and go back to a better route. Maybe I only had one chance and this was it.

I stopped that night. My barracks buddies actually tried hard to entice me to keep doing drugs with them. In doing so, they revealed to me what kind of friends they were. Each of them eventually came to a bad end. I�m glad I turned away.

Now, what has all this to do with dentists? Well, it�s all to say that I think there must be a vestigial junky in me. I love the laughing gas. Any appointment that includes laughing gas is never long enough for me. I can have, at great expense, an hour of that old feeling of �I know I should care, but I just don�t� Even better, �I know this must be painful, but it just doesn�t matter� I am still, it seems, very attracted to numbness.

I never really quit drugs. I think that might have been impossible. Instead, I just took a long break from them. I promised myself that if I live to be seventy years old, I would search on my birthday for a supplier of opium and spend the last days of my life dreaming of happiness. That�s a promise I still intend to keep. I�ve got seventeen years to go.

In the meantime� there�s my dentist and her laughing gas, eh?

Talking about the drugs first was a good idea. Later, maybe tomorrow, with all this as a background, I�ll describe my hour in Miss Melanie D.D.S.� chair.

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