Aug 14, 2008

Gena and I in July, 2001. gooneruk’s post about wasabi (and eating breakfast in my parents’ kitchen) reminded me of this story… Freshman year of college — with its freedoms, its judgmental bitches, its heartless boys, and my brief stint as a blond sorority girl — left me about as crazy as I’ve ever been. I spent the summer of 2001 in St. Paul, smoking too much pot, snorting Adderall, taking prescription diet pills I procured illegally online, working my ass off at two restaraunts, writing bizarre poems, and reading the collected works of Sylvia Plath, starting with her 768-page unabridged journals. To counterbalance the daily drug use, I took up with a 20-year-old man who was fresh from a 28-day stay at Hazelden and was still living in a half-way home. He came from a wealthy family and had spent his first years of college in Miami, blowing rails. He bought me expensive things for no reason — the only man who ever has — and I took perverse pleasure in sneaking away for sickeningly sweet, nasal-burning bumps of Adderall. We fought a lot — the diet pills made me impatient and mean — but we were lonely, young, and stranded in a pastoral. On the evening that we met, I was persuaded to join him and his friends at a sushi restaraunt in downtown St. Paul. His “friends” were fellow residents of the half-way house; they were loud and too-jovial, addicts trying to figure out how to act in the world without their fix. Once an addict, always an addict, and after the salmon skin rolls and maguro sushi were cleared, they turned to the doughy, pale green mounds of wasabi. They piled chunks on the end of their chopsticks and swallowed them down, sitting back in their chairs with a sharp intake of breath, their wet eyes rolling back, an animal sigh escaping their lips. “Oh, man….” Watching these poor fucks get their rocks off on wasabi was as effective a warning as I needed. At the end of the summer, my therapist wanted me in an inpatient facility to get me off the drugs and ride out the depression. I wanted to go back to New Orleans. I had something to prove, not least that I wasn’t like them. And while that summer was certainly not the last of my troubles, my mean reds and moody blues, at least this is true: I love the sharp pain of wasabi as it shoots from mouth to nose to eyes, but I don’t need it to feel alive.

Gena and I in July, 2001.

gooneruk’s post about wasabi (and eating breakfast in my parents’ kitchen) reminded me of this story…

Freshman year of college — with its freedoms, its judgmental bitches, its heartless boys, and my brief stint as a blond sorority girl — left me about as crazy as I’ve ever been. I spent the summer of 2001 in St. Paul, smoking too much pot, snorting Adderall, taking prescription diet pills I procured illegally online, working my ass off at two restaraunts, writing bizarre poems, and reading the collected works of Sylvia Plath, starting with her 768-page unabridged journals.

To counterbalance the daily drug use, I took up with a 20-year-old man who was fresh from a 28-day stay at Hazelden and was still living in a half-way home. He came from a wealthy family and had spent his first years of college in Miami, blowing rails. He bought me expensive things for no reason — the only man who ever has — and I took perverse pleasure in sneaking away for sickeningly sweet, nasal-burning bumps of Adderall. We fought a lot — the diet pills made me impatient and mean — but we were lonely, young, and stranded in a pastoral.

On the evening that we met, I was persuaded to join him and his friends at a sushi restaraunt in downtown St. Paul. His “friends” were fellow residents of the half-way house; they were loud and too-jovial, addicts trying to figure out how to act in the world without their fix.

Once an addict, always an addict, and after the salmon skin rolls and maguro sushi were cleared, they turned to the doughy, pale green mounds of wasabi. They piled chunks on the end of their chopsticks and swallowed them down, sitting back in their chairs with a sharp intake of breath, their wet eyes rolling back, an animal sigh escaping their lips.

“Oh, man….”

Watching these poor fucks get their rocks off on wasabi was as effective a warning as I needed. At the end of the summer, my therapist wanted me in an inpatient facility to get me off the drugs and ride out the depression. I wanted to go back to New Orleans. I had something to prove, not least that I wasn’t like them. And while that summer was certainly not the last of my troubles, my mean reds and moody blues, at least this is true: I love the sharp pain of wasabi as it shoots from mouth to nose to eyes, but I don’t need it to feel alive.

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