Here's how it went down: it was a particularly hot year, and we needed a boat. What more can I say? I possess the sort of effervescent personality that's like catnip to the druggos. It's my blessing and my curse.
Anyway, this guy was a functioning meth addict, and by that I simply mean he also had a shanty on the Delta. If you're not familiar with it, the Delta is a series of waterways traversing the innards of methamphetamine colonies between Sacramento and Stockton, and it's where people who enjoy wakeboarding and suffering the occassional brain-eating amoeba like to frequent.
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| Delta Country |
That is to say, it's about as clean as it's customers.
Fun Fact: My friend (we'll call her "Nicky") was on her way to the Olympics in synchronized swimming before she started swimming in booze. She still had the diving underwater part down, cuz she kept darting to the bed of the river and resurfacing with tiny white "clams," which I had to point out were actually teeth.
The Delta is also a popular site for body disposal.
But when you're high on meth, racing through the
canals in your boat, you don't notice these kinds of things. What was
impossible to ignore were my summer-love's big, black eyeballs and lock jaw.
I was on the opposite side of having fun, and summer couldn't
hurry the fuck up and end fast enough.
Of course, we didn't spend all our time on the
water, but I had to keep up relations when we were landlocked so we'd get the
invite when it was time to go boating again. I know what you're thinking:
Why not just find someone else with a boat? Seems like it would be easy
enough, right? Sure, but I had invested a lot of time and energy into
this project, and I don't like to give up on things. Also, at
20-something, my insides didn't exactly match my outsides. To the layman,
this means I had low self-esteem, and the only criteria a potential partner had
to meet in order to date (fuck) me was simply sending a hint of interest my
way. Pathetic, I know.
Back on dry land, my special friend shared a guest-house
in a rich neighborhood with a friend of his, (which further lent itself to the
appearance he could keep his shit together, and maybe meth wasn't so
dirty) and this friend owned a 1985 white limousine, complete with a tape-deck.
Yet another fucking nail in my coffin, as there was no way my friends
were gonna let me consider ditching out early. To add insult to injury, the only tape these
guys seemed to own was Sir Mix A Lot, so at night my friends and his would all
pile in the limo and drive down to one of the two local dive bars in town
screaming, "My posse on Broadway" out the sunroof.
My only hope of getting out of this relationship
was being stricken down by an STD, which never happened, much to my surprise.
Surely the odds of that were in my favor. Not a big one, but maybe a little gonorrhea or something. That's no worse than anything I could have contracted from the Delta… I mean, sure, like a normal person I lived in fear of HIV or an Indian Summer. These are all things that should have bothered me, but what ate at me the most was his height: 5'7" (I'm 5'9"). And he was cut (roids?) so he just stood there looking like a gacked-out Mighty Mouse.
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| Mighty Mouse |
I felt dirty by association. How much more of this could I possibly take?
When summer finally did come to a close, I felt like I had won my first marathon. Suffering three long months was a true test of endurance, and I was a goddamned champion. I got through it with a renewed sense of street cred and vigor, and above all else, my hoo-ha in tact. My relationship naturally fell off with the cool breeze of fall, so I didn't have to lose face with my friends.
Years later when I got sober, I ran into him - clean, and with his pregnant wife. It made me kind of happy for him - it's not every day a meth-head gets a happy ending.
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