Most of what I know about the workings of capitalism I learned hanging around the edges of the suburban drug trade, and that learning has served me well through three small businesses. Our president-elect and I are of the same generation, we both inhaled, and we are both now -- on a vastly different scale, to be sure -- prying at the edges of capitalism to see how it still works, if it still can work, how to make it work for us.
Much of what I know about myself I learned during those years, the years I spent renouncing my first set of goals and making myself unelectable, for there was an age during which the use of various theoretically banned substances was generally understood to open spiritual and creative paths, and to be fun.
My daughter is five. The DARE volunteers within our school district have already begun inoculating her against the evils of drugs. I will not renounce my path, nor do I know how or when or if I will ever be able to speak with her about it.
This is discursive, flashes of memory. Thanks for coming across the borderline with me.
This is a meditation. I am obliged to be more circumspect than I would ordinarily wish; still, I will be honest. I spent too many late nights staring in the mirror, trying to figure out who looked back, to give that up.
This is a meditation which I share here because Barack Obama is to be the first president of my generation, because it is my faint hope that we might once again talk sensibly about banned substances and such.
Here are some stories.
Once upon a time some people we knew offered a girl and I $10,000 to fly to Peru, go on an all-expense-paid tour, and not to look in our luggage when we came home. These were well-recommended people, professionals, we were told. $10,000 was a lot of money, but fortunately I had once had that much money in my bank account, and knew what it would and would not buy. I can remember driving to downtown Seattle, about to take the Mercer exit, when I realized that no matter how exciting the prospect of the adventure might have been I had walked out on Midnight Express and had no stomach for the consequences of failure. I was somewhat disappointed to learn this about myself, but there it was. A month or two later two new facts became clear: the husband, who had been doing the offering, had taken to freebasing, and was no longer to be trusted; and they had been middle management in a similar operations, and were not the captains of industry they presented themselves to be. We all watched "Miami Vice."
Once upon the time a phone rang too early in the morning for me to imagine crawling out of the waterbed (the one I later gave to the two lesbian Osmond Family groupies) to answer it, and so I heard over my shabby Radio Shack answering machine that the young man who was about to be my oldest stepbrother had miscalculated, had been brought home to the basement apartment where he lived and went to graduate school (instead of to the hospital, where he belonged), and died. At his funeral, one of his brothers placed a turntable on a chair and put on a scratchy LP to play the Stones' "Wild Horses," which I cannot yet listen to. A decade later the phone rang to tell me of the passing of a young almost rock star, and when I went to his manager's house to talk about how we would write about him, to borrow photographs for the story, I was able to tell the manager and the musician's girlfriend and everybody else there convincingly that I knew something about how they felt. I did, but it was also a convenient story.
Once upon a time -- these vignettes are in reverse order, for some reason -- I was standing in my mother's kitchen eating a bowl of cereal at 2 a.m., hungry after a long and intoxicating date with my first serious girlfriend. My best friend knocked quietly at the back door. He and a co-worker had gone to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight, but they had been searching at the door that night, so they ate the speed they had with them, on top of the mushrooms they'd already taken, and would I come along to make sure everything was OK? In the back of an unrestored mid-50s coupe of indifferent parentage, I was offered was seemed to be crumbs from my friends hand, and told I might as well have a few mushrooms, too. I assumed they were nothing, since they were crumbs and he was well on his particular path through the evening, but they were not. The mushrooms had been freeze-dried. We drove to the co-workers' house in a shabby neighborhood, to find the basement had been broken into by a neighbor, a tall, softly heavy fellow wearing jeans and a t-shirt against he winter night, swaying in the doorway with a bottle of whiskey at his mouth. He had broken in after a fight with his father, and he was drinking whiskey to cover the pain of his broken ribs. Eventually I insisted that I be returned home, as I had to go to work the next morning. Things got worse. I can remember lying in the darkness repeating my name so as not to lose entirely who I was. One of the cats who had previously been utterly indifferent to me came to my room and kept me company that night, and stayed. They sent me home from work, that day, bemused. I think that I very nearly lost myself that night. And yet...
Carlos Castaneda, the fraud, has an expression amid The Teachings of Don Juan which has served me well: A path without heart.
Perhaps this is necessary to say, as well: I was an asshole. A single-minded, ambitious asshole. I can remember dropping a girlfriend at the end of summer, and telling her that because high school was starting up again I wouldn't have time to see her. (She became a Ph.D. sex therapist.) You see, I wanted to be president. I had watched the Watergate hearings, and had come to believe in the power and the glory of the democratic process. I had ingested the myths of American democracy which insist that anybody can grow up to be president. Barack Obama could. I couldn't. I am not jealous.
But I went through many years of my life with a single-minded focus on my own ambitious, shaded however they were by all I had read of Marx and Trotsky and Freedom Riders. Love me, I was a liberal, and utterly unlovable.
The two other things I absorbed about capitalism came in a high school economics class. There I learned, from the chair of the department who swore at his students and threw chalk at stupid answers, and was mostly beloved, about sunk costs. That something is worth not what you paid for it, but what somebody else will pay to take it away from you. And about opportunity costs, which, in this case means that I am here typing this instead of playing with my five-year-old, but right now she doesn't need me.
One of the things we believed, back on the cusp of the Reagan era, was that drugs would be decriminalized. That pot would be legal, that mushrooms were comparatively benign and natural and should be legal. That cocaine was harmless (and I surveyed the literature at the time, at the UW health sciences library, and could find little evidence to the contrary). And so we felt free to explore, we modestly comfortable middle class kids from the suburbs.
And then the rules changed.
This was explained to me by a bass player who had spent many years in Hawaii after his tenure in Vietnam. The pot dealers there went to ways when Reagan began recriminalizing drugs: Some of them retired, the smart ones. The others looked at risk:reward and got into the cocaine business because it was more profitable and less easily detected. And they all bought guns. The drug trade went from a hipster handshake to, well, to "Miami Vice" in a very few years.
And pot went from the relative toxicity of a bottle of red wine to the relative toxicity of a bottle of everclear, went from $20 an ounce to $200 an ounce.
But the key to the Reagan war on drugs was the middle class, for they began seizing the assets of those holding pot. They took the cars one drove, the houses one grew things in, and no matter whether the parents knew their children had a little weed. Suddenly the assets of the middle class -- their wealth -- were at risk, and so the middle class withdrew in large part from the drug trade. From that drug trade, anyhow. No longer was it likely that the cops would simply take your joints, as they had taken your six-packs in high school. Now they could and might take your house. Your parents' house.
This is complicated. Freebasing gave way to crack, AIDS and MDMA seemed to appear on the landscape at more or less the same time, and somehow heroin came to be trendy.
Long before that I left the field of battle. I had gotten what I needed. I had somehow remade myself into somebody I could live with. Somebody other people might want to live with. Doubtless there were other ways to get there, but I will not repudiate my path.
Once upon a time one of my dear friends finally hit bottom, and we finally got her sober. If I get into heaven as a nonbeliever it may be because I spent that one month of April, from noon to 6 a.m., talking to this woman and helping her to believe that she could be sober. This is a long story I shall not trouble you with, save to note that when last we spoke she was still sober, and it's been more than twenty years.
Five years ago my mother found my brother in a pool of blood in his apartment, emaciated and so badly beaten that the police thought his home had been invaded. He had done it to himself, over a period of days. He is a binge alcoholic, sober now for four years.
For a time I worked with a young guy who had a side business in hemp fashions. The problem was that, though he believed in the product, in all the benefits the hemp folk champion, the problem was that his partner was a rich kid pot dealer, and for murky reasons I didn't ask, the business vanished one day.
In the State of Washington you could buy only beer at grocery stories, everything else at state-run liquor stores. Generic buildings, joyless places. My brother now goes to the gym at or next to (I cannot remember, and won't ask) the building which once housed is liquor store of choice. At 18, I did not drink. Nor, really, until I was 21, except for the Friday nights we had margaritas at the Mexican place down from work, and the night the hookers across the alley from my first apartment called the cops because I was making too much noise kicking the chrome off a friend's $50 car.
Well. I didn't drink much, but the point was meant to be that it was harder to come by booze than anything else. The point that I have clutched these many long years, looking in the mirror, looking in the mirror of my past, the point I have long believed is that some drugs should be legalized and state regulated.
I think that still, but now I have a daughter.
I think that still, and yet I know also that the world of drugs has changed drastically from the times when my generation comfortably dabbled in one thing or another.
Last winter I ended up randomly at a meeting in a coal mining community at which most of the discussion was about Oxycodon. And I realized that the world I once knew tolerably well has changed beyond recognition.
Back in Seattle I knew a poet who had been a street person and a junkie, and a jazz musician and other things. He would always remind me that chemical substances do not have moral properties. That people make choices. That he made the choice one day to stop sleeping in gutters.
We who were shaped by the 1960s were shaped by a belief in the evolution in the human spirit. I fear that belief is now a fossil.
And I do not know what I will tell my daughter.
But I do know this: Among the many other possibilities Barack Obama brings to the White House, there is the possibility that at least American drug policy might be shaped by somebody who actually understands the problem. The power and the glory, to borrow again from Ochs.