Love is the ghost, haunting your head,         Love is the vampire, drunk on your blood,                 Hungrily licks you,                        And painfully picks you apart.                           J. NAPILATANO

     Upon release in September of 1982, I went to live with my brother who was attending medical school at LSUMC in Shreveport. While I was incarcerated, he had experimented with IV amphetamine himself and was having a difficult time in school as a result.  I attended classes with him and tried to encourage him but he was too far into the addiction by then.  He became paranoid and withdrawn despite the fact that I counseled him to leave the stuff alone.  My ineffectiveness was primarily due to the fact that I could not resist indulging in his drugs myself whenever it was offered and, therefore had a very low credibility with him when speaking of the evils of drug use.  He became angry and sullen when he was finally expelled from school and he threw me out of his home.  Initially, I went to live in the Union Gospel Mission and took "scab" work with the phone company during the operator's strike of 1983.  Thereafter, I worked several menial jobs and moved to a $175/month efficiency apartment in the Fountain Tower on Fairfield Avenue.  I was not happy and didn't last long at most jobs.  While working as a delivery boy for Sherwin Williams paint company, I got word from the secretary that the boss was about to fire me so I answered an ad for IDS to train to be an investment banker.  John, the manager, liked me and thought I had great potential but I became discouraged when a friend told me that my record would prevent me from securing a license.  I quit in despair and started looking for another job.  John called me out of concern and I explained my reasons candidly.  He went to his superiors on my behalf and worked out a way for me to complete the training and get a securities license.  Greatly heartened and surprised, I returned to train with a vengeance.

     Things went well until, one evening, John pulled me aside and told me that his boss had been hospitalized for cocaine addiction and that the corporate office had made the ridiculous assumption that I was supplying him.  A "hatchet man" was flying in the next day from Minneapolis with the expressed purpose of putting an end to my training. I was dumbfounded.  I had only met the man once and had no idea that he was on drugs.  With my delivery job ending along with this fiasco, I became so alarmed that I answered an ad in the newspaper that said GO TO WORK NOW in ten point caps.

     I called the number and arranged an interview for that evening.  I found myself in a telephone sales room above an office on Line Avenue that was only four or five blocks from my home.  The manager explained the gimmick and the portrait offer and put me on the phones.  This was the first week of December 1983.  I only sold three or four offers per four hour evening shift and, after a week or ten days, I went to the manager, a charismatic thirty-year-old guy whose name was David, and groveled, since I was really trying and needed the job.  He laughed and told me that I was one of his best sales people and that two sales per night was quite satisfactory. Furthermore, he informed me that he had been about to approach me with the idea of becoming the manager after the Christmas break.  David and I hung out together over Christmas and he sold me on the job.

     January third I was phone room manager in training.  It was wonderfully hectic and totally consuming with the two phones ringing constantly, messengers calling in as they picked up the money, people calling in for jobs, interviewing, and being a one-man cheering section for the phone workers.  He taught me his unique style of management based on love and charisma, how to select for applicants that were emotionally starved and teach them to sell by positive emotional reinforcement and increased self-esteem.  The pervasive team spirit made it a joint mission and people would regularly give back rubs or other encouragement on their breaks to coworkers in a slump.  Even when I had to let people go, as they would inevitably "burn out" on the job, there was no resentment and we remained friends.  Socializing intimately as a group after hours, we became obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because of the remarkable effect its raw sensual message seemed to have in liberating people from their sexual inhibitions and hangups.  It became a theme in our office and we usually attended at least one performance a week in full costume and makeup.  Some unforgettably beautiful expressions of free love consummated many of those evenings.

 

    (TIME CAPSULE: it is now the year 2002, and completely out of the blue, I am delighted to say that I have received a communication from Kelly after so many years. She respectfully notes that her memories differ somewhat [and are probably more correct] from what I have written here. I have asked her to add her memories and feelings to this text and hope she will accept. This is your story too, my love, that I celebrate here. Thank You.)  

    The seasonal sales office did well until its close in June and the company, after sending me to Atlanta to be scrutinized by the executive staff, decided to keep me.  I managed to talk them into moving Kelly and me to Memphis where I rented and outfitted a sales office for the studio there.  I was delighted at the prospect of returning home.  Memphis is a beautiful and friendly town with a vital rhythm that calls to something deep within me.

     Our plans began to require more money as our sights were raised toward the future.  I trained Kelly to be the manager and took a job selling Honda automobiles in August of 1984. I loved the cars and had no trouble transferring that feeling to others.  My first month in the business, I was number three out of twenty in sales having been christened, as are eager new new salesmen everywhere, "the lot lizard."  At the end of my first full year, I was elected to the national council of sales leadership and December of 1985 put five-thousand dollars in my pocket.  Kelly and I had gotten married in March and soon bought a house in the suburbs and a new Honda.  By altering her birth certificate to reflect an age of twenty-four (an age which her appearance and manner supported) instead of eighteen, she got the manager's position at Fredrick's of Hollywood in the Mall of Memphis.

     Kelly and I both had deep insecurities that were made bearable (but not eliminated) by the love, friendship, and affection within our marriage.  She was still only eighteen years old and had experienced virtually zero normal youth, no matter what role she played in the business world.  Her angst over her lost childhood was driven home most poignantly when she was around people her own age.  She gradually succumbed to despondency and I felt her slipping away. My job had become so all-consuming, requiring, as it did, six days each week and, at home, hours to "unwind" from the pumped-up sales mind set, that I had little to give emotionally and was often quite irritable.  She resorted to her childhood responses and ran away from home three times.  I had to drive to Louisiana twice and bring her home.  The third time she wouldn't return and, before she left, she destroyed my carefully built credit by writing hundreds of dollars worth of bad checks on our account for clothing and such.

     Devastated emotionally, my sales plummeted regardless of how many hours I worked.  I spent my off hours pacing from one end of the house to the other, holding lengthy disparaging conversations with myself until, exhausted, I would fall into fitful sleep.  I managed to exist in this vulnerable state for quite a few weeks before I received the invitation to disaster.

     An old acquaintance stopped by one night while passing through town.  He left me with a small gift, half a gram of 4-methyl-aminorex, a potent first cousin of methamphetamine.  In my despair, I injected the whole thing in one dose.  I resort to the words of William Gibson⁽¹⁾ here to describe the experience:

"The drug hit like a freight train, a white-hot column climbing my spine starting near my prostate until finally illuminating the structures of my skull with x-rays of overamped sexual energy.  My teeth sang in their sockets like tuning forks, perfect-pitched and clear as ethanol.  Sandstorms raged across the floor of my skull generating waves of high thin static breaking behind my eyes as hot spheres of purest crystal expanded . . . "

. . . exponentially throughout my being in an orgasmic crescendo and rush of lust.  My pain dissolved into warmth and my behavior degenerated into the mindless futility of stimulant overdose as I systematically trashed my well-ordered household, taking all manner of things apart and leaving the pieces strewn about in a trail of destruction across my once-attractive home until the house itself, again quoting Gibson, "came to resemble the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison I hadn't known I carried".⁽¹⁾  By morning, I knew, not only that I couldn't go to work, but that I couldn't even call.  My voice refused to go beyond a harsh dehydrated croak that I was certain would tip any listener off to my tragic and shameful condition.  I felt as if my brain had been soaked in some flammable solvent and left, grey and shriveled, to dry in the cold February sun; the force of my shame an unmerciful flail of self-loathing and despair.

     The dealership management became concerned when I did not answer the phone and called my father who, along with the parts manager, drove to my home and beat on the windows and doors for what seemed an eternity as I cowered behind the locked door of my study.  Ultimately, they broke in and found me in my withered state and crusty, greasy, sweat-soaked clothes.  Mortified beyond words, I took a shower and tried to repair my appearance somewhat.  Though exhausted, sick, and shaking, I drove myself in to work, only to have the sales manager inform me that I was fired.  My best efforts to find employment quickly and avert the brunt of this disaster failed, and I soon found myself faced with a difficult and painful decision.

     Powerful negative feelings regarding the idea of divorce had developed in response to my parent's breakup and I had sworn that I would never do such a thing.  However, faced with $1700 in monthly bills that I was unable to pay, I eventually yielded to the inevitable and, in tears, called Kelly to say that I would have to bring her divorce papers, so that the house could be sold and the accounts settled.  My father assisted me with the sale at a slight profit and I moved to a townhouse near Memphis State University, where I skated in the front door and out the back of two local industrial concerns, working as a chemist, over the course of the year that followed.  I was in a chronic state of involutional melancholia and it poisoned all that I touched.

     At this point, it seems that, though I might have been born a prince; autonomous, spontaneous, and loving; I had, somewhere along the way, been turned, unawares, into a frog.  The healing presence of nurturing love had temporarily lifted the spell but, with the end of love and the end of hope, I could feel the mantle of froghood descending inexorably around me, soon to click back into place with finality and the sound of heavy prison doors slamming home.

     Life appeared no more than a succession of painful experiences, interspersed with unendurable banality, and peopled by the mean and the depressed who were scrabbling for survival in the confusion of their pointless existence.  I had a sense of being surrounded by the lees and dregs of a futile humanity's savage avarice, the wounded denizens of a weeping world which held nothing for me.  The torn and twisted tatters of my sanity flapped madly about in the icy black gale that blew howling over the labyrinthine nest of confusion, misery, contradiction, and self-doubt that I had built upon the craggy promontory overlooking the dark chasm of my soul.  I was a leaf in the wind, spinning, and out of control.

     A few weeks previously, more out of boredom than anything else, I had cooked off a supply of phenylacetone (P-2-P), employing the classic 15-hour/145C heating of dry phenylacetic acid, acetic anhydride, and anhydrous sodium acetate (0.6:1:0.1), described in the 1940's by Magidson and Garkushka.⁽²⁾  But, for not even one of the dozens of different methods known for converting this compound into amphetamine or methamphetamine, could I put together a complete set of reagents -- to my considerable dismay. In the extremity of my frustration, I decided to develop my own procedure from an idea that had occurred to me earlier that year, though at least one organic chemistry text book said it would not work.

     Undaunted by this mere technicality, I dissolved the P-2-P in a tenfold excess of a four-molar solution of methylamine in methanol.  Keeping the mixture at room temperature (<20C) by using a cooling bath as necessary, I added, dropwise and slowly, the theoretical amount of sodium borohydride which had been dissolved in a tiny amount of 0.1 normal sodium hydroxide solution.  Twenty minutes later, I neutralized the solution with hydrochloric acid and evaporated the methanol to yield crystalline methamphetamine hydrochloride of frightening potency.  Incredibly, the majority of this was carried out on a paper towel, sitting at my desk. Righteously pleased with my ingenuity, I dubbed my new procedure Twenty Atom Bombs in Twenty Minutes.

     Of the two jobs I'd won and lost that year, one ended due to the resentment I had engendered among my coworkers in response to my patently eccentric behavior.  To the other, I just simply never returned after securing this new supply of drug. My pattern of thinking and feeling were 180 degrees out of phase with the mainstream of life.  Like a negative film exposure of consensual reality, the only joy I knew was when the crank was singing in my veins, and the only time I found myself interested, aware, and motivated was when the madness was upon me.  It was a realm of exotic nightmare in which I lived, of frightful illusions, and of dreams darkly cast.  At one point, my feet bound in plastic wrap, I jumped, naked and screaming, eighteen feet to the walk below my bathroom window, pursued and terrorized by an army of parasitic worms that I believed had invaded my home and infested my body.

     My mother came to check on me after I didn't answer the phone for two or three weeks.  She arranged for the landlord to let her in and helped me gather my wits.  From long experience, I was able to quickly straighten up and pack up my things to move.  This was fortuitous, since eviction proceedings were already underway.  Mom allowed me to store the boxes and stay at her place where I went to live for a few weeks while I decided what action to take.  She listened when I needed to talk which I very much appreciated, since I was still licking the ragged wounds of the loss of my wife and friend.  I had temporarily lost contact with Kelly, though we did talk from time to time after that to help each other over the bumps as best we could. 

1. Gibson, William - Neuromancer, (New York: Berkely Pub. 1984).

2. Magidson, O. Yu. and Garkushka, G. A. - Journal of General Chemistry (U.S.S.R.) , 11, 339-343 (1941). Abstract in English from Chemical Abstracts, vol. 35: 5868.

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