| They move in the dark
old places of the world;
Like mariners once healthy and clear-eyed, When their ship was holed could not admit ruin, And the necessity of flight, But chose instead to ride their cherished wreck Down into darkness, and there, not quite to drown, But ever to continue plying sails, Against the midnight currents, moving from pit to pit To lightless crag, in hopeless search For some ascent to shore. And who, in their decayed, slow voyaging, do presently Lose all desire for light, air, and living company.
From here their search is only for the deepest groves,
|
About this time, I received a call from an acquaintance in Minnesota. I'd met Alvin in prison (he had ended up there under circumstances somewhat similar to my own -- busted for making speed) where he'd struck me as a decent sort of guy. At that time, I viewed him, as I did myself, as a victim of the system and its fascist drug laws. Unfortunately, he had been, in addition, the one who'd dropped off the aminorex that had cost me my sales job. Also recently divorced and alone, Alvin lived in large home on prestigious Lake Minnetonka that he had inherited from his parents. He suggested that I come to Minnesota for a while, offering me a position in what he described as a lucrative firewood business and a free roof over my head until I had sorted things out. He even offered to pay for the move. After considering my options briefly, I concluded that, what the hell, anything was an improvement over my current state of affairs. In a decidedly uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly 1979 TransAm that my mother had inherited from her nephew's estate and towing a U-Haul trailer crammed with the majority of my worldly possessions, I drove the thousand miles to the town of Deephaven Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. This was mid-September of 1987.
Minnesota, as it turned out, proved to be an exceedingly hostile environment for me -- and not just with regard to its hellish abomination of a climate. At best, the people seemed a generally dour and unfriendly lot, often emotionally unexpressive, sullen, self-righteous, and deluded. The intellectual atmosphere I found effete and prejudicial, the worldview self-serving and unrealistic, and the local accent grating and unlovely. I have often wondered how I would have reacted had someone pointed out to me back then that the state's top grossing industry at the time was psychological treatment.
I handled the phone orders and paperwork end of Alvin's firewood business and he the delivery of the wood. It soon became apparent to me, however, that there was simply no way that he could be making money in the quantities that he casually tossed about from firewood sales alone. Also, I found his regular habit of leaving home around midnight and not returning till near dawn suspicious, to say the least. After I'd been there for a month or so, people began arriving from all over the country. Eight or ten total, they all piled in Alvin's 26-foot RV one day and left for a two-week trip out to Montana and back.
During this hiatus, I stayed home alone the majority of the time. I could find little with which to occupy myself since I knew no one else in the area. One afternoon, I was playing pinball in his arcade room when I noticed, on the cluttered desk in the corner, a two-gallon freezer bag containing about two pounds of white crystalline powder. At this time in my life, I usually kept on hand what amounted to a small but functional laboratory packed into a couple of banana boxes. After all, one never knows what opportunity might present itself and I believed it best to be prepared. I was therefore able to analyze the material from the bag and found it to be virtually pure 4-methylaminorex. Within days I was strung out and insane, and I managed to stay that way for most of the two weeks. When Alvin returned, I was embarrassed but admitted what I had done. Strangely, he wasn't angry and told me to forget it, though occasionally, he would sit down with a notebook and ask me pointed questions about drug chemistry.
Needing desperately to ground myself -- to establish some sort of purpose, I applied to the University of Minnesota in hopes of completing the few hours lacking on my B.S. degree. I was accepted to start winter quarter, but unfortunately, it would require me to repeat my entire senior year and more in order to obtain a degree. I did well enough, however, that my work quickly attracted attention. My undergraduate grades had transferred as 4.0 and I had maintained a 4.0 for the first quarter. One of my courses was taught in the Medicinal Chemistry Department of the Collage of Pharmacy, located in the U. of M.'s School of Medicine. The course was on instrumental methods of analysis and was open to undergraduate seniors. By midterm the professor was impressed enough with my performance that he had the chairman of the department approach me regarding the Ph.D. program in medicinal chemistry. I found the prospect quite exciting, especially since Dr. Hannah, who introduced me around the department, was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and, quite likely, would be my major professor.
It was decided that I should enter the doctoral program immediately since there was only one slot left for that year. The five-year program, from B.S. directly to Ph.D., was the most prestigious of its type, accepting only three students per year out of all of the applications from around the world. I could not turn down such an honor, though, in hindsight, it is clear that I should have at least tried to put it off a year, since I was in no condition mentally for such responsibility. I was to be at the unprecedented disadvantage of being in both undergraduate and graduate school at the same time and given the additional burden of a teaching assistantship in pharmaceutical biochemistry to boot. This was far in excess of what I could handle at the time, having been out of school for nine years, emotionally troubled, chemically dependent, and having no local network of friendship and support. Spring quarter, I used Alvin's drugs on several occasions and soon found myself seriously behind in my work. I was also beginning to suspect that my benefactor had ulterior plans for me.
Around this time, a young woman by the name of Nancy arrived at the house for a brief stay, and a relationship evolved between us. Over the weeks that followed, Alvin's behavior began to deteriorate and he became increasingly unstable mentally, often brandishing machine guns and other weapons about in the house while howling about being plagued by "devils." The constant availability of drugs was not healthy for either Nancy or me and we soon decided that the situation was untenable - that we would somehow have to escape. When it appeared that Alvin had become overtly psychotic, Nancy and I had him hospitalized, soliciting help from police to move us into hiding because of threats he was making.
We got an apartment in Minnetonka, but it wasn't long before Nancy moved back home to Wisconsin for fear of reprisal from Alvin. I quickly found a new roommate, Holly, a thirty-year-old executive for a travel company and took a job on a horse farm where two-year-old thoroughbreds were broken to race for nearby Canterbury Downs. Weekends, during that summer of 1988, I also worked for the Minnesota Renaissance Festival -- an experience which I thoroughly enjoyed, and, despite the two jobs, I was able to catch up on my course work by midsummer.
During the cold and lonely fall quarter that followed, I became so despondent that I once again sought relief in drugs. It wasn't long before my roommate moved out as I began to show signs of unhealthy paranoia and spent days at a time in my room. One day, that I thought was late October was actually November twenty-eighth, I began to hear people outside my apartment, talking over 2-way radios in such a way that it appeared that they were narcotic agents and that they were preparing to come into my home and kill me. In terror, I called my mother who suggested that I call 911. I ran out my front door, kicked in the door of the apartment across the hall, and hid under the furniture while I called emergency services and asked for the police to be sent to save me from these assassins. The police arrived and found no assassins but my appearance and behavior caused them to suspect that I was using drugs. Breaking into tears, I admitted that I was and pleaded for help with my addiction. Instead of helping, they searched my apartment and arrested me. Released the next day "pending complaint," I was told that I would probably be prosecuted in the near future. Alone, afraid, and uncertain where to turn, I checked into the depression unit of Riverside/St. Mary's hospital for two weeks. The landlord initiated eviction proceedings while I was in the hospital.
Upon release, I went to the professors to explain my depression. They told me to rest during Christmas and that we'd work things out in January. Needing a place to live, I moved into a five-person rooming house in Dinkytown on Eighteenth Avenue. Winter quarter my work suffered but I managed to catch up by spring break. Spring quarter, I did poorly on the graduate records examination as a result of having been awake on drugs for four or five days and unable to concentrate. To the department faculty, I had become a liability and an embarrassment, I believe, and this provided a convenient excuse to dismiss me from the program, leaving me feeling like the proverbial drowning man who is going down for the third time.
Unwilling to even consider the frightening scope of this defeat, my drug use skyrocketed until, on the ninth of May 1989, my roommates called the police to report the fact that I had been locked in my room and unresponsive for nearly two weeks. The complaint from the previous November showed up on the computer in the patrol car so I was arrested and taken to the Minneapolis City Jail.
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