Crescent Heights
In some ways, I suppose, our addiction is not just to a substance but to the exotic conditions surrounding that substance: the intricacy of plotting where to meet the dealer at what time to least arouse suspicion, the adrenalin of finding a liquor store across town so that you don’t bump into someone from rehab, the ambrosiac taste of a beer in a dive bar at the precise moment some fat idiot drones ‘Keep coming back…’ in a striplit community center, balancing his styrofoam cup of coffee between quivering thighs. Similarly, we become addicted not just to the affect of the drug, but to the grandiosity of our own sublime, majestic tragedy: the sunlight filtering through blinds, lighting up dust motes settling on skin ashy and gray, stretched taut against a hollow skull, a body beaten, defeated and whimpering as the comedown grips hold. Vile and loathful we may be, but there is something about what others view as pitiful, as the lowest of the low, as filthy and execrable, repulsive and inhuman, diseased and outcast, that appeals to us passionately, and once we have glimpsed the quickest path of descent, we are racing down it gaily like children on some grand 1950s adventure story - Biggles does Blow, Nancy Drew and the Missing Crack Pipe - at once hating, loathing, despising ourselves, at once adamant that nothing in sobriety could ever taste quite as delicious as our own spectacular, superb self-destruction.
MIMI IN NY | 4:13 PM |
