Too Stoned To Strip

i'm enough of a coward that there are certain challenges i'm perfectly happy to have ducked - even if only by accident. Child-rearing comes to mind.



i'm also not going to lie to you and tell you that i didn't have a perfectly good time taking drugs when i was younger, because frankly i did have a perfectly good time. As far as i can tell it did me no particular harm, left me with some great memories, opened my eyes to many possibilities and provided me with hours and hours of wild tales to tell. All in all, not a bad deal. but not something i would particularly advocate now that i'm older and little more aware.



So, having admitted that i spent a time in thrall to one chemical or another and further having admitted that not only did i enjoy said experiences but that they seemed to be harmless - what in heaven's name would i ever say to a child of mine on the subject? Please ask me on a case by case basis? Give her a little list of approved and unapproved illicit substances? And at what age? No, i'm glad to be ducking the whole thing.

But you know....as crazy as we were back then there were still rules - even for freaks like us. There were some things that just weren't cool. At least in my circle anything involving speed or needles was not cool and that seemed to serve to keep us out of the worst sorts of trouble. You always hear that stuff like heroin is bad news, that it will lead to no good end, but you don't necessarily get a first hand story about what it can actually do.

i have one for you.

During the year or so that i lived in Miami, a dear friend back home in San Diego went through the breakup of his marriage and he was really really REALLY not taking the breakup well.

In a search for replacement, or compensatory, female companionship, he somehow made the aquaintance of a certain young lady. She was in need of some rescuing and my friend, who would adopt every stray cat in southern California if he didn't have cooler heads in his life to tell him to put the kitten down and back slowly away, decided that rescuing her was just the ticket.

Now, one might perhaps attempt to rescue a heroin addict.

One might even perhaps attempt to rescue someone who was seriously mentally ill.

It is sheer folly for the untrained to attempt to rescue someone who presents both in one neat package, and yet that's what he set out to do.

To his good credit, he realized, even as befuddled as he was at the time, that to come home from work and find that said young lady, who by this time was encamped in his home, was watching "Natural Born Killers" several times a day was not at all a good sign. When she also requested that he buy her a handgun and made an off-hand remark that only death would separate them (or words to that effect), he knew the jig was up and managed to disentangle himself from her at the cost of new locks and a changed phone number.

Now, all of this is horrifying enough, but it's all in the past and he's survived with some lessons learned by the time i hear about it, so, although my eyes are bugged out all the way through the story, my brain still hasn't quite overloaded. No, not quite yet.

Somehow or other i asked about her employment history - apart from her jail time that is. (Did you know, by the way, that you can visit the San Diego Sheriff's website and actually find out who's in jail? It's a handy thing when you're being stalked by a crazy addict who's just been locked out of your home.) And this is where my brain finally shorted out for good on this one. i'm told that she was "a dancer". "What kind of "dancer"?, say i" "An exotic dancer," says he. "Ah," say i, "a stripper. And why did she stop stripping?" "Well," says he, "in her own words, 'eventually the drugs started to interfere with [her] career.'"

"Dude," say i, "are you actually saying she was too stoned to STRIP?"

i ask you, at precisely what age is a child's moral development sufficiently mature to understand a story like this? Damned if i know. i'm just glad i can duck the issue.