Couple things here. First of all , I used to think doing heroin made me cool. I don't really think that any more. Secondly, this was written in 2005 probably, not long after getting to Thailand. Kinda clearing out here. Putting it here means I can stop emailing it to myself so I don't lose it. Barcelona was beautiful but really boring. They all sat in cafes and drank these tiny beers, then at 2 AM they'd go to some cavernous room and dance to throbbing techno cranked way too loud. It seemed like there was always a parade of people dancing down whatever street you were on. I remember deciding I hated any culture where "the beat" sets you free or whatever. Is there anything worse than a dude who knows/thinks he's a good dancer? Puke. Also, I really wanted to be able to put "Can buy drugs overseas" on my resume. No lie, it took me two weeks of research before I was confident I wouldn't be sharing a cell with Brad Davis. And lastly, the title totally sounded like a Steely Dan lyric to me: "What's he doing now?"/"He's scoring smack in Bar-ce-lo-na"
I went down to Sant Pau in the Ravella
around 4 in the afternoon. I had been going to a tiny, shitty park inhabited by the ghosts of prostitutes that a zombie
woman told me about but was having no luck. This was a Monday and
there were cops everywhere. Before I got into the actual spot where
drugs are sold I saw a deal of some kind in progress so I
approached the dudes and asked, “Amigos. ¿Dondé puedo comprar un
poquito de caballo?” I had learned “caballo” from this dude who
stole my drugs from me the first time I scored. I had thought it was
cocaine and was checking it out in a doorway when this drunk guy
walked up and said yeah it’s coke I love coke can I do some with
you? When I said I wanted heroin he said ”Caballo?” and told me
he’d help me find some. He didn’t, he just led me to a bench and
snorted all the drugs. I was like “Que pasa bro?” but he just
looked at me. I wasn’t mad really, didn’t care but as I left I
said to him, “Dios recuerda.” Like, “God remembers.” He said,
“No existe.” And I patted him on the back and said “Dios
recuerda. Buen suerte” and left. Anyway I have since decided that
that was in fact heroin (I hadn’t expected it to be white powder)
and not cocaine but I don’t know for sure. So on this day in the
same area I was armed with the correct term for what I wanted to buy.
The two guys I approached didn’t speak any English but were real
helpful. One seemed super fucked up and looked Jimmy Buffet-ish -- dirty Hawaiian shirt and shorts, dirty hair. The other guy was
short, very neatly dressed in khaki pants and an open collared white
linen shirt, with amber-vision sunglasses pushing back the hair on
his head, short hair. They took me through the square, past Ravella’s
Rambla and up the lane to a spot with a church on one side and a
street of ancient walkups perpendicular. I couldn’t understand a
fucking word they said to me but I did get that they thought I really
looked like a policeman. I was like, “But I’m an American.” I
look pretty American. Maybe they use undercover Americans there
though I don’t know. One stayed with me while I waited for the
other one who went into one of the walkups. He came out with a little
green balloon. I said “It’s real? You sure it’s real?” He
shrugged and said “Come on.” Like gimme a break I am honest. He
told me to meet him there Friday between 6 and 6:30 for more.
I went home and opened the balloon
convinced it would not be heroin. When I dumped it out it was white
powder. I figured only one way to find out and did a line. It hit in
a little ways into the song “Jukebox Boogie” by Dr. Isaiah Ross
and I knew it was real so I did a bunch more. I laid the lines out on
the case that my little-used Italian language CDs came in. After a
good 20 minutes of sitting there motionless listening to live Doors I
got up and went to a couple bars and rubbed my face marveling at how
ridiculously good I felt and the shit was. I kept thinking it had
passed but then another rush would hit me. It kept waving in and out
for hours. By the time I went back home, the waves were receding and
the only drawback became this palpable comedown that actually felt
like coming off speed or something. I got really anxious and stared
at the ceiling until daylight. I did the rest of the bag the next
night and basically repeated the same experience.
Friday night I showed up late and
missed the guy. I ended up back in the area but it was way late and I
got beat by these two guys I’d never seen. I bought two bags and
asked if it was real, I’m here for two months you can make more
dough off me and all that. They said it was but it turned out to just
be sugar and flour or something. Drug dealers who sell fake drugs are
stupid. It turns out to be less money in the end. At home, as I was
dumping out the non drugs, I picked up the old bag to throw out in
case one of the roommates walked in my room and it turned out to have
a huge line left in it. Crazy.
This CD case sat on my desk with heroin
all over it for the rest of my time there. I kept worrying they would
see it and think I was doing coke.
The last time I scored was in the
daytime and I spent like a half hour convincing this guy I wasn’t a
cop before he would sell me anything. He made me buy two bags and I
was leaving for Thailand in two days so I didn’t know how I would
do it all. Also my breathing was starting to get kinda bad by now
because it was like 2 days on 2 days off 1 day on and one day off so
3 out of 6 days. My lungs just seem to inflate if I do it this much.
I also tried smoking some because both my nostrils were too plugged
up but the shit completely ravaged my throat. Anyway I found ways to
get it up my nose and then spent the last two days in Barcelona
fucking high as a kite. I went and sat at this fountain near the zoo
with gorgeous statues of Poseidon, Pegasus and a huge elephant and
plumes of water spraying into the warm night air, I drank a coffee
for 2 hours near the apartment and I sat in a bar trying not to fall
face first off my stool. I also floated around the apartment sucking
on my inhaler and telling my German exchange student roommates and
their boyfriends that I had a cold every time I coughed which was
every two seconds and sounded like I had flaming gravel in my chest.
The day I left to go to Thailand I
packed my backpack and set off at 5AM for the train station my
roommate told me led to the airport. My breathing was so bad that I
had to walk very gently because with the pack on I could overdo it
really easy, start fighting for breath and then need to use the
inhaler. When I went down into the station I went down the wrong
stairs and had to come back up. This almost killed me. I literally
could not breathe; it was like someone was sitting on my chest. I saw
these two guys talking and went up to them to ask where the fucking
train to the airport was and in mid-sentence I started to faint. I
quickly took off my backpack and sat down on it. One of the guys was
clearly homeless, the other one was wondering how to get away from
the guy. The homeless one said in English, “are you okay?” and I
gasped, “where do I go --- for the train --- to the airport?”
Apparently my roommate had given me bad directions because the guy
led me out and across the plaza to a bus station. He chatted with me
and stopped whenever I needed to and when we got to the bus station I
was able to drop the pack, sit for a minute and get okay with the
breathing. If this guy hadn’t brought me here, I would have been in
serious serious trouble, wandering around choking. I bought him a
coffee and he split. I missed the plane anyway and my breathing
didn’t get back to normal until approximately ten days after
arriving in Thailand. The other day I realized that during every
exchange with a dealer I had asked “Is it real?” which is (in my
Spanish) “¿Es verdad?” But I had been saying “verde” instead
of “verdad.” “Verde” means “green.” So I asked all these
street dealers if the heroin I was buying was green, was insistent on
it even. “¿Es verde? ¿Es verde?” Jeez.
