Booze, Barflies, Weed, and Seizures - Memories of a Freak Magnet.

I never had any personal experience with hard drugs, but nonetheless they have influenced my life.

I remember a day when my mother left my estranged father and I on a line to see a movie.  When she left to park the car, Pop abruptly took me off the line with him and we wandered around the neighborhood going randomly from store to store.  As we walked along the street, I would hear him stifling a chuckle (or a sob?).  When my mother caught up with us, horrified at the thought that my father may have kidnapped me, she never left me alone with him again.

When I told mom about my father’s inexplicable chuckling, my Mom said bluntly, “I think your father has a drug problem.”

I had already been in classes at intermediate school where the cops told all the horror stories about drug abuse.  Through that lens, I saw my father as some kind of ghost, if not an outright monster.  I didn’t just feel he was no longer a part of the family.  I felt he was no longer of this earth.

When I was in the schoolyard, I would peek through the gate at small clusters of tiny vials scattered on the ground.  When I asked a more worldly wise friend what they might be, he said it was crack.

When I started high school, my mother and I moved to another part of the city and gave my father no information as to where we now lived.  There were cliques of kids who indulged in buda (marijuana), but I wasn’t part of those circles.  I doubt we would have liked each other’s presence anyway.

Entering college, I dealt with a lot of stress and I made no lasting friendships there.  The only people who extended the hand of friendship were born-again Christians and communist groups.  They all had agendas and needed not so much friends as followers.  I extricated myself from them as soon as I felt uncomfortable.

So, I hung out with guys I knew from my old neighborhood.  We’d travel the length and breadth of the city club hopping and hanging around in bars.  I had outgrown the scare tactics about alcohol and cannabis and partook of both on the weekends.  Sometimes to a degree that would have given Caligula pause.

On New Year’s Eve 1989 at Avenue A, a friend and I were hanging out.  Some wreck of a man staggered up to us and started a stream of consciousness blathering.  We grinned and indulgently nodded our heads as we looked at each other to come up with an escape plan.  I don’t remember how, but we were able to shake the guy off.  

I asked my friend, “Why don’t any hot girls approach us?  Why is it always drunken fuck-ups?”

My friend’s gaze turned to a lamppost where stickers for various band names and political slogans were pasted.  He gestured me over to the lamppost.  “Have a look at this,” he said.

I caught sight of a sticker that read in a jagged font:  FREAK MAGNETS.

We both laughed.  “Yeah, that’s we are,” I said.  “We’re fucking FREAK MAGNETS!”

As the 90s started, we partied harder and got more drunk and high off of weed.  We would come across girls, but we didn’t have the balls to strike up conversations with them.  Because of that, our anthem was “Too Drunk to Fuck” by Dead Kennedys.

But in lieu of girls, we kept attracting freaks.

Not freaky girls, mind you.  Just FREAKS.

One night at some bar who name I don’t recall, some man with gin blossoms all over his face and a cloud of frizzy gray hair approached my clique.  He started blathering what I believe he thought were “life lessons.”  The bartender and the other barflies started making fun of him.

“Who you laugh at?” he demanded with a heavy accent.  “I am not a useless drunk!  I have business!”

“What’s your name, businessman?” one guy asked with a disdainful grin.

“Rafik,” he responded with rage in his voice.

“Yeah, how you spell that?”

“RAFIK!”  He roared.  “R-A-F-I-K!!!”  He pounded his fist on the bar with each letter.

This gave me pause.  “Rafik?”  I asked myself.  I was a film student in college at the time, and I purchased a lot of my film stock from a store named Rafik.  I asked myself, “Is this the guy that actually runs the place?  Is this THE Rafik?  Is Rafik on some midnight prowl to take the edge off a crazy week at his business?  I’d never seen him at the counter of the film store.

I nudged my friends, “C’mon.  This isn’t funny anymore.  Let’s find another place.”

Another night, we were at a pizzeria at St. Mark’s Place.  We ate our slices and knocked back some beers.  The subject of dead rock stars came up in conversation.  We were joking and laughing about the guys so young that they wound up in “The 27 Club.”  The 27 Club, for those who don’t know, is the pantheon for all the rock and pop stars who died at the age of 27.  This well regarded privilege included, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and most recently, Kurt Cobain.

Suddenly, a few tables away from us, some inebriated guy growled at us, “You’re all a bunch of queers.  You worship death!  Bunch of queers.  Bunch of death loving queers!”

We looked at the guy and started laughing.  We echoed, “Death loving queers?”

“Yeah, you, you fucking queers,” he snarled, “You’re a bunch of fucking queers that worship death!”

We burst into laughter.  He stormed out in a fit of outrage.

“I guess that’s what we are,” I said.  “First we were Freak Magnets, now we’re a bunch of Death Loving Queers.”  Again we laughed.

Suddenly, the guy zipped up from behind us.  He grabbed the food he left behind.  He flung it at us, missing by a mile.  “BUNCH OF FUCKING DEATH LOVING QUEERS!” he snapped.  Finally, he left.

From there on, the name of our clique alternated between The Freak Magnets and the Death Loving Queers, abbreviated “DLQ.”

We continued our weekend avocation of being boozehounds and baseheads for the first half of the 90s.  Then, something happened to me that changed my life, in the worst way possible.

March 23, 1996.  I went to screenwriting class on a Monday after a major bender around the Lower East Side.  We were going over each other’s scripts.  I felt perfectly fine…

…The next thing I knew, I was strapped to a stretcher.  My mind was completely voided of memory and sensation.  I saw my screenwriting teacher hovering over me, urging me to lay back.  I could hear him, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

As I slowly gathered my wits, my memories, and my whereabouts, I was in a hospital bed with a saline drip going into my arm.  A doctor and a nurse revolved in and out of the bed I was in which was partitioned with a heavy drape.  After a time, the doctor approached me with some small talk.  In hindsight, it was probably meant to gauge my coherence.

Finally, he announced, “You’ve had a seizure.”

I was totally taken aback.  A seizure?  Me?  Was it the stress at school and my part time job.  I had been working and studying at crazy hours.

The doctor asked, “Do you have a history of seizures?”

“No,” I stuttered out of nervousness.

“Does your family have a history of seizures?”

“Not that I know of.”

“How much alcohol do you drink?”

I hemmed and hawed, “Well, I drink off the weekends.  Not a lot, but…”

“No more alcohol,” he said.  We’re going to set an appointment for an fMRI.  In the meantime, here’s a prescription for a medicine called Dilantin.  It should keep any possibility of seizures under control.”

I was gobsmacked.  I asked, “Is this a one time thing?  Could it happen again?”

“We don’t know yet,” said the doctor.   “That’s what the fMRI is for.  To see if there’s anything malignant in your brain.  Say, a tumor.”

TUMOR?  I said to myself.  Could it be THAT bad?  Am I going to die?

After a week of Dilantin intake and taking time off of going to college, I went to the hospital for an fMRI.  They scanned my brain, then they did some examination with my eyes.  I guess they were trying to determine if flashing lights provoked a seizure.

Then they had me wear a lopsided crown of wires and devices plugged to my scalp for further examination.  They said to go home with this embarrassing headdress and take a day to relax.  Then I had to come back to the hospital to see if any more results appeared.

The following day, I took a cab to the hospital.  They undid the wires on my scalp.  An hour passed.  Then a doctor approached me.

“We didn’t detect any malignant tumors,” he said.  “It appears that you have what is called generalized seizures.”

More Q and A determined I had to take more Dilantin indefinitely.

Over the next few years, I would have seizures, usually due to not getting a large enough dose of Dilantin.  Finally, I was referred to a neurologist.  When I told him I was taking Dilantin, he frowned and asked, “Why are they giving you such an out of date medicine?  You may as well be treating your condition with voodoo.”

Thereafter, I took a more sophisticated medication called Lamictal.  I’ve been on an even keel over since.

I did have an episode visiting cousins in California, the doctor at the hospital said due to the time difference between Eastern and Pacific time, I was taking the meds at the wrong time of day.

As for the Freak Magnets?  The Death Loving Queers?  We all reached an age where we were settling down with jobs, getting married, and moving to other parts of the country.  Without alcohol and weed, we didn’t have much of a social circle.  We keep a tenuous link through social media, reminisce about the old days as DLQs, and talk about what we’re up to in the present.  I’m pretty sure however that if we got together at a bar or a club, we may as well have been trying to talk to aliens.

Another factor that turned me away from playing with my health is my wife, Suze.  I didn’t want her to spend our marriage dealing with a seizing drunk.  We’ve been married nearly a quarter of a century.  It’s humbling and wondrous to think about how our lives changed.

I reminisce with my wife about the decade of the 1990s, the decade where we became adults and experienced the freedom, the fun, the responsibility and drudgery of no longer being a kid.  I often see the 1990s through rose tinted glasses, in reverie of all the wild bands I saw, all the offbeat TV shows I would watch, and all my misadventures with the Freak Magnets / DLQs.  There were good times, but oftentimes the partying was one last hurrah before true adulthood laid its clutches on us.  Suze has fond memories of her own, minus the drinking and toking.  She had some wild, artistic friends and even played a the role of Gwendolyn in a way off Broadway (Columbus, Ohio) production of The Importance of Being Earnest.  My friends and I had talents, but we didn’t become an artistic movement of our own.  Again, it was alcohol, not creativity, that was the tie that bound us together.

I have no life lessons or cautionary tales about alcohol and cannabis.  I’m not a barfly like Rafik.  Even if I didn’t have the seizures, I’m pretty sure I would have weaned myself away from liquor and weed.  Again, without a circle of friends to drink and toke with, what’s the point of drinking and toking?

I live a life of suburban comfort now, my wife and I and no children.  I write scripts in the hope of becoming a professional screenwriter.  I take all sorts of angles of getting into the field.  Slowly but surely I grow closer to my goal.  Or maybe I was Sisyphus pushing a stone up the side of a mountain.  Whatever the case, I’ll let you know in my last blog of my final hour on Earth, whenever that time will be.  Hopefully a long way away.

I’ve considered this blog to be an epilogue of sorts to the entries concerning Christiane F and Zoo Station, just to show why I relate to a clique of addicts and their misadventures.  It was writing critiques of those books, movies, and miniseries that made me reflect on my own experiences with drugs.

Anyway, I’ve come to the end of that experience.  I no longer drive like a demon from station to station.

-JJB