Sketches of Vancouver

I have decided to BEGIN with the asides this time and tell the main story after that. Okay so, this post is mainly about when I was having obvious mental delusions about what was reality and what was not. This isn't the only time I have "freaked" out, though it hasn't happened often. Just quickly I want to say that you may read this and think "wow, this totally isn't a harsh freak out" but it actually was. Enough so that it stayed with me. The other times that I lost my grip was when one time I had been up for days on speed and were convinced that my friends in the other room were planning a birthday party and were not going to invite me because I was too sketchy (which I wasn't but sleep deprivation plays tricks with your mind man...). Another time I remember (and I may have mentioned this in a previous post) was a time when I swore I could hear my "boyfriend" (a guy that I had been seeing on and off, he was date and wouldn't leave me alone) through a vent in my friend's hotel room talking and plotting how they were going to lure me into another room and murder me. Lastly, I will mention that I have not done much grammar or spell checking here - no time, I am a very important person you know....

Where was I??? Oh right, I was going to talk about a night way back that took place around Cambie and 41st. It starts the same as most of the other posts: I was on the stroll, it seems to me that it was a Friday or Saturday night (it's always easier to make money on weekends!! Yay!) - and I was in need of dope. I usually worked all the time, regardless if I had any dope or not already, if I was downtown, I was for sale.

I was in the hood, walking like I would, and a truck pulled up. Unassuming,

casual, smallish truck, no extended cab just room for the driver and one other person, and this night it was me that was the other person.

Immediately after getting in I could see this guy was wasted. He was very drunk. Was this a deterrent for me? No. His drinking and driving was not a problem for me. I wasn't worried about my own mortality, I faced it everyday, nor was I even the slightest concerned for the safety of the public. Sorry, but I just wasn't. I had been with drunk guys before, it happens. Most of the time it just makes them unable to "finish" or they are mildly unreasonable, big deal. And actually I did see this one girl get into this drunk guy's car one time..it was a red convertible and the guy picked up the girl and then took a corner real fast. Moments later I rounded the same bend and saw that right after they had sped around the turn the idiot drunk driver had put his shiny new car around a telephone pole. Awwww, poor him. No one was inured but I bet she was pissed off. Now she had to go find a new date. He would be good for no money.

So random guy picks me up in his truck and asks me if I know where he can get late night off sales. No, i told him except I sort of knew about this guy that ran one of the shady downtown bars that sort of sells (booze) from the hotel lobby. We drive down there and he bought some whiskey or something else equally disgusting. After this we were trying to think where we can go and he decides on Queen Elizabeth park. Now, since having sex in public places was my business I would normally have vetoed this suggestion but it was very late when this guy had picked me up, it was close to dawn and I figured by the time we drove there the sun would be pretty much up. Public parks like this one have hours usually ranging from 6 or 7 am until 10 at night but there is really no enforcing of these daytime hours. Police do cruise however but at least if it is light outside a car is not so obvious, unlike at night when headlights and the cover of darkness can give off a suspicious vibe to any officers or dogooder civilians that happen go by. So we get to the park, I think we did..I mean, I have been there lots of times but it seemed to me we were on the outskirts of it. We were within distance of residential homes so yeah. Anyways, moving on.

I had dope on me, it was crack cocaine and he was not keen on the idea of me smoking it in his new truck. He could be pissed drunk on stinky wild turkey but the scent of crack cocaine (which is really isn't a bad smell, it is sort of sweet if I am to be honest and it is definitely not a smell that sticks around) in his truck was not going to happen. I had to get out of the truck, do my toke and then get back in for whatever sexual favour he had requested, I have no idea what that was when I think back and it isn't even important.

He was sort of a sketchy guy. He was average, fairly attractive, nondescript really. He was sort of unstable - being that he was drunk and I guess that's what caused him to freak when he saw me doing a toke.... I did my toke and by the time I had started to exhale he had thrown my bag out of the driver's side door and squealed away. I was like "whaaaa???". I had been up for a few days and having just exhaled a major crack hoot in combination with his unexpected bail on me I started tripping. Hard. Usually, I could be counted on for not losing my sh*t in most situation but on this occasion I lost it. I assumed he was going to hunt me down and try to kill me since I had his money and hadn't performed any sexual act with/to him. I suddenly found myself running for my life. Don't ask me why I came to the conclusion because I can't tell you. All I know is I was terrified and was running.

He had driven off but then after I had grabbed my bag he had come to screeching halt and violently turned his truck around and came speeding back in my direction. Naturally I thought he was trying to run me over. I was having serious mental delusions. I ended up running into some one's open backyard and hid behind their garbage cans. And as I watched him cruising and trying to find me I ran from one backyard to the next hiding and hoping no one would call the police because I was lurking on their property. Eventually he gave up and took off and I was alone, it was early A.M and I was very far from downtown.

I have always said that no matter where you are, a girl can get a date, and usually this is true. But Cambie St on a busy morning is not a breeding ground for men cruising to pick up a prostitute. Mostly people were on their way to work and pulling over on a busy street like that is not something done casually. So I was left to hitchhike. I had the money he had given me but I had no change for the bus and there was no stores (to get change) open at that time. It was humiliating, I HATED being out when people were going to work plus I had anxiety at whether or not this crazy man was going to come back to murder me - thought it was fabulous of him to chuck my bag out his truck before he took off though, I will give him that.

Hitchhiking was never something I have liked to do (except for on Kingsway in the middle of the night, it is EASY to get a ride on that road). I felt like I was so obviously a drug addicted prostitute so who in their right mind would stop to give ME a ride? Well, the only person that did was a cab driver. Sweet and nice cab driver. He was headed in my direction anyways and my obvious look of distress and fear must have been what made him stop for me. And no, he wasn't like other cab drivers I knew, he didn't expect a hummer for a ride.

This was just another tale of why drugs are bad and why you should never get in a car with a drunk driver.

The Raven:

I am running out of stories maybe. I find myself wanting to share other tales of yore..tales that go all the way back to before prostitution and occurred in the medieval days of ravers and good ecstasy.

A while back, quite a while back, I may have touched on something called psychosis and/or hallucinations, whether they be auditory or visual. Now, most people (including myself), have found it amusing or just wondrous at least when they come into contact with or hear about a person that was so wasted that they are obviously totally out of touch with reality. It can be a laugh and scary. I feel like I may have mentioned this in regards to myself..and my own experiences but I can't totally remember everything I have written about in this blog. But hey, it can happen to the best of us. No one likes to admit that they have lost their sh*t at any time. BUT being that this is so many years after the fact I am able to look back now and laugh, as well as shake my head. In fact the other day I was at school telling a couple of my fellow students about the first time I had done ecstasy. It was ugly. I had put like a half gram of coke up my nose and was on my way to a New Year's Eve "rave" (we used the term "party") called "Life Force". First off, let me mention that this is an aside, this isn't even the intended subject of this post but just something I felt like sharing in this minute.

Anyways, we are at the party and I am there, out of my mind gassed on up and I am introduced to someone that is selling Es. Now, this isn't your average, modern, run of the mill E that is made of some unknown substances be they acid, PCP, etc. This was like, pure, split it between two people gel cap E, worth every cent of the forty dollars (yes, that's right, forty dollars - the cheaper the E is, the sh*ttier it is..so forty is not unreasonable). Within an hour and from a combination between the cocaine and the E I was hallucinating madly. That can happen if you do too much E, I really should have split it with someone but I didn't. So yes, mad hallucinations. I actually didn't have that good of a time that night as I was overly wrecked. But when I got home and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth did I get the real shock, the heart stopper, the "oh my G8d I should not have done that, what if I stay like this forever" moment. As I was brushing my teeth and I looked up and saw my eye.

My eye. My right eye has been weaker than the left for my whole life. I wore glasses as a child, contacts as a teenager but as an adult I never have. I mean, I do now so I can see better while driving and all that but my eyes both stare in the same direction, behaving like normal eyes nothing creepy. When I was young though, I had what one might call a lazy eye. Meaning one eye is normal and the other goes in, towards my nose.

It had been YEARS since I had even thought about my eye..and it was this night, this night doing too much E too soon that made it come and rear its head. I saw in the mirror that my eye was moving around in my eye socket with no rhyme or reason. It was terrifying. I was THAT GIRL. I was her, the girl that was pointed at and you may have said " look at her EYE" and "SHE must be so wasted", etc. I could control it if I tried hard enough but if I didn't it was bouncing around like that DVD graphic that is on your TV when you don't have a DVD in the player but the TV is set to DVD. You know?

It is funny when I think about it now but at the time it was crazy. And as I progressed through my drug using, and actually it was only in my crystal meth/E/MDMA/PCP/LSD phase (which lasted a few years), that I had to purchase an eye patch at a drug store just so I could go into day two or three of sleep deprivation without worrying that my eye was going to "go"....only the closest of friends where ever allowed to see me like that. And, since I am on the subject, my personal recommendation to anyone that does make a habit of consuming copious amounts of whatever substance (especially those that have a hallucinatory effect) and like to stay awake for days at a time, I would suggest that when you are in that very vulnerable and unguarded state, keep only your best friends around you. I found that it helped to reduce any unnecessary paranoid episodes as well.

See, at parties or raves I would actually enjoy singling out those that did appear to be losing their grip and would say things to them that would exacerbate their situation. For example, I recall one individual, he was a person that I knew and I had sold him some acid and could tell the he was trippin' HARD and I went up to him and asked him if he was aware that he was convulsing. He wasn't convulsing but it amused me when I saw that he panicked for a minute. I told him I was kidding so his initial shock became relief ( I probably helped him if anything). Another time I went up to this girl at a party and she was obviously too high, so I told her that her mum was at the door of the facility and that she was asking for her. I had no idea who this girl was so of course there was no way I could know her mother, but the girl freaked like I knew she would. One's mother may not be the best prescription for a youngster in the depths of an ecstasy high.

As a last thought I will mention that often a person in recovery will question themselves this: "will I ever have as much fun as I did while I was getting high?". I mean, that was the problem right, it was too much fun? (I am not referring to my heroin/prostitution days - that was in a way enjoyable but mostly miserable, I am talking about the getting high...getting really, really high. On e's, acid, mushrooms, MDA, crystal meth, etc..you know, the raver "party" drugs that I mentioned a few paragraphs back). Well, I still ask myself that same question because I find that a lot of life still pales in comparison to dancing your f*cking brains out in the middle of the forest ( I went to a lot of outdoor parties) as the sun comes up with a bunch of your friends that are going off as hard as you are.

This isn't to say that I don't get my kicks these days...but it's just something something about those nights. But it does/did get ugly AFTER the party - I will give you that. That sounds so cliche, there must be an after school special out there with that title, "After the Party". Maybe an A & E Special Presentation about the dangers of ecstasy and raving and how there is a direct link between raving and eventual turning "out" to work the streets....(there is no link that I am aware of, I am just an anomaly, soon to be martyr.)

This wasn't even what I was going to write about today, I was GOING to write about a time when I tripped out mega hard and badly, psychosis style when I was with a date out by Cambie and 41St....I guess I will just have to write about that next time.