Dan Daiquiri

A descriptive trip into 2012, I’d just got my first flat and things were getting loose. I knew I’d get into that rotten stuff soon enough. A turbulent time navigating through various encounters with substances and the impacts caused, a time in which I was slowly descending into the worst version of myself. My aim has to be always to provide an accurate account of my life events, and never to glorify substance abuse. 

I opened my eyes, how long had it been? I was suspended in limbo for what felt like days, moments merging into one another and almost blurring the line between memories and current time. Deja vu rippled throughout my consciousness as I stumbled about my house, clinking bottles as I moved in what felt like slow motion. They created a reverbed echo throughout my cochlea which at the time, impacted balance. When I blinked, there I was sitting in the bean bag from an almost third person perspective, out of body and I could see the absolute disgrace that was my flat from above.

A mish mash of random speckles of paint and writing coated the walls, a thin veiled curtain was over one window and a wooden board over the other from when I smashed my window after drunkenly leaving my keys in the house. Almost another misdemeanour on my ever growing criminal record. Hundreds of bottles littered the living room and all around the furniture there were various ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts which had already been harvested for tobacco. The light fixture hung out of the roof with exposed wires over a set of mismatched chairs and a dirty pink leather sofa which I’d stolen from the street around the corner, a real specimen to behold. My bed was a bizarrely shaped sofa bed which felt more like an over inflated air mattress, not that I slept much anyway but it was mainly there for anybody else trying to catch some Z’s. The issue with being such a riot and a people pleasing person while living in a studio flat is that you can never stop the party and kick people out. Pair this with not getting sleep as your bedroom was also the living room, a recipe for disaster. In reflection I realise just how terrible my sleep deprivation must have been during this time. It’s no wonder I’d often pass out, and was also prone to sleep paralysis.

As I gained a moment of consciousness I began to question how long I’d been lying in the black bean bag, was it minutes or hours? days perhaps? Who knows, I certainly don’t. I took another bong and fell back in. There’s no question about it, it was one of the largest bean bags I’d ever seen and when lying in the middle of it there was a semblance of comfort. Like a cold shiny hug, with the bean bag I was the small spoon, I turned into the foetal position and slipped further down into the legal high trip.

The days of mephedrone were long gone and focus was now on the new style of designer drugs flying about. Nowadays this is called spice but back then it was packaged and sold in colourful packets at extremely low prices. Usually found in dodgy kinds of stores, you know the ones: half an army shop and the other half a bong shop. A million different flavours of rolling papers parked right up next to a switchblade knife. I remembered the first time I smoked the stuff and was piqued with intrigue. However I was very much aware of the potency but would still regularly dabble, the main issue was it wasn’t an ideal partner to alcohol with most of its psychedelic effects being lost under the lower humming vibration of bevvy.

Stuck in a repetitive cycle of parties, different drugs and carry-outs followed for what felt like an eternity. The issue was I had never really considered what I wanted to do with my life, and even when tripping on any of the substances I was doing: I had never once questioned who I was or what I wanted from life. I thought I was stuck with the cards I had in my hand, freshly dealt from the dealer and ready to be put down into the next game of “Ring of Fire”. In reality, I never knew that at any point I could be whoever I wanted to be and that at any moment I could change the tide and be better. The life I lived was a choice, and for better or worse I would continue traversing the rough terrain over my living room floor occasionally trampling on the DVD copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas- a film I watched religiously as I felt at the time closely resembled the life I was in whilst also providing some sort of bucket list of drugs. It wasn’t long until we were on ether.

Ether had always seemed like an unattainable target, however it was relatively easy to synthesise it with a few simple ingredients: engine cold start was the main ingredient to all of this, some simple extraction and science and voila in about ten minutes we had a batch of diethyl ether. It was so impure and astringent I can still taste it in my mouth eleven years later. Little did we know back then that what we were brewing had high levels of n-hexane, and likely contributed to the drowsiness and nausea. I’d heard from a friend that this was the most efficient method to make ether because lets be serious who was gonna acquire a group of nineteen year old unemployed wreck heads a bottle of pure ether? He was also the most knowledgeable and reliable out of everyone I knew over those years when it came to all things substance related, so I knew there must be an element of truth to it.

It was certainly a crazy trip, akin to an extremely amplified amyl nitrate mixed with nitrous oxide. Slight visual hallucinations paired with absolute confusion, your brain trying to make sense of simple concepts whilst also trying to find words to articulate them. It was a very bizarre time, for most of the trip it sounded like there was an air conditioning unit circulating behind my head however this was the blood rushing through my brain and popping blood vessels. I could feel the pulsating vibrato as it changed in pitch occasionally, hoping for it to go into the deeper bass-filled sound as the fan on the air conditioner continued behind me. The loss of basic motor functions was the most concerning part of the trip though, struggling to move whilst also being aware of my paralysis was terrifying.

There was something so sinister about this setup, the way in which we made the ether, maybe it was the fact we knew that this was the utter depths of solvent abuse or perhaps it was the strong gasoline scent radiating from my ground floor flat and drifting out through the slats in my boarded up window. When taking any new drug it almost opens a new door of perception, further deepening either an understanding of yourself or the world around you. However with ether, it felt it only melted brain cells whilst giving a bottomless foreboding. An unshakable dread and a disgust for oneself, trying to live your day by day whilst pungent aromas of petroleum emitted from my pores.

Regardless, over the months it didn’t take long for the noise complaints to come rolling in and the police were at my door more frequently than the postman, I generally had no fear and would often joke with them in an effort to befriend them. None of it really registered in my mind at the time that this could in fact get pretty serious, often escaping by the skin of my teeth.

I craved more and had heard about dextromethorphan which was ingested through cough syrup. My friend and I decided we wanted to give this a try, what did we have to lose? We got out of our ether slumber and hyped ourselves up, only ever focussed on the end result. The excitement of a new trip of some description was exhilarating, a new window to see the world and a feeling that maybe we’d make it out of this lifestyle through that very experience. I think with every experience I search for in life, I’m always looking for a way out, looking to escape the very life I have spent decades building. I don’t know why, maybe its some form of sadistic self torture to punish myself for never feeling good enough. But in this moment a new high was on the cards and surely this would be the way forward, I had a pretty bad cough anyway so what harm would drinking a bottle or two do to me?

We done a bit of research and found that no pharmacies in my area stocked the specific cough syrup we needed. Finally we found a match, a retail park about an hour walk away with no simple public transport connections. We set off on foot after another couple cigarettes and a swig of cider, this would be an expedition beyond any other comprehensible to our limited minds right now and the only way through was to fortify our haziness.

We arrived at the pharmacy, feeling significantly worse than we did but the swig of cider was still present in my blood and I could still taste it in my mouth. A disgusting sharp yet sour low vegetal taste from the white cider which had never seen an apple in its life, fermented onions should never have been bottled but it was unfortunately the most budget friendly choice.

My friend went into the pharmacy because I looked shocking, a silhouette with an almost wavy hedgehog kind of hairdo and puffed eyes unable to look at one thing. A smug smirk on my face at all times like I knew something nobody else did when I was in fact struggling to cope with the crippling reality that is existence. As the pharmacy doors opened there he was, walking towards me with a bag containing four bottles of cough syrup. All with dextromethorphan, the day was going to get very wild or so we thought.

When we arrived back at the house, we felt a sense of achievement at the completion of our expedition with cough syrup in hand. We cracked it open, clinked the bottles together as a toast and began drinking the thick viscous mollases like liquid. About 45 minutes must have passed, still nothing. Eventually I got some sort of kick from the DXM, however it wasn’t nearly worth the nausea. After some light visual trips which then fizzled into a sense of fatigue I lay down, accepting my fate and realising that maybe it was time for some real sleep.

I was fine, but my friend really wasn’t. I remember him being sick constantly for hours. I lay there, where I had always been… on the bean bag. I wonder where he is now, I wonder if he made it out. It’s funny how your brain can just focus back on moments and remember the gaunt look on his face as he put the bong to the floor once again.

My little humble abode wasn’t rare to a party, there was always at least one crazy night a week which was then followed by subsequent smaller parties. I cannot for the life of me remember the occasion we were celebrating, likely just another brew payment day or another minor event which didn’t merit going all out. I had dressed up as a prison inmate in an orange jumpsuit for some reason and had invited a large cross section of my friend group. The night was ticking by in the usual fashion with the initial burst of excitement slowly fizzling out into the stratosphere as we all tried to take charge of the music and talked over each other with increasing oscillating volumes.

My sister was at the party and we were having a laugh, being silly as always. There was an altercation though when one of my friends made a remark against her and this was when the whole atmosphere changed, the night was never going to be the same. I snapped back with anger, a feeling of rage washed over me. I don’t mind being on the receiving end of some form of verbal abuse as I can talk my way out of it. However, when family is involved my entire world flips upside down and I’ll go mental. I shouted back, and he swung at me with his fist. I knew this was heading towards a full blown escalation and we’d only just begun. I swung a punch, it connected and echoed with a kind of low crunching slap sound, this was to be one of the only punches I got in as I was soon knocked down after two hits. I fell to the floor, inebriated and confused.

I remembered the feeling of anger rippling through my body. We scuffled about on the floor, rolling around but it’s safe to say I was becoming worse off. As each blow was dealt to my face with a clenched fist, my rage grew further. The feeling of helplessness and weakness flashed back to high school, that moment when my bullying had hit breaking point. It had been a while since I’d felt this, and it was something I didn’t quite have control of or even a basic understanding. Here it was, an uncontrollable urge to fight back. I had to, I couldn’t possibly give up because that’s weak. Instead I grabbed the closest thing I could: a small bottle of beer with the label half ripped off. In my fit of rage I began swinging it to the back of his head, each time bouncing back like the beat of a drum. Each time my anger growing. Never once smashing, I felt like a failure in that moment, I couldn’t even smash the bottle. In retrospect I’m glad it never but through the lens of my drunken rage I wanted that bottle to smash, almost a validation that I wasn’t completely lost. He left the house and as my anger grew I gave chase with a skateboard, I never did know when to call it a day.