Walking down Burnside on my way to work, I heard an echo, many times removed from a rhythm which has intrigued me since I was old enough to know that the underground is mysterious, forbidden, and captivating.
``Some good smoke, man,'' from another face of the same shadowy urchin I'd encountered at rate intervals since I was first allowed to walk city streets alone. But this one was just testing the waters; I think he really wanted to sell me some crack. I've never tried that cocaine byproduct, and would like to, but I don't buy from street peddlers.
Now I come from pretty solid middle-class stock but am both a liberal and a cynic; I'm willing to look for the dead end in any path until I'm bored with it. But I retain enough inertia from childhood that my friends tend, perhaps unconsciously, to steer me away from the really interesting experiences. So crack, like heroin and intravenous cocaine and alcohol, remains in the blind spot of my education, like a book written in a language I am not qualified to learn. Yet I have regarded these experiences with a sluggish avidity -- waiting to leap at the opportunity, but loath to pursue it.
I read Balzac at an early age; in adolescence it was Barth; and in college years, Burroughs. Balzac's drug was social -- the structure of French gentility was strong enough to sustain evil dreams and share them among the dreammakers. Barth's is organic; I realized after three or four novels that he conveys the schizophrenia of adolescence but no adult sense of knowing better. Burrough's drug is multiplex -- primarily chemical but inextricably linked to the machinery of American aristocracy which spawned his forbears. I still admire him for finding his madness in mind-altering substances rather that in reality, as I admire Camus for finding his in extremity rather than in the workaday world. I think they both showed that the universe which lies between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. must be transparent if those who maintain it are to find inspired within them a vision of the history they are helping to create.
As I kept my eyes fixed forward to signal my response I remembered my world beyond experience and the step I need never take.
Daniel Elbaum is an Oregon writer whose love of computers sometimes keep him employed. This is the second piece Mr. Elbaum has had published in SOTT. Currently he is in search of a girlfriend, or an alternative lifestyle -- whichever arrives first.
For more stories by Daniel Elbaum, click here.
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