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Drugs

The End, Part One

Amphetamine Logic is coming to an end. I am better and I will continue to get better, and it doesn't matter to me that you don't want to believe this, or don't understand what it means.

Hit me, I hiss at Sebastian when I see him at nightclubs still. I slept with him in his basement apartment on Saint Marks Place for years. He’d beat me in the jaw while we fucked because I told him to.

That would make things twinkle and pop in the dark for a second. For many years these were the only stars I saw.

One night I passed Macauley Culkin in the rain. His cheekbones were insane! Like a male model, but about to die. We locked eyes and we smiled at each other.

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He reminds me of me, I thought as we passed each other. And then: Should I say hi and fuck him? (As if I would ever: this is just the sort of garbage that flashes through your brain when you're high.)

This is amphetamine logic: I am eroticized by pain.

And that's a lie. How turned on could I have actually been? Amphetamine logic will keep you turned on and tweaked up, but most of the time it shutters you in alone.

One of my favorite songs was "Ashes To Ashes": I've never done good things/ I've never done bad things/ I never did anything out of the blue.

I know I write slutty columns, but for most of my 20s I wasn't even fucking. I mean, I barely did fucking anything.

*****

Amphetamine Logic is coming to an end. I am better and I will continue to get better, and it doesn't matter to me that you don't want to believe this, or don't understand what it means.

I'm almost done with writing about drugs. This was supposed to be the last installment, but we have a column or two more to go: I have to make you understand why I had to tell you all this. I haven't finished explaining how it used to be.

When I was a prescription amphetamine addict and I guess I still am I didn’t go in the ocean or the bay or whatever, I didn’t go in the salt water for seven summers. I didn’t have anyone to go with and besides I had things to do; I had papers to sit on my floor and go through. I had photographs to tape on my wall. I had to walk alone all night: Little Miss Bones on Great Jones ignoring both of her beeping cell phones, sucking down Marlboro Ultra Lights. Need an axe to break the ice.

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At 4:00 AM in SoHo I would stop and look at the blank-faced mannequins in the windows of the shuttered stores on Broadway and feel something like my soul if I believed in souls slipping out of the top of my head like steam from a kettle and rising like street exhaust into the blinky-black sky. Adios, ghost. Then I'd walk home, listening to the Rolling Stones: YOU'RE A STAR FUCKER STAR FUCKER STAR FUCKER STAR FUCKER STAR YES YOU ARE YES YOU ARE YES YOU ARE ARE ARE ARE.

Then it would be time for a project.

If I throw away this box spring and bed frame, I'd think, now, secretly, in the middle of the night, and leave it on the sidewalk, my mattress will be like a lily pad!

This was amphetamine logic. This was all I had. I started living in a pile of things on the ground, like a gorilla. In the city that never sleeps, I never slept. Behind my blackout curtains New York City would black out and I could only black out if I took black out drugs for psychotics—Seroquel, say—and then and only then could I sleep under my fur coats like a whore. My duvet had been destroyed in a flood but I didn't care.

I sold all of my designer clothes from when I was a fashion magazine editor and started wearing "Masta Killa For President" t-shirts.

All those nights—all those many nights, God—I took speed at least once every two hours—a big, flat pink 30 mg. pill. And the speed slowed down everything. My apartment was silent and still.

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I'd sit in the middle of it all and lay, like I said, in a child's pose, with my head on the floor. When morning came, I'd go out and crack psychiatrists like coconuts on Fifth Avenue. Gimme more.

I'll be 30 years old in four days, and here's the big revelation: it's OK to be a freakshow. It makes you special and strange and valuable to the universe.

Baby Fruitbats of Adderall Island who feel like you are all alone and things will never change, are you listening to me?

But it’s not bad, you guys. And I’m crying when I’m writing this, because I feel so stupid and embarrassed, because I was so, so ashamed of who I was for so, so long. I know I am all popular now, but God, you guys, for years I didn't have any friends. But you know what—it’s not bad to be different. To be so weird and to love getting speedy and to be chaotic and to love taking notes and copying poems and sleep with pictures of Sid Vicious above your bed. I collected drug baggies and I couldn’t help it; I still love them and all the patterns. I bought them on Ebay. I liked to starve myself and if I had to go to sleep with a man at 1:00 AM I was so miserable. But it was and is OK: it's just a different life. It’s just different.

Back when I was full of shame I'd smoke a cigarette on my window ledge and talk to God on the 16th floor, age 18.

If anybody—God, do they? If anybody saw, if anybody knew… I used to think three, five, ten times a night. Oh God, oh God, I am so defective and uncool and I would die if anybody—anybody—discovers how gross I am. How crazy my apartment is. How meth lab-y my mind is. How broken my brain is. And I would watch all the lights change on East 86th Street and I would smoke and cry. God. GOD. I'd throw the lit butt out the window. What brand of cigarettes did I smoke back then? Camel Lights. I am the only person like this in the entire world, and I will throw myself off the motherfucking roof if anybody ever finds out the truth about me.

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Also by Cat Marnell:

The Cockroach and the Cokehead

Graffiti, Crackheads, More Cocaine, Miami (Bitch)

Coke Sex for Teen Sluts

@Cat_Marnell