Sex, Drugs, and Offset Lithography Peter B. Steiger 12/03/04 I do drugs on a regular basis. I can hardly start the day without a good 12 ounces of some carbonated caffeine-bearing beverage, I have a glass of cheap box wine several times a week (to counteract the effects of the caffeine so I can sleep), and don't get me started about the unshakable grip of antihistamine dependence. That said, I can't blame my eccentric personality on anything other than perhaps eccentric upbringing. As far as I know, I have never taken illegal drugs unless you count the botched marijuana tea experiment. This clean living didn't stop me from almost getting arrested on a drug possession charge. First a little background about my college life. I was about as streetwise as Beaver Cleaver when I went out into the world on my own for the first time in 1981. I didn't know anybody who used drugs (or if they did, I was too naive to know about it); heck, I didn't even know anybody who had ever had so much as a speeding ticket. But I was plenty weird. Weird enough that one weekend I was recognized as a brother dopehead by an art dealer. He set up a table outside the cafeteria every year to sell cheap art prints, and he roped students into helping him by offering a free print for every hour of service. I had my eye on the Norman Rockwell barbershop quartet picture, so I took my turn behind the counter. I went into the sales pitch like a carnival barker, using my umbrella as a cane and wearing a jauntily perched red-and-white styrofoam fake straw hat used in my barbershop quartet. My employer watched this act for a while and kind of winked at me as he headed towards the bathrooms. I figured he needed to see a man about a picture of a horse and wanted me to mind the store, so I kept up my spiel. He returned a few minutes later looking confused; apparently he had expected me to follow him. So he pulled me aside and turned away from prying eyes while he held out to me this little brown lump of dirt. Considering that he had just been in the bathroom, I didn't really want to know what he was showing me or why, and he finally figured out that I had no clue what his game was. "It's hash," he explained in a whisper. That only confused me more. Was he showing me his leftover lunch? And why was he being so secretive about... oooohhhh! The light dawned, belatedly, and I had to explain to him that I acted as I did not because I was a stoner, but because I am just naturally goofy all the time. Boy were we both embarrassed. My other brush with the underworld came when my roommate and I came into possession of a freshly uprooted, full sized cannabis plant. We figured this was probably our only opportunity to find out what all the fuss was about, so we felt obligated to try it once and see for ourselves. The only problem was, neither of us smoked. We had heard about eating it in brownies, but both of us being guys and living in a dorm on campus we had neither the means nor the first clue how to cook, either. A furtively purchased copy of "High Times" from the local, uh, novelty shop gave no further help. Then we figured, all it is is leaves so why not make some tea? We didn't really know how to brew tea, either, but at least that seemed simpler than brownies. We dumped the leaves into a coffee maker and let the water drip through them into the coffeepot. The first sip was awful. So we started adding anything we could get our hands on to enhance the flavor... sugar, lemon, honey, I think a little vodka... nothing helped the taste. We drank it anyway, and although we were as sick as you might expect for the next couple of days we didn't even get a buzz from the vodka. Among my other college acquaintances of dubious character was a guy I'll call "Joe" on the off chance that if this story ever gets printed in wide circulation and he's still alive and he ever reads it, he won't realize that I'm talking about him and he won't hunt me down and kill me. Joe was a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, the boyfriend of the roommate of my girlfriend at the time. He was... scary in so many ways. If you have ever seen "A Fish Called Wanda" and you remember Kevin Kline's character, this is the kind of person I'm talking about. Joe has that same manic laugh, which he usually used while describing his latest cruel revenge on someone who done him wrong - there was the sugar in the gas tank, various physical acts which hurt just to listen to, and his favorite, the time he put a box of kitchen matches in a convenience store microwave oven and left it on high while he ran for cover outside. Boom. That's the kind of funloving clown Joe was. Even more alarming was the fact that Joe liked me. Every once in a while he would resurface, presumably out on parole or something, and he would make a point of seeking me out so we could hang around like the good pals we were. Trust me, I never suggested to him that I found his company the least bit disturbing. Would you? I kept moving to different off-campus apartments, and Joe always managed to find out where I lived and show up at some insane hour of the night to go out. I'll leave you thinking about Joe some more while I tell you about my summer job, which also kept me in burger money when I got out of college in the middle of the Reagan recession. My father worked as a chemist at a printing ink company, a job he had since before I was born. With his tenure he was able to wangle a job for me whenever I wanted one. One year I got lucky and landed a job in the shipping department where everything came to me clean and ready to be mailed out, but most years I worked in the back of the factory cleaning out these giant kettles used to mix ink. Now, you have probably noticed that ink was not meant to come off surfaces easily. The cleaning solvents used to remove ink are extremely powerful chemicals with long names, and over the course of several summers I became intimately familiar with a gal named Methyl Ethyl Ketone. This stuff can clean the white off rice. So all day my job consisted of pouring a couple of gallons of MEK into these tubs big enough to live in, and scrub it all around until the dried ink was washed off and down the drain on its way to Houston's scenic Buffalo Bayou. I made those old tubs sparkle like new! I also had no protective equipment at all save for a pair of gloves that were dissolved before my summer stint was through. So day after day, I stuck my head deep into a vat of a chemical that has the same effect on you as a lungful of airplane glue or nail polish remover. In the evenings before going home I mopped down the entire factory floor with MEK, which gave rise among the other factory workers to the use of the phrase "happy hour" to describe the cleanup period at the end of the day. I'd drive the forklift around crazily with my finished tubs and we'd all laugh ourselves silly. I'm pretty sure my dad, back in his sterile lab, had no idea what kind of work conditions he had signed me up for. All of these circumstances - my complete cluelessness, my daily dose of MEK, and my deep enduring friendship with Joe - came into play one night after work when Joe tracked me down yet again to my dad's apartment in southeast Houston. I was outside waiting for my dad to get home - I had forgotten my apartment key and beat him home - so Joe decided we could climb up to the second story balcony and go in through the window. Amazingly enough in an era when everybody wants to mind their own business and stay out of trouble, a neighbor lady told us to get lost or she'd call the police. At least she warned us first so we had a head start. Joe suggested we take in a movie while we waited. I was in no mood after a hard day of sniffing airplane glue, but of course I agreed enthusiastically and jumped in his car. We roared off - literally. At every stop, Joe would gun the engine so we took off like a rocket leaving half his tires on the pavement behind us. So it came as no surprise to me when a police car raced up behind us with its lights and siren going. Joe pulled over and muttered some concern that "I hope they don't find those Black Mollies I lost behind the seat last week!" I had no idea what he meant, but from his tone I was pretty sure he wasn't afraid the cops would find a couple of dead goldfish. I expected him to get a ticket for speeding (actually the crime they charged him with was "excessive squealing of tires") and we would be off, but things got interesting after they looked at his driver's license. Not only did they pull him out of the car, but they pulled me out too and did the spread-your-hands-on-the-car routine. While Joe was being handcuffed (!) another officer gazed intently into my eyes with a flashlight and asked a lot of questions I didn't understand. They emptied my pockets - confiscated my Bic pen - and insisted I was using some kind of drugs. Only later did I realize that after a day of MEK inhalation my pupils must have been the size of hub caps. Fortunately they didn't find anything on me, black mollies or otherwise, so I was free to go. Not so for Joe, who was on his way for a ride in the back of one of the three patrol cars that congregated around us after they made him get out of his car. I got to walk home, still trying to puzzle over what the heck was going on. Wouldn't you know it, Joe used his one phone call to call me at my dad's apartment. By this time Papa was home. He had never heard of Joe, had never met the boy, but to my amazement he went downtown to see if he could help. He couldn't - they must have set a sky-high bail on poor Joe - and I never did find out what happened after that. That was the last time my life was made more interesting by the presence of the most psychotic friend I ever wished I didn't have. Twenty years, eight moves, and 1100 miles later, I'm just now starting to relax. Say, can you spare a hit of solvent? I need a fix in a bad way.