After I put my Palm Pilot away, I started marching bravely east toward Tates Creek Road. Eventually I ended up on Lansdowne. As I walked, I came across a young fellow in a Taco Bell Uniform going the opposite direction. I was feeling very friendly (and Manic, as you may recall) so I said hello to him and
asked him a few questions about where he was going, where he was coming from, etc. One thing led to another and eventually we were both sitting beneath an overpass smoking weed out of my pipe.
I asked him if I was headed to Tates Creek Road and he said no, I needed to go the way he was going. He said I could walk with him, and perhaps we could stop by his place and smoke some more weed.
When we got to his apartment, he seemed disappointed because he recognized his brother’s truck out front and said “Aw, he’s home already.”
In any case, we went in. Inside I found two rather thuggish dudes. It soon became apparent that they had gotten together to do some coke.
They rather hilariously claimed that they had never done coke before, that it was their “first time” and even tried to conceal it from me until it became obvious what it was. We talked for a little while and one of them mentioned how young I was.
I said, “I look younger than I am. I bet you’d be surprised at my actual age.” I told them what it was and they didn’t believe me, so they asked to see my Driver’s License. Once they saw it, they nodded dismissively.
At some point I got rather loud and one of the thuggish dudes (I think it was the brother) got visibly agitated. He seemed like he was afraid I would get a noise disturbance called on him.
I began to brag that I had a high pain tolerance. I had recently tried putting a cigarette out on my hand to see if I could “take it” (I still have the scar). The dudes started to humor me, saying, “I bet you could kick someone’s ass.”
So I said, “Well, watch this,” and I took a match and extinguished it between my fingers, just like Lawrence of Arabia.
I remember it vividly because by this point the dudes had realized I was far off my rocker and one of them said “Don’t do that, man . . . ” and actually made a sad “Awww” when I performed the “trick.” They might have been sarcastic about it but I couldn’t recognize. Eventally my loud mouth got the dude anxious enough that he offered to take me home.
He said, “C’mon, I’ll drive you home right now.”
I said, “Well, I came here to smoke some weed, you guys got any?”
They said yes and I waited while the young Taco Bell fellow rolled up a joint. While he was doing so, he informed me that coke was a “live organism” and you had to add baking soda to it to “activate” it for use.
We sat down in a semicircle on a pair of couches as part of the weed smoking ritual. I plainly remember asking them, “Is this just weed?” And they responded, “Yeah, it’s just weed.”
I hadn’t seen the young one adding anything to it so I took their word for it. I took huge hits off the joint and the dudes started making fun of me, telling me I was diesel and hardcore and shit like that.
After we finished, I asked them if I could buy a couple joints off of them. I gave them a $20 and didn’t ask for change, and they thought that was extremely odd and were even a little put off by it. Maybe they thought I was well off or something.
I wasn’t dressed like it though, although I probably did look a little like a College Student.
Once again the brother asked me if I needed a ride and by this point I was getting a little suspicious of them so I told him it was alright, I would walk. He said “Fine, then.”
I asked them which way it was to Tates Creek, and they told me to go the opposite direction that I had been going.
It was then that I realized the young one had lied to me. I thanked them and left.
I got a couple blocks and I began to feel . . . very strange. It started as a tingling sensation in my brain, and then quickly changed into a full body experience of shimmering movement, as though I were being absorbed upward into the air.
I felt almost exactly as I did when I smoked salvia. I couldn’t walk straight. My heart started to pound.
It was really terrifying, and my mind started to run a hundred miles a minute. I felt as though I might collapse and die.
I called out to the Good Lord Above, praying that if He brought me through this alive, I would re-dedicate my life to Him.
Eventually I realized I was going to have to sit down and perhaps get some medical attention, so I started looking around at the nearby houses.
It was late, so most of them were dark. Eventually I spotted one where an upstairs light was on. I went to the porch and rang the doorbell.
I sat down on a bench in front of the door and waited for someone to answer. I began praying in tongues just as I did as a kid, babbling senseless gibberish as fast as my lips and tongue could generate it.
Nobody seemed to be coming. I thought my physical form was about to evaporate.
In about five minutes, blue lights swirled around me. I saw cops approaching from the street.
I had read it was best to admit to the presence of drugs if you had them, so the first thing I said to them was, “I think something I smoked has been spiked.”
They were a bit surprised and asked me to repeat that, so I did.
Then they asked me to empty my pockets, so I dumped them out and the cops started to go through the stuff.
They found the two joints and the marijuana pipe, and they asked for my ID.
I gave them my wallet.
“This is real slick,” one of the cops said, turning around the marijuana pipe in his hand (as I’d said before, it looked exactly like an automobile lighter and was designed for concealment).
“Whaddaya think?” he asked another cop. “You suppose this is used for smoking crack?”
“You have multiple IDs here, sir,” one of them said, looking at the two Drivers’ Licenses and various Student IDs I had. “And you look completely different in each one of them.”
On one of the Drivers’ Licenses I had made an intentionally goofy face with my tongue sticking out, and the pair cracked up over that for a minute or two.
“Do you realize we could cite you for having two Drivers’ Licenses?”
I explained that I had lost one, gotten a replacement, and found the other one.
“That doesn’t matter, you’re supposed to turn the extra one in.”
Then they really started to give me the third degree.
“What are you doing disturbing an old lady at 2 o’clock in the morning?”
“Don’t you know whose door you’re knocking on?”
“Sure you don’t.”
“Where did you meet these guys that offered you the marijuana?”
“You don’t remember huh? I bet.”
Throughout all this I was extremely Paranoid and chattering away. I probably didn’t make much sense.
After a minute they asked permission to go through my laptop bag, saying, “You don’t have any needles or anything I could stick myself on in here do you?”
When they searched, they found the two books I was carrying: a book on the Kabbalah and a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto.
The questions started to take a darker turn.
“I bet you think you’re outside the system or something, don’t ya?” said with a massive amount of scorn.
“What are you doing walking around at this time of night?”
One of them even said, “I bet you’re part of the Fedayeen,” which was Saddam Hussein’s Elite Guard.
I started to freak out and shake my head and deny, deny, deny, and about this point is when I started to demand a lawyer.
I did it so much eventually a cop said, “This isn’t like television sir, no lawyer is going to come down here at 2 AM to deal with a possession charge.”
They asked me a few questions about where I lived and where I worked.
“Really? That address isn’t on your Drivers’ License,” they said.
“Are you sure you live there?”
“Medical Consulting Company here? Yeah right. I’ve never heard of it.”
Finally, with a labored sigh, one of the cops asked me, “So what do you want us to do? Do you want us to take you home?”
I explained that I had been spiked with something, I was having a severe reaction, and I needed to go to the hospital.
They grumbled and called for the Fire Department to pick me up (in non-emergencies, the fire department of Lexington handles hospital transport).
I remember there was a fat goateed white guy and a sympathetic black woman riding in the back of the fire vehicle with me.
I asked the fat guy what he did and he said angrily, “Late night taxi service, apparently.”
They took me to Samaritan Hospital, the hospital where I was born. It is one of two hospitals in Lexington which will accept patients without insurance.
The other one is the University of Kentucky Hospital, and one of the cops said it was full.
When I got there I went through the check-in procedure and they asked me a lot of questions.
The cops started making a big deal out of my multiple Drivers’ Licenses and questioning my identity.
They studied each license in a very exaggerated, close manner and when I told them my Social Security number their response was a sarcastic, “Sure it is.”
I began to think that maybe I wasn’t really “me,” that I was just some homeless person with false memories of a bunch of friends and a job.
At the same time, the hospital staff were both scared and scornful of me, so at one point I cracked a joke asking “What, am I being detained?” It didn’t go over very well.
Eventually they put me in a room with a woman wearing a Doctor’s coat.
She handed me some forms to sign. I looked them over.
“Of course he has to read every word,” one of the receptionists said bitterly.
It was a release form stating that I had no living will and that in a crisis situation the Physicians could determine whether to resuscitate me or not. It was standard procedure for hospitals, but after reading it I felt convinced they wanted me to sign over my life to them. I even thought they were going to engineer some type of cardiac arrest and intentionally not revive me, so as to rid the world of a useless individual.
“I can’t sign this,” I said.
“Well,” the woman said, “then I can’t offer you treatment.”
She snatched the ink pen out of my hand.
“I’ll have to hand you back to the Officers.”
I thought about this for a minute.
“Alright, I’ll sign, I’ll sign,” I said desperately.
The woman crossed her arms and smirked.
“What are you going to sign it with?”
At this point I made another mistake: I reached into her personal space and snatched her pen out of her coat pocket.
“Security!” she yelled.
Some big 300+ pound guy in scrubs lumbered in asking, “What’s goin’ on here?”
At this point I panicked. I leapt out of the chair and pushed the Security guy down; he made a strange muffled groan as he fell over, kind of a half-“Argh.”
I bolted to the left and down a hallway, trying to make for the exit, and suddenly an incredibly short, oily janitor who looked like he walked off a mob movie set leapt in my path, brandishing a billy club in one hand and a can of Mace in the other.
“Where you you think you’re goin’?” he asked. I leapt into a side room.
“That’s right, get in there,” he said.
“Sit down in that chair,” and I did.
“You’re gonna wait right here until the Officers come back.”
At one point I looked him in the eyes and contemplated trying to get away again, but the janitor said, “Don’t even try it.”
The officers came and took me into custody. They seemed not at all surprised that I had made a disturbance.
They cuffed me, took me outside, and helped me into a Paddy Wagon.
I had to sit down and hold on to a rope with my hands behind my back.
The rear compartment was steel and completely windowless except for small slots in the front and back.
At this point, I was absolutely convinced that I was going to be taken out to a field and shot execution-style.
Will caco survive this horrendous experience? Check this blog next time to find out!