Cocaine Chickens

    Nearly three decades have passed since that evening spent in the flat above the music store.  The building is still there - an old brick structure overlooking the Columbia River.  I lived in former office space tucked into a corner of the second floor where plenty of  large windowpanes allowed me to watch the fierce rains and winds that blew from the Pacific past the Columbia Bar and Astoria.



Things were changing.  The great fisheries had been faltering for a few years and the old growth timbers were mostly gone.  The docks along the banks of the river still stank of fish processing  and the worker owned plywood mill still found peeler cores to produce products, but the foundation of the local economy shook with change



In the Coast Range someone had discovered a deposit of natural gas that brought further exploration efforts.  I was doing simple contour surveys for a company out of  Texas - a subsidiary of  a  great multinational that had made a mark in defense.



It was against this backdrop that I began to discover the true nature of addiction.



Western Oregon knows rain, but not as well as Astoria.  I liked to spend  my spare time beneath the great bridge spanning the river, sitting along the bank in a spot somewhat protected from the storms.  I would sit alone, drinking, wondering what lay beneath the dark, turbulent waters that struggle past Pacific tides to reach a vast destination.  Sometimes my thoughts drifted to the young Cambodian refugee who survived the darkness no one should know.  Other times I thought of the Alaska native struck by a car along the highway that ran through town - a young woman who had stumbled into the darkness.



At the flat above the music store I spent time with a friend, one of the cowboys involved in gas and oil exploration.  He was a slight, effeminate young man with long hair and a positive attitude.  His parents had fallen to the excesses of  the late Sixties in San Francisco and, like myself, he had grown up on the streets where children are often little more than a sexual commodity predators exploit,  We recognized each other the day we met.



The ragged, overstuffed furniture next to the radiators that circulated steam from the boiler provided a comfortable place to look at life on the river.  Freighters carried products to and from the Port of Portland and ran raw timber back to Asia.  The tugboats carefully guided the great ships through the channel as they passed east and west beneath the great bridge connecting Oregon to Washington.  We sat watching the traffic as a steady rain fell from dark skies.



In front of us stood a low table covered with the things we felt we needed to live with the realities neither of us never wanted to know.  There was alcohol and glossy folded papers that contained a drug that was very popular at the time. 



Next to the cocaine lay a bent tablespoon that contained part of  a wadded cigarette filter and the remnants of the hits we’d finished.  As our conversation dulled to the reality around us I reached for the cocaine, spilling a heavy dose into the spoon, heating it with a lighter, then drawing it into the syringe. I grabbed a length of surgical tubing, tightly wrapping it around my upper arm, watching for trapped blood to swell a vein.  As the plunger hit bottom I realized something was different.  The sound s on the street below seemed amplified to a level one might expect in a war zone.



As a small child my father sent me out to kill a chicken for dinner.  He warned me that I should kill a hen, being certain I didn’t kill the rooster.  I didn’t know the difference.  Down by the coup that held the birds I captured the biggest, most beautiful bird and managed to pin its neck to a block of wood where the hatchet severed  the rooster’s head.  The decapitated creature’s body began the grotesque dance associated with death.  Blood spattered everywhere as the headless body gyrated convulsively, seemingly trying to stand once more.  I was proud of myself as I carried the bird by its feet back to the old farmhouse.  But the belt came again as I wondered when I might do something right.



My friend once spoke of being an adolescent male prostitute in San Francisco.  He said people called him a “chicken” and his customers “chicken hawks.”



It was my turn to dance on the floor of the flat overlooking the river.  I stood up, but went into convulsions,  knocking everything around me helter skelter.  I suppose someone would have found me on the floor looking toward the things we can’t see, with a wide-eyed stare, if my friend hadn’t resisted his initial impulse  to flee.  As he was leaving he looked back to see me staring, motionless from the floor.  I was conscious, but wasn’t breathing as the sensations surrounding me began to fade.  My friend walked back from the door, kneeled beside me, then began shaking me while telling me to breath.  He reached me.



Less than one hour later I plunged a more carefully measured does of the cocaine into a vein.  Addiction is a terrible thing.