It started almost six months ago. The monkey dance, that is. I can't tell you the exact time or place, or what led to those first dangerous steps between my son and his dangerous new partner, but I can tell you about the final moments in this particular stage of the dance. Whether my son and Mr. Monkey will be picking up where they left off is still a question mark, but, for the moment at least, that particular dance card has been cleared and put away.
Strange how even things that you know are bad can seem bearable until someone from outside steps in and yanks off the blinders that have been keeping you from succumbing to a nervous breakdown for six months. I knew my son was depressed, and I knew that was the reason he'd turned to monkey dust. When his Danish girlfriend made the decision to return with their daughter to Copenhagen the previous December, it had been a heart wrenching situation for all of us.
For my son, who had never been the most emotionally stable person to begin with, it precipitated a downward spiral that surpassed anything that I or anyone else who had helped him through his previous drug troubles had ever witnessed before. It was the reason that I moved in with him, the reason that I stayed even after I realized that there were going to be complications that I hadn't anticipated which might (and did) have personal repercussions for me, But I'd never blamed The Girlfriend for any of it. I mean, people do things. Sometimes they do things that make other people unhappy. I was unhappy, my son was unhappy, and as it turned out, The Girlfriend was unhappy, too. But my son's decision to dance with the monkey was completely his own.
My decision to stick around even after he started showing signs of dust aggression was my own as well. Open any newspaper or spend half a second on the internet, and you can read about incident after incident in which a duster has gone beserker on the drug. Tales of men with machetes, women with hatchets, teenagers with guns and a sudden inclination to push a fellow teenager out of a window abound. In the city where I've been residing these past six months, a duster met an untimely demise just a couple of weeks ago when his "friend" got pissed off over some dust issue and shoved him out of a second story window. Witnesses say that the victim seemed to be all right, that he was already starting to get up when his "friend" (I just have to include those quotation marks) came out of the building and helped him back inside. No reason to call an ambulance, the witnesses decided. So they left, leaving the victim to breathe his last on his...wait for it..."friend's" couch.
The stories get even crazier, the death-by-dust twists even more grotesque. In another incident that took place here in the city where I currently reside, a duster arrested after running into traffic (literally) died within an hour of his arrest from what local news sources implied were complications related to his dust intake on a day on which temperatures soared to 100 plus. But dusters and a few others know the real story. I got it from the friend of a brother of a cop. The dead duster got that way after becoming so enraged that he reached down and tore his balls out of his scrotum, and then hurled them across the room. Makes you cringe, doesn't it? It should also make you wonder at the repercussions of using a drug that can somehow drive a man to rip off his own balls. Never mind the woman who, only a few weeks ago, starred in her own personal mug shot after tearing out the bathroom plumbing to barricade the bathroom door in an effort to keep out the people who were after her. The twist is that there were no people after her, the bathroom was in her neighbor's house, and she didn't have their permission to be there. In a related twist, I know that woman, and if you had told me six months ago that she would be arrested for doing something like that, well...you know. Because she's really a pretty nice person. Definitely not the kind of person you'd ever imagine ripping out bathroom plumbing. Because that must be hard to do, right? And she's not Wonder Woman. She wears Celine Dion Perfume, for chrissakes.
My son has never come close to tearing off his own genitalia or ripping someone's bathroom radiator out of the wall (not sure it was actually the radiator, so don't quote me). But in the last few weeks, he's turned into someone who might be able to do both of those things and perhaps even a few more. It started with the name calling. I couldn't open my mouth or even walk into a room that he was in without him shooting me an look of almost diabolical hatred and hissing, "Shut the fuck up, up cunt" or "Get out of my face, bitch." The epithets became so frequent and so common that I stopped hearing them. Well, at least most of the time. There were some occasions on which, feeling bad about some unrelated matter, a random "Fuck off, bitch" would send me on a crying jag that would last for hours. This would infuriate my son even more. "Oh, boo, hoo," he'd sneer at me. "Poor me. Boo hoo." Not sure where his anger came from. But it didn't go into hiding when his friends came over to the flat. I tried to be pleasant to them. Even the most strung-out, bruise-ridden junkie could count on a semi-civil greeting from me (unless he was one of the two of three I'd banned from the flat, in which case, I had a few choice invectives of my own to spew. Knowing that my son did dust didn't mean I had to put up with actual junkies, I'd tell them. It felt weird, telling a junkie to his face that he was a junkie. Weirdest part was that I was too damn naive to realize that junkies aren't necessarily born looking like cadavers in T-shirts. And that "junkie" sometimes describes people you love.
Until last week, my son's rages and personally directed rants were just part of the fabric that made up our life in one uncomfortable little corner of the dust world. My worries about him have been at critical mass for some time now and I've somehow learned to live with the pressure. But then The Girlfriend came back.(End of Part One)
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