Dope Story- on the streets by Ditton Wilson

Dope Story – on the streets   , by Ditton Wilson

Being on the streets is a lot different than being on the road. I have been on the road a lot more than I have been on the streets. In the name of retaining my “street cred”, which I have in abundance here is a gritty tale about street life in Salt Lake City.

I was staying at my parents house because Dr. Hubbard had finally fired me from the cell phone tower job for being too strung out. I didn’t really hold it against him because he had been cutting me a lot of slack anyway. Anytime there was something to pick up in town he would send me. He tolerated me being late. He told me at Christmas, when we had a two week break, that I should either get a solid supply or kick. He told me that it was the up and down shit that was fucking up the job. That was all true because I would work great until I ran out of dope and then I would sit (lay) in the crummy for a couple of days until I could make it to Salt Lake City again. Not only that, but he had CPR’ed me back to breathing only a couple of months before that, so I couldn’t really hold a grudge against him. I came back from Christmas break with only three days under my belt and I ended up fleeing the job site in the work truck. I didn’t really know where I was going. I just knew that I had to get off of that cold fucking hill.  Malad pass in a snowstorm, and me already radiating cold from the center of my being. I really was just going back to the hotel to climb under the covers, but after he called me on the cell and fired me, I headed into Salt Lake City. So, that was how I ended up fired from a great job and kicking dope in my Mormon parents basement. I said “please just leave me alone for three or four days”, and they did.

After that I didn’t have a habit, but I was still chipping every two weeks or so. My folks had gone somewhere and left me in charge of the house. Oh yeah, they had gone to pick up my Sister at the airport in Salt Lake. She was on her way back from a two year Mormon mission in Ecuador. I had a small, but messy party while they were gone. There were a lot of empty beer cans around. The day before they were due back I started cleaning things up and I thought, “you know whats always great for cleaning up messes………”, and I was in the car for the four hour SLC drive.

The first weird thing that happened was that the Mexicans wanted to meet me on a new corner that ended up being really close to the main downtown SLC cop shop. They never showed up. Later, after I had called them again and agreed to our regular corner, a cop came fast around the corner with his lights on. The Mexican who met me crept away, but they had me driving with a suspended license. The logic they used for searching my car was that since they were impounding the car for my suspended license violation they needed an inventory of the contents so that I couldn’t accuse them of ripping of stuff in my car later. (My great line of the day “Please Officer, let me go and I promise I will never, ever, come back to Utah again!”)

That’s when the second weird thing of the day happened. I was sitting in the sun outside of Trolley Square near downtown Salt Lake City, handcuffed and watching the cops go through my truck, when I saw someone staring at me from a Subaru that was slowly cruising by. It was a good friend of mine that I hadn’t seen in years. When we started hanging out ten or more years earlier it was right in this area, we lived in an apartment not two blocks from where the cops were now searching my truck. I knew Fountain wouldn’t stop because he was located in Montana now and there was only one reason for him to be this far from home. Reasons that didn’t need further police scrutiny. Meanwhile, the cops found my rigs, my spoon, my lighter and they let me keep all of it. When they asked what the needles were for I said that my Grandpa used them when he was fishing for blowing up worms to make them look bigger. They radioed that into headquarters and then handed me the package of micro-fines!(?) Before they left with my truck, I told them that I needed the roll of cash that was tucked between the seats and they gave me that, too. Then I got a ride with the tow truck driver headed more toward downtown and the park where I needed to be. I found another Mexican pretty quick. I like the Mexican dealers, at least in SLC. In Portland, too, I guess. They never flat out ripped me off the way I’ve been ripped off by other ethnic groups around town, and that means white people. The one time I got ripped off by a Mexican in Portland he gave me five balloons and two of them were full of plastic but the other three had really good shit inside them. That seemed like a strange way to do business, but I never was in Portland that much.

This guy I found on the fourth of July weekend couldn’t really speak English all that well but he hooked me up and we went to a vacant field with tall grass to get high. His name was Jaun or something. He had a friend who couldn’t speak any English at all. I gave them a balloon to split and we crouched down in the weeds and cooked our shit. The sun was starting to go down and it was still pretty warm.  Jaun told me that he was stuck in Salt Lake City and that he wanted to go back to Mexico really bad but he couldn’t because he was so strung out. After we did our shots I offered them some of the coke and they looked really surprised, especially the friend who couldn’t speak English. So we all did a shot of coke. We ended up talking about methadone for some reason and I go the impression that Jaun thought  that methadone was  a magic pill that you took one time that would somehow cure you from being a junky. He kept asking me to bring him a methadone pill so that he could go back to Mexico and see his family. My ears were ringing and I was really happy. I told him I would see what I could do and I took off. I went down a couple of blocks and rented a hotel room. All my stories about being on the street happen in hotel rooms.

The next morning ended up being the Fourth of July and everything was closed and the cops wouldn’t let me get the truck out of the impound lot. I wandered around SLC all day. I had a large pancakes and egg breakfast at a diner downtown. I went in the bathroom and did a speedball. I went to the mall across the street from the temple. I drank an orange Julius and sat on a bench watching all the people. I bought a Built to Spill CD at the mall record shop. I kept an eye out for my parents and my sister. I did another shot in the bathroom and went over to the visitors center at the temple. When the LDS visitor center guys came over to me I was standing in front of the big window that looks out at the temple. I asked them when the King was coming out of his castle. I feigned ignorance as they tried to explain and I left them thinking that I thought Ronald Reagan lived there. I went to the bookstore and bought a Phillip K. Dick short story collection. I went into a bar and drank two beers and played pool with some girls. I went back to the motel and rented another room. I watched TV and did drugs.

The next morning I called a friend who I new was doing pretty well in Salt Lake. I hadn’t seen him in ten years either. He came and got me at the motel and we went and had breakfast. I drank a bloody mary and filled him in. He seemed shocked, but I told him everything was going to be ok and he gave me a ride out to the impound lot. It’s pretty nice to have friends like that, who you can depend on after years of no contact. For all he knew it was a scam of some sort. Now that I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t just take a cab out to the impound lot because it seems like I had plenty of money, or enough, at least. Maybe I was starting to run out of money, or maybe I was realizing just how expensive it was going to be to get the truck out. I might have been scared that they were going to arrest me again when I tried to drive out, since I still had a suspended license. I might have been feeling a little alienated.

My parents beat me home by a day and walked into a messy house with beer cans everywhere and a couple of dead plants that had been neglected in my absence. When I went down to my room my mother had dumped the two dried out plants onto my bed. It was a mess and she wouldn’t talk to me. It’s not like I quit doing drugs because I killed two of my moms plants, that’s not quite accurate, but that’s kind of what happened. I haven’t had a habit since than at least.