You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood Page A

marijuana. It sharpened the intellect and shattered the inner censor. Even better, cocaine felt like something I’d been waiting for all my life.
    When I was a child I was clumsy and overweight, something of a laughing stock in school, and an embarrassment to my parents who felt, certainly with my best interests at heart, that I would have a much better chance in life if I became thin and wiry, an athletic American boy. The prevailing treatment at the time, routinely prescribed by pediatricians, was dextroamphetamine, administered in enormous black capsules. Commonly issued to combat troops and popular with cross-country truck drivers, these were known on the street as Black Beauties. The Urban Dictionary describes the effects as “a mild to moderate euphoria, increased hyperactivity, increased awareness of surroundings, increased interest in repetitive or normally boring activities, decreased appetite, and decreased ability to sleep,” which just about nails the way I went through elementary school. When I got older and read the beat poets I discovered that speed was commonly used by hipsters in an era of stifling conformity, the experience enhanced by cigarettes, espresso,
jazz, and intense conversation. But I was ten years old. I had grandma, Hebrew school, and years of inexplicably sleepless nights filled with nothing but doo-wop and Jean Shepherd on the all-night radio. I have no idea of the medical repercussions of a childhood hooked on diet pills, only that I experienced life as a treadmill set at high, going nowhere very fast. I wondered why my friends didn’t spend entire afternoons rereading the same paragraph in the World Book Encyclopedia, or watching in euphoric wonderment as an ant climbed the window jamb. Which is why, when I did coke for the first time, I experienced a fuzzy and romantic longing for the past. My childhood came back to me: the shakes, the grinding teeth, the dry mouth, and above all the sublime ability to focus, to shut out everything in this vast and complicated world except repetitive or normally boring activities. Like writing.
    Coke gave you not only the concentrative facility to immerse yourself in any insignificant task whatsoever, but the conviction that whatever arse-backwards and pointless thing you were doing deserved the Nobel Prize. As a child I could make no use of this facility but now the adrenaline rush, the confidence, the exquisite ability to concentrate at last had a focus. I have read that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde in six days. For some time he had been musing on the idea of the duality of good and evil coexisting in a man’s nature. But while sick in bed, taking a medication suffused with a potent cocaine derivative
popular in Victorian times, he wrote the first draft in a kind of frenzy, running down the stairs in his bathrobe, reading drafts to Ms. Stevenson, tearing back upstairs with her encouragement to write more. If I can extrapolate from my own experience it was the confluence of idea and drug that enabled him to write so quickly. I seriously doubt it was just the cocaine. If it was the drug alone he would have run downstairs to beg Ms. Stevenson for a quickie and run back up to write nothing but drivel. Or so it went with me and Ms. Piercy.
    I was turned on for the first time at a dinner party and remember stealing into the bathroom to take notes on a roll of toilet paper. For months I’d been grinding away on a second novel that was supposed to be funny, and here I had discovered the perfect tool to complete it. At 4 A.M. every day I drank a huge mug of coffee and chopped my first lines of coke. Within seconds I was overtaken by voice. It wrung my nerves and flowed through my fingers. It was the voice of my loud and sarcastic Brooklyn uncles, of comedians in Catskill mountain hotels, the New York Jewish voice that excited and nurtured me as a child but began to fade when I went to college then