In the beginning part 4

Okay. I am posting less and less often. I am moving this week and have been packing on top of everything else I have to do, so I hope that getting moved will help me get back to posting more often.

A friend asked me the other day about the term "gutter punk" stating she was afraid to find out what that meant. Gutter punks are punk rockers that are homeless. They don't shower, brush teeth, change clothes, etc. Those behaviors are not really uncommon to the homeless; the difference is that "gutter punks" are really quite proud of being dirty. He who stinketh the most wins.

As I said in the last post, I got married to a guy named Squid. We broke up and I went to a few different places to stay after that. I ended up moving in with my friend Star (who would later become my best friend of 20 years). She had an apartment that her mother paid for while she was finishing up high school. We didn't stay there too long before we decided we would skip town. Our friend Mark had moved to California to live with his mother, so we thought we would hitch out to see him. Star and I packed up a couple bags worth of stuff; we had maybe $50. I can't remember for sure. Our friend drove us out to 35 and left us with our thumbs out. One guy picked us up and drove us back to the bus station where he said he was going to buy us tickets so we wouldn't have to hitch to California. He left us there which really made us mad. I guess he thought that if he left us back in Dallas we wouldn't hitch. We got another friend to drive us out to Mesquite to the truck stop so we could find a trucker going to Cali.

Not to confuse my readers, but I just remembered something. As a teenager at 16 or so, I was staying down town on the streets and one night I slept on the JFK monument. It doesn't fit into the time line here, but I thought it would be interesting to add it since I forgot it. The JFK monument is a flat marble square about 3 feet off the ground it is about 5 ft by 5 ft. It is really, really uncomfortable to sleep on. It is really hard. The reason I slept on it, though, is that it is surrounded on all four sides by these tall stone pieces like walls. You get in trouble for just sleeping on the side walk or in a park, but they can't see you in the monument. Funny, huh?

We found a trucker who was going to Cali; he said he would take us all the way there. He was kind of scary. He looked like Abraham Lincoln meets Charles Manson. When he would stop to sleep I had to lay beside him b/c he wouldn't keep his hands off of Star. He would literally try to crawl over me to get at her. It was great fun, but we tried to just endure so we could get to Cali. We did finally make it out there. It took a few days, but we were so glad to make it. We called Mark and found out that the trucker had left us like right down the street from his apartment. We stayed with him for a couple days, then the three of us got on a bus and headed for Hollywood Blvd. I forgot to mention that he lived in Los Angeles. He helped us find some folks to hang with and then headed back home. The time on the Blvd is kind of blurry. We drank a lot. It is a really weird atmosphere and culture. It was very different from Texas. We ended up hanging with some people who were squatting on Melrose avenue. Like I said, very blurry. I did a lot of LSD there. We could not trust anyone. Everyone tried to scam everyone else. We all slept in our Doc Martins and used our leather jackets as pillows so no one could steal them from us. Eventually I worked my way into hanging out with some people with a lot of Meth. I was doing lots of Meth and LSD. I actually walked away and left Star stranded b/c I wanted to do more speed and the people with the speed did not want her to come. I abandoned my best friend for speed. After being awake on speed for like 120 hours straight and I started to lose it. It had been a few days since leaving Star stranded and I didn't really have anyone I could trust.

I should interject here that I am naturally a very paranoid person. Okay, maybe I should not say naturally, but I tend toward paranoia. Even to this very day I tend toward paranoia. The difference now is that I am able to talk myself down out of paranoia now. I can look logically at the situation and tell myself that what I am thinking is tainted by paranoia and center myself. I do firmly believe in a lot of conspiracy. My husband loves to say that it is just b/c I am crazy.

Take that tendency toward paranoia and add the other factors in (1. not knowing the Lord yet and not being healed at all, 2. a lot of drugs going into my body and mixing of drugs, and 3. no sleep for over 100 hours) and you have a really big mess. The mess was big enough that I cannot tell you today what really happened. I have had a lot of hallucinations in my days, but usually once I came down I could see what really was going on during my drug induced hallucinations. The events that went on this day have no base in reality for me to say what happened.
First, as I sat in an apartment, I kept seeing this shadow on the wall. It looked like a man holding a butcher knife. I would get up and walk over to where it was and look around and look in the bathroom and no one would be there. Then I would go sit back down. No one could figure out what was wrong with me. I was too paranoid to tell them what I was seeing. I started to think the man must be crawling up into the ceiling when I would go look for him. One of the guys was moving back to Dallas so we took a several boxes of his stuff to the post office so he could mail them back. For some reason, they kept all leaving me in the line at the post office with the box. I think they were outside smoking cigarettes, but it really kept freaking me out. I really and truly thought that they were plotting to blow up the post office and let me be blamed for it. I thought for sure that the box must have explosives in it. I kept walking off and leaving the box in the line by itself b/c i didn't want to be alone with it. Then I thought I saw one of them drop a box in the mails slot and knew that it had to be a bomb. I don't know what was really going on, but I was convinced that the bomb was going to go off and I would be blamed for it. We finally got done at the post office and went back to the guys apartment where the girl I had been hanging out with was. She had stayed behind b/c she was starting to crash and wanted to sleep. As we approached the door to the apartment I had a flash in my head and I just knew that my friend was going to be dead inside. Someone had murdered her and I was going to take the fall, or so I thought. I could see how the blood would look all over the walls. I was thinking that the man with the butcher knife was going to kill her and then crawl into the ceiling and somehow I would get blamed. We opened the door and she was fine. There was no blood and no dead person. At this point I was really starting to lose my grip on reality. Me and the girl left the guys and went back down to the blvd. We had some meth left and I had a big knife that I kept in my boot. Somehow I got the idea that one of the people around was going to narc on me so I started plotting how to get rid of the stuff. I ended up dumping my knife in a trash can. Then I dropped the baggy with the last of the meth right behind a cop. I thought that if I dropped it behind him I would be safer. We wandered around more; we ran into a friend of mine who, I would have sworn dropped something into my boot. I just knew that he was trying to frame me for stealing something. I must have taken my boot off a dozen times looking for whatever I thought he dropped into my boot. I never found anything. At this point I was really losing ground. Just when I thought I might really freak out, we ran into my friend Mark (the one I knew from Dallas). I begged him and his girl to let me hang with them. I needed to be with someone I had known before and could trust. I also asked him to help me find Star. She was the only one I knew I could trust and could count on. I had left her stranded, though, so I wasn't sure if she would have me back again. I proceeded to tell Mark about all the weird stuff that had taken place that day. I just wanted to come down and go to sleep so I could find reality again. We were driving around with one of the other punks, I think in a stolen car. I kept seeing shadow people come out of the pavement and mail boxes. It was not a fun night. We hung out and that night they helped me find my way back to the squat on Melrose. I met up with Star; she was still pretty mad, but she let me come into squat to stay and threatened to kick my ass if I didn't got to sleep so I would stop being crazy. She convinced one of the guys who was driving around in a stolen car to drive me back to Dallas.

Before we left for Dallas, there was a really crazy night that everyone on Sunset strip ended up tripping on LSD. I will pick up there next time. It is late and I am sleepy.