As a result, there were days where he found himself with a big bag of speed but no money or food.
“I don't care, just so long as I can keep myself in buds and Wonderbread,” Sultan used to say. That was about all he ate: white bread and an occasional soda, never any vegetables or fruit. Most of what he ate wouldn't even be considered food by most people: Slim Jims, Cheetos and Lifesavers picked up in corner stores on his way to score more, ever more, drugs.
Even as he walked around, Sultan seemed to be going through a process of decay. His skin looked bad. Though once he had been a beefy dude, a bodybuilder, Sultan had dropped about sixty pounds and was beginning to look thin. There were certain afternoons when a bunch of us were sitting around the gloom of his apartment that I could have sworn the dealer's body was turning transparent. Sultan hadn't changed his bedsheets in a year. The mattress and blankets were a dingy brown that stank like a lost athletic sock in the boys' locker room. Sultan's clothes looked like layers of grime on his gaunt body. He seldom bathed.
And yet Sultan still got laid quite frequently and by some good-looking women (as well as drug whores and coke hags). Some women even fucked him in his own filthy, greasy bed. Add to that the room and probably the mattress itself were swarming with roaches, and you wonder what women saw in the experience.
“I can't understand it,” T2000 lamented one night. “I have a good job and adequate hygiene but I can't even get a woman to give me directions. Sultan smells like a public urinal during intermission at an AC/DC concert and he has babes lining up to spread their legs in a trash heap bed so filthy I wouldn't even stand in it with combat boots on at high noon.”
But Sultan kept fading. He was becoming ever more transparent. All his circadian rhythms were gone. When he ate or slept was determined by the ebb and flow of drugs. The concept of a night's sleep no longer existed. Sultan would stay awake for four days at a time and then crash for fourteen hours. Or maybe he'd be bingeing out on some opium or heroin and the whole day would be a series of nods, a constant drifting out of and back into naps. In a life so phantasmagoric, time was meaningless, until it was time to score. Sultan had a reputation for always being a few minutes early for a buy. But these incidents of coherence and punctuality only took up an hour here and there. Most of the dealer's days were spent in a great drifting of clockless stupor.
Food fell way down on Sultan's list of priorities. There were four drug habits he had to attend to first: pot, alcohol, speed, and heroin. The last two took up most of his energy. He was always either up or down. Sultan began to forget things, get confused in his mind. Long term malnutrition was beginning to do permanent brain damage. He would smoke pot and do crank until the hunger pains went away. Viruses caught onto him like velcro. One Christmas Eve, Sultan had pneumonia. I watched him sit in our kitchen and do 135 bong hits in a row.
I hadn't heard from the Sultan of Stone for a couple months so one afternoon I went by his apartment to see if I could buy some weed. He was passed out on his back porch. It turned out that he had been awake for a few days on meth. When the sun rose that morning he decided to lay out and catch a tan, promptly passing out. Never did bother to put on any suntan lotion. He had been lying in the sun for ten hours straight when I woke him. The skin on his face was bright red, flaking, and blistered. Since he had passed out on his side, the burn only covered half his face. The other half was pale and white.
In the weeks that followed, Sultan kept his drugs in a little black tin box which he carried with him at all times. He'd wander through the trash-filled hallways of his apartment in a daze, a sticky ring of heroin tar congealed around his lips like some kind of death lipstick. I went by that winter and he was just a snuffling, coughing little worm wrapped up in rags. The apartment had dunes of garbage undulating across beer-stained carpets cratered with cigarette burns. A burn hole the size of a bowling ball was at one end of the couch, where Sultan had passed out with a lit joint in his hand one night. Every surface tingled with the static of roaches. No one had cleaned the place in over a year; the only housemates who still lived there were just as crazy as Sultan. The heat and electricity had been turned off long ago.
“What could I do?” Sultan joked. “The power company wouldn't let me pay off my bills with quarters of crystal meth.”
The Sultan of Stone had become a shrunken little weed weighing about ninety-eight pounds. To protect himself from the apartment's chill, Sultan wrapped his head and arms up in strips of cloth that looked remarkably like bandages. He was a dingy little mummy sitting there on the couch, already dressed for burial. Sultan didn't once make eye contact with me during my entire stay. I couldn't see his face, but what peeped through the bandages looked like some mollusk that had been squashed on the beach. I left wondering if the roaches would eat him while he slept one night. After that visit, I didn't see Sultan for years. He became another ghost in my life.
Most of my ghosts are technically still alive. It's just their minds that are gone, the bodies still walk, Frankenstein monsters lobotomized by hard drugs. Even though I've done my best to escape my ghosts, they still appear to haunt me every now and then. Manifestations on street corners in the drizzly fog of a Mission Street night. Every now and then one of them will walk up to me at a party, standing there all gangrenous and numb, and even though we had hung out for a year, they can't remember my name anymore. Leaving a path of fried neurons, these ghosts wander ever deeper down rotting streets. One day I'll probably find one of them in my garbage can, some crack gang's warped version of recycling.
Because my ghosts are still among the living, they make the hauntings real. Even the undead can get strung out on ectoplasm, but these wraiths have found even more potent poisons, toxins which outdo the spirit world because their effects are tangible and in the here and now. That's the difference between the madman and the drug addict: the addict realizes that his dreams actually are real; in order to sustain his delirium he must constantly obtain more of the chemicals which create that madness. All of his reality is based in the acquisition of a material substance. His addiction is a pure form of materialism and supply-side economics. This is entirely rational behavior according to the cultural laws of our consumer society. Even though all the addict seeks is delirium and chaos, what he actually finds is a twisted form of rationality and logic.
6
Sunny Friday afternoons in the Haight I would come home from work early. The radiating low sun had not yet been snuffed out by the roaring fog. Mist piled up like ominous mountains on the edge of the neighborhood, mountains moving slowly but irrevocably forward on a snail's viscid trail, its chill marine breath just beginning to infect the dry dusty afternoon air. It would be eighty-five degrees and suddenly a slow sullen breeze thirty degrees cooler would coax shivers from your skin.
Lots of evenings the dividing line between light and fog was Divisadero Street at the bottom of the hill. It was the borderland. I'd ride home from work with the sun shining on my back but when I hit Divisadero the light would turn gray and cool. As I rode Haight Street up the hill past its intersection with Divisadero, I'd often ascend into a chilly cloud. Fog hugged the top of the hill like a damp head of matted hair. As the road leveled out into the Haight, my helmet and leather jacket would get slicked down driving through water droplets just hanging in the air, hovering dewdrops thick as an insect swarm. Most nights the Haight had a semi-liquid sky.
In this twilight zone of moistures I would arrive home on a Friday afternoon at 666 Ashbury and snort two fat lines of speed hoping it would lead to something holy. Even though my drug-fueled searches for truth usually only led to detours, even these diversions were valid destinations in and of themselves. You can only appreciate heaven after exploring all the hells, and I always loved the energy the powder gave me. It was the false enthusiasm for many a wild night.
On near toxic amounts of amphetamines and LSD numerous satoris were induced. Gushing spasms of stuttering hallucinations attacked like an epileptic's fit at 4 a.m. on Saturday nights. A drooling shit-faced sage, I'd eat peyote or yage,
