Leaving Dirty Jersey: A Crystal Meth Memoir

The line of evergreens in front of the Princeton Shopping Center was bristling and swaying in the wind, morphing and swirling and streaking the sky neon green, and even tripping on acid I was trying to walk like a tough guy. Swinging my feet slightly to the side in a kind of waddle, I led each step with a shoulder as if wading through water. For once, though, I wasn't scowling. I was happy and smiling, having cut school with two friends. We'd dropped the acid and sniffed some heroin and watched the end of Casino. Now we were on our way to the shopping center for pizza, and one of the trees was whispering to me. The words sounded familiar. When I realized that the tree was quoting Casino, I laughed, and then sunlight flickered across the grass -- dancing flames of iridescence -- and I began to burst with a this-is-special feeling. It was a gorgeous day, and nature was putting on a light show for me. Then the cops pulled up.
As soon as they told us to stop and stand over there, the sun seemed too bright: My eyes began to water and I couldn't stop blinking. In my pocket were a bag of pot and eight paper hits of acid. I fidgeted while one of the cops -- a short, clean-shaven officer with a nasal voice -- explained that he'd just received a call about three guys trying car-door handles in the parking lot we'd just passed through.
My friends, who were black, screamed racial profiling: "You know ain't nobody call. You just wanna harass a bitch." I needed a different strategy, but I couldn't come up with anything better than shaking my head in disbelief, looking nervous and high. Another squad car pulled up.
Afterward, my friends and I would complain about how unfair the whole thing was: We actually hadn't been trying car-door handles, so in our minds it was all bigotry and harassment. It never occurred to us that we looked exactly like the type of people who do try car-door handles and that, in fact, on any drug but acid we were those people.
"Come on over here," said a gray-haired, mustachioed detective in a dark suit, standing by his car. He was talking to me. Trudging over, I stared at the ground and hoped that I was walking normally. "Why don't you empty your pockets for me," he said, "and put everything on the hood, over here."
"You don't have the right to search my pockets," I said.
"Yes, I do." He laughed. And that was that. I placed cash, keys, little scraps of paper -- everything that wasn't illegal -- on the hood of his car. Then he told me to turn my pockets inside out.
"No," I mumbled.
"No?" he said, raising his eyebrows.
The local paper said that a seventeen-year-old high school senior darted (or maybe it was dashed) down the street in an attempt to escape, but I'm less sure of what I was trying to do. I didn't even know that I was going to run until I'd started, and then, once the boots were thudding and the cops were shouting, it just naturally popped into my head, as if I'd undergone some junkie training program, that I should eat the acid -- destroy the evidence.
It is impossible, though, to open a sealed baggy while running from the cops on a head full of acid. It also didn't help that my boots, which were fashionably untied, began to come off. When I tried to kick them off altogether so I could run in my socks, my fashionably baggy jeans fell to my knees. Stumbling, then running like a demented penguin, I shoved the closed baggy into my mouth and started to chew. I had no chance of swallowing -- my mouth was parched -- but I hoped that the baggy would open in my mouth so I could eat the remaining tabs. It didn't.
The mustachioed detective soon caught up and struck me on the back of the neck, sending me flying through the air.