And the victory continued into the wee hours and beyond. Traversed 30 city blocks to join Kim, Cam and Debbie (remember them?) for numerous beers and long cut lines of methamphetamine which some friend had procured during travels in India. Got quite wired, truth be told. Conversation, while snorting lines (like conversation before movies) often centers around other experience snorting lines.

“Have you ever sniffed something that made you curl up in a ball w/pain?”

“Only if you count that time in the limo before the prom… whoops! My nostril’s bleeding. Oh well, I’ll use my other.”

“We were just doing SO much blow back then.”

I’ve noticed that pretty much everyone did SO much blow at one time or another in their past. It was always connected to a friend or a source which provided it for free. Cokeheads. The lot of them.

Friend from India presented a relatively solid identity stemming from what I felt to be an unusual degree of self-awareness and acceptance. Self-acceptance, that’s what it was. She only cracked once and blushed + stuttered when she had been arguing the worthlessness of Jane’s Addiction and I, of course, surprised + hurt and battling gallantly to defend my band and she called them “White trash from L.A.” and said they would admit it themselves, and we briefly discussed the definition of “white trash” and to illustrate she asked if I knew their song “Get out of my way all you faggots and dike-whores” (something like that) which seemed an odd title for my band and certainly not one on any of the three J.A. albums we have at the apartment, and I expressed surprise and scepticism and then she realized that she had been thinking of Guns + Roses, not J. A. at all. So she blushed and stuttered, and I did my best not to make her more embarrassed, saying oh sure it’s an honest mistake, so many similarities (none really), anyone would have conflated the two, etc etc. But it riled me up somewhat because when she first labeled them as “white trash” and “crappy,” another guy (the ONLY other guy there, I might add… room full of girls and I hardly noticed… [yeah sure]) said, “Oh, are they?” and she seemed like such an authority on the matter, being from L.A. and claiming, even, to have met the band (or knew people who knew them), that he accepted her word as fact and left with this new concept of them, and never became aware that she had hopelessly misrepresented the group. This bugs me. I considered insisting that she find the guy and admit her mistake (I would have), but it wasn’t my place. Plus she was still cutting out lines…

So we drank beaucoup cervezas (linguistic melange) and climbed back to the roof and gazed out, again, on an orange + neon Manhattan beneath us.

I dig them: Kim, Cam and Debbie and William and Gail and the ½ black, ½ white (Danish, French, Cherokee, Native American) who had just been in India and who said at one point that after seeing what she had seen there, she would never be grossed out again. I bit (how could I not?) and asked for details; the grossest spectacle she had witnessed, and she all too eagerly launched… (and see ‘Jay’s Life Revisited’ for the remainder of this spellbinding voyage into disgust…)