Because I spent my lunch money on drugs I went for the most part without lunch, still yet another reason to avoid school. At home I'd fix myself something. At school I had a pocketful of whites and a pair of quarters for the vending machine.

My lunch ritual was not driven by amphetamine, although in hindsight it looks it. Drugs had the opposite effect on me: whites made me chill. That's why I liked them. I was self-medicating, where today at that age they'd have had me on Adderall for realz. Compulsive behaviors were an outcome of my standard extreme hyperactivity plus I believe an early manifestation of what later widened into more fully-realized Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

I'd buy a can of Coke and a bag of Lays potato chips which I'd mash and knead all through lunch break, as if the bag were bread dough I wanted to shape into a ball. The chips were pulverized into an oily fried pulp I'd scoop between fingers and wash down with fizzy soda. That buzz nicely rounded out my amphetamine high: sugar, caffeine, salt, fat. All the food groups.

I was so thin it was crazy. The motorhead's physique: 6'4", 157 pounds.

My eighth grade American History teacher made an offer. If I'd agree to never, ever, under any circumstances, ever set foot in his class he'd give me a B. I was that disruptive, 'cos I was that wired.

Deal, brah. I'll hit the beach instead. Hang loose kiddos! I'm outta here.