The drugs at this moment are model glue, reds, weed, and alcohol, in roughly ascending order of cost.
Model glue is vertiginous and triggers a vicious chemical hangover that feels like an icepick between the eyes. Reds make me want to thrash and babble, not a recommended outcome for someone who already can't sit still. Weed makes me bovine, a distinctly moronic stupor like having my IQ diminished by 100 points. Alcohol is fun fun fun, but it can be smelled on one's breath and I don't have the bucks.
I'm experimenting with alcohol on the many days I'm not in school. My neighborhood friend can steal it from her alcoholic mother, who assumes she drank it herself. We'll malinger off school, share a cup of mom's wine. Sometimes rum and Coke, my favorite all through public school. Starting slowly in sixth grade, accelerating year by year until my gap year before college, when I give it all up for reading.
Somehow I've acquired a small handful of whites. Bootleg amphetamine sourced from bikers. Looking back I believe they were my friend's mother's streetsourced diet pills, but wherever they came from they were the shit. With my reverse reaction to drugs they chilled me out, clarified my thinking, and when mixed with alcohol were mighty good fun. That's my shizzle, then, but in sixth grade I naturally haven't got the stones to buy them and the bikers I later become friends with would have refused to sell to someone that young.
It's not until middle school that things get really rolling. By then there's also LSD, and I'm riding my bike to O.B. to buy from the big scary dudes who aren't, scary that is. My friends, Tony Tuinal and Tiny and Shamu.