William Lobb

Author

Addiction

Justice in America

Brittney Griner has been taking me back to the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York in the 70s. Of course I think she should be free, and this whole scene is a disgrace and a sham, and a political game, but that’s exactly my point.

She’s not the first or the last to get burned in this game, and that is all drug laws are, a game. Man, when those laws of Rocky’s hit it was some scary shit. Boys like me doing serious time for an ounce of weed, or less. Selling coke brought here from Columbia via the CIA, we knew how it got here, we all knew. The only thing that kept me out of prison was my white skin and dumb luck.

Her circumstances are abhorrent, I can’t even imagine being in prison that far from home, hoping the politics of the day makes her freedom a good and profitable move; if not financial then in political capital.
I hope someone gains her freedom as soon as possible, but I knew guys who went in and never came out or when they did get out their life had long since passed away.

I’m not saying anything other than this woman is far from the first and will not be the last to have her or his life ruined by asinine and draconian drug laws. Don’t let anyone tell you the American system was or is any better than any other nation’s.

America has four or five percent of the worlds population and over twenty percent of the world imprisoned people. Portugal decriminalized possession and sale, focusing on treatment, not jail. Which one is the progressive nation?

Like everything else, this is about power and control. Always was, always will be.

Old Drunks, and Bad Timing

A conversation with an old friend, another drug addict, and a drunk. He said he’s been thinking about getting some wine a lot these past weeks. Wine, or some beers, maybe a joint or two to take the edge off, get a little fucked up.

I replied I had similar thoughts during Ma’s last month. The horror of that shit-show. The day I walked into the nursing home, and she sat there covered in cake, her fingers sticky with icing, and the realization that she’d lost the ability to feed herself with a fork or spoon, and had resorted to trying to eat with her fingers. The walls were gray, Pat Robertson was spewing some ridiculous bullshit on the TV.

“Yeah, walking out of there that day, getting fantastically fucked up seemed a good idea. I got passed it, same as I will today. The endless conflicting reports that life as we know it is, far all intents over, or this is just a bug, like a cold, and it will all magically disappear. It’s enough man, to make you think, right?”

“I’ve briefly contemplated getting fucked up. You have to, It’s part of the process to being less fucked up. I’ll never consider myself sober, simply less fucked up. I’m good with not so fucked up.”

So I asked my old friend, “How fucked up will work for you? I know my fucked up. You think we should try my fucked up?”

“My fucked up would probably start with four or fives hits of blotter acid. Sitting around a kitchen table while Hector Luis ‘updates his-self,’ meticulously working a spike into a vein. Luis was a terrifying son-of-a bitch on heroin. After we both had settled into our drug of choice we’d sit there spinning a loaded .38 in circles on the smooth Formica top, like spin-the-bottle for psychopaths, talking about how we would go about killing each other. Luis had a go to plan: hydrochloric acid for my fingerprints, and burial with lye and lime to decompose my body and cover the smell. Hector Luis was a meticulous motherfucker, always thinking.”

“Maybe I’d need to get two quarts of vodka and a handful of reds fucked up, then go start fights fucked up. That was a good, fun fucked up. I could barely stand, but I’d fight you.

“Maybe we could get ‘shoot a guy while stealing his cocaine fucked up?’ Like the night we ended up in the ER at Horton Hospital? The detective asking, “Why would anyone believe that you two Cheech and Chong motherfuckers weren’t involved with that shooting in Goshen, and how did the slugs end up in Luis leg?”

“We were lucky the only thing the detective cared less about than the slugs in Luis leg was the bleeding doper in Arden Hill Hospital, 5 miles up the road. None of us were worth the hours of paperwork.”

“So, my long not-so-fucked-up friend, do you need to get that kind of fucked up, my kind of fucked up, or do you want to get some kind of pussy-ass fucked up? I can’t get fucked up the way Luis and me used to get fucked up, because Luis was my crime partner and Luis is fucking dead, and I no longer have the energy.”

“How fucked up are we taking about here? You are suggesting to me that getting a little fucked up might be an answer to all this, but I don’t really recall how a little fucked up works.”

“So, are we going to go get fucked up or not?”

Finally my friend said, “I guess not.”

“Good, that’s a good answer, a good thing, it’s a good thing to be not so fucked up.”

#MLK90

I wonder if Dr. King, in 1968, could imagine that this country would be more torn and divided in 2019 than it was in that decade?

I think of King and John and Bobby Kennedy often in the same thought. I wonder if the world would be a different place had they not, all three, been murdered.

2019, and we have Nazis in our government.

Ironically today, Steve King is being censured in Congress, for boldly proclaiming himself a white nationalist, a white supremacist.

Dr. King would have been 90 today. When great men are murdered because they scare lesser men, I find it impossible to believe in any grand plan. I think instead that stupid, lazy people, unbridled and unburdened of thought and conscience simply allow hate to flourish.

I felt hope and positivity in the ‘60’s, in spite of Vietnam, in spite of the social and racial divide, I felt hope. That hope, Dr. Kings dream, seems to be trampled and pissed on in 2019.

This nation is at a precipice. I fear we may finally fall over the edge.

#MLK90

The Face – from The Third Step

She read a poem from a man who had been sober twenty- two years and then relapsed. He had completely fallen apart. The poem she read was one of the last things he wrote, before his fall:

Twenty-two years since my last drink, last handful of pills

Twenty-two years since the night I first saw that red-eyed, red-faced, puking demon. [Read more…] about The Face – from The Third Step

Twenty Five Years

I’ve looked forward to this day for 25 years. Never sure I’d see it. To be honest, on October 28, 1993 I wasn’t sure I’d see October 29th, let alone 25 years.

I’d had a disturbing phone call the night before. My doctor, a friend, and drinking buddy, called me.

He simply said, “Bill, your liver enzymes are through the roof, triglycerides too. You are in end-stage liver failure. You are going to die.”

Being told I was going to die didn’t seem to phase me. My life at the time was ugly and dirty and violent. The threat of death seemed to be a pretty much accepted daily occurrence. I asked Frank, my doctor, and source for some primo pharma, how long he figured I had left. He said if I did nothing maybe a month, maybe six weeks.

Six weeks would be my daughter’s birthday. I really didn’t care much about dying, I didn’t want to die on her birthday. [Read more…] about Twenty Five Years