stinkie’s; Also known as the Manomet General Store.
I grew up a small town that is a small part of a small south shore Massachusetts town. Manomet is a village within Plymouth, MA. There wasn’t a lot to do.
I was really young when I first figured out that drugs were a problem and that my relationship with substances was not that of your average experimenting youth. Of course, I did my best to ignore this knowledge for at least the next decade.
I was introduced to cocaine at my friend’s graduation party in 2003, and I loved it. It made me energetic, interesting, social, and able to drink twice as many beers without passing out. I remember subjecting a poor high school house party to a diatribe about the roots of popular music from Civil War-era cotton fields to modern music. These kids were just trying to listen to 50 Cent, God bless them for not shutting me up. Cocaine makes you egotistical and self-centered (which I already am), it’s just a bunch of people talking over each other about themselves, and it’s awful.
For the next 2 years, I would do blow on weekends occasionally with my other friends who did blow, and we thought we were keeping it from everybody who was against doing blow. By the way, everyone who was shaming us for sniffing coke ended up doing it at least a few times. The shit was unavoidable in my town. Every weekend, I would stay up from Friday night to Sunday night, all coked out. Thousands of dollars went up my nose.
Your basic booze hangover has got nothing on a booze and cocaine hangover, though. Holy fuck, man, you feel like a zombie inside of a flaming dumpster of medical waste.
You see, I have this thing with coming down. I don’t want to ever do it, no matter what. Once I go up, the prime directive is not coming down, no matter what gets in the way.
In 2005, a girl I knew from school moved into my neighborhood. She had a younger single mother who worked a lot and was never home. It was the perfect setup to have kids over to party every day. The girl’s boyfriend happened to sell ounces of cocaine, and he set up shop in the little teenage wasteland of that house that I could walk to in 5 minutes from my parents’ house.
I was in a bad way that year, having suddenly lost a close friend in a car accident in April, and my parents going through a separation. I did coke and got polluted with alcohol every night that summer. The party never ended. I would come home at 6 in the morning, sleep until 3, and repeat what I had done the night before. There was never a time when I didn’t owe the coke dealer at least 20 bucks. I would drive my little maroon ’96 Ford Escort around in a blackout, despite the fact that my friend had literally just been killed in a drunk driving accident. I’d wake up to all of these dents and broken headlights, with no idea what had happened. It’s a miracle I never killed anyone, let alone myself.
As far as the coke-dealing boyfriend, the neighbors must have gotten tired of all the comings and goings 24 hours a day, and they likely called the police. I was there every single day, and the one day I wasn’t, the door got kicked in by law enforcement. Those kids did state prison time over what was found in that house, and I never saw any of them again.
In early fall 2005, I got a job at “Stinkies.” The Manomet General Store in Manomet, MA, is a pretty run-of-the-mill, small town convenience store. Snacks, smokes, lottery, secret behind-the-counter porn DVDs… you know, convenience store shit. The locals called it Stinkies. I think it was due to their racism against Muhammed, the Pakistani owner. I remember a lot of verbal abuse going his way around the time of 9/11, when any Middle Easterner was suspect to your basic angry white American male.
Getting the gig at Stinkies was perfect for me. I didn’t have to start until the early afternoon, and the store was a daily stop for literally everyone I knew. I’d stand behind the counter, with Grateful Dead bootlegs coming out of my iPod Classic, shoot the shit with everyone who came in, and sell minors all the tobacco products they could ask for. Everyone loved me. It felt like I was in the epicenter of the little town.
You know who else came through Stinkies to pick up their blunts and cigarettes? If you guessed coke dealers, you win the prize. I was there by myself without supervision for 8 hours, so nobody could give me shit for getting high the whole time. The crazy thing was that I was allowed to take cash out of the register to be paid back out of my wages. So the drugs would come to me, and I had an unlimited source of money for them.
This is when things started getting really dark, as awesome as the situation sounds. When the coke would run out, but I couldn’t sleep, and I was viciously craving more cocaine, there’s a paranoid depression to that, and it’s very painful. That’s why people get addicted to blow. The comedown is brutal. It would have been more manageable if I had something like Seroquel to help me sleep it off, but I didn’t learn that until much later. I was in deep existential ache every morning, and I had no power to stop it.
The first time I told anyone else that I might have a problem was in that fall. I had a dear friend named Maggie, who partied like I did, was sharp as a tack, and cooler than most other girls that I knew. We were very close, and we had these in-depth heart-to-heart talks, all fucked up, at 6:30 in the morning.
I clearly remember this conversation for whatever reason. I expressed that the way things were going was very not good. I told her I was thinking about quitting it all but worried that I’d have no friends if I did. My reasoning was that the only thing my friends together did was get fucked up, and that was the basis of all my friendships. Maggie was so nice, she assured me that i would always have my freinds, drugs or not. That was the first acknowledgment of how bad my relationship with mind-altering substances had gotten.
I didn’t go to rehab or anything. I skipped town. I couldn’t stand where I was, and my parents were just starting with their divorce. I took the divorce very badly and used it as an excuse to keep getting wrecked all the time.
The young woman I was seeing had a pretty well-off father, and he was paying for her apartment while she attended nursing school at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. For whatever reason, this girl was in love with me, so there were no problems when I came up to go see a show at the Paradise that fall and didn’t leave for the next 5 years. so i made my escape to what used to feel like the big city (until i got to NYC, where i live now). I worked at my aunt’s microbrewery and restaurant (of all places for a drunk like me), enrolled in classes, and didn’t do coke for a good while. It seemed like the move was a good idea.
Wherever you go, there you are, though, and you take yourself everywhere. I didn’t know this when I was 19, and I blamed all my drug problems on the town I was in. It would be a really long time before I got hip to the fact that no matter where you are, you can get bad again. i eventually got bad again in boston, actually, worse than i had imagined before. that’s how addiction works, it always has a surprise for you, there is always a darker, lower, worse place to get to.
The first time I actually got clean was almost a decade later, in 2014. So I had the knowledge that I was an addict bouncing around for 9 years of progressively worsening self-destruction.
i really don’t know why this came out of my head onto this page, but there you have it.
I dont use cocaine anymore, but i do drink a lot of coffee, you can help me with that, if you liked what you read: https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
this link will bring you to the many other things that come out of my mind:
