“It’s not the actual drug buying, you know?” Roy said. “It’s that time you have to spend there.” He turned and squinted at me through the thick Texas midday sun. We were on our way to Richard Kilo’s. His real name was Richard Key but because of his line of work…

“I know,” I said. “That’s why we’re going now. We should be able to get there and get back to school in time.”

We were going to buy a gram of crystal meth during our lunch hour. We were in high school. Being a teenager felt like being extremely famous in a way. People stood back from us. Teachers, parents watched from a distance while we changed. It felt like every minute we lived, the universe was being created anew specifically for us.

I drove. Roy fidgeted in the seat, rooting through the junk that accumulated on the floor of my car. The endless Styrofoam cups, paper bags, empty cigarette packs, plastic cassette cases—everything that washed in from our throw-away existence.

“What’s this?” He held up my street map of Austin.             

“It’s a map.”

“These drawings on it?” He asked, putting a finger on the doodles I had made in the empty spaces. They were sketches of skyscrapers and apartment blocks. We had no idea at the time that Austin was better than any other place. We just lived there.

“Let’s call them improvements,” I said.

“Just in case reality doesn’t work out, huh?”

“Better than more of this.” I waved a hand to the McDonalds beside the discount dollar store and the muffler shop passing outside my car window. It went on like this for miles in every direction in this part of Austin.

“Is that so?” Nothing was funnier to Roy than me being idealistic.

“People need architecture to believe in. They need a place that locates them not just in the city but in the world!”

Roy turned to me, a smile twisting under his squint. “Where did you read that, dude?”

“A book on the Bauhaus.”

“So this is what happens when they put you in detention?” I didn’t know why Roy was laughing. A few months ago, tripping on acid, he stayed up one night creating a set of sixty-seven flash cards, each with a separate shortcoming of his life, or personality fault of his father’s, all printed out neatly in felt tip marker.

We turned the corner onto Richard’s street. Broken toys and mismatched sets of lawn furniture littered the overgrown yards. A rusted car sat on cinderblock pilings awaiting repairs that would never come.

“I hate this,” Roy said, clutching his head as we stopped in front of Richard’s house.

“Come on. It’s not that bad.” Maybe because my big brother knew Richard first, it seemed like the path had already been cleared. There was someone familiar in the wilderness. “Besides,” I said to Roy, “this is how we get the speed.”

“I know. The speed,” he muttered, getting out of the car.

“Careful,” I warned him. “Cops can read lips.”

He actually ducked and scanned the horizon. Whenever we went to buy drugs, one of us would always joke about cops being able to read lips from a distance, or being able to follow our car somehow from in front. It was part of the fun. With Roy it was always torture-your-friend-as-you-would-have-your-friend-torture-you.

We walked across the ankle-high lawn to Richard’s door. Loud music thudded inside. I knocked. Then knocked again. Zif, one of Richard’s friends, opened the door a crack and let out a barrage of Hard Core Punk so aggressive and repetitive it sounded at first like a jackhammer.

“Hey, dude,” Zif said, then turned away to let us enter. You could see in profile how wasted away he had gotten from drugs. Just a skeleton under a Scratch Acid t-shirt.

Richard was installed in his favorite chair, his formidable belly gathered before him. He was just setting his bong down as we walked in. The music played so loud that  we couldn’t hear voices or the TV that was showing the old movie Excalibur. Richard was a huge fan of that one.

Zif sat back down on to the couch and held his temples. He was lightheaded, no doubt. Richard nodded to me. “What’s up, dude?” He had a tendency to ignore Roy.

“Hey.” I nodded back and took a seat. It was like we were allowed to sit before him, as if we’ve come to argue our case in his court. His walls were covered with Skrewdriver and Bad Brains posters. The music carried with it a kind of persistent threat. That feeling was embodied in Richard himself: moody, volatile, prone to violence. That’s why Roy hated being around him. It was tyranny to have to sit in the same room for half an hour.

Richard leaned over and turned the stereo down with the majesty of a pilot in a cockpit. The sound quieted just long enough for him to ask, “You guys want go, right?”

We nodded.

Then he turned the stereo back up and the thudding sounds of Skrewdriver rose again. Like a craftsman he prepared a bong hit, picking apart the bud, rolling it between his fingers, pushing it gently into the bowl. With a master’s touch he tamped it down, then placed his mouth in the open end of the tube. He flicked a lighter and the grass torched up, a bright, rich orange cherry. The water gurgled as he inhaled. With a hand over the top, he passed it to Zif, who, extending his stick arms, accepted it. After an excruciating minute, Richard tilted his head back and exhaled a billowing column of smoke.

Zif offered the bong to me and Roy but we both said no.

“You don’t smoke?” Richard asked

“No.”

“But you smoke cigarettes?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the point of that?”

I shrug. “Addiction…?”

Roy relented under Richard’s incredulous squint and took the bong.

“Don’t you guys have school today?” Richard finally asked. He, himself, had dropped out last year.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re on our lunch period now.”

He turns to us with a scowl: “I don’t want you just stopping by here and going.”

“I know,” I said.

“You gotta stay at least half an hour.”

“I know.”

“That’s the rule. I don’t like people coming and going so much. I’m not running a 7-Eleven.”

“We came straight here.”

“It doesn’t look good having all this traffic in front of my house.”

“I understand completely. We got an hour if we need it.”

He paused. Some action on the TV caught his eye. “Cheggit,” he gestured with the lighter. We checked it: it was Merlin in Excalibur casting a spell. There were waves, then a fire.

“What’s the deal with Lamar High School?” Richard asked quickly. “Someone told me people are trying to burn it down.”

“People are,” I said.

“Who?”

“I dunno.”

“The school wants to keep it a secret,” Zif said taking a drag on his cigarette. “Stop kids in other schools from getting the same idea.”

“Of course they do,” Richard said. “No one tells you the truth about half the stuff you think you know.”

I grunted in agreement. Richard’s house was a place for grunting. The music raged at conversation-impeding levels. Everyone was a ‘hey.’ Cool things were ‘kick.’ Guys either shouted or nodded stoically while Richard explained the shape of the universe. He liked a chorus of grunts in agreement. But over time, the endless parade of people agreeing with Richard only made him paranoid about whether anyone was a real friend.

Richard reminded Zif—for our benefit—about a guy who mistakenly thought he could just drop in to buy drugs. “That hey said he had a party to get to in South Austin. Thought he could just whip in here for a few minutes and I’d sell him an ounce and he’d be on his way. Can you believe that shit? I made him hang out for a full hour before I offered him a joint. Didn’t I, Zif?”

Zif nodded and said something but his voice was trampled by the sound of the stereo.

“Didn’t he hang out for like, an hour? All humble and shit. All thankful for the ganga we smoked. Didn’t he?”

Zif nodded. That was Zif’s job. Nodding. Opening doors. The guy was so thin he barely registered as a full-fledged presence.

“He should have been thankful,” Richard said about the unwise drug-buyer. “He didn’t even invite me to the party. Then he thinks he can just pop in?”

“We’re here on time,” I said.

“Dude,” Richard said, methodically repacking the bowl of the bong. “They don’t tell you half the things they know,” he said, coming back to the earlier one-way conversation. “Like religion. They’d have you believe there was this guy named Jesus who performed these miracles.”

“Right,” Zif said.

“Oh, sure,” Richard said, he paused his bong loading and looked at me. “People saw miracles being performed. Sure they did. Because they were all tripping their balls off.”

“Um-hmm,” I said.

“Ergot poisoning. It was one of the biggest crop blights back in Biblical Times. It’s a kind of mold that makes you trip. Like acid. People were tripping their asses off. Jesus and his disciples were too. So they saw miracles all right. They totally saw them. Everyone did back then, that’s why they wrote them down as if they really happened. That’s how Christianity started. But do you hear people talking about that today?”

“No,” I said.

“Of course not,” Zif sighed.

“But maybe they don’t talk about it because it didn’t happen that way,” I said—the idea just escaped my mouth.

“It happened,” Richard said.

“But how do you know?” It came out as more of a challenge then a question.

“Because I know!” Richard said, pounding a fist on his knee. “Everyone was tripping.”

I surprised even myself by blurting out, “But you weren’t there!”

“Dude! …I know. Now how much do you want?”

Being a superstar at seventeen, a moment like this is iconic. Like Elvis at Sun Records. Like the Sex Pistols up in Dallas. The Moment happened, it was frozen in time, and the world changed within it. “A gram,” I said.

Richard stood up and stalked out of the room.

“Religion’s all about control,” Zif sighed. “That’s what it’s all about,” he said, a distance in his voice. “Being controlled. That’s why I couldn’t stand school. It was the same bullshit.”

“Yeah,” I said, unconvinced but agreeing anyway. Bullshit—all school and all religion. Everything everywhere, bullshit.

A minute later Richard returned with two postage stamp-sized baggies. He flipped over what looked like a piece of tile on his coffee table. Opening one small baggie, he poured out a little pile, divided it into lines. He offered the straw to Zif, who snorted his allotment and then offered it to Roy and me.

“A gram, right?” Richard asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, handing him the money.

Both Roy and I snorted a line. It felt like a rusty nail being jammed into my nostril. I lit a cigarette to chase down the burn and wiped the tear from my eye. By then the confidence was with me. Promising ideas flooded my mind, starting with the sensation that I would soon connect with a girl from school named Sarah. She was adjacent to my every thought. The speed put a rising feeling in my chest, as if I was on the tip of a mountain. It made my fingers clammy. I was only celebrating now for what would come, celebrating what was imminent. I felt it. I breathed it.

“You guys like go, huh?” Richard asked, arranging another set of lines.

Roy and I nodded, laughing squirrelly laughs.

“Speed’s not natural,” Richard said. “Not like ganga.”

“That’s what we like about it,” I said. Roy and I laughed nervously.

“Yeah, but ganga, mushrooms…that stuff is natural. Your body knows how to process it. Speed is just chemicals. When they don’t have the right chemicals, they substitute them.”

“Hmm,” I said, mindlessly now. I didn’t really care.

“It’s not cool,” he said. “You’ll see.” For a guy who considered Christianity a two-thousand-year-old acid trip, he was clear about some things. Seconds later, something on TV caught his eye, he gestured toward it. “That dude kicks ass here! Watch this!”

We watched. But I looked though the TV screen, already far gone on the possibilities. No words. No images. Just the pulsing sense that I would walk out of this ramshackle house and into a clean, new world. I was one footstep or two away from a life constructed of sharp edges. Of solid things. A place with snap and effort. A place where I would stand before Sarah and she would stand with me. Waiting. Waiting. I was sure. In this way, it wasn’t just the speed, I realized, it was youth I was high on. I couldn’t wait to get out on the streets. To drive them. To own them.

The fist battering at the door stopped all of this speed dreaming. We should have jumped. We should have panicked. Richard didn’t look so bothered. Zif got up and went to the door. He exchanged a few words then turned away, letting the skinhead Kyle inside. Kyle was a lean, ruddy, angry-looking guy, with a loud, barky laugh. He had the Black Flag tattoo at the base of his shaved skull, which seemed obligatory for those guys. Just to show he was the real thing, there was a Texas flag tattooed on his forearm, too.

I couldn’t tell whether his arrival raised or lowered the tension in the room. Whatever the case, the guy sure as hell had some way of knocking. Neither Roy nor I winced at Kyle’s scowl. The confidence had really kicked in. It flowed through our bloodstream. What all of us wanted.

I looked over at Roy, his red eyes were a-wonder at the drugs, the possibility of violence. Kyle pulled out a little wad of 20s. “Here,” Kyle said, handing the money to Richard Kilo.

“Cool,” Richard said.

Kyle asked about some dope, disappointed to learn he just missed some bong hits. It’s been a few hours, Kyle said. Richard laughed and shook his head. “A few hours.” He reached for the cigar box with the endless stash of pot inside.

I checked my watch. I could no longer just sit there, sitting still. Even the pot smoking was at too glacial a pace for me. “Whoa,” I said, standing up. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Already?” Richard asked.

“Is it cool?”

“Oh, I guess you gotta get back to school. Yeah. One of us has gotta stay in school.” Us? I remember thinking. Us? (As the years pass I realize again and again. Yes, us.)

“Hey, what’s that brother of yours up to these days?”

“Nothing much.”

“Tell him I said, ‘What’s up,’” Richard said. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“I’ll tell him.”

A minute later, Roy and I were back outside, out of the air conditioning, into the bleaching Texas heat. The neighborhood, I noticed, popped every which way around me in jagged lines. The rusted car loomed on its stacks of cinderblocks. The lawn furniture stood, missing its legs, but was perfect. All of it was perfect. Because even its rottenness reached out to me. A dilapidated house, an oil-stained street could not convince me I wasn’t destined for everything. This world I was inventing and imagining and bringing to life just by looking at would propel me.

How did I know this? The drugs, that’s how. The confidence hummed inside me.

Neither Roy nor I were paranoid. We were fearless when we should have been the most fearful: there was enough crank on us to land us in jail and in this very touch-and-go moment of our lives, time in jail would send us careening the wrong direction for many years to come. It could send us in the wrong direction pretty much forever—as forever as the feeling that coursed through my body in that moment.

With our baggie of speed tossed in among the insurance papers in the car’s glove compartment, we drove back to school.

To ward off danger, I left my algebra textbook in plain sight on the back dashboard. First impressions counted. We never said it but we were sure the cops wouldn’t single us out. Any remaining doubt about our chances was smoothed over by the irrefutable chemistry of the crystal meth. Go.

We pulled up to a stop light. “You got a real knack for handling the personalities of drug dealers,” Roy said, lapsing into the kind of small talk we always did in the heady first hour of the rush.

“Thanks,” I said.

“No seriously. You have a real knack. People like that freak me out. I can never get along with people like Richard Kilo.”

I chuckled, thinking it was just my luck: Some people have a real knack with girls and I have a knack with drug sellers. My feet did an uncontrollable step from the clutch to the brakes and back again while we waited the eternity for the traffic light to change.

“Don’t you notice?” Roy asked.

“Not really.”

The momentum that ran through me shot out past the weeds growing up through the sidewalks.

Twenty minutes later, in the quiet of my fourth-period class, I drew otherworldly cityscapes and skyscrapers, sketching out my plans for a new architecture. I never said and no one asked and I would never be troubled to admit that what I really sketched was an imaginary world that put me closer to its center. I was on a plane where all was balanced, where everything made sense. Even if it was the twilight of my childhood, under the influence of hard drugs, I was sure divinity was just around the corner from everything I could see.