The first taste is always fatal, one sip and you are hooked for life. As Lou Reed would not say, the first thing you learn is that you do not have to wait…
Drugs dealers are usually so keen to sell your doom back to you that they often give you the first taste for free with glee-smiles of reassuring assurances thrown in for corporate appeal: the corked smiles of hyenas and vultures waiting in cold patience for their prey to fall down of theirr own accord...
This one was different: a washed out gypsy in the golden arcades of Geneva, waiting in the dark corners of the diamond fountains swerving jeweled displays and Arab bank insignias. She was my first dealer, a dealer with a conscience….
As I circled around the arcades in avid anticipation, the same images flashily superposed themselves over the bright galleries sparkling gold and silver: the impossibly orgasmic faces of my best friend and my girlfriend, as they both went down with a thud, hard hitting the school’s toilet sickened floor with voidless eyes....Stéphane et Valerie were soaring on the amber colors of the pleasure dome in a wasted graffiti ridden cubicle of a grey far too grey Lycée…speed metal band Helloween blaring away through their headphones: the metal speed of sound muffled by the cotton storm of heroin...Liberté, égalité, fraternité...Vive la Différance, Vive La France….
There she was, my awaited gypsy, holding ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, in hand. One touch…love, self and death would mean nothing. The fix that fixed everything; it was stronger than death...immortality at last...of the gutter maybe, but immortality nerveless...
A frail gypsy of jet black hair greeted me with sunken eyes, a Goth of pure darkness at the gates of Rome. She was the complete antimatter of all the golden dripping riches around her; she caved an anti-halo all by herself. She was my negative purity, my black-hole; the local space-time inescapably warped by her density, by her pin-pointed presence, so dense, so cold, so negative…a winter storm in the sizzling heat of an August night....
Are you sure? She whispered... concern for her victim before the kill? What kind of drug dealer is this?....She started to show me her arms, legs, neck, and nearly every other body surface you could vein stick a needle in. Sores of purple and black bruised her incredibly soft tanned skin. She preached what she sold. Far from putting me off, as she intended, it had the opposite effect - like moth drawn to flame, a dark fascination drew me further in; images of my Valerie stoned and out of it, more beautiful than ever, flashed pass my mind.. .
“Je veux juste essayer” une fois seulement…yeah well…only once, is that not what they all say….
There a was moment of suspended silence as we looked at each other, eye to eye, two pools of black melting into pools of my blue…it didn’t last long, her junkie instincts took over…she handed me a dirty foil rapper, the money exchange hands, and I got what I wanted…
Of course, it was pouring rain the next day…however, the script did not quite follow the preordained line. She was nowhere to be seen, and, more importantly, no one else took her place, mere coincidence? Waited and waited for hours and hours, as I unleashed the first timers’ script that is lived out in all the urban centres of the world. The obsessive magnetic tug of the remembered ecstasy vanished after a few days…
I was safe...at least for a while....
Both Valerie and Stéphane were to be expulsed from school, for all the difference that it made, as Aristotle’s Lyceum was more of an exception than the rule...the name roll would register a blank once more, for the last time....they both set off south, in search for the perfect fever, the perfect fix, the perfect horizon. As they say, once you taste it, it is forever, until death do us apart...
