Lol, well, there was one more.
In 1988 I was living in a studio by myself. I had gotten kicked out of my mental health housing for doing drugs and not paying rent on time.
I was forced to find my own housing and I found this studio. It was $300 a month which was high priced at that time, in that city. It was the smallest studio you could ever see. It fit a bed, a dresser and a chair with my TV on it. It had a tiny bathroom which barely fit a toilet and a shower. It was just those two small rooms. It had no refrigerator but a hot plate came with it. That was basically it.
It had a closet which was an indentation where I could hang a few clothes and a shelf that I later filled with a couple dozen packages of Top Ramen that I got from a food bank.
The complex had 6 units like mine and 6 bigger units. I was hooked on crack when I moved in and I also did powder and I soon learned that everybody in this small complex did coke too. In fact the guy next door to me, 4 feet from my front door was a coke dealer.
Anyways, I moved in and the first week I was there I made friends with two neighbors. I had bought some salsa from Costco right before I moved in but I had no refrigerator. I was walking past the first studio with a huge jar of salsa and the door was open and i saw two guys inside so I asked them if they wanted it. They said sure, so I gave it to them for free. And made two friends. I have a bunch of stories about both of them but I became good friends with only one of them, a guy named Mike.
He was just a year or two older than me. We didn’t become friends for actually a week or two after that but we were friends and hung out for the next 7 months I lived there.
Turns out he was somewhat of a con man. We partied like crazy and we partied with his friends and strangers a lot. I said he was a con man. Stanford University was about a twenty minute walk from our apartments and about a 5 minute drive. Before I came into the picture he had ingratiated himself into a couple of the fraternity houses. He made friends with all these Stanford students whose parents had to be rich for them to even get in Stanford. I don’t know what lies he told them but he ate in their cafeteria for free and hung out at the dorms. The students didn’t really do drugs but they drank a lot and he took me with him to their dorms and we drank and they had a “foozball” game and we would all get drunk and play with it.
You’ve seen them; they are like miniature soccer games with 5 inch men on 5 poles and you twist the handles to make them kick a ball into the opposing goal. They used to be really popular.
Anyways, my night of folding, lol.
The frats threw a huge party. Tons of these rich guys and girls in the recreation room in the dorm. Lots of booze, loud music, the works. The party got pretty loud and there was dancing. I don’t know where Mike was and I just stood against a wall holding a beer trying to look cool. But I got overwhelmed. My schizophrenia wasn’t acting up but those rich kids with all these sexy girls got too much for me. I can handle parties but I didn’t know a soul and I was alone and I felt so out of place.
An adjoining room was a library so I just gave up. I left the room and the music and the girls and totally folded and went in the library and sat by myself and found a book and buried my nose in it. I basically hid. A couple times people wandered in but I didn’t even look at them. Yeah, I folded like a cheap suit. But I swear, that was my only time in four years of addiction! There was one other time but that’s a different story…
