by Jane Brunton

Created on: August 05, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

VORTEX

I lie at the edge of a pit. I strain to hang onto Doug's hand but I cannot resist the pull of the vortex that sucks him down. I lose my grip, first one finger then another, till finally our hands slip apart. I watch in anguish as he is whirled away and down. But he is not alone; along with him go 13 years of my life; onetwothree. His cries grow fainter and fainter till only my own screams are audible.

I awake, sweating. The nightmare is over - for tonight. I lie there till dawn going over and over it again in my mind. But it was too late, it was all too late.

Doug, at 16 had a compassion and empathy for others that were far beyond his year. But he felt too deeply. He was not afraid to explore the wounds that life dealt and pick at them until they bled, over and over again. He was obsessed with finding out why, why? His restless spirit drove him to seek constantly for I knew not what. This obsession and the ugly truths it revealed drove him to seek solace in drink.

When this was no longer enough to ease his torment he turned to speed, now called crystal meth or crank. "You don't understand," He told me when I beseeched him to stop. "The doctors don't know anything," he said, when I begged him to get medical help. "They tell me that I'm handling it," he said of my last hope, the Drug Addiction Research Foundation.

Incredulous, I spoke to the same doctor he had visited a day or so previously at the foundation. I confronted her about her interview with Doug. She confirmed that she felt he was handling the drug and asked whether I hit up as well.

She seemed bemused by my fear of the even more dangerous substances used to cut the speed, like battery acid or rat poison. And the people you had to deal with to get it.

Nothing could deter Doug from seeking the relief he felt when he did a hit. Unlike other speed freaks, who became agitated and talkative, Doug became very calm and sweet.

Many years later I realized that Doug's usual hyper-kinetic activity and the effect that speed had on him probably pointed to him suffering from this ADD (attention deficit disorder). There was little attention paid to it in the sixties although Ritalin was being suggested for hyperactive children.

Frantic with worry and impotent in the thrall of the white crystal I separated from him in 1973, realizing that the only person I could save was myself.

Less than a year later he was dead. Ironically, not from a hit of speed but from a hit by a speeding automobile. I was stunned. I had never expected this. Doug was immortal. All of my friends were. Isn't everyone under 30? I spent weeks in a swollen-eyed daze. Even years later I can still hear his voice.

I will never know what his last moments were like. Did he call my name? I, who could not save him from the vortex.

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