Speed Demons

(7 of 8)
I kept at that cycle for a few years and started taking drugs other than methamphetamine until I hit my own personal bottom. I spent six weeks in a drug-treatment center working out a plan for living that didn't require copious amounts of methamphetamines or tranquilizers. I left rehab five years ago. I haven't had another hit of shabu--or taken any drugs--since then. But I am lucky. Of that crowd who used to gather in my Tokyo apartment, I am the only one who has emerged clean and sober. Trey, my fellow magazine writer, never really tried to quit and now lives back at home with his aging parents. He is nearly 40, still takes speed--or Ritalin or cocaine or whichever uppers he can get his hands on--and hasn't had a job in years. Delphine gave up modeling after a few years and soon was accepting money to escort wealthy businessmen around Tokyo. She finally ended up working as a prostitute. Hiroko did stop taking drugs. But she has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and currently believes drastic plastic surgery is the solution to her problems. Miki has been arrested in Japan and the U.S. on drug charges and is now out on parole and living in Tokyo. And Haru, the dealer, I hear he's dead.

Despite all I know about the drug, despite what I have seen, I am still tempted. The pull of the drug is tangible and real, almost like a gravitational force compelling me to want to use it again--to feel just once more the rush and excitement and the sense, even if it's illusory, that life does add up, that there is meaning and form to the passing of my days. Part of me still wants it.

At 2 A.M. on a Saturday, Big and his fellow bikers from Do It Yourself Happy Homes are preparing for a night of bike racing by smoking more yaba and, as if to get their 125-cc bikes in a parallel state of high-octane agitation, squirting STP performance goo from little plastic packets into their gas tanks. The bikes are tuned up, and the mufflers are loosened so that the engines revving at full throttle sound like a chain saw cutting bone: splintering, ear-shattering screeches that reverberate up and down the Sukhumvit streets. The bikers ride in a pack, cutting through alleys, running lights, skirting lines of stalled traffic, slipping past one another as they cut through the city smog. This is their night, the night they look forward to all week during mornings at school or dull afternoons pumping gas. And as they ride massed together, you can almost feel the surge of pride oozing out of them, intimidating other drivers to veer out of their way.