Sometimes, having cool and pleasant mountain summers has its disadvantages; I’m reminded of this anew every year when my neighborhood fills up with drunks. Most of them spend the cold months in Tucson and Phoenix or in a few cases with relatives on the reservation, then head back up here as it gets too hot for them down south. Suddenly I can’t walk to the corner store without being hit up for change, and every time I cut through the lot North of my apartment to go downtown, there are a bunch of discarded and often broken liquor and beer bottles. I clean them up occasionally but like a bad magic trick, they’re always back.
Last night on my way home, I got one of the fun drunks. I was about to cross Route 66 when a guy on the other side drunkenly yelled an insult at me. I looked to either side of me to see if he could have meant anyone else, but as Robert DeNiro observed, I didn’t see anybody else there, so he must have been talking to me. I was more puzzled than anything, since I was 99% sure I’d never met this guy and here he was, questioning my heterosexuality in an impolite manner. I started to cross the street towards him, not in a confrontational manner but because it was the direction I was headed anyway, and he sort of shuffled away from me, punching a street sign for no apparent reason. Then he fell down, tried to get up, and fell down again, staying there this time. I walked up and looked at the guy, who seemed to be just this side of passed out, and unaware of my presence. He was white, which makes my PC side perversely happy, because it becomes just a little easier to avoid associating being a drunk with being Navajo. The thought briefly crossed my mind that I could take the guy’s wallet, something a young me wouldn’t have thought twice about. I no longer feel guilty about thoughts like that, I figure it’s only bad if you can’t recognize it.
As I got home I got back to the perennial question of who I despise more, drunks or tweakers. Drunks are more plentiful and a constant reminder of why I pretty much stay away from the sauce, and probably the greatest example of the ways in which people will act horrifically undignified under the right circumstances. I’m sure junkies do stupid things when they’ve been shooting dope, but I don’t go downtown and watch junkies loudly and belligerently hassle a random person for looking at them funny, or walk by Mogollon and watch two people who have just met tottering around uncertainly making out in the back lot because they’re riding the white horse. Nope, just booze. I view pot pretty much the way I view people who smoke a lot of pot; dumb and slightly irritating, but essentially harmless.
On the other hand, I’ve never seen a trailer explode because of drunks, and I’ve seen this occur in two different neighborhoods I’ve lived in, and the aftermath in two more. Tweakers stopped living on earth a while ago and the mania for mean, horrific, petty crime that seems to accompany meth addiction makes it pretty awful. Meth hasn’t hit the way I feared it would, even in the meth-epicenters of the southwest (holla!) and the midwest, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time. If I saw tweakers in anything remotely resembling the numbers of drunks, it wouldn’t even be a question. It wouldn’t matter anyway, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog because I would be barricaded in my apartment, shotgun in hand, and ironically probably doing meth myself keeping the hordes of living undead away from my possessions.
People with a serious meth addiction really do remind me of the zombie type things from 28 days later, in terms of physical appearance and cleanliness but also the way in which they can switch suddenly from stupefied directionlessness to sudden manic savagery. Sitting down for a meal with someone going through meth withdrawal is probably one of my least favorite memories; when her tooth cracked in the middle of eating a hot dog, I visibly and unprofessionally shuddered; I don’t really do that a lot.
I wish there was a society where substance abuse didn’t seem so attractive to so many people, because they felt fulfilled already. Does such a society exist in the modern world? Doesn’t look like it. I’m sure Ahmadinejad thinks there’s no heroin in Iran, you know, the way there are no queers there, but ultimately, has any such society ever existed? I’d like to think so, because it would mean we could get there again. Maybe we could anyway. Not going to hold my breath though.
