Men of the Skull Chapter 9: Coke

This chapter is among the shortest in the book- and one of the nastiest.  It was also among the last that I wrote for the book.

Why is it nasty?  Well, because it tells an unvarnished Truth.  This is a Truth that many of the brothers don't want told, but everyone knew.  It was far from a secret- in fact Skull had a reputation as a "drug house."

Not THAT bad though!

It was the 80s, and drugs were common.  I think I was the only lame ass who DIDN'T know how or where to score drugs, because I didn't want to do so.  I'd seen what drugs could do to a person, and I had enough issues with my drug of choice; alcohol.   Still, if you wanted to be popular, you did drugs- lots of them.  

The Bone was full of Dead heads.  There was a LOT of pot in the house.  But the major drug was cocaine.  That was true of many of the houses.  Rumor was that, for one of the houses, their house philanthropy was to give a charity a cut of the money they earned from selling drugs as the house business.

Times are different now.  I'll almost guarantee that most of the brothers don't touch drugs any more.  After all, that was college, and they are now mature, respectable family men.  But this happened, and to ignore it would be to remove a major part of the Truth of this book.  And I wrote this book to be about the Truth.  

To this day, I have never smoked pot.  I tried coke three times.  Hated it.  Never tried anything else.  I stuck to booze.  It caused me enough trouble.  

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Chapter 2.9: Coke

Thursday, September 11, 1986 10 miles of Delaware River fouled by tanker’s 200,000- gallon spill

            It’s funny the ways that knowledge can serve.  I noticed that a number of the brothers seemed to have allergies.  They had red eyes, sniffled a lot and sneezed.  Now, these were rich guys.  It didn’t take me long to connect the dots.  The final clue was how some of these guys were absolutely hostile to me- as if they had something to hide: Paranoid.

            With all the fancy book learnin’ I got when training as an EMT, I put together the pieces: Cocaine.

She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie;
Cocaine.

Yeah.  Lots of mirrors on tables in the house.  Not in every room to be sure, but plenty.

You could tell when they were hopped up: usually at parties.  Some of them would use it as fuel to kick down people’s doors.  Assholes.  Still, there was one guy who had a major problem.  He would snort any and all he could whenever he could.  He owed a lot of people a lot of money because he kept borrowing to buy, or he snorted other people’s stash.  Not a good idea.  The coke heads looked down on him like he had no control or something.

So I’m guessing a lot of those guys were so paranoid that they thought I was a cop.  That would explain a few things.

Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones is ready, watch your speed.

Still, I mean the amount of money some of these guys spent on coke alone, never mind pot, would easily have paid a person’s tuition.  And these guys not only bought for themselves, oh no!  Many many sorority girls would do anything for it.  The term then was “coke whores.”  Glamorous shit, eh?  That was the 80s.

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