Young teenager, with unpleasant experiences in daily routine, seeks psychic stimulation. Imagination and music and the cracks in suburbia revealing glimpses of weirdness make for an enticing luminosity. How to enter these spaces, where the mind is aglow and able to perceive and feel from an alternative coordinate system? The young teenager here, he goes from sniffing markers and holding his breath to inhaling rubber cement and liquid paper*. The waves of tingles that move through his body and the accompanying chemical changes that rush through his brain seem to indicate a breach in his immediate reality and the existence of another dimension of experience. He and a similar-minded friend soon acquire the guidance of an older, knowledgeable and mysterious, fellow named Seth. Seth instructs the two boys on the way of inhaling glue. They sit against apartment buildings, tucked away behind bushes, with tubes of model cement and the plastic bags from the supermarket produce section, learning the rudiments of vapor inhalation. They practice with amounts of glue, how it’s spread into the bag, how to hold the bag and with how much capacity in it, and how to work it with the other hand to establish a good rhythm between the lungs filling the bag and the squeezing down of the bag to fill the lungs. And through the experiences of this practice they psychically move into another dimension, or at least psychically move out of the one they were otherwise in.
Our young teenager also experiments with alcohol and sessions of heavy drinking. From the earliest of these he goes through intense episodes of falling-down drunk, foggy and ill voyages into blackouts. Soon he is drinking fairly regularly, beer mostly but also wine or wine coolers, and it is during these drunken times that he also acquires the habit of smoking cigarettes. Alcohol is an easy fix because it is so prevalent, even to a minor, and it enjoys such widespread acceptance and support. It might even be said that the path to mindless drunkenness is encouraged or can seem normal.
And so, the teenage years go by, filled with days getting mad drunk and smoking, tobacco as well as a great many clove cigarettes, and occasionally mixing another substance into the equation such as marijuana or cocaine. But still, the special relationship between our teenage user and volatile chemicals is a deep one and continues on, whether it be by inhalation of model cement or liquid paper from a bag while parked alone in a secluded place, or from bag with an intoxicating spray in a storage room at place of employment, or slumped over a sink in the graphic arts class pouring lacquer thinner into running hot water…
Oh, the beautiful, sunny, breezy, southern California suburban days that float by, with these boys sniffing up tubes of glue, sitting in a car at a community shopping center (where the necessary supplies were readily available), listening to Pornography by The Cure, and floating in and out of vaporous inebriated states of sensation! How the outside world would change, while their insides would turn strange and grow numb! After some hours of filling the car with dangerous vapors, one of them or both of them might want a cigarette, and while pulling one out and handling the lighter, they would giggle perversely at the thought that the car might be so full of fumes that a spark would ignite the whole thing into a ball of flame! Then they would flick the lighters, and even though there was no explosion in the suburban shopping center that day, there was a couple of boys aware of that cool and noxious feeling one gets when commingling nicotine-laced smoke with toxic glue fumes in a being with numb body and mind peeking through one of those weird and ephemeral ruptures in mundane reality.
*These, and as far as I know All the substances mentioned herein, were of a different constitution when the events depicted in this writing took place. The events themselves might in fact never have occurred, and this could be merely a piece of fiction. In any event, the author is not advocating in any way the use of any mentioned or related substances.