THE ROAD TO EUPHORIA

There were thirty thousand tabs of Ecstasy in three clear plastic bags on the coffee table between us. I was kicking back on one of two dueling couches waiting for an answer. The fat and fidgety man across from me stared at the tassels on his loafers. The E was mine, the hesitation was all Bobby McGee’s.

He threw up his hands, “What’s it like, acid or something? I’ve heard of it. But look, my customers work on oil rigs or in meat packing plants. They hit town for the weekend, they want real dope, the kind they can shove in their wing or smoke in a glass pipe. These guys want oblivion, not ecstasy. If this was Percocets I’d take the whole volume, but Ecstasy? Sorry, but I can’t move this shit.”

The guy with the tassels was an oh-zee player we all called Bobby M, back in the pen. I was trying to persuade him to invest some of his hard-earned cocaine cash, but my pitch was going sideways.

In the summer of 1993 E was still too much of a niche market in Canada, too much of an unknown commodity for the made players like Bobby M. His Red Deer condo was my third stop covering four provinces and three thousand kliks in three and a half days. Already Friday and I still hadn’t unloaded kilo one.

Tuesday, I had picked up 22 keys of the stuff from a Mob runner at a service center on the 401 just outside Toronto. I drank coffee and kept their specifically modified Ford Probe pointed north by northwest along the Trans-Canada for the next 24 hours, just to get my butt out of Ontario.

I made my first stop in Winnipeg and pitched The Hound, but he was still laid up in a wheelchair— a bullet had caught him in the spine on his last bank robbery. He didn’t get out much. Greyhound hadn’t even heard of E. Another long night of black coffee in Styrofoam, Amen radio and wheat fields on both sides as I barreled through on a prairie blacktop as flat and true as a bowling lane. By mid-morning I was pulling into the Majestic Acres Trailer Park just outside Swift Current. There was nothing too promising about the button of a trailer plunked down on Site 36, the one nearest the RV Sewage Flush Unit.

I had come to talk to Mushroom and we sat at a particle board table passing a mickey of Crown Royal between us. Mushroom’s circumstances belied his financial condition. He probably had enough twenty-dollar bills buried in two-gallon pickle jars in the ground around us to raise the whole of this table top another six inches; enough twenties to purchase at least half of the million-plus wholesale stash of drugs I had in the false wall built into the back seat of the Ford.

Mushroom always was queer for twenties, he called them “the common denominator” and probably still had one from the first bag of pot he ever sold, back in the 60s. And he wasn’t interested in parting with a jar full today either, saying, “No thanks. I think I’ll just stick with what I got. Around these parts you don’t go to jail for growing pot.”



But Mushroom, being the true psychedelic pioneer he was, couldn’t help but enlighten me at length on the drug they call Ecstasy. “E or X, it’s all the same. Elizabeth, Eddy M, MDMA, Love, Beans, and Sassafras Tea, but that’s just the generic handles. Usually they name it by the batch, what’s yours look like?”

I told him they were plain white tablets, each containing 100 milligrams of the best and most pure MDMA that could be made illegally. That the chemist had been flown in from Amsterdam, and even the binding agent was organic.

“First off, they should be 125 mils, but hey, pure is good. And second you got to find a jazzy name. You should call yours White Lightning or Pearl Buzz, too bad they didn’t think to throw in some color. You need color in the psychedelics business. You could have Pink Nike or Chocolate Rave, although E ain’t a real psychedelic, in the sacred sense I mean. It came out of the designer drugs in Southern Cal back in the 70s. Originally, there were supposed to be five Es: Ecstasy, Euphoria, Empathy, Epiphany, and Enlightenment, but the DEA grabbed the principal guy in Laguna before he could get all of the Es done up. Then the bikers came along with their bathtub PCP and fucked up everything. The rest is history, but hey, real Es got some integrity.”

Mushroom probably would have gone on for hours, but the door to the trailer opened and a sliver of a girl in silver track pants and a teddy-top swung out with the door and asked if we wanted to smoke a fatty. Mushroom leaned in closer to me and said “I like E for the va-va-voom, know what I mean? I wouldn’t fuss if you was to leave a little.” I excused myself, went to the car and filled a clean Styrofoam cup from the samples bag. When I returned, he had gone inside. I left the cup of white beans sitting on the table, some for Mushroom and some for his va-va-voom.

I drove another hard day’s night through the heart of Alberta, a moonlit landscape dotted with small oil rigs all pumping in the mindless rhythm of those wooden drinking birds you see in Trick n’ Joke shops. I almost dozed off, then suddenly my tires hit the shoulder, my head snapped up. The sign for Red Deer was caught in my headlights. Inside city limits, it took a lot of wrong way streets before I finally found the guy I’d pinned my hopes on. All for bust. I left Bobby McGee’s thinking that for a drug promising ecstasy, this was getting depressing.

As I passed through the foothills and entered the Rockies, I began to feel like I had a piece of barbed wire stuck in my head. The barbed wire had a name, Lemon Morin, a fastidious little collector for the mob, who would be waiting in Vancouver, expecting the first payout, a quarter to a half mill. I still had an Asian connection in Van, and the faint hope he would take it all.

I had been out of prison a few years, trying to go straight, but my finances were in the toilet and life was pressing in on all sides. Which is why I decided to try this trip. I had considered bank robbery because that was all I knew. But I also knew I had been in prison too long. Banks, along with everything else, including me, especially me, had changed. I was a dinosaur and my era was over. In prison, too many days had passed in the mindless rhythm of those oil donkeys sucking the blood up from buried bones.

I stopped in Lake Louise to pick up two kids and a dog with a bandana who were hitchhiking; their cardboard flap read “Vancouver.” The boy called me Mister, which made me think he was either from a very good family or no family at all; the girl had a purple cast on her wrist. I never did find out what that dog was about. He just lay there on the back seat, poking his nose into the upholstery where I had my E stashed.

For the first hour the girl sat staring out her window, with that fixed look of a child being borne away home. Silence is not golden, it’s awkward; by Revelstoke I had them educated, but not convinced, on the silkiness of Sinatra, and they had taught me that Snoop Doggy Dogg was a musician and not a character in a comic strip. By Kamloops they were both laughing and volunteering bits of personal information. They were middle class kids, decent and smart, and they were lying: about the jobs they had waiting, her wrist injury in a game of volleyball, their ages and, I suspected by the way they tripped over them, even their names. I didn’t press the issue. I had enough secret baggage of my own.

Still, I found myself wanting to know their real lie. Was she pregnant? Had he been threatened with boot camp? How had she really broken her wrist? Or had they maybe murdered her parents? Why did she stare out the window that way? Why did he look in her direction so often, with such tender desperation, as to confirm she was still there, as if the world might break if she wasn’t?



An hour out of Vancouver, I pulled into a truck stop near Hope. They said yes to hot apple pie, and yes to ice cream topping, and when I suggested it, she giggled out a yes, yes to cheddar too. For a while that night in the diner I entered their world, where pie tasted “awesome,” where a jukebox was “Like, whoa! Check it out,” the most magical box that ever existed, and the lyrics of B17 were “so totally hysterical” we laughed until everyone in the place was staring at the tears running down our cheeks, then we laughed even more. I picked up a take-out burger for the E guard dog and stepped out of the diner with a lightness, a sense of something lifted. I thought maybe all things were possible, even a return to the place before too much hurt, the place before my heart began its retreat.

On the last leg into Vancouver, we were all still ribbing and half-giddy. Then the penny dropped. It was nothing, an innocent declaration by him. Their “best thing,” as he called it, was “to be at a really cool rave and pop some E.” My world snapped back into place. Lemon Morin, 30 000 Es and the undeniable knowledge that these two bright and shiny kids were our eventual customers.

I dropped them off near the Y and made them each accept a C-note. Then I drove out close to the airport and parked on the street below The Sheraton, and sat, staring up at the tall tower of rooms. I was in no hurry now. And Lemon Morin would be tired from all the scrubbing and cleaning and spraying he had surely done before relaxing. He was a notorious germ freak, an obsession tolerated by the wise guys, because he was just as meticulous about their business matters.

Along with the gun and knife Lemon packed everywhere, he never traveled without tubs of wet wipes, cans of Lysol, bottles of Dettol, latex gloves, his own sheets and a plastic mattress cover. I’ve seen Lemon put a condom on a telephone before he’d use it, and I’ve seen him pull out his own cutlery in a five star restaurant.

I was half out of the car when I spotted something wedged in the back seat, the plastic cap on a prescription vial. The name on the label did turn out to be different than the one she had volunteered, but I didn’t feel cheated. The script for the Percocets came from Calgary, where possibly a father, more likely a mother’s boyfriend, had probably lost his temper and put a girl in a purple cast.

I was surprised to see a Loomis van pull up to the curb 30 feet in front of me. Only then did I notice the bank. Even so, the hour was late for banking business. One guard carried two bags inside. It dawned on me finally that he was probably filling the ATMs. I noted the exact time, for future reference. When the guard emerged again I saw him read my front tag before he climbed back in the van. It didn’t matter, this car was registered to a legit mob front.

I stared back up at the hotel, then spilled four percs into the palm of my hand. I knew at a bone-level I would never be a successful drug dealer. People like Lemon Morin, and the people who hired him, have a quality I’d never possess. They’d grown a thick skin of insulation to keep the dirt distant and the hurt from touching.

In a few minutes I would walk into that hotel and leave the keys to this car and a message for Lemon with the concierge. The mob guys would be pissed, but it was a have-the-money-or-the-product deal. They could have their E. I wouldn’t be their first minor disappointment.

My life had somehow slipped away when I wasn’t looking. I was an ex-junkie and I knew where it would end up before I ate those Percocets. Most likely, back here in this very spot. Wired-up, unprepared, unprofessional, but waiting for that Loomis van just the same.

Perhaps it was the alchemy of my life that had produced the sixth E, a personal one, just for me. E for evanescence. I sat down on the curb, the percs were melting in my stomach, and I dissolved into their spreading warmth.

STEPHEN REID

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