Blow (35 page)

Much faster is what Sigmund Freud, Sherlock Holmes, and John Belushi enjoyed doing, which was to dissolve the cocaine in water and shoot up intravenously (Belushi's fatal shot had a dash of heroin in it, making it what's known as a speedball). “In my last severe depression I took coca again,” Freud wrote back in 1884, “and a small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.” Shot directly into a vein, the coke takes just two minutes to impress itself on the brain cells, and maintains its effect for ten or fifteen minutes. In solution form, the coke contains more wallop than when snorted, and can create sensations that, as Freud observed when he stayed up one night monitoring the habit of a friend, proved to be more than mildly disconcerting. The friend, whose name was von Fleischl, had been trying to cure his morphine habit with cocaine. One night he suffered a paranoid reaction and, with Freud at his side, began hallucinating that monsters were trying to get at him and insects were gnawing at his skin. More or less promptly after that, Freud decided he'd better knock it off.

The fastest route to a high, one that didn't make its appearance in the United States until around 1986, and then mostly in cities on the East Coast, is to cook up the cocaine into crack and smoke it in a little pipe. The kernel of crack doesn't stay lit very well, so you have to keep firing it up with a butane lighter, hence the telltale burn scar on the outer edge of a crack addict's thumb. After a hit on the crack pipe, the rush comes on in only ten seconds and envelops the mind with the intensity of a fierce squall at sea. Three or four minutes later, it tails off, vanishing as rapidly as it appeared, to be replaced by a sharp psychological crash and an agonizing hunger for more.

When snorted, the only way George did it, coke takes a little longer to produce an effect, four to five minutes from nose to neuron. But the euphoria lasts longer, from fifteen minutes to half an hour, at which point the good feelings inevitably start turning sour and the high takes a downhill slide, reaching its half-life—the point when the half drug has been eliminated from the body—in forty-five minutes to an hour after the hit. That's when you want to check into the coatroom or the john to do it again; and this goes on maybe five times a night, so that you can knock off a fifth of a gram, half a gram if you're a fairly heavy user, or a whole gram if you're near to going over the edge. When the crash would come for George, the feelings he missed most were the sense of possessing total control over his environment, of having a heightened sensitivity to things—“when you're having a conversation with someone and you know what they're going to say before they say it”—feeling magnificently superior to the other people in the room, of being a superman, a person whom no one can touch and no one can bring down.

By his own account, between 1978 and 1980, his years of heaviest use, George averaged about five grams a day, between 100 and 150 lines, five thousand milligrams. This was his maintenance dose. Some days he'd be up to ten, even twelve or fifteen grams, and he recalls on at least one occasion making a whole ounce—twenty-eight grams—disappear in a period of eighteen hours. “I just seemed to have this tremendous capacity for coke,” he says. “I never met anyone who could snort more coke at a sitting than I could. You put ten grams in front of me, and I could go through that stuff in ten minutes. One of the Colombians, Victor, would come up to Eastham and we'd do two or three grams and he'd have his head in the toilet. I'd do it with Mr. T, and after nine or ten lines he wouldn't know where he was.”

After a while, snorting lines or doing little coke spoons got in the way of George's travel schedule—he was always on airplanes or in cars, going or coming—so he took to filling up a Tylenol bottle with a few ounces, which he would pop into his shirt pocket. When he wanted a hit, he'd uncap it and insert a straw, not even taking the bottle out of his pocket, and a constant flow of coke would be vacuumed into his nose. Mirtha recalls that at parties in Miami with the Colombians, “the coke would be out on the table on a silver platter and the men would be doing these little lines, maybe taking just a hit with their spoons. George would measure out a line twelve inches long, run up the whole thing with his nose, and in one hit it would all be gone, like that.” The Colombians would say that George didn't do your normal lines, he did boulevards. “Mr. I-95,” they called him, in reference to the endless string of white lines that mark the lanes on the interstate.

Averaging 5 grams a day, throwing in a few extra for the binges, this added up to somewhere around 6,000 grams, or 13.2 pounds of 100 percent pure cocaine that he visited on his brain cells from 1978 to the end of 1980. Cut and sold on the street, the amount would have cost close to $2 million. But the financial consequences of his habit paled alongside what it did to his personality and the general pace of his life.

The effect cocaine has on the brain is essentially to make the billions of neurons “talk” to each other, and in turn send out messages to the various parts of the body telling them how to act and feel. A brain cell, cell 1, say, normally communicates in an orderly fashion by firing off a neurotransmitter containing its message into the space between cell 1 and cell 2, known as the synapse. There the message from cell 1 is picked up by cell 2 through its receptor, whereupon cell 1 terminates the transmission by cleaning the remains of the neurotransmitter out of the synaptic space and getting off the line, as it were. It does this by employing a mechanism known as “reuptake.” The conversation having stopped, cell 2 can react to the message without getting confused by any static residue. One of the most important effects of cocaine is to cause the neurons to fire off their neurotransmitters into the synaptic space, willy-nilly, shooting out one impulse after the other and creating a lot of general chatter in the head. Another thing it does is to block the reuptake mechanism, which prevents cell 1 from clearing its former message out of the synaptic space before issuing a new one. This means that for the duration cocaine is present in the brain the cells never stop talking, the general effect of which is like a party telephone line with billions of customers, all blabbing at once, and no one will shut up, and you have to do what everyone says, and do it now.

Among the messages that come across loud and clear is the one that gears up the body to cope with an emergency—adrenaline shoots into the system, the pupils dilate, and the heart rate accelerates, pumping blood to the muscles. The senses go on high alert, the need for sleep and food gets suppressed, the energy level soars. For the same reason the Indians in the Andes could run twice as far when they chewed coca leaves, George Jung could stay up for four and five days at a time with no sleep, talking incessantly, making deals, doing business, fast-forwarding his life in general until it resembled the action in single-reel film from the 1920s. This was especially evident to anyone having the misfortune of being present when he was behind the wheel of a car. Once, when he was driving a Colombian visitor from the house at Eastham to the airport in Hyannis, George informed his alarmed passenger that he'd drop him off at the rotary by the air terminal, but that he was in too big a hurry to stop the car. “I told him, ‘Look, I'm really rushed, I haven't got the time to stop, but I'll slow down a little. You'll just have to jump.' It took two times going around that rotary, but he did it.” As a driver, George had been a public menace ever since his teenage days, but on coke he gave “speed demon” a new dimension of meaning. After midnight one night, trying to get to the Cape to supervise a money delivery, he drove his Thunderbird from the center of Boston to the Sagamore Bridge, fifty-four miles, in the space of twenty-five minutes, and this included negotiating two cloverleafs.

Coke also intruded into most aspects of George's home life at Eastham, where Mirtha would try to keep up with George, at least part of the way; Clarie would sometimes wake up wondering why her mother was running the vacuum cleaner around at three or four in the morning. George liked to take Clarie off to her fourth-grade class at the Eastham elementary school, and on more than one occasion he ended up in some confrontation with a teacher or the principal, on whom George would unload the brunt of his own teaching philosophy from the pimp classes at Danbury. “Going to school in the car, I'd be having a little pick-me-up out of the Tylenol bottle, and Clarie would ask what I was doing. ‘It's my medicine, Clarie. The doctors say I have to have this all the time.'” Arriving at the school at 8:00
A.M
., he'd storm in with his sunglasses on, a silk scarf, leather jacket, his Porsche burbling to itself outside in a no-parking spot, whereupon he would discharge himself of some opinions to anyone in sight, then tear off. “I remember Clarie looking at me once and saying, ‘Why can't you just be like the rest of the dads?' I knew she was mortified a lot, but I couldn't stop.”

That summer, however, he decided abruptly that maybe he'd been doing too much coke after all and resolved to tail off some on the grammage. The occasion came six days before his thirty-sixth birthday, on the same day his child was born, when George suffered a heart attack. He'd already experienced some physical consequences from the drug, one of them a subspecies of cocaine psychosis that had to do with what the medical books call “tactile hallucinations”—thinking things are crawling on your skin. This comes about because the same neurotransmitters that fool you into believing you're physically invincible, sexually irresistible, and intellectually formidable, not to mention the life of the party, can also cause you to lose touch with reality in negative ways as well. You begin to suffer symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, thinking people are after you, that there's stuff on you that shouldn't be there. What George felt was an unbearable burning sensation in his feet. He thought his soles were peeling off, that he'd been walking on a bed of coals, like some Indian fakir, only not because he wanted to. A doctor he saw couldn't figure it out, probably because George neglected to tell him about his coke habit. Walking being too painful, George stayed in bed, and he also stopped snorting coke, since getting high while lying on your back isn't much fun. Abstinence, it turned out, was the cure, and eventually the sensation went away.

Late in July, with the baby's arrival drawing nigh, Clara Luz had the family move to the Pompano Beach house so Mirtha could give birth in Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Miami, where they had good Cuban doctors. Mirtha's water broke early in the morning a few days after they arrived, and George found himself barreling down I-95, his wife beside him growing steadily more panicked, telling him to hurry or she'd have it by the roadside. George had thought to get a little blasted on coke before they left in order to speed passage of the birthing experience—and in Miami he became disoriented and couldn't find the hospital. Finally he flagged down a cabbie and gave him two hundred dollars to lead the way. The cab promptly pulled a U-turn over the median strip, and George followed suit in the big Thunderbird, which took the divider by leaping about a foot into the air, causing Mirtha's head to smash into the roof, not doing wonders for her emotional state. They reached the hospital with plenty of time, it turned out, since the baby didn't arrive until that evening—a girl. She was named Kristina Sunshine Jung, the first name because it resembled Christian, George's father's name, the second to honor the fact that she'd been born in the Sunshine State. The initial glimpse George and Clara Luz got of her was through the little window in the nursery, and at first George wasn't too impressed. “You look at them and to me they all looked the same, like wizened little midgets. But Clara Luz was going, ‘Oh, she's beautiful, she's so wonderful.' ‘Okay,' I said. ‘Now, let's go home.'”

He felt the pain right after he got in the car and was putting it into drive. It hit him in the chest, with the force of a sledgehammer. More pain began shooting up and down both arms, and he started sweating profusely and growing faint. Clara Luz took his pulse, which was racing wildly, and quickly got him into the emergency room, where the doctor informed him he'd had a violent heart attack. He laid George out on a gurney, plugged him into an EKG monitor, and gave him a shot to calm the heart muscle. “You just about blew up the machine. You've got to tell me what you've been doing,” George recalls him saying. “I said that I'd probably done an ounce of cocaine in the last fifteen hours. He looked at me as if I was fucking insane.” Cocaine heart attacks arrive compliments of another neurotransmitter—norepinephrine—which pumps stimulating signals into the heart muscle. These cause the muscle not only to work extra hard but to go into overtime, so that it fails to take the usual rest periods, during which it normally gets replenished with blood and oxygen, enabling it to continue to work. The sledgehammer blow George felt to his chest was, in effect, his heart muscle crying out for more oxygen. After the shot slowed down his heart, and after lying there for a couple of hours, George felt considerably better, and during a moment when the doctor was otherwise engaged, he walked out of the emergency room, got into his car, and drove home.

As it turned out, the heart attack wasn't the half of it. Something much worse, in terms of family relations, happened the following day, when George found himself so hung over from the cocaine binge that he couldn't get out of bed to make the little champagne pour the hospital gave for the new daddies coming in to see their wives and babies. “I never heard the end of that one,” he says. “Mirtha got hysterical about it, crying, shouting, going on about how I was the only father who wasn't there. She'd bring it up later over and over, when we'd argue—‘You rotten son of a bitch, you couldn't even get to the hospital when your daughter was born.' You know how women can throw in your face what you did ten years ago. They'll go back twenty if it's good enough. They've got everything categorized in their minds, all the dates and times, every fuck-up you ever made. Mirtha was so pissed she didn't even want to hear about the heart attack.”