Drug Czar
BY GEOFF KAGAN TRENCHARD
I come from a family where getting fucked up is an inherited recipe.
Anything I didn’t learn from a grandmother who drank herself to death
on cheap vodka and food stamp tomato juice, I picked up from my cousin
who chopped speed with a drywall knife ’til his knuckles splintered
like fiberglass. There wasn’t much new for Officer Weber to tell me
when he came to my seventh grade social studies class
to tell us about the D.A.R.E program. I distinctly remember
how Officer Weber paced the length of the chalkboard,
slapping his basketball of a gut in time with the pregnant pauses
of his sentences. Well, kids, his thick fingers palming
both sides of his stomach like Buddha molesting his own belly,
I’m here today, to talk to you, about the dangers of amphetamines.
The first time I did speed was about a week before. Mike dropped
an eightball into our Super Big Gulp. We stayed up 'til sunrise
smoking endless cigarettes, meticulously duplicating album covers
on our notebooks. A few years later, Mike went to jail for burglary.
Took a vocational course on how to cook diet pills with gasoline for fun
and profit. One day, Officer Weber played a movie intended
to relate to us on our level. You know the story: a troop of bubble-headed
teenieboppers get approached by a shady figure who tries to get
them hooked on “the dope.” Before my friend Lisa became a statistic
used to scare parents, she sat at the desk next to mine in home room.
Once let me watch while she changed her shirt when we ditched.
I never got to kiss her, but she gave me her pewter skull necklace
with the knife in its head and plastic ruby eyes. Over Christmas Break
she whittled herself down to a skeleton in heavy mascara. The last time I saw
her was in a hospital room. Said the day she gets out she’s catching
a Greyhound to Missouri. Meet up with a boy who loved her enough
to tattoo her name over the abscesses on his shooting arm.
At the end of my seven weeks of Drug Abuse Resistance Education,
we had a party with juice boxes and popcorn.
Officer Weber handed out ribbons yellow as a streetlight
in an empty lot, that read PROUD TO BE DRUG FREE.
The acid I took at lunch was just kicking in. His voice
sounded like the shriek of air from an emptying balloon
as he congratulated me and placed his award on my desk.
I come from a family where getting fucked up is an inherited recipe.
Anything I didn’t learn from a grandmother who drank herself to death
on cheap vodka and food stamp tomato juice, I picked up from my cousin
who chopped speed with a drywall knife ’til his knuckles splintered
like fiberglass. There wasn’t much new for Officer Weber to tell me
when he came to my seventh grade social studies class
to tell us about the D.A.R.E program. I distinctly remember
how Officer Weber paced the length of the chalkboard,
slapping his basketball of a gut in time with the pregnant pauses
of his sentences. Well, kids, his thick fingers palming
both sides of his stomach like Buddha molesting his own belly,
I’m here today, to talk to you, about the dangers of amphetamines.
The first time I did speed was about a week before. Mike dropped
an eightball into our Super Big Gulp. We stayed up 'til sunrise
smoking endless cigarettes, meticulously duplicating album covers
on our notebooks. A few years later, Mike went to jail for burglary.
Took a vocational course on how to cook diet pills with gasoline for fun
and profit. One day, Officer Weber played a movie intended
to relate to us on our level. You know the story: a troop of bubble-headed
teenieboppers get approached by a shady figure who tries to get
them hooked on “the dope.” Before my friend Lisa became a statistic
used to scare parents, she sat at the desk next to mine in home room.
Once let me watch while she changed her shirt when we ditched.
I never got to kiss her, but she gave me her pewter skull necklace
with the knife in its head and plastic ruby eyes. Over Christmas Break
she whittled herself down to a skeleton in heavy mascara. The last time I saw
her was in a hospital room. Said the day she gets out she’s catching
a Greyhound to Missouri. Meet up with a boy who loved her enough
to tattoo her name over the abscesses on his shooting arm.
At the end of my seven weeks of Drug Abuse Resistance Education,
we had a party with juice boxes and popcorn.
Officer Weber handed out ribbons yellow as a streetlight
in an empty lot, that read PROUD TO BE DRUG FREE.
The acid I took at lunch was just kicking in. His voice
sounded like the shriek of air from an emptying balloon
as he congratulated me and placed his award on my desk.
GEOFF KAGAN TRENCHARD’S poems have been published in numerous journals, including Word Riot, The Nervous Breakdown, The Worcester Review, and November 3rd. As a mentor for Urban Word NYC, he taught weekly poetry workshops in the foster care center at Bellevue. He has also taught creative writing workshops in Rikers Island with Columbia University’s “Youth Voices on Lockdown” Program. He is a recipient of a fellowship from the Riggio Writing and Democracy program at the New School and the louderARTS Writing Fellowship. He has performed poetry on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, at universities throughout the United States, and in theaters internationally as a member of the performance poetry troupe “The Suicide Kings.” He lives in Brooklyn.