Cooking Around The Stove

A few months after Patti and I split, I found out that one of my sources had come into the possession of a few pounds of Opium. I had never tried it, but it was immediately apparent that a few of my other contacts had access to the same supply, because within a few weeks, it had become the new thing to do at parties. The method of ingestion was part of the fad. A group of people would gather around an electric stove and turn all four surface burners to high...and when the burners were red hot, multiple stainless steel knives would be placed into the heating elements until they were also glowing..we would place a small pea of opium on a plate, take the cardboard tube from the center of a roll of paper towels, and then grab the hot knives from the burners and touch them to the opium...which created plumes of pure opium smoke that we would then suck through the tube. "Stove" parties would go on for hours at a time, and because the drug was so potent, it didn't take much to get very high...which made it a very inexpensive way to get totally wasted...in what seemed at the time to be a very social setting. Bruce and I could smoke opium for hours, and only use a few grams...and since I was buying ounces for just over four hundred dollars, $40.00 worth of opium lasted us all night, instead of the $600.00 plus per night we spent on cocaine parties. I liked the high better, too, and by the time I had gone through a few ounces, many of my close friends were getting their own supply from me. I found that smoking it was wasteful, and that nibbling on tiny balls of the stuff got me higher, and I used far less than when I smoked it...but for a couple of months, when the novelty was new...the kitchen became the main room in a lot of the houses I visited. There were a lot of permanently scorched flatware sets in Northeastern Conn. in 1981...and the electric companies must have loved us. I never thought about the fact that heroin is made from opium, or that I'd experience the same withdrawal symptoms when I stopped..the thought of running out never crossed my mind. I just thought that my source would get more...I didn't find out until there was only a few ounces of the supply left that the shipment of opium was a one-shot deal, and there wouldn't be a second batch...and that was after I had been doing it for the better part of a year...