Minutes of Heaven Miles of Hell

By Mitch Webb

The horrid smell wasted no time waking me up. Having only been in bed two or three hours from a three-day cocaine binge, I forced a thin split between my eyelids to locate the disgusting odor. My eyes struggled to focus through the foggy film while stars and blackout spots danced around my peripheral vision. The nauseating stench and three-day empty stomach forced me to bow over the edge of our broken bed. My throbbing head dangled facing the dusty hardwood floor as I unwillingly burst into a coughing frenzy, resulting in streams of murky mucus bridging the two-foot gap. I felt the blood vessels in my eyes exploding with each weakening grasp for oxygen as the ringing in my ears amplified.
After a few relentless minutes, the stormy seas settled somewhat and I collapsed back into a horizontal position on the bed staring blindly at the ceiling. Wiping my mouth and eyes with trembling hands, I wondered how many more times death would release me. Enfolded tightly in a sheet, I found myself alone. Although extremely weak, I mustered the strength to wrestle myself free of the binding sheet and instantly snapped my head backwards. I had found the origin of the repulsive aroma...my own waste!
Over the past three years, I had lost control of many things; but never had I lost control of my bowels! Mary must have been so sickened and disgusted she left me packaged in my own excrement and urine. Who could blame her? I was committing suicide on the installment plan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mitch Webb
• Release date: Jul 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476235059

Mitch Webb

I am a 46 year old happily married man with a lovely 10 year old daughter whom I adopted this year. I grew up and attended school in Black Mountain, NC. After school, I served in the military, and was discharged after an accident which left me disabled. Afterwards, I chased women, drugs, and good times for the majority of my adult years until running into Christ, and I have been chasing real life and real love since. I reside in a humble home located in Inman, SC, and enjoy traveling, reading, writing, and prison ministry.

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MINUTES OF HEAVEN

MILES OF HELL

By

Mitch Webb

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Mitch Webb on Smashwords

Minutes of Heaven Miles of Hell

Copyright 2012 by Mitch Webb

Part I

The Ladder of Drug Etiquette

Chapter 1: Genesis

The Basics

Getting high? I’ve always been getting high.

Sunday afternoons at my house were as lazy as turtles chewing jerky. I remember stretching out on our high mileage couch, blanketed with Mamaw’s homemade multi-colored quilt. It was an old and scratchy sort of throw not long enough to cover a cough, much less my tall skinny frame. While watching a western named The Good the Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood, I stirred a big bowl of chocolate ice cream into a thick milkshake. What more could a twelve-year-old boy ask for? Television was my drug of choice long before I could even spell drug.

Bell-bottoms, shag rugs, and Farrah Fawcett posters decorated the disco era in the late 70’s when a television sitcom began to air called All in the Family. The two main characters of the show, Archie and Edith Bunker, mirrored my parent’s persona. My dad was a prejudice die hard republican that ran our house with an iron fist, and mom was a faithful church attending woman with strong convictions for doing the right thing by everyone. Also in the family was my music-loving brother, four years my junior, who later went into Christian counseling. For the time era, I figure we lived an average American lifestyle. We were a blue collar family and although poor in finance, my family was rich in unity.

Growing up in a small redneck town in western North Carolina, I recall toys and entertainment were limited, and neighborhood children to play with were few and far in between. I don’t know, maybe there were more children to play with than I care to admit, but often I preferred to play alone. Keep in mind; this is in the days before all the electronic gadgets were available. Looking back, I think we were actually made to stay outside and play. Whether it was playing hide and seek, riding bikes, playing cowboys and Indians, or playing by myself, staying outside until dark was the norm. Afterwards, my brother and I would normally get from thirty minutes to an hour of television on the weeknights. On the weekends my folks were a lot more liberal (perhaps because they were so tired from the work week).

Growing into my teens I found a new high replacing television--weight lifting. There probably isn’t a boy alive who hasn’t looked at some man who was chiseled with muscle and desired that for himself. I decided to join the school’s wrestling team to assist in my physical training, although wrestling wasn’t my specialty. Well, wasn’t my specialty doesn’t exactly describe my athletic contributions. Let’s simply say I was pinned more than Mamaw’s hair on Sunday morning.

Speaking of Sunday mornings, I faithfully attended a small Baptist church in the country. Not by choice, mind you, but because Mother strongly encouraged me to go. Church and the rules of church just wasn’t my thing. From my young, simple-minded point of view, I couldn’t understand why the receptive congregation would fervently welcome a new tongue lashing each week only to thank the pastor afterwards. Church terrified me with constant shouting reminders of doom and gloom; however, I did relish the church summer trips to our North Carolina theme park Carowinds. Another childhood reminder of church was the great emphasis and dialogue put into food. Who is doing the cooking, who needed thanks for the cooking, and who is going to eat the cooking, and so on. Through the years, I must say this fascination with dining inside the church has not diminished any.

Being fourteen years old in my home was like being fourteen in dog years--predictable. My parents woke me up, fed me, and seen me off to school faithfully. We ate dinner at 4:40 sharp, Monday through Friday and bedtime was at 9:00. Saturday mornings overflowed with Lucky Charms and Looney Tunes, spilling into afternoon tree climbing. Occasionally, when finances would allow, I received allowance for doing chores expected of me. I would blow my money on Spiderman comic books, Star Wars trading cards, or whatever the notion took--as much as fifty cents to a dollar could take me.

OK, let’s skip a couple of years to the judicious age of sixteen. My first quality ride was a moldy-cheese green 1970 Dodge Dart that would do zero to sixty in about--well, eventually. I worked full time at McDonald’s and part time at a full service gas station earning good money ($3.35 an hour); although it appeared all my money was going into my car, eating out, or various teen-age desires. I felt the need for a new high.

Marijuana

During that red-letter time in my life, marijuana made its grand appearance riding shotgun with my soon-to-be best friend Matt. I believe he was high the day I met him in tenth grade shop class. His audaciously stupid-funny humor attracted me from the onset. I don’t know how we hooked up. He was the classic clown of stoners, much in contrast to me--the pen-yielding soldier in a squad of geeks.

Matt smoked more than that old Dodge Dart of mine; but marijuana wasn’t for me--yet. I didn’t even attempt to smoke marijuana for maybe seven or eight months. During that time, I would be lying if I said my interest was non-existent. My curiosity in pot (marijuana) stirred each time I witnessed my best friend having hee-haw hysteria. How bad could that drug be if it made one feel so happy? I felt subdued, like sitting on the bank watching Matt swing off a rope mischievously into the deep creek waters. What about me? I wanted to dip my toe in the tempting waters!

After carefully weighing my wants, I decided to learn how to smoke pot.

The decision to sample marijuana was not due to any form of pressure; envy and curiosity were enough motivating factors for me. Since I was a non-smoker, I didn’t know how to inhale. All right, I knew how to breathe, but that was a bit more natural than actually wanting to put smoke in my lungs. Because Matt was the only person I had ever been around that smoked pot, I asked him to teach me the fine art and decorum of smoking weed.

Matt coached me like a relentless drill instructor only to get frustrated at my defeat. I managed to suck the smoke past my lips, but no farther; my unpolluted lungs vetoed what smoke slithered toward it. With each diminishing attempt, I ended up hacking with a look reflecting my asphyxiation. The failed smoking attempts and the hyperventilating proved more than I was willing to sacrifice; the drug was too much work. Keep it.

My next tug of war with smoking pot came nearly a month later when I decided to fly solo. I didn’t want to burden Matt anymore, but more accurately, I was too embarrassed to fail again in front of him. The curiosity I had in the harvest of smoking marijuana equaled my impatience. Therefore, one day while Matt’s attention was elsewhere, I borrowed some of his weed. He would’ve gladly given me some, but I didn’t want him anticipating my intentions.

Anyway, I took one of those pre-rolled tapered cigarettes with me to the local grocery store and parked some distance away. I put the joint (marijuana cigarette) up to my lips and lit it with the lighter--also borrowed from Matt. So there I sat puffing--grimacing as if kissing a cobra. Staring down my nose, I saw the cherry of the joint get brighter. At first I couldn’t take in the smoke, just as before; but after enough determination (and enough of Matt’s weed), I was able to.

I finally coerced an unsympathetic ball of smoke into my virgin lungs, sending me immediately into a whooping outburst. The pot tasted much like it smelled, although I had never actually tasted a minty skunk before. I choked, hacked, and gagged resentfully for about a minute--long enough to lose most of my oxygen. Once the coughing abated, and the floating black spots from lack of oxygen cleared out, I understood why people liked weed.

Marijuana provided a blissful feeling heightening my senses.

First, food tasted better. Not just some food, but all food! The ‘munchies’, as it is known in the marijuana realm, is difficult to explain. Simply put, it was taste bud paradise! Strangely enough, hunger wasn’t needed to possess that bizarre sensation. Imagine the stomach no longer a part of the digestive equation--but the sense of taste expanding. If it tasted good, as most of it did, then I ate it! However, since the stomach was a part of the digestive equation, belly sickness occurred many times from trying to fill a delusional empty tank.

In addition, from observations I have made, proper dining etiquette is not required. For instance, most folks will agree that bacon and eggs go well together. Although the stoned person would agree with the last statement, they would have no problem with combining eggs with say, M&M’s or a taco. All potheads have strange cravings or eccentric eating habits to some degree, although combinations and protocol varies from stoner to stoner.

By the way, the slang term stoner or stoned is simply one of countless labels for the marijuana smoker or his state of mind while under the influence of the drug. Of course, marijuana itself has scores of titles. There are many slang terms used for marijuana; some of those include grass, green, weed, dro, doobies, pot and bud.

Second, music had new life. Once again, as with the food observation, the listening experience is tricky to put in plain words. I found music to be one of the better perks of smoking marijuana. Once I got high, the music was never far behind. Intensity level of instrument distinction was one reason I enjoyed it so. To put it in English, I heard instruments played in songs I had never noticed before. How could a drug do such a thing? Originally, I thought the experience to be an audible hallucination, but changed my mind once I listened to the same songs with a clear head. Sure enough, those instruments were there if I closed my eyes, and listened for them. Songs that I had enjoyed for years were all of the sudden fresh to me again.

The final spin-off of this drug was strange indeed. Whenever I smoked weed everything was funny. Not chuckle--chuckle funny--but heart attack funny. It was the kind of funny that hurt my chest from prolonged laughter. Once Matt and I started laughing, there was no end until tears ran down our cheeks and our lungs could take no more. My teeth would turn dry while my cheeks begged for mercy. It took little to set us off; most of the things we found humorous were not comical at all. Often we would forget why we were laughing in the first place, which in turn sent us back into a sidesplitting hilarity.

When we could escape the prison cells of laughter, we would entertain ourselves listening to music while cruising the strip. We had to have righteous sound, regardless of the car we drove. In the days before Jenson and JVC (and in our case, money), there was a seedy man up the road who sold various audio equipment to Matt and I (you probably know the guy). At any rate, that’s what we did in the early eighties. We would drive in a large loop on Patton Avenue (local hangout) Friday and Saturday nights with music screaming, hoping to score with the ladies. Scoring with the ladies merely meant getting them to pull over for hollow chitchat.

Pot did have one other side effect in that it reddened the eyes. The stoned person would normally experience a droopy look in their eyes as if they were squinting or extremely sleepy. On one occasion, I recall driving home stoned late one night after leaving Matt’s house. We had been to the mall and walked around stoned all day making fun of elderly people--just being annoying teens. Well, we got to his place and smoked some more grass, which only compounded the bloodshot droopy-eyed look.

On the way home, I pulled over into a medical clinic parking lot near my house. It was after hours, maybe midnight or later, when I pulled into the dark secluded location on a hill. I knew I had to clear my eyes up, because Mother was always there--no matter what time--to make sure I made it in OK. To avoid unwanted attention from the law or anyone else, I killed the lights in the Cutlass I owned at the time. I fumbled around in the console compartment blindly while looking around at the surroundings, feeling for my bottle of Visine. I found the odd triangular shaped plastic bottle, unscrewed the top, and dotted my eyes liberally. I squirted several drops in each eye, although much of it missed altogether.

Instantly my eyes felt like an old Jerry Lee Lewis song--Great Balls of Fire. Normally there was always a little sting when applying those drops, but I recall thinking I must be seriously stoned because I didn't remember Visine blazing like that. The salty tears spilled steadily down my face. Because the pain was so awfully excruciating, I couldn’t help but rub and rip at my helpless peepers. Once the constant flow of tears finally slowed to a drip and enough for me to crack my eyes open, I cut on the interior light to dig out the Visine. Once I fondled my way through the console to the odd shaped bottle, it was then I realized I had mistakenly put concentrated breath drops in my eyes! Needless to say, this act caused my sunburned eyes to blister. However, I did have the freshest eyes in town.

The Bummers of Marijuana

Since I told of the bracing rides in the marijuana amusement park, it seems only fair I communicate the downers as well. The name marijuana came from a Mexican slang term for cannabis or hemp. In 1619, the American colonies actually required farmers to grow the hemp plant for making clothing, sails, and rope. The first two written drafts of the United States Declaration

Reviews for Minutes of Heaven Miles of Hell

[Moe Will · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

True inspiration . The story kept me interested until the very end and I could relate to everything he spoke on. I feel like I can change now too!!