Owl; A True Story About Heroin Addiction, Mother Nature, Magic and Miracles . . . Among Other Things

By G. Andrew Smith

she died while he was in prison and he couldn't escape feeling responsible. he, her beloved son, had become a dope fiend, after all, so her shame must have been lethal. lethal too is self-loathing; it's the very engine of addiction. she had been buried deep in the woods way up north and, by the time he mustered the guts to visit, heroin had its hooks in deep as well. native peoples believe that, when we die with unresolved issues, nature steps in to lend a hand. western culture labels such things superstitious or supernatural and tries to ignore them. however you choose to explain what happened when he finally visited that grave, it was magical – magic as real as the rocks in the creek bottom and its effect on him was nothing short of miraculous. he was changed forever by the experience.

this extraordinary true story is a journey of redemption through the "minefield" of memories that torment the conscience of one heroin addict. the entire narrative is written with the reader effectively on the author's shoulder as he sits, remembering and writing, on the porch of a log cabin, the recent site of the extra-natural manifestation that inspires this monumental undertaking of introspection and uncompromising self-appraisal. on the way, we become intimately acquainted w/ a number of characters from the lovable to the malevolent; notably the sinister "mr. jones, the boogie man of heroin addiction" allows us to experience the many, sundry agonies and attractions of opiates in a unique and creative way. nature, the wild world, with it's inevitable surrounding presence and reassuring constancy becomes a character in itself by which all elements of the story are reflected, measured and, in the end, resolved. As the reader follows the author on his "memory lane" journey, he is taken far afield across the length and breadth of the state of washington; it's geography, zoology, history and even it's anthropology is visited and innovatively described via mr. smith's singularly eclectic prose style. from a dicey trip to the state penitentiary as a convict to the native people's celebratory farewell to an eleven thousand year old salmon fishing site on the colombia river, days before it was flooded into oblivion by a giant dam, along with abundant points of interest in between, the author keeps our eye on the ball and eventually rewards us with a terrific story from beginning to a most rewarding endoument.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. Andrew Smith
• Release date: Apr 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452384108

G. Andrew Smith

Mr. Smith has lived the greater part of his life in the Pacific Northwest. At the end of what was a veritable thirty year train wreck on the Addiction-to-Heroin Limited, he settled in Seattle where he now writes, relishes the natural beauty of the place, and surrounds himself w/ a few, very good, old friends. He is passionate about the environment and sees America's addiction to consumerism, along with corporate obstinance and greed, as the bane of our beautiful blue oasis Earth. He is a bachelor and has no children.

Book preview

OWL

A true story about heroin, Mother Nature, magic and

miracles . . . among other things.

by

G. Andrew Smith

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SECOND

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Published by G. Andrew Smith at Smashwords

Copyright © 2010 by G. Andrew Smith – All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products incidentally referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you share it.

If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Acknowledgements

I wish to dedicate this small history to the memory of David R. Luke who passed from this life just as this work was being completed. The appropriateness of this measure lies in the fact that David – though more of a spectator than a participant – was present at every instance of foolhardy, boneheaded misadventure recounted in these pages . . . plus many more. I will always regret that I never had a chance to stroll with him through those particular memory lane minefields and listen to what thoughts had distilled from his 35 years of life since those times and how they might have added to my own – the ones I’ve labored to relate herein.

I owe many thanks to my friend, Mathew Oyer, whose considerable intellect and generous contribution of time spent proof reading went a long way toward transforming an early rough draft into this completed manuscript. It is safe to say that his involvement gave a badly needed infusion of new blood to a project that had, a year and a half ago, become perilously anemic.

Forward

The events described in this short history – all of them – are true. Where lapses of memory have limited my ability to be thorough – usually the result of inebriation of one sort or the other – I have made the reader aware of such limitations and resisted the urge to fill in the gaps imaginatively. Additionally, because we all have a tendency to associate claims of supernatural encounters with perception gone psychologically awry, I feel it appropriate to mention that I have no predisposition to schizophrenia . . . I don’t see and hear things and I am adequately oriented to time and place. In short, if I see something, it is there.

Where I have found the use of names necessary they have been changed to protect a) the guilty and their reputations, posthumous and otherwise b) the author from the litigiously inclined and c) those whose delusional sense of security could implode with exposure to the truth.

As an e-book published in the early, 'pioneering' days of the genre, the possibility does exist that a reader with an exceptionally acute critical faculty could find some unconventional or distracting aspects in the text. The manuscript in its present form has been written and rewritten dozens of times and whittled down as close to the bone as balance and reason will allow. Beyond that I could rewrite and revise forever in an obsessive/compulsive attempt at perfection, or submit what you now find before you with the keen hope that you, its readers, will find entertainment and merit in its pages.

G. Andrew Smith August 17, 2010/ Seattle, Washington

Forward to Second Edition

Having lived and worked with the original edition of OWL since its publication in August of 2010, and with the benefit of some thoughtful criticism from readers whose literary acumen I respect and admire, I have found a number of ways to improve upon that original work. This, the Second Edition, is the showpiece of those improvements, as well as a good measure of my own growth as a writer over the past year and a half.

In many ways, I have discovered through this process that my above comments (Forward to 1st Ed.) about rewriting and revision fail to recognize the most important truth about those processes. This truth lies in the hard earned ability – and discipline – to recognize when the time for rewriting and revision is over, and to stop rewriting and revising immediately upon the arrival of that time.

As before, it is my keen hope that you, dear reader, will find entertainment and merit in the pages here presented.

Submitted on the occasion of the Second Edition publication, December 24, 2011 G. Andrew Smith

Copyright 2010 G. Andrew Smith

TABLE of CONTENTS

C hapter 1 ____ The Wild Chicken Ranch

* * *

Chapter 2 ____ Deedle

* * *

Chapter 3 ____ MonkeyBizniz

* * *

Chapter 4 ____ Me and Mr. Jones (We got a thing goin on.)

* * *

Chapter 5 ___ Tiptoeing Through the Memory Lane Minefield

* * *

Chapter 6 ___ Old Louis and Hexed Heredity Hocum

* * *

Chapter 7 ____ To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

* * *

Chapter 8 ___ Outdoorsbboy

* * *

Chapter 9 ____ More Collateral Damage

* * *

Chapter 10 ___ Nuts and Bolts

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Chapter 11 ___ Under the Bus

* * *

Chapter 12 ____The Day of the Three Rain Rain & the Stone Age Excalibur

* * *

Chapter 13 ____The Owl and the Introspectoscope

* * *

AFTERWORD – Injuns, Octopi and Organic Magic

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OWL

A true story about heroin, Mother Nature, magic and

miracles . . . among other things.

And this our life, exempt from publik haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

Wm. Shakespeare 1599

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Chapter 1

The Wild Chicken Ranch

Lately the crowd and rush of my dreams – nightmares, just brief minutes in length – have rubbed my mind raw; so frenzied, vivid and jarring they preempt any benefits of sleep. I gasp back into wakefulness from these strange snoozes, sweaty and trembling as if I'd just survived a close scrape with death or disaster. A few days ago, I lunged out of a real doozy and grabbed pencil and pad to try capturing something of the dream’s weird content and texture. The following rather lengthy paragraph is a best effort at transcribing my jittery scrawl and disjointed notations from that day and using it as a starting point for this examination of the astounding, paradigm shifting experience I have just lived through, as well as what will likely become a journey of self-discovery, produced collaterally as I search for an explanation of that which could well be unexplainable.

It was night. A young woman and I had broken into some vaguely familiar back room to fix. I watched her cook the heroin. She was beautiful, voluptuous, and the flame from her lighter limned the perfect roundness of her breasts. Finished, she handed me my share in a plastic, insulin syringe; but, before I could use it, an old woman slammed into the room, shrieking at us and calling for help. Suddenly I was running, alone, through an older neighborhood on a Sunday-ish morning: a few people out and about, some of whom seemed to be pointing accusing fingers at me. The syringe, still containing my shot, had begun, inexplicably, to grow larger. An old man fumbled with a revolver, clearly intending to use it on me, but he was unable to close the cylinder properly and the bullets kept dropping to the ground. I kept running. The syringe was now about three feet long and I was desperate to find a place where I could fix – somehow I knew the dope in the transforming apparatus to be unaffected – to have remained viable. Finally, I crawled under a rickety board fence and into a small enclosed area in some guy’s back yard. He was sun tanning on a chaise lounge with the radio playing and, though he obviously saw me there, my trespass elicited less response from him than would a bug. So, reclining on my left side, I proceeded to maneuver the now huge syringe into position and insert the needle into a large vein in my upper arm; but by now it had grown to such a length that I had to kick off my shoe and manipulate the plunger with my toes while holding the needle in the vein with my right hand. Somehow, I pulled it off. I was flooded with relief along with the warm heroin rush that began to replace the miscellaneous anxieties and unpleasantness of the morning just as a police car screeched to a halt on the other side of the fence. Without question, I was screwed . . . but greatly consoled by the fact that I’d gotten loaded before going to jail. (Most heroin addicts don't feel high in their dreams. I, however, am one of the fortunate few who do.) Then, instead of a siren or megaphoned voice coming from the cop car’s grill – now just inches from my head and separated from my ear by only the flimsy boards of the old fence – a loud, driving, punk rock genre tune blared from it:

". . . and the hopped up, chopped up, communional biscuits

the pale sissy god

chokes down our abstemious lunch."

Etcetera, etcetera. (Followed by a four note, ascending bass line repeated three times:)

BUMP ♫ BUMP BUMP BUMP

BUMP BUMP BUMP ♫ BUMP

BUMP BUMP BUMP ♫ BUMP

This bizarre musical phrase repeated itself several times before I awoke, bolted upright, breathing heavily, sweat soaking my head and neck, on the sofa here in the cabin. The bold cadence of the strange dream-tune kept pounding in my brain, as if the strings of the bass had linked to my spinal cord somehow. I doubt I ever felt worse

But, Sweet Jesus! I am so glad to be here! Out of that daily dope fiend madness. Safe! Truly safe! Out of the neighborhood of Mr. Jones for the first time in a long, long time and therefore, by default, some distance from one of The Grim Reaper's favorite hang-outs where he enjoys a bonanza of collateral action from scores of gutter hype hazards. Not to mention being out from under the ever-escalating risk from the police and their lunatic War on Drugs.

But Hallelujah! and to hell with them all! I have escaped, once again, to My Special Sanctuary – perhaps for long enough, this time, with a spot of luck.

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It came to be known by my hardy har-har, laugh yourself to death, screwball buddies as The Wild Chicken Ranch or, in more casual parlance, simply, The Wild Chicken, as in, Let’s head on up to the ole’ Wild Chicken for a while, which, not surprisingly, was everyone’s favorite place in the whole wide world to head on up to. Naturally, it had other folksy monikers as well: The Forty, The Farm, The Ranch, The Place. My tobacco plug chewin’, ancient, lumberjack Grandad, whose face in profile was flat as a plank consequent to its being squashed a couple times by great big logs, called it the Stump Ranch. But for me, even now, many years later, it is and will no doubt remain, The Wild Chicken Ranch.

As a matter of fact, a few evenings back, feeling a vestigial return of my old self after well over a month on the sofa of misery, I found I was up to an evening stroll and, having grabbed the shotgun on my way out the door – a matter of course during Wild Chicken autumns – I made a pretty impressive wing shot and bagged a wily wild chicken right down by the creek. The place is crawling with them – the Common Ruffed Grouse – always has been and it was due to their convenient abundance, as well as their peerless qualities as exceptionally quick and crafty game-birds much prized by shot gunners everywhere, that they soon became the focus of my comrade’s and my own fierce, young, blood-sport passions. Thus it was that each September, with the opening of grouse season, The Ranch became the staging area for much ballyhooed bacchanals of wild chicken slaughter; and it was in memoriam of the gallant, little fowls’ supreme sacrifice, each year, that the place was dubbed: The Wild Chicken Ranch . . . by a certain knot-headed few, that is, amongst whom I guess I must include myself.

And one other thing about wild chickens: they are far tastier than your common, ordinary, domestic chicken and, after applying my time honored culinary magic to the one I slew down by the creek, I savored every last edible morsel of him for my dinner that night. Moreover, I savored every last detail of the entire experience: the bird’s first nervous clucking as he became aware of my proximity, the heart-stopping racket of his exploding into flight, the smell of gun smoke, the grouse’s exceptional, functional beauty, up close and in death, still warm in the palm of my hand. Even the business of cleaning him for the pot: the recoil gag-reflex from the organic/awful smell of guts, the surprisingly tasty looking contents of his crop: a fresh clover salad with snowberries, Oregon grapes, a rose hip or two for vitamin C, and a number of small rocks that serve the purpose of teeth and chewing in wild chicken digestion. I could have been twelve years old again, the year I first got the hang of shooting grouse on the wing; and I took great pride in the accomplishment – still do, it is a very difficult thing to master – particularly so with the bleary sight and shaky, sweaty hands one endures toward the close of a lengthy separation battle with heroin.

And yes, I certainly did cherish every detail of the experience that other evening – not a bit less than I did the very first time – they were identical in every way, nothing had changed. Nature is very special that way. Its one of the very last domains where one can find such enduring constancy in modern life; it’s dependable, like honesty, and I find there is tremendous comfort to be had in that.

And nowhere, of which I am