As the party wound down and most people left, I prepared to exit the premises. Nearly every light was off, and I hadn’t really considered where the remaining residents had disappeared to. The house was reasonably sized, but I hadn’t gotten a tour, so I didn’t know who was there or where they were. It was definitely quiet as dawn approached. I was pretty confident that Brad had ended up with Sarah. His friend, Dave, was the last guy I saw in the place, and Kristin had disappeared somewhere down the upstairs hall on the split floor. Earlier that night, Kristin had been surfing the web in the back office of the house, so I made my way quietly down the dark hallway. “Hello?” I asked softly. “In here,” I heard a female voice reply, more softly than mine. I stepped back a few feet and looked into the last bedroom I had passed on my right. I could barely make out the silhouette of a girl lying on the bed atop the covers as I entered the room. It was Kristin. As my eyes adjusted, I could see she was still wearing the black T-shirt that had been given to her, and her jeans had been put back on. Brad was right—this girl was definitely on a mission. The proverbial “point of no return” had begun.

We four gathered around the small table they had in the kitchen, each one of us claiming a side of the table where Tommy carefully divided up the drugs based on who paid what. We had also chipped in to buy some crack rock to smoke before we did the “h.” Tommy prepped a standard glass bowl pot pipe by shoving a portion of a kitchen scrub brush into the end that typically you’d place bud into. He used a lighter to slightly melt the material into place so it wouldn’t come free without a little effort. Upon the bed of scrub brush, we placed a few small pieces of crack, and then each took turns lighting and smoking another one of the most addictive narcotics on the street. The high you got from smoking crack was instantaneous and usually much more intense than the cut cocaine we were buying at the time. Once the four of us were substantially flying higher than motherfuckers, Tommy laid out the heroin into lines for each of us to do. He was like a “House Mother,” carefully monitoring the consumption and reaction to the drugs with each of us. It felt like a very safe situation to be in, as strange as that sounds to the non-drug user.

With the momentum building of the Chicago, we established a solid rotation between three bars that welcomed live cover music: “Hi-Tops”, “Duffy’s”, “McGee’s”. We would pack those places in nearly every time, with some of those times leaving some fans outside unable to get in due to capacity limitations. Along with the solid show the five of us had locked into came the drinking and, for me, drugs. I got into a habit of doing blow before many of the shows, and afterward, it was also ever-present to keep the party going. I’m not going to lie and say that using cocaine didn’t lead to a lot of exciting scenarios because it did. The prettier girls who wouldn’t think twice about saying no to hanging out with me usually would suddenly want to spend a few hours after a show together. And even on nights I didn’t play, I got dates with some of those young college girls who’d been at one of those three bars we were starting to gig at regularly. This was becoming every weekend thing, too. Then, during the week, I’d return to my regular job and wait until Friday, when the cycle would repeat itself.