Revealing the Roots of Behaviors and Addictions

American Beauty

You can make it out alive, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make it out living — Day 9

You are disintegrating Into everything around Reintegrating The worm we dug from higher ground You have let go of ego Ego is no longer you Closer to nirvana Since the porter’s whistle blew

Kundalini Express, Love and Rockets — 1986

Dryuary Day 9

I’ve always been comfortable with people I don’t know. I’ve always been a great stranger. This is when I have a clean slate, when no one knows me.

It was summer 1990. I had met Chris over spring break on South Padre Island. He was tan, with salt bleached curly hair. He and his friends had driven down from Kent State in Ohio.

Kent State? I don’t know why I found this so romantic.

We met on the beach and managed to meet up at a packed cantina later that night. There were many decks, at least a thousand revelers, cranked music and low lights. I don’t know how we found each other.

I sometimes think God was like, “You wanna get fucked up? Here. Take this path for a spell. Come back and see me when you’re done.”

And I picture God leaving me, walking away and throwing his hands up.

We connected, me and Chris. I received a plane ticket to meet him in Northeast Ohio after spring semester closed. Kent State University was like nothing I’d seen before. The cobbled streets were packed with old book shops and music stores. The natural foods co-op had been there since the 70’s (as of today, it’s still open). The pubs were packed every night. The parties swooned with laughter and long hair and pale ale and girls in sandalwood and boys cuddled in piles of girls passing joints and grooving and every person I met was so happy to meet me.

We spent days walking around Kent and around campus. I saw the memorial for the 1970 shootings and felt like I had never before even read a newspaper. Everyone here was so conscious.

You have to understand, I was visiting Kent, Ohio after five years in the underground disco scene in Houston, an urban scape spiky and raw, full of post-punk house and industrial music, synth-pop, and ecstasy. I felt like I had just come out of the goth fun house and emerged onto Planet Wow, man.

People would joke about hook-ups right in front of you. Sex was not taboo. Nobody hid from anything. It was revolutionary to me, as if I could just tell everyone I’d had dozens of sexual partners and still feel I belonged, felt they wanted me around.

But I’ve always been comfortable with people I don’t know. I’ve always been a great stranger. This is when I have a clean slate, when no one knows me.

Bob was driving. Chris rode shotgun. The van had all of its benches removed to make room for the cases of beer and the nitrous tanks. There was a keg between the two front seats. I sat on the keg, for six hours, from Cleveland to Chicago. Bob and Chris took turns swapping Grateful Dead bootleg cassette tapes for the ride.

I knew three songs by the Dead.

I wasn’t really listening to the music on the way there. I’d been to my share of concerts, but no experience had applied the torque to turn my world on its head quite like seeing the Grateful Dead for the first time at the World Amphitheatre in Tinley Park, Illinois.

When I jumped out of that van, my veins dilated and my teeth grew. A thousand smells hit me at once — pot, incense, sandalwood — my follicles teemed with the excitement in the air. A sea of joy spread out before me, humanity waving back and forth like anemone in a coral reef — my eyes and ears feasted on vast parking lot of troubadours, whirling skirts, bells on feet, the beat of drums.

Cars pulled up and unloaded tarps, coolers, sound systems, guitars, drums, grills, tapestries and lawn chairs. A parking spot became a temporary flat. We’re moving in, if only for a few hours. I opened a beer to walk around the lot; Chris always carried a wineskin full of Absolut Vodka.

People spontaeneously broke into dancing in pods all around. Licensed vendors were selling everything from grilled cheese sandwiches to jewelry to art. Unlicensed vendors would walk around, whispering over and over again what they had for sale. If you were within earshot, you could buy whatever you wanted from the voices that trickled by like the Doppler Effect.

“shrooms, shrooms, shrooms, SHrooms, SHROOMS, shroOMS, shrooms….”

“doses, doSES, DOSES, DOses, doses, doses….”

No one was a stranger. Thirty thousand people in a parking lot were catching the same vibe. You could stop at any car, dance with anyone, talk to anyone, and you were welcomed with open arms. We ran into people whom Chris and his friends knew from other concerts, people they just knew from being on the road. I received bracelets and kitsch from happy revelers in tie dye and dreads; I stopped at one car to buy a woven bag. I loved that bag. I carried for four years it until it fell apart.

“Have a good show, man!”

“bud, bud, Kind buD, KIND bUD, BUD, BUD, BUd, kind bud, buddddd…..”

Bob was among a subgroup within this culture. They didn’t go to shows for freelove hippy shit. They went to make money, usually by selling balloons full of nitrous oxide. At five bucks a pop, Bob did very well on tour with the Dead.

We dropped acid every night. I floated around, dissolved in a giant pot of paint, suspended above ground through crowds of twirling people, seeing sounds, hearing smiles, feeling lights. I was hooked. I never wanted to leave. These were the innocent times. Everything was discovery, walking through the looking glass, grooving with people, transcending my past.

I had left East Texas a disco queen, and returned a Deadhead, after one week.

Fast forward to 1994. San Francisco, California. I was strung out on meth; Chris was shooting heroin. These paths never end well. The innocence was long over.

So, after weeks of planning to make sure I could leave for good, leave his bright charisma which had withered into a web, I left. I went home, to a mother who did her best to not be outwardly shocked by my spindly frame, who didn’t want to know what had been going on. She was only relieved to have me home.

I had come back to tell God I was done. I think everyone was relieved, even though the touch-and-go nature of my previous actions had never led to anyone being confident of my journey, much less my whereabouts. For that short time, she was happy I was home, upstairs in my bed, where the nightmares had begun so long ago.

And my circle? All of those people I fell in love with, too many to mention here. Well, many of us are fine, we moved on, settled down, healed from our transgressions. Many are dead, including Chris. Overdose, complications from addiction, suicide. Some did jail time. Countless, like me, ended up in months of therapy just to gain back some trace of who we were without it being a chalk line on a grimy sidewalk.

See, you can make it out alive, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make it out living.

My use of illicit drugs dropped to almost nothing. Almost. And the next chapter of my life would be the pages that saved me from myself, and saved me for the love that was yet to come.

I’m so glad to have been saved.

Josie Elbiry, 2021

Revealing the Roots of Behaviors and Addictions is a series of short memoirs documenting my emotional journey through a month without alcohol. In the beginning, I had a realization that the last time I had been sober for a whole year I was 11 going on 12. In one of the other memoirs…I mention being 13 I believe, but that number is false.

You can catch up on all of the memoirs here: