We had just gotten off of the Hogwarts Express, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit light-headed". My collaborator, one "Duke" Hunter, shouted "Damn Straight!" In a tense, short voice.
The Great Hall was enchanted to show the exterior sky, a useless and petty example of wizarding "superiority". I remember that it was letting in all the gastropods. Thousands of them. Snails and slugs, slimy and sickly, sliding inside. They were piling up in the food. Dumbledore gave some sort of speech, but I don't remember a thing. "The applause seems to stun these horrible creatures," I told Duke, fitting a new cigarette into my holder absent-mindedly.
Most wizards were ill informed about drug use. The pure-bloods were the worse off, a redheaded Gryffindor had once asked me to 'about that potions accident", referring to my cigarette smoke. The Half-bloods were little better, and even the muggle-borns were poorly educated on drug use. The sole exception to this rule was ministry officials.
I snapped back into reality when a blonde first year sat down across from us. He tried to shake hands, but I mistook the gesture for some form of violence and cowered beneath the table. Duke helped me back up. He said, in a slow, carefree tone "It's okay, we're your friends. We just want to be friendly. Right, Gabe?"
I snapped up to Duke's level immediately, "No more of that talk or I put the fucking leashes on, okay?"
The first year, no doubt scared shitless, asked "So, I hear that in Gryffindor we're supposed to be really brave…"
"Fucking straight we are!" Duke said, passing him the joint he had been smoking. I remember that I ate shrimp cocktail and grapefruit.
"No…thanks?" He said. Probably a pureblood. Poor kid had no idea what it even was.
"How about some ether?" I asked him.
"W—what?"
"Never mind." I mumbled back. I became more preoccupied with the gentle sag the whole hall was exhibiting.
The next thing I remember was Duke mauling a grapefruit with a combat knife. "Just cuttin' the limes, man!" He said, not at all jovially. The first year quickly ran to the opposite end of the Gryffindor table.
"Well, I'm gonna miss him." I said, genuinely shocked at the amount of fear we instilled in the boy, despite not having any intentions of causing harm.
Cut to Gryffindor fifth-year boy's dormitory. Frantic unpacking, a scene of chaos, urgency somehow applied to an everyday situation. We quickly gathered our stock of drugs, most of which were contained in my trusty black steel briefcase. We had two ounces of chronic weed, a bag each of peyote, shrooms, salvia, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, a whisky-bottle full of cocaine, a collection of various opiates, another of amphetamines, a quart of DXM syrup, a tank of nitrous, a quart of tequila, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, a large amount of ecstasy, and five dozen amyls.
We didn't sleep that night. Instead, we took a few adderalls and mescaline. Our trip was to be different. It was a gross physical salute to the possibilities offered to us by our outcome in the genetic lottery. Our wizarding abilities. We went for a swim in the lake, I remember.
The first school day was less than successful. By choosing to do drugs rather than sleep, we snorted coke on a regular basis to stay awake. We overcompensated, to understate the situation. O.W.L. year, the year that would have the most severe affect on the quality of our lives for the rest of our lives, and we were already fucking up. Actually, the introduction to Fifth-year charms went fine. The cocaine made us beautifully attentive and focused. Flitwick was more than a little impressed with the ease in which we understood his lesson.
It was Potions where we fucked up.
Cocaine is a fickle mistress, and we spent most of Potions talking loudly about subjects utterly irrelevant to the class, despite the obvious presence of one Professor Snape. He stole 50 house points and gave us detention. We laughed in his face.
"I would expect that you boys would give a little more gravity to my lesson, since this is O.W.L. year after all. Wouldn't want to work as janitors our whole life, would we?"
"No I don't think I'll be a janitor we prefer custodian hahahah, You know you really need to get laid you know what I mean, I'm telling you this because I love you man hahahaha" I replied, mumbling and laughing the whole time.
"Very well. I think it is quite obvious why the sorting hat did not place you in Slytherin. It is certainly no concern of mine if you wish to fail. I will ask you to leave and not further interrupt the studies of your peers."
We decided that we had had enough coke, so we went sober the rest of the day. A dreary, horrible state of being if there ever was one. How do you people live like this? We rapidly descended into sleep.
The first week of school passed by in a drug-induced haze. I remember Harry Potter kept waking us up at night. Self-righteous pigfucker kept having nightmares. I offered him some opiates, but he just looked at me stupid.
That Friday, I was introduced to a decadent, vile, depraved, scum-sucking bitch of a pigfucker woman. She was the new Defense-Against the Dark Arts teacher. This was the biggest failure of a lesson I have ever had the displeasure of being party to. Let it be known that if I ever meet her, or her boss, Cornelious Fudge-fucker, in a dark alley, I will curse their legs off at the knee without warning.
This woman was obviously a ministry official, a puppet of Fudge and his fascist idiocy. I could tell because she was one of the few witches who were aware of the concept of drug use.
The absolute first contact I had with this terrible creature was her sickeningly sweet introduction. She then said something like "wands away please, wouldn't want anyone to get hurt. And could you two in the back come here please?" She pointed to us. We slowly, very slowly, got out of our chairs, and came up to her.
"Now, now dearies, don't be shy, let's see your eyes?" We were left with little choice but to remove our aviator sunglasses, revealing eyes as red as tomato slices and as dark circled as an inverse raccoon. Her face narrowed, giving the impression of a Nazi toad. The difference being, to kill a toad requires only a spotlight and a .22 rifle. To kill this vile bitch would require sorcery they don't teach you at Hogwarts, that's for damn straight.
"Well, what are your names?"
I mumbled back " I am Gabriel Hock, and this is my colleague, Duncan Hunter."
"Well you two should know that the Ministry disapproves of drug use, especially amongst students, especially during class! I suppose that you two will have to learn this lesson the hard way. Detention every night for a week, starting tonight. And no smoking, it smells simply foul!" She said, adding a sickening pointed cough. I removed the cigarette from my holder and put it out in her pumpkin juice. She was livid, but she said nothing.
Of course, you must understand that I had no intention of going to detention, just as I "forgot" to go to that of Snape. The best way to not get punished is to simply ignore it. Sure, there would someday be a consequence, but I was far from expelled.
Harry Potter, jackass that he is, tried to start a shitstorm with his friends, united in hatred against Umbridge. Maybe I would have joined in, but we felt it was in our best interests to lie low for the class. It was for this reason that we discreetly ate some morphine, sinking into blissful stupor. I remember that she was a fucking shitty teacher, she just had us read a fucking stupid book for an hour. Made me wish I had ate some acid first.
After class, I lit up my much-needed cigarette. "Well, Duke, we're up shit creek now, these Nazis are on to us. That bastard Fudge has fingers everywhere. I know he's dirty as a pigfucker from Detroit. But Umbridge's got us fucked in a corner, I hope you realize that." I vented.
"Umbridge can punish us all she wants, but drugs aren't illegal to wizards. I looked it up. The closest they can get is nonmagical intentional intoxication laws, which only exist on local levels. Unless they do something corrupt and rotten, we can't get expelled, not even if we snort horse off McGonnagal's tits while Professor Vector masturbates."
"You should be some kind of attorney, you know that? If you can keep us unmolested you can keep anybody out of the service of the state."
"Yeah man, that's the plan once I get out of this place" He said using his wand to light his cigar.
"I feel a powerful lust for shrimp cocktail, let's go to the kitchens real quick." I mumbled, snapping one of the amyls beneath my nose. I let out an animal cry of pleasure, moving in an erratic fashion.
That night came and went, retreated into the haze of my mind. The next event of note was the first quidditch match of the year, on a lovely blue-sky Saturday. We were walking down to the quidditch pitch, fairly drunk, I was armed with a flyswatter (as well as a concealed .38 revolver inside my badass leather jacket), my partner said "here, try a little sunshine," passing me a hit of acid.
I ate it, and asked him "How long do I have?"
"It'll be a goddamn miracle if we make it to our seats before you turn into a wild animal." His face was stone, but I could tell he was laughing on the inside.
"You pigfucker!" I said, proceeding to hit him around the head and neck with the flyswatter.
When we got to the pitch, everything began to go wrong. I took a wrong turn in the stands, and was shooed out of the team room by a mass of muscle. There are no words to describe the terror I felt. Things briefly returned to normal when we sat down, until my seat started to slide into the pitch. At first I hollered and screamed, fearing to let go of the chair but also struggling violently against falling to death. I then pulled myself together.
The quidditch game did not go as well as it could have. I didn't give a flying fuck about the score, or the snitch, or who suffered what violent, disfiguring injury. I was more concerned with the gigantic Hungarian Horntails swooping around the pitch. Several times I recoiled in fear. However, what really did me in was the realization that these were drunk dragons. I hallucinated the dragons drinking whisky straight from the barrel. "Somebody has to stop this horrible display, before we all get burned to a crisp!" I blurted at Duke, who had brought the cocaine with him, and was busy dosing some out.
He said "you'll be fine, try and relax, it's not real, man. Have some nose candy." He passed me the bottle and spoon. I took a generous helping.
Unfortunately, I received all the wrong benefits of cocaine that day. The dragons became more ferocious, I hid behind my chair, to the annoyance of the rather pretty redhead behind me. Upon sight of her, I forgot about the terrible hallucinations and attempted to negotiate sexual entertainment. She was less than amused, and cast the bat-bogey hex on me. I was now in considerable pain. Duke decided it would be in our best interests to retire early. We left for the common room, snorted some horse, and went to sleep. I woke early the next morning, and began to write the first draft of this very book. It was the first step in what I now realize was the only career I would ever have.
