We made it there safe and made all the rounds of the spring break beach scene; the only notable thing that happened was that I met a girl and started dating her. This generally doesn’t happen at the beach during spring break—people just do some hard-core partying and then go home. But this girl lived in Lafayette, Louisiana, two hours across the state, and we began driving back and forth to see each other.
She shared my interest in getting high and helping others do the same. And once again, she compounded my problem, because she had Mexican drug connections. These people were serious about bringing in drugs from across the border, and our business grew. I was now involved in trafficking hundreds of pills through the network, and I could have done serious time as a federal offender. Somehow that never happened.
As much as I spent my evenings in dance clubs, I gravitated toward the center of attention—the role of DJ. This was my new aspiration; the closest thing to being a rock star in a nightclub is being the one who selects and mixes the music.
There was a real flair to it, a knack for making nightclub magic, keeping the house rocking to its highest potential. Raves—huge dance parties—were at the peak of their popularity during this time. Nonstop, pounding, synthesizer-dominated grooves, played through huge speakers, drew people into these clubs, and a slick DJ knew how to move seamlessly between CD and vinyl.
For me, it was a continuation of what I had done with “Closer’s Corner,” replacing comedy with music—and to a large extent, liquor with recreational drugs. In 2000 and 2001, I was all about being a techno DJ, just as I’d been all about Brazilian jiujitsu and multilevel networking. It was my new chosen career.
Every club regular knew me, and a lot of them bought from me. My new girlfriend had enlarged my network, and I was able to move uptown to a nice apartment. Most nights we walked into the club at nine or ten, and ended up on Bourbon Street before it was over. We used friends who would distribute whatever drugs we were moving at the time. The evening ended at five or six in the morning, unless we threw a Rave after-party that would last until noon. The party was always at my house, the center of activity for a lot of people caught up in this world.
I remember a lot of crazy things—and I guess it’s amazing I can even remember anything at all. One Sunday morning, we decided to be “roof rangers,” as we climbed on the roof of our home to read the morning paper. It’s a miracle someone didn’t plunge to the street below in our stupefied condition. Another time, we climbed into my friend’s attic, walked toward the neighbor’s attic from there (he lived in a double), dropped down into his home while he was out of town, borrowed his vacuum cleaner, then returned it without being caught.
I never got into trouble—not selling drugs, not getting sketchy prescriptions, not driving to Florida while high. We were bulletproof.
Until we weren’t.
One of our closest friends, a big part of our group, died with a heroin needle stuck in his arm. It sent shock waves through us. Maybe he just wasn’t careful enough. Maybe we should have picked up on his warning signals. Maybe, maybe—there had to be something different with him. He was dead, but it wasn’t going to happen to us.
Until it did happen to another one of us. Over a three-year period, I lost eight friends to drugs and alcohol. It was like living in a mystery novel, where characters were being found dead one by one. But the identity of the murderer was no mystery at all. Everyone knew the killer and knew the killer would strike again. But nobody could do anything, because the “killer” was the thing that held us all together and gave our lives meaning.
The killer owned us, and we despised it but continued to serve it as slaves.
We talked about getting out, changing things, moving on with our lives. Detox was a hopeful and completely terrifying word, but if we really thought about it, there were only two potential outcomes: detox or death. The problem was, we didn’t really think about it for very long—the drive to the next high was too strong.
Eight dead, six in jail. Those six weren’t bulletproof, either. Looking back, there’s something very odd about the fact that none of this ever happened to me. Things were happening all around me, after all—things I didn’t even know about.
For example, at the New Orleans State Palace Theater, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) began to investigate the raves as a real local crisis, a health epidemic. They knew that, during a two-year period, four hundred teenagers overdosed and ended up in local emergency rooms during fifty-two raves at the State Palace, many of which I attended. The DEA, along with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, began an undercover sting operation called Operation Rave Review in January of 2001. They began arresting dealers, went after the owners and operators of the club, and eventually all but eliminated the drug activity at that particular location.
Soon after their success there, the same investigators moved down to Panama City, to Club La Vela, the place where I met my girlfriend and sold drugs during spring break in 2000. Again, multiple arrests were made. The owners of the club were charged with operating a “crack house.”
I also discovered that when I was visiting Dr. Casey, who wrote almost unlimited narcotic prescriptions, there was another visitor sitting in that waiting room—a pharmacist named Dan Schneider. He had carried out a
