I walked straight to my car and slipped inside. I was shaking and ashamed. Then I lit up.
Thirty seconds later, I was numbed and flying and no longer ashamed at all—until the next time.
For months and months afterward—for most of the next year—there was always a next time.
It sounds absurd now, given that first day, but I came to California for a fresh start. I wanted a new place to be lost in and a certain level of anonymity. I wanted to get away from Washington and every bad reminder and influence there. I wanted to go someplace that wasn’t always gray. I wanted a do-over. I planned to find a rental, settle in, and stay.
Instead, I holed up inside the Chateau for the first six weeks and learned how to cook crack. At that point in my free fall, I was acutely aware of the hotel’s more depraved history. It was part of the attraction. My bungalow was near the one John Belushi died in from a drug overdose. Not long after Jim Morrison supposedly leaped from a fifth-floor window at the Chateau, he died in a Paris hotel bathtub. I thought about those kinds of things a lot. The amount of alcohol I consumed and crack I smoked was astounding—even death-defying. Morrison was a fucking piker compared to my shenanigans.
Cooking crack took practice, but it wasn’t rocket science: baking soda, water, cocaine. That’s it. I’d decided I wanted to cut out the middleman who could dilute the stuff with God knows what. Besides, my bungalow had everything I needed: stove, microwave, glass jars, and a tutor who made house calls—Honda, the skateboarder-turned-car-thief.
The most critical parts of the process are procuring a proper jar to cook it all in, one that’s not too thin (it’ll break) and not too thick (it won’t heat properly); and getting the proportions just right. I became absurdly good at it—guess that 172 on my LSAT counted for something—though I wasn’t beyond the occasional major fuckup. I’d heat the mixture over the stove in a baby food jar that would splinter and ruin everything. Or—this was later, in a hotel room without a stove or microwave—heat it with a torch lighter, hold the jar too long so it didn’t cool down too quickly, and burn the shit out of my fingertips.
It’s less potentially toxic to buy from somebody who knows how to cook. But cooking my own opened new avenues to me: there were ten times more people who sold powdered cocaine than sold crack. Buying it was a more genteel process, relatively speaking. Except for my desperate forays into Tent City, I figured I could eliminate one layer of drug-world repulsiveness.
I was off to the races.
With a room right by the pool, I didn’t leave the Chateau’s lush hillside grounds for a week or more at a time. I cooked and smoked, cooked and smoked. Occasionally, I slipped out late at night and drove for hours through the Hollywood Hills—back and forth on winding Mulholland Drive, up and down the switchbacking two-lane Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Even with LA’s vast galaxy of lights twinkling below, it was like being dropped into a whole other world. It was wild and primordial and, except for the howl of a far-off coyote or some fierce avian screech, fantastically silent. I’d watch the sunrise from Runyon Canyon.
Subconsciously, it was the beginning of me falling in love with the California I love now, the one with untamed hollows and feral creatures tucked all around. Even in my ludicrous state, I kept those images in the back of my mind, noting that this could someday be a refuge. This was a place full of beautiful things, if only I could keep my eyes open long enough to appreciate them.
Sometimes I stopped and composed hurried letters about it to Beau:
Dear Beau,
It’s different here than either of us thought it would be. It’s not all just Beverly Hills on the beach. It’s horse country and mountains. There’s a real feeling of ancient wilderness that still exists here. You’d be amazed by the green of the city and how beautiful the Hollywood Hills are. Did you know there are mountain lions and coyotes here? I mean RIGHT HERE? I wish we’d both learned to surf. I remember when we used to say that you, me, and Dad were going to ride motorcycles up and down the Pacific Coast Highway. I regret we never did.
Love,
Hunter
Then I’d head back to West Hollywood to cook and smoke, cook and smoke.
The extent of my human contact was hanging out with a bunch of Samoan gangsters. I was connected to them through Curtis and his girlfriend.
For the next four or five months, my orbit was populated by an opaque, sinister night world of interconnected lives that roamed L.A. between 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. It mainly consisted of Curtis and his extended crew of thieves, junkies, petty dealers, over-the-hill strippers, con artists, and assorted hangers-on, who then invited their friends and associates and most recent hookups. They latched on to me and didn’t let go, all with my approval.
I never slept. There was no clock. Day bled into night
