The Rules are simple:

1. Don’t use coke.

2. If you use coke once, you’re a cokehead.

3. Never trust a cokehead.

She was not the prettiest woman I’ve been with, a middling 6 at best.  The way she dressed made matters worse – all jeans and sweaters – so I was pleasantly surprised when she peeled them off.  Her breasts were larger, her body curvier, than I expected.

What she lacked in curb appeal, she made up for under the hood.  Her sexual appetite was voracious.  Rodeo clowns aren’t this motivated . . .

I was working at a bar the night I met her.  I was loaded.  I had a rule against drinking on the job, but I wasn’t bouncing that night so I made an exception.

No one needs to be crisp to serve a drink.

She and her friend chatted me up.  I let them do all the work.  I gave her my number and forgot about her.  Later that night, I fucked the shot girl in the front seat of her car in full view of the security camera.

A week or so later I got a phone call, mid-shift.

“Are you working tonight?”

“Yeah,” I said, shouting over the bar noise.

I didn’t recognize her voice.  She sounded sexy over the phone.  I didn’t hang up.

“What are you doing after your shift?”

“Uhh . . . sleeping?  I’ve been up for  a couple days.”  I replied.

“What time do you get off?  You should come over . . . “

It was Saturday night.  I worked Friday night, stayed up all day, and I wouldn’t leave the bar until 5 am.  I was dead on my feet, having hallucinations about dozing off at the wheel.

“What’s the address?”

She lived an hour away.  I cursed and opened a Red Bull.

I finished my shift and closed out the bar, mopping up spilled beer and hopes and dreams.  The shot girl pawed at me a bit, but I pleaded fatigue and headed out to my car.

The drive was a highway blur.

“I’ll let you sleep,” she lied as she ushered me through the door by the arm.  She helped me out of my coat and pushed me toward the bedroom.  I collapsed face down, nearly out when I hit the pillow.

She crawled on top of me and ran her hands up my back.  She slowly rubbed and thumbed her way down.  My head swam.  Right then, at the brink of consciousness, she grabbed me by the belt and unfastened the buckle.

After 45 sweating minutes she made the mistake of getting on top.  I woke up, mid-coitus, with her still riding me.  She just smiled and kissed me and laughed.

She finished me off in her mouth.

The next time I opened my eyes it was mid afternoon.  She was dressed, leaning over me.

“Feel better?” she asked.

She was holding a plate of scrambled eggs and toast.  I sat up, still foggy, while she served me breakfast in bed.

She was in her early thirties, older than me, and divorced with no kids.  In hind-sight, there were red flags everywhere.  Indicator lights flashing across the dashboard.

I was younger and foolish and she had just fucked me unconscious.  I took the bait.

It went on like this for a few weeks.  She would call and I would burn up the highway.  One night she asked if I had ever had a threesome.  I hadn’t.  She called a friend and made arrangements.

The friend was below my taste, but if two fives make a ten then I was batting at least an eleven.  That has to be worth something, I thought.  Unfortunately, things did not go according to plan.

I arrived to find that the friend had too much to drink.  The wine was making her overly sentimental, and she whined for an hour about not wanting me to think she was a slut.

I exercised every fiber of tact I had, trying to woo her back, but it was no use.  We left her sitting on the papa-san, and retreated to the bedroom to fuck while she and the neighbors listened.

The whole affair was sordid.

We covered all of the important bases early on.  Neither of us were into exclusivity.  If the unthinkable ever happened, she informed me she would abort it without even telling me.

Check Oil Pressure.

Check Water Temp.

Eject.

She was a degree of jaded I had never encountered.  She hid it well most of the time, but things rapidly disintegrated into booze-fueled fuck-romps.  If I showed up at her door with a bottle of whiskey, we left a trail of clothes to the bedroom and drank while we fucked.  The sex was violent.

Then we went downtown.

She would mingle with the other regulars while I talked shit with the bartenders and completely ignored her.  A few drinks later she would sit at the other end of the bar, trying to pick up other girls.  Then we went back to her place and fucked again, or I would pass out drunk and she would ride me anyway.

. . .

Then she met Willy Pete.

It was New Years Eve and I had spent a week holed up at a friend’s apartment.  He lived in a dingy rat-hole by some country highway crossroads.  His living room was full of old couches and TVs, and for six days we had an uninterrupted bender.

We stayed up every night until dawn.  People came and went, bringing liquor and food.  Every day we woke up, drag-assed to the liquor store for a magnum of Fleischmann’s vodka and started over.  In the afternoon we watched every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie while I did chin-ups on the door frame.

At night we drank.

She called me early New Years Eve to ask if I had plans.  She was going to a party, but she was in heat.  I was an hour and a half from her apartment, and half drunk.  I was in no shape to go running for a booty call.  She asked for the address.

Less than two hours later we were parked on a roadside, fucking in the back of her car.

We headed back to the apartment.  She stayed for a drink, listening to Willy Pete explain the finer points of meth-head chemistry.  The subject of cocaine came up.

She had mentioned it before.  She teased me about the night I met her, how drunk I was, and admitted that she had been a little coked up that night.  This explained why she had driven an hour just to go to a bar.  She talked about her coke head past.

She left for the other party in her coke head present.

After New Year’s Willy Pete drank with us.  I quit the bar, and moved to a different place up the street.  I lost my Friday shift, but picked up some week-day time.  I would head to her place early Friday.  We fucked and showered before Willy Pete got out of work.  When he arrived we headed out to the local tavern.

The place was busier than usual.  An old friend of the owner’s was back in town, and the two of them were drinking heavily behind the bar.  Things got out of hand.  One of them offered me a bottle of Jack Daniels across the counter . . .

. . . and I woke up near dawn in her bed with a strange girl.

I had a searing headache and no memory of the night before.  She had dark hair and warm, pillowy D-cups.  She was girl-next-door cute.  She was snuggled up against me, wearing only a t-shirt and panties.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but, uh . . . who are you?”

She said her name was Liz.  She told me we did not have sex, although she wasn’t opposed to the idea.  She fondled me a bit, but I was struggling not to be sick.

Later that day, Willy Pete gave me the dirt.  After I blacked out at the bar, we ended up back at the apartment.  The two girls put on a floor show and afterward Liz came in to curl up next to me.

He didn’t mention the coke.

Things began to unravel.  I met more of her friends.  I was completely cold to her, except when we were fucking.  We went to a party at some rich, middle-aged businessman’s house.  I was the youngest person there.  He was an old friend of hers, a former employer.  He played an alpha-male buddy routine with me while she flirted openly with him.

Unsure of which one was trying harder to shame me, I ignored them both and drank his expensive liquor.  She palmed him a gram and he excused himself.

. . .

We took a detour one night on the way to the bar.  She turned down a dirt road and pulled up in front of some shitty modular home.  The nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away, and she insisted I stay in the car.

I sat there, furious, replaying things in my head.  I resigned myself to suck it up, make it through the night, and leave early in the morning.

It was a miserable night.  Cold.  The bar was dead.  She was on her phone every ten minutes.  I came out of the bathroom and she was gone.  I got her voice mail several times and left no message.

When she finally called me back, she told me to meet her back at her apartment.  Willy Pete had arrived at the bar, my only consolation, and gave me a lift.

She was lying on her bed fully clothed when I arrived.  I didn’t ask any questions.  I took off my boots, took a few pulls off the Wild Turkey by the bed and went to sleep.

The next morning I woke with her clinging to me like a barnacle.  She was squeezing me with her hand to arouse me.  I moved to get up and she began to plead with me – first verbally, then orally.  I relented.

We didn’t say a word as we laid on the damp, cold sheets.  She was facing the wall, with her back to me.

I was disgusted with myself.

She asked if I would come up next weekend – she wanted to make some kind of special plans.  I informed her that I had a female friend flying in from out of town, and that I wouldn’t be around.  I got up to shower and heard her sniffle.

She told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.

I didn’t talk to her at all that next week.  I picked Aimee up at the airport and promptly forgot about the last few months.  I was pampered and doted on for six days.  It was wonderful.  I felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest.

I dropped Aimee off and kissed her goodbye.  I hadn’t been out of her an hour when my phone rang.

“Where are you?”

Motherfucker.

I didn’t want to entertain her conversation, but she begged me to come see her.  I was almost to my exit when I imagined stuffing myself in her mouth, still warm with someone else.  I changed lanes and kept driving.

She opened a bottle of vodka when I got there and started drinking heavily.  After her pleading over the phone I had expected some modicum of kissing up.  Instead she shuffled around her apartment, brooding.

Her nose was tell-tale red.

She began to ask me questions about the week prior.  I refused to answer, reminding her that we were never really “together”.  I owed her nothing and I told her so.  The angrier she got, the calmer I felt.

Complete and instantaneous dissociation.

I realized my “revenge” plan was now irrelevant.  Smirking, I turned for the door.  She stood in front of me, screaming.  I told her, very casually, to get the fuck out of my way.  I moved to step around her and she shoved me.  My smile vanished.

“How can you say you don’t have any feelings for me?”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“How can you say you don’t love me!?“

“Because I don’t.”

“You FUCKER!”

It all happened in slow motion.  I saw the punch coming from a mile away.  She cocked her hand back behind her waist and swung for the fences.  She caught me right on the jaw.  My head snapped to one side and back.

I stood there wordless.  I was too surprised to be angry – too stunned to hit her back.

I moved to leave again and she threw herself in front of me.  She screamed at the top of her lungs that she would call the police and tell them that I hit her.  My surface tension broke.  I hurled my phone at an adjacent wall and called her a stupid fucking whore.

She collapsed on the ground in a heap, sobbing.

“You’ll fuck her again,” Willy Pete told me, one afternoon.

I never spoke to her again.

Bouncing is a lousy way to earn a buck.  No one likes being the sober guy at the party.  It’s almost enough to make a person quit drinking . . .

Being sober around drunks is like a free lesson in human nature.

I was asked to work an event for a friend recently.  It was mostly tedious, counting heads and keeping the building from going over capacity.

Two black guys came to the door with a blonde in tow.  They were sober, but she wasn’t.  Her nose was red, her eyes glassy and vacant.  She was coked out of her mind . . .

I was about to wave them through when I noticed that she was pregnant . . .

“Dude, they should totally legalize that!  They can just tax the shit out of it!”

This is quite possibly one of the least intelligent thoughts to ever exit a head.  If you have this thought, I caution you to keep it to yourself.  In fact, un-think it.  The only way this idea should ever leave your head is in a fine pink mist behind an exiting bullet.

Let me explain . . .

I understand the sentiment behind this particular idea.  The operating notion here is a Compromise:

The government can benefit by taxing and regulating a new industry of legalized vice, and perhaps some of the money can be used to benefit the Social Good.  If we just legalize certain drugs and prostitution, perhaps we can fix Social Security and provide Universal Health Care.

This is a fine idea, in theory.  Allow me to break it down a bit to identify all the parts that suck.

This idea presumes that the Government has the right to tell a person what they can do with or to their own body.  It’s called Paternalism, and it assumes a) that drugs and prostitution are inherently bad and therefore b) people should not be allowed to do them.

“Please, mom and dad?  Can I please have sex and drugs?”

Do you really want a Government run by felons, cheats and liars telling you whether or not you’re allowed to do something with your own body that won’t affect any non-consenting parties?

Holding to the idea of a Vice Tax presupposes that the Government/Society is correct in its assumption that drugs and prostitution are inherently wrong.  If they were not inherently wrong, then they wouldn’t be illegal and you wouldn’t be trying to compromise to have them made legal.

If drugs and prostitution are inherently wrong then conditional legalization would not make them “un-wrong”.  In this case, the idea of the Vice Tax works like a bribe – it assumes that the government has something to gain by this new source of revenue.  Either the government can use this money for more pork barrel spending or they can use the funding for social welfare programs.

Unfortunately, these social welfare programs would then be funded by something we presume to be vicious by its very nature.  Our Fair Republic would have health care, sure . . . but it would be funded by the uncontrollable habits of junkies and sex fiends.  From a ethical stand-point, this is a nightmare.

Little Timmy will get his immunizations, but he’ll be sitting in line at the clinic with ten people waiting for methadone, HIV and death.

I don’t honestly believe that legalizing drugs and prostitution will cause drug and sex addiction to spiral out of control.  I simply want to make the point that if something is illegal because it is “wrong”, then bribing the government to legalize it anyway isn’t going to change the moral worth of that thing.

Consider how a bunch of lesbians, granolas and stoners are fighting to get Coca-Cola banned on college campuses around the country because union organizers at South American bottling plants are being murdered.

Do you think these self-righteous Moral Crusaders are going to feel any differently about your newly legal addiction to speed-balls?  What about the National Organization for Women – how do you suppose they’re going to feel about a Nationalized industry of legal prostitution?

They’ll call it female sex slavery – and the money it generates for “Health Care” will be called blood money for America’s sloth and junk-food addiction.

How is that little Vice-Tax-Funded Utopian Vision working out so far?

Now let’s consider the money aspect of it a little closer.  Are you a smoker?  Have you seen the cost of cigarettes rising over the last ten years?

There has been a tremendous fight over the addictive nature of nicotine and tobacco products.  Millions of dollars have been paid out to lawyers, and in court settlements.  Despite all this, the Government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to levy harsh taxes on cigarettes “to force Americans to quit”.

What a fucking lie.

The Government is taxing the Hell out of smokers because they know that smokers are addicted, and will continue to buy cigarettes.  Taxes have grown so high that smokers in the Northeast will make pilgrimages to Indian Reservations to avoid the tax when they stock up on smokes.

New York State has lost so much revenue that it is seeking to violate treaties with the Iroquois Nation by charging them sales tax.  These are treaties that date back to the formation of this country – treaties which made Native Americans tax exempt on account of we conquered them and stole their land.

If the Government legalizes drugs and prostitution, by the time they get done slapping taxes on your habit it will be more prohibitively expensive than ever before.  You’ll be buying a gram for $750.99.  A blowjob (with a Government approved condom) will run about $500.00, plus fees.  By the time it’s all said and done, maybe once a year you’ll be able to afford that coke-fueled threesome you had your heart set on.

A whole new black market will spring up so that people can dodge the taxes and have their drugs.  The Government won’t make any money, Little Timmy won’t get his Health Care and the whole thing will crash before it even gets off the ground.

The Government can’t tell you what Church to go to.  It can’t tell you what car to drive (though it’s trying).  We’re supposed to have free speech.  We’re supposed to have the Rights to Life, Liberty and Property.

Yet here we are, two hundred years later, and we’ve gone from “No Taxation without Representation” to “Tax the shit out of it, just let us have it back!”

People wonder why the Government is robbing them blind.  They’re doing it because you told them to . . .