Chasing Dragons
- Jan 5, 2018
- 5 min read
by Fabielle Georges
Author’s note: This piece is the introduction to my memoir, Depression: A How-To Guide on What Not to Do, where I discuss depression, addiction, and mothering under the guise of a self-help book.
In 1877 thirty-year-old inventor Thomas Edison recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a cylinder phonograph in one of the first reproductions of recorded sound. His invention called for tin foil to be wrapped around a rotating cylinder. Tin — thick and stiff, pressed between the weight of two heavy rollers, heated; used to fill the gaping holes eating their way through teeth and bone — was now being used to register sound.
But for all its wonders, tin still had its flaws. It scratched easily. Made sound feel like wool on dry skin, like an itch you couldn’t scratch in the back of your throat. In food, it lingered. Left a taste in your mouth like the weight of someone’s nicotine-laced tongue heavy on yours, like metal. So in time wax and aluminum replaced tin.
Wax offered sound smooth and easy like Saturday mornings, like sweat dripping down the sides of mason jars. And aluminum allowed the food to remain faithful to its respective taste.
Aluminum foil was produced as early as 1903 in France. Ten years later aluminum gained commercial success when it was wrapped and tied into tiny bangles around racing pigeon legs for identification.
Around the same time companies like Tobler in 1911 and Life Savers in 1913 used aluminum to wrap their treats. Businesses all over were beginning to see the value in the availability, frugality, and overabundance that aluminum — worth more than gold in 1845 — had to offer.
By the 1940s aluminum had been introduced as a household item. Companies like Jiffy Pop with their 1959 flexible and expandable foiled popcorn bag changed the access to food. For women who were once expected to happily sweat with necks wrapped in pearls and feet squeezed into kitten heels over gas stoves; and aprons silhouetting waists cinched and gathered under the tightness of wired girdles; and have their hair perfectly French-rolled; and their lips never faded (only bright shades of red would do); and to have meals like meatloaf, steak and potatoes, or smoked ham ready by a socially imposed daily deadline of 6 pm, pre-made food offered something like relief.
For the man who had no wife, burying himself under forced smiles of bachelordom; for the woman who had no husband to nag or children to fuss over; for the family more concerned with the advancement of technology than their fidelity to tradition, TV dinners wrapped and packed into aluminum foil offered comfort and a sense of home. With its meager beginnings failing as tin in phonographs and food containers, foil had grown into an extremely lucrative market providing creative and practical options for customers all over. According to Reader’s Digest online, This Old House online, and Instructables.com, today foil is used for an array of activities including but not limited to
• Polishing silver • Scrubbing pots • Improving radiator efficiency • Sharpening scissors • Fixing loose batteries • Coloring hair • Protecting tree trunks • Improving outdoor lighting • Keeping your sleeping bag dry • Luring fish • Palette for painting • Keeping paint brushes wet • Getting rid of rust • Serving as an impromptu funnel • Softening brown sugar • Scaring birds away from gardens • Sliding furniture on carpeted floors • Boosting WiFi signals • Hats for the paranoid fearing the invasion of their private thoughts • Keeping heat off home windows during summer months in the South • Seed incubator • Chasing freebased cocaine dragons
In 2015, a more than twenty-nine less than thirty-year-old girl-child-woman stood barefoot in the kitchen of the apartment she’d just rented in a city whose name—Riviera Beach—deceived its appearance with its browned grass and decrepit old buildings. She stood there on marble laminate tiles that puffed up around the bottom corners where the stainless steel fridge and dark chocolate-colored cabinets touched it. She stood there molding and folding pieces of foil into piped bowls and shallow spooned shapes. Everything was ordered accordingly. Baking soda in a four-ounce glass bowl, powdered cocaine forming a tiny hill on an antique burgundy vanity box with a mirror on the top, razor on the glass, a reused spray bottle of nasal decongestant now filled with tap water, lighters, and three scoops made and shaped from a single plastic straw.
She was a scientist in her own right; mixing, hypothesizing, trying and failing. Sometimes, only sometimes, she would cook up something strong enough to dizzy the stability she’d once found in her head, neck, and shoulders; strong enough to make her feel fingers tickle their way up the side of her face.
She had a method, and order:
1. Cut rectangular strips of foil. 2. Mold and fold the foil. Bowl it by grabbing the edges and pinching them down. Then scrunch the end to make a handle. 3. Take the do-it-yourself scooper designated for collecting the coke and pour one scoop (maybe 1.5) into the bowl. 4. Take the do-it-yourself scooper designated for collecting baking soda and pour tiny amounts of into the mix. 5. Add one drop of water then mix with the scooper designated for mixing the coke, baking soda, and water. 6. Put fire under the bowl. Inhale the vapor with the straw you made by wrapping foil around a pencil. 7. Pause. Let the mix thicken up. 8. Put fire under the bowl again. Inhale till the mixture went from clear to a sunset-colored oil then to black ash. 9. Repeat.
And she’d learned a few things through the process of trial and error.
1. Rectangular strips only. Preferably two inches by four inches. Square pieces make it too easy for her to burn the tips of her fingers. 2. Always use less baking soda than coke. 3. Rub water on the bottom of the bowl so that the mixture burns slow. 4. Wrinkled foil works better because then the mixture won’t run. 5. Foil straws are ideal; because plastic ones melt too easily. 6. The best “hit” happens when the freebase turns into a sunset-colored oil. 7. Holding your breath after a hit leaves your head spinning so wonderfully you’ll smile and giggle about the high. 8. Doing it on a week night makes work the next day unbearable, but you will always only remember this after you’ve done five twenty-dollar baggies in one night, in one sitting. 9. You will always plan to quit the day after the binge, but the day after the day after the binge, you will want more. 10. You will question whether you are an addict or not. But it will sometimes be a word too heavy for you to accept.
It will definitely help with the depression because it keeps you numb, numb, numb
Fabielle Georges is a Haitian-American author. She is a recent graduate from The University of Tampa’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is the recipient of the 2008 fellowship at the University of Delaware as a Black American Studies Summer Scholar. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines like Rust & Moth and Mujeres de Maiz. Her essay “The Darkness” was recently featured in the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines, edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mai’a Williams, and China Martens. Currently she is working on her debut memoir, Depression: A How-to Guide on What Not to Do. She lives in Miami with her son where she works as a middle-school teacher.
