Justin Miller

Anything my 9 month old son Jack can get his hands on instantly goes into his mouth.  So in my ongoing effort to keep his diet limited to people food, I was just picking through my living room carpet a few minutes ago looking for the bits of bird food that my cockatiel 'Dusty' spreads all over the carpet whenever she eats.  If you run your hand around the carpet near her cage it is like popcorn with the little dry pieces of food popping up everywhere.  So I was just running my hand over the area around her bird cage carefully picking up bits of food and it suddenly reminded me of a scene with one of my old best friends Justin Miller.  I have not seen him in 7 years and I assume he is dead.  Maybe (hopefully) in jail, but probably dead.

With my colorful past I may not be the one to talk out against a certain drug...or maybe I am.  It all started with pot…I used to love weed.  My last two years in high school and my first year of college I was almost never not stoned.  That changed during my second year of college though.  Up until then school had been easy, stoned or straight, and despite my love of marijuana I was still getting mostly straight A's.  Then I ran into Calculus IV.  It was hard.  Not like Calc II hard or Calc III hard...but insane hard.  I realized that in order to pass this I was going to have to study and study well and study straight. 

I did that but the thing was that after I quit smoking weed for awhile I forgot how to be stoned.  Every time I tried it I was paranoid-high and had no fun whatsoever.  Plus the weed just kept getting stronger and stronger.  In high school we smoked brown seedy Columbian weed and we loved it because that's all we knew.  But in college it was a whole different game.  With the mid-80's came better and better weed...brown went to green and seeds became a thing of the past.  Every once in awhile I would try taking a hit and I would be so high it was ridiculous.  So I have not been a regular weed smoker for over 25 years and probably have not had even a hit in 10 years.  I have absolutely nothing against it and firmly believe it should be legalized, but I just do not choose to smoke it anymore. 

Anyways, I have dabbled in a few things and regret none of them except for Crystal Meth.  I tried it once 23 years ago in Phoenix and it was not good.  I was visiting my friend Chris Galanos in Phoenix, who had moved there a couple years earlier from Minneapolis.  We went to a party one night and it was the weirdest thing…normally when you go to a party most people have a drink in one hand, and maybe a cigarette in the other hand.  But at the Phoenix party most people had a piece of tinfoil in one hand and a straw in the other hand.  Every once in awhile they would drop a few small white crystals on the tinfoil, run a lighter underneath until the rocks turned to liquid and produced smoke, and then they would suck up the smoke with a straw.  Everyone was doing it in mid-conversation as casually as you would take a sip of a beer.  I felt like I was in bizarro-world…the people seemed like the same sort of cool people I normally hung out, but yet it was so very different from the hippie parties I normally went to in Minneapolis.

I asked Chris what the f*ck was going on and he told me what it was.  I had never even heard of Crystal Meth.  But of course being young and stupid and invincible I gave it a try.  I was up for a couple of days and felt sort of great, but it was a 'false' great.  It did not feel real.  I was aware that my grinding happiness was manufactured and just wasn’t real somehow.  The pure joy of watching Jerry Garcia singing 'Comes A Time' or 'China Doll' in concert while high on pot or something would melt me into a puddle of delirious happiness that I felt and spread to anyone I could for hours, days, years and now decades after the fact.  But with Meth, instead of the deep, lasting, life-changing happiness I felt with pot or acid, it was more like eating shards of broken glass with your body’s engine continuously red-lining.  It was horrible. 

My friend Justin owned a garage/auto shop that he built on his home property in Princeton, MN about an hour drive north of me in Minneapolis.  He was a genius.  I nicknamed him 'MacIver' because he could fix anything.  You put him in a row boat in the middle of a lake with nothing but a pen-knife, a straw, a piece of rope and a 9-volt battery, and before you know it he would have somehow built a jet engine that would be whisking him ashore in no-time.  I exaggerate, but barely.  The guy was not only a genius, but he was an ex-special forces Navy guy who was 250 lbs of solid muscle and skill.  He had a wife, 2 young daughters, a thriving business, a pole-barn full of cool cars, several horses on many acres of land, and he was one of the most loyal, cool, fun guys I ever had the pleasure of knowing.

His only vice was that he somehow got into Crystal Meth.  In the last year that I knew him, he had dropped over 100 lbs and was like a walking skeleton.  What was left of his hair had turned white, but most of it had fallen out.  He had sores all over his face and head.  His teeth were brownish-grey.  He was dirty and smelled like chemicals.  Every time I left his house that last year I was practically in tears as I watched him deteriorate before my eyes.  I would try and talk to him about his drug use, but have you ever tried talking to someone when they are high?  It doesn't work.  I kept thinking that I would try and catch him sober and talk some sense in to him, but he was never sober.  It was useless.  I watched as all of his possessions were slowly sold off to pay for his drug use.  I watched as his wife eventually packed up the 2 kids one morning and escaped for good to her mother’s place in South Dakota.  I watched as his auto shop disappeared.  I watched as he disintegrated into a babbling, broken, confused shell of a once great man, all for Meth.

On the last day that I ever saw him I went up to his house hoping to have him fix something on my car.  I knew he could use the money, and I think he still derived some joy from fixing things. Even from the depths of his seemingly inescapable whirlpool of drug use he showed glimpses of happiness whenever he would fix something.  But the only fix that was going to happen that day was him getting high if possible.  I got to his place and for over an hour I tried to coax him out of the back of his carpeted dirty old van parked between his house and his shop.  But he spent the entire time I was there on his hands and knees with a ruler and a piece of paper picking at his van carpet...much like I was just picking bird food out of my living room carpet a little while ago.  Except that he was slowly and meticulously going over every square inch of the carpet, scraping it with the ruler and catching pieces of dirt onto the piece of paper, hoping to find a meth rock while babbling nonsense to me. 

It was sad and sickening and I have never felt so helpless.  I tried in vain one last time to get him to step out of himself and look at what he had become, what he had lost and what a short and miserable future he had left if he didn't stop.  It was no use.  I left one more time in tears and never saw him again.  I tried calling about a week later but the phone had been disconnected.  I drove up there about a month later but the house was empty, the shop closed, the horses gone...no Justin.  All of his normal friends had vacated months/years ago and I did not know any of the people he had been hanging with recently so I had nobody to call.  None of his old friends knew what happened to him.  Every once in awhile today I try and Google him, but with his common name it never brings up anything of use.  He has simply vanished.

None of the people I hang out with do Crystal Meth so I am preaching to the choir there, but for anyone else…I do not like to be preachy and I usually support just about anything in moderation, but I will say with no reservation to please never try Meth.  It will take everything away from you...and I mean everything, one little rock at a time.