  1993: It was early in the first semester of Grade 9, how old are you then – 13 maybe? Anyways, I had just started high school right outside of Barrie. Compared to the public school which was small and in a community where everyone knew everyone else – going to this high school which housed over 3000 students from all the surrounding areas. I was meeting new people left, right and center… and loving every minute of it. One day this girl I had only just met,Genevieve, and I found ourselves outside smoking right after the last class before lunch. We had had mutual friends but hadn’t really talked.
She asked me if I wanted to go smoke some hash under the bridge. I had never done anything besides drink before and I’ve always been a very curious person who has trouble turning down new things that could be potentially exciting. I said sure. We walked down to the little bridge and decsended along the worn dirt path to climb up underneath it. I had never been there before but everyone always talked about going there, this was “the” place kids smoked drugs at during school hours. There were stones placed perfectly in little circles to seat yourself on.
Lighters, empty beer bottles, cigarette butts… the place was strewn with garbage. For somewhere which was spoken of so sacredly it was not taken care of very well. She pulled out a plastic pop bottle she had been carrying and began the ritual. I had never even witnessed the act of preparing bottle tokes “bt’s”. I was silent as she broke out eight little pieces of the smelly brown/black chunk. I was told that four “bots” was sufficient enough to get us nicely cooked.
So we did then, and I didn’t really feel anything other than a little light-headed. She got quiet, staring at that chunk of hash finally saying, “Fuck it. I stole this from my brother, he’s going to notice some is gone and bitch me out for it so I might as well not put any of it back. We should just smoke it all right now.” Once again, all I could say was “sure”. We spent the entire lunch break smoking hash under that bridge and ended up doing close to 20 bots each by the time we were done. Even now, after so much experimentation and tolerances that have been built up, I couldn’t smoke that much and hope to be coherent in even the smallest of ways.
So not knowing what the hell was going on, we left and went back to school to start our afternoon classes. I didn’t know what I was feeling, what I was thinking, what was going on… I knew absolutely nothing except that I had never felt that way before, I had never felt so out of my mind, out of my body, disoriented and confused. Sitting at my desk a boy I had the biggest crush on asked in a condescending tone if I had ‘smoke dope’ which he was violently against. I lied, not an oscar worthy performance, and told him no. Then I got up declared loudly that I was extremely ill and walked out. Everything else is a haze – running into people in the hallways, stumbling and trying to hold myself up, calling my parents to come pick me up because I was sick.
Which they did. Which I don’t remember. My mom thought it was the flu, I had apparently passed out in the back of the car and had to be escorted to bed. This was my first time ever experimenting with drugs of any kind. It was certainly not the last. This one is for Genevieve who was my initial benefactor.
2004: I had been at club with banging techno all night. Several friends and I went to this after party at some loft space and kept on going. We were in real troublmaking moods that night and the amount of shit that we ingested was disgusting. Around 7am I was sitting on a couch bent over one of the coffee tables in the main living area breaking out lines of coke. Someone sits on the floor in front of the table across from me and begins doing the same. I looked at her and some something familiar, but didn’t really think about it and just attributed any feelings of strangeness I was having to the severe abuse.
We started small talk and then her eyes got all big and she started having quite the shit fit asking if my name was &^*#@. This girl was Genevieve. Just over 10 years earlier she had gotten me high for the very first time, and now we, as strangers sitting across from another met while sharing lines of coke. I think some cosmic force was seriously fucking with me that night. And if it wasn’t strange enough that we met again there, it turned out for a year she had been living a five minute walk from me with a friend (who was my best friends roomates best friend) who’s house I had been to partying several times. (Strange things happen if we only take a moment to notice) 
