Come Winter 1983 we were at our collective wit's end with the heroin trade. We prayed for drastic change, and it arrived in the form of an eccentric and lovable character named Ivan Ivanovitch, a bona fide compatriot / co-conspirator in the punk D.I.Y. tradition. In a covertly Socialist way, he generously shared the wealth, from his well-orchestrated cocaine smuggling trips out of Bolivia. The drug underworld boasts legends about guys like Ivan; swallowing condoms filled with high-grade cocaine, and calmly? sweat-beadingly? boarding aircraft, enduring lengthy flights and the random lottery of customs interrogations, knowing any seepage or stomach acid gone AWOL will result in one's swift and unpleasant demise. Paranoia alone enuf to kill ya. Ivan was a Purple-Hearted veteran of these missions, in the formative years of the CIA's "War on Drugs" in Central and South America, and no one's mule - he did it for his sole betterment (a debatable point considering the long-term effects of cocaine use). Our communal explorations were unparalleled by anything we had done so far, for the sheer quality, and the seemingly, never-ending quantity, of the supply. This unlimited stock raised the stakes in our game, in the usual life-threatening ways.........
We met Ivan through 'Tin and ZaZa, who had recently befriended the noble knight. On our first visit to his cozy home, he gifted us a plateful of the purest, whitest, sparkling-est flake we'd ever set eyes upon. Warning of its extreme potency (as his personal stash it had never been cut or modified), he accentuated the need to monitor our amount intakes in a stringent manner. As discreet veterans of the needle, our preferred way to commune resembled that of a ceremonial magician's pentacle / portal opening, into which our inherent vampiric spirits willingly.....transgressed.
With repeated usage, our skins (and shining skulls!) emerged bearing a tangible opalescence. Indeed, an agreement between our Mortality and the Immortal Divinity of the Coca Goddess was to be negotiated; our retinas scanned and identities mirrored, before the weft and warp of Space Time and the Naked Singularity, mimicking the angelic, crystalline, heavenly powders coexisting in Nature....(the mimicry of snow).
Intermingling in the warmth of luxurious interiors, in the blue pitch of our cossack blood (Turkish: "kazakh" = "independent, a free spirit" or "kaz" = "wanderer", in reference to the Kazakh's nomadic, horseback culture), we proved more than willing to ride out the Revolution with Our Benevolent Leader. It was a mutually beneficial exchange, for Ivan's Beloved Mother was recently deceased, and as her devoted youngest son, he was in the throes of suffering a terrible agony of raging grief and remorse surrounding her death. Cocaine provided the perfect antidote, unleashing his Spirits into realms of waking-the-dead madness, initiating the occult speaking-in-tongues we'd witness during the shockingly-harsh roller-coaster crashes mitigating his internal tragedy and sense of personal loss. The Coca Deva facilitated an afterlife communion with His-Mother's-Hovering-Spirit, affecting us all in profound and shamanically humbling ways. We found ourselves in the center of the proverbial snow hut, huddled over the fire, sharing ancestral responsibilities on an intensely bonding, emotional journey. Overnight, the Death Family was born.
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