Actually my name is not Neil Allen. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a major league pitcher. Instead I work for an organization that distributes free condoms around Chicago. Business is booming.
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With the end of the drug war and the last faint moans of the sexual revolution being heard throughout the land, these two related trends reached a kind of climax in 1990, though both have remained largely unreported and uncommented upon: Condoms, once the sexual protection of last resort, became available everywhere. And marijuana, once America’s first choice in illegal drugs, became more difficult to find and more expensive than ever.
I quit pot about ten years ago and started doing coke and drinking. It was good for my social life, and it was the fuel for the business engine too. I had the money and pot made me paranoid, though ultimately not as paranoid as coke did. When I quit coke I leaned more heavily on drink as my drug of choice, and without the coke to keep me alert I started waking up sick, in bed with people I might have met at the bar in Star Wars. With the real possibility of AIDS, this was too dangerous, but what are you going to do if you’re drunk, you don’t have a condom, and there aren’t any at the bar? I stopped playing the field and now I stay home and watch a lot of TV. But watching TV without some extra stimulant is just too boring, so I’ve started smoking dope again, when I can find it.
