In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir by Bobi Conn

Author:Bobi Conn [Conn, Bobi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542004169
Published: 2020-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

To the City

During my freshman year and the summer that followed, I worked at Denny’s with a girl who had gone to Berea College for a time—Tanya was a cook and not at all the waitressing type. Since she didn’t have a car, I gave her rides to and from work, and soon we were friends of sorts.

Tanya was hesitant to do meth as often as I did, but we smoked a little weed together and drank a little and stayed up all night. That summer, we decided to go to a music festival in Atlanta. We planned to leave after work one evening, drive through the night, and find a hotel down there. Taking my cue from my father, I brought a few Lortabs with us to help us stay up all night. We stopped at a Waffle House sometime around eleven that evening, already exhausted from working and being up for a regular day.

We took turns going into the bathroom to snort our Lortabs. We ate a little something, she drank coffee, and we got back on the road. We were driving the boxy white Ford that Granny had lent me—James had taken our car, which his grandparents bought us. We had sold my baby-blue Dodge Aries and bought something else, and that something else had died from a lack of oil—I had used a coupon for a free oil change, but the mechanic didn’t tighten the oil filter.

I had brought as much money as I could, so I could buy something at the festival to bring back and resell—something psychedelic. I drove all night, minding my father’s demand that I not let anyone else drive Granny’s car. We got into Atlanta around four thirty in the morning and went to a shabby motel. While we were checking in, we saw some people our age getting out of a minivan at the entrance. They came in and booked a room, and we thought that though they didn’t quite have the hippie look we expected, they might be going to the same festival. Their room was a few doors down from ours, so we managed to introduce ourselves as we all carried our stuff into our rooms, and before long, they offered to sell us some liquid LSD.

They had come to Atlanta from Florida not to attend the actual concert but to walk around the festival parking lot and sell their acid. I immediately bought a few doses, and they insisted we needed to get sugar cubes, so they could drop each dose onto a cube. I had dispensed the liquid into people’s mouths before, but once accidentally gave someone three or four drops when he wanted one, so I knew the dangers of imprecise measurement.

We went driving around Atlanta as the sun rose, going into every all-night grocery store we could find. We seemed to be in a residential area, but next to nice-looking houses, prostitutes stood on the street corners while morning climbed into the sky.

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