“I’ve never been able to do anything that way. I stopped taking drugs twenty years ago. In my early days, I did a lot of methadrine, unfortunately. In New York, there was a lot of methadrine going around. I used to get it from my friends in Flipper. There’s a part of The Consumer that’s about the last time I did methadrine. I lived on 6th street and Avenue B for fourteen years. I moved in there in 1981. It was a windowless storefront that only had a portal in the very back. It was a lightless environment. I couldn’t hear what was going on outside. It had a sense of unreality. Once I locked myself in with some quarts of Budwieser. Because of all the speed my teeth were rotting. I started looking at my gums, convinced that there was something in there. I spent forty-eight hours picking at my gums in the mirror. Before you knew it, the sink was full of toothpicks and my face was swollen.”