His habitual attire consists of bell-bottom dungarees and an army field jacket. There is little spare flesh on his large frame, but he insists he is fat compared to a year ago.
“I was doing a lot of speed for a while there. I shot crystal a few times but mostly it was a pill thing, dex or meth or bennies — whatever was around. That really takes the weight off you. You don’t sleep and you tend to forget about eating. It doesn’t kill your appetite as much as it puts it out of your mind. I like speed in a lot of ways but it is a very bad drug to stay with for a long period of time. I still do speed once in a while but more as an occasional thing so that it doesn’t move in and take over. And I’ve gained some weight back and am in much better physical shape.”
For several years, drugs have been very much a part of Flip’s life-style. He is less apt to talk of the drug experience as a vehicle for self-realization than are many other members of the youthful drug scene.
“Drugs are to get high. I’ve been getting high for like ten years with one thing or another. Airplane glue. This was the first big thing I remember. Squirting a tube of glue into a bag and sniffing it. We used to do this all the time when I was like ten and eleven and twelve years old. What’s weird is that this is thought of as kid stuff, which it is in that it’s really young kids who are into it, but it’s one of the most dangerous drugs around. It can really fuck up your liver. Nobody knew this at the time. It was just a way to get high. Fifteen cents for a tube of glue and you were beautifully spaced.
“I would try everything at one time or another. Liquor, wine, beer. I don’t dig hard booze much but I still like to get off on beer or wine now and then. Codeine cough syrup. Different kinds of ups and downs, reds and greenies and tranquilizers. Mescaline. Acid. STP. I don’t know how long it’s been since I tripped. I guess it must be close to a year. What happens, all the trips are good at first, and then you’ll have a bummer and no matter how well prepared you are, it’s a freak scene. Really bad. And then there was a point like where every other trip was a bummer, and it wasn’t worth it.
“Cocaine is very nice but you can’t always get it, and too much of the coke nowadays is cut with methedrine which is a dangerous combination. In fact too much of everything is cut with meth. I’ve seen too many people get too hostile and paranoid on that.
“Heroin scared me. I snorted, and the sensation was too much. It was too good. I know people who are into scag in a careful way. Like they use it once a month because nobody gets hooked on anything using it once a month. That’s nice if you can keep your head in that compartment, but not everybody can. And I have just known too many junkies. It is an absolute death trip. You have to get off just to stay even. I’m too much into life to want that kind of scene. I don’t want to turn myself off, turn the world off.
“I told Glory, don’t. The only thing I ever told her don’t. I told her she ought to trip once and I would be with her even though I didn’t want to trip myself any more. I thought that would be worth it for her as an experience, and it was. But heroin, I told her not even once. I told her I made it once, and it was unbelievable, and nobody should fuck with anything that dangerous when there’s that much chance you could love it too much. And she agreed, but she said it was a minor bitch having something like that that you can’t know what it’s like. Which I could relate to. So what we did, we smoked some grass, which makes it easy to get back into a past experience, what it feels like, not just how you remember it. And I went completely into the one heroin experience I had and I described it for her. I couldn’t have done this completely straight but I was back into it myself. And she said afterward that hearing about it the way I described it was enough, that it handled her curiosity and now she could live without it.
“Another reason I didn’t want her to fuck with it was there’s this very close line between what it takes to get you off and what it takes to kill you. So many people have OD’d on the shit. And there was this thing in the paper, a girl who died of an overdose from snorting. This was something you never used to hear of, but there’s all this weird smack coming in from South America that nobody knows how much it’s cut or what with, and you can die from it. As a matter of fact I knew someone pretty well who they found dead with a needle in his arm, and I was really shook.
“Drugs in general I use a lot less than I did a year, two years ago. But I can’t see ever getting to the point where I won’t want to get high a certain amount of the time. I couldn’t see myself not smoking every day, for example. It’s something I do.”
Flip’s introduction to homosexuality took place while he was in a reformatory for stealing a car.
“Before that there were a few of us who used to fool around. It was nothing much. The same kids who would get off together sniffing glue. We would be at somebody’s house and we would jerk off together in front of each other. Or we would have these contests as to who could come first or who could shoot the farthest. It’s funny to think back that the object was to come first, where when you get into sex it’s more the object to be able to go a long time without coming, so that your chick can get off.
“Another thing we did that was a definite gay thing, although we didn’t see it that way, was to jerk each other off, and the object was seeing who could make the other come first. More than that I never did at the time. There was a kid who I knew vaguely who supposedly blew another kid but I never knew for sure if it was true. It was just something that was talked about. And two other kids that I know for a fact one of them tried to get into the other one’s ass, but they couldn’t manage to do it, and they would joke about how they had tried and it never went beyond that.
“Reform school was something completely different. If you were a new kid and a young kid you had absolutely no choice in the matter. It was open your mouth or spread your cheeks, whichever somebody had in mind, and if you didn’t cooperate in a hurry you could get the shit beaten out of you. Some of the guards were into this, too, they would fool around with some of the kids, but for the most part it was the kids themselves. Some of the kids were definitely queer. With others, I guess it was the same as what I’ve heard about a lot of adult prisons, that a con will get completely into the scene while he’s in slam but be completely straight on the outside. The general feeling was if there’s no meat then you eat potatoes and it’s better than starving. There were no girls for sex so you used boys for sex.
“I guess I was fourteen at the time. My fucking mother, with the age I was I could have gotten probation with no trouble. I got probation once before on the same charge and could of got it again, the judge as much as said so, but my mother did this number about how she couldn’t do a thing with me and maybe it would do me good to get sent away. In all the world there is only one person that I hate. There are people I have no use for but only one that I hate, and it’s my mother. I usually won’t talk about her, but Glory sees it that I should get into this more, or else one day I’ll find out that she’s dead and it might shake me on account of not working it out in my head first. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t even handle thinking about that stupid drunken cunt with the drunk bastards she would bring home to live off her, and then letting them send me down, fourteen years old and she lets them put me away...