PAUL:	There are moments I'll remember all my life, as the 
	song goes.  But there are moments of this much-abuséd life 
	that will never reach the surface of the cerebellum.

	And I think I know which moment it was that created the 
	blank space on my tabula that became rasa ... on New Year's 
	Eve night, 1989.

	There are parties, and then there are parties.  This was to 
	be the party that lasted the whole decade.  Like a ten year 
	long New Year's Eve celebrating the next century.  What better 
	way, it was mused by myself and my cronies, to usher in the 
	twenty-first than by closing out the twentieth with a New Year's 
	Eve Decade ?  A decade of Decadence.  We would be out of it for 
	a long time.

	We started buying the supplies in late August.  Necessary for 
	this was the liquidation of several properties overlooking the 
	Pacific along the mid-California coast;  blatant lies were told to 
	loan agents at all the banks from LA to Eureka.  Family trusts were 
	ravaged, stocks and bonds were junked, cars stolen and fenced, 
	every felonious activity that promised instant cash was undertaken.

	With the proceeds, we procured some of the stickiest buds from 
	the basements of Vancouver and the Laotian highlands.  Finger 
	gum scraped from the digits of farmers in the Negev and Bhutan.  
	Exquisite and legendary bars of government inspected Nepalese.

	These were to be the appetisers.

	An entire week's run from a methedrine factory was acquired and 
	stored under the proper conditions.

	Owsley was enticed out of retirement for the right price and 
	insanely clinical LSD-25 joined the list of cocktails.

	On to mountains of the bluest, hardest cocaine.  This was the 
	most difficult property to keep and the supplies were replenished 
	every week.

	Cask-strength whiskey from little known distilleries on the 
	far-flung isles of Scotland arrived in hogsheads.

	Tequila from the south, rye from the north, bourbon from the 
	east, and Champagne from Champagne.

	No intoxicant was too costly, none was too dangerous, none was 
	under stocked.  We had a larder of uplift that would give us a 
	quake of 9 on the mental Richter scale.

	And then in November from Mexico came some experimental bovine 
	de-wormer that was purported to be a powerful psychedelic:
	Muco-methyl-psycho-propylacid-poly-phenyl-bio-presper-garbanzobine, 
	El Quinto Caballero.

	It looked like one hit would be too much for two, so eight of us 
	carved up this baby.  

	And that's all I remember.

	I missed all of 1990 and 1991, waking up finally in October, 1992, 
	in a Belgrade apartment with some Finnish money, a prescription, 
	in German, made out to one Spurgeon Canetti, a charge card in the 
	name of Fontinato, small twin incision scars on my groin, wearing 
	a pair of shoes a size and a half too small, a tee-shirt from the 
	Nelson Mandela election campaign, two odd socks, and extremely 
	soiled underwear.  Even then it took me five days to figure out 
	something was wrong.

	My advice ?  Celebrate New Year's one year at a time.