Read Online Apologies to My Censor by Mitch Moxley - Free Book Online

Sanlitun Bar Street and surrounding Houhai Lake, but many of the more popular bar districts had been demolished to make way for apartment blocks and shopping malls, and bottles of Tsingtao were being swapped for bottles of Chivas mixed with ice tea, a Chinese club staple. The holes-in-the-wall were being replaced by lounges, hutong bars, pubs, and massive nightclubs. These clubs, with names like Angel, Babyface, Coco Banana, Vics, and Mix, were often packed seven nights a week with hundreds of people, mostly Chinese, drinking in private booths and dancing until dawn listening to some of the world’s top DJs. New bars and clubs seemed to open every other week, and it was impossible to keep track of which ones were cool at a given moment. The Olympics were still a year down the road, but the party was well under way.
    There were plenty of drugs in Beijing—cocaine, ecstasy, hash. It was all available, and it was easy to find, a fact I immediately found alarming. I had been smoking pot periodically since my early teens and had experimented with mushrooms and ecstasy by the time I was twenty. A few years before moving to China, I started taking coke from time to time. But for me, coke comedowns were brutal, life-questioning nightmares that took me two or three days to get over. In Toronto, before I left for China, I was doing coke every few months and it was something I was looking forward to escaping in China, where, it being an authoritarian state, I assumed drugs would be scarce.
    Not so. The first night I went out in the city, Rob, Max, and I were approached on the street by a half-dozen African men in the darker sections of Sanlitun. Trade between China and Africa was booming, and thousands of Africans were coming to China to buy cheap goods to sell back home. Some who didn’t make it as merchants ended up on the streets of Sanlitun selling drugs, and they did so in the open. Nobody seemed to be trying to stop it.
    â€œPssst. Yo, what’s up,” they would say. “You good? Need anything?”
    About once a month we supplemented our nighttime activities with “extracurriculars.” Although I had been hoping to avoid drugs, I struggled to do so once I arrived in Beijing, and they seemed to be everywhere. Since what I was looking for in Beijing most of all was escape, narcotics fit nicely into the equation.
    The quality varied. One hot July night, we bought ecstasy from a Nigerian drug dealer on Lady Street, a bar area near the American embassy. We met him after dinner and he led us around the corner, where he pulled out a small plastic bag filled with baby blue pills. We bought two each. (On the way to get a cab, Rob pulled into a sex shop to buy some generic version of Viagra. “For later,” he said.)
    We went to a bar in Sanlitun and I popped my first pill. An hour later, nothing had happened. Frustrated, I told Max I was going to take the other. “I would wait a little,” he said. “See if the first one kicks in. I’m feeling it.” I ignored Max’s advice and swallowed the second pill with a swig of beer.
    Soon the walls were melting. I sat down at the bar and could barely lift my arms. People tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t respond. “Are you all right?” Max asked, patting me on the back. I was not. I stumbled to the bathroom to wash my face and saw devils in the bathroom tiles.
    I emerged from the bathroom, and Rob and Max laughed at me when I told them I needed to go home. I caught a cab, and when I made it back to my apartment, I took two allergy tablets in a desperate attempt to sleep it off. It didn’t work. My heart raced and I hated myself. I stared at the ceiling, eyes wide open, until the sun came up, when the panic finally subsided and I managed to get a few hours of shaky sleep.
    I eventually drifted away from the Potters of China Daily . One Sunday, when I was filling in for a colleague editing the Monday paper, still hungover