I never took quaaludes in college. in the 1970s. I remember seeing kids crawl around on the floor. That wasn’t for me. Young people only know quaaludes from The Wolf of Wall Street which had a lot of quaalude consumption.

I was visiting my neighbors in 1986 and they had quaaludes. I had been drinking so I took a half one one and put the other half in a plastic sandwich bag and carried it home. I never could find where I put it.

Several months later, my house was broken into. The bad guys went through everything, even dresser drawers with t-shirts and underwear. The police were in the house on the third floor and I was in my bedroom on the second floor. There, next to the nightstand, was the plastic bag with the half of the quaalude. I thought: I’ve been broken into and I’m going to get busted. I had a half-bath connected to the bedroom and I flushed the half a quaalude.

I haven’t taken anything you can’t buy in a store since that day. I have no objections to drugs and would consider them if they were legal. I worry about quality control. When you’re young, you think you’re immortal and you don’t consider what could be in that drug you put in your mouth. When you’re older, you know know you’re not immortal and you worry about what’s in something. Also, I would want to check first that it didn’t interfere with any of my prescription meds. That certainly wasn’t a consideration when I was 20!

I moved to Baltimore on January 2, 1976. I didn’t have a job there but I wanted to get away from THEM (AKA my parents). The apartment was only $65 a month which was cheap even then. It was on Eutaw Place in a huge, elegant old building that had been split up into many apartments. Eutaw Place had been one of the finest streets in Baltimore and had a median strip. It had fallen on hard times since its prime at the turn of the century. I knew people in theater who had renovated the floor and got cheap rents in return. Some of them moved out so there was a vacant apartment.

There were good and bad things about the apartment. It had high ceilings and a great bay window. It was also roach-infested. The building was managed by a guy who ran a bar on the Block, which is Baltimore’s strip club district. One of his employees, who lived in the building, murdered a guy by slitting his throat with a bottle during the July 4th weekend. I figure he either didn’t pay or asked for something too freaky.

It was time to move and I was out of there by September.

This is the building.

The view from outside looking south. It looked similar in 1976.

Everyone should have a job where they deal with the public. I conducted interviews in local government offices from 1976-1981 and I will write several posts about the most unusual ones. Most people were normal, honest and frankly, not memorable. For the really bizarre ones, I always thought it was wrong to laugh at them to their face. It was hard not to laugh if the members of the public laughed. I think I only laughed maybe four or five times total. If I had to laugh (or yawn because I was out late the night before), then it was time to get a form or make a photocopy of a document.

I once interviewed a man who said he was pregnant. He and his friend, who I assume was the “father”, both wore hoop hearings which was radical around 1980. If you saw men wearing earing back then, they just wore a single stud. He was going for psychiatric treatment at a local hospital. He didn’t know why. I knew why.

Late in the interview, he told me he was having labor pains. His friend laughed at that and I did too. ( I could understand that you could feel you were missing out by not being able to have children but nobody told me labor pains were fun!