A person who was a good friend of mine - my best friend in high school - basically degenerated before my eyes. It was heartbreaking, because he was one of the smartest and most talented people I’ve known - an excellent artist, he could have been a major talent. He was that good, at least, in my opinion.
We used to spend literally days painting, not even stopping to sleep. We would also talk about religion, history and philosophy all night. Not healthy I’m sure, but better than what was to come.
We always drank a bit and smoked some pot, but increasingly for him that became the point - the art kinda tapered off. Eventually, at some point, it just stopped. I’d come over with the excuse that we would do some painting, we would do a few minutes, take a “break” - and soon be drinking and smoking. I was into it too, but gradually I realized that I was really more into the art.
Eventually, he moved to the country to his dad’s farm (he was also a drinker and smoker and had zero control over my friend), and things really went downhill. He started up a grow-op in his barn. He begain to distill hash oil in his kitchen. His begain to have mood swings. His place became increasingly filthy. He acquired many guns. There were scary people hanging around, buying and smoking his drugs. One day, I realized by watching that these scary people were afraid of him.
I think the last straw for me was when he acquired a sort of serf - a big, scary (but harmless) tatooed fellow who, essentially, moved onto his farm to do the heavy work of running the grow-op in return for free drugs and a place to stay. He was filthy as a pig and almost as ingnorant. Once I came up, only to find that the only pair of underwear the guy owned was soaking in a mud puddle in front of the barn. My friend talked about this poor guy, and ordered him around, as if he was a slave, or cattle - not behind his back, but openly to his face. He meekly accepted this role.
Why, may you ask, did I keep going to see him? He was my best friend, and so talented - I just could not accept he was evolving into something else. Plus, he kept up the pretense. This was just something he did for money (he said), one day we would have a studeo, make some serious art … but gradually I realized that was never happening.
I guess one visit sort of epitomized things for me. He called me asking for me to come up, we would go sketching. I went up, to find that his "harvest’ was in and what he really wanted was some help processing it - his “serf” wasn’t enough. Well, I could hardly refuse. There we were, picking through piles of pot, the buds in one place and the leaves in another … and what should I spy through the window but a line of armed men walking towards the house.
We quickly threw a sheet over the pot and walked out. I had visions of prision or worse dancing through my head, as you could well imagine. Just then, I would have given anything to be somewhere else - I nearly bolted for the woods.
As it turned out, it was just some hunters trespassing (“we were looking for the road”).
That night, we had a feast. The “serf” cooked up a big chunk of meat, which we washed down with shots of Black Russians - vegitables were unknown in this household. The place was, as usual, filthy - filthy beyond description, buzzing with flies and covered with sticky bits of pot. While we were eating, some sort of long, skinny animal with teeth and claws emerged from a hole in the floor, snagged a bone, and dragged it down into the hole - I was so high (we’d been smoking pot and boozing all day) that this almost seemed normal (it turned out it was a mink). The “serf” guffawed and reached for a nearby shotgun; my friend growled at him while chewing on a bone … I sort of saw, at that instant, just how degenerate they (I guess we) had become. Somehow, in easy stages, we had become some sort of barbarians. To an outsider it would no doubt have looked like a scene from Silence of the Lambs.
That did it. I decided to cut off contact. That was almost twenty years ago now. Last I heard, he was doing okay …