How to Avoid Attending a Cocaine Party

One guideline for living: If you are invited to a leisuretime party by an acquaintance or coworker of yours, you might want to ask at that time what the motif or theme or featured activity at the party will be.

I still wince when I recall the occasion in the mid-1980s when an erudite, highly intelligent, "New Yorker" literary magazine devotee, herself a female single adult coworker of mine at "The Patriot Ledger" daily newspaper in Quincy, Mass., in a seemingly friendly manner invited me to attend a party with her that was being hosted by a male friend of hers in north Quincy, she said.

Upon arriving at the party inside a private apartment unit with that female coworker of mine, I was immediately greeted by a bald Anglo man who identified himself as being the party host. He then asked me if I would like to partake of some free cocaine that he was offering to all of his guests at that cocaine-theme party in north Quincy.

I politely declined, and experienced considerable shock and politely conveyed revulsion and civilly-stated alienation on my part about the theme of this particular party, and about the party host himself, a prematurely aged single adult male person who was observed by me consuming the very illicit drug that he was offering to everyone else at his party.

I left the party within 20 minutes of entering the party site, very relieved myself to be liberated from the presence of any cocaine in my life. I believe that my female coworker, who stated to me that she was herself very comfortable with the cocaine-consumption activities, remained at the party with her male party-host friend on her own volition.

Fortunately for me, that was the very last party I ever attended at which any cocaine was consumed by anyone attending that party. And, needless to mention, I myself have never once consumed any cocaine on any occasion in my entire life; nor would I ever do so, under any circumstance.

Prior to the party in north Quincy, Massachusetts, the subject of cocaine had previously been identified to me in a surprising context also relating to very same daily newspaper employer of mine, "The Patriot Ledger," a Quincy, Mass.-member of the New England Daily Newspaper Association.

One day in 1985, I made a leisuretime phone call from my Beacon Hill efficiency apartment unit in Boston, Massachusetts, to the private residence of one of my veteran copy-editor coworkers, an apparently friendly fellow by the first name of Peter ---- a heavyset older man who had identified himself as being a former English professor at Rutgers College in New Jersey.

In that leisuretime telephone conversation, Peter declared, "Your coworkers at 'The Patriot Ledger' daily newspaper all think you (John Kevin McMillan) are very strange, since you don't know the meaning of the term 'freebasing cocaine' (exact quote) when you encounter that term while proofreading stories for this newspaper" (approximate quote). "Everyone else at 'The Patriot Ledger' is very familiar with the concept of freebasing cocaine. You're perceived by your coworkers as being very naive and out of touch with the modern reality, John."