the substance phase, and the larval-stage damage — "We both ended up losing enthusiasm…"
We both ended up losing enthusiasm for substances after only a couple years, Orin because he had finally entered puberty and had discovered the weaker sex and found he needed all his faculties and guile, myself because a couple of really negative methoxy-psychedelic experiences left me with certain Disabilities that to this day make normal life an exceptional challenge, and which I tend to blame on having done deadly-serious hallucinogens at a sort of larval psychological stage during which no N. American adolescent should be allowed to do hallucinogens.
Context
The E.T.A. adolescent-using economy seen from the far side of it, decades on: two of the two best ten-year-olds in Boston "experimented heavily," and where Orin walked away when puberty gave him a better appetite, Bain didn't walk away clean — a couple of bad methoxy-psychedelic trips at a "larval psychological stage" left permanent Disabilities that still make ordinary life an exceptional challenge. The datum the whole book circles: the drug taken young, at the stage when the self is still forming, doesn't just pass through — it leaves a shape, and the man is still living inside the shape it left.