Synopsis: A real-life adventure spanning two continents, Cokehead is a semi-regular pulp series chronicling one man’s journey to and from the depths of cocaine addiction including entanglements with Mexican drug police and a trio of knife-wielding pimps in Amsterdam, and life as a second-rate model in Milan, a bartender in Toronto and philanderer everywhere.

Mexico, 1991: I’m facedown in the desert dirt by the side of the highway running north from Mazatlan to Nogales, Arizona. There’s an automatic assault rifle pressed into the nape of my neck and the Mexican drug police – several of whom strut about in acid-washed ball-huggers – are methodically dismantling the interior of our Volkswagen van in a vain search for some semblance of an illicit stash.

Several miles back we’d opted not to stop at what turned out to be a drug checkpoint, which, from our inebriated vantage point inside the van, looked more like a safety meeting for card-carrying members of the Tijuana cartel.  “Should I stop?” asked Erich, the driver, as the machine gun-toting gang waved us over to the side of the road.

“Fuck that,” said my cousin, Glynn, from the front passenger seat.

So fuck it. We kept going.

Predictably, our failure to stop did not go unnoticed. Warm wind whipped against my body in the backseat though the custom sunroof we’d cut into the van with a circular saw back in Canada a couple months earlier. I took a swig from my bottle of Corona and glanced out the right window where Poco, an iguana we’d acquired on our travels, dangled from a curtain.

That’s when I spotted the loaded Jeep – and its rear-mounted machine gun trained on our van – careening towards us from across the desert. Blood drained from my face, but not before some of it seeped past whatever part of my brain draws conclusions, because that’s when I knew we were fucked.

Erich stomped on the brakes as the Jeep catapulted out of the sand and skidded to a stop in front of us on the highway. A second Jeep screeched to a halt behind us and an impossibly large number of Mexicans spilled out and surrounded the van, training their array of high-powered weapons on us from almost every angle.

Inexplicably, my first instinct was to stick my half-empty beer back into the fully stocked cooler – a metal, powder blue Coleman with dual bottle openers that my mom had lent us with explicit instructions we bring it back home in reasonable condition.

Cool. But given that our fate suddenly hung in the heavily armed hands of Menudo, the bigger concern was what our condition would be when we got home.   If we even made it out of the fucking desert.

“Driver – hands on dash!” a voice bellowed in broken English from a bullhorn. Erich and Glynn threw their hands forward onto the dash.

“Driver – hands up!” the voice crackled again.

“What the fuck does he want us to do?” Erich shouted, understandably confused, hesitating slightly before raising his hands into the air.

Two narcs flanked the van and stuck their rifles through the open front windows, pressing them against Erich and Glynn’s respective temples.  The side door of the van slid open and a third pointed a semi-automatic handgun at my head, nervously flicking the safety on and off.

“Okay, okay, okay …” I muttered breathlessly, slowly inching my hands into the air.

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