Substances/Escape

(In addition to my previous post "Cigarettes and Chocolate...milk)

There is also the example of Deborah getting frustrated with how things are going with her family at dinner and she decides to opt out of the whole dinner/ceremony and instead choosing to go upstairs and eat magic mushrooms. This is obviously a form of escape—complete mental escape. Because using drugs to have a “trip” completely changes your perspective on the world and your mind set, so she could not be further away from her problems. Grady also uses a hallucinogen (although much milder) in the form of marijuana to sort of escape his life. The pot and prescription pills actually seem more to dull the pain in his life so that his problems fall to the background and he does not have to think about them or deal with them.
Another form of escape evidenced in the novel is dressing up as the opposite gender. The transvestite (Anthony, I think his name was) pretends to be a whole different person altogether in order to (for one thing) escape his life for a while, which I think is a really interesting idea. Obviously, he is gay (as he has relations with Crabtree) but the other aspect truly seems to be a need to pretend he is someone else. Definitely trying to escape. Maybe from his unaccepting family? He mentions something about having masculine brothers, at least.
James Leer also tries to escape in a non-substance abusing way (although he has plenty of experiences with substances thanks to Grady and crew). Leer knows extensive amounts of information about movies and movie stars and he seems to almost lose himself in all that. He also tries to play his own character in the book he wrote as a form of becoming another person. (He might also be a pathological liar. The two circumstances are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but either way they are forms of escape and trying to become/be perceived as a different person).
I’m not sure if I will go the route of using only substances in my paper to say that the characters use them for comfort and/or escape. Or maybe I will just stick with the idea of escape (which means the cigarette examples and chocolate example would not fit). I’m just not sure exactly which way to take the paper yet.