by Jerry Stahl
And now—oh, God, no! No! Here comes another memory. STOP, PLEASE! Why does my own brain hate me? I’m picking my son up at preschool, and I’m early, and I’ve just copped, so I go in the boys’ room. And—NO NO NO NO!—I come to—you never wake up on heroin, you just come to—to screams of “Daddy, what’s wrong?” See my little boy in his SpongeBob SquarePants hat, his mouth a giant O. He’s screaming, screaming, and—what’s this?—my ratty jeans are already at my ankles and there’s a needle in my arm and my boy’s teachers and the principal of the preschool are hovering over me like a circle of disapproving angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and—
And I hear myself, with my child looking on, like it’s some kind of aw-shucks normal thing, saying, “Hey, could you guys just let me, y’know . . . just give me a second here?” And, in front of all of them, in front of my sweet, innocent, quivering-chinned son, I push down that plunger. And suddenly, everything’s fine. Everything’s awful, but everything’s fine . . . My little boy’s horrified coffee-brown eyes glisten with tears. Good-bye, little Mickey, good-bye . . . My wife will get a call from family services. I’ll be leaving now. Hands behind my back. In cuffs. All I remember is the officer’s name: Branderby. His sausage-and-pepper breath. I manage a little wave to Mickey, who gives me a private little wave back. In spite of everything. I’m still his daddy. For years afterward, I have to get high just to think about what I did to get high. But it’s okay. Really.
It’s.
Fine.
Heroin. Because once you shed your dignity, everything’s a little easier.
Where was I? (And yes, maybe the dope did diminish my capacity for linear thinking. So what? Let’s see you count backward from yesterday to What-the-fuck-happened?) When my boss moved to pharmaceuticals from “marital aids,” I followed. (He insisted on the old-school term his father used: marital aids. Instead of the more contempo “sex toys.”) We’d been taken over by a conglomerate. I cut my teeth on Doc Johnson double dildos (“For ass-to-ass action like you’ve never dreamed of!”) and Ben Wa balls (“Ladies, no one has to know!”). Then it was up (or down) the ladder to men’s magazines, romance mags, even a couple of Cat Fancy imitators. Starting in back-of-the-book “one-inchers” for everything from Mighty Man trusses to Kitty Mittens to X-Ray Specs (a big-seller for more than fifty years). When I tried the specs and—naturally—they didn’t work, my boss said, with no irony whatsoever, “We’re selling a dream, Lloyd. Did you go to Catholic school?”
“Metho-Heeb,” I told him.
“What’s that, kid?”
“Half-Jewish, half-Methodist, and my mom did a lot of speed.”
“Well, lucky you,” he said. “Me, I was schooled by nuns. But when I put on those X-ray specs, I swear, I could see Sister Mary Theresa’s fong-hair.”
While cheesy, this is a serious, high-stakes business. To stay on top of the competition, you have to know what’s out there. Like, just now, on The Dylan Ratigan Show—What great hair! Like a rockabilly gym teacher . . . too bad he quit—I caught this commercial: Life with Crohn’s disease is a daily game of What if . . . ? What if I can’t make it to— Here the audio fades and there’s a picture of a pretty middle-aged brunette looking anxiously across a tony restaurant at a ladies’ room door . . . The subtext: if you don’t take this, you are going to paint your panties.
Listen. I spent a lot of time watching daytime commercials. I had to. (Billie Holiday said she knew she was strung out when she started watching television. And she didn’t even talk about daytime!) Back when it was still on, I’d try to sit through Live with Regis and Kelly without a bang of chiba. Knock yourself out, Jimmy-Jane. I couldn’t make it past Regis’s rouge without a second shot. At this point he looked like somebody who’d try and touch your child on a bus to New Jersey.
Is it any accident that so much contempo TV ad content concerns . . . accidents? This is the prevailing mood. Look at the economy. Things are so bad you don’t need to have Crohn’s disease to lose control. But worse than pants-shitting is public pants-shitting. Americans like to think of themselves as mud-holders. You don’t see the Greatest Generation diapering up, do you? (Not until recently, anyway.)
Junkies may be obsessed with bathrooms, but America’s got them beat. So many cable-advertised products involve human waste that you imagine the audience sitting at home eating no-fat potato chips on a pile of their own excretions. Ad Week put it on its cover: “American Business Is in the Toilet.”
But the real big gun in the BFS (Bodily Function Sweepstakes) is Depends. Go ahead and laugh. These guys are genius. Why? I’ll tell you. They know how to make the Bad Thing okay. (Just like heroin!) Listen: Incontinence doesn’t have to limit you. It all starts with finding the right fit and protection. The fact is, you can manage it so you can feel like yourself again. (Oddly, I used to lose bowel control after I copped. I’d get so excited, it just happened. So I’m no stranger to “manpers,” as we say in the industry. They could ask me for a testimonial. Though, in all honesty, if it were my campaign I’d have gone with something more macho. Something, call me crazy, patriotic.
Depends. Because this is America, damn it!
Then again, maybe the macho thing is wrong. Maybe—I’m just spitballing here—maybe you make it more of a convenience thing. Or—wait, wait!—more Morning in America-ish. More Reagan-y.
Take two: America, we know you’re busy. And you don’t always have time to pull over and find somewhere convenient to do your business. With new Depends, you can go where you are—and keep on going. DEPENDS—because you’ve earned it. Subtext, of course: We’re Americans! We can shit wherever we want!)
Ironically, because of my own decade and a half imbibing kiestered Mexican tar, I got some kind of heinous, indestructible parasite. Souvenir of Los Angeles smackdom. For a while I had a copywriting job in downtown LA, five minutes from MacArthur Park, where twelve-year-old 18th Street bangers kept the stuff in balloons in their mouths. You’d give them cash, then put the balloons in your mouth. If you put them in your pockets, the UCs would roll up and arrest you before the spit was dry. Keeping it in your mouth was safer. Unhygienic (parasites!), but on the plus side, visit any LA junkie pad, and there was always something carnivale about the little pieces of red and blue, green and yellow balloons all over the place. Like somebody’d thrown a child’s birthday party in hell and never cleaned up.
But now—call it Narco-Karma —I have to give myself coffee enemas every day. Part of the “protocol” my homeopath, Bobbi, herself in recovery, has put me on for the parasite situation. Bobbi also does my colonics . . . She likes calypso music, which I find a little unsettling. Though Robert Mitchum singing “Coconut Water” while I’m buns up and tubed is the least of my issues. Bob knew his calypso. (Check out Calypso—Is Like So! liner notes by Nick Tosches.)
Like I say, part of my job is recon. And I’m not going to lie, just thinking about that killer Crohn’s copy makes me a little jealous. The subject, after all, was shame. What does some pharma-hired disease jockey know about shame? Did he have my mother? Scooping his stainy underpants out of the hamper and waggling them in his face, screaming she was going to hang them on the line for all his friends to see? (No, that’s not why I do heroin. Or why I ended up in side effects. Whatever doesn’t kill us just makes us us.)
For one semester I attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I studied advertising with Joe Sacco, whose legendary “Stronger Than Dirt” campaign, arguably, sheathed a proto-Aryan superiority sensibility under the genial façade of Arthurian legend. (For you youngsters, the ad featured a white knight riding into a dirty kitchen on a white steed.) White Power might as well have been embossed on the filth-fighter’s T-shirt. See—excuse me while I scratch my nose—there’s a connection, in White American subconscious, between Aryan superiority and cleanliness. “Clean genes,” as Himmler used to say. Tune into MSNBC’s Lockup some weekend, when the network trades in t
he faux-progressive programming for prison porn. Half the shot-callers in Quentin look like Mr. Clean: shaved head and muscles that could really hold a race-traitor down. Lots of dope in prison. But—big surprise—the fave sponsors of Lockup viewers, to judge by the ads, are ExtenZe (penis size), UroMed (urinary infection), our old friend Depends (bowel control), and Flomax (frequent urination). The Founding Fathers would be proud. Once they hosed off.
You think junkies don’t have a conscience? All the snappy patter I’ve cranked out, and you know what made me really feel bad? Feel the worst? Gold coin copy. People are so dumb that when they buy gold—a hedge against the collapse of world markets!—they think it matters if it comes in a commemorative coin. A genuine re-creation of an authentic 18-something-something mint issue Civil War coin with our nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, on one side, and the Union flag on the other. Worth 50 “dollar gold.” Yours for only $9.99. The “dollar gold” was my idea. I don’t even know why. I just knew it sounded more important than “dollars.” Later, in the running text under the screen (known as flash text in the biz), I misspelled gold as “genuine multi-karat pure god.” I think this was my best move. Not that I can take credit. Just one of those serendipitous bonbons you get when you type on heroin. In an effort not to fall off my chair, I’d type with one eye closed, as if I were trying to aim my fingers the way I aimed my car, squinting one-eyed over the wheel to stay between the white lines when the world went tilty.
So now now now now now now what do I do? I mean—shut up, okay?—I did leave out a key detail. Like, how it all ended?
Okay. Let me come clean. (So to speak.) I got caught shooting up on the job. Dropped my syringe and it rolled leeward into the stall beside me, where my archrival, Miles Dreek (can a name get more Dickensian?), found it. And, long story short, ratted me out. I couldn’t even plead diabetes, because the rig was full of blood, and everybody’s seen enough bad junkie movies to know how the syringe fills up with blood. (Generally, on film, in roseate slo-mo, dawn-of-the-galaxy exploding-nebulae-adjacent scarlet, which—come on, buddy—does not happen when Gramps drops trou and Grandma slaps his leathery butt cheek and sticks in the insulin.) That was my first experience of needles: Grandma spanking Grandpa and jabbing the rig in. Grandpa had it down. The second his wife of sixty-seven years geezed him, he’d pop a butterscotch Life Saver and crunch. Hard candy! Sugar and insulin at the same time. A diabetic speedball. These are my people!
But wait—I was just getting busted. At work. (People think only alcohol can give you blackouts. But heroin? Guess what, Lou Reed Jr., sometimes I think I’m still in one . . .)
I remember, right before the needle-dropping incident, I was just sitting there, on the toilet, with a spike in my arm, Lenny Bruce–style. Suddenly I jerked awake, feeling like one of those warehouse-raised chickens, the kind photographed by secret camera in Food, Inc. on some infernal industrial farm, feet grafted to the cage, shitting on the chicken below as the chicken above shits on it.
You don’t think they should give chickens heroin? Don’t think they deserve it? Well, call me visionary, but if they’re already pumping the poultry full of antibiotics and breast-building hormones (rendering, they say, half the chicken-eating male population of America estrogen-heavy, sterile, and sporadically man-papped), then why not lace the white meat with hard narcotics? Chicken McJunkets! Whatever. Give me one night and three dime bags and I’ll Don Draper a better name . . . Or I would, if I had a place to live. Right now I have enough to stay at this hotel, the Grandee (an SRO) for a couple more weeks. After that I don’t know . . . The guy behind the cage in the lobby looks liver yellow. Doesn’t talk much. But never mind, never mind . . . Me being here has nothing to do with heroin. Just bad luck. But weren’t we talking about heroin chicken? Believe me, plenty of clean-living junkies would hit the drive-through—provided Mickey D could take those damn other drugs out of his birds. Hormones, antibiotics, beak-mite repellent . . . No thanks! That stuff could kill you.
But enough! Let’s settle down and spit out the palette cleanser. It’s time for the entrée.
ONE
Christ-Work
I was shooting dope at Christian Swingles, a faith-based dating website where I worked in Tulsa. We didn’t have coffee breaks at 10:45, we had prayer moments. With a muffin cart. If you think it was easy doing heroin in that situation, well—you’d be absolutely right. What a nest of freaks! The good kind. But I can pray to Jesus with a little smack in me. With a little more I can even believe. Opium of the people, on opiates.
This was the dawn of online dating. So I wasn’t cranking out my usual side effects, pharma-copy, gold scams, or sex-toy banter. Christian Swingles was weirder. At least for me. (Not being a Christian.) The genius of the site was that it was about so much more than Christ-loving singles. It was about a way of life. The dos and don’ts of Jesus-centric singledom. I’m still afraid if there is a hell, I might go there for this. But let me walk you down the path of perdition. No one starts out in hell; they have to do something to deserve it. You have to put in the work.
The owners, naturally, were two Jewish guys. Eddy and Teddy Lifshitz. (They swore their cousin was Ralph Lauren—“The schmuck got Goy surgery in Tijuana, after his name change, and then tells Oprah, ‘My given name has shit in it?’ ”) The brothers Lifshitz cut their teeth on J-Dreemz—the first Jewish dating site (and ultimately BlackBerry to JDate’s iPhone). Just because it was owned by Hebrews, however, did not mean the owners wanted anything less than absolute authenticity when it came to Christ-friendly content. (The brothers strove for equal authenticity in their later ventures: Interracial Daters, Black Love, Cantonese Seekers.) Swingles content was half Bible-dating behavior, half typical faux-dating quiz questions. But the man in charge was the real deal, an actual former air force chaplain named Bobby Bobb.
The silver-haired Pastor Bobb was hired by the Lifshitzes themselves to run the place. (I remember the first time I saw the brothers, two thin-lipped hunched young men who might as well have been wearing yarmulkes and talliths. They looked like they’d just stepped from the Wailing Wall to the “Loving Hall”—the short corridor behind reception, where hung framed photos of successful Christian couples, newlyweds who met in Christian Dreemz-land, and pictures of Jesus: the ultimate Christian single.)
Anyway, I started working for Swingles after I met a volunteer from Prison Fellowship, Chuck Colson’s group. (Colson, for you under-forties, was one of the Watergate burglars. Watergate was . . . well, why bother? That’s why God made Google. Let’s just say it was back when they used to prosecute presidents for crimes. Not for secret bombing or lying the country into war or anything like that. For breaking into a hotel room. Then lying about it. You’ll notice, presidents don’t break into hotel rooms anymore. The system works!)
After serving Nixon, Colson found the Lord in a minimum security federal penitentiary in Maxwell, Alabama, and decided to spend the rest of his life “giving back.” As Chuck put it in his 1983 book Loving God, “Though folklore has it that minimum security prisons, like the one I was in, are full of wealthy ‘white-collar criminals’ doing a few months of ‘easy’ time . . . well, that’s just not true!” Chuck knew what it meant to be down. Chuck was giving back.
How I got to the federal pen isn’t much of a story. After getting fired from my last job, when that guy Dreek snitched me off, I was flying from New York City to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for my mother’s funeral. I forgot I had a syringe in my sock. Crime doesn’t get much more glamorous. Because it happened at an airport, it was federal. (Thinking about it now, I don’t actually want to shoot heroin—I just want to stick a syringe in my eye.) I didn’t even make it to the metal detector. As I was standing in line, shoeless, an adorable, floppy-eared beagle puppy padded over on the end of a long leash.
Had I been paying attention, I’d have seen the other end of the leash was in the hand of some yoked flattop in a DEA T-shirt and reflector shades.
(The Jerry-Bruckheimer-let’s-hire-Henry-Rollins-to-play-a-DEA-agent look.) Instead, I had my nose buried in a copy of Naked Lunch. I know, I know. It’s a cliché. But for me, somehow, Lunch is always vaguely reassuring, a warm bath for the brain, in times of trouble. Not that times were that troubled. I was going to my mother’s funeral. I hadn’t seen mine in a decade or two. But still . . . I saw that cute little pup sniffing up to my shoe, and I thought, before I even realized I was a fucking idiot, that the God of unhappy boyhoods had sent a little Snoopy to cheer me up. After which, of course, Snoopy sniffed the syringe in my sock, and no amount of explaining could make Bruckheimer Reflector Shades believe it was mom-grief.
Of course, there’s a drug for that too. Viibryd. An antidepressant, a grief-fighter. It gets me misty-eyed just thinking about it. The sheer paradox. Listen: Antidepressants increase the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, teens, and young adults. Depression and certain other psychiatric disorders are themselves associated with increases in the risk of suicide. Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately . . . The beauty of that. You take the stuff for grief, and it makes you suicidally grief-stricken . . . Mission accomplished! It’s the Möbius strip of symptom and relief. I have the condition, I want to get rid of it, so I take the medication to make it go away, and—Pfizer meet Job!—inflict upon myself the exact thing I want to eradicate.
