Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  The kid looked visibly agitated, and muttered under his breath in Spanish. “He crazy. Mess up in the head. Always ask for credit. Get mad when we say no, jou know? Makit trouble.”

  “So it’s the same as last time?”

  “Sí. Is the same.”

  “A’right. Cool.”

  The kid opened the door. The room beyond was a huge, desolate loft space. The only furnishings were a TV with an Xbox attached, a leather couch, and a coffee table. The windows were covered with black sheets. A bald man-mountain wearing a Lakers top sat with his back to them, engrossed in a game of Grand Theft Auto, a gun casually poking out of the waistband of his shorts. Two other guys, dressed in chinos and button-down check shirts, on the couch. One bald with a wispy mustache. The other with long, straggly hair and a goatee. On the table was a shoebox full of money. Next to it two handguns, a weighing scale, and a copy of Trump: How to Get Rich. The guy with the goatee was expertly wrapping preweighed lumps of tar heroin in wax paper, stuffing them into tiny black balloons, and tying them off. The young kid handed the money to the mustache. He counted it and put it into the shoebox without a word. They talked among themselves in Spanish without looking at Joe and Tania as they handed the kid the drugs. The kid passed the stuff to Joe, and he popped it in his mouth.

  The kid led them back to the door, pulled back the deadbolt, turned a handle, and wrenched it open. There was a sudden rush of activity. It took Tania a moment to realize what was happening. The Russian, snot still streaming down his nose, had barged in and grabbed the kid by the shirt, pressing a pistol against his head.

  “Getouttathefuckingway!” he screamed.

  Joe grabbed Tania and dragged her to the side. They huddled for safety against a wall while the Russian marched the kid back into the room and started barking orders.

  “Everybody up! This is a fucking robbery! On your feet. You, fatso! Toss over the gun or I blow his head off. No bullshit!”

  The big guy stopped playing the Xbox, and slowly reached around and pulled the gun out of his waistband. Without turning around he gently placed it on the ground, sliding it across the floor a little. Then he rotated on his ass to face the Russian. The other two were sitting there with looks of outraged disbelief on their faces.

  “Kick the gun over, fatso! And you two—on your feet or I shoot him. Hands in the air, quick, quick!”

  From her vantage, Tania could see the Russian clearly. His hand was trembling. He was dope sick and desperate. By contrast, the dealers were cool as hell. Even the kid with the gun pressed against his temple seemed nonplussed. They all moved with a kind of insect calm, slowly doing whatever the Russian instructed. Waiting for the right opportunity to pounce. Tania sensed that the Russian was too nervous, too desperate to pull this off. She closed her eyes.

  “Okay, everyone against the wall.”

  They lined up silently. They stood there, palms up, watching the guy closely as if committing every aspect of his face to memory.

  “Jou really focked up,” the goatee muttered.

  “Shut up! Fucking beaner!”

  “Jou robbing 18th Street, homie.” The goatee shook his head sadly. “They gonna cut off jou balls.”

  “One more fucking word outta you and I’ll kill him, and then I’ll kill you. Yeah?”

  The goatee shrugged.

  The Russian glanced toward Joe and Tania, still huddling together next to the door. “You on the floor. You, bitch!”

  Tania looked up.

  “Listen. You need to get up slowly, no sudden movements. I want you to go over to the table and pick up the dope. Put it all in the shoebox with the money. Close it up and bring it over to me. Don’t fuck around.”

  Joe squeezed her hand and whispered, “It’s okay. Just be cool.”

  Tania did as she was told. She brought the box over, stopping a good three feet away from the Russian. She realized she needed to piss badly and a mad urge to laugh came over her. She watched the Russian’s hand trembling wildly, the muzzle of the gun twitching against the young kid’s temple.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  “Put the box down and slide it over.”

  She did this. The box lay just in front of the Russian and the kid he was holding hostage.

  “Now go. Back over there.”

  Tania scurried to Joe, crouched down with him again. As they huddled Joe could feel her trembling. He whispered, “It’s gonna be okay.” Somehow she believed him.

  The Russian sniffed, more and more snot dripping down his face. “Okay, that’s good. This is what’s going to happen. Me and my friend here are going to go down the stairs. If anyone even peeks their head out of the door before I’m on the street, I shoot him. I’m not bullshiting, in Russia I’ve kill many men in cold blood. I’m no fucking joke. Asshole,” he said, poking the gun harder against the kid’s temple. “We bend down together. On three. You pick up the box, and we get out of here. Yes?”

  The kid remained silent. His young face may as well have been carved in stone.

  “Okay. This is one … two … and … and …”

  A look of confusion came over the Russian’s face. His nose and mouth twitched wildly, as if he were having some kind of facial spasm. “Ah,” he bleated. He sniffed as more goop dripped from his nose. “Ah!” he said again. He wrinkled his nose wildly. “Ahhh …”

  The Russian sneezed. The sound of it—and the almost instantaneous bang as the gun went off—echoed around the loft. The kid flew sideways, the contents of his skull exploded from the side of his face. When Tania opened her eyes again, the Russian was just standing there, his face slick with blood, holding the gun with a look of terrified confusion. He stared at the murder weapon as if seeing it in his hand for the first time. He peered down at the kid. He was laying with half his face blown off, in a rapidly expanding pool of blood.

  “Shit!” the Russian screamed at his hand, as if it had betrayed him. “SHIT!” He looked up. The three dealers were already advancing on him. He turned the trembling gun on them. Screamed, “Back off!” They stopped advancing.

  “Jou a fockin’ dead man,” the biggest of them said. “Jou shot my focking cousin. You fockin’ dead man.”

  The Russian kept the gun on them, glancing down to the bloody shoebox, then over to the door, as if weighing his options. Tania thought he might be crazy enough to try and grab the box and outrun the dealers. Suddenly the Russian’s hand stopped shaking and a strange calm seemed to settle over him.

  “No,” he said, firmly. “You’re a fucking dead man.”

  He opened fire, setting off a series of deafening cracks as bullets flew around the room. One caught the big man in the chest, another hit the mustache in the groin, a third blasted the goatee in the stomach. All three hit the ground. The two who were still alive were screaming and cursing in Spanish. The Russian stood over them and used his last two bullets to put them out of their misery. He tucked the gun in his waistband and went over to the table. He grabbed the dealers’ guns and then retrieved the bloodstained shoebox. Almost as an afterthought he paused on his way out and told Joe and Tania to get on their feet. They did not get up. The Russian looked at them with a curious expression on his face.

  “We didn’t see nothing, man,” Joe said. “Look, we just wanna get the fuck outta here and go get high, that’s all. We ain’t going to the fucking cops or telling anyone we were here. Okay?”

  The Russian nodded slowly. Then he pulled one of the dealers’ guns and fired four times. The first two bullets hit Joe in the stomach. The third hit Tania in the chest. The fourth went wild, ricocheting around the room. He fired again, but there was the click of an empty chamber. Joe and Tania lay over each other, a pile of tangled limbs and hot, fresh blood. With that, the Russian fled down the stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Tania said.

  “What’re you sorry about?”

  “Peeing. I peed in my fuckin’ pants, can’t you smell it? It’s probably on your upholstery. I’m so … ugh.”
>
  “Don’t sweat it.”

  They were in Joe’s car, heading back to Hollywood. Smoking cigarettes with still-trembling fingers. It wasn’t shock or fear that made their hands shake. Instead it was something that felt like the aftermath of a particularly strong orgasm.

  “What the fuck do you think just happened?”

  Joe looked over to Tania. She stared off into space, but didn’t answer. She just carried on smoking, and looking down impassively at the gaping, bloody hole in her shirt. She shook her head slowly.

  “I mean,” Joe said in a voice that was a mixture of horror and wonder, “I mean just look at me!”

  She looked over and her eyes widened, as if she were seeing the devastation for the first time. With one hand still on the wheel, Joe lifted his bloody shirt. His stomach was ripped open, his jeans soaked with deep black blood. Something that looked like a purple, flayed snake lolled obscenely out of the moist hole. It lay glistening on his lap. She shook her head dreamily.

  “Tania … did we die?”

  Tania half closed her eyes and let her head rest lazily against the passenger window, as they turned down Wilcox Avenue.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that it felt …” She drifted off, a wan smile playing on her lips.

  “Amazing?” Joe whispered.

  “Yeah. It felt fucking amazing.”

  As soon as they made it back to her room at the Gilbert Hotel, they got high. It was a run-down box with threadbare brown carpeting and a broken television bolted to the wall. When they stumbled in past the front desk, Joe holding his guts in with his forearm, the old Bangladeshi man behind the Plexiglas window with the NO GUESTS NO EXCEPTIONS sign pasted to it didn’t look up from his newspaper.

  Tania locked the door behind them while Joe busily cooked up a bag of dope in a bottle cap. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his abdomen as a temporary fix.

  “Got any vitamin C?”

  “Yeah, think so.”

  “Lemme see a pill.”

  She threw over a bright orange pill from the bottle in the bathroom. Joe examined it for a moment, and nodded. He clumsily crushed half the pill into powder against the bedside cabinet, then sprinkled it into the heroin. He dropped a healthy chunk of crack into the dark brown goop and heated it again. Tania watched him curiously.

  “You need an acid to break down the rock. Otherwise you can shoot it. You got a spike?”

  Tania shook her head.

  “I got a fresh one. You can go first if you want. You ain’t got hep or nuthin’, do you?”

  “No.” She glanced down at her T-shirt, which was plastered to her body with drying blood. “But I guess it wouldn’t matter at this point, would it?”

  “Guess not.”

  She watched him rip open the syringe and draw some of the caramel-colored mixture into it through a cigarette filter.

  “Jesus, Joe. Be careful … I haven’t had a fix in over a year …”

  “You worried you’re gonna OD or something? Like you said, probably wouldn’t matter at this point, Tania.”

  Joe offered to hit Tania. After she got her fix, she watched him shoot up with all the practiced efficiency of an old-timer. While it felt pretty good, Tania couldn’t help but think that the speedball was somehow disappointing. Shooting dope seemed pretty anticlimactic after experiencing death in all of its terrible, wonderful glory. It reminded Tania of when she had smoked crack for the first time. How alien the idea that she could ever just snort coke again suddenly seemed. It was instantly rendered pointless, a monstrous waste of drugs.

  As Joe and Tania lay in the aftermath of their speedballs in that squalid Hollywood hotel room, they each realized intuitively that something about them had been changed forever. There was no going back to the old ways now.

  Four days later, Joe lay on the floor of his apartment on Normandie and Franklin. He was puking yellow goo into a bowl that was already full to the brim with foul-smelling bile. He was shaking violently. His guts were hastily held together with layer upon layer of CVS bandages and duct tape, and each time he retched he became paranoid that they would rip apart and his insides would come spilling out again. The phone rang. He looked at the digital clock glowing on the cable box. It was two thirty a.m. He crawled over and retrieved the handset.

  “Um,” he mumbled. “Eh. Hello?”

  “Joe? Oh God, Joe, is that you?”

  “Yeah … I’m here, Tania.”

  “Joe!” She sounded like she was crying. “I’m sick! I’m fucking sick. I don’t understand it. It started last night. It’s getting worse … I bought a bottle of fucking methadone … drank the lot … nothing helps …”

  He listened as she vomited violently. He tried his best to sound comforting, shushing her gently until her convulsions seemed to recede.

  “I know … I know … I shot some dope two hours ago, didn’t do a thing. I can’t get this sickness to go … I’ve never been this sick … Never …”

  They listened to each other groan and sigh over the phone for a while. Their pain seemed to eventually give away to an exhausted surrender to the futility and horror of it all.

  “Joe. I’m coming over. I need to get well.”

  “Okay.” He gave her directions, in between retches. “Hurry, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Forty-five minutes later she stumbled out of a cab and staggered toward the apartment building. Finding Joe’s door, she pounded frantically until he yanked it open. He was stooped over, like a little old man. The apartment was dark, and smelled of sickness and rotting meat. She couldn’t tell if the smell was from Joe’s apartment, or if it was rising from her own fetid wound. They embraced painfully.

  “How’re we gonna do this?” she gasped in his sweat-drenched mop of hair.

  “The bathroom …”

  Tania let her heavy coat fall to the floor, exposing a David Bowie shirt soaked crimson. She staggered after Joe. The fluorescent lights momentarily burned her eyes. He was standing there, pointing to the bathtub. It was full of water. An extension chord snaked in from the living room. An ancient twelve-inch black-and-white TV sat on the toilet’s lid.

  “This’ll be the easiest way. The quickest. And it won’t make a mess like the fucking bullets did.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s smart.”

  As if to emphasize the point Tania pulled off her T-shirt. Right between her tits, in the space where the bullet had gone in, was a wad of surgical cotton the size of a fist. It was stuffed into the wound and stained a gruesome shade of brown. It was clumsily held in place with peeling duct tape.

  “I’m still scared,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, what if we don’t come back this time? Or what if we do, but it doesn’t fix us?”

  Joe shrugged. “Could it be any worse than feeling like this?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  Joe and Tania undressed silently. There was no embarrassment. There is nothing two people can share that is more intimate than death. They folded their clothes into neat piles and placed them by the sink, grimly focused on the task at hand. Tania went in first. Joe held her hand as she climbed into the lukewarm water. She sat at one end of the tub with her knees pressed tightly together. The water began to turn pink. Joe gingerly eased himself into the tub after her.

  His bandages soaked through quickly. The bathwater steadily deepened from pink into a murky scarlet.

  “Does it hurt?” Tania had a look of almost motherly concern on her face.

  “Not the wound. Everything else hurts, but not the fucking wound.”

  “Fucking same thing here.”

  Joe reached over and flicked the TV on. A repeat of Entertainment Tonight was playing. Mark Steines was talking about Lindsay Lohan.

  “Turn it down, Joe. If this doesn’t work I don’t want this shit to be the last thing I hear.”

  Joe muted the channel.

  “Here we go.”

  Joe picked up the TV and

/>   Dropped

  It

  In

  The

  Tub

  There was a flash of intense white, a strobelike flicker, and then nothing. Lights instantly went out all over the apartment building.

  And then it was over.

  Joe came out of it first. The house was shrouded in darkness. The air smelled funny. In the dark, he could see the television floating in the water between them. The water was brown and fetid. They had shat themselves at the moment of death. It didn’t matter. Tania started to stir, lifting her chin from her chest. Joe smiled a slow, satisfied smile.

  “How do you feel?”

  Tania let out a long, ecstatic sigh. “Fucking fantastic. You got a cigarette?”

  There was a faint smell of cooking meat in the air. Joe placed a hand on his hair and it felt brittle, singed. But the unbelievable relief that he felt was better than anything he had ever experienced in his entire life. As they both sat there in a tub full of electrified water and shit, coasting on their high, they started to slowly nod off into a gentle dream state.

  * * *

  “My name is Joe, and I’m an addict.”

  “Hi, Joe.”

  “I’m finding it impossible to quit. I’ve had three relapses in as many weeks. I know they say to keep coming back but … I’m sick right now. It’s been two days since my last relapse. I’m here because it’s all I can think to do …”

  As Joe talked, Tania sat next to him, watching. She didn’t tell him, but this morning as he lay passed out on Valium, she’d silently crept into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Withdrawal sweat was soaking every inch of her stick-thin body. Her tits looked a cup-size smaller. She reminded herself of those awful pictures of Nazi concentration camp survivors. The hole in her chest wasn’t healing. In fact, it was starting to smell worse and no matter what she stuffed in there—cotton, old newspapers—the stench still leaked out from under her clothes. She had even tried an air freshener inside the rotting cavern, but that uneasy mixture of decay and potpourri was somehow worse.

  What use was this if the body couldn’t heal itself afterward? She had been shitting blood for four days since the last reckless, desperate fix. She had gulped down a bottle of drain cleaner in a moment of feverish madness. This morning, with the sickness back worse than ever, she had to do something about it. Joe was insisting that they detox and she’d initially agreed, and now he was watching her for signs of weakness. It was like being back in that fucking sober living house. Back to the cycle of meetings, prayers, and self-denial. She couldn’t stand it. Joe could stick out his attempt at doing it cold turkey if that’s what he really wanted. After all, she rationalized, how could she help him with his own detox if she was incapacitated by sickness? If she could just stay well enough to help him, then maybe he stood a better chance of actually making it. Then she would detox. Her mind made up, this morning she had a fix without telling Joe. She carefully slid the kitchen knife up into the hole in her chest, and stabbed around in there until she hit paydirt. When she came to on the bathroom floor, she finally felt human again.