Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  Choppers sail past every couple minutes, visible only by their floodlights overhead. An open pickup truck rolls by, packed with Chinese men shoulder to shoulder.

  All things in moderation, rambles the Jones in his inner ear. Old dog, new tricks …

  He can smell the proximity of the pharmaceuticals. They vibrate, rattle him on a cellular level. Drug radar erect, drug meter pinned. There are drugs and they lie within reach. He’s come this far to be warmed by their honey-sweet light, and yet he finds himself afraid. For if he cannot get to them, he will freeze to death, from the inside.

  Scratches at his beard, rough. If Dos didn’t know better, he’d tell you he is suffering withdrawal symptoms. Impossible. Doesn’t fucking make sense, but there it is. It hurts, Dos is beat, and longs to have this done with, to float into the delicious embrace of the medicine, one fucking way or another.

  A bird in the hand, says the Jones, and his stomach quivers. Unzips the bag, unsteady on his haunches, withdraws the gun, trying to decide how and where to carry the damn thing, settling on the shallow pocket of his sweat jacket, which barely covers the weapon and necessitates that he hold it by the butt.

  Pulls the hood on the jacket up over his unkempt hair.

  Observes the sorry details of his position, this parody. An unlit New York City alcove, a weaponized junkie in a hooded tracksuit, resolute, ill intent, eyes on the prize. Not exactly a novel picture. Ghetto stuff, unbefitting a learned man like Dos Mac.

  Funny I managed to avoid such a situation until this very moment. All that focus and energy wresting free of the near-inescapable, gravitational field of a black hole like Brownsville. Shit. What heights I’ve known. Relatively speaking. And yet here I am.

  Corrects himself immediately; of course, I am not a lost user, not anymore, don’t be a fucking clown … I am, simply, an adult human, having a crazy day, indulging a craving, and am I not entitled to a little break, some misbehavior, as disciplined as I am, as hard as I apply myself to my work?

  Scrolls through the available options for the umpteenth time. In terms of approach, they’re pretty limited. Not much to do but waltz right in there and get as scary as possible.

  Dos figures if there’s a move to make he’d better make it before he passes out. The traffic has abated to the point where it’s just gotta be done.

  Plenty of time for analysis and/or shame, logics Dos, after I secure some drugs.

  It’s just me, thinks Dos, stepping into the street, abandoning his bag. Bearing witness to my own debasement.

  Hands jammed into his insubstantial pockets, eyes on a Humvee and an NYPD Volt, both of which seem to be unmanned. Dos heads straight across First Avenue, aiming himself at the hospital’s main entrance. He doesn’t feel scary.

  The gun is half in and half out of his jacket, Dos thinking he might be rushing events, contemplates turning around, the borrowed pistol continuing to slip, Dos scrabbling at the thing, feeling the duct tape, the rubber grip, his fingers seeking a more solid purchase, sliding through the trigger guard …

  Doesn’t so much hear the burst as register the abrupt absence of sound, followed swiftly by a numbness in his left hip. He is then aware that there has been a gunshot of some kind, pivots slightly uptown as the Librarian’s disembodied mug floats on by, sniggering, mumbling, Snipers. Of course, thinks Dos, of course, and he turns again to face the hospital, peripheral vision gone, scanning the rooftops and balconies for some sign of …

  Trying to work out why he would be targeted, trying to understand the intent of the handful of soldiers and cops emerging from the hospital entry, apparently headed his way, apparently shouting things he cannot quite hear. Dos brings his left hand out of his pocket and notes with detached interest that it is warm and wet with blood, tucks in his chin to discover yet more blood, an alarming quantity of blood, and it occurs to him that someone must have been quite severely hurt, and if this is the case it might make his mission to score that much more difficult.

  This is as far as he gets before that thought bubble pops, and Dos Mac wilts sideways, collapsing to the pocked tar of First Avenue.

  “… Anywhere from thirty and fifty, gunshot wound to the hip …”

  Dos is ripped out of a fairly neutral stupor by excruciating shards of pain in his side, faintly detects his body lifted and borne aloft, the pain abates momentarily, only to come crashing back as he is dropped on a hard surface. His bladder empties into his pants, hand wrenched awkwardly back, a metallic ratchet … his eyes are open and he is looking at his left wrist, secured to a bar with a pair of handcuffs, the attached hand apparently having been dunked in cartoon-red paint.

  “Flip him,” instructs a female voice from somewhere in this overly lit room, and the agony that accompanies this action causes him to pass out again, though it’s his impression that he comes to within seconds. On his side, cool air caressing an ass cheek …

  “… in and out,” the female is saying.

  “Self-inflicted,” chimes in somebody else.

  “Obviously,” says the lady. Irritated. “But we can’t do civi’s. You rolled him in here? Now roll him back out.”

  “… ID says he’s Class A.”

  “This fucking guy?”

  “Gotta confirm it but that’s what he was carrying.”

  The lady sighs audibly. “All right, then. But I want security.”

  “Of course.”

  “It is what it is, let’s clean him up.”

  The room starts getting shifted around, a uniformed guy materializes all up in Dos’s grill speaking far too loud, as if to a retarded child: “Sir, do you know why you’re here?”

  Vision clearing by drips and drabs, Dos registers the faux-concerned, acne-scarred face of a white soldier. Not finding this worth deep study, he rotates his head, taking in a standard hospital room, several folks attending to the business of prepping for surgery, an Asian girl in Winnie the Pooh scrubs leaning over him, hooking a heavy plastic sack to an overhead rung … a bag of liquid … a bag of …

  A bag of morphine.

  “Sir, do you know why you’re here?” repeats the soldier, sounding further and further away.

  Dos saying, “I surely do, son. I surely do.”

  And like a cadaverous Buddha, Dos Mac smiles with his whole body. Extends his right arm.

  Novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, JERRY STAHL is the author of six books, including Permanent Midnight, Pain Killers, and I, Fatty. Most recently, he wrote the HBO film, Hemingway & Gellhorn.

  possible side effects

  by jerry stahl

  Bad Penny, She Always Turns Up. That was one of my most popular campaigns, back when the porn business was referred to as Adult Films, not “triple-X content.” Not that I’m a porn guy. I’m not. Anymore. I’m the kind of writer you don’t hear about. The guy who always wanted to be a writer—who read the backs of cereal boxes as a kid—dreamed of being Ernest Hemingway, then grew up and wrote the backs of boxes. You don’t think about the people who write the side effect copy for Abilify or Olestra ads … It’s not as easy as you think. You need to decide whether anal leakage goes best before or after suicidal thoughts and dry mouth … I take a ribbing from some of the guys (and gals) at the office—which, I have to admit, gets to me. They know I’ve been working on a novel, but it’s been awhile. I guess I should also admit that the heroin helps with some of the shame I feel about writing this stuff. Or life in general. I’m not, like, a junkie-junkie. I use it, I don’t let it use me. And I’m not going to lie, it helps. It’s like, suddenly you have a mommy who loves you. You just have to keep paying her.

  Not that life is bad—I’m making a living, and not a bad one, considering; when I got my MFA I thought for sure all I had to do was start writing stories and things would just kind of take care of themselves. I realize now that it probably wasn’t smart to use my “craft” to make my living. “Don’t use the same muscle you write fiction with to pay the rent,” my professor and thesis advisor, Jo Bergy, advis
ed. Of course I ignored her. I wanted to be a writer! In New York! But gradually, as the years passed, the bar for what counted as writing got a little lower while the pay, occasionally, got a lot higher. Why is that? Why should I be paid more for vibrator copy than my searching and personal novella about growing up the son of a blind rabbi and his kleptomaniac adulteress wife in Signet, Ohio? Sure, I placed a few “chunks” of the book as short stories in the beginning. That’s what made me think I could do it. Though why I thought the three free copies from Party Ball magazine, or the two hundred I got from Prose for Shmoes, out of Portland, was going to make a dent in my living expenses, I don’t know. I had some encouraging correspondence from The Believer. But ultimately they ended up printing the letter of protest I wrote when they rejected my twenty-first submission. Again, the drugs helped. I feel a terrific sense of shame about my whole life situation. I see other people my age making big money doing memoirs, getting screenplay deals based on tweets, and here I am bouncing around from porn dog to New Media Guy to Uh-Oh Boy—industry lingo for Side Effects Specialists, a.k.a. Sessies.

  And yes, just thinking about this, the knife-in-the-chest regret I feel at chances blown, assignments fucked up, books unwritten or written badly … public scenes (more than once involving kneewalking, twice on a plane) when I was, you know, more high than I thought I was, it all twists me up. On smack, sometimes, you feel so perfect, you just assume everything you do is perfect, too. And when you remember, and the remorse kicks in, it’s like a razor-legged tarantula crawling upside down in your heart, cursing you in dirty Serbian for being a lame-ass dope fiend who blew every chance he ever had and ended up in the world of incontinence-wear and catheters. (Referred to, just between us girls, as “dump-lockers” and “caths.”) Well, do a little heroin, and you can remember the good things. On smack, everything feels good. I would gladly slit my own throat, attend the funeral, and dig my own grave, if I could do it all on decent dope—and not have to actually cop it. As William Burroughs said, it’s not the heroin that’ll kill you, it’s the lifestyle.

  But we were talking about the good things! Reasons for me to like y-o-me.

  Like, not to brag, it was my idea to refer to the discharge from the rectal area as “anal leakage,” rather than actual “intestinal discharge.” Which, technically (if not linguistically) speaking, are two different things. My thinking was—and I said this to Cliff and Chandra, the husband-wife team who took over the agency—my thinking was, bad as “anal leakage” is, at least it’s vaguely familiar. Tires leak, faucets leak, it’s round-the-house stuff, and we all have anuses. (Ani?) But discharge is never good. Try and think of one situation involving “discharge” from your body that is not kind of horrible. Perhaps, hearing about my life and “career,” you think they sound pretty horrible. Or maybe you’re thinking to yourself: okay, he has some problems, he’s had a bumpy career path, but he doesn’t seem like a heroin guy.

  Exactly! It’s no big deal! Everybody has their little rituals. Miles Dreek, the other Sessie, walks in with his raspberry cruller and chai tea every morning. When I come in, I have my own stations of the cross. I go to the men’s room, cook up a shot in my favorite stall, grab coffee in my ironic Dilbert mug, and amble back to my cubicle where the latest batch of American maladies awaits. Today, for example, is Embarrassing Flaky Patches Day. I watch the moving drama the clients have already filmed, showing a nice white lady with other nice white people in a nice restaurant, and listen to her VO: It was a weekend to relax with friends and family. But even here, there was no escaping it. It’s called moderate to severe chronic plaque psoriasis. Once again, I had to deal with these embarrassing, flaky, painful red patches. It was time for a serious talk with my dermatologist.

  Here’s where I roll up my sleeves. (Well, at least one of them—haha!) From a list of heinous side effects I start cobbling together the Authoritative-but-Friendly PSE (possible side effects) list. HUMIRA can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. Serious, sometimes fatal, events can occur, such as lymphoma or other types of cancer, blood, liver, and nervous system problems, serious allergic reactions, and new or worsening heart failure.

  I had me at cancer! Seriously. I don’t care if bloody images of Satan bubble up on my flesh, I’d have to do heroin just to stop worrying about the lymphoma and heart failure I might get for taking this shit to get rid of them. But that’s me. That’s the dirty little secret of TV medicine spots. The people who write them wouldn’t go near the stuff.

  Of course, people will tell you heroin is bad. But let me tell you my experience. If you take it for a reason, and you just happen to have a reason every day, then it’s not exactly addictive behavior. It’s more like medicine. Or a special survival tool. For example, there may be a thought that crops up in your head. (We’re only as sick as our secrets!) Like how, lately, I have this thing, whenever I see a pregnant woman, especially if she’s, you know, exotically dimpled, or has a really great ass, where I just sort of see her in stirrups, giving birth, her sweaty thighs wide open, the doctor and nurses with their masks on, the doctor reaching in, up to the wrists. It’s better if it’s a female doctor, I don’t know why; I’m not proud of any of this. Once there’s the actual pulling out of some bloody placenta-covered screamer, I’m gone. But still I think about—this is really not cool, really not something I want to think I’m thinking about—but nonetheless, what I think about, almost against my will, is how her vaginal walls—for which the Brits have a singularly disgusting word—will just be gaping. I remember it from when my ex-wife gave birth to our son Mickey. (She left me, years ago; last I heard she was running a preschool for upscale biters. Which is a syndrome now; Squibb R&D has some meds in development. But never mind. Kids’ drugs take a little longer for the FDA to rubber stamp.) Anyway, I just picture the gape. As riveting as Animal Planet footage of boas dislocating their jaws to swallow an entire baby boar. (The same arousal, it goes without saying, does not apply during a caesarean; I’m not an animal.) But still … when my thoughts—how can I put this?—veer in this direction, some nonwholesome wouldn’t-want-to-have-my-mind-read-in-front-of-a-room-full-of-friends-or-strangers direction, I need something to get rid of the thoughts. I need the heroin.

  Worse than fantasies are memories. Which may, arguably, qualify as disguised fantasy. Didn’t George Bernard Shaw say, “The only thing more painful than recollecting the things I did as a child are recalling things I did as an adult”? Or was that Cher?

  I actually started writing in rehab. (My first one. I’ve been in eleven. Three in Arizona.) And it was awful. The writing, I mean. We were supposed to paint a portrait of ourselves in words. I still remember my first sentence. I AM TAPIOCA TRAPPED IN ARMOR! Followed by: Little Lloyd (that’s my name; well, Lloyd, not Little Lloyd.) “Little Lloyd” has cowered continually, long into adulthood, at the memory of deeds perpetrated on his young unprotected self, scenes of unspeakable humiliation. Which—can somebody tell me why? Freudians? Melanie Kleiners? Anybody?—barge into my psyche at the most inopportune moments. Imagine a big-screen TV that turns on by itself and blasts Shame Porn to all your neighbors at four in the morning. Like, say, I’ll be at a job interview, talking to some wing-tipped toad named Gromes about my special abilities recounting the consequences of ingesting Malvesta, a prescription adult onset acne pill (glandular swelling, discomfort in the forehead, bad breath, strange or disturbing dreams), when I am suddenly overcome with memories of my mother paddling around the house with her hands cupped under her large blue-veined breasts, blaring Dean Martin. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore! She’s high-kicking while our mailman, a long-faced Greek with a nervous twitch, peers in the window. And Mom knows he’s there. I’m three and a half, and waiting to get taken to kindergarten. Mom’s supposed to drive me, but instead, she starts screaming, over the music: Why don’t you play? Why don’t I play? It makes me anxious. Should the mailman be looking in the window? Where is his other hand? What hap
pened to his bag? Ahhhhhh … Not even four, and I already need a fix.

  Well, that’s it. After the That’s Amore flashback, I’m cooked. Forget the job interview. I’m like Biff in Death of a Salesman, grabbing a fountain pen and running out of the office. Except I run straight to the bathroom and pull a syringe from my boot. Minutes later, before the needle is out—AHHHH, YESS-S-S-S-S-S-S, thank you, Jesus!—The Mommy-Tits-Amore-Mailman image furs and softens at the edges. Until—MMMMM, lemme just dab off this little kiss of blood—what began as horror morphs into suffused light, savaged memory softened by euphoria into benevolence, to some slightly disquieting, distant image … Mom is no longer doing a dirty can-can in the living room, entertaining a twitchy peeper in government issue … Now—I love you, Ma, I really love you—now her legs are simply floating up and down. My mind has been tucked into bed. A loving hand brushes my troubled little brow … Heroin’s the cool-fingered loving caretaker I never had. I mean, everything’s all right now … As if my memory’s parked in the very last row of a flickering drive-in, with fog rolling in over all the cars up front … So even though I know what’s on the screen, and I know it’s bad—Is that a knife going into Janet Leigh?—it … just … does … not … matter. It’s still nice. Really nice. Provided, that is, I don’t pass out in the men’s room, and they end up calling paramedics, and I wake up chained to the hospital bed. Again. In California they can arrest for you for tracks. Those fascists!

  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 boy’s bathroom. 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 SpongBob 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—