Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

  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, 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. Goodbye little Mickey, goodbye … My wife will get a call from Family Services. I’ll be leaving now. In cuffs. 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 that day 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?) 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?”

  “Methoheeb,” I told him.

  “What’s that, kid?”

  “Half-Jewish, Half-Methodist, and my mom did a lot of speed.”

  “Lucky you,” he said, “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 …”

  Don’t kid yourself, 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!—I caught this: 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 Holliday 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 of 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? (Well, not until recently, anyway.)

  Junkies may be obsessed with bathooms, but America’s got them beat. So many cable-advertised products involve human waste, you imagine the audience sitting at home, eating no-fat potato chips on a pile of their own secretions. As Ad Week put it on a recent cover, “American Business Is in the Toilet.”

  Right now, the real big gun in the Bodily Function sweepstakes is Depends. Go ahead and laugh. These guys are genius. Why? I’ll tell you. Because they 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. May as well tell you. I’d get so excited, it just happened. So I’m no stranger to “mampers,” 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, damnit!)

  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 Reagany. 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!

  See what I mean about dope making you more creative?

  Not that I can mock. Ironically, because of my own decade-and-a-half imbibing kiestered Mexican tar, I got some kind of heinous, indestructible parasites. Souvenir of Los Angeles smackdom. For a while I had a job in downtown LA, five minutes from Pico-Union, 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 festive about the little pieces of red, 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.

  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 “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 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 the White American subconscious, between Aryan superiority and cleanliness. “Clean genes,” as Himmler used to say. Tune into MSNBC Lockup some weekend, when the network trades in the 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 peeing.) The Founding Fathers would be proud.

  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 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 recreation of an authentic 18-Something-Something mint issue Civil War coin with our nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, on one side, and the thirty-three-star Union flag on the other. Worth fifty “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 deliberately misspelled gold as genuine multikarat 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. This happened when I did too much. 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.

  So 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 fllls 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 his 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 wannabe. 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. 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 them.

  You don’t think they should give chickens heroin? Don’t think they deserve it? Well, call me visionary, 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 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 … 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’s could take those other damn drugs out of his birds. Hormones, antibiotics, beak-mite repellent … No thanks! That stuff could kill you.

  Don’t worry. I won’t be out of the business for long. I have a plan. A new campaign. Look: Camera pans a modest but nice house. Outside, a sweet LITTLE BOY swings on a swing. Stressed-but-pleasant-looking MOM looks on, wiping her brow. Mommy, watch! yells the boy. I’m watching, says the pretty-but-tired woman, casting glances back toward the second-floor window. In which—REVERSE—we see our GUY peering out. We push in on him. He looks down at a foreclosure notice in his hand, then back out at the scene in the yard. His face registers complicated feelings: pain, regret, sadness … But we know what he wants. He wants relief. The man sits down on the bed, pulls out his works, and prepares a shot. We hear, in V.O.: When I have emotions I don’t like, I take heroin … CUT TO: Man and wife together, in front of the swings. The man has his arm around the woman. The boy’s beaming.

  Heroin. It makes everything good …

  PaRT II

  SuRReNDeR TO THe VOID

  L.Z. HANSEN came to New York City in the early 1980s at seventeen years old, from London, England. She lived in the Chelsea Hotel and Hell’s Kitchen before eventually settling in the East Village. Hansen has worked as a hair and makeup stylist, clothing store owner, streetwalker, speedball addict, escort, massage parlor owner, writer, and madam. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies, has spoken at colleges on her life and writing, and is working on her first novel. Hansen hosts her own monthly reading series, and enjoys life in the East Village, where she resides with her family.

  going down

  by l.z. hansen

  Streets were hot, stinking hot. Sticky cans and discarded food collected around full garbage cans, and the flies were feasting. I felt cold. Goose bumps stood out on my arms. I noticed blood spots on the sleeve of my white long-sleeved shirt. I rolled them up just enough to hide the blood while still covering the pit of my elbow.

  Sweat trickled down my back, and made me squirm.

  A banged-up undercover cop car crawled past. The windows were rolled down, and two fat cops were sucking air. I slowed down and stood under a torn awning so they wouldn’t see me.

  One of them was the bastard who stopped me two nights ago on Rivington. On the street they called him Flash. I didn’t know if it was in reference to Flash the superhero or the Queen song. I hadn’t copped yet, but Flash swore he’d seen me score. He pulled me into a stairwell to pat me down. I knew he wasn’t allowed, but there was nothing I could do. I was lucky he didn’t plant something, and take me in. It’s best to let the cops do whatever they are going to do. He felt me up, and stuck his hands down my pants. I think he wanted me to resist. The fact that I didn’t pissed him off, and he told me to fuck off.

  “Mama, youse looking for the good shit?” A man with one eye and one leg steadied himself against the wall. He smiled a toothless grin.

  “No. Leave me alone.” I said. The man’s face stayed with me. One eye, one leg, and no teeth. I wondered what else he had lost. If I had one eye I’d wear a patch. Don’t see too many girls with an eye patch.

  Walk down Avenue C. It’s so quiet, and still daytime. The fiends weren’t fiending, yet.

  Houston Street. I saw a young hip-hop kid selling Road Runner by the Parkside Lounge.

  Butterflies flipped in my gut as I neared the buzzing block. The seller was wearing a lot of gold, and stood out too much. I had five hundred dollars on me, which when transferred into dope, should have been enough to get me through the weekend, but it never did. It’s never enough. Money had lost all meaning to me. It had become various amounts of heroin. My new currency. A hundred bucks meant a bundle; fifty, half a bundle; ten bucks, a bag; five bucks, a pack of smokes, not enough for a bag, and therefore meaningless. An annoying little piece of paper, unless accompanied by another five dollars, which had meaning, a whole bag of heroin.

  A haggard street hooker stood in front of me in the dope line, and bought one bag. A nice-looking rock dude, the type I liked, pushed in front of me.

  “Yo, da lady waz in front of youse,” the dealer said.

  Rock dude looked at me with hollow eyes and stepped back. Shame, looked like a cool guy, minus the dope.

  “How many, Mama?”

  “Five bundles.”

  “I got youse, I got youse …” He smiled flirtatiously. Then reached into his underwear and pulled out five bundles, tightly wrapped in rubber bands. I traded, money for heroin.

  Beautiful. All’s okay with the world. Now nothing could go wrong today. I felt my security blanket surround me.

  “Thanks. Will you be here later?” Don’t know why I said that, but I always did.

  Walk quickly, quickly. Get off the block, off the block. Don’t want to get stopped by the cops now. Hands deep in pockets, holding my life line.

  It felt so good to have dope on me. It was the only time in my day that I could slow down, and view the world I had long ago stepped out of. The sky, the blue-blue cloudless sky, the people, feelings. I felt powerful
and … safe at that moment. No one could touch me.

  Then a large sweaty man appeared out of nowhere.

  “Lady, please, you got a few dollars? I gotta get straight.”

  “Err … Hell no!” I looked at him like he was insane. I got mine, fuck him. Why would I give money away? That’s bullshit. I felt guilty at being so cold and mean, but everyone for themselves, right?

  I looked back, and saw him watching me. He made me nervous, and broke my momentary blissful view of the real world. I was bought back into my universe.

  I saw Marilyn walking with a young, thin Hispanic male I didn’t recognize.

  “Marilyn!” I yelled.

  Thank God, perfect timing. I could go over to her pad to get straight, instead of using the filthy bathroom at Odessa Restaurant.

  “Can I use your place?” She knew what I meant.

  “I was going to Tito’s, you can get straight there. Got a bag for me?” she said smiling, linking arms.

  Tito walked ahead, not talking. He took his T-shirt off and mopped his brow with it. He had a rough jailhouse tattoo of Jesus crying on the cross in the middle of his back.

  I trusted Marilyn. She had been out on these streets her entire life, and knew everyone. Every dealer, hustler, whore, and thief. In this life of disease, Marilyn was a beam of sunshine. She was always smiling. Even though she had little to smile about. She whored on Allen Street for ten bucks a pop and told me horrific tales of her life of abuse. Her ability to forgive and forget was astounding, and unusual. She had asked me why I spoke with an accent. I told her I was from London, England. She asked where that was, and if they spoke a different language there.