American Junkie

by Tom Hansen

  Copyright © 2010 Tom Hansen

  Soft Skull Press Edition 2017

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

  eISBN 978-159376-671-9

  Author Photo by Jim Tillman

  Book design by Jason Gitlin

  Drawings by Jason Brinkerhoff

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  FOREWORD

  Nixon started the War on Drugs fifty years ago, oblivious to the fact that the Sumerians were brewing beer a good eight-thousand years before Christ got his apostles ripped on goblets of O-positive. Between erecting pyramids and random cat worship, the Egyptians spent Sunday afternoons wasted on mead and figs. The Aztecs had ayahuasca and sacrifices, the first people to realize that yanking the heart from a virgin was the ultimate way to mainline. Coltrane was a junkie. So was Charlie Parker, and Miles before he cleaned up, or at least discovered coke. The boys in Mötley Crüe got so bored one night they shot straight Jack Daniels into the crook of their arms, which may be the single dumbest act of excess in human history. But if that’s all to be expected, what of our writers? Alexander Tocchi nodded across the Scots countryside and Paul Bowles prowled the opium tents of Tangier. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in a laudanum coma and Alistair Crowley shot pharmacy-grade H while worshipping Baal in dank castles. Coleridge dabbled and Keats chipped, but the true king of dope-lit was, of course, William Burroughs, who somehow remains an icon despite the fact that Naked Lunch is an incoherent fever dream of boy-lust, spilled paregoric, and bottled paranoia. The Burroughs junkie may have been a time-travelling, emotionless cipher, but at least he always got off.

  Clearly, there’s a theme here. Like, for instance, that drugs are fun. Maybe not for Nancy Spungen, or various acid casualties that can still be found under bridges in Oakland mumbling about MK-Ultra, but for most users—which includes almost everything from Coors Lite to forged Ativan scripts—it’s the only way to get through the day. Or at least the weekend. The need to blot consciousness is universal, since it’s a long, dirty slog just being alive, forever pretending that we’re going to be here forever, that we’re not all going to die, and soon. The biggest metaphysical joke of all is that if God exists, he’d prefer we didn’t for very long, and if he doesn’t exist, some random force is still going to pull our plugs.

  Hey it’s worth remembering that at the turn of the last century cocaine was legal, and opiates were the main component in most children’s medicines.

  Being a junkie is hard work. It’s an 80 hour a week job with no vacation pay and limited benefits. Amateurs do lines off strippers while their posses watch, or sing songs about hoping to die before they get old, but it’s the pros who really commit to nothingness, to the blank warm canvas of processed opiates. Pot is a Rasta’s Eucharist and mushrooms may WD40 the doors of perception, but heroin’s only answer is to insist on the meaninglessness of asking questions at all.

  Which is an argument even Johnnie Cochrane couldn’t glove his way out of.

  Tom Hansen’s American Junkie is a book that knows all these things down to its marrow, doesn’t even bother to say so. It attempts to impress no one, convince the reader of nothing. There are no solutions, no explanations, no redemption. Its mere existence insists that we’re all addicts at heart—some people just find more powerful anodynes. American Junkie is the best kind of tale of dissipation—unlike the million whiny mea culpas that came before and will come after— because it tells you “I did this, and then this, and then this.” Period. Hey, it could happen to you too. Or not. Doesn’t really matter either way. The junkie in jail or the junkie in a penthouse or the square who doesn’t even know he’s a junkie yet are all the same: suckers if they think they don’t have a line in this book written just for them.

  A few short words about veins, which are, miraculously, smart enough to hide. Veins know better, they shrink and retreat, sink into the muscle and fascia. Veins don’t want you to shoot junk, but give in resignedly in the end, carry that bull-rush of dope straight to your heart, like a reluctant but reliable friend. Or the worst enemy.

  Most addiction memoirs titillate the reader with the early madness, the almost-O.D.s and shootouts with dealers, then ease you into the long slog of getting clean. They peddle epiphanies that are actually just brute realizations: a relief after taking the Harley over the high side one too many times, the smell of bleach on the bathroom floor of the twelfth rehab. That book has already been written, and way too often. Sure, sobriety is a gift for friends and family, but there’s nothing more tired than the tale of getting clean. Jim Carroll was a better addict than he was a poet. James Frey wasn’t a junkie, just addicted to lying. Kurt couldn’t do it, and neither could Layne Staley, who both make just the right kind of cameo here— they show up mid-chapter, cop a few bags, and then leave. Hey, rock star junkies are just junkies with a little more money, so who gives a shit? The only thing worse than some navel-gazing hippie trying to explain the concept of time, or even the killer time-signature of YYZ, is the memoir that tries to sandwich its epiphanies between the glamour, the burnt spoons between the glamour. Tom’s not having it. He ran into the stars, and then the stars ran away with their dope.

  There is only ugliness, just before there is the truth. There are all the books where you immediately know the author is full of shit, with their clever metaphors about blood drawn back into the needle like crimson posies, about mosaics refracted in broken needles. Then there’s AJ, which doesn’t deign to try and impress. If you want arty polish, find it elsewhere. If you want Lou Reed metaphors and louche French dabbling, it’s not within these pages. There is no doubt that Tom put in his time, deserves a Heroin Union Card and monthly stipend just for getting through it all. He literally tried to negate himself. To erase his body and still his mind. He bears the very real scars from it. He asks you, with each sentence, exactly how far out on the powdered limb are you willing to go, how much do you have invested, to literally and literarily follow him?

  Some people get second chances, and others even deserve them. Some of us are emotionally damaged past the point of acceptance or redemption. There’s a need, a hole, and it must be filled, coal shoved into the furnace until there’s nothing left. Can any of us actually be recovered? Is there any point in being saved at all? To die at thirty-five or sixty-five feels arbitrary in the face of dying anyway, the likely void we will all return to that can only be approximated by the high that is impossibly low. The French say that orgasms are the petit mort, the “little death”, and they are no doubt right. But so is each shot of heroin. Booze can make you giddy or furious, weed full of creative notions or dumb epiphanies, coke an unwarranted sense of self-worth. Only heroin can give you nothing. Pure, cold squat. It’s the great equalizer in the sense that, if we’re being honest here, there’s absolutely nothing to equalize. You can exchange your twenties for a handful of nods and some scribbled lyrics, not to mention pericarditis and four years on a prison tier, or you could work hard every day and drink coconut water and do Cross Fit. One might have a moral or ethical edge, but either way, you’ll still wake up at forty with no clearer sense of the point of existence than you did in your previous thirty-nine.

  O
f course, Tom is clean now, has been for over a decade. Which is a great thing, because the world’s a better place with Tommy in it, and the random fact of being alive allowed him to write AJ, which is just the smack to the cheek you need— not to mention the rush of smack to the frontal lobe you need to experience, if only vicariously. American Junkie has been out of print for years, and it’s nearly a crime that it took this long to be re-issued. So let’s all thank our non-existent God that the fine people over at Soft Skull saw fit to rectify the problem. Now sit back on your cigarette-burned futon, spin a side of the first Suicide album, and crack open the binding of American Junkie on me—a book that’s real in the way that few things are.

  —Sean Beaudoin

  PREFACE

  This is a work of non-fiction. Scenes have been reconstructed from clear and vivid memories. Certain passages, wherein I was barely conscious, or high, have been reconstructed from memory fragments, some with the help of anecdotes related to me by friends and associates and recalling my general attitude at the time to create an internal dialogue.

  I know that memories can be subject to distortion over time. I know that temptation to spin the story to make me appear a certain way is insidious. That said, I have done my best to make this a true and factual account. Nothing has been made up. Medical records have been inserted to document the extent of my addiction, and subsequent damage to my body. News clippings and government reports have been included to document aspects of the story. Dialogue has been reconstructed from doctor’s notes and memories. Dates have been checked and events and scenes corroborated. Some names have been changed.

  PART ONE

  IN THE BALANCE

  [MAY 26, 1999]

  You come to.

  You’re not awake, exactly. For a long time now there hasn’t been much difference between being awake or being asleep. You’ve just opened your eyes again, that’s all.

  It’s morning sometime. At least it looks that way. The rising sun is pushing in through the curtains. It’s another day. Monday, Tuesday, it might even be Sunday. People might be out there going to church. You wouldn’t know.

  Your hand is moving. It gropes for a pack of Camels, and a cigarette moves in front of your face, then closer, between your lips. You light it and take a drag. The smoke leaves your lungs and hits the light, billowing out like blood in water. Another kind of smoke trails up from the end of the cigarette, bluish, more solid. It curls and tumbles upwards, and then, nothing. You lean back against a pile of dirty pillows.

  You haven’t left this room for months, this mattress for weeks. Everything you need is right here, within reach. The pink plastic Bubble Tape chewing gum box full of heroin. A beeper and phone. A glass of water, a burnt spoon and a plastic gram scale. A Zippo lighter, John F. Kennedy’s face engraved on it. Some cigarettes, Camel Filters. Hard Pack. A roll of paper towels. A hundred-box of brand new syringes, ten packs of ten in plastic bags, and a big bottle of antibiotics, 500mg capsules of Keflex. Cephalexin. To fix all the other fixes. At the foot of the bed is a big screen TV, it’s been on all night. It’s on all night every night.

  The Bubble Tape box looks like a chewing tobacco tin. You pop the lid, remove a twenty-five gram chunk of black tar heroin, eyeball two grams, split both, drop a half-gram into the spoon and add some water. You hold the Zippo under the spoon. There’s that steam, that smell, like burning tires and vinegar, twisting your spine.

  Carefully you set the spoon down on the soot-stained carpet, drop in a piece of cotton rolled from a torn up cigarette filter. You place the needle against the cotton and fill the syringe as full as you can, then set it aside. With your teeth you tear open a ten-pack of new syringes. You remove three more and fill them as well, drawing the plungers back as far as possible.

  It used to be so easy. Bulging veins all over your arms. Pipes. You didn’t even have to tie off. Just a little prick and it was there in a flash.

  There was no waiting.

  It’s not like that anymore. It’s not like... anything... anymore...

  From the hole in the side of your butt you remove a wad of paper towels, soggy and limp, yellowish brown in places, about the size of a grapefruit. You toss it out into the center of the room with the others. You run your finger around the lip of the wound, then inside, pushing here and there, feeling for a fleshy spot. But there is only bone. It feels like a dried out sponge, or rotting wood. You roll onto your other side, check the hole behind your other hip. Eventually you find a suitable spot, soft, fleshy.

  You line up the four syringes next to each other on the mattress. One by one, you stick them into the flesh and push the plunger.

  The heroin doesn’t do what it used to do, but it still does something. And something is better than nothing. You lean back against the pillows, light a cigarette and wait.

  This is the good waiting, a little longer than the old but good enough, you still know what’s coming.

  Gradually the heroin bleeds into the tiny capillaries working to repair you, then finds its way to the bigger veins hidden below your skin, then races through your bloodstream to your heart, then your head. Sheets of smoke float lazily in the light of the room. You pick up the remote. Some of the buttons are melted from dropped cigarettes. You flip through some channels, find Law And Order on TNT. You close your eyes.

  You come to. The center of the room is bright, glowing. Tiny particles of dust are caught in the light, drifting, floating. The dying stars of a shattered universe. Slowly they move out of the light and disappear.

  There’s your hand again, reaching for the phone. It did that yesterday, but then you pulled it back, like the day before that, and the day before that, and the week before that, and the week before that. When you couldn’t move your leg anymore. When you couldn’t get up. When you noticed the smell. Sickly sweet, like rotting meat. This time, your other hand moves to push the nine button, but it’s stuck, melted by a cigarette. The finger pushes harder and the button comes free. A faint beep comes from the receiver. The finger moves to the one button. Two faint beeps. The receiver moves to your ear and you hear it ring once, then a voice.

  [1967]

  “Tom!” I was quite deep in the woods but I could still hear her, the voice finding me through the trees. “Tom!” I looked down at my feet, where I’d trapped a garter snake under my sneaker. It was writhing, twisting, trying to escape. I bent down, picked it up by its tail. Holding it out in front of me I made my way toward the apartment, weaving around rotten tree stumps, ducking under branches and stepping on blackberry vines. I made sure to steer clear of the beehive I’d crashed into a short while before when Megan was chasing me. I scrambled out of the woods, across the makeshift back yard, climbed onto the cement patio and into the apartment through the sliding glass door. My mom was in the kitchen, cooking.

  “Look!” I said, holding up the snake.

  “Yee-ach!” she said, followed with a few of her Norwegian sayings that I didn’t understand but knew were the equivalent of ‘gross’ and ‘that’s disgusting.’

  “Get rid of that thing and go wash your hands. It’s time for dinner.”

  I flung the snake out onto the grass, ran back inside and into the bathroom. I turned on the tap, soaped up my hands and then grabbed the little brush and began scrubbing my nails. I don’t know how many times she’d told me that the black stuff that gathered under my fingernails was actually “Hundreds of tiny worms! Crawling, crawling!” she would say, rolling the r like she did in her accent. It sounded like “Crow-ling, crow-ling!”

  I don’t remember much, just fragments, images, certain events. I was six. A boy. Just like any other. I had Tonka Trucks and toy guns. A yellow road grader. I liked to play in the rain, in the dirt. There was a girl, Rebecca I think her name was. She helped me tie my shoes in kindergarten. I remember the curved staircase of our old house, the carpeted steps, the interlocking vertical planks, varnished a deep amber color, the trademark of the homes my dad built. I remembe
r the stories my parents told, of how they’d met on my uncle’s farm in Norway, gotten married after WWII, then moved here in 1957, sailed across the ocean on a ship. Stories about ‘the old country,’ they called it, stories about my eleven aunts and uncles and thirty-three cousins, stories about my family tree, about my history. Stories about me.

  We’d left our house in Edmonds, where I’d spent the first five years of my life, and moved into an apartment in Lynnwood, the next town over. It was a strange place, all spread out, just woods and hills and two-lane roads, not really a town at all in the traditional sense. I couldn’t figure out where it began and where it ended. Its main attraction was the highway that cut through it and the Fred Meyer, the couple grocery stores, gas stations and a drive-in movie theater along it.

  After I cleaned up we sat down to dinner. It was just the two of us. It’d been that way for a couple of years, since my dad stopped building houses. He was up in Alaska most of the time now, fishing King Crab. My mom had taken some housecleaning jobs to make ends meet. She couldn’t afford a babysitter so she would take me along. People would answer the door and she would say, “This is Tom, my son. He’s quiet. You won’t even know he’s here.”

  “I’m going to ride my bike down to the cliffs,” I said, after we finished eating.

  “Okay, just be back before dark.”

  I pushed my bike out into the parking lot. It was a big orange thing, a girls model, way too big for me. My dad picked it up second-hand from one of his friends. As I was about to climb on, I saw Megan, down at the other end of the parking lot with a couple of other kids. She was seven, a year older. Her parents owned the apartment building and lived in a house next door. Shortly after we moved in we became friends. We had a secret place, a hangout deep in the woods behind the apartments, next to a decomposing tree stump. I liked her, and I was very happy to have a friend in this new place. But then one afternoon in the parking lot, Megan picked up a small boulder and two-handedly brained me in the temple with it. Covered in blood, I ran home where my mom patched me up. I still have the scar on my temple. The first of many.