Some People’s Tales of ‘Junkie Chic’ Aren’t So Cool
I’ve heard that the comeback of heroin has spawned “junkie chic” in clothing styles and behavior trends. A movie called “Trainspotting” chronicles the desperate lives of some Scottish addicts. Apparently hard-drug-user slice-of-life stuff is cool again after a long period of exile.
But for me, needles and spoons never went away. For 30 years they’ve been inside the front door of my family home. You see, I grew up with three junkie brothers, impoverished, fatherless, in Florida, and my life has been colored with the residue of that experience.
Looking for funny junkie tales?
Let’s start with brother Ray. He and a buddy tried to rob a drugstore. Ray was the gunman; his weapon, a toy pistol. But when the cops came, his buddy drove off without him. To escape, Ray ran into an apartment complex, stripped off his shirt and merged into the crowd at the pool. Good tactic. Problem was, it was a senior citizens’ home. The cops easily plucked him from among the elderly waders and plopped him in prison for four years.
Next comes brother Biff, broke and strung out, living at Mom’s. He was flabbergasted one day to see a gardening truck pull up to the small concrete-block house, have the driver knock at the door and ask who owned a certain tree in the yard because he’d like to buy it. That’s my tree, said Biff, pale white, sun-shunning, often sickly, and ever the opportunist. The man paid Biff for the tree and dug it out of the yard, hauled it away. Dope money. Just like that. A junkie’s dream. Even Mom laughs at that story.
Then there’s Lowell, my closest brother, a year younger. He got hooked in his late 20s when he ventured back to our New Jersey origins and began commuting to New York City shooting galleries for a fix. He claims my writing saved his life, or perhaps a life term in a North Carolina jail. He was driving back to Mom’s house in Florida with other users and a load of narcotics when police pulled them over. There were questions about his license, about all of their licenses. (Aliases and fake IDs abound in the junkie world.) The cop was on the verge of doing a search when talk somehow drifted to the (then current) TV show “Airwolf.” I’d written for it. The cop’s favorite show, it turned out. May have seen my episode. He let them go without a search.
Junkie luck.
Ray was handsome, had charisma and charm. But he became the original south Florida junkie of the ‘60s, when drugs first appeared on the scene. He tells funny stories of how he put yard grass into a bag and sold that as pot. But he doesn’t talk about stealing paper route money from under my bed when I was 12, or the 40 bucks I’d hidden in a drawer so I could take Brenda Smith to the prom. (She went with someone else.) Or how he took our tiny black-and-white TV or our toaster to the pawn shop. He never laughs about the times he raided Mom’s pocketbook or took her car for repairs it didn’t need but she paid him for. But he’s cried. His first arrest was when I was 11, startled awake when detectives broke in the front door in the middle of the night and dragged him away.
These days most of Ray’s teeth are gone, he’s overweight and his skin is sagging off his neck as his habit ravages him. He’s been in and out of hospitals for various infections and health problems, but the one place he won’t go is to detox. Still, he says he’s clean today and will do the right thing.
Biff was once an excellent physical specimen whose gymnastic prowess in high school included a back flip dismount from the goal post on the football field. He played pool like a pro, winning tournaments and dope money on the Florida circuit. Always proud of his good looks, (he gel-styled his hair in a wave in the ‘60s) he lamented losing his teeth, a common junkie malaise. Several times, Biff showed up at my place to go cold turkey. But he was a constant addict, on smack or on the “clinic.” That’s where he went for methadone (synthetic heroin, government-sanctioned, stronger than the real thing, almost impossible to kick) when he was trying to get clean. He did too much of it, though. When it killed him at age 41, the autopsy reported that major organs were saturated with methadone.
Three years ago, Lowell reached the edge of the precipice. The best-looking, smart, a talented guitarist, he’d ballooned to 270 pounds, from eating tubfuls of Lucky Charms for every meal, a habit he and Biff had added to their toxic repertoire. Skin lesions and sores covered his body, and his matted, dirty long hair had dust in it. He lay in bed day and night except for rides to the clinic, suffered horrific nightmares, and he, too, lost most of his teeth.
In a struggle that amounted to a living nightmare itself, I got Lowell out of bed, on his feet, to skin and head doctors, on a gradually reduced methadone dose and into exercise. Now he has a new set of false teeth, is back to his normal weight of 190, and for the first time in his life, has a job. He also claims to be off the clinic, but junkies lie.
Deaths, prison terms, accidents and injuries, psychological scars and constant pain surrounded my brothers and their strange and pitiful hangout friends for three decades.
In the beginning, someone would get busted, sick or scammed out of his money. In the end, someone was shot, overdosed or walked too close to a moving train. In between were sick days, withdrawal, non-running cars, crime, phony names, fake addresses and unpaid bills. The garbage of life accumulated around them.
Junkie chic.
And stories? There’re a million of them. They come just before the pain, and after.
* H. Gregory, a pseudonym, is a writer and lives in Los Angeles.
