Heroin Chronicles

EDITED BY
JERRY STAHL

T
ABLE OF
C
ONTENTS

Introduction

PART I: REALITY BLURS

PART II: SURRENDER TO THE VOID

PART III: GETTING A GRIP

introduction modes of desperation

by jerry stahl

It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom
.

—Edgar Allan Poe

S
omewhere, a long time ago, I wrote:
All my heroes were junkies
. (Hey, you pick your cliché and you run with it. That's half of life. ) So let's march 'em out. The Junkie All-Stars: Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, Billie Holliday, William S. Burroughs, even Dylan, there for a while. (Not to mention Cliff Edwards, otherwise known as Ukulele Ike, the voice of Jiminy Cricket and a lifelong addict. Junkies have all the best stories. But we'll get to that.)

Of course, Rush Limbaugh seems to have also colonized his hefty keister onto the Heavyweight Fiend list, but that's these days. (And we're not going to hoist up Herman Goering, another fat-ass fascist, and drag him around the track.) Oxycontin, known to newshounds, aficionados, and Justified fans as Hillbilly Heroin, is so much easier to acquire and imbibe than the old-fashioned nonprescription variety.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not judging Rush. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. And there is no finer cure to self-hate than determined, euphoria-inducing opiate use.

Culturally speaking—shout out to Rush again!—opiate consumption now packs all the glamour of the buttock boil that kept the right-wing rant-meister out of Vietnam. For which, perhaps, Drug Czar R. Gil Kerlikowske could issue a gold medal for yeoman service in the name of addiction prevention. And I say this with respect. Growing up, if some right-wing pork roast had morphed into our national dope fiend, I would have found another line of work and become an alcoholic. Everybody knows the difference between them: An alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout and apologize when he finds out. A junkie will steal it and help you look for it. Call it a matter of style, or a mode of desperation. Nothing wrong with
Lost Weekend
or
Arthur
or
Days of Wine and Roses
, but give me
Panic in Needle Park, Man with the Golden Arm
, and
Requiem for a Dream
any day.

Ply Mother Theresa with appletinis for three days straight and she'll crawl out the other end with dry mouth and a hangover. Shoot her up for three days and by Day Four the saint of Calcutta will be strung out like a lab monkey, ready to blow the mailman for dime-bag money. Being a junkie is not a lifestyle choice—it's an imperative of molecular chemistry.

Still, Keith, Miles, and Lenny made it look pretty cool. (Even if, one learns the hard way, Lou Reed and Bird aren't on hand to tamp your forehead with a wet towel when you're kicking. By which point it's pretty clear that heroin, at the proverbial end of the day, is about as glam as puking on your oatmeal.)

It may have been some twenty years since I've stuck a needle in my neck, but it's not like everything above it has healed up nicely. Shooting dope isn't what made me a crazy, pissed-off, outsider sleazeball and one-man crippling fear machine. Heroin just gave me an excuse. But that's me. If the short stories you are about to read in this collection are about nothing else, they're about actions—occasionally hell-driven, occasionally hilarious, uniformly desperation-and-delusion-fueled actions—the kind made by those in the grip of constant gnawing need. The entire anthology, on some level, can be viewed as an eclectic and festive encyclopedia of bad behavior.