'Round she goes with the living dead
black lipstick and a cigarette
and her half-closed eyes are deeply set
and she stares out cold from
a shrunken head.

-- "Shrunken Head" Jack Logan, 1994, Twin/Tone Records


Our esteemed editor of this fine page (himslf far too much the gentleman to own up to his own expertise in treatment and counseling of the living dead) wonders why usage of heroin is on the rise. It's a good question, but one seldom asked of me. I'd be the first one to turn to, it has always seemed to me, since I've made no secret either personally nor in the professional world of my long, long romance with heroin. It goes by varying names according to trend and happenstance. My son, 27, tells me it is most commonly called "dope." He's rather amused when I tell him that in my day, it was marijuana which was referred to by using that term -- or illicit drugs in general.

That word, 'illicit' has now and always has had much to do with the very powerful allure of heroin, it seems to me. Despite the movieola image of huddled junkies in a fleabag dump splitting bindles and swooning into perfidy, disgrace, moral decay and imminent death, such is a scene I've never once seen. It simply wasn't my experience at all.

Heroin is a solitary and invisible companion, a phantasm. Shooting dope is an intensely private act, perhaps even more so than masturbation. But everyone masturbates! Or so I believed for many years. Through luck, grace, the care of friends and a thoroughly disciplined path of return, I grew old enough to know better. And I grew up enough, I suppose, to leave the skinny bitch alone.

I sincerely apologize to anyone offended by this usage: that skinny bitch. But it remains what I finally and privately called her, my heroin. There isn't any intended sexism nor any ism. As a young man I deeply and truly believed that, not so much the drug itself, but the trade in it was deliberately racist.

Shooting dope conjured up my sloppily-thought fantasy of somehow avenging a greivous moral wrong done to an innocent race of slaves. No one on this planet is able to entice me into explaining why this addled notion once made sense to me.

But I'll tell you how it felt: it felt white, like cotton, and more peaceful than snow. The roads disappeared, taking sound and sight along with it. My sportcoats all became Harris Tweed and my books had all been written. The dark had been banished.

2.

Let me tell you a story I've heard several times, told by a man older than I am, about his son. I first heard his tale in a smoky church basement, back in the day when even a countrified Southern church would allow smoking within its walls -- but only on carefully-set-aside evenings. Bad coffee, an immovable cloud of bluish, eye-watering smoke

Dean, my friend, began to drink heavily when he boarded a train for the first time out of the South and away from his family for more than a day or two. Dean isn't his real name, although a serious baseball could run through the history and the stats of Major League Baseball and figure out who I'm referring to. Dean, a very wiry man, but a naturally gifted athlete had been drafted by the Yankees during their ultimate glory years -- Whitey, Mickey, Maris, Berra -- that crowd. No more A ball for Dean. He made the change comfortably, pitched well and loved the life. On the road he roomed with Whitey and matched 'em all drink for drink and he often won the monthly Who Played Half Assed Decent With The Worst Hangover contest. They were all two-fisted country fellows and Dean was a fine additionn to the pen.

He learned about speed, which he didn't consider dope, along the way and later he learned about a simple way of calming down after the trucker's drugs and pre-game jitters. Just a little snort exactly 15 minutes before showtime. And Dean showed up in Yankee Stadium with a great pedigree -- his cleats were more horrendous than Cobb's, and he arrived with the mighty approval of Ernie Shore, the only pitcher to ever hurl a perfect game in relief.

The little snoot caught up with Dean in a big way and did so quickly. He retreated within -- almost always the pattern I've seen and experienced. Got injured and rode the train back to his country-ish home and ste at learning to become a machinist. It's on old story, from the syphilitic Bambino to Dock Ellis pitching a perfect game with a headful of blotter. (And at the time blotter wasn't the diluted toilet paper they sell for acid these days.)

What did I see in it? Hard to say, these days. Junk is rightfully called junk. The term 'smack' never made sense to me, because I've been smacked many a time -- in the parlance of the Deep South of the United States-- I've had the taste slapped out of my mouth. Junk flirts, doesn't smack. It murmurs, doesn't shout. It impresses no one, compels a user to trust no one at all, and yet trust reptilian middle-men who only wish for your life to continue so long as you have money to hand them.

It's the solitary choice of often decent folk, trying to find some sense, or some connection at least to a confounding worled swirling around and then past them. Duggy has noted a predilection among horn players. I've seen in with atletes, but no vocation is so strongly tied in my mind to the poppy's ooze as is mathmaticians, and specifically theoretical mathmaticians.

Heroin: a hitch-hiker's thumb in a carless world.