DjeneritJunkie
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Oct 23, 2011
- Messages
- 1
To anyone who spends any amount of time reading any amount of this semi-biographical story; thank you for taking time out of your day to read something I have written. I wrote this ten years ago, and upon reading what I had written, noticed that the only thing that is different is my attitude; surprising how little else has changed.
Chapter One: The Ritual
"When the fuck is he going to get here? I swear to God, if he doesn’t show up like real fucking soon I am going to die,” I agitatedly whimpered at my boyfriend Tony as I writhed and wretch in the seat next to him. He said nothing, but let out an irritated sigh, letting me know that he would like me to shut up and sit still. I knew he was preoccupied; busy dealing with the same runny nose, hot and cold flashes, and churning stomach that I was complaining about in the most annoyingly pitiful voice I could muster up. Unlike me, however, Tony knew that crying wouldn’t make the situation any better, and would only serve to make things more frustrating.
We were sitting in our parked car on a busy, one-way street in San Francisco; occupying ourselves in different manners while waiting impatiently for our heroin connection to arrive with the magic cure for our ailments. Tony intently watched the driver’s side mirror, studying each approaching vehicle, while simultaneously listening to me bitch and moan about how sick I was and how our connection was never going to show up. We hadn’t fixed since around nine o’ clock the previous evening, and the sickness was intensifying by the second. It was now three o’ clock in the afternoon on a nice, sunny day; which all of the “normal people walking up and down the street seemed to be enjoying. We, on the other hand, were busy hating life and every person who passed our car for their pleasure, a result of an apparent lack of chaos in life.
Suddenly, as if someone had just lit a fire under his ass, Tony sat straight up, making me jump in the process. “Here he comes, do you have the money ready?” He asked urgently. Amazingly, the very instant that Tony had finished his sentence I began feeling the tiniest bit better and life was just a little less miserable than it had been mere seconds before. My body was still very much in pain, and all of the symptoms that heroin withdrawl causes were still present, but the panic was gone. Until the drug was in my hand, something beyond my control could happen that would prevent it from ever getting there. Meaning that, until I was actually in possession of my dope, on top of being physically ill, I would mentally screw myself by ignoring my common sense and believing that he was not going to come and I was never going to “get well.” This would inevitably create anxiety and utter distress, which lead to mental and physical panic, the likes of which are beyond comparison.
I looked down the sidewalk and, sure enough, I saw Jorge making his way to our car. I pulled the wad of ten and twenty dollar bills out of my pocket and quickly recounted one hundred dollars for the umpteenth time. I rolled down my window and had to concentrate on controlling myself from jumping out of the car, sprinting down the sidewalk, and mauling him (had I not been so sick, and the idea of moving been so wearisome, I would have met him half way). Jorge was a Latino whom, we had heard through the grapevine, was affiliated with the Mexican Mafia. He didn’t speak very much English, and we didn’t speak very much Spanish. This meant that most of our conversations were limited to a, “hello, how much, when, where,” and sometimes, “can I pay you later?” But that was enough and it sufficed.
Unlike some other drug dealers we had dealt with in the past, Jorge was very reliable and operated in a professional manner. We attributed this to the fact that he himself did not actually use the drugs,; he was strictly distributional. He would tell us ahead of time if he was taking a day off, and would always call us back after we paged him, even if it was to tell us that he was out of dope (which was once in a blue moon), so that we would know to look elsewhere. It was a nice change - to be treated like human beings rather than dogs, like customers rather than burdens. For the most part, Jorge would even meet us on time; unless of course we were sick, whereupon he was almost always twenty to thirty minutes late. It is amazing how quickly one’s feelings can change about another person. Two minutes ago I wanted to inflict bodily damage on Jorge; now, as I watched him approach the passenger side window, I could have kissed him.
“Hola,” Jorge greeted us, as he stuck his hand through my open window.
“Hola. One hundred?” I said, pushing the folded bills into his open hand.
“Si, okay,” he responded in broken English, as he put three grams of hard, black tar heroin, wrapped in a plastic sandwich baggie with a knot in one end, into my eagerly awaiting palm.
“Gracias, see you manana,” I quickly mumbled, leaving no room for conversation.
“Okay, bye.”
“Alright, let’s go!” I hastily commanded Tony, who needed no prompting. He had already started the car, turned on the blinker, and was busy edging his way into traffic before I had finished my sentence. Seeing Jorge may and taken away the mental panic, but my body was now twice as pained as it had been a moment before. Although I disagree with those who believe that heroin addiction is a mostly psychological addiction; I do have to admit that a large part of it is. Simply having possession of my drugs made me more aware of every single discomfort, no matter how small; unlike the period spent waiting, when my mind was doing everything possible not to concentrate on my unease.
It seemed to take forever to reach our destination. Every red light we hit tested the heights of our willpower by having to sit at each one rather than running through them. At long last we pulled into the alley, which at different times of the day, for about a half an hour, we would become a part of the scenery of. The alley was really only around five to seven minutes away from where we had just scored, but, as sick as we were, it seemed like an eternity. We parallel parked between two other cars, rolled up the windows, turned off the ignition, and began our ritual.
I handed Tony our box (a traveling chess board that we had converted into a portable paraphernalia storage), from which he pulled a spoon, two half inch, one-hundred unit/one CC syringes (if the needle is half an inch or longer on syringes they are called long rigs or points and anything shorter are referred to as shorts on the street), and some cotton. He held out his hand and I gave him the plastic baggie containing the dope, which was already open, as I had unknotted it on our way over. He set the baggie on the dashboard and proceeded to hit it with the backside of my hairbrush in order to break up the large, rock-hard, three-gram chunk into smaller, more manageable pieces. While he was busy measuring out enough heroin to get us both good and loaded, I located a bottle of water in the back seat. “I need some water and a lighter,” Tony told me before looking up to see that I was already handing him both of the requested objects.
Moving as methodically as only a junkie can, Tony dropped the dope into the spoon and set it down on the center console, using an old business card as a coaster in order to keep the soot (caused by touching the flame of the lighter to the bottom of the spoon) from getting everywhere. He proceeded to pick up one of the syringes, drew up one hundred units of water, squirted it out into the spoon, and repeated this once more before picking the spoon back up, and holding the lighter under it. You have no doubt heard the saying, “a watched pot never boils.” Well it doubles as, “a watched spoon never boils.” And, as dope sick junkies waiting to get well, it never rang more true than the moment at hand.
As I intently stared at the spoon, willing myself to look away, but finding that I was unable to perform the simple task of turning my head or diverting my eyes, the familiar odor began to tickle my nostrils. “Oh, no,” I said quietly, more to myself than to Tony.
“What,” Tony asked distractedly, doing more so out of obligation than interest. I, however, was unable to answer him at that moment; I was busy trying to suppress the vomit that was creeping its way up my throat. Tony, being as absorbed as he was in finishing the task at hand, didn’t pursue an explanation. The only reason he had asked in the first place was to make sure that the police weren’t around; and seeing as I wasn’t panicking, or yelling for him to, “hide the shit,” he deduced that they weren’t. I understood all too well, knowing that the “normal “obligations usually required of a significant other did not apply at moments like these. This suited me just fine, being that I was fully conscious of the fact that if I so much as opened my mouth, I was going to be sick all over the car.
Melting down and bringing heroin to a small boil releases a very potent odor. Some junkies, like Tony, will tell you that they love the aroma of boiling heroin. Others, myself included, are happy that the scent is there, but aren’t particularly fond of it. When dope sick, the smell is more than we can stand. I, unfortunately, despite all attempts to breathe exclusively through my mouth, got a nice big whiff of the sticky tar being liquefied. Alas, all of the concentrating on not vomiting that I had done was in vain. I barely had time to open the car door before I began throwing up the most hideous bile in existence.
If you are a junkie and are reading this, then you know what I am talking about. Let me explain for the rest of you. Some junkies, after so many hours of being dope sick, will feel like they have something (which I call a tick), stuck in the back of their throat. They will swallow and cough, and swallow and cough, over and over again, but it won’t go away. What eventually happens is that, in the process of trying to remove this tick, they swallow so much that their stomach fills with saliva. Then something happens: the car bounces the wrong way, they smell something rancid, or maybe they cough again in their attempt at dislodging the tick. No matter what the catalyst may be the result is the same: that person will gag. Once the gagging has started it cannot be stopped and the junkie will eventually begin to vomit.
Because their stomachs are full of saliva (and usually nothing else since eating is not something dope sick people do), that is all they have to throw up. But saliva on the way up looks, tastes, and feels different than it does on the way down. Unlike what you are accustomed to swallowing, this is a very sour, foamy yet goopy, green tinted substance, the likes of which can be compared to nothing that I have ever seen. Sooner or later though, the junkie will run out of saliva to vomit up, and that is when it gets really ugly, because next comes the bile. As if bile isn’t revolting enough as it is, dope sick bile is just a little more intense. It is neon green/yellow and is the most putrid tasting, nasty smelling, disgusting looking slime that I have ever seen (let alone tasted).
Not all junkies are lucky enough to have this as a symptom of withdrawl. Tony never once threw up due to being dope sick. Whereas I have driven from Napa to San Francisco (45 minutes to two and a half hours depending on traffic), and waited for my dealer while clutching a plastic shopping bag which I would sporadically stick my head into order to vomit.
Now, I am sure that you are all asking yourselves, “did she really need to go into that much detail?” I just wanted to paint a picture, you know, put you in a junkie’s shoes for a moment, to give you as accurate an idea as possible of some of the things that we endure due to our little problem.
So, while I was busy vomiting up my insides, Tony was drawing up the last of the melted dope with a syringe. I finished my business, took a couple of deep breaths, rinsed my mouth out with some water, wiped my face, closed my door, and turned to see where Tony was in the process of getting well. My rig was full and sitting on the center console, but I had to wait until Tony was done so that he could hit me. Luckily, he already had the needle in the crook of his arm, and was pulling the plunger back to see if he had hit a vein (this is called taking drawback, registering, or getting a flash). The empty space in the syringe quickly filled with the crimson red of his blood. He unwrapped the belt from around his bicep and began to push the plunger to the bottom of the needle. Once he had emptied all of the heroin out, he pulled the plunger back a tiny bit (called jacking back) so that when he removed the needle from his arm it wouldn’t burn. He pulled the rig out of his arm with a quick jerk, licked the drop of blood that came out with it, and let out a grateful sigh of relief.
I hoped that his relief would last, although I could almost guarantee that it wouldn’t. Since I was unable to maneuver the needle well enough and had never actually stuck a needle into my own skin, I was dependent on Tony to do it for me. Unfortunately for both of us, God hadn’t exactly designed me with the veins to be a junkie, and unlike Tony, I was going to have to search for anything even resembling a vein. This dependence was the cause of many fights, and neither of us was looking forward to the task that lay ahead of us. I grabbed the belt and held if in front of Tony’s half-closed, glazed over eyes, which were fixed in a far off, content stare; reminding him that I was still sick and would like to feel better as well. He let out a sigh of disappointment, grudgingly took the belt from me, wrapped it around my bicep, and the search began.
Rather than making Tony look, I, being the ever-considerate girlfriend that I am, allowed him to nod off while I scoured my barren arm. I pumped my fist a few times in order to get the blood flowing better, and started to lightly run my fingers over the top and bottom of my forearm. I found four possibilities: two on the back of my hand, one on the underside of my wrist, and one on the inside of my forearm, before I apologetically disturbed Tony from his blissful nod.
“Hey,” I said, lightly tapping his shoulder, “I found a couple of things for you to look at.” He let out the unhappy groan that I was expecting, pulled himself together, and picked up the syringe.
“Where?” he dishearteningly asked, expecting the usual hour-long game of hide and seek to ensue. I pointed to the vein on the back of my hand. He began to lightly push on it and shook his head after a couple of seconds, indicating that he doubted we would hit it and not worth the time it would take to try for it. I turned my arm over and pointed out the extremely thin vein on my wrist. This time he could actually see the vein I was pointing out and proceeded to lightly slap the area right under the palm of my hand. “Okay,” he warned. “Stay still.”
“Be gentle,” I instructed (I told him this every single time he ever put a needle in me). Closing my eyes, I nodded, giving him permission to begin. I held my breath until I felt him push the needle through the top layer of skin.
“I’m under the skin,” he informed me, as he began pushing and pulling the needle in and out of my skin at different angles. I felt him (I didn’t like to watch) push in and pull out three times. I was just about to tell him that we weren’t going to hit this one when I heard him say, “I got it.”
“You do?” I hesitantly asked, expecting him to tell me no, never mind, but hoping that he was right the first time.
“Yep,” he said matter-a-factly, sounding much more self assured than he did a second ago.
“Go slow, it’s a small vein,” I directed him as if he were the one who couldn’t hit himself or done this everyday for the last year and a half.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said exasperatingly as he began to lightly push down on the plunger. As I sat there, as still as I possibly could, I began praying under my breath.
“Please, let him keep it,” I quietly pleaded over and over again. It was amazing that he had hit a vein so quickly, but it would be a miracle if he was able to get the entire shot into this vein without either blowing it up (poking a hole all the way through the vein, causing a blood pocket under my skin), or just slipping out and losing it for good. “Ow, ow, ow, stop, stop, stop!” I cried frantically as it began burning up the entire length of my arm. I made the motion that I was going to rub my arm, but stopped just above my skin and began fanning the area that was stinging, knowing that we could lose the vein if I so much as flinched. “Check,” I told him.
“This is why we lose them,” he complained. “You make me check like eight times before I’m done” Tony snapped while taking more drawback to reassure that he was still in the vein. “Yep,” he said as if he knew all along.
“Thank you God,” I whispered as Tony resumed the tedious chore of ever-so-slowly pushing the plunger to the bottom of the syringe. He had to stop three more times to ensure that we didn’t blow the vein up by pushing too much in too fast.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he pushed the last drop of heroin out of the needle and into my vein, granting me a long awaited and much anticipated reprieve at last. “Thank you baby,” I said in a grateful, relaxed voice as I leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“You’re welcome sweetie,” he sighed, his voice dripping with the relief. Now that we were both feeling a million times better than we had just minutes before we began the clean up process that followed every performance of our ritual. I understood the reason for the relief in his voice because I felt the exact same way. We were both so happy that it wasn’t the standard enormously frustrating ordeal that plagued us night after night. Thankfully, God had taken pity on me for the moment, and we would be able to put off the screaming match for an hour or so, until it was time to fix again.
Usually, after several wearisome hours spent looking and digging, by the time a vein was found we would be at each other’s throats, yelling and screaming obscenities and things that we would later regret at one another.
These gruesomely painful hours would always end with me having tears streaming down my pinched looking cheeks while staring Tony down with puffy, red, rubbed to hell eyes, wailing and accusing him of not really wanting to hit a vein on me, and that he was missing on purpose. Looking back on it, the only reason that I can come up with for acting the way I did is that it must have been my insane idea of motivation. Although I knew that my allegations were preposterous, all of my yelling and screaming must have been my way of encouraging him to try harder. I can’t think of any other reason for my behavior at that point in time. A few years later, after Tony had completely stopped shooting me up, on the rare occasion that he decided to help me, were I to talk/yell at him like that he would tell me to, “fuck off, do it yourself,” and refuse to help me in any way for quite awhile after that. When I think back I am absolutely amazed at the audacity of my motivation process and the fact that I thought that it was okay for me to take out my frustrations on him.
It had been a mere minute or so, and I was already feeling so much better. Nobody can explain what it feels like to shoot heroin, but I am going to attempt to anyway. For me, when the dope hits my blood stream, I get, what I refer to as “the tidal wave,” or just “the wave,” which washes over each individual part of my body one at a time. When it first rolls in, my body is tense and aching. The wave crashes over every tight muscle in a certain area, creating a flooding sensation. The moment the wave touches an ache or pain, that section become completely relaxed, making my body feel heavy and warm (the heaviness is my favorite part). Once the wave has done it’s job in one location it proceeds to the next, beginning in my stomach and traveling to the tips of my extremities. The wave is intensified one hundred fold if I am sick when I shoot up, making it feel like the heroin is literally gluing my bones and body back together. It is as if the dope is holding me, wrapping these big, warm, strong arms around me and keeping me happy, safe, and cozy.
We finished picking everything up and started the car. I nestled into my seat to enjoy the ride home. We pulled onto the freeway, both of us feeling much better on the ride home than we had on the ride down. Now that we were back in our own skin we could resume our boyfriend/girlfriend roles and relationship. While sick, everything gets put on hold. There are no, “I love you’s,” or any other sort of sentiment or affection being exchanged. There is only one thing on any junkie’s mind, and that is getting well. However, once that is accomplished, business can commence as usual, and the terms of endearment and syrupy exchanges work their way back into our conversations. I would always laugh at Tony after he shot up, because the first thing that he would do , every time, without fail (unless we were sick beforehand), was rub the end of his nose with the palm of his hand, turn to me, and tell me, “I love you so much,” in his I-just-injected-a-big-shot-of heroin voice (which is at least three octaves lower than before his shot and much slower at articulating words). Then he would lean over and plant a big kiss on my lips, smile lovingly at me, and perform Eskimo kisses on my nose. We could be in the middle of a huge argument seconds before he hit a vein, but as soon as he was done fixing he would totally forget the fight and would sometimes even apologize to me (which was a huge deal, since he was always right). It was almost as if the last ten units of heroin in the syringe contained some sort of personality changer. The moment he pushed the last few units into his vein he would become a lovey-dovey, touchy-feely, sentimental guy who wanted nothing more than to kiss and cuddle me.
So the conversation on the way home consisted of the normal, “we’re going to be together forever and be the happiest couple in the world,” promises to one another. Or the ever famous, “we’re going to get clean, get our shit together, and live happily ever after.” Unfortunately, we knew that our dreams were not likely to come true given our current situation, circumstances, frames of mind, and motivation levels.
There was a time, long ago, when promises of this nature were a possibility. Once upon a time, I could actually picture myself living the standard American dream (or at least semi-standard), with typical accommodations (the house, the job, the 2 cars, and the 2.5 children), and being relatively happy. Life had not always been like this. I was not born with the giant gorilla of heroin addiction strapped to my back, rubbing feces in my face. I can remember a time when I didn’t have to shoot smack just so I could function as any kind of a human being. I hadn’t always had to wake up in the morning, plagued with the anxiety of having to come up with some new scheme to get enough money to score. My life didn’t always revolve around whether or not my dealer was going to be able to meet me or have the dope to sell to me. Long ago in a land far away, I was a normal human being instead of the desperate junkie that I had become.
Chapter One: The Ritual
"When the fuck is he going to get here? I swear to God, if he doesn’t show up like real fucking soon I am going to die,” I agitatedly whimpered at my boyfriend Tony as I writhed and wretch in the seat next to him. He said nothing, but let out an irritated sigh, letting me know that he would like me to shut up and sit still. I knew he was preoccupied; busy dealing with the same runny nose, hot and cold flashes, and churning stomach that I was complaining about in the most annoyingly pitiful voice I could muster up. Unlike me, however, Tony knew that crying wouldn’t make the situation any better, and would only serve to make things more frustrating.
We were sitting in our parked car on a busy, one-way street in San Francisco; occupying ourselves in different manners while waiting impatiently for our heroin connection to arrive with the magic cure for our ailments. Tony intently watched the driver’s side mirror, studying each approaching vehicle, while simultaneously listening to me bitch and moan about how sick I was and how our connection was never going to show up. We hadn’t fixed since around nine o’ clock the previous evening, and the sickness was intensifying by the second. It was now three o’ clock in the afternoon on a nice, sunny day; which all of the “normal people walking up and down the street seemed to be enjoying. We, on the other hand, were busy hating life and every person who passed our car for their pleasure, a result of an apparent lack of chaos in life.
Suddenly, as if someone had just lit a fire under his ass, Tony sat straight up, making me jump in the process. “Here he comes, do you have the money ready?” He asked urgently. Amazingly, the very instant that Tony had finished his sentence I began feeling the tiniest bit better and life was just a little less miserable than it had been mere seconds before. My body was still very much in pain, and all of the symptoms that heroin withdrawl causes were still present, but the panic was gone. Until the drug was in my hand, something beyond my control could happen that would prevent it from ever getting there. Meaning that, until I was actually in possession of my dope, on top of being physically ill, I would mentally screw myself by ignoring my common sense and believing that he was not going to come and I was never going to “get well.” This would inevitably create anxiety and utter distress, which lead to mental and physical panic, the likes of which are beyond comparison.
I looked down the sidewalk and, sure enough, I saw Jorge making his way to our car. I pulled the wad of ten and twenty dollar bills out of my pocket and quickly recounted one hundred dollars for the umpteenth time. I rolled down my window and had to concentrate on controlling myself from jumping out of the car, sprinting down the sidewalk, and mauling him (had I not been so sick, and the idea of moving been so wearisome, I would have met him half way). Jorge was a Latino whom, we had heard through the grapevine, was affiliated with the Mexican Mafia. He didn’t speak very much English, and we didn’t speak very much Spanish. This meant that most of our conversations were limited to a, “hello, how much, when, where,” and sometimes, “can I pay you later?” But that was enough and it sufficed.
Unlike some other drug dealers we had dealt with in the past, Jorge was very reliable and operated in a professional manner. We attributed this to the fact that he himself did not actually use the drugs,; he was strictly distributional. He would tell us ahead of time if he was taking a day off, and would always call us back after we paged him, even if it was to tell us that he was out of dope (which was once in a blue moon), so that we would know to look elsewhere. It was a nice change - to be treated like human beings rather than dogs, like customers rather than burdens. For the most part, Jorge would even meet us on time; unless of course we were sick, whereupon he was almost always twenty to thirty minutes late. It is amazing how quickly one’s feelings can change about another person. Two minutes ago I wanted to inflict bodily damage on Jorge; now, as I watched him approach the passenger side window, I could have kissed him.
“Hola,” Jorge greeted us, as he stuck his hand through my open window.
“Hola. One hundred?” I said, pushing the folded bills into his open hand.
“Si, okay,” he responded in broken English, as he put three grams of hard, black tar heroin, wrapped in a plastic sandwich baggie with a knot in one end, into my eagerly awaiting palm.
“Gracias, see you manana,” I quickly mumbled, leaving no room for conversation.
“Okay, bye.”
“Alright, let’s go!” I hastily commanded Tony, who needed no prompting. He had already started the car, turned on the blinker, and was busy edging his way into traffic before I had finished my sentence. Seeing Jorge may and taken away the mental panic, but my body was now twice as pained as it had been a moment before. Although I disagree with those who believe that heroin addiction is a mostly psychological addiction; I do have to admit that a large part of it is. Simply having possession of my drugs made me more aware of every single discomfort, no matter how small; unlike the period spent waiting, when my mind was doing everything possible not to concentrate on my unease.
It seemed to take forever to reach our destination. Every red light we hit tested the heights of our willpower by having to sit at each one rather than running through them. At long last we pulled into the alley, which at different times of the day, for about a half an hour, we would become a part of the scenery of. The alley was really only around five to seven minutes away from where we had just scored, but, as sick as we were, it seemed like an eternity. We parallel parked between two other cars, rolled up the windows, turned off the ignition, and began our ritual.
I handed Tony our box (a traveling chess board that we had converted into a portable paraphernalia storage), from which he pulled a spoon, two half inch, one-hundred unit/one CC syringes (if the needle is half an inch or longer on syringes they are called long rigs or points and anything shorter are referred to as shorts on the street), and some cotton. He held out his hand and I gave him the plastic baggie containing the dope, which was already open, as I had unknotted it on our way over. He set the baggie on the dashboard and proceeded to hit it with the backside of my hairbrush in order to break up the large, rock-hard, three-gram chunk into smaller, more manageable pieces. While he was busy measuring out enough heroin to get us both good and loaded, I located a bottle of water in the back seat. “I need some water and a lighter,” Tony told me before looking up to see that I was already handing him both of the requested objects.
Moving as methodically as only a junkie can, Tony dropped the dope into the spoon and set it down on the center console, using an old business card as a coaster in order to keep the soot (caused by touching the flame of the lighter to the bottom of the spoon) from getting everywhere. He proceeded to pick up one of the syringes, drew up one hundred units of water, squirted it out into the spoon, and repeated this once more before picking the spoon back up, and holding the lighter under it. You have no doubt heard the saying, “a watched pot never boils.” Well it doubles as, “a watched spoon never boils.” And, as dope sick junkies waiting to get well, it never rang more true than the moment at hand.
As I intently stared at the spoon, willing myself to look away, but finding that I was unable to perform the simple task of turning my head or diverting my eyes, the familiar odor began to tickle my nostrils. “Oh, no,” I said quietly, more to myself than to Tony.
“What,” Tony asked distractedly, doing more so out of obligation than interest. I, however, was unable to answer him at that moment; I was busy trying to suppress the vomit that was creeping its way up my throat. Tony, being as absorbed as he was in finishing the task at hand, didn’t pursue an explanation. The only reason he had asked in the first place was to make sure that the police weren’t around; and seeing as I wasn’t panicking, or yelling for him to, “hide the shit,” he deduced that they weren’t. I understood all too well, knowing that the “normal “obligations usually required of a significant other did not apply at moments like these. This suited me just fine, being that I was fully conscious of the fact that if I so much as opened my mouth, I was going to be sick all over the car.
Melting down and bringing heroin to a small boil releases a very potent odor. Some junkies, like Tony, will tell you that they love the aroma of boiling heroin. Others, myself included, are happy that the scent is there, but aren’t particularly fond of it. When dope sick, the smell is more than we can stand. I, unfortunately, despite all attempts to breathe exclusively through my mouth, got a nice big whiff of the sticky tar being liquefied. Alas, all of the concentrating on not vomiting that I had done was in vain. I barely had time to open the car door before I began throwing up the most hideous bile in existence.
If you are a junkie and are reading this, then you know what I am talking about. Let me explain for the rest of you. Some junkies, after so many hours of being dope sick, will feel like they have something (which I call a tick), stuck in the back of their throat. They will swallow and cough, and swallow and cough, over and over again, but it won’t go away. What eventually happens is that, in the process of trying to remove this tick, they swallow so much that their stomach fills with saliva. Then something happens: the car bounces the wrong way, they smell something rancid, or maybe they cough again in their attempt at dislodging the tick. No matter what the catalyst may be the result is the same: that person will gag. Once the gagging has started it cannot be stopped and the junkie will eventually begin to vomit.
Because their stomachs are full of saliva (and usually nothing else since eating is not something dope sick people do), that is all they have to throw up. But saliva on the way up looks, tastes, and feels different than it does on the way down. Unlike what you are accustomed to swallowing, this is a very sour, foamy yet goopy, green tinted substance, the likes of which can be compared to nothing that I have ever seen. Sooner or later though, the junkie will run out of saliva to vomit up, and that is when it gets really ugly, because next comes the bile. As if bile isn’t revolting enough as it is, dope sick bile is just a little more intense. It is neon green/yellow and is the most putrid tasting, nasty smelling, disgusting looking slime that I have ever seen (let alone tasted).
Not all junkies are lucky enough to have this as a symptom of withdrawl. Tony never once threw up due to being dope sick. Whereas I have driven from Napa to San Francisco (45 minutes to two and a half hours depending on traffic), and waited for my dealer while clutching a plastic shopping bag which I would sporadically stick my head into order to vomit.
Now, I am sure that you are all asking yourselves, “did she really need to go into that much detail?” I just wanted to paint a picture, you know, put you in a junkie’s shoes for a moment, to give you as accurate an idea as possible of some of the things that we endure due to our little problem.
So, while I was busy vomiting up my insides, Tony was drawing up the last of the melted dope with a syringe. I finished my business, took a couple of deep breaths, rinsed my mouth out with some water, wiped my face, closed my door, and turned to see where Tony was in the process of getting well. My rig was full and sitting on the center console, but I had to wait until Tony was done so that he could hit me. Luckily, he already had the needle in the crook of his arm, and was pulling the plunger back to see if he had hit a vein (this is called taking drawback, registering, or getting a flash). The empty space in the syringe quickly filled with the crimson red of his blood. He unwrapped the belt from around his bicep and began to push the plunger to the bottom of the needle. Once he had emptied all of the heroin out, he pulled the plunger back a tiny bit (called jacking back) so that when he removed the needle from his arm it wouldn’t burn. He pulled the rig out of his arm with a quick jerk, licked the drop of blood that came out with it, and let out a grateful sigh of relief.
I hoped that his relief would last, although I could almost guarantee that it wouldn’t. Since I was unable to maneuver the needle well enough and had never actually stuck a needle into my own skin, I was dependent on Tony to do it for me. Unfortunately for both of us, God hadn’t exactly designed me with the veins to be a junkie, and unlike Tony, I was going to have to search for anything even resembling a vein. This dependence was the cause of many fights, and neither of us was looking forward to the task that lay ahead of us. I grabbed the belt and held if in front of Tony’s half-closed, glazed over eyes, which were fixed in a far off, content stare; reminding him that I was still sick and would like to feel better as well. He let out a sigh of disappointment, grudgingly took the belt from me, wrapped it around my bicep, and the search began.
Rather than making Tony look, I, being the ever-considerate girlfriend that I am, allowed him to nod off while I scoured my barren arm. I pumped my fist a few times in order to get the blood flowing better, and started to lightly run my fingers over the top and bottom of my forearm. I found four possibilities: two on the back of my hand, one on the underside of my wrist, and one on the inside of my forearm, before I apologetically disturbed Tony from his blissful nod.
“Hey,” I said, lightly tapping his shoulder, “I found a couple of things for you to look at.” He let out the unhappy groan that I was expecting, pulled himself together, and picked up the syringe.
“Where?” he dishearteningly asked, expecting the usual hour-long game of hide and seek to ensue. I pointed to the vein on the back of my hand. He began to lightly push on it and shook his head after a couple of seconds, indicating that he doubted we would hit it and not worth the time it would take to try for it. I turned my arm over and pointed out the extremely thin vein on my wrist. This time he could actually see the vein I was pointing out and proceeded to lightly slap the area right under the palm of my hand. “Okay,” he warned. “Stay still.”
“Be gentle,” I instructed (I told him this every single time he ever put a needle in me). Closing my eyes, I nodded, giving him permission to begin. I held my breath until I felt him push the needle through the top layer of skin.
“I’m under the skin,” he informed me, as he began pushing and pulling the needle in and out of my skin at different angles. I felt him (I didn’t like to watch) push in and pull out three times. I was just about to tell him that we weren’t going to hit this one when I heard him say, “I got it.”
“You do?” I hesitantly asked, expecting him to tell me no, never mind, but hoping that he was right the first time.
“Yep,” he said matter-a-factly, sounding much more self assured than he did a second ago.
“Go slow, it’s a small vein,” I directed him as if he were the one who couldn’t hit himself or done this everyday for the last year and a half.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he said exasperatingly as he began to lightly push down on the plunger. As I sat there, as still as I possibly could, I began praying under my breath.
“Please, let him keep it,” I quietly pleaded over and over again. It was amazing that he had hit a vein so quickly, but it would be a miracle if he was able to get the entire shot into this vein without either blowing it up (poking a hole all the way through the vein, causing a blood pocket under my skin), or just slipping out and losing it for good. “Ow, ow, ow, stop, stop, stop!” I cried frantically as it began burning up the entire length of my arm. I made the motion that I was going to rub my arm, but stopped just above my skin and began fanning the area that was stinging, knowing that we could lose the vein if I so much as flinched. “Check,” I told him.
“This is why we lose them,” he complained. “You make me check like eight times before I’m done” Tony snapped while taking more drawback to reassure that he was still in the vein. “Yep,” he said as if he knew all along.
“Thank you God,” I whispered as Tony resumed the tedious chore of ever-so-slowly pushing the plunger to the bottom of the syringe. He had to stop three more times to ensure that we didn’t blow the vein up by pushing too much in too fast.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he pushed the last drop of heroin out of the needle and into my vein, granting me a long awaited and much anticipated reprieve at last. “Thank you baby,” I said in a grateful, relaxed voice as I leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“You’re welcome sweetie,” he sighed, his voice dripping with the relief. Now that we were both feeling a million times better than we had just minutes before we began the clean up process that followed every performance of our ritual. I understood the reason for the relief in his voice because I felt the exact same way. We were both so happy that it wasn’t the standard enormously frustrating ordeal that plagued us night after night. Thankfully, God had taken pity on me for the moment, and we would be able to put off the screaming match for an hour or so, until it was time to fix again.
Usually, after several wearisome hours spent looking and digging, by the time a vein was found we would be at each other’s throats, yelling and screaming obscenities and things that we would later regret at one another.
These gruesomely painful hours would always end with me having tears streaming down my pinched looking cheeks while staring Tony down with puffy, red, rubbed to hell eyes, wailing and accusing him of not really wanting to hit a vein on me, and that he was missing on purpose. Looking back on it, the only reason that I can come up with for acting the way I did is that it must have been my insane idea of motivation. Although I knew that my allegations were preposterous, all of my yelling and screaming must have been my way of encouraging him to try harder. I can’t think of any other reason for my behavior at that point in time. A few years later, after Tony had completely stopped shooting me up, on the rare occasion that he decided to help me, were I to talk/yell at him like that he would tell me to, “fuck off, do it yourself,” and refuse to help me in any way for quite awhile after that. When I think back I am absolutely amazed at the audacity of my motivation process and the fact that I thought that it was okay for me to take out my frustrations on him.
It had been a mere minute or so, and I was already feeling so much better. Nobody can explain what it feels like to shoot heroin, but I am going to attempt to anyway. For me, when the dope hits my blood stream, I get, what I refer to as “the tidal wave,” or just “the wave,” which washes over each individual part of my body one at a time. When it first rolls in, my body is tense and aching. The wave crashes over every tight muscle in a certain area, creating a flooding sensation. The moment the wave touches an ache or pain, that section become completely relaxed, making my body feel heavy and warm (the heaviness is my favorite part). Once the wave has done it’s job in one location it proceeds to the next, beginning in my stomach and traveling to the tips of my extremities. The wave is intensified one hundred fold if I am sick when I shoot up, making it feel like the heroin is literally gluing my bones and body back together. It is as if the dope is holding me, wrapping these big, warm, strong arms around me and keeping me happy, safe, and cozy.
We finished picking everything up and started the car. I nestled into my seat to enjoy the ride home. We pulled onto the freeway, both of us feeling much better on the ride home than we had on the ride down. Now that we were back in our own skin we could resume our boyfriend/girlfriend roles and relationship. While sick, everything gets put on hold. There are no, “I love you’s,” or any other sort of sentiment or affection being exchanged. There is only one thing on any junkie’s mind, and that is getting well. However, once that is accomplished, business can commence as usual, and the terms of endearment and syrupy exchanges work their way back into our conversations. I would always laugh at Tony after he shot up, because the first thing that he would do , every time, without fail (unless we were sick beforehand), was rub the end of his nose with the palm of his hand, turn to me, and tell me, “I love you so much,” in his I-just-injected-a-big-shot-of heroin voice (which is at least three octaves lower than before his shot and much slower at articulating words). Then he would lean over and plant a big kiss on my lips, smile lovingly at me, and perform Eskimo kisses on my nose. We could be in the middle of a huge argument seconds before he hit a vein, but as soon as he was done fixing he would totally forget the fight and would sometimes even apologize to me (which was a huge deal, since he was always right). It was almost as if the last ten units of heroin in the syringe contained some sort of personality changer. The moment he pushed the last few units into his vein he would become a lovey-dovey, touchy-feely, sentimental guy who wanted nothing more than to kiss and cuddle me.
So the conversation on the way home consisted of the normal, “we’re going to be together forever and be the happiest couple in the world,” promises to one another. Or the ever famous, “we’re going to get clean, get our shit together, and live happily ever after.” Unfortunately, we knew that our dreams were not likely to come true given our current situation, circumstances, frames of mind, and motivation levels.
There was a time, long ago, when promises of this nature were a possibility. Once upon a time, I could actually picture myself living the standard American dream (or at least semi-standard), with typical accommodations (the house, the job, the 2 cars, and the 2.5 children), and being relatively happy. Life had not always been like this. I was not born with the giant gorilla of heroin addiction strapped to my back, rubbing feces in my face. I can remember a time when I didn’t have to shoot smack just so I could function as any kind of a human being. I hadn’t always had to wake up in the morning, plagued with the anxiety of having to come up with some new scheme to get enough money to score. My life didn’t always revolve around whether or not my dealer was going to be able to meet me or have the dope to sell to me. Long ago in a land far away, I was a normal human being instead of the desperate junkie that I had become.
