when i was 19 years old living in boston as a fresh college dropout (and as i would find out 6 years later, an egg) i tried heroin so that i could tell my friends about it. drugs had played a pretty central role in my day to day life since high school and like any other kid that age i tended to take anything with the right blend of danger and insight and make it my entire personality — eventually i’d learn to channel that obsessive nature fully into music and generally Being Alive but that was quite a ways away.
i got off work one night at about 2am and headed to my dealer’s house. he was the younger brother of another student i was somewhere between friends and acquaintances with — a burly paranoid typhoon of a human who wanted to be jim morrison almost as badly as i wanted to be kurt cobain. i usually would buy coke and weed from him and take whatever random pills he happened to have lying on the table; today the proverbial super mario box sporting a “?” contained something new.
“you see that bag on the table that looks like brown coke?”
“yeah.”
*laughs* “that’s heroin.”
this was it. with no shortage of shame i must admit i was really excited and had been fantasizing about this moment since age 14, walking around my high school campus nursing some heartbreak or another and listening to 40oz to freedom by sublime.
my dealer instructed me to rack out a little bump no bigger than my pinky nail (which since i bite them is even smaller than normal), and wait till i felt it before taking any more. naturally when it didn’t kick in immediately i insisted on doubling down. also as much as i’d love to leave this out i made a decisive point to put on something in the way by nirvana, which to this day sends a seismic cringe rattling down the length of my spine.
we went outside to smoke a cigarette, and immediately a new feeling washed over my body. i can best describe it as the comfort of a loved one putting a blanket over you, coupled with a really intense head rush. i sat down on the curb laughing.
anyone that’s done heroin before will tell you that it’s pretty normal to throw up. i maybe got to enjoy the initial feeling for 5 minutes before nausea took ahold — by this time we’d gone back inside and i’d found a literal blanket to lay on the couch under, but nature was calling.
i’m not sure if this was 15min or an hour, but most of my remaining memories of the actual high consisted of puking into my dealers bathtub while chugging blood orange pellegrino sparkling water in between bouts of nausea. eventually i began to come down and decided to go home, making my way downstairs to his living room. my dealers house was always directed by david lynch, the dialogue jumpy and the atmosphere thick with a decidedly bizarre dread. this entire incident his brother had been sitting in the corner of the living room spiraling out into the singularity of a xanax black hole, and he was still in position when i made it downstairs. while no one was looking, i stole two pills off the top of their fridge that i never ended up taking and they lived in the pocket of jeans i no longer own for quite some time after the fact. i never found out what they were, i think i just swiped them to feel guilty about something.
the part about this story that always sticks out to me is the visual component — they don’t tell you that heroin has a slight psychedelic component to it. everything looked like the first bit of the wizard of oz, sepia toned and monochromatic. a drug experience that had taken me straight to kansas as if it was the land of oz itself. i didn’t trust the wizard here (he was scary) and it was time to leave.
the oz comparisons don’t end at the light brown tinge to reality — i opted to walk home to my apartment as the sun was coming up, and as i navigated the boston streets still in an opiate haze my dealer rolled past me on his bike. cackling like the wicked witch herself as he disappeared into the fading summer darkness. one day i’m going to put that into a music video or something, it’s funnier the more i look back on it but at the time it was really strange and freakish and amplified my urge to get home to safety. eventually i made it to my mattress on the floor at 54 burbank street, and passed out as the sun came up.
it would take another 5 years for me to stop using hard drugs and another after that to quit drinking alcohol. i’d write sober shortly after the latter, a song about missing fucked up adventures such as the one above despite knowing all roads containing such mishaps tend to lead to the same destination. these days i find a lot of joy in seeking out strangeness without having to take a pill or snort or smoke or inject something as a cover fee, strangeness that since i’ve moved to new york city has been in no short supply. after using heroin that first time i made a point to tell everybody i’d done it, expecting shock and awe and pats on the back for some reason. i regret being repulsed and disappointed at my friends’ concern, like they were yawning at a trapeze act i’d spent months perfecting. i think i’m still learning to reckon with the piece of myself that feels as if she has to put herself in mortal danger and spiritual agony for attention — hopefully at that point i at least get a half decent song out of it. don’t do drugs kids :) or do, it’s none of my business
2 things to add:
-said dealer texted me like 5-6 years after this saying i owed him money and after responding in a panic asking what for, he said “just kidding lol” and i haven’t heard from him since. he might be dead
-i’m aware that there’s a deeply rooted and kind of beautiful irony in my posting this story for attention
one of my favorites