Passing Through: Heroin & State Rehab Pt. 1

Passing Through: Heroin & State Rehab

Pt. 1

Author's note: any resemblance between this travelogue and reality is purely coincedental.

United States

2012

Forty-hour work weeks spent nodding out over a table saw or a kitchen prep table, puking in between cocaine injections while peeling potatoes. Getting fired constantly. Walking off job sites to cop.

Working just enough to get a wad, hit the interstate down to Paterson and come home with enough bricks for a few flips. From the woods to the hood & back again; the Green Mountain State to Section 8, bright lights with dog fights, sticks to bricks; all this for a dope habit. Specifically heroin, pre-fentanyl days. When the US still occupied Afghanistan. When the east coast got the real china white.

Best Buy, I-91, Pedigree, Rat Poison, Diamond, so many brands for so many little glassine packets. Dogfood, diesel, down, Donny Darko. A smack by any other name still tastes decent.

A little bit of check fraud, a little bit of return fraud, hocl some stolen merchandise, hock everything just to get well. My own mother is not exempt from this adult temper-tantrum I'm throwing. Call it psychological barbarism. Call it coping. If I'm lucky, I'll have few extra bags to get high on.

It's no wonder I just got dumped. I was busy dumping me, too. Somewhere in the depths of my psyche, there's a two year old child shut behind a dark closet door while two sleep-deprived adults follow the advice of conventional parenting:

Let the child cry until they are exhausted. They will eventually stop and learn to soothe themselves.

Jonny! Get out of your head and into the world, she would say.

Stop. Being. Anxious. Stop. Being. Depressed. They would say.

I move to Portland Oregon for a change of scenery.

Geting over a breakup, I try living houseless in a city for awhile. I try to get clean. What a joke.

The front page of the paper declares Multnomah county just decriminalized posession of all drugs in personal quantities. The picture displays a syringe going into the center of the county.

I work up enough paychecks to buy some weed to ship back east. I work cashier jobs in Gresham. I am also a "courtesy clerk". I am asked to round up shopping carts and to clear the broken glass around the bottle redemption machine. This is back when Oregon only paid five cents.

I'm sleeping under picnic tables, getting beat and robbed for selling weed on the wrong blocks. I don't know any better, just a kid from the sticks.

I'm open-sleeping in abandoned buildings, some of them actively under construction. I sleep in a different place every night, stealth-camping in occupied apartment complexes. Basements. Hallways. I get a job working as a canvasser for some democratic candidate. I could give a shit about politics but the pay is decent. I'm walking suburban neighborhoods, door-to-door handing out pamphlets, checking addresses off from a palm pilot.

I spend most of my shifts hiding out in dingy bar rooms sipping two dollar cans. I throw the pamphlets in the trash and clock out. Clean for a couple weeks, I am positively jonesing for a hit.

I seal up some high-grade indoor with a little hand-pump vacuum sealer. I do it inside park bathrooms and hide the weed in cereal boxes. I hop the light rail without paying and ride toward the airport post office.

I'm doing all of this from a place of privelege: White privelege. Male privelege. American privelege. I'm doing all this from a place of renunciation, pure loathing for "the system" of states and countries. I'm doing this from a place of wretched, guilty self-loathing and misanthropy. It's a tried-and-true edge-dweller formula for annihilation. Many modern tramps fall victim to this.

You're spoiled. You don't know how good you have it. You don't know how hard we've struggled to give you this. You don't know what it's like to go to bed hungry. They told me growing up.

Nobody told me the shit I'd learn in libraries that upended everything I was taught. The pinnacle of the industrial epoch, the exhaustion of planetary resources with industrial education corraling us like chattle. Nobody told me my heretical nature might be useful. They dismiss every "rebel without a cause", threatening to lock us up somehow, slowly binding and burning us against institutional pillars.

My own family behaving like enforcers, jailors, probation officers. Me, their investment. Their property. The old mentality of breeding; name the kids "Shovel", "Pick", and "Wagon". Name them like livestock so you don't get too attached.

Name them after leftover namesakes from a religion you don't practice. Name them something meaningless to you so it hurts less when you use them.

It's not their fault. They're too busy working and providing so we can have more than we could ever possibly need. Why? Because idle hands are the

devil's playground. Hard work keeps the bulwark of introspection at bay.

If their hands were idle, they'd have to face what they've been coerced into doing. They'd have to acknowledge the cliff they push toward.

Don't open that door. You don't have the bandwidth to handle what's behind that closet door. You'd weep for generations, the sins of the father.

Everyone warned me about PCP and heroin and cocaine but nobody warned me about the disconnect from culture, country, and lineage. Nobody warned me about all the prescription drugs that upend our sanity, that patronize a very necessary upheaval.

Whatever physical barbarism we phased out in the industrial age was merely replaced with psychological barbarism. Generations of repressed guilt & shame comes out in bizarre, chemical ways in the atomic age.

I was punished and piss-tested for smoking cannabis so I turned to the liquor cabinet and the medicine cabinet. You name it, I found it and used it. I began skipping class to read ethnobotanical manuals and studying pharmacology. From caboose to caboose, I later jumped to bottles of oxys & roxys legally prescribed, brought north from Florida.

Controlling the opiate trade in order to control a population is not an old trick. The British did it to China with opium. The Chinese do it to British Colombia with fentanyl. The wheel of opiate-commerce and chemical enslavement goes 'round.

Now I'm out west smoking that chiva. Mexican black tar.

This stuff has legs, man. That east coast stuff don't. Smurf lets out a gravelly groan, routine euphoria settling into his lungs after taking a murky shot.

Smurf is forty-something. I'm twenty-one. He's taken me under his wing. He was a professional snowboarder in Colorado for a while. He couldn't get unstuck from smack. He threw his career away to chase dragons instead of freshies. So it goes.

We watch each other's backs, sharing a double bed room. We switch hotels every so often. I mail herb, he flips balloons of coke and smack. Smurf walks the city blocks with his mouth blown up like a squirrel, cheeks full of tiny balloons. This is a protective measure. About to get busted? Swallow your stash.

Every so often narcos, presumably nortenos, visit our hotel room to negotiate business with Smurf. I get a bulk special on balloons for the week. Smurf stays up all night smoking cigarettes and watching tv. Sometimes he shoots coke and gets paranoid, stares through a crack in the curtains. I nod out and sleep 14 hours a day.

You're a good kid, Jay. Don't let these cities eat you alive. Smurf tells me one. I've been wailing the blues since the doctor spanked me on the bottom.

It's nobody's fault.

It's near Christmas now and I've been chipping away at this habit for too long; six months bombing around the city getting high. It's time to leave.

I get enough methadone to kick my habit before heading east for Christmas. That dingy motel room fades into memory. A couple weeks later, I get a call from Smurf's partner. He's been busted again. He switched hotels after I left and got raided. He'll be sitting and kickin' awhile without so much as an aspirin.

Kicking in jail is not easy. I'll tell ya the secret: lie still, flat on your back. Focus on your breathing and don't move. Just lay flat and lay still until hell passes over you.

Back in Vermont on Christmas eve, I drive my Dad to catch a flight out of Hartford, CT. I take advantage of the locale, hitting the block to grab some china. A dark-skinned twelve year old boy serves me.

I make it home for a little Christmas celebration with friends. My mom's heart is broken seeing the shape I'm in. We all feel helpless.

I head north after Christmas, moving into a dingy apartment in Burlington's Old North End. I get a kitchen job and become an expert as using needles.

Jon D Rapp is a typewriter tramp and reformed lunatic.

Find bad advice on his socials @typewritertramp