"Shakin' In My Belly, Achin' In My Head" -- from

[Lightning Rod]

(segment from Epistolary Memoir)

VanZandt,

You are one of the few people left on the planet with whom I can speak with any candor about the subject of heroin. We shared that dark fascination before we were old enough to know better. We were both junkies for our own arcane and romantic reasons. I was seduced by the pure pleasure of it and you seemed to love it for its more tragic and miserable symbolisms. Catholics are all alike, 'dey loves dem some sufferin'. I suppose we were both natural suckers for it considering the naive young psychedelic ranger romantics that we were. We both had our literary excuses.

I remember how fascinated and involved you were in the ritual aspects of shooting up. It seemed to represent some cruel eucharist to you. Over the years I have studied the intra-veineous application techniques of many needle-freaks. Each has his ritual. Brother John say, 'you can tells a lot bout a man by de way he joogs it.' I suppose that this is true in an okie-doke anecdotal sort of way. Do they use a belt to tie off or is there a rubber surgical tourniquet in their little leather hit kit? There are as many methods of injection as there are junkies. Robert Golden blew the veins out in his arms so badly that he had to take his pants off to shoot up.

I don't know if you like to talk or write or even think about the dope days. I would understand if you didn't. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of my involvement with heroin. It's a part of my life that seems to make some people uncomfortable though. I can understand why because It has caused me considerable discomfort as well and I seldom talk or write about it for that reason.

The first time I shot heroin I was tripping on LSD. It wasn't heroin actually but dilaudid. Clint Scudder was hitchhiking the well-worn subversive turnpike from Norman to Austin and he stopped over in Denton at the Hill House. He had a handful of the little white soluble tabs that were made to be injected. The needle thing was strange to the Hill House Gang in those days. We were pot heads and acid freaks. IV drugs were looked upon as the darker side of the pharmacopea. I had shot speed three or four times and was still trying to adjust it in my conscience. It felt entirely too good. I knew that it was terrible for my body but it was also wickedly dangerous and seductive as a woman who you know you can never afford, but for just one night, just one night....ah, yes. There is also something so intrinsically naughty and anti-social about shooting up. It's the ultimate unnatural act. I guess that's why it has to feel like kissing god on the lips.

So, Clint broke out the works and Linda and I split a 4mg. dilaudid. It was just about that time in my acid trip where things were getting edgy on the come-down. You know, that phase where everything looks entirely too real and stark and sharp-edged. You are tired of looking directly into the light and what you really want is to go to sleep but the chemical won't let you and your body is starting to get little aches and twinges. It's not my favorite part of an acid trip. When we shot the D it was like being dropped into a big blue pillow stuffed with the lightest down in the universe and suddenly you are in warm flannel PJ's and Mother Mary is crooning softly and rocking you, back and forth from technicolor to black and white, back and forth from the shrill acute rock and roll of life to the jazz interior of dreams, back and forth rocking between heaven on her right tit and salvation on the other, back and forth.

The comparison is often made between shooting dope and sex. I find those analogies to be banal and not helpful in understanding the scope or nature of either experience. Certainly they both have orgasmic aspects and are both used by humans to manipulate one another, but they aren't the same types of pleasure any more than carnal pleasure is the same as spiritual pleasure. Heroin did help me to understand that love and sex are not actually connected as the mythology would have us believe. If sex was my Kryptonite, then heroin was the impervious lead box that protected me from it. Burroughs chose to describe addiction in luridly sexual terms but I have to think that he was speaking comparatively rather than descriptively. He was dealing with the subject of de-sensitization to taboos. Which is uglier, a butt-fucking homo or a dope-shooting junky? And when do either of them begin or cease to have shock value? We can say that dope is sex and that love is addiction, but those are limp metaphors. Sex is sex and dope is dope and money is money and love is love. Each one represents its own exquisite and individual type of pleasure and torment.

I chipped around and avoided a habit for a couple of years after that. I was being moderate and cautious with it until I discovered that heroin mixed well with stimulants like speed and cocaine. At first they seem to perfectly balance each other, both eliminating the other's less desirable effects. But we both know where that dalliance leads and pretty soon I had acquired my first addiction. It wasn't a large habit, but enough of one where I was careful to have a wake-up shot available each morning. I remember waking up one morning with the sniffles in Austin and didn't sleep until I landed on your front porch in Berkeley the next day. After we split a half-tea of Telegraph brown we had a nodding conversation wondering why heroin was called a 'body drug' when there are also significant psychotropic effects. It can lead us down the foggy, damp avenues of the mind where every monster of human nature keeps a flat, or it can tow us up the canals of our imagination into the soul's estuaries where salty dream liquids mix with the fresh tides of morning. I've often thought of opium as the perfect Buddhist prayer potion. Addiction is of course the cruel zen master of lessons about attachment and detachment.

Opiate addiction is the champion and exemplar of all lesser addictions including the knock-offs and counterfeits invented by psychologists. Real meat and bones physical addictions are a world away from the numerous obsessions and compulsions or other weak or bratty behaviors that presume to call themselves addictions. I'm sorry, but 'sex addicts' and 'shopping addicts' and 'gambling addicts' aren't real addicts and just use the label as a refuge from responsibility for their petty character flaws. I don't want to sound mean or judgmental but it's true, these imaginary junkies know nothing about actual physical addiction. Alcoholics and smokers and users of other drugs that are psychologically addictive have a better understanding of it but still not complete. It's only when you wake up one morning with cramps in your belly and ants under your skin that you suddenly know with every cell in your body that Kansas is long gone, Toto, and that you have entered a different dimension with different rules and different priorities and paradoxes. In the blink of a tornado you are swept into The Tube. I've heard you call it that, being in The Tube. It's a clear, plastic tube that winds through everyday life meandering nonchalant between people and experiences, and as you slide through the tube you are breathing different air than those who you see around you. They can see you as well, and assume that you are in the same world that they occupy. But you are in The Tube, quite impervious to them, slipping pneumatic inside the slick membrane of your addiction which is more than simply a job but a career, nay a calling, a mission. We used to joke about how once you become an addict, once you crack that first habit, that you were forever and irrevocably ruined and changed on a metabolic level as if you had been bitten by a vampire and you were doomed to a long and tedious shadow existence and there was no going back through the looking glass because you are on an existential one-way street and even if you are able to avoid it for years it lurks like a germ in your blood, a disease more tragic than love, biding its time. Burroughs remarked that, 'a junky can be clean for twenty years and walk past a drugstore and start hurting.'

I long for it briefly on rare occasions when I'm only thinking of the good parts. I'm certainly not nostalgic for the lifestyle. It's a pain in the ass to be a junky and habits are more expensive to keep than exotic pets or in-laws. I'm glad it's a part of my life that's behind me. Not that I would turn down a sip of laudanum on infrequent occasions but I have relocated it in my medicine kit from the 'dietary' to the 'sacramental' category. I certainly plan to have it on hand for the extreme rights of unction because the function of the unction is to help us slip painlessly from one world to the next. So, I figure that I always have one more habit left in me. I just don't think I have another kick.

I know you have some reflections on this subject. How's about sharing them with me. I'm thinking about publishing a new kind of book. I'll explain further in due time. A few days ago I converted the contents of my online version of Cool Calm Collected into an iPhone app. It took me ten minutes. The work was already done and formatted on the web site. All that information was pulled automatically and formatted for the tiny screen complete with illustrations. I smell the future of publishing.

My best to all fams on Memorial Day,

william s. toots

[SadLuckDame]

This is very good writing LR, really, really good.
I could sit here and just keep reading it.

[dadio]

A world far different from my own therefore more interesting and intriuging.