Hansen - American Junkie

Copyright 2010 Tom Hansen

Soft Skull Press Edition 2017

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available

eISBN 978-159376-671-9

Author Photo by Jim Tillman
Book design by Jason Gitlin
Drawings by Jason Brinkerhoff

Soft Skull Press
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Printed in the United States of America
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Nixon started the War on Drugs fifty years ago, oblivious to the fact that the Sumerians were brewing beer a good eight-thousand years before Christ got his apostles ripped on goblets of O-positive. Between erecting pyramids and random cat worship, the Egyptians spent Sunday afternoons wasted on mead and figs. The Aztecs had ayahuasca and sacrifices, the first people to realize that yanking the heart from a virgin was the ultimate way to mainline. Coltrane was a junkie. So was Charlie Parker, and Miles before he cleaned up, or at least discovered coke. The boys in Mtley Cre got so bored one night they shot straight Jack Daniels into the crook of their arms, which may be the single dumbest act of excess in human history. But if thats all to be expected, what of our writers? Alexander Tocchi nodded across the Scots countryside and Paul Bowles prowled the opium tents of Tangier. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in a laudanum coma and Alistair Crowley shot pharmacy-grade H while worshipping Baal in dank castles. Coleridge dabbled and Keats chipped, but the true king of dope-lit was, of course, William Burroughs, who somehow remains an icon despite the fact that Naked Lunch is an incoherent fever dream of boy-lust, spilled paregoric, and bottled paranoia. The Burroughs junkie may have been a time-travelling, emotionless cipher, but at least he always got off.

Clearly, theres a theme here. Like, for instance, that drugs are fun. Maybe not for Nancy Spungen, or various acid casualties that can still be found under bridges in Oakland mumbling about MK-Ultra, but for most userswhich includes almost everything from Coors Lite to forged Ativan scriptsits the only way to get through the day. Or at least the weekend. The need to blot consciousness is universal, since its a long, dirty slog just being alive, forever pretending that were going to be here forever, that were not all going to die, and soon. The biggest metaphysical joke of all is that if God exists, hed prefer we didnt for very long, and if he doesnt exist, some random force is still going to pull our plugs.

Hey its worth remembering that at the turn of the last century cocaine was legal, and opiates were the main component in most childrens medicines.

Being a junkie is hard work. Its an 80 hour a week job with no vacation pay and limited benefits. Amateurs do lines off strippers while their posses watch, or sing songs about hoping to die before they get old, but its the pros who really commit to nothingness, to the blank warm canvas of processed opiates. Pot is a Rastas Eucharist and mushrooms may WD40 the doors of perception, but heroins only answer is to insist on the meaninglessness of asking questions at all.

Which is an argument even Johnnie Cochrane couldnt glove his way out of.

Tom Hansens American Junkie is a book that knows all these things down to its marrow, doesnt even bother to say so. It attempts to impress no one, convince the reader of nothing. There are no solutions, no explanations, no redemption. Its mere existence insists that were all addicts at heartsome people just find more powerful anodynes. American Junkie is the best kind of tale of dissipationunlike the million whiny mea culpas that came before and will come after because it tells you I did this, and then this, and then this. Period. Hey, it could happen to you too. Or not. Doesnt really matter either way. The junkie in jail or the junkie in a penthouse or the square who doesnt even know hes a junkie yet are all the same: suckers if they think they dont have a line in this book written just for them.

A few short words about veins, which are, miraculously, smart enough to hide. Veins know better, they shrink and retreat, sink into the muscle and fascia. Veins dont want you to shoot junk, but give in resignedly in the end, carry that bull-rush of dope straight to your heart, like a reluctant but reliable friend. Or the worst enemy.

Most addiction memoirs titillate the reader with the early madness, the almost-O.D.s and shootouts with dealers, then ease you into the long slog of getting clean. They peddle epiphanies that are actually just brute realizations: a relief after taking the Harley over the high side one too many times, the smell of bleach on the bathroom floor of the twelfth rehab. That book has already been written, and way too often. Sure, sobriety is a gift for friends and family, but theres nothing more tired than the tale of getting clean. Jim Carroll was a better addict than he was a poet. James Frey wasnt a junkie, just addicted to lying. Kurt couldnt do it, and neither could Layne Staley, who both make just the right kind of cameo here they show up mid-chapter, cop a few bags, and then leave. Hey, rock star junkies are just junkies with a little more money, so who gives a shit? The only thing worse than some navel-gazing hippie trying to explain the concept of time, or even the killer time-signature of YYZ, is the memoir that tries to sandwich its epiphanies between the glamour, the burnt spoons between the glamour. Toms not having it. He ran into the stars, and then the stars ran away with their dope.

There is only ugliness, just before there is the truth. There are all the books where you immediately know the author is full of shit, with their clever metaphors about blood drawn back into the needle like crimson posies, about mosaics refracted in broken needles. Then theres AJ, which doesnt deign to try and impress. If you want arty polish, find it elsewhere. If you want Lou Reed metaphors and louche French dabbling, its not within these pages. There is no doubt that Tom put in his time, deserves a Heroin Union Card and monthly stipend just for getting through it all. He literally tried to negate himself. To erase his body and still his mind. He bears the very real scars from it. He asks you, with each sentence, exactly how far out on the powdered limb are you willing to go, how much do you have invested, to literally and literarily follow him?

Some people get second chances, and others even deserve them. Some of us are emotionally damaged past the point of acceptance or redemption. Theres a need, a hole, and it must be filled, coal shoved into the furnace until theres nothing left. Can any of us actually be recovered? Is there any point in being saved at all? To die at thirty-five or sixty-five feels arbitrary in the face of dying anyway, the likely void we will all return to that can only be approximated by the high that is impossibly low. The French say that orgasms are the petit mort, the little death, and they are no doubt right. But so is each shot of heroin. Booze can make you giddy or furious, weed full of creative notions or dumb epiphanies, coke an unwarranted sense of self-worth. Only heroin can give you nothing. Pure, cold squat. Its the great equalizer in the sense that, if were being honest here, theres absolutely nothing to equalize. You can exchange your twenties for a handful of nods and some scribbled lyrics, not to mention pericarditis and four years on a prison tier, or you could work hard every day and drink coconut water and do Cross Fit. One might have a moral or ethical edge, but either way, youll still wake up at forty with no clearer sense of the point of existence than you did in your previous thirty-nine.