Copyright 2019 by Beth Alvarado
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ISBN: 978-1-938769-48-1
Cover design: Melissa Dias-Mandoly
Digital production: Joel W. Coggins
In a Town Ringed by Missiles
Imagine turning your head and holding your arm out, as if for a blood test. You feel a slight prick, you loosen the tie, and then suddenly this warmth floods up; you feel a rush that begins at the base of your spine and surges up until it explodes in your head, like light. Then, for hours, you float in a bubble of warmth and well-being, dreams as vivid as movies drift before your eyes. This is why people like heroin.
Imagine you no longer feel like an ordinary girl, bland and vulnerable, but like a girl who is daring, an outsider, one of the guys.
This is why I tried it in the first place.
But why is a question that heroin addicts never ask. We know why. The question for an addict is why not ? I had to have a very good reason to give up that rush. After all, Id come to love the ritual, even the smell of sulfur, the flame beneath the spoon. I loved the liquid lightning that filled my veins and blossomed in my head. I loved the dreams, more brilliant with color than anything Id seen in life. And then the psychic numbness that enveloped me for hours, where I had no worries, no fears, no anxieties, no guilt, no desires.
So why is not the question. We may as well ask why people have sexwhich, as we all know, can have as-deadly side effects as heroin.
I was sixteen when I started. Thin, thin, always dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt, hair long and wild, I imagined I was a bohemian. The rules didnt apply to me. I didnt have to attend school to get As and Bs. Janis was still alive, I think, maybe even Morrison and Hendrix. The Civil Rights Bill was six years old. Watts had burned, so had Newark. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy had all been killed. Vietnam was old news. The Cold War was simply a part of the landscape. We wanted out. Sometimes it seemed as if the world were falling apart. We were kids living in the borderlands of Arizona, in a town ringed by missiles. We couldnt imagine a future. Instead, we shot dope. We ran it across the border. We were falling from idealism to despair. Id fallen, needle to the vein. Planes like dark predators were circling overhead.
By the time I was nineteenonly three years laterI had not only grown up, I felt old . I had quit using every toxic substance Id ever tried. This includes pot, hallucinogens, cocaine, speed, and alcohol, none of which required any effort at all to quit as I didnt especially like them, as well as the two that caused me difficulty, heroin and tobacco. I could claim that this makes me an expert, not only on addiction but on recoverybut I am ambivalent about everything: what constitutes addiction, whether physical addiction leads to psychological or vice versa, and whether or not people can be cured. I even wonder whether addiction is a symptom of an underlying disease or the disease itself.
Recreational use, thats how I thought about heroin when I first tried it. I wasnt going to get strung out. I just liked the high. Besides, I was a lightweight. I could get high on very small amounts, but eventually, after a few years, I did start using more often, several times a week, then every day, then several times a day. This is the point at which we considered ourselves strung out: we no longer got a rush, we didnt get high at all. We were shooting dope to keep from getting sick, to stay normal. And, frankly, it got boring. We were always having to figure out how to get money and then how to get dope. As boring as any other routine. Ive heard both war and prison described as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of violence. Thats a pretty good description of addiction. Nirvana, chemically induced, cannot last.
Out of all of those moments, and there were many, where people driven by desperation stole from us or pulled guns on us, there is one I remember so clearly that, in retrospect, I can call it a turning point. Franklin and Val had come over to cop, shed just suffered her third miscarriage and, perhaps because of that, he let her get off first. Almost immediately, her eyes rolled up in her head and she hit the floor. She was out. Franklin was sitting on the bed, tying himself off. The whole time we were trying to revive her, Franklin was busy finding a vein. We slapped her, rubbed ice cubes on her, shook her. Nothing. We considered shooting her up with salt water, which wed heard was the antidote, although wed never seen it done. Finally, we dragged her to the bathtub and held her head under cold running water. When she came out of it, Franklin was still sitting on the bed, nodding. He rubbed his face. Huh? he said, looking at his wife.
That night, Fernando, who was not yet my husband, was lying next to me. Wed saved a tiny bit of dope for the next morning, but we had no money. Fernando said, Its time to kick. Something bad is going to come down.
At the time, this seemed to me a profound statement and perhaps it was, implying as it did, cause and effect. Consequences. Lying there next to him, I knew what I couldnt articulate. The medicine had become the disease. We had fallen into a kind of despair, where we couldnt remember how we were before, where the things that happened seemed to happen to other people and we were numb observers, where there was no future, or if there was one, we couldnt imagine it.
But this is what I remember most about the day Val nearly died. It was a gray day, windy, dusty, bits of dried leaves in the air. After she came out of it, I watched them climb on their motorcycle. Franklin was big, tattoos on his arms, and Val seemed frail. She put her arms around him, leaned into him, and they sped off. I kept seeing her go out, lips blue. What if she nodded out on the highway? She would slip like a rag doll beneath the traffic behind them. He wouldnt notice. He wouldnt care. Could this happen to me? Where nothing nothing nothing would matter? Not Fernando. Not if I was pregnant. Nothing. Except dope?
