Michael W Clune - White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

The Secret Life of Heroin

A Memoir

by

Michael W. Clune

Hazelden
Center City, Minnesota 55012
hazelden.org

2013 by Michael W. Clune
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America

No part of this publication, either print or electronic, may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. Failure to comply with these terms may expose you to legal action and damages for copyright infringement.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clune, Michael W.

White out: the secret life of heroin: a memoir / by Michael W. Clune.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61649-208-3 (softcover)ISBN 978-1-61649-493-3 (e-book)

1. Clune, Michael W. 2. Heroin abuseUnited States. 3. Literature teachersDrug useUnited States. 4. Drug addictsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

HV5805.C597A3 2013

362.293092dc23

[B]

2012048531

Editors note

This memoir is based on the authors actual experiences. Certain peoples names and identifying details have been changed to protect their identity. Some conversations and descriptions of events have been compressed or imaginatively recreated and are not intended as exact replications.

The lyrics in (pages 105, 108) are adapted from Shimmy Shimmy Ya, by Ol Dirty Bastard, Elektra Records, 1995.

16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 6

Cover design: Jon Valk

Interior design and typesetting: Madeline Berglund

Developmental editor: Sid Farrar

Addiction represents
a pathological usurpation of the
neural mechanisms of learning and memory.

Steven E. Hyman, Addiction: A Disease of Learning and Memory,
American Journal of Psychiatry 162, no. 8 (August 2005): 141422.

To study the self is to forget the self.

Dogen (12001253)

Id like to thank Jon Sternfeld, Rebecca Traynor,
Aaron Kunin, Colleen, Barbara, and Michael T. Clune,
Sid Farrar, Stan Apps, and Jimmy Kinnon.

CHAPTER 1

M y past is infected. I have a memory disease. It grips me through what I remember. For example, seven years ago in Baltimore, Cat wakes me up to kiss me on her way to work. Im about to fall back asleep when I remember about Dominic. I remember how fun he can be. I sit up in bed and think about it.

It is mid-June which in Baltimore is not a fresh thing. Mid-June is already midsummer. Veins filled with heavy blue. Humid, ninety degrees. I sit in bed thinking and the things I should do like renew my drivers license or protest my parking tickets are like chewing on broken glass. Then I remember I can go to Dominics. I just think casually about going over there and maybe hanging out. I dont wait to have a shower.

I pull up at Dominics, get out of the car, and someone is already yelling at me.

Dom dont need you coming around here. Its Dominics brother. He stares at me.

Is Dominic here today? The time for polite questions seems already to have passed, but I say it anyway. I say it in the ingratiating high-pitched voice I use these days when Im forced to speak to people. Doms brother spits, barely turning his head.

Dominics gone, he dont live here anymore, get the fuck up out of here.

The brother looks like a deflated version of Dominic, white all around the pupils, wearing a tool belt and work boots. He doesnt drink or do drugs. Doing drugs makes your pupils swell in your iris. Not doing drugs shrinks the whole package, and you can see crazy white all the way around. When I was six I read in a book that Tarzan could recognize crazy people by the white that goes all the way around the iris.

Have you happened to see Henry around today?

Man listen to me, Dominic dont need you around, fuck Henry I dont know where that one-armed freak is, if I see your monkey ass here again Ima call the cops.

As soon as he says monkey the door opens and Dominic himself shuffles out.

Hey Mike come on in. Me and Henry was just trynna think about that other thing for you. Dom is an enormous bear of a man, thick shaggy black hair, mumbly lips, big eyebrows. His whole face is camouflage for his coded speech. His eyes always on the ground, one expression. He is beyond shame.

Doms brother walks through the door and angrily starts hammering a light-fixture bracket into a wall. Dom and I follow. There is absolutely no furniture or wallpaper or pipes or carpet or tile anywhere to be seen in the room. Lights coming through a single window with a sheet stapled over it. There must be forty staples in it. The brothers work. I see Dominic has a syringe sticking out of his neck. I just like to be around him. Things happen around him. Hes like an open door things walk into and out of. Some of the things stay for a while.

Syringes, for instance. He has a bearlike bulk but he never eats. Hes a gathering of things. When that magnet inside him finally stopped spinning and all the things dropped to the pavement for the cops to pick up there was maybe ninety human pounds of him left for the ambulance, according to Henry, who was there, according to Henry.

In that bare front room at Dominics there is a trembling joy in the air. The thick sun of June gets trapped, pools, and grows cloudy. Proto-organisms form in the cloud of wood-color, heat, and sheet-light. Im full of angels who fasten their lips and wings and hands to Dominics body, until he looks like a beach a thick flock of seagulls has landed on. By the time we get to the kitchen he doesnt even look human.

The human form is not one Im too committed to anyway. As Henry said once, I have a vein that starts in Baltimore and ends in Philadelphia. And heres Henry. One arm. The missing arm is like an anchor dropped in the ocean of what he should look like and doesnt. It keeps him anchored. He has a high-pitched grannys voice.

Hey Mike we was just trynna think about that other thing for you. Dom sits heavily down in a chair, his neck goes out like a Slinky and his head is just way way back.

Its good to see you Henry. Man is it hot out today!

This is the part I think I need to remember. Or I need to forget. Its kind of hard to put together. Addiction is a memory disease. I was there at Dominics. I remembered one hour ago, sitting up in bed and thinking about renewing my drivers license. I remembered six months ago, writing notes to myself in scary big letters and taping them all over the apartment so when I woke up I would see them. No dope today!

I also remembered talking to one of the teenage prostitutes who sometimes slept on mattresses on Doms floor. She said that Henry once told her he lost his arm by getting high and falling asleep on it in an awkward position. He slept for three days, and when he woke up it was dead. They had to cut it off. The story deeply affected both of us. Everyone knows how your arm can fall asleep in an awkward position. Everyone knows sleep is the cousin of death.

So it came right down to it.

Mike, we was trynna think about that other thing for you, Henry said solemnly. Id been asking them to see if they could get me some OxyContins. I wasnt ready to ask them for the white thing. I waited.

And, between us, you know Dom is gonna keep trying, you know he dont wanna let you down. We both looked affectionately at Dom passed out in the chair. He was going to keep trying. He would always keep trying. He was probably trying now, in his way.

But between us theres no way youre going to get it. Itll never happen. First, because theres this lawyer who comes through and buys all we can get the first of every month. How much? Dollar a milligram. That figure brooked no argument. I lit a cigarette and bowed slightly to the phantom lawyer.