Heroin Addiction

“Hi, I’m Jessica and I’m a sex addict.”

“Hi Jessica.”

“Hi, I’m Phillip and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi Phillip.”

“Hi, I’m David and I’m addicted to heroin.”

“Hi David.”

Sitting down I could swear one of my kidneys has popped and that my left leg is on fire. This Subutex crap they’re giving me doesn’t do anything and it’s certainly not helping with the fire ants crawling around my inner thigh, but the questions they ask here are striking many chords, a fucking Beethoven symphony to be a bit more precise – tears and all.

At forty-three and with the divorce having happened twelve years ago I’d never have thought it could be the basis of my newest relationship; heroin usage. I say relationship because that’s what having heroin addiction is. It’s that person who at first makes your life brighter and without whom, ultimately; there can be no light at all.

I started using heroin about a year ago. I was in the projects just before the holidays researching my latest book when I saw her; a teenage girl with a look of endless bliss on her face like something I’d never imagined; a part of me asked if it could be real. She looked about 18, pretty, and the nonchalant way she sat against the wall, forearms resting on raised knees and slender hands draped like cloth, drew me to her.

“Fuck it, its just research,” I told myself.

After that conversation with Nina I knew I’d be back. Even walking away from her after saying goodbye I knew that within a week I’d be right back there. Everything about her was so free, so soft, so all right.  I asked her what she was so happy about, she didn’t exactly live in any area to smile about, and she said she couldn’t say. I told her I was researching for a book and she said,

“come back sometime and I’ll show you.”

A week later I was sitting watching as Nina inhaled a thin stream of white-grey smoke through an empty kitchen-towel roll off a piece of tinfoil. I was holding the lighter as she’d asked me to and watched as the saline solution swirled and steamed round the little brown grains.

“Now you,” she said. And then it was I. It was too much for me to say no to, this beautiful young thing, wanting to do something with me, the bliss on her face and the calm in her eyes. And so I held the tin foil level and breathed through the paper-roll while she held the lighter underneath. The calm that washed through me like a wave of purifying light and the way our eyes connected and whispered, “yes, that’s it,” was like nothing before, or since.

And that’s how it began.