I’ve mentioned in at least a couple of places that I view underground art and music subculture and homeless hard drug subculture as two sides of one coin but I’ve never really gone into why. The thing that I found most fascinating in both of these settings can also be found in comic books or even sitcoms. It’s about archetypes, lore and the cult of personality.
When I was really young I read everything I could find about Greek and Norse mythology – especially the large lithograph illustrated books by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. Once I was buying comic books my immediate favorites were the 1980’s run of The Uncanny X-Men, Jack Kirby’s The Eternals and a kind of encyclopedic character sourcebook called Marvel Universe. I liked learning about pantheons and memorizing the appearance, powers and personalities of all of the gods or superheroes.
When my family first got cable I would read through all of the listings so I could videotape any monster movies or fantasy with creature effects like Jack the Giant Killer and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. As I got older this gave way to enthusiasm for cult and auteur cinema and the focus shifted from the colorful characters onscreen to the directors themselves. There’s a whole rambling essay up about this called Bad Fish but the takeaway is that in deep fandom the artist becomes the hero.
The first kind of DIY shows I spent a lot of time at were ska shows and although I enjoyed memorizing all of the bands their end product, with the possible exception of The Aquabats, wasn’t as colorful as I would have preferred. My tastes have always run a bit anachronistic so when I didn’t see what I was looking for in the popular music of my age mates I started digging through thrift stores for New Romantic Synthpop records from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
The best single word to encapsulate the desired element is theatrical.
I had a head start for alternative comics but was more of a late bloomer in terms of discovering punk, hardcore and eventually noise. Chicago’s experimental music scene at the turn of the millennium had a good portion of performance oriented projects but the strongest appreciation of a nationwide caste of beguiling feedback thespians came from touring myself on the small festival circuit. The best way to quickly see exactly what I’m talking about is an anonymous blog called Noise Park that offers a who’s who of this scene drawn in the style of South Park characters.
The world of hard drugs didn’t immediately offer this because I was still ensconced in DIY music and any other users I knew socially were a smaller subset of people associated with that scene. I was deliberately oblivious to the associated social stigmas to the extent that I introduced myself to one of my new favorite bands in early 2001 by asking if they needed help finding heroin. There was nothing concrete to indicate that The Get Hustle would be interested except that I thought their slinky dark cabaret music “had that vibe”.
It’s a testament to the power of interpersonal magnetism that nobody in the band used or was interested in that drug but we still became great friends. It wasn’t until SXSW in 2011 that a band did approach me for that kind of thing, Australian Birthday Party imitators Slug Guts, but while 2001 me would have been over the moon 2011 me couldn’t even be bothered to find it for them. I did end up getting some dope a little later at the same festival but I wasn’t in the mood to make it a mission on the night they approached me.
In 2016 I started going to a Los Angeles methadone clinic and living in the homeless community that orbited it when I began to appreciate how similar these things could feel to the DIY music scene. Some might bristle at this and insist that there’s nothing creative about drug addiction but I see the same approach to community building around an occult pursuit that polite society deems either disinteresting or repugnant. I’ve never been involved in kink or BDSM but I imagine it’s close to the same thing – hence the band name The Velvet Underground.
By 2018 our wanderings had brought us to the Bay Area and I eventually learned to navigate the tent community behind the Emeryville Home Depot. When we were still working at Mission Thrift in San Francisco it made more sense to frequent the Honduran dealers called “Hondos” around Civic Center BART and the Tenderloin but once we were spending all our time in Oakland the trip to the city started feeling like too much of a hassle.
The part that appealed to me was the hidden nature of everything and the quest-like process of hunting down connections. Underground music has gotten a lot more accessible with the internet but the first years I spent exploring it sat on the outside margins of the digital era. I wouldn’t necessarily call seeking out either obscure music or drugs heroic but the process was reminiscent of the point and click graphic adventure games I used to play in my adolescence. Even without the step of ingesting intoxicating substances the successful problem solving involved will flood the brain with the body’s own reward chemicals.
It feels like the reward is directly proportional to both the scarcity of what is sought and the challenge involved in finding it. For example with music The Residents and Lightning Bolt were both bands that I had read about and been interested in long before I was able to get my hands on one of their records. In both cases I can still recall the feeling the exact moment that flipping through the new arrivals and clearance bin respectively in the Hillcrest Off The Record offered up the prize, I listened to what I found countless times and it still feels like both discoveries had a lasting impact on my life.
Music lost a lot of this thrill with the advent of file sharing services like Napster and Soulseek a few years later. Suddenly I could listen to every band I’d read about and been interested in all at once in a sudden flood and instead of playing a new discovery on repeat for weeks I struggled to find the attention span to sit through an entire album or sometimes even a song. It was kind of the same thing with drugs – finding heroin in the Tenderloin was about as difficult as looking for a McDonald’s hamburger and consequently never felt as exciting as finally finding the same drugs after a long search in Oakland and Emeryville.
The absence or presence of what I’ll call the “magic” for lack of a better term rubbed off on my feelings toward the people who populated the background in both situations – the incidental characters. I’m sure the Tenderloin is bursting at the seams with fascinating personalities but the streamlined nature of copping there prevented anyone from making much of an impression. When I search my memory now the only thing that comes into focus are the two times I ran into people I already knew from DIY music circles in this environment: a relatively scarce and unexpected experience.
In contrast a kind of warm nostalgia washes over my memories of brief interactions with strangers on the opposite side of the bay even when they didn’t play significant roles in finding the things I was searching for. The one that immediately floats to the surface is “goatee guy” – a man in his 40s who dressed like Ali G but wore a thick mask of bronzed foundation makeup that he topped off by drawing on a pencil lined goatee with liquid eyeliner. Judging by this bizarre habit he must have been a tweaker but he appeared a couple of times in West Oakland spots where I copped dope.
If it wasn’t for his clear adult size and energy it would be easy to mistake him for a young schoolchild playing a gritty tough guy character in one of the plays produced by the main character in Rushmore. On our first interaction I was waiting on a dealer parked outside of a kind of workshop built into old loading docks where he was working and he walked over to see if I was up to anything unsavory. While my purpose would have been quite unsavory to the entire polite and law abiding world I could sense his worries sat closer to looting, theft and espionage and I assured him that me waiting for my “friend” would not pose a problem.
The next time we crossed paths I’d gotten sick of the long delays and high prices of the delivery crew and had talked to a few obvious junkies around the library to get clued in on a nearby squatted house that this crusty gutter punk kid I’ll call Mando trapped out of. In terms of price, quality and availability it was a huge step up – for awhile anyway. It was a few weeks of steady buys before I was permitted to come into the house proper and it was in the probation period that I met “goatee” for the final time: he smirked at me sardonically as he passed through the door while I was still forced to sit outside like a puppy.
By the time I gained access to the inner sanctum Mando was rapidly becoming less reliable. His tar began to take on the appearance of crumbled chunks of Oreo cookie – mostly black but with conspicuous white flecks that could only mean some flavor of fentanyl. I never noticed a batch feeling particularly stronger or had anybody overdose off it but these dangers were clearly waiting in the wings. Miraculously it never came up.
The thing that made me need to keep looking for someone else was a mix of communication and supply. I had cultivated a healthy stable of middles using terms that are now autobanned on Craigslist and I needed at least a few grams on a daily basis. I would upcharge these customers at least double the rate I was getting grams for when I bought at least three as a “ball” for the discount. Mando started splitting his time between that squat and another one on the edge of China Town but now his phone would be off for an entire day or he’d tell me where to meet and then not answer calls when I got there.
This was especially dangerous when I was picking up for one of my “heavy duty” customers – people with busy jobs who came to me every three days or so to pick up enough weight to see them through. If I wasn’t able to get what they needed on any particular day they would have to look for an alternate arrangement who would most likely become the first choice for subsequent pickups. I depended on these larger purchases and the profit I made on them – first to support our own habit and later, when we were on methadone, to buy a used RV to live in.
When I asked around for better options I started hearing that you could find stuff around the homeless camp behind the Home Depot in Emeryville. It may seem mind numbingly obvious that any homeless camp would be a good spot to look for heroin but that hadn’t really been my experience. While crack always seemed to be around the corner, heroin was more of a specialty product that most of the camps didn’t mess with. To complicate matters crackheads would almost always say they could find it when asked only to either waste hours of your time wandering around, try to rip you off or trick you into buying crack instead in the hopes that you would smoke it with them once you were stuck with it.
My first trip to the camp wasn’t particularly successful. I asked a group of white kids living in tents along the bottom edge of the camp and one of them said he could help me. He disappeared for a while and came back with a bag that was too small for what I paid. His friend shined a tiny keychain black light on it and claimed that the reaction showed it to be of exceptional purity – this wasn’t the case. Regardless they were middling themselves and as I was also a middleman my success was contingent on finding somebody who was actually selling opposed to a gofer who would levy additional taxes.
I went back to dealing with Mando but on one of my last visits another customer gave me more detailed directions on exactly which tent to hit up in Emeryville. I can’t remember if Dizzy and T were supposed to be brothers or cousins but they were the go to guys for heroin on that end of the camp. T’s tent was on the back edge of the Home Depot compound right at the corner and impossible to miss because it was surrounded with broken bikes.
Now that I think about I never once saw T riding a bike or even working on one but he most likely used to fix them for money before he got into selling drugs. It’s also possible he was just hoarding broken frames from being spun out of his mind and never actually got around to fixing them. He and Dizzy probably both used meth and heroin but T seemed like the much bigger tweaker. He was lean, muscular and perpetually shirtless with occasional sores on his face and bald head that must have come from getting sharded out and picking at his skin as xylazine wasn’t a thing yet.
Dizzy was the more reliable dealer but took me longer to get acquainted with because his tent sat in the center of the opposite row of tents and didn’t have a conspicuous feature like the bikes. Dizzy never wore a shirt either but had more of a teddy bear type body – usually he wore camouflage pants and a gold chain with neat dreadlocks topping everything off. While T was a prototypical tweaker Dizzy gave off major junkie energy and always seemed right on the edge of nodding out.
The camp ran between Peralta and Hollis streets on both sides of an access road for the 580 freeway. The Peralta end was predominantly Black with tightly packed tents running under the freeway overpass and artificial walls made by tying up tarps. Hollis was home to the small row of white kids I’ve already mentioned – they were probably some of the last additions to the community and the first to be made to move. Dizzy and T were Black but most of their clientele and associates were white and the sprawling midsection of the camp they called home was racially integrated.
Before I’d been introduced to Dizzy and T I’d learned about a heroin dealer in the Peralta section called Happy. Happy had one of those sturdy square tents that looks like the canopies used at farmer’s markets except with solid walls. He stubbornly refused to sell to me no matter how long I was around – once or twice I bribed one of his regulars with a few extra dollars or a small break off to cop for me but eventually I stopped even trying to go to his tent.
This brings us to Pooh. Pooh also lived on the Peralta end of the camp. He was heavy set, older and smelled like his namesake. That last bit could be bitterness talking as he was my nemesis for as long as I came to the camp but he also seemed genuinely disgusting. Like most of the Black guys on the Peralta end Pooh consumed black tar heroin by turning it into what was called gunpowder and sniffing it.
Gunpowder, sometimes referred to as cheese, is created by mixing tar with crushed up Benadryl or powdered milk and shaking it with a couple of pennies in a pill bottle. Because of the quantity and consistency of the resulting powder heavy users of this form have running noses and are constantly loudly sniffling and snorting. When I first started copping around Oakland this was all I could find, packaged in neon colored water balloons, but I soon got sick of it as it’s nearly impossible to dissolve in water for injection.
Pooh also had a bizarre way of consuming crack cocaine. Instead of smoking it out of a glass pipe he would crush it into loose leaf tobacco and roll it into cigarettes with these weird blue rolling papers. I never quite understood what this was – when I smoked Top Tobacco the included packs of rolling papers had a couple of blue sheets to signify the end of the pack but this stuff seemed to be in a blue paper every single time. Like the gunpowder it seemed to be a popular method on Pooh’s end of the camp.
I’d gotten into the habit of buying crack when I was still copping from the “Hondos” in the Tenderloin. They carried tar in dime bags and twenties but the crack was only five dollars a bag and referred to as “nickels”. They always seemed to give me a better deal when I picked up a combination of the two products and I’d have more luck requesting a couple of nickels thrown in for free than I would asking for an extra bag of tar or “Chiva”.
When I first got to San Francisco I was dissolving the crack in white vinegar and shooting speedballs but once my veins got bad and it was hard to properly hit I got a glass stem and started smoking it. The first time I ran into Pooh I was trying to grab some crack and he said he’d have to go and grab it from someone. I ordinarily wouldn’t let money walk but because we were at his tent instead of some random corner I figured he’d probably be back.
I should have probably realized it was a red flag when he said he needed to leave the camp at all. The camp was a destination for people looking for drugs and especially for crack on that side of the camp so there’s no way it wasn’t around. I waited on an office chair outside his tent for a while but after about 45 minutes it was obvious he’d ripped me off and wasn’t coming back. I thought about looking through his tent and maybe throwing whatever he slept on into the gutter but there didn’t seem to be much point as that wouldn’t get me my money back.
From that point on Pooh made it his mission to fuck with me and try to get over on me. I never made the mistake of trying to buy drugs from him again but he was constantly around trying to trip me up. A couple of tents over from him was a dude with a big gold watch who always had rock on hand so that became my go to when I was looking. It had been a daily pickup in San Francisco but once I was able to buy tar in weight I mostly stopped messing with it unless one of the customers I middled for was asking for it.
Once I’d gotten into a reliable groove with Dizzy and T I stopped going to his end of the camp and didn’t see him for a while. A few months later I had just met one of my regulars in the Home Depot parking lot and stepped into T’s tent to grab a gram. There was always a few people hanging around in there and I’d never had a problem so I wasn’t paying much attention when a gloved hand shot into the air to pass the money up. T handed me the gram but just as I was going to leave the tent he suddenly called out:
“Where’s the rest of it?”
That’s when the owner of the gloved hand turned around and I realized it was fucking Pooh! I had brought in eighty dollars as four twenties but he had discretely pocketed half of it and only passed up forty. When T demanded the rest of the money he made up a story that I had ripped him off and he was just taking what was owed to him. The story was bullshit of course but based on a small nugget of truth.
A few weeks earlier I had been dumpster diving in the nearby BevMo! as they often threw away exotic cheeses and found what looked like two sealed fifths of a middle shelf golden tequila. I didn’t drink alcohol at all back then so I went and tried to sell them on Pooh’s end of the camp. He was around when I found an interested buyer but this person opened a bottle and took a sniff only to discover it was full of piss!
I’d already been transparent about finding the stuff in a dumpster so when this came to light I apologized for my mistake and tossed them into the nearest trash can. No money had changed hands yet and I was obviously as surprised as anybody so while the potential buyer was irritated there wasn’t really anything to do about it. Pooh tried to turn it into a bigger scene and get people to kick my ass but at this point I’d been coming around for a while, spending money and wasn’t in the habit of bullshitting or not paying my dues so nobody really listened to him.
In T’s tent he modified the story to say that I had sold the piss bottles to him and gotten away with his money. It was obviously bullshit, especially seeing as he didn’t drink either, but T’s girlfriend latched onto it and said she’d do the same thing in his position. Maybe she always had something against me or maybe she was just tweaking hard that day and feeling combative. I expected T to be a little more proactive about somebody taking money that was intended for him in his own tent but I also understand that it was my problem and nobody really wanted to deal with Pooh.
Besides that Pooh was strung out and had probably come to his tent to cop so he must have figured he’d be getting it either way.
T was really into stealing spray paint from the Home Depot to make crazy looking customized sneakers around this time so his tent was full of cans. I looked over at a crate full of it and briefly thought about spraying Pooh in the face and attacking him to get my money back. You could say that I was worried about the fallout and collateral damage from trying this in a crowded tent or you could say I was just a coward but really I had the luxury of not having to deal with it.
I forget exactly how the numbers worked out but however I was doing things with this particular customer I was going to be able to bring back the half gram, I had to give half back to T, and still end up walking away with something. The most plausible explanation would be that I was charging him $160 a gram and he had given me half the money while holding onto the second half. This way I would have still ended up with a half gram after collecting another eighty dollars and bringing the customer another half.
It wasn’t the full gram I would have been getting from the deal initially but it was something. You could say that I was ripping my customers off but they could easily see what camp I walked into and came out of every time they met me and nothing was stopping them from walking in and trying to find stuff themselves. They were paying me to not have to do this and by extension to not have to deal with situations exactly like the one I’d just gotten into with Pooh. They paid a high tax to me because I had already gone through the trial and error of figuring out who was a ripoff and who was legit and the assurance that I would always find them the quantity they were paying for.
All of this also meant I essentially had the privilege to not have to retaliate against Pooh. Many people in the drug game might tell you that you always have to fight to get what’s yours in these situations or nobody will respect you and you’ll keep getting ripped off but the amount of money I had coming in from my non-homeless customers essentially put me above that. I stopped fucking with T almost entirely after this incident and took my sizable business over to Dizzy instead so in the long run Pooh’s theft cost him even more than it cost me.
It’s possible I could have fought Pooh and even successfully gotten the money back. I’m no fighter and he was significantly larger than me but I never saw him fighting anyone either – just pulling this same kind of sneak maneuver and talking shit. Ultimately it wasn’t worth the risk of either getting hurt or attracting police attention through an altercation and getting pinched with drugs on me. The main thing was that another customer would almost certainly be calling me later in the same day and although Pooh had gotten over on me twice both of his tactics would only be effective a single time.
Lots of junkies and other drug addicts will tell you that they’ve never been ripped off and always fought to get their shit back but everybody gets taken at least once – one way or another. Pooh and I were both homeless and both junkies but we were still on entirely different levels. He lived in a tent and had to pull schemes like the ones he pulled on me or other high risk crimes to support his habit. I lived in a car and had figured out how to use craigslist to build a roster of housed and working junkies that would bring the money to me.
The fact that I was white and from an educated background almost certainly worked in my favor. Even if someone like Pooh did figure out the online systems I was using and could hold on to a working phone to implement it most of my customers would likely drive off the moment they set eyes on him.
Immediately after the incident in T’s tent he jumped on his bike and rode in circles on the street around me threatening to kick my ass and take the dope I had just bought. I was still angry and fantasies of pushing the bike over or jabbing a stick between the spokes flashed before my eyes but I just ignored him. You could say I was afraid of him but in another way I was above getting my hands dirty to even deal with him.
One of my wife’s uncles is almost certainly a hard drug user, his hands have the same texture as many long term crackheads I’ve known, and the few times we’ve hung out nearly every one of his stories is about getting beat. He’s told me about getting taken with OTC pills sold as painkillers, buying EBT cards that are already drained of funds and assorted other scams. I’ve been taken a fair number of times myself but the way he talks about it almost seems like he derives some strange pleasure from getting beat over and over again.
When LaPorsha was growing up her father was a moderately successful drug dealer and both of her uncles were extremely jealous and tried to emulate him. Her other uncle became a small time cocaine dealer and eventually died from his addiction to the drugs he traded in – I forget if it was meth or fentanyl. The uncle who always talks about losing appears to be dealing with his feelings of inadequacy by almost fetishizing failure.
Although I’ve dabbled in spirituality the strongest organizing principle in my life is the pursuit of beauty. As long as I’m experiencing beauty or working to perpetuate it I feel content. I don’t have any real regrets concerning my life decisions or past experiences because I can always see some spark of beauty in all of it. I’m sure the average observer would see the world of homelessness and drug addiction as hideously ugly but for me there were moments of sublime allure.
I’ve had jobs that required waking up very early in the morning but rising at dawn for a long commute and waking up early because you live in your car and the sun just rose are very different. I have fond memories of driving through the streets of Oakland’s Chinatown, empty save for a few night herons, and visiting a Vietnamese bakery for strong coffee and red bean buns. We’d also get high and spend hours walking along Lake Anza or the forest trails of Joaquin Miller Park.
Everything about Pooh was disgusting to me and the two times he got over on me filled me with rage so the beauty in these interactions is less obvious. I do believe that there is a certain beauty in simplicity however, and a person who wears their true colors on their sleeve. Pooh was like a living avatar of dishonesty and avarice – anybody who was paying attention could see that I was bringing a large and steady flow of capital to this particular drug market so it would have been far more profitable to him to actually supply me while making money off of every transaction.
Pooh seemed fundamentally incapable of this kind of planning or foresight however. There is a myth about drug addicts that their brains have been rewired so they can’t make rational decisions beyond what might get them their desired substances in the moment regardless of any future consequences. I completely disagree with this, along with nearly all dogma surrounding addictive drugs and their consumers, but it did feel like an accurate description of Pooh.
A person who always lies and tries to take advantage of the other party in every transaction is essentially transparent. Nobody in any part of the camp seemed to particularly like Pooh but his presence was tolerated because they all knew and saw exactly what he was. While his appearance and odor were decidedly unsavory I do think there’s a certain beauty in that.
T had already shown himself to be unreliable in other ways, like occasionally shorting on weight, so after this incident I switched to doing all of my business with Dizzy. Dizzy had a far more professional approach. He set up a Rubbermaid table in his large tent and weighed everything directly in front of the buyer except for prepackaged dimes for the small time customers. He went to jail for a minute but his heavyset white girlfriend held things down in the same way during his absence.
It was during this period that one of the white kids I’d dealt with on my first trip to the camp overdosed and I had to rush over to save him. I was in Dizzy’s tent buying from his girlfriend and although she had a Narcan kit she didn’t know how to use it. I was able to bring him back around and the opiate blocker didn’t put him into precipitated withdrawal. People online swear that this is a constant when Narcan is used on anyone with a physical dependence but I’ve never actually seen this happen.
Maybe things are different with the weird mix of fentanyl analogues and veterinary tranquilizers that have replaced heroin on the street since I stopped using.
The kid had blonde dreadlocks and had told us a story about his former girlfriend becoming addicted to meth and deciding that God had told her to become a sex healer when they first arrived in the camp. She wasn’t around anymore. Not long after his friend with glasses in the next tent over had broken the key to his Volkswagen Jetta in a rage over missing a shot and the car got towed. I forget where he said they’d come from and why they ended up in Oakland but “East Coast” and “jam bands” seem like plausible answers.
It wasn’t long after this that the city forced them to move their tents from the piece of sidewalk they were on so they squeezed into the crowded section where Dizzy’s tent was. It was at this point that I got a true picture of glasses kid’s complete and total apathy: he set his tent up so that it was spilling into the actual road and cars would pass less than a foot away from the farthest corner. It’s a miracle that a drunk or distracted driver never crushed his and his girlfriend’s sleeping bodies.
I can’t even imagine what it takes to become so far gone that you become indifferent to your physical safety on that level. There were also a couple people in the camp who had a reputation for finding syringes clogged with blood on the ground and attempting to inject the contents in case they still had drugs in them. One of them was a mixed race kid who died of an overdose that was big in the newspapers but the other one was an Asian woman with long black hair I’d been seeing around since I lived at Apgar in 2009.
She gave off truly terrifying energy like a feral animal trapped in a human body.
The beginning of the end for the camp was when T’s tent exploded and started a small fire. T wasn’t at home and nobody was hurt but it spread to a storage shed for Home Depot merchandise and did $160.000 worth of damage. I never saw T attempting to cook meth in his tent but by the time it happened I hadn’t been by there in months so it’s theoretically possible. People in the camp did occasionally use generators and propane heaters so those are possibilities.
I added a photo of the wreckage up at the top as the featured image.
Dizzy and his girlfriend bought an RV and his tent became a pure trap house with nobody living in it. He began to operate it like a timeshare with him and several other dealers selling at predetermined shifts of about six hours at a time. One of them was a tall light skinned guy I’ll call Flint who came from Reno, didn’t use and was a little sharper about everything than everyone else who sold there. He was the kind of drug dealer you would imagine might’ve taken a business class or two at a community college.
He noticed I was averaging three to six grams a day so he made sure to give me his phone number when Dizzy wasn’t around. Unlike his brother Dizzy had always been solid and done right by me so I didn’t change immediately but after a few times of him not being around Flint became my go to. He was clearly on another level and instead of having me come to the camp I began meeting him in his rental car or at a variety of hotels he’d been staying in.
The camp was high risk, Dizzy had already been arrested once in that exact tent, and for the most part very low reward. I only ever saw one or two other customers grabbing grams or higher when I came through. It was usually other residents of the camp trying to get dime bags for eight or nine dollars. Flint probably found a handful of other customers on my level and stopped fucking with the camp entirely.
When we first moved to the house we live in now we were still driving to the Bay Area for drugs and occasionally Flint would come all the way up to Vallejo to meet us so we could shorten our trip. We got into a car accident and stopped doing drugs. I probably still have Flint’s number in my phone and even though it’s been four years I’d guess it would still connect me if I tried it.
His white girlfriend was already smoking fentanyl toward the end so although he never sold it he probably had connections in place to make the transition when the flow of tar disappeared.
This piece took me over a week to write and now I don’t even know if it’s interesting or if it conforms to what I laid it out to be in the introduction. It barely feels like it’s even a story. For that reason I’m going to add a few random anecdotes here,
On the day Lil Peep died I was copping in Dizzy’s tent and talking about it to a small crew of cloud rap “hood hipster” looking guys I hadn’t seen around before. Like ripped designer jeans, Nirvana shirt, gold chain and a Carhartt beanie over bleached dreadlocks style. They didn’t do heroin but they were talking about shooting meth sometimes and their girlfriends obsessively searching their bodies for needle marks because they lied about doing it. One guy said that he would inject under his nutsack for this exact reason.
I’ve never heard of anybody finding a vein there and meth isn’t really a drug you can shoot into muscle or skin pop. Maybe he was lying about it. I definitely didn’t look under his nutsack to verify.
This other little detail is from when I was still copping from Mando. He told us to pull up to the squat in Chinatown but wasn’t answering his phone once we got there. While we were waiting another couple dressed in pajamas pulled up and it was obvious we were both there for the same thing. We asked each other when each party last spoke to him but it was the same for both of us – he’d told them to pull up then stopped answering his phone.
We started knocking on the squat door and shouting up to the windows and another dude who lived there came down. He had blonde hair and fairly traditional tattoo sleeves – koi fish and chrysanthemums and shit. His name was Kero because he had started a huge fire playing with kerosene as a baby. He did have some gnarly burns but I think they were more recent.
He was able to make a call and help us both get dope but he kept complaining about it saying “I don’t even have a dog in the race”. When I hear that expression people usually say “fight” instead of “race” but maybe he thought a dog race was more applicable. Considering they are both references to gambling it feels like it doesn’t really matter which one is used. It’s funny to think of selling heroin as a race though because it usually involves lots of waiting and dealers taking as long as humanly possible.
Regardless of Kero’s complaints it was nice of him to not demand break offs or extra money from either of us. He was a junkie too but he was already high and he probably figured that because we were both couples and only buying twenty bags we would need the whole thing just to get well. I know people who have never used heroin probably think every junkie is like Pooh but in my experience more of them are Keros.
I probably haven’t done a good enough job describing anybody for a story that’s supposed to be about archetypes or groups of characters. All of these people ignite a certain warm nostalgic feeling in me but I’m not sure how to convey or share that. Now that I live a recluse’s life on a mountain and see nobody on a daily basis except for my wife and our pets I’ve been missing this kind of thing.
I do see wild animals from time to time. When we left the mountain yesterday we saw a deer on the way down and two bats and a jackrabbit on the way up. That’s exciting but it doesn’t really take the place of being surrounded by people and personalities. That’s why I’ve been getting back into underground music and booking shows. It’s not like I can get back into drugs.
I hate fentanyl…
People into the NA Kool-Aid will tell you that you’ll never get sober until you hit “rock bottom” but in my case I never did anything like that. I’m pretty sure the drugs did it for me. Whatever’s on the street now is a nightmarish nadir compared to real heroin and with this country’s twisted take on common sense drug laws I don’t see recovery starting any time soon.
“Hi, my name is fentanyl mixed with xylazine, nitazezene and random RC benzos and I’m a ridiculously shitty bag of drugs!”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 