American Junkie by Tom Hansen

Author:Tom Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

[LATE 1982]

I held the cigarette under my face and let the smoke trail up, directly into one of my eyes. Eventually I couldn’t bear it and I blinked, my eye filling with tears. I took a break for a second, then did it again, fighting to keep my eye open in order to get the maximum effect, make my eye as red as possible. I had the other symptoms memorized and ran over them again in my head; a dull aching pain behind my eyes, half of my face feeling stuffed up and then the other half. I let the smoke float up into my eye until I couldn’t take it anymore. My friend Josie watched me intently from the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to get a shot,” I said, “Demerol.”

“Why?”

“No money,” I said.

“Why do you have to do that stuff?” she asked.

She just didn’t get it. Alcohol didn’t work anymore, never had really. I had drunk enough, but mostly only because everyone around me had been doing it. Mostly because there hadn’t been anything better. Demerol was better.

At the admissions desk I told the nurse I had a migraine and described the symptoms. I said that my name was Arthur Lake, a skateboarder I remembered from the old days, and that I hadn’t been able to work or sleep for two days. Nodding occasionally, the receptionist took my information, then ushered me to a room. I grabbed a couple of magazines from the wall and climbed up onto the paper covered exam table. After about ten minutes, a doctor came in and before doing anything asked me if I was driving anywhere that night. I knew he was going to ask that, and I had that answer memorized as well, the same thing I’d told the admissions girl. No, I wasn’t driving, I was walking home and I lived at an address I’d memorized a couple blocks away. I went through the symptoms one more time and the doctor told me to pull down my pants. He prepared an injection of Demerol, and stuck it in the side of my ass.

I walked out of emergency room and down the street into the darkness of the parking lot. I got in the car, drove down to Boren Avenue and got on Interstate Five going north. Just like the time before and the time before that, just as I crossed the apex of the ship canal bridge the Demerol hit, the feeling spreading, the weight lifting, evaporating. The waiting was over. It was even better than the Percodans and Percocets I’d begun taking whenever I could get my hands on them. Words simply couldn’t come close to describing the feeling, the actual physical sensation it gave, but it was what Demerol took away from me that was the kicker. Hate. Jealousy. Envy. Rage. For years now they had been growing inside me, like a tumor. I’d hidden it well, but it was beginning to overwhelm me.

I envied other people.

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