Heroin Chronicles by Jerry Stahl

Author:Jerry Stahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

ERIC BOGOSIAN wrote the plays and films subUrbia and Talk Radio (in which he also starred). He often acts on stage and screen, last appearing on Broadway in Donald Margulies’s Time Stands Still. His most recent novel is Perforated Heart.

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by eric bogosian

A strip of white light falls across a man seated in pitch-black, holding a microphone. He speaks in a slow, deliberate voice with a New Orleans accent.

The way I see it, it’s a fucked-up world, it’s not going anyplace, nothing good is happening to nobody, you think about it these days and nothing good is happening to anybody and if something good is happening to anybody, it’s not happening to me, it’s not happening to myself.

The way I see it, there be this man, some man sitting in a chair behind a desk in a room somewhere down in Washington, D.C. See, and this man, he be sitting there, he be thinking about what we should do about crime rate, air pollution, space race … Whatever this guy supposed to be thinking about. And this guy, he be sitting down there and thinking, and he be thinking about what’s happenin’ in my life … he be deciding on food stamps, and work programs, and the welfare, and the medical aid and the hospitals, whether I be working today. Makin’ all kinds a decisions for me. He be worrying about how I spen’ my time! Then he lean back in his ol’ leather chair, he start thinkin’ about da nukular bomb. He be deciding whether I live or die today! Nobody makes those decisions for me. That’s for me to decide. I decide when I want to get up in da mornin’, when I want to work, when I want to play, when I want to do shit! That’s my decision. I’m free. When I die, that’s up to God or somebody, not some guy sittin’ in a chair. See?

I just wanna live my life. I don’t hurt nobody. I turn on the TV set, I see the way everybody be livin’. With their swimming pools and their cars and houses and living room with the fireplace in the living room … There’s a fire burnin’ in the fireplace, a rug in front of the fireplace. Lady. She be lyin’ on the rug, evenin’ gown on … jewelry, sippin’ a glass o’ cognac … She be lookin’ in the fire, watchin’ the branches burnin’ up … thinkin’ about things. Thinkin’. Thinkin’. What’s she thinkin’ about?

I jus’ wanna live my life. I don’t ask for too much. I got my room … got my bed … my chair, my TV set … my needle, my spoon, I’m okay, see? I’m okay.

I get up in the mornin’, I combs my hair, I wash my face. I go out. I hustle me up a couple a bags a D … new works if I can find it.

I take it back to my room, I take that hairwon. I cook it up good in the spoon there … I fill my needle up.

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