Union Street

It looked like some sort of psychedelic pile of laundry, this album cover I held in my hands in the one record store in State College, PA. I was months away from graduating and simply transfixed by this album cover. I'd taken to buying records based purely on the cover art. I'd found 100 Flowers, DNA, and, as it happened that day Thelonius Monster. That was the moment two very disparate paths crossed and slowly lurched forward to their inevitable end.

Leslie and I made it through the end of college and the move to the Via Carlotta. We were working on music videos. Me charging walkies and picking up Kino Flos and Leslie filling her car with mindless snacks and cigarettes. Back then, craft service had cigarettes on offer. Singles or packs, although the packs were kept under the table and reserved for special people. Sometimes I was special. We were civilized then. I'd visit Leslie on whatever set she was working on and eat lunch with her. The crews were usually the same people I'd work with on my jobs. There seemed to be a handful of self-contained crew universes all centered around various production companies. You'd see the same people a lot. It was nice. There was much less a sense of clear hierarchy than what was very apparent on the commercials we would all eventually graduate to. Everyone drank from the same cooler of wrap beer.

We'd created a cool little life in that courtyard apartment on Franklin. Paul and his little herd found a place down near Gower and Sunset. It was a glorious cacophony of empty beer cans and tinny heavy metal. I'd started playing music again, that's its own story, but it brought new characters into the mix. There was Aaron and Johnny, respective guitarist and drummer for the band, pulled from recycler ads. Remember finding bandmates that way? The slow catastrophe hadn't begun yet. But I was certainly looking for it.

Once I started as a PA, I had to get a car. I know I've written that I drove to LA in my brown Chevette, but that memory was flawed. I'd actually sold that to my friend Drew the day I left college for the last time. I sold it for a hundred bucks. I felt horrible about it. I get attached to things, and I imbue them with human qualities. And these qualities are always the best or at least the saddest of the human condition. When these things go, I feel like I've betrayed them. I'm that way with all kinds of stuff. When I empty a bag of, say, frozen peas I have to make sure every single pea is out of the bag. The idea that I would break up this family and that one pea might find himself alone in a crumpled plastic bag is intolerable to me. I do this without fail with almost everything I come in contact with. I've gotten good at it. I cause as little inanimate suffering as I can. So, I felt sad that Id abandoned the Chevette, but I knew Drew would be kind to it, so I left State College with a somewhat lighter heart.

I went to the recycler again to find a car to buy. I needed one quick, and I think we had around a grand or so to spend on it. I found an ad for a yellow Toyota Tercel. It seemed like it would do just fine, so Leslie and I went to check it out. The apartment was somewhere around Western and Santa Monica, I think. Just a little apartment in a typical sunny little LA apartment building. The couple who was selling it was a young Asian couple. I think they may have been Thai. I remember thinking that at the time because the guy's last name seemed to be a very long series of all consonants with one or two vowels thrown in seemingly randomly. Lots of Ss and Ws and Ks wrapped around an A or two. In any case, they were a nice couple and had what I still consider one of the oddest and heartbreakingly innocent décor choices installed perfectly in the apartment. The main room was a fairly large living room which shifted into a dining area before a doorway leading into the kitchen. The walls of the space had picture railing wrapped around the entire perimeter and along a support beam deal that bisected the ceiling. Just enough room to hang framed 8 x 10 photographs above the rail. And so they had. The entire apartment, or what we could see of it, had perfectly spaced photographs of various desserts hung every 6 inches or so. That is to say, they had an awful lot of pictures of food on their walls, like any and all kinds of sweets. Cookbook-level photos of pieces of cake, ice cream sundaes, pies, and more, all beautifully shot and lovingly hung. And there wasn't a single detectable note of irony in any of it. There was nothing else odd or in any way different about the rest of the apartment. Just these pics of dessert. They just loved desserts, and these images made them happy and warm where they lived. At least, that's what I told myself. I didn't think to ask them about it at the time. Leslie and I just left after buying the car and immediately said, "What was up with the ice cream stuff?" I've thought about those two and their desert art so often over the years. It's become a regret that I didn't say anything to them about it. Because even then, despite how odd it seemed, it also felt so pure. I wish I'd told them how beautiful they were for this and how much I'd hold them in my heart forever. Which I have. The ice cream couple and the little yellow Toyota they sold me. I hope they are forever surrounded by the things they love.

Working as a production assistant in LA during the end of the 80s meant one thing. The Thomas Guide. The Thomas Guide was this huge, unwieldy spiral-bound book of the map of LA. Well, maybe it wasn't so unwieldy as it seemed pretty easy to use, but it was definitely huge. It lived in the backseat passenger floor in my little car, so it was easy to reach back and grab when I needed to figure out how to get to Castex, Or Roger George or that garage in the valley where we got the first Xenon lights from. Xenotech? Was that the name of that dude's business? In any case, you couldn't be a PA without one. Or at least you'd be a very shitty one. You could tell where anyone who mainly drove for a living in LA worked by seeing what pages were tattered and hanging on by a scrap. There are certain chunks of the Valley and Hollywood that will forever be my sense of what this city actually is based on that first year and where the Thomas Guide led me.

I'd gone all-in on being a PA and playing music. I was no closer to becoming an electrical engineer than I am now. Five years of college were drifting off into the ether of this drug-addled rock star fantasy I was cultivating. A rockstar in a little yellow Tercel no less. We called the band Sleep, and we started working at it. My friend Rob who I played with at Penn State, somehow showed up in LA and just walked into the band. He just appeared, mumbling something about a chemistry doctorate at UCLA in his very, um, spectral way. Flat affect and all. But he could write a pop song!

And so there we were. Rehearsing, hanging out and drinking, occasional hits of acid at Butthole Surfer shows (the one where Rob got his head busted open by a flying folding chair and wanted us to take him to the ER. He was fine. He looked fine, at least. Kinda bloody, but with the intense noise of the Butthole surfers and the giggly LSD, his wound seemed sort of beautiful. Anyway, we stayed, and he was fine. Rub some dirt on it, the Little League baseball coach in me would say.) Leslie had moved on to Art Department and was working with Jose. She should have been there, to begin with. She's an amazing artist, and while Art Dept was hardly fine art, it was surely more creative than handing out Twizzlers and cigarettes. Eventually, I'll tell you about the shirts. The lyric shirts that pulled me into her orbit, to begin with. I was working a lot. Life was actually all but idyllic in a weird 24-year-old kind of way. This whole huge transition for all of us was happening. It was time for me to start fucking everything up.

I hadn't, in any way, lost the aspiration of becoming a heroin addict. I was in a band, so that checked out. I was in some slightly romantic city of debauchery, so there was that. I had a beautiful artist girlfriend. Check. What I didn't have was heroin. Everyone in my extended family was decidedly not at all interested in this drug, to put it mildly. The sway it had held over me since I first heard Lou Reed or The Stones or, the big one, Nick Cave, had bounced off everyone else like flies in our sleep. My idea of what heroin, or more succinctly, heroin addiction, would do for me was so wildly inane that it's almost embarrassing to tell. Almost, but not fully because it existed, And it was me. And it was true. I thought of heroin addiction as a means to a better life like Rob felt about his doctorate. Like someone might consider starting a family. Like a carpenter might consider the perfect hammer. I was so romantically delusional, but fuck, I was driven. And so, I set about to figure it out. Alone.

There was no hot goth girl connection anymore. I hadn't even remotely penetrated the music scene in any meaningful way, meaningful meaning finding other junkies to help me cop. I was just me, surrounded by friends and a family who assumed I was "living my best life." All the while wholly consumed by capturing that feeling again. That feeling that I felt when I snorted the "official dope" from New York that last week of college.

Look. To almost any sensible person, there's just no way to convey why a "feeling" brought on by a substance should be anything more than a selfish indulgence. And that heroin certainly is. People talk about self-medicating, and trauma and pain, and God knows I do too. It's my stock in trade now as a therapist, but at its core, for some, for me, it was something altogether more… or less. It just made me feel like someone else. Maybe that's the same thing, but it was so acute, this feeling of being relieved of being ME and somehow still just a slightly better version of ME. This is the feeling heroin gave me, and it gave me this feeling in fucking seconds and in a predictable way that never, ever failed short of getting burned and shooting a chunk of Tootsie Roll. Imagine doing something that, within 3.5 seconds, made you exactly the weight you wanted to be. Made you as precisely funny as you wanted to be. As talented in any field as you ever dreamed and as far away from loneliness as you'd ever imagine. Forget that none of it's real but imagine feeling in your heart that it all exists! Right! Now! And imagine that once it's available, only choosing NOT to feel any of these things is the only way to stop. Imagine having to truly choose this. This is what people don't get. And none of this is an excuse. I did all of this for purely selfish reasons. I found a way around discomfort. Demanding comfort in this world is selfish. But this is the mechanics of how junkies operate. Once we're in it and we glimpse this false but perfect version of ourselves, the very notion of walking away feels like dying. Actually physically dying. Scoff away, and I understand, but this is how screwed up this life is. Look, something must explain all this opiate addiction to you. And I was looking for any way into this life.

I was not thinking clearly.

I found a way in. It's not like there was some Eureka! moment or a long slow solving of the puzzle. I think it was just a matter of thinking about heroin a lot and listening to a lot of music. We had the turntable and the receiver I had in college. We bought new little speakers. The college ones were too big to bring. We bought cool little bookshelf speakers that sounded pretty good. We bought them at Circuit City. When we paid for them, we were told to pull around back, and they'd bring out the merchandise. They gave us two pairs. They made a mistake. When we got home and realized this, we were a bit flummoxed. What to do? All I remember is taking them back and being made to feel like a chump. By Circuit City. Well, where I was going, I'd need all the Karma I could muster.

At some point, the Thelonius Monster record wound up on the turntable. I liked a lot of this record. Not all of it, but overall I dug it. I was and am a big lyric guy, but for whatever reason, certain lyrics of this record hadn't pushed into me yet. And then I heard Union Street again. Like I had many times before. Bob Forest, the singer of the band, has a voice like a thin sheet of acetate on a windy, hot summer day. In the desert. God knows what that means, but it's a wholly unique voice, and I love it. In time that voice would just flat out tell me to grow the fuck up and stop getting high, but on that night, he sang Union Street, and I heard the lyrics. "Down on Union Street. That's where my Baby gets her Dope."

Hmmm. Union Street? Let's check out the Thomas Guide.

I remember looking down on a page that Union street bisected. In my little yellow car. All intent and investigational. Union street figured on multiple pages, so I started at the top and went south. I think It starts at 3rd street, but at least that's where I started. I drove south and just took in what was happening. Lots of low-rent apartment buildings, cars held together by duct tape and kids, so many kids running shirtless about the place. I was on to it.

Eventually, I hit the intersection of 6th and Union (later 6th and Bonnie Brae). There was a shopping plaza on the left. There was a "dentista" office. A mercado. I pulled in and went into the market to get a drink and look around. Very Mexican. More kids. Bright fluorescent lights. Meat. Mothers. Tattoos.

I walked out, and some teenage guy asked me, "Chiva?” "Dope?" I asked. "Chiva," he said a bit more emphatically. Christ, work with me here. "Heroin?” "Si! Chiva!".

It's hard to describe the feeling. The relief. The wonder. The excitement of maybe having found it.

"How much?"

"45 quarter"

I said ok and pulled out the cash that I had ready to go, and he looked down and spit a blue balloon from his mouth into his hand. I gave him money, and he gave me the balloon. That was that.

I'd paid 45 dollars for what was supposed to be a quarter gram of black tar heroin. I had no idea of the economics of this stuff yet. But I'd found it!

I got home and was alone. Leslie was working. I cut open the balloon to find a little ball of tar wrapped in a small piece of wax paper. It smelled like vinegar. I looked at it and considered the next step. I knew spoons were part of this deal, so I put some in a spoon with a few drops of water. I was careful to just pull a small piece away. I was always careful. I lit the stove and held the spoon over a low flame until the brown blob dissolved into the water. An amber bit of liquid slowly cooled in the round of the spoon. I could see it cool. I was in wonder and excitement and remember feeling a sharp pang of guilt. I knew for a second what this meant. That went away quickly, overpowered by a rushing feeling of relief. I set the spoon down and found a pen and, with a kitchen knife, cut off about three inches of the pen's tube, the ink cast aside. I bent over, and with the pen in my nose, I pulled it in to me. Into Me.

It worked.