American Junkie Read online

  This was Darwin’s finest hour, just like they taught us in school. Natural selection was about to eliminate me from the gene pool. It was probably a good thing, society shouldn’t have to clean up my mess. I couldn’t swim, so I would sink. The weaker ones get weeded out. It’d been that way since the beginning of time and there was no way around it even now, especially in this country, despite all the bullshit about so-called civilized society.

  But there was a problem with that theory. I wasn’t weak. I’d been walking around for years with my skin half off, my insides exposed to anything and everything. For ten years I’d had an open wound at one place or another on my body. I had hardly bothered to cover them up. I changed the bandages every week or two if at all, stuck my dirty fingers around in there. I had shared needles with thousands of people, screwed strange girls without condoms. Rivers of filthy drugs had flowed through my body, I had hepatitis A, B, and probably C, yet on the rare occasions I saw them, doctors kept telling me that my liver was ‘just fine.’

  I had never gotten sick, never gotten an infection, nothing. Not even a cold. Some junkies I knew had gotten the flesh-eating bacteria, necrotizing fasciitis, they called it. No one really knew where it came from, some said it was just floating around in the air, some said you got it from dirty needles. A girl I knew from around the scene had gotten it. Only nineteen, she had just started shooting heroin. It had gotten under her skin and eaten her up in four days, killed her. She’d gone to the hospital and even they couldn’t stop it. Somewhere along the line I must have been exposed to it, and who knows what else. Yet here I was, still. Clearly, I was a superior physical specimen. And yet in almost every other way imaginable, totally unequipped to live in this world.

  Death was just a word, it meant nothing to me. Maybe because I’d never really lived. My time was up, that was all. I was lucky to have made it this far. Something inside me had died a long time ago, my body was just taking its time catching up. One of these days or nights I would close my eyes and they would not open again. One or two people might notice, but for the most part it would be as if I never existed. I wasn’t about to bail out now. I’d chosen this life and would rather go down with the ship. My ship.

  [OCTOBER 29, 1999]

  It was raining a little. I stood out on the sun deck, leaning on the railing. I took a drag of a cigarette, turned my face to the sky, closed my eyes and let the tiny raindrops fall on my face. Six months ago they would have hit my face like sulphuric acid. I wiped the drops away with my sleeve and looked out over the balcony. The rain was falling in streaks, like faint scratches in a film. I glanced over my shoulder at the greenhouse. Something was happening in there. Plants were growing, cells were dividing. Bugs were crawling around. Why? I don’t know. I flipped my smoke out into space.

  What makes up a life? Is it just numbers? Thirty-seven years. Zero kids that I know of. A few crummy jobs and one good one, a few brief loves, if you could even call them that. A few crummy bands. A lot of waiting. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months. If you figure twelve years times fifteen heroin sales per day you get 65,700 drug crimes. A conservative estimate. I made a few grand working regular jobs, a total of a hundred dollars from my skateboarding career and eighty-five bucks from twelve years of playing music. Millions of dollars had passed through my hands from selling heroin. The times I’d shot up I couldn’t even begin to count. Those were the facts, the numbers, the bottom line of my life.

  I don’t have a feeling of peace, or serenity. I haven’t had a spiritual awakening, haven’t been saved. But there was a certain balance, a kind of truth that had come out of this. My outsides now matched my insides, I was now exactly what I appeared to be. Broken. Scarred. Damaged. I was now, finally, just what I always was, a human being, wearing his emotions on his skin. Unfortunately, that kind of honesty probably wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  I looked up at the clouds, a uniform gray. I was still standing. Somewhat crookedly now, but still here. The pounds of flesh I lost had given me some kind of temporary reprieve, a stay of execution. Why, I don’t know. I have no kids, and given my disposition, age and physical condition it was unlikely to happen in the future. The bloodlines of Stangle and my biological mother will go no further. I will be the end of the line, a remnant of an ancient race on the verge of extinction, unable to adapt enough to survive.

  There have always been two Tom’s, and they have always hated each other. The man I wanted to be and the one I became, the first a romantic dreamer and the other a cynical realist. They took their aims and gave their best shots, over and over, day after day, night after night, year after year, leaving my body in ruins. One had never been able to defeat the other, to the point where I could become that person. They were equally strong. And they were still with me, I could feel them, lurking inside, waiting patiently. Every day that passed they were just walking away, casually reloading their guns from bottomless pockets.

  I have no clue what I’m going to do once I walk out that door. I know the world out there has continued changing and it will be more unrecognizable, more terrifying, more absurd and meaningless than ever. I know the sun is getting hotter. I know people are getting fatter and sicker and older. I know that I can’t go back, that time and progress can’t be stopped and that it was futile to try. If I could, I would run away as fast as possible. But I can’t run anymore, there’s nowhere to go. Maybe I’ll crawl into a hole and finish dying. Maybe, I’ll write a goddamned book.

  I leaned on my cane and limped back inside, down the hall and into my room. I packed up all my stuff, which fit into one little bag. At the nurses station I stopped to say my goodbyes to Greg, CJ, and the others. Hugging them all, I felt like I should cry, but I couldn’t. I’d always hated long goodbyes and I extracted myself as quickly as I could without being rude, ducked into the elevator and pushed the button for the first floor. The last thing I saw as the doors closed was the aquarium, the bubbles, the colorful fish, swimming. Back and forth, back and forth.

  The elevator jerked and began descending, then shuddered to a stop. In the lobby people were walking around. Talking. Going about their lives. I walked to the exit, stepped on the rubber mat. The automatic door swung open.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’d like to thank Harry Kirchner and Jarrett Middleton at Pharos Editions, and everyone at Counterpoint Press and Soft Skull Press for making this possible.

  Sean Beaudoin for hooking me up and for the fabulous introduction, and the rest of my writer friends for being the best crew a guy could hope for. Jonathan Evison, Joshua Mohr, Grace Krilanovich, Danny Bland, Aaron Dietz, Rob Roberge, Gina Frangello, Lenore Zion, Kris Saknussemm and Patrick O’Neil.

  My agent at Hard Rain Partners, Todd Stanley.

  My musician friends Mark Lanegan and Duff McKagan for their support and encouragement. My editor Terry Glavin, my pal Kenneth Gordon and my girlfriend Jasmyn Kelley.

  My parents who raised me, Ole and Gudrun Hansen, for everything, and my biological parents for not taking the easy way out.

  My mom’s cousin Harry Jacobsen, his wife Else, and his daughters Ellen and Lillian, whose kindness and generosity allowed me the time to write this book.

  And last but not least my friends, fans and readers from all over the world, too numerous to name, many of whom pulled me through some dark times with their support, financial and otherwise. I love and appreciate each and every one of you.