An old name resurfaced yesterday. A junkie drummer called Mac who useta drive me around the Hollywood AA meetings and try to pick up girls 30 years his junior by coming on like some grand old dame of the recovery scene when in reality he was living in Genesis house like me, after a disastrous 3 year heroin run. I guess he’d had clean time before that, but his habit on and off was 30 years old, 7 years longer than I’d been alive back then.
He told me that New York Luke checked out 2 years ago.
He crumbled after a solid year clean, scored a bunch of crack, and went back to his apartment with a new pipe and a bunch of porno. They found him 2 weeks later, pants around his ankles, pipe still in his hand. Mac said they knew he was dead because there was still left over crack, har-har. Heart trouble. 44 years old, another stiff to add to the list.
I remember him singing to me “I’ll put flowers on your grave, baby” when I was sharing one morning over breakfast. That was the deal in Genesis: scrambled eggs or cereal, and “sharing”. We’d say the serenity prayer; thank God for another day on the earth without dope in our veins, and then each in turn take the floor to say what we were grateful for. At least that was the plan. Mostly we just bitched and complained:
“I didn’t sleep none, because that Jew-fuck in the next bed was snoring again.”
“Hey fuck you Dave. At least I don’t stink up the place with my farts.”
“Suck my dick, fatso.”
“I only do that for money or dope. Whatcha got?”
As per usual I was bitching and complaining, miserable in my new found sobriety, and announcing “I’m gonna split to England! The dope is practically legal back there, and the quality is good. They get it from Afghanistan, not fucking Tijuana. They hand out methadone like its aspirin. Fuck this country, and fuck AA.”
Yeah, I was all sweetness and light in Genesis house. And Luke, he started singing “I’ll put flowers on your grave” in this rasping old falsetto, and then laughed his dirty New York laugh. Some of the others cracked up but most didn’t, as joking about death was generally considered bad form in a place when so many of us already had one foot in the afterlife. I’m writing this, 7 years later, in New York. The sound of traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway bleeds through my window, like the rolling of some distant sea. I wonder absently if I’ll get to return the favor and place flowers some on his.
The sun looked the color of puke. The sky was like a detuned television. I was miserable. I was rooming with old Hank, the afforementioned alcoholic Jew opera singer who snored like a freight train coming into station, and Dave, a big fat fuck who wore ugly jewelry and boasted about what a hardcore motherfucker he was to anyone who would listen. For some reason got all of the pussy at meetings. He called it “the thirteenth step” - after the girls would come into the program from the street, all beaten up, with their self esteem in the ground, there would be big cheesy Dave cooing in his sweet junkie con voice “you wanna get together for coffee sometimes and talk about the steps….?” And after they talked steps one through twelve, the thirteenth step was next, and that wasn’t one that they wrote about in the big book. It was one best discussed behind closed doors.
I never got laid because of an AA meeting. I scored drugs at a few of ‘em, but never a girl. Thing is, you had to be prepared to bullshit them. You ask a girl out for coffee at an AA meeting and the topic of conversation is always recovery. Nothing kills a hard on like talking about recovery.
Then there was Brad, a good-natured piss artist who seemed too young to be the kind of fall-down-in-the-gutter drunk that he was. He didn’t like to drink socially; he went straight for the bowery bum shit. He didn’t go to bars, he headed straight to the liquor store for Mad Dog, or Night Train, or King Cobra, and he’d just drink and drink until he pissed his pants. Brad played the guitar and once met Carmen Elektra at a meeting. She had told him she was doing a new TV show and he offered to write her a song for the theme. I guess she told him “sure” to get rid of him, and from that moment on all Brad could talk about was how he was going to write a song for Carmen Elektra’s show. He’d sit there agonizing over his acoustic guitar, and look up at me sometimes with his pained expression on his face, strum a couple of chords and ask “do you think these are good enough for Carmen?”
There was another roommate, an Italian from New Jersey called Rob who looked like a young Stallone, and was by his own accounts a ‘fashion designer’ and a crack head. He talked like something from a movie. Complete Jersey boy. He even said “fogeddaboutit” like he was parodying himself. Mac told me that he’d had something to do with Luke’s relapse, but I could be getting that all fucked up.
Sometimes I’d get so lonely I would talk to myself, but I bored myself rigid. Other times I would lock myself in the bathroom and pretend that I was fixing using a pen or something and watch myself in the mirror and think about how beautiful it looked, the scars, my ribs sticking through my flesh, the whole thing. I missed dope but I had no money. Anyway, they said that if I relapsed again I was bound to die or end up in prison. I’d look at my reflection again. That was not a face that would fare well in prison, I decided.
Brad had a sister who was an evangelical Christian, and one day she took Brad, Rob and I out to church. The church was out in Venice. I hate churches. I was raised a Catholic, as was Rob, and that’s usually enough for most people. We went along because we weren’t allowed to come and go from the house as we pleased. All trips away from Genesis House had to be recovery related, and you had to take someone along who had been there for a minimum of 30 days and had been OK’d by the house captains. Brad, Rob and I were not OK’d. But the captains knew that Brad’s sister was a religious type, and so we were OK’d as long as we went straight to the church with her and came straight home without stopping. Just the idea that we would get in a car and drive somewhere was exciting enough to entice Rob, Brad and I into a house of God.
We found ourselves in a vast quartz palace with video screens and a rock band that sang songs with titles “Awesome Lord, I Give my Life to You.” They sounded like Nickleback, and if that’s not bad enough, all of the songs had Evangelical-themed lyrics. When they were done, the Preacher came out and stood center stage. There was an entire lighting show going on. I thought about the Marilyn Manson show I had gate crashed on Ecstasy last year.
“I had a dream!” the preacher screamed.
When he said “I had a dream”, people yelled out “preach it!” like we were at a Baptist church, even though everybody was white and I mean white all over – white skin, white teeth and - no doubt - white underwear.
“ I had a dream last night that today… TODAY!... we would raise, not one-“
“NO!”
“Not two…”
“NO!!!”
“But three THOUSAND dollars from the plates.”
“PRAISE JESUS!”
“And that we would be enabled to buy the new video screens we so desperately need! Now, brothers and sisters, will my dream come true?”
“YES BROTHER!”
“I SAID – WILL my DREAM come TRUE?”
The place erupted, even though I thought that this preacher’s dream was slightly less impressive than Martin Luther King’s. The plates went around, and people practically killed themselves trying to get their wallets out. People tossed, 20’s, 50’s 100’s… some even frantically wrote checks and threw them in the plates. That was my first up close experience of religion in the US. It was pretty much perfect, I guess. I looked over to Rob and his mouth was sorta hanging open. He said “I need to go smoke” and he and I got the fuck outta there, leaving Brad and his sister praising Jesus with the rest of the nut cases.
Sitting out under a flat, two dimensional sun, watching Rob smoke a cigarette. It was one of those skies that look like a painted backdrop. The first few months off dope and everything has this vague tint of being slightly unreal, artificial. And a couple of girls walked up to us, pretty I suppose if you like those white bread American types with perfect teeth and healthy looking legs. They asked why we were sitting outside of the church and not inside where the miracle was happening.
“Ah,” I said, “You know, I wanted to try it out. Take a look. It’s not for me. Nice church though. Pretty.”
And their big white toothy smiles disappeared and simultaneously they both raised their thumbs and placed them in their mouths and kinda flicked us off by scraping the tongue past the top row of teeth, before they walked away silently. I think it was come kind of Evangelical curse.
“Ya wouldn’t get that treatment at St John The Divine,” Rob told me, “These fucking evangelicals are nuts, bro.”
Years later I would be back in America and those people would be running the country. But nobody was blowing shit up, apart from the government and they were doing it far away from American soil. My generation is a pretty unimaginative one. Scared of taking risks. Where’s OUR Hinckley? Where are the glamorous assassins, the madmen, the fruitcakes? I guess they’ve got better things to do than hold the power of history within their hands. Nobody is burning, burning, burning anymore. This is an age of smoldering ashes, not fires. Everybody is too content, well fed, self-satisfied.
I asked Mac what happened to big crazy Dave, the guy whose routine involved 13th stepping, and all of that fun stuff. Dave was an asshole, but he talked a good game when it came to recovery. I remember once buying a magazine, one of those English ones like Mojo or something, and they were doing a special about musicians and drugs. And none other than my old band mate Marc Almond was in there talking about they joys of being clean. I remembered us snorting coke regularly, and the way he called it “nose candy”. This only served to reinforce what I secretly believed: that no one REALLY gets clean. They clean up for a while, but then they are able to go back to doing it once in a while. I knew that Marc wasn’t a raging coke fiend at the time I knew him. He’d found his equilibrium. I was reading the magazine in my bottom bunk and Dave glared over at me. He’d noticed the word “DRUGS” on the cover.
“What’s that shit you’re reading?”
“Look at this! My old singer is in here, talking about how he takes it one day at a time. You see! He fucking HAS to say that because he used to be a mess. Everybody is so fucking brainwashed that if you’ve had a drug problem you cant ever do any drugs again! Its fucking bullshit!”
“You’re talking bullshit,” he glared, “the party’s over for you, man. You’ll never be able to use again. If that fruit is using coke, he’ll fuck up again sooner or later. Our brains are wired differently now. The only solution is totally abstinence.”
I thought about never tasting a margarita or getting stoned again, and shivered. But Dave seemed utterly convinced. He was a prick, but he was something of a pillar in the recovery community.
So I asked Mac what happened to him.
“Sad story.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, the last time I saw him… shit, you know I’d lost touch with him after leaving Genesis House, you’d split to England already… but I’d heard he wasn’t doing so good. It was pussy that fucked him up. Fell for some girl, she went out, big time, and he followed. I was at a meeting and this really skinny dude comes up to me and knows my name. It takes me like 5 minutes to realize that its Dave. I mean he was a big guy, right? He must have been down to 140lbs when I saw him.”
“Holy shit. What did he say?”
“He said, HEY MAC YOU GOT ANY KOLONOPEN? And I said no. And he sat down at the back of the room and fell asleep. Someone was sharing, and he fell of his seat, and cracked his head on the floor. Big mess.”
I should also note that I am writing this, stoned, and nicely drunk.
I guess everybody is different.
That’s what makes life so exciting. Just ask Dave.
DAN FANTE
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
LENNY BRUCE
CHET BAKER