How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z - Tapa blanda

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Ann Marlowe is a New York writer and critic who has written on music, books, and culture for The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Artforum, and Bookforum.  She lives in New York City.

De la contraportada

How to Stop Time is an important contemporary contribution to the classic accounts of the seductive attractions and dangerous distractions of drug use.
In this hypnotic and piercingly intelligent chronicle, Ann Marlowe dissects her former heroin habit, and recounts in harrowing detail the rigors and realities of life under the influence while building a successful Wall Street career and establishing a reputation as a critic in the alternative press. A one-time Harvard grad student in philosophy, Marlowe ruthlessly examines the paradoxical nature of addiction, and connects her own experience to a wider discussion of heroin in the context of our post-consumer, digital society.

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Excerpt

a

When I was six or seven, a Chanukah gift for me arrivedin the mail. The slender brown paper-wrapped box wasfrom my aunt Ruth, who lived in Manhattan and alwayssent me fun presents, so I tore off the paper as fast as Icould. Inside was a white B. Altman box. Oh no. I'dtold my parents I wanted a bow and arrow, a really goodjump rope, and a Slinky, but this was probably clothes.Boring. Reluctantly, I opened the cardboard container.

    Inside was a white crewneck sweater, with a red Aembroidered directly in the center of the chest, underneaththe neckline. This wasn't going anywhere nearschool. I got teased enough for the frumpy clothes mymother bought me, but this was really bad. I didn't evenlike the colors: white was icky. And Aunt Ruth knew myfavorite color was blue, my second favorite green?whydid she get me a red initial?

abstention

I roll the empty ice-cream spoon around in my mouth."You don't have to take the finish off," my mother tellsme. "Put that back in the dish. It's close to your bedtimeanyway." We are eating butterscotch ice cream by thelight of a mosquito candle in the full dark of our backyard.My little brother, just four, is asleep in his room.Since I turned ten, my bedtime is nine thirty, instead ofnine, and I guess that I have a half hour to go.

    It is very quiet; there is no through traffic on our suburbanNew Jersey street, and the houses are on lots of anacre or more. Our three lawn chairs are on the octagonalpatio in the center of our backyard lawn, where the cultivatedand the wild have fought to a draw. The lawn ismarshy, and the woods that ring it on three sidesencroach each spring in the form of hundreds of treeseedlings I must pluck out as they appear. On the fourthside of the lawn the dark bulk of our house rises, lit onlyby the ceiling light in the kitchen and one lamp in thefamily room.

    I stay still, hoping that if my parents forget about mypresence they will talk about secret, adult things. Dad,olive-skinned and handsome, with closely cropped blackhair already flecked with gray?he is, after all, forty-one?wearsbaggy chino shorts, a madras shirt, socksand sandals. Mom, a little taller, paler, short-haired,"pleasant looking" in her words, is in a short-sleevedman-tailored yellow blouse, her favorite color, a bluecotton skirt that falls below her knees, stockings (despitethe heat) and sober brown lace-ups. The stockings arefor her varicose veins, the shoes for her flat feet, theblouse to conceal the tissue missing from her neck sinceshe had half of her cancerous thyroid removed twentyyears before.

    Instead of feeling sorry for my mother's infirmities, Iam appalled by them. Although she suggests that I toowill eventually have varicose veins, I hotly deny it. And Ihate the shoes she makes me wear, ugly things with "support";she insists that I have flat feet like hers. The moreshe draws attention to her physical imperfections, themore I?even at ten?want to distance myself from her,to show her that I am strong and athletic and healthy.

    I am tall for my age?alas, not now?and have small,regular features. The only problem is my hair, a mass ofblack ringlets at odds both with the straight-haired fashionsof the times, and our mainly Anglo-Saxon town.And my clothes, chosen by my mother. Because shethinks fashion is created to manipulate people intospending money needlessly, she won't buy me the expensivetrendy clothes I want; because two of her uncles aregarment manufacturers and she grew up knowing howto judge fabric, she won't buy the cheap imitations thatwould please me nearly as much. Instead of the fashionablehot pants I covet, I am wearing an archaic shorts setin a pink and yellow floral print I know is uncool, anoutfit I'm glad my school friends aren't here to see.

    At least the sixties have pushed my mom towardgreater informality: now, in 1968, I no longer have towear white gloves and black Maryjanes on special occasions.But why couldn't my father pick my clothes? Iloved his old black leather motorcycle jacket hanging inthe laundry room closet. Mother says he wore it whenhe courted her, and he drove a little MG convertible. "Itwas so small," she laughs when she remembers. But itsounds a lot more fun than the two Rambler stationwagons he chose for us. Washed-out red (1964) andhospital green (1965), they were inexpensive and highlyrated, I've been told, by Consumer Reports. When I askwhy my friends' parents have more glamorous cars, I amtold they are pretentious, and buy their cars on credit.My parents buy theirs for cash, and advise me to do thesame when I grow up.

    The crickets and frogs make a rough music in thebackground of my parents' voices. You can't see anyother houses from the back of the house; my parentshave told me we are lucky to have one-acre zoning inour town. This is also why it is safe for me to walkaround the neighborhood by myself, or even to school amile away. My parents talk a lot about safety, buttonight the conversation is duller, revolving aroundrepairs to the washing machine. The talk doesn't interestme until I hear the names of our next-door neighbors,the Van Eingens, whose little girl and I ride our bikes upand down the street together. I could see them sitting ontheir patio when I followed my parents out the laundryroom door to the backyard a half hour ago.

    "... Must have a drinking problem," my mother issaying. "They've been out there at least since I broughtthe steak out to you at the grill, and I saw they had severalbeer bottles on the table then." "They have peopleover a lot," my father offers. "They don't have educatedvoices," my mother notes. "I don't believe either of themwent to college." "But he must be doing well," myfather counters, "he mentioned he was buying a Lincoln.""Probably on credit," my mother responds.

    My parents didn't demonize drinking; it was just oneof those things, like golf, or buying showy cars, that theythought beneath people of their intelligence and goodeducation. Both of them had been to graduate schooland studied science and knew, for instance, that golfprovided little exercise, that many expensive cars werepoorly engineered, that buying on credit was cost-ineffective,and that alcohol injured your health, made yousay stupid things and increased your chances of injuringyourself in freak accidents. I knew our Ramblers werepractical, but I had much more fun riding in the cars ofmy parents' friends, showy automobiles that are belovedcollectors' items today.

    I was too sheltered to even wonder if the Van Eingenswere having more fun than my parents, who between thetwo of them didn't have a drink a week. Drugs were completelyout of the question. My mother and father had fewfriends and socialized only a few times a year, mainly withequally abstemious relatives whose foibles they talkedabout behind their back between visits. What we calledthe liquor cabinet held, upon sneak inspection, a dustybottle of Benedictine, whatever that was, and another witha name I at least recognized: Scotch. Both were nearly full,and I left them that way. I had no curiosity about alcoholin grade school. This I must have picked up from the culture,for by junior high I'd gotten tipsy a few times at parties.But then and now, alcohol isn't my drug.

    Just as rare as my parents' puritanism about alcohol isheroin's entrance into my consciousness through familystories. I grew up hearing of a legendary great uncle, theblack sheep of my father's family, who was in due coursea minor league ballplayer, a merchant sailor, and ajunkie. My father's Hebrew name, David, was his, andbefore I was born he died at the Federal Narcotics Farmin Lexington, Kentucky. This is all I know about him.All of his accomplishments were unusual in the Jewishcontext of the sixties and seventies, although less so inthe racier forties and fifties, and the presence of a professionalathlete in our family made as great an impact onme as that of a junkie.

    Although we have no physicians on either side of theimmediate family?odd for Jews of the professionalclass?at various times both my parents made their livingworking for drug companies, my father as a researchchemist and patent attorney and my mother as a medicalwriter and marketing consultant. My parents bothwere at ease with the sciences, but I detested them, andthe chemistry set my father optimistically bought melanguished unused. Dad had heralded his later talent fororganic chemistry by producing a genuinely life-threatening,permanent scar-leaving basement lab explosion atfifteen; it didn't look as though I'd be following in hispath to grad school in chemistry.

    Perhaps narcotics addiction, the dark sides of medicine,an opposite or obverse of the healing side, hung inthe air over our family too. My father was proudly right-wingon most issues by the time I was old enough tounderstand dinner table conversation, but there werebooks about junkies on my father's shelves. That's whereI found Thomas De Quincey's brilliant, unsurpassedConfessions of an English Opium Eater, as well as Junky,and cheap drug exploitation novels from the late sixties,and a detective novel of which I remember only theopening lines, about a lawyer so brilliant he might havepracticed anywhere, but he had to be within five minutesof a fix, so he practiced in Harlem.

    My dad was draconian about crimes against property,rioters, welfare and "permissive child-rearing," which hesermonized about at the drop of a hat, but he was surprisinglyliberal on social issues. He professed sympathyfor Oscar Wilde, whose "Ballad of Reading Gaol" heknew by heart, and he never said anything scornfulabout drug addicts. When Great Uncle David's namecame up, it was my mother who always put in, "the onewho was a drug addict." Neither of them added anycondemnation, because in suburban New Jersey in thesixties and seventies, being a junkie wasn't even on theradar screen. My parents were more concerned that mybrother and I not develop a taste for sugary sodas; wedidn't.

addiction

The nearest I can come to explaining to someone whodoesn't take illegal drugs the unrecapturable specialnessof your first heroin high is to invoke the deep satisfactionof your first cup of coffee in the morning. Your subsequentcoffees may be pleasant enough, but they're allmarred by not being the first. And heroin use is one ofthe indisputable cases where the good old days reallywere the good old days. The initial highs did feel betterthan the drug will ever make you feel again.

    The chemistry of the drug is ruthless: it is designed todisappoint you. Yes, once in a while there's a night whenyou get exactly where you're trying to go. Magic. Thenyou chase that memory for a month. But preciselybecause you so want to get there it becomes harder andharder. Your mind starts playing tricks on you. Scrutinizingthe high, it weakens. You wonder if you're quite ashigh as you should be, if the cut's different, if there'ssomething funny about your jaw or lower back, if it usedto feel this speedy.... Ah for the good old days, whenheroin felt wonderful. If I had to offer up a one sentencedefinition of addiction, I'd call it a form of mourning forthe irrecoverable glories of the first time. This means thataddiction is essentially nostalgic, which ought to tarnishthe luster of nostalgia as much as that of addiction.

    Addiction can show us what is deeply suspect aboutnostalgia. That drive to return to the past isn't an innocentone. It's about stopping your passage to the future,it's a symptom of fear of death, and the love of predictableexperience. And the love of predictable experience,not the drug itself, is the major damage done toheroin users. Not getting on with your life is much morelikely than going to the emergency room, and muchharder to discern from the inside.

aging

Dope can make you bad looking, especially if you'reusing a lot: you retain water, so your face grows puffyand aged, you develop blemishes, your skin looks green.And after quitting, you look worse for months beforeyour former looks return. But heroin also seems toretard the aging process. People who've been involvedwith dope are pickled by it, preserved from decay.

    What happens might be purely chemical?heroindoes slow the metabolism. Or it might be psychological,an arrest of life experience. Think about those commercialsfor skin care products that point out that laughingor frowning ages your skin. Life on heroin doesn't lenditself to lots of animated facial expressions. Your lows arehigher and?because of the physical annoyances ofaddiction?your highs are lower. There are not a lot ofsurprises, which is often the point; your rhythms aredefined by the familiar and predictable arc of the drug'sbreakdown in your body, rather than the hazards oftime. It is absence of pain that you are looking for, butabsence of living that you get. Your last few years of useare like suspended time, and this absence of living tellson your face, and, alas, on your heart.

alphabet

Sanctified only by usage, but nevertheless immutable,alphabetical order is one of the more obvious enemies ofchance. While there is an underlying arbitrariness?whichwords to alphabetize, which letters they happento begin with?once a commitment is made to the principle,all is fixed. Alphabetical order is the schoolchild'sfirst lesson in the implacability of fate: he may beassigned to a seat solely on the basis of his last name,and he will learn to listen for that name each morning inthe roll call, in its proper place.

    When you stop to think about it, alphabetical order isemphasized in early schooling more than its intellectualimportance warrants. Learning the alphabet is conventionallythe first step in learning to read, but it's not necessaryfor the process. Given a basic vocabulary, you canread in a language without knowing its alphabeticalorder. True, you can't use a dictionary, a phone book ormany other reference works without great trouble. Butdigital culture makes it likely that the importance ofalphabetical order will erode rapidly in the near future.We won't use paper dictionaries or reference works; wewill just query a database.

    Our early training in the alphabet is mainly aboutsubmitting for the first time to an arbitrary discipline.The implacable order of letters will not be rearranged toplease the child; no cute pleas or frightening howls willchange it. Memorizing the order of the letters is aninduction into the child's inherited culture, a set of rulesthat initially appear equally arbitrary, but which makehuman society possible. Rules are the enemy of entropy.The sonata and the sonnet, the haiku and the lipogram,the blues lyric and Scrabble, the civil statute and the religiousinjunction all set up artificial forms that comfortdistress at the uncertainty of human fate (see vertigo).

arrest

The olive skin and curly black hair that made me ananomaly in my childhood town allowed me to blendinto the heavily Hispanic Lower East Side street scenemore easily than many of my friends, but it is probablyjust dumb luck that saved me from the embarrassmentsof arrest. I tried to minimize risk: street lore had it thatcopping during the day was more dangerous than atnight, because the police were more motivated to makearrests in daylight. Buying below Houston Street wassaid to be more dangerous than above, since that areahad been targeted for a police crackdown. You were supposedto drop the dope bags if you thought a cop wasbehind you; looking back over your shoulder was a tip-offthat you'd been copping.

    Before leaving the house, I made sure I had my licensebecause if you're arrested you get released faster with ID.And of course I had to have the right money, whichsometimes meant getting reverse change, a ten or twentyfor ones or fives. Stores in the neighborhood often refusedthis request. But almost no dealers would take ones. Ifthey knew you, fives were OK, but tens were the onlysure thing. You could usually get change for larger bills,but it wasn't the best idea. If the guy took your twentyand only gave you a bag, or would only give you twobags, not a ten and a bag, what were you going to do?

    Whenever I went out to cop, I was watchful. I likedgoing for a reconnaissance by bicycle, to check to see if aparticular spot was open. (You don't take a car, becausethe new laws let the cops confiscate it if you're busted.)The odds that you would arrive when the spot was openwere maybe fifty-fifty. If it was closed, you had probablypassed by a bunch of undercover cops, who had watchedyou walk to a known dope spot and turn around andwalk away. The more times the cops saw you the morelikely it was they'd pick you out and arrest you someother day when you were walking away from buying. Itwas too much exposure?hence the bicycle. There werealso supposed to be video cameras aimed at notoriouscop spots and if you showed up a lot they knew youwere using.

    If the lookouts or another user told you to come backin five minutes, you had to kill time. Sometimes I spentthose stressful minutes lingering in a bodega, searchingfor an imaginary need on the dusty shelves of Goyacanned goods waiting forlornly in their off-colored sun-fadedlabels, or searching among the stale bags of driedblack and red beans. Many of the stores were drugfronts, but they wouldn't sell to Anglos, or dealt in crackrather than dope. Or I pretended to be waiting for afriend outside, reading a band poster pasted on a lamppost, or one of those signs, handwritten when I firstmoved to the East Village but later printed out on homecomputers, announcing the finding or losing of a pet.

    The worst was being told to come back in twentyminutes, so you had to go home or somewhere else andrepeat the whole procedure. What with all this, I sometimesjust sought out a friend of Dave's named Stan, aprematurely decrepit and unexpectedly sweet whitehandyman who would get you a bag or two for cost plusfive bucks or a taste. You could spend your waiting timein Max Fish (see Max Fish), get high there without havingto go home, and start your evening more smoothly.

athletics

All my junkie friends had been good athletes. Alexandrahad lettered in three sports in her California boardingschool, Dave went to prep school on a football scholarship,Ondine had won show-jumping events, Sam hadrun cross-country and climbed mountains, Can hadmountain-biked and windsurfed competitively. Whenthey stopped doing sports for one reason or another?injuries,moving to New York from a less urban environment,depression, work?they used dope to blow off theirnaturally high level of energy, to calm them down, makethem feel normal. And some of them did both dope andsports.

    Pat's girlfriend Cassandra used to snort dope immediatelybefore going running (I, more puritanical, did itafter, as a reward); a friend of a friend ran the New YorkMarathon high. But my friend who best exemplified thelinkage between sports and dope was Candy, who is as talland lean as a man. Shortly after I met her, I learned howphysically fearless she was. One night, I ran into her outsideMax Fish at two in the morning. Already fucked upon dope, she was heading off to cop again on Avenue D,mounted on her expensive Italian racing bike, her shoesin the toe clips, her left arm in a cast. The day before,she'd broken it in two places in a freak accident.

    Heroin provides the all-absorbing, anxiety-deflectingpresentness, which we can also find in sports. In the middleof a good tennis or basketball game, the voices in myhead that do not bear on the activity of the moment arestilled. I forget about not forgetting to buy garbage bags,about my date tomorrow, about my eventual death. And Iemerge from the spell of the sport better able to focus onwhat is and isn't important. So much of my life has beenspent in this oblivion of athletics: hitting a tennis ballagainst the wall as a kid, practicing squash in college,doing martial arts, learning to surf, shooting baskets, andrecently back to tennis again. Perhaps if you fall out of thehabit of playing a sport seriously, where those moments ofimmersion occur often, you are more vulnerable to achemical substitute than someone who never knew thosemoments at all.

    There is also a biochemical link. Both serious druguse and serious sports demand strong constitutions anda high pain threshold. Like many of my druggie friends,I have a hardy constitution and don't notice pain thatbothers most people. Endurance sports like running andswimming have always been easy for me, although I'mnot talented at them, or particularly fast. I just don't feelthe pain. Or is "high pain threshold" code for self-hypnosis,the ability to make yourself not registersensations as negative?

    During the years I used dope, I played a curious gamewith myself, balancing heroin against exercise in aneffort to get high as often as I wanted without losing mystrength and muscle tone. Later, a physician friend suggestedthat my level of exercise made it possible for mybody to clear the drug from my bloodstream unusuallyquickly. And so, although my highs ran out faster thanthey might have otherwise, I also sunk more slowly intoaddiction.

    My experiences with mixing dope and sports concentratedon martial arts. Doing both heroin and tae kwondo in a committed way wasn't as difficult as the nonusermay believe, but it required planning. I found that goingto martial arts class the day after a night spent gettinghigh worked well: since some heroin was still in mybloodstream, I felt less pain during the warm-up exercises.(My lifetime pull-up record?nine?was achievedone such day after.) But the day after the day after I wasirritable, uncomfortable in my skin, and found martialarts purgatorial. Of course, if I got high that night, Iensured myself another good class the next night....

    This system worked well until one evening, on a dayafter dope, when I got kicked hard in the stomach in theregular sparring exercise. Tears came to my eyes from thepain, and when I stood up straight it was cautiously, suspectinga broken rib or bruised organ. Luckily it was neither.I was ashamed; despite my years of training and myblue belt, I simply hadn't seen the kick coming. Chalkthat up to last night's dope, I thought. I pulled backfrom heroin for a week or two, but eventually the heroinwon out, and it made me pull back from sparring, whichwas what I'd loved about tae kwon do in the first place.Toward the end of my dope years, I had a low-level butconstant sense of mortification about this evasion.

babble

There is this moment of exultation just when the dopehits your bloodstream, and you feel so good you have toshare it, so you talk, you talk as you have never talkedbefore (if you are normally reticent), you chat with peopleyou'd cross the street to avoid other times, you speakalmost as a substitute for motion. And in a group ofpeople who have gotten high together, the talk erupts atnearly the same instant, all voices suddenly raised,engaged in discourse, if not dialogue, because what witheveryone speaking at once, it is really impossible to havea conversation, but the delightful part is that no one ismad about being unable to complete sentences withoutinterruption, because the bliss of heroin has descendedon all.

    These moments offer something like the freedom ofthe psychoanalytic couch, at a lower price, and in a socialsetting. They might be some users' reason for doing thedrug: if you have trouble getting to freedom of speech,but distrust liquor's lack of control, dope unlocks the doorjust enough. This urge to talk might have something todo with the way I began writing professionally (see firsttime) and the odd little fact that the literature of opiatesin English began almost with the first users.

    But dope babble bothered me. I thought it made mesee myself as others saw me: all my life I had been told Italked too much. And if my psycho-analysis had helpedme to piece together some subtexts in all those words,dope made me suspicious of their quantity. Now that Iwrite, I talk less. The babble has been recognized andchannelled, perhaps also tamed and removed from theunstable excitement of its origins in the unconscious.

bad thing

When my brother and I were kids, we were always beingwarned against some carelessness, or some pleasure, thatmight result in disaster. "Don't hold that pencil nearyour eye! If someone knocks against you, it will pokeyour eye out!" "Wear your rainboots! If you play in yoursneakers, you'll catch a cold." And so on. The disasterthat was never mentioned was my dad's illness, but Iwouldn't find out about that until later.

    Heroin use is way outside the margin of these potentialdisasters, but it's also possible to see it as a way of wardingthem off. A line from a television song, "Adventure,"always reminded me of heroin: "I love disaster/And I lovewhat comes after." So the life you lead after the disaster isfree of certain kinds of anxiety, fears that are worse for youthan worrying about being a drug user.

bag

In New York, heroin comes in $10 bags, small? ¾" by1 ½"?glassine envelopes, glued shut on three sides andsealed with transparent tape at the top. Sometimes theyare folded in thirds horizontally and encased in brightlycolored plastic bags. The plastic prevents the heroinfrom dissolving if you put the bag in your mouth, or ifit gets wet somehow. This is convenient for the user, butdesigned for the street sellers, who often conceal bags intheir mouths or under a paving stone or in a crack in thewall. Street folklore has it that the dope from enclosedbags is weaker.

    If you buy in bulk, the price comes down. The typicaldeal is $90 for a bundle, ten bags, but sometimes youcan get a bundle for $80. Sam even found a place thatwould part with five bags for $40. The other way to getmore for your money is to go to the places where poorerusers buy. The bags are still $10, but the dope isstronger, which is why Dave and Ondine sometimeswent up to East Harlem to cop. Dave would go to theBronx, but that's unusual for a downtown user. I suspectedthat these trips were fueled by a hunger foradventure; the cab fare Ondine paid must have wipedout any savings on the dope (see madness).

Continues...

Excerpted from How to Stop Timeby Ann Marlowe Copyright © 2000 by Ann Marlowe. Excerpted by permission.
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