“They can’t be. They would be, like, five years old.”
“They are. I just wear ’em here. I haven’t been outside in a while.”
“Man, you should get out. Check out your yard. Your gardeners have knocked themselves out.”
I would have been amused by this dazed and confused small talk, but my friend was crashing as a viable living organism in front of my eyes. The footwear might have concerned me, but his eyes terrified me. He was twenty-seven years old, and he had a look that recalled every old man with senile dementia I had ever passed on the streets of Hollywood. Whatever candles burned behind those eyes were fluttering out. Not many years earlier we’d shared a sort of punk rock bravado about our favorite rock stars who’d died young—Gram Parsons, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Seeing John’s life and spirit exit in curls of smoke from the glass pipe scared me. I saw all my illusions about cool, success, fame, and having a good time die. John wasn’t just my friend. He had a true gift as a guitar player. And it was all going up in crack smoke. I couldn’t fully admit to the depths of my own problems, but I could see John’s with crystal clarity. I had to do something. He was becoming mummified in this place. I knew if he stayed here any longer, he was going to die.
“Man, don’t your teeth hurt?” I asked.
He nodded and palmed his jaw. Of course they did. If you neglect yourself long enough, your teeth are the first things to go. You smoke enough crack, your teeth rot out from the smoke and lack of saliva. Oddly enough, he was in a place where the thing that might really kill him wasn’t drugs but an infection from his derelict, abcessed teeth.
My reaching out to him from a place of understanding worked. I was surprised that he was willing. I guess he was done. We walked out to my Jeep. “Wow. You’re right,” he said, blinking like a deep-sea creature pulled too fast to the surface. “Those bougainvilleas look great.” It was, no doubt, the first time his boots had touched the gravel walkway in years. One of the gardening crew, an older Mexican, had just walked around a corner of the house and stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of this wan apparition who looked a lot like Saint Lazarus. The only thing missing was a dog to lick John’s hands.
We got into my Jeep. I picked up my cell phone to call Las Encinas Hospital. John looked perplexed. “What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a cell phone. They’ve been around for a while now, John.” I guess he’d been so isolated he hadn’t seen one before.
When I dropped him off at Las Encinas and saw the staff of chirpy people walk him in, I felt like I’d delivered him to a new and better life. This was the motherfucker of all good deeds. I really cared about him and I had pulled him from death’s door.
I must be a pretty good person, I thought. I was in my Jeep driving onto the 101 freeway and on autopilot, I turned back toward John’s house. My next thought was, I bet he has a bunch of shit in his house. No sense in letting it go to waste. I’m going to get high.
Once back at John’s place, I didn’t have any trouble locating his stash. I used it to cook up a crack rock the size of a baseball. To me, it was a work of art. It almost seemed a shame to break off a chunk and destroy its pristine roundness, but that’s exactly what I did. I shoved the ivory-colored chip into a glass tube that had one end stuffed with a filter made from a copper scouring pad. I brought it to my lips, held a flame to the rock, and inhaled deeply. I heard the sizzle and pop as it melted and felt the smoke numb my tongue and throat. I held it in for as long as I could and then exhaled a cartoonishly huge billow of white smoke. I watched it expand and felt my heart start to race while I heard my blood pulse through my ears before the hit slammed into the front part of my brain and lit up every conceivable pleasure receptor.
I didn’t think of this as “stealing.” Junkies never do.
There’s an old story in recovery meetings that goes, “The difference between a drunk and a junkie is this: An alkie will steal your wallet. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.” That’s the kind of friend I was. Everything boiled down to that one sputtering rock in the pipe.
I was at the tail end of a dark period, and I was bone-tired of the life I had been living. The years 1993 through 1995 were a blurry, bleary-eyed mess that I would just as soon have forgotten if they hadn’t left such a hard stamp on me. They’d wrecked me and shamed me. There had been that awful moment in January of 1993 when I sang the national anthem at a Clippers game at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. I had been asked to perform the song, and I was a Clippers fan. What could possibly go wrong? I drank heavily and smoked some crack to sharpen up before I went in front of the crowd. I had the idea to sing the song as a slow, folkish antiwar protest tune. I think I was the first punk rocker to have ever been asked to sing the national anthem at any American sporting event. Clipper Ron Harper even gave me a little pat on the ass like jocks do at games in anticipation of what was sure to be a stirring and thought-provoking opening to the game. “Go
