Authors: Jerry Stahl
Heroin Chronicles (25 page)
The noise of the helicopter is getting closer. As it lifts me into the air, I start to spin round and round like a whirling dervish. I am pulled inside, the blinders removed, and I gaze into the face of a rather handsome medical worker. Another time, another place, I would have asked for his number. I apologize to him for wasting his time when there are others who really are sick and in need of his help. He holds my hand as I sob my way to the hospital.
Once there, I am wheeled into an emergency cubicle. The fury welling up inside me is matched in fervor only by the disappointment at having failed. A social worker informs me that I will be committed to the psychiatric unit; she asks who she can call for me. The idea of seeing those I cherish fills me with dread. She hands me a pen and paper, and reluctantly I write down some numbers. Before long, my friends start to arrive. I don't want to look at them, but my neck brace makes it impossible to turn away. The combination of painkillers and physical discomfort sends me off on a belligerent diatribe.
“I'm going to keep trying until I get it right!” I yell at them. It's cruel and spiteful. In their shoes I would've suggested a .357 Magnum for my next attempt.
My mother is the last to visit me. She is told it was an accident. I can never tell her the truth. She would be devastated to know that her only child was going to leave her all alone. She is frail and old, quietly crying over me. She was right. I can't handle freedom.
It is then, when I am faced with the anguish and sorrow I have caused to the ones I love, that I am able to take responsibility for what I have done. Responsibility is love. And I want to fall in love again. During my years in the heroin wilderness I lost my dignity, my integrity, and my self-respect. I thought that freedom meant having no ties to anyone, no possessions and no responsibility. When I was loaded there was a ten-foot wall of cotton candy between me and the world, shielding me from sadness, hopelessness, and pain. I was in my own nebula. And I didn't realize until it was too late that the sugar walls had closed in and I was trapped, a prisoner of my euphoria. Just another slave to the poppy. There is no freedom in death. I lie in the hospital bed, bound tightly by the splints and bandages, with an overwhelming rage to live.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This collection is comprised of works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The story “Godhead” by Eric Bogosian was published in an earlier form in
The Essential Bogosian
(Theatre Communications Group, 1994).
copyright © 2013 Akashic Books
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