Chapter Seventeen
You never can see yourself. When a window dresser is doing a window, he knocks on the window to the people outside and he looks at them and he goes, “How does it look?” Because he’s so close to it he can’t see it. I didn’t go to Vietnam, but I was in a fucking bigger war and mine didn’t end in the seventies. You’re in a war against the cops, against the drug dealers, against yourself. It’s all against yourself. You’re fighting a war and you don’t know who your enemy is. You’re fighting a war and you’re killing your enemy. The war takes your best friends and you think your best friends are after you. Your best friends! Once I caught the habit, it was all over for the next twenty years. I started heroin when I was twenty-two years old and I got clean when I was forty. It was terrible. The heroin took all my dignity and my self-respect away. When you shoot heroin, when Eddie gave me the heroin that night and I was throwing up all the way from Avenue C down to Hoyt and Degraw, it didn’t matter. That night it just seemed that everything was so good. And I did it again and again. You don’t get a habit right away.
If I was to go out to get heroin and I was to throw up from it, I’d know I had good stuff. That’s the sign of really good dope, addicts think. You eventually stop throwing up, and when you stop throwing up you get this tremendous high, a euphoria. What goes up comes down, when euphoria wears off and reality is in front of you. It’s hard to stay up all the time. What happens with heroin is that once you get a habit your body needs it, like I did heroin for a year and a half or almost two, before I fucking found out I had a habit. How I found out I had a habit is that I got locked up one night. I went into jail and was in there thirty, forty hours, and I started crawling the fucking walls. I said, “Oh shit, I really am an addict.” Until then I thought I could stop anytime.
When you’re in a withdrawal every joint in your body starts aching: your knees, your arms, your back, your neck, your spine. Everything gets so uncomfortable that you can’t find a place. You could lay on cold floors or marble floors where it feels good, you get up, you lie here, you turn, you lie on your back, you lie on your stomach, you lie on a window, you lie on a fucking blanket and you lie in all different places. I was in jail with a seventy-something-year-old guy, an old black guy. They put us in a cell with no sink and just a bucket of water. We drank out of a stainless steel bucket, that was our water. All I did was throw up near the bowl. I kept telling my partners, “You fucking gotta get me out of this joint.” When they finally got me out on $10,000 bail, I ran right to my apartment on Dayhill Road and I ripped the fucking ceiling out. They were all looking at me, all my friends. “Just shut up.” I opened up the box, the toolbox with the key, took out a big fucking package of dope. I mixed it up and I shot it. As soon as I shot the dope and after I got high, I just looked at everybody and said, “All right. Where are we at? What’s happening? What are we gonna do now? Who ratted us out? What happened here? How did I get locked up?” I was able to conduct business.
It is true what they say about heroin addicts. It has a different stigma than people that do coke or crack or that drink. A lot of cool people did a lot of heroin, but once I got around other people I found out how much heroin wasn’t accepted. The heroin addict is at the bottom of the list because people think you’re a lowlife. I personally think the crack addict or the cocaine addict is more lowlife than anybody, but the heroin addicts are a very unique bunch of people. They have a lot of intelligence, they can be super cool, they talk a lot of jazz, they’re very very smart people. When we deal with them in the field of addiction, they’re in a class of their own. It’s been like that for one hundred years if you read back on morphine, heroin, jazz musicians, and the elite. It’s kind of a cool high, detached. If you’re not totally out of it, you seem to have this terminal hipness about you. That’s a good word, terminal hipness.
When you come into a rehab and there’s three or four heroin addicts compared to ten crack addicts or cocaine addicts, you’ll find the heroin addicts always drawn towards each other. They’ll always be talking to each other because they think they are better than others. They’ll whisper, “They’re crack addicts, crackheads, cokeheads, alcoholics.” Speaking clearly they’ll say, “We’re heroin addicts.” They think they’re very cool. They are very cool. They’re very sensitive and nice. This is what I always tell people in the rehab where I work. The majority of heroin addicts are angry and resentful, but when they clean up, you have the good guy. I’ve seen the meanest women and men turn into angels just because they stopped using. Heroin is like a fucking demon.
From the time I was sixteen years old hanging out in Peter’s cellar, I always thought heroin addicts seemed to have a cool thing about them. It was the sunglasses. They always had on sunglasses, and a toothpick in their mouth. They were always drinking a container of coffee with a newspaper folded under their arm like they were looking for a job, a job that never came about. They had all these things circled in the newspaper and I believed the newspaper was under their arm for about ten years. It’s 1955 and the thing’s been under there since 1945, the same paper. They were always reading. If it wasn’t books or magazines, it was a newspaper. Hanging out, bending over, halfway down, nodding out like they’re in Oz, dribbling, waking up, reading. They had a lot of answers for things. Lots of them went to music and jazz concerts.
It’s a crazy thing to say but drugs saved my life. Isn’t that wild? They saved me from dying. They saved me from going to the electric chair for killing somebody. Drugs gave me another focus. My focus was to get more dope. The focus wasn’t on killing anybody. The focus wasn’t on fighting. The focus was just on how could I get more drugs without getting caught so I wouldn’t go to jail. The focus as far as I was concerned was, “What can I do to make more money to get more drugs?”
Being on the methadone program was the worst time in my life. I was on it for twelve years; it was a ball and chain. I can’t see how anybody could say that methadone is good for you or that you could function. I never functioned on it as a steam-fitter, I never functioned on any job being on the methadone program. It’s crazy saying that people could work a normal job on 100 mg of methadone. That’s like me saying I could work shooting a bundle of dope. Yeah, you could be a brain surgeon, but I’d hate to be the brain that’s fucking getting worked on. There has to be a different way; I don’t believe in the methadone program. People are just making money off of the programs. They’re all privately owned and subsidized by the city and the state and we pay for them. I think they’re all crooks and liars and I know this from being on it for twelve years.
I’m sorry to say that still today I have a big problem with cops. I remember being beaten half to death one night on the parkside; I was found by the cops and they took me home. They didn’t take me to a hospital just because of who I was. They know you’re from the neighborhood and they think, fuck you, die you little bastard. The cops thought like that because we gave them a lot of problems and they gave us a lot of problems. It was us against them, that’s just the way it was.
It’s 1959 and you look around and you say, “Where’s the cops?” There were twenty thousand then, now there’s forty thousand, and you still look around and say, “Where’s the cops?” Do they all get paid to stay home or does it just seem like that? When they have to be in place for the mayor or a union rally, they’re out in fucking force. If somebody’s gonna protest or march, there’s a million cops on the scene, or if they’re gonna have this Million Man March then there’s seventy thousand cops with fucking armor on. Sounds like I got a resentment against them. Well, you get beat up as many times as I did by the cops, taken for as many rides from the time you’re twelve years old . . .
I think back about how the alcohol and drugs got me to be so mean. It’s like I don’t even think it was me that I’m talking about. I’m a totally different and changed person. It’s like the guy I’m talking about is a guy that I once knew. He doesn’t really exist anymore. This guy is dead and I can tell you all about him because I hung out with him, I was very close to him. But I’m not that guy.
The other night this guy comes up to me and he says, “Hey, Bengie! How you doing? Boy, you look terrific!” I talked to the guy for fifteen minutes and he says, “I still go to the Greenwood Group; I’m chairing the meeting down there.” I said, “Yeah, that’s very good,” and blah, blah, blah. When he left I leaned over to my friend Harry and I says, “I don’t even know his name. I think it could be Richie, but I’m not sure.” I wish when people come up to me they’d say, “I’m Charlie” or “I’m Richie.” I should put a sign on me saying, “I was in a black-out for twenty years. What’s your name?”
When I found AA and NA I learned you don’t have to suffer. Hundreds of thousands of people take themselves on this journey of pain and suffering only because they don’t have a clue of who they are. The drugs make them somebody else and keeps them from stopping. Some people do it until they die. You really have to believe that this is a gift from God, if there is a God. Why am I getting this gift and why is the guy who goes to therapy for years still using? Sometimes I wonder why a therapist even keeps doing therapy with them. Don’t they know that it’s impossible to talk to somebody who is using? The best place to talk to somebody is in detox where they get clean first. They have to be clean for at least two months so that whatever you’re telling them gets in their head. They gotta realize they have a choice in the matter—you can get high, or you can stay on this path—that’s the thing I teach in the rehab.
All my life I thought I didn’t have a choice. By the time they leave the rehab in twenty-eight days, I pound it into their head that they have a choice. You can’t blame your mother, or that you’re not getting laid enough, or that you’re the poor black guy . . . Shooting dope ain’t going to get you from homelessness to a Park Avenue apartment. But not shooting dope is going to get you a job, so you can get an apartment, so that one day you can work your way to Park Avenue, if you want to. It’s not a big deal to me. But when you leave you should know that you have a choice. If you shoot dope, it’s because you do not want to live in the here and now. You don’t want to go through the pain of doing things as people do, as normal productive members of society.
Responsibility. You don’t want to pay rent. You want somebody to pay your phone, your cable. When you get clean all that responsibility goes on you. Nobody who runs around getting the money to get dope worries about the rent. Nobody says, “Oh they’re going to shut my cable off next week.” They don’t care. They’ll get rid of cable, they’ll sell the TV. It took me about a year going to meetings to find out that I really surrendered. What they were talking about was abstinence from all drugs. I was abstinent, but there was still a part of me that wanted to get high, even after I got clean. But I was having fun, I sort of prolonged it, and that’s what you do until a bulb pops up in your head that says you don’t have to use. It’s amazing.
It took a few years for it to really hit me that what we were talking about is that I can’t use any chemical safely, no more. It will actually start my engine all over again, the old way of thinking. If I use a mood-altering chemical, I will start thinking automatically about how to get more and more, and more and more. There’s no end until my money’s gone, everybody’s money is gone who’s around me, doors are locked again, and I’m in the park again, sitting with the bags on the parkside saying, “What happened?” I was saying those words with the shopping bag in my hand, “What happened?” How did I get from there to here? With kids and wives and family and drugs and millions of dollars? How does it happen that I don’t have enough to get a packet of Hostess cupcakes?
I don’t ever want to say to myself that I can’t use, because I can, because I have a choice. As my life got better in the last years, I’ve developed more things that are in my life to keep me from using: my friends, my grandchildren, my family, the people I work with. Why would I want to destroy all of those relationships, all of them good things that you’ve put together, to get high? I always say that no matter what happens to me—and I said this before my daughter died—no matter what happens to me, I’ll never use. I’ll go through it, the pain, because that’s what you need to do. And like my friend Richie said to me one day when his daughter was murdered and I asked him how he was doing, he said, “There isn’t enough dope in the world to take this pain away.” And I know, no matter what happens to me, the dope is only for a few minutes and then the pain comes back. So why not deal with it right then and there? And that’s what I did when I was with my daughter.
When I came into the “program” and I went to my first meeting, one of the first things was a step meeting, and we talked about step nine. It’s about making amends to people. I didn’t really understand all that stuff, but what they were talking about was that in the eighth step I’d have to make a list of all the people I’ve hurt and then in the ninth step I was going to have to go and confront these people and say I was sorry. I said, “Holy shit. I can’t believe there’s a fucking program like this. How can I ever possibly do this?” I mean, I gotta have ten or twenty people around me to think about how many people I’ve harmed and hurt and did this and that to. But the bottom line is that you stay clean. You make a list and the rest gets done by just getting clean. I make amends today by helping people. When it’s possible for me to help somebody that I’ve harmed years ago, and I see them again, I will. I don’t go around telling everybody that I’m sorry. I’m not about to do that. My amends come from being in my neighborhood all my life and mostly that I’m willing to help anybody—race, creed, color, religion, I don’t care who it is.
That’s what I do today to relieve some of my guilt from the past. Because my past is bad as far as I’m concerned, because I lived it. I mean, it’s my past, it’s my way of living. It’s sad and it really is very painful to me sometimes. It’s very painful when I think about the kids. When I run on the boardwalk, I think of the past. I run and I think and I think and I think, and things pop into my head about who I harmed here, and who I harmed there. And then I’ll think some good thoughts about my grandchildren, about what I can do for them, and I just hope and pray they don’t ever get into what I was into, the way I lived. There’s a lot of people that can go out there and self-destruct in no time at all. I hope this never happens to any of my children or grandchildren and that they try to understand they should be doing something good for themselves instead of living like I lived.
When I first got clean, I shot a deer after ninety days. I killed the animal and I went and told people that I shot Bambi. Some people said, “That wasn’t really funny.” When I went home I saw it over and over in my head. I did so many things in my life that could keep me awake at night. Now I do this? I ain’t doing this fucking shit no more. So I went and tore up my hunting license. Now I go in the woods and see them deer with their babies—that is so cool. They see you but they don’t run away. It’s like they know you aren’t going to hurt them. It’s like God working, even though I have a very hard time believing in God. I have a hard time believing in that, but I don’t have a hard time believing what I’ve been through. This God got me where I am today. That’s a great awakening—that you’re not in control of anything. What I did do was take all the necessary steps and put years of work into it.
I can remember as a kid sitting on the corner saying, wow, it’s gonna be 1975 someday. Spaceships will be in the street and fucking cars are gonna be floating in the air. I used to dream like that from seeing these space movies. I couldn’t imagine what the year 2012 would be like, never thinking that I’d be here for the year 2012—with twenty-eight years clean and seven grandchildren.
Now in 2012, at the age of sixty-nine, my focus is on my three sons and my seven grandchildren. To be with them, to take them on vacations and to be a part of their lives and to continue to help them in their struggles. Most of all, I am grateful to the friends I’ve had for the past twenty-eight years in Narcotics Anonymous who helped me and showed me how to live.
