CHICAGO TYPEWRITER

VAMPIRES - PART I

Heroin turns you into a vampire. I mean real heroin - the stuff that you cannot find anymore in the United States, as open borders become hardened once again, and since the Regime lost its toehold in Central Asia.

Fentanyl turns you into the walking dead and kills you - but its not the same. And the people who slam Fentanyl into their veins almost certainly caught the habit from pills or from real heroin. And now Fentanyl is all they can get.

When you inject heroin the first time - it matters if you inject it, snorting it or smoking it isn’t the same phenomenon and doesn’t cause the same transformation - you get violently ill. Its like the person you were previously is dying. Something essential about yourself is being wrecked, or vacating your body by way of some metaphysical trauma. But when it passes, its fantastically euphoric - like being in a dream that is entirely lucid.

Hollywood movies always feature corny dialog, where some minor or major character declares that shooting heroin is, ‘‘like sex’’. That is how you know whoever wrote the dialog is a lame and they never did heroin. Heroin is nothing like ‘‘sex’’. Having sex with a girl is a very physical thing that you experience with another person. Heroin is in many respects the precise opposite - heroin takes place within yourself. It takes you out of human society. And the euphoria isn’t ‘‘orgasmic’’ nor primarily physical. People only say that because lames - especially of a certain age - have been convinced by legacy media and goofy, bourgeoisie conventions that ‘‘sex’’ is somehow the ultimate experience or sensation, thus they reason that junkies act the way they do because they’re engaged in something that is, ‘like sex’.

As your habit takes hold, you find that the daytime is upsetting. You wake up afraid and feeling sick - and if you’re resourceful and have enough game and hustle to make sure you have a wake up shot, even when you get well the morning light is still anxiety provoking. You can’t hide in the daylight. The daytime brings all kinds of activity and scrutiny. Daytime belongs to law abiding citizens - to healthy people, to people who (correctly) shun the darkness and the madness and sickness that calls it home. Your biorhythms will become rapidly nocturnal as the poison alters your blood - and then your being.

Food tastes different - foods that were once your favorite things to eat come to taste as ashes in your mouth. Bland foods that you never had a taste, let alone a craving for become your survival staples. That is, IF you can eat at all. Even when a heroin addict is well and not in the throes of withdrawal, food is a dubious proposition. Often, consuming even a modest meal will quite literally hurt - nausea is a constant too, but I speak of actual pain. Food sits in your stomach like shards of sharp granite. And the vampire-addict must time his meals around when he can get well. To attempt to eat when in Heroin withdrawal will cause violent stomach upsets and - to be frank - bowel control issues.

As you become pale, and your eyes sunken, and your bodyweight plummets, you will also come to smell differently. I’m not speaking of body odor - the new vampire-addict will smell even after a scalding hot and soapy shower. Its a subtly musky scent, but comingled with that semi-familiar, musky ‘‘human’’ odor is a kind of chemical perfume. Its almost ‘‘fragrant’’ - owing, in part, to the fact that Heroin, even when distilled and chemically manipulated, retains characteristic of plant matter - but its not a pleasant smell. It smells, literally, like death.

My Peckerwood friend - name of J.B. - had a horrific upbringing. Heroin addict, career criminal parents, in and out of foster homes and Juvenile Hall, all of that. He straightened out in his 20s and worked his way through college as a grave digger in Waukegan Illinois. J.B. came to hate the smell of flowers - on grounds that decaying flowers, co-mingling with the sickly-sweet odor of formaldehyde and embalming fluid and decay - got stuck in his nostrils, as he described it. He said that it smelled like his Mother and Father’s house.

He told me he smelled, ‘‘death’’ on me.

He said, ‘‘I love you, Thomas - and I pray you survive this. But I cannot have you in my home again’’.

He wasn’t cruel about it. I understood completely. I was a VAMPIRE - and VAMPIRES, like all real monsters, reek of death and Stygian horrors. There is nothing glamorous or pleasant or compelling about them. To host them in your house is like keeping dead things in the basement or a disused closet.