The Heroin Chronicles

The Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl
The Heroin Chronicles

The Heroin Chronicles

by Jerry Stahl

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Overview

The latest entry in the Akashic Drug Chronicles Series. Heroin has long been understood as the most “literary” of narcotics, and this collection will, for better and worse, have tremendous pop cultural appeal.

“Desperate, degrading, wise, witty, these tales of addiction encompass family struggles, failed relationships, dirty sex, overdoses, and the constant drive for drugs that fuels each vein-digging author. Dispelling myths about the glamour of self-destruction, Stahl has chosen stories that are raw and real, focusing on the often bleak hopelessness of addiction, a life lived day to day with the next high as the only real motivator. And though Stahl is secretive about how many of his contributors are clean, still using, or in recovery, each narrative demonstrates a remarkable self-awareness, a revealing tone that allows readers to relate to addiction, even if they have never picked up a needle themselves.” —Interview Magazine

Inspired by the ongoing international success of the city-based Akashic Noir Series (Brooklyn NoirBoston NoirParis Noir, etc.), Akashic created the Drug Chronicles Series. On the heels of The Speed Chronicles (Sherman Alexie, William T. Vollmann, Megan Abbott, James Franco, Beth Lisick, Tao Lin, etc.) and The Cocaine Chronicles (Lee Child, Laura Lippman, etc.) comes The Heroin Chronicles, a volume sure to frighten and delight. The literary styles are varied, as are the moral quandaries herein.

Heroin has long been understood as the most “literary” of narcotics, and this collection will, for better and worse, have tremendous pop cultural appeal.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781617751066
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date: 01/01/2013
Series: Akashic Drug Chronicles
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

JERRY STAHL has written ten books, including the best-selling memoir Permanent Midnight, made into a movie with Ben Stiller; the essay collection OG Dad; and the novels Pain Killers; I, Fatty; Perv; Plainclothes Naked; Happy Mutant Baby Pills; and Bad Sex on Speed. A Pushcart Prize–winning author, Stahl's work has appeared in Esquire, Vice, the Believer, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times, among other places. He has written extensively for film and television, including Hemingway & Gellhorn, which earned a Writers Guild Award nomination; Bad Boys II; and the cult classic Dr. Caligari; series credits include Maron, CSI, and Escape at Dannemora, for which he received an Emmy nomination. He has two daughters, and lives with artist Zoe Hansen.

Read an Excerpt

THE HEROIN CHRONICLES


Akashic Books

Copyright © 2013 Akashic Books
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61775-106-6


Introduction

modes of desperation by jerry stahl

It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. —Edgar Allan Poe

Somewhere, a long time ago, I wrote: All my heroes were junkies. (Hey, you pick your cliché and you run with it. That's half of life. ) So let's march 'em out. The Junkie All-Stars: Miles Davis, Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, Billie Holliday, William S. Burroughs, even Dylan, there for a while. (Not to mention Cliff Edwards, otherwise known as Ukulele Ike, the voice of Jiminy Cricket and a lifelong addict. Junkies have all the best stories. But we'll get to that.)

Of course, Rush Limbaugh seems to have also colonized his hefty keister onto the Heavyweight Fiend list, but that's these days. (And we're not going to hoist up Herman Goering, another fat-ass fascist, and drag him around the track.) Oxycontin, known to newshounds, aficionados, and Justified fans as Hillbilly Heroin, is so much easier to acquire and imbibe than the old-fashioned nonprescription variety.

But don't get me wrong, I'm not judging Rush. A man's got to do what a man's got to do. And there is no finer cure to self-hate than determined, euphoria-inducing opiate use.

Culturally speaking—shout out to Rush again!—opiate consumption now packs all the glamour of the buttock boil that kept the right-wing rant-meister out of Vietnam. For which, perhaps, Drug Czar R. Gil Kerlikowske could issue a gold medal for yeoman service in the name of addiction prevention. And I say this with respect. Growing up, if some right-wing pork roast had morphed into our national dope fiend, I would have found another line of work and become an alcoholic. Everybody knows the difference between them: An alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout and apologize when he finds out. A junkie will steal it and help you look for it. Call it a matter of style, or a mode of desperation. Nothing wrong with Lost Weekend or Arthur or Days of Wine and Roses, but give me Panic in Needle Park, Man with the Golden Arm, and Requiem for a Dream any day.

Ply Mother Theresa with appletinis for three days straight and she'll crawl out the other end with dry mouth and a hangover. Shoot her up for three days and by Day Four the saint of Calcutta will be strung out like a lab monkey, ready to blow the mailman for dime-bag money. Being a junkie is not a lifestyle choice—it's an imperative of molecular chemistry.

Still, Keith, Miles, and Lenny made it look pretty cool. (Even if, one learns the hard way, Lou Reed and Bird aren't on hand to tamp your forehead with a wet towel when you're kicking. By which point it's pretty clear that heroin, at the proverbial end of the day, is about as glam as puking on your oatmeal.)

It may have been some twenty years since I've stuck a needle in my neck, but it's not like everything above it has healed up nicely. Shooting dope isn't what made me a crazy, pissed-off, outsider sleazeball and one-man crippling fear machine. Heroin just gave me an excuse. But that's me. If the short stories you are about to read in this collection are about nothing else, they're about actions—occasionally hell-driven, occasionally hilarious, uniformly desperation-and-delusion-fueled actions—the kind made by those in the grip of constant gnawing need. The entire anthology, on some level, can be viewed as an eclectic and festive encyclopedia of bad behavior.

But it's the need that makes the junkie a junkie. Even when it's not mentioned in any given story, it's there, like the weather, and it's always about to storm. Once the craving goes, the habit dissipates, but the dynamic—the Algebra of Need, as William S. Burroughs put it—remains in place. Junkies are like veterans, or bikers, or cancer survivors, or ex-cons. (Speaking just as a member of Team Dope Fiend, I don't trust anybody who hasn't been to hell. I may like you, I may even respect you, but, when the balls hit the griddle, I'd prefer somebody get my back who's had experience in my little neck of it. See, I know a guy, did a dime in Quentin. Been out twenty-three years. But even now—even now—according to his wife, he still wears prison sandals in the shower. Can't get wet barefoot. Once they've walked the yard, some men look over their shoulders their whole lives. Dope fiends, metaphorically or physically, live with their own brand of residual psychic baggage.)

When you're a junkie, you need junk to live. Everything's all on the line, all the time. Here's the thing: people know they're going to die—but junkies know what it feels like. They've kicked. Which hurts worse than death. But they know they're going to run out. It's a mind-set. No matter how big the pile on the table—junkies already see it gone. Junkies live under the Syringe of Damocles. Junkies exist as the anti-Nietzsches. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you need more dope.

Which doesn't make fiends unique—it makes them human. Just more so. Junkies feel too much. And need a lot to make them not feel.

Every writer you're about to read has been to places the "normal" human may not have been. And lived to talk about it. They haven't died for your sins. But they've felt like shit, in a variety of fascinating ways. And by the time you finish this fiction anthology, you will understand, from their pain, from their degradation, from their death-adjacent joy and skin-clawing, delirious three-a.m.-in-the-middle-of-the-day lows, the wisdom that comes from the nonstop drama and scarring comedy of living every second of your life in a race against the ticking clock of your own cells, a clock whose alarm is the sweaty, skin-scorching revelation that if you don't get what you need in three minutes your skin is going to burn and your bowels loosen, and whatever claim you had on dignity, self-respect, or power is going to drip down your leg and into your sock like the shaming wet shit of green-as-boiled-frog cold-turkey diarrhea.

Unlike serial killers or traditional torturers, junkies spend most of their time savaging themselves. That everyone they know and love in the world is often destroyed in the process is just a side issue. C.A.D. Collateral Addict Damage. And yet.

From this festive and inelegant hell, these junkie writers—some ex, some not-so-ex, but a good editor never tells—have returned with a kind of sclerosed wisdom. Their burning lives may lie scattered behind them like the remains of a plane crash in an open field, but the flames will, I guarantee, illuminate the lives of any and all who read it, whether addicted to dope, Jim Beam, gun shows, bus station sex, Mars bars, Texas Hold'em, telenovellas, fame or—thank you, Jesus, Lord of Weird Redemption—great fucking writing.

Jerry Stahl Los Angeles, CA September 2012

(Continues...)



Excerpted from THE HEROIN CHRONICLES Copyright © 2013 by Akashic Books. Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

PART I: REALITY BLURS....................14
Fragments of Joe Tony O'Neill....................36
Hot for the Shot Sophia Langdon....................56
Dos Mac + The Jones Nathan Larson....................80
PART II: SURRENDER TO THE VOID....................96
Going Down L.Z. Hansen....................108
Baby, I Need to See a Man about a Duck Michael Albo....................124
Godhead Eric Bogosian....................128
PART III: GETTING A GRIP....................142
Ghost Town Lydia Lunch....................150
The Monster John Albert....................162
Black Caesar's Gold Gary Phillips....................180
Sunshine for Adrienne Antonia Crane....................192
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