Anything Could Happen

Tom is in his late 50s. He has been “in the game,” as he calls it, pretty much his whole life.

“I was always fascinated by the junkies,” he tells me with words that are garbled from his mouth of missing teeth. “Pretty much goes back as far as I can remember,” he says. “Hell…I started using junk when I was just a kid.”

Tom grew up in the Pacific Northwest, back in the 1970s.

Similar to me as a little boy coming up in Detroit during the same era, his family bounced between poor and working class neighbourhoods. He was the youngest of six children, while I was the youngest of seven.

Tom described his first experience in a shooting gallery as a 12 year old (back in the day a shooting gallery was a place where people both scored and shot drugs - usually heroin).

His story took me back in time.

It was the late 1970s on the West side of Seattle. There was a large dilapidated house in a neighbourhood that was falling apart. Inside were many rooms. All of them dimly lit either with candles or lamps with fabric draped over their shades (yes, firehazard). The windows had curtains drawn no matter the time of day, or were boarded up.

It was a filthy place.

Piles of dishes and garbage, the sink and counter tops alive with mold, mildew, and rot. Mice running from room to room, dirty body smells and odours of excrement in the carpet. Blood spatters on the walls.

“They had jars of communal syringes on the table,” Tom said, describing the scene. “They were kept in old pickle jars filled with rubbing alcohol. In those days spikes (syringes) were hard to come by so if you got a hold of one, you saved it and shared it around. They got dull from so many people using ‘em over and over. We’d file ‘em to try and sharpen ‘em up. Man those fuckers hurt when you stuck it in because the tip was so blunt! We didn’t know how easy it was to get HEP C from sharing rigs, or vein damage from the spike being dull. There was no such thing as harm reduction back then, so we just made the best of what we had.”

Teasing apart Tom's story from mine…

My own fascination with the underground started in the late 70s. My sister’s boyfriend, Steve, opened me. He was deeply deeply involved in Detroit’s subterranean reality.

Steve was a first wave punk rocker who partied with bands like The Stooges and the MC5. He hung out at dive bars - The Red Carpet and Bookies in Detroit’s most notorious neighbourhoods. He encouraged me to get into the music and would bring over essential records for me to listen to, the most pivotal for me being Iggy Pop’s, The Idiot.

We cruised Detroit at night together, me and Steve and my sister.

The Stooges and Gary Numan blaring through the speakers on 8 Track tape as we roved Woodward or Gratiot Avenue in Steve’s maroon Monte Carlo, passing the dark vestibules where 1970s punk rockers, prostitutes, and druggies hung out.

It was a different dimension from this one that I now inhabit here in the mountains, an arcane and dangerous world unbound by the conventions of regular society. Anything could happen in this wilderness of concrete.

Have I mentioned in a previous post that Steve also shot junk?

He was adamant that I should never go down that path, but nonetheless, when desperation took over, he took me to the places where he copped in the city’s blue light district. I would wait in the car while he went in to score.

“Keep the doors locked and the windows rolled up, kid. Don’t open for nobody but me,” he said, leaving the keys behind so I could keep the music going, listening to Dum Dum Boys on repeat.

I sat there in the passenger seat with the music turned up, my nine year old eyes wide and fascinated by this underground reality. I remember seeing the people going in and out of the house, their skinny bodies, their sunken eyes, either urgent and twitchy needing to fix, or their floaty, dreamy, post-heroin staggering bliss.

One of the main distinctions between Tom’s childhood and mine is that I never tried dope.

He didn’t really have a choice. That shooting gallery he described was a block away from where he lived with his parents and a couple of siblings. It was the place he went to escape.

He hung out on the porch, day after day, month after month, feeling more comfortable there than at his own home where his parents fought incessantly, screaming and beating each other, getting violent with the kids.

“Strange as it sounds,” he said, “it was the one place in that shitty ass town where I could just sit and think, without nobody bothering me.”

One of the old timers who hung around the house changed that. He decided it was time to make the little boy a man. He grabbed Tom - his big hand clutching little boy’s arm - too strong and powerful no matter how hard Tom tried to resist.

“Time to show you what this life’s all about. Bound to happen sooner or later, might as well be me that shows you,” the old timer said.

Old man recapitulating his own trauma, jabbing dull dirty needle into Tom’s fresh vein, the barrel pushing heroin and other people’s DNA into the boy’s system like a rapist ejaculating into his victim…

Quickly little Tom lost himself, floating off to the music of STIX:

I’m sailing away. Set an open course for the virgin sea…

Bookies 870 photographed in the late ‘70s by Sue Rynski