We call this place Hepatitis Heights. It is a drug den on top of 23rd Street, Potrero Hill, San Francisco. The year is 1999. I've been living in the city almost ten years. I left my hometown of Berlin, Connecticut to follow the lead of my heroes, Kerouac, Burroughs, Westerburg, the call of the drifter, and now I am stuck here. It's 1:30 p.m. and I've switched on the TV show Cops. I own a tiny black and white television they will not take at the pawn shop, despite my numerous pleas.
The apartment has three bedrooms and a bathroom on the right, boxed in by a spacious kitchen and quaint breakfast nook at the end. It resembles many of the Victorians you find in San Francisco. Except this place is filled with dope fiends and speed freaks. We don't allow crackheads here. Even among drug addicts, there is a hierarchy.
When Hadley, my wife, and I first moved in, we got dibs on the front room, the one with the bay windows overlooking the winding hills of San Francisco and its shimmering bay. Hadley had schizophrenia. We painted the room hospital green to remind her of home, and, for a while, it really was home. But she's gone now.
These days, people trade goods and services to sleep in the bathtub. Months-old trash is piled up and festering in the hallway. Tweakers crawl around at night, rummaging through the busted vacuum cleaner parts and gasoline-soaked rags, searching for something to sell.
I'm still in the front room, the bay windows now lacquered black. Long velveteen drapes snatched from the thrift store on Valencia and 16th, slightly stained with grease and cum, give the room its majestic, low-budget-adult-film feel. I'm not sure of the players in the company today. We have a rotating cast. At any given time, there can be upwards of twenty desperate, addicted criminals in this place. I lock my door at night. But that doesn't stop the mice from crawling through my hair.
I've found a vein in my big toe for my wake-up fix. I am mostly a heroin addict at this point, although I will pretty much shoot up anything. I blew out the big veins years ago. All I have left are the tiny ones in my fingers and toes, and of course I have my cock. I've taken some cigarette butts from empty beer bottles in the trash, and am drying them out in the dirty white microwave I keep in my room. Waiting for the bell to ring, I see on TV the cops have just raided a drug den, this one a meth lab in the basement of a house belonging to an old woman. Her adult son, apparently the cook, is being interviewed, his jaw seemingly unattached from the rest of his face. This is a common speed freak phenomenon, the result of constant teeth grinding.
As I watch the man on TV struggle to speak, a backroom scream echoes through Hepatitis Heights, followed immediately by the loud crack and jarring noise of kicked in doors, broken glass, and shouts of "Police!" United States Federal Agents and the San Francisco Police are raiding my house. An M-16 aimed at my head, I am ordered out in the hall and up against the wall. The cops rouse the two smelly girls that each paid me a dollar to sleep in my closet and tell them to do the same. Bright yellow sunlight streaming through the open front door causes the other vampires to shield their eyes and hiss. Agents and cops are everywhere; they're swarming the place, coming in through the windows, up through the cracks in the floorboards; and this will do little to endear us to our upstairs neighbors.
As a heroin addict, I posses more lucidity than most of the speed freaks who crash here, although I am anything but well. I am the one-eyed king. Spellbound, the tweakers can't move, their faces frozen, locked in the grimace of a nightmare. This is the day they pray doesn't exist. Methamphetamine produces profound paranoia, so addicts must convince themselves on a daily basis that the government is not stalking them with video cameras, that no one is tapping their telephone lines or living under their bed. So I can imagine how difficult this moment is for them, this melding of fears and reality.
The officers keep shouting, "Get down!" or "Get up!" or "Up against the wall—now, asshole!" and I can't distinguish whether it's coming from the TV or the ATF or if it is all in my head.
I am having a tough time keeping my arms up. I got out of SF General yesterday, the result of a nasty motorcycle spill, during which I broke my collarbone. My left arm is in a sling. As soon as I got home, a guy I'd ripped off for twenty bucks came by and picked a fight with me, and the collarbone snapped apart again.
The drugs that have navigated my bloodstream and been filtered though my liver now arrive at the pleasure centers of my brain, optic nerves tingling in a spastic morphine dream.
The door to my room is open, and I can see tourniquets and needles and little balls of cotton, the bite-size packets of antibiotic they hand out at the Needle Exchange, scattered about the floor. One of the cops sees this, too. He asks me if they can search for contraband. I ask, "Can I say no?" He says, "Yes, you can say no." So I say, "No."
See, they are not after me today. Nor most of my other roommates. They are after this one lowlife who lives in the back, Lonnie, who has warrants out. Most of us have warrants out. But ours are for little things, like stealing paint from Home Depot or buying needles from an undercover cop in the park. Lonnie's crime involved guns and shooting at police, stuff the Feds take seriously.
I look down the hall and see some of the recruits for the first time. Everyone is dirty, scary, whacked out of their skull. Everyone stinks. Nobody has shoes.
And this is my life. I am thirty years old. I don't know where my wife is. I have lesions peppering my face. My arms are riddled with abscesses. I weigh a hundred and sixty pounds. When I first became addicted shortly after arriving in San Francisco, I told myself I was just a white suburban kid playing the part of a scumbag junkie. It will give me material for an album or book I'll write someday. I am not like these other people. But today as the ATF drags Lonnie away to San Bruno Prison over the din of television theatre, as the rest of the Heights' death sentence kids drag themselves into their respective dark corners to inhale aluminum foil or cook up a fix or just beg for a cotton, I realize I am not playing a part anymore; I really am a scumbag junkie. And I don't know how I am going to get home.
