Permanent Midnight

I used to think that there was no way out, that I would just have to kill myself. When I was reeling in some locked bathroom, blood on my shoes, and someone banging on the door ... When my wife was pregnant, and I was sure to my sick soul that the baby would be born some eyeless mutant, vegetative at best, because of all the chemicals I had pumped into my veins before I slammed the seed that fertilized her blameless egg ... When I was in the hospital kicking and my eyelids scraped like barbed wire and my skin felt boiled in oil and every breath was a serrated knife drawn slowly up from my intestines through my lungs and out my gagging throat ... There was no other way.

And yet, here I am, north of one year needle free. Living life no longer like a human pincushion, seeing my beautiful little girl every afternoon, hating myself only because it seems to be my nature and not because, say, I've stolen a handful of crumpled fives from the purse of a women who made the mistake of thinking I was clean and really cared, or because I spent the money meant for milk and diapers on another fix.

The temptation is to be clever. To make it all wildly amusing. I published a story once, at thirty days off the spike, about doing dope in the studio where they shot ALF, banging so much shit in the sound stage toilet I heard the furry little puppet hissing my name and scratching at the door.

I imagined in my narco-dementia, that this three-foot furry TV star - no more than a puppet with attitude - could see right through the bathroom walls. Alf was out there, eyeballing all the blood I'd splattered on the mirror, on my fingers, into tiny, scarlet puddles at my feet. And he did not approve.

People thought my story was funny, hysterical. And I was glad. Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addiction. Not that I never skirted cerebral hemorrage imagining a prime-time hairball pawing at the men's room knob while I geezed a speedball and tried to dab the bright red puddles off the floor with paper towels. That happened. But i wasn't laughing about it. I was staring in the mirror and squeezing back the worst tears in the world, tears that came out yellow because, by then, my liver was already telling me what my brain could not accept. I was dying. But not fast enough. I would have to live a little longer, to survive more horror. Which of course meant doing more heroin, the thing that made such horror endurable.

To some extent, this entire memoir is nothing but a history of WRONG SITUATIONS. Behavior so inappropriate it hardly qualifies as behavior anymore. More like some toxic, nonstop twitch .... At Moonlighting, on the Fox lot, I had a corner office where I routinely arrived every morning an hour early, locked the door, and fixed to make myself chipper before the arrival of my wholesome co-workers. Some people stopped to get croissants and cappucino on their morning drive. I stopped for dilaudids. But the transaction, however unlikely or illegal, became just as mundane. As did the whole daily ritual of procurement and consumption.

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Mike Davis, Hubert Selby,Jr .... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.

*excerpt from Permanent Midnight by Jerry Stahl.