I used to have a neighbourhood. In fact I was born in one. It was a little place called Oak Forest in Houston, Texas. My family lived there for about three years and then we began moving. We moved West, East and North. When I was about fourteen, I found myself back on the same street in the same neighbourhood where my life began. This time around we lived just across the street from the first house I ever knew.
All the same families still lived there and the only changes I could discern were that the parents were older and many of the boys were gone to Basic Training or were already in Vietnam. I was a mere four years away from my own draft notice. I was younger than any of the other boys in that neighbourhood and although they all treated me as a little brother, I was too young to hang around with them.
I spent much time alone and walking the rails that ran nearby. I had a few friends from other parts of town that I had met in school and did most of my socializing there. The Sixties had come and gone while I watched all the people around me adopt strange new behaviours almost overnight. I was too young to join the hippie movement but I watched it develop and cave in on itself.
People were emulating characters they saw on popular TV shows and movies just like they do today. What had been taboo was made normal and then discarded for the next update, all without any conscious thought on the part of the general public, as far as I could see. Some of the changes were for the better and some were very deleterious.
It was a time of pharmaceuticals, relaxed sexual attitudes and drugs of all kinds. It also was a time of the best guitar solos in popular music composition that I had ever heard. It didn't matter to anyone what you did because they were doing it too. Most thirty-somethings were high on doctor prescribed relaxants and those over forty were drinking off their own war experiences.
Their children had been encouraged by the culture creators to use a pharmacopoeia of psychoactive substances and their derivatives. There was a substance to abuse for every possible type of individual. Cocaine for the players, hashish for the philosophical, speed for the poor, Robitussin for the shy, mescaline or peyote for the outdoorsy and psilocybin for the intellectuals. Everyone smoked weed.
A hellish backdrop to this was the zero-tolerance policy of the Texas Legal System and the educational component of those Lone Star laws. Young men were brought to our middle schools literally in shackles and dressed in orange coveralls with shaved heads to give serious sermons in the auditoriums. One emotional fellow I remember, spoke of having been arrested for three marijuana seeds in his pocket and how by that transgression he had forfeited his future.
I used to accompany a neighbour woman on her visits to the Huntsville Texas Prison's Darrington Unit to see her son and though I had to wait outside the main gate and pass my time with an old guard, it left a lasting impression in my adolescent brain. The old timer on duty showed me where Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had blasted some friends out jail and had killed a guard near where we stood.
Though it had always been around, heroin invaded our suburban working class streets at this time. It was a two-pronged attack. Not a few of the soldiers returning from their tours of duty brought their overseas acquired habits with them. Added to this influx were the omnipresent tentacles of organized crime. Our proximity to a porous international border meant that supplies were in constant need of more demand.
School children of my generation used to see salesmen from the Duncan Yo-Yo Company hanging about our playgrounds demonstrating tricks like Around The World and Walk The Dog and returning next day to fill all our orders. Now, they saw new faces from other streets who showed them how to Skin-pop The Horse. It was absolutely free and the duped ones said it made you feel really, really good.
In very short order the recruiters were the school-children themselves. That first crop became zombie purveyors to support their own unquenchable yens. For me this was a very troubled time on my home-front and everywhere I searched, I saw only indifference, denial, greed and bodies waiting to be boxed.
I felt that my society had no expectations of me beyond not getting caught doing anything wrong until such time as my Draft Notice arrived in the mail. I did a lot of pondering and did not trust many of those around me. I decided not seek council as I could see no person nearby possessing any wisdom that I might unburden myself to. One day quite unexpectedly, wisdom came walking up to me in a pair of Tony Lamas.
I had chanced to pass a young man on the sidewalk who lived across my street. He was older than me and insisted that I spend the night at his house. I was perplexed, proud and shocked. It made no sense in my experience for him to want to spend time with someone so much younger. When I hesitated he became adamant. I accepted the invitation as a recruit accepts his Drill Sergeant's invitation to 'drop and give me fifty.'
It was that evening I received a thorough education on heroin. My friend and neighbour had been tricked into the habit while still in high school and had managed to hide his addiction from all. He was a swimming athlete and one of the nicest, clean-cut, soft-spoken individuals on our block. He told me that he did not want me to have to experience the hell that his life had become and that in his reckoning I was in great peril due to my naivety.
While he played Willie Nelson and Michael Murphy records on a cheap box style record player, he told me everything he knew. He showed me how the product burned different colours on tin-foil according to what it was cut (diluted) with. Comet Cleanser, rat-poison and baking soda were all prevalent at that time in our area. He warned me of who would approach me, what they would say and where that was most likely to occur.
He made it clear that there are some things under the sun that may not be tried and simply abandoned. he explained that once you choose to ride on certain horses, you cannot ever get off. With a righteous anger of a magnitude I have never heard since, he described his lifestyle of deceit, petty theft, permanent ill-health, tremors and random visits by pistol packing low-level dealers. He knew deep inside that it wasn't going to be alright someday and intimated as much to me.
As Willie sang Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, my friend cooked his dose in a spoon with some tap water and a Zippo lighter. To my horror, he vacuumed up the liquid while it was still hot. He tied off his leg with a rubber tube like the ones we boys made sling-shots out of. He told me to call 911 if he didn't wake up and that if he did wake up to forgive him if he cussed me out for the first few hours.
He found a vein and plunged in the point with a deft hand. After injecting about half of the dose, he siphoned some blood to mix with the remainder in the syringe and then hammered it all home. He collapsed backwards onto his bunk exhaling all the tension and worry that has existed since the beginning of man's story on earth.
I gingerly pulled the needle out of his leg and undid the ligature. I watched his chest for breath and moved his phone over to his bedside. The record player finished and I closed the lid. I smoked for a few hours in the dark listening to him breath deeply and evenly the way my dogs did when they were having a good sleep. Eventually I curled up on the living room couch to process what had just taken place.
The phone's unwelcome ring jangled me awake and it was a call for my host. The caller was highly emotional and insisted that I wake my friend immediately. I woke him up to a hail of bitter pain-laced curses just as he had forewarned me. He grunted a few questions into the phone and then slammed down the receiver.
“Gitchersel dressed, Makul ma bwa. We're gone ta funeral chappul. Frendamawn jus OD'd lassnite. Prolly onna same shit I juss had. He ain't ta furst an he ain't gone be ta lass. Unnerstan wut I'm tellin you?”
I rode along with him and moments later we were looking down on the stiff teenage body that had hastily been prepped, then I was dropped off at home. My teacher left Houston the very next day to settle in Austin. I visited him there a couple of times over the next few years and during one of my visits, I saw new local enforcers come to collect monies owed by my friend. He had no cash and gave them his wife's camera instead.
He drove an old black Ford F 150 pick-up and always talked about getting around to changing the oil someday. I believe it had belonged to his deceased father and he loved it dearly. I moved to Canada but passed through Austin whenever I was in Texas. He was always dodging fists, knives, bats, bullets and struggling to get clean every time I saw him.
Once I passed through Austin on my way to Beaumont from Vancouver. I stopped at a gas-station and bought four quarts of 10 W-30 automotive oil. I had a crescent wrench in my backpack already. There in the parking lot of his apartment building was the little black truck. I crawled underneath and began my job. I was just tightening up the drain-plug when he burst out onto his second floor balcony.
“Hey, wuttin hail you thank you doin ta ma truck?”
I slid out from under the dusty ebony vehicle and looked up at him, wrench in hand.
“I figurd yew prolly hadn't gotten ta changin yer oil jus yet, so I thot I jus dooit for ye.”
He grinned and shook his head just like my imaginary big brother would have done. He found his peace up above very shortly afterward in a motel room and every time I look around at the life I have made for myself, I can still hear his selfless tuition. Great Spirit, I have been trying to honour the gift of that guardian in cowboy boots ever since.
fin