Brass Junkie....that Funkie Junkie....

I'm wearing a diaper. RIght now. I'm not sure if it's the June Allyson, TV-advertised slip-on brand, an official Depends, or some no-name, buy-'em-by-the-gross institutional variety. All i know is, I just woke up wearing the thing in this hospital recovery room. Snug and bloody. Pinching so much at the waist it's almost enough to make me forget the screaming hell of the thirteen fresh sitches throbbing due south, on my balls. Or what's left of them. But don't get me going.....

This whole deal is not, like, something I'm proud of. Not the kind of thing that makes you want to grab the nearest phone and dial fifteen of your closest friends. On the other hand, I think I ought to mention it. I think I have to, because this--meaning Zip-Loc scrotum, blood-soaked diaper, infernal recovery room--is where I now find myself. Where drugs, for better or worse, seem to have taken me. And this, it says so right on the contract, is a book about me and drugs.

But back to those guaze-warpped testicles. My genital mummy. The point--oh Christ, oh screaming Jesus, they're bleeding right through the gauze. I'm spotting! But nevermind...The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.

It's led right up to this "billiard"--I'm quoting the doctor who said to call him "Buddy"--this "billiard" size cyst whose removal now has me bruised and oozing. That poison all but destroyed my liver. And the liver, they tell me, is the janitor of the body. It cleans up. My little janitor couldn't handle the overflow, and busloads of heinous narco-residue somehow spilled down there, into heuvos territory. Hence my appreance back here in Cedar-Sinai, my home away from home. The place I kicked junk--twice. The place my child was born. The place, if I can trust Doctor Buddy, where I've just given birth to a scrotal eight ball.

This mortifying diaper-wear is taking me back, sending me careening down toxic memory lane. I can't help but think, lying here in post-op nitrous and dilaudid delirium, of the day the other product of my loins, my baby daughter, popped to life at this esteemed instution. I was thirty-five, between pit stops in the Chemical Abuse Ward. The one time I set foot in Cedar when they didn't want to chop of my arms at the shoulder blades--just to keep the needles out. Not that it would have helped. I would, if one armed and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty Spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes.

Let's just say it was that trip to Cedar, the one where I walked in a junkie and walked out a junkie dad, that let me know how far I'd sunk. Even now the details--before, during, and after--make me want to pluck my eyes out and pound dirt in the sockets. There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming. At this point, there's nothing left to do but let it out.

So...by way of time and place: March 31, 1989, I found myself in the sterile confines of the Cedar-Sinai OB/GYN tiolet, injecting a bomb-size hit of Mexican heroin while, twenty feet away, my baby daughter inched her way south in my screaming wifes uterine canal.

Somehow, cross-eyed and bloody-armed, I managed to scuffle back in time to witness the sweetest thing in life shoot out of the womb and into Los Angeles. Not, however, before I saw the sheer unfettered loathsomeness of my being reflected in the eyes of the man delivering my daughter. One glimpse of this little girl's father, it was clear, and Dr. Randomangst would just as soon have shoved the poor thing back into oblivion.

And who could blame him? It doesn't take Jonas Salk to surmise the future of a newborn whose daddy slimes into the delivery room oozing from the arms. I was hells's own creepy beast, and he could see it.

You might say that success ruined me. You might say I ruined success. The eighties launched me on a drug-soaked spiral from feature magazine to sex films to the multi-G-a-week world of network TV. On one level I may have qualified as Young Urban Professional. But that status--newly married and monied--occupied the mere surface of a life whose underside embraced a more tormenting reality of drugs and addiction, betrayal, loss and crime.

Father. Husband. Writer. Junkie. On a daily basis I lived this double and triple life. I pingponged back and forth from LA's hard core 'hoods to those studio digs, from the comfort of my just-bought home to the rougher confines of the dope house...The hard fact: whatver the universe in which I touched down, Hollywood High or Hollywood Low, among family, friends, or fellow hypes, the only constant was the facade. I was a gangster with gangsters. I was a Yuppie with Yups. I was a daddy with the dads.

How i slipped into this abyss--and how I made it out--are questions I'll chase down from one end of this volume to the other. The truth: This book for me is less an excercise in recall than exorcism. And a schizophrenic excorcism at that. Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector. As the film goes in one end, at the other it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.

The soul, I believe, allows you to forget such trauma. It wants you too...The real record of these years exists on the ceullular level. The mind buries the horror. And the body is where it's buried. Hence the sideshow liver they tell me could fail in a year, this recent souvenir in my scrotum, the fatigue and ache and feverred, sweating nights that never end. Until they do.

Tha fact is, I'm not sure the way this journey will go or where it's going. I only know I have to make the descent--to re-crawl into the inferno and pray to God in His Junkie Heaven that I crawl back out again.