I depended on Mary to locate my veins back when I transitioned from smoking it to shooting it. Mary was not quite a nurse but close enough. Before she transitioned to the streets, she had done two semesters at Cascade Community College for nursing. So for a time, during that golden age when we began hitting it hard, she was our medic. She knew exactly how to pop it into you so that it bit with that trickle that feels like “ah” all the way. Mary didn’t dope then. Why she lived outside wasn’t substance related.
We would have been fucked without her. She kept the needles clean, made sure there wasn’t any cross contamination, even went as far as stealing a steady supply of rubbing alcohol, and would always produce a new syringe to ensure things were legit.
And oh what a dawn it was to be alive back then. A time before our bellies hurt, a time before the rains came, when the warm air on your skin made the dope even better. There is nothing that beats that initial transition. Fuck. Liquid sunshine poured into you that makes you feel like a god and a goddamn baby without a care. Fight that nod too and just ride it till that last bit disappears in your veins. Ride it ’til the cramps and then begin the odyssey all over again for that delicious more.
Jerry, my sponsor, warns me against such romantic language. Over coffee, when we talk about that old school back then stuff, and how I got to now, he will say to me, “Dick you can’t, I mean can’t, fall prey to that kind of talk. The addiction is strong. Your junkie is panhandling in the parking lot, his wallet is full, and he is looking for where you are weak so he can score. He wants nothing more than for Dick to slip so he can get loaded.”
But I don’t think it is that bad to talk about those “golden days.” Because, just like the summer here in the Northwest disappears in a flash to be replaced by endless rain, those days were short lived and then it began to pour.
Mary tried her best and we ran that first veins all we could. In the beginning, we all chipped in from a day’s handling and bought dope together. Mary would dose us out with the perfect amount. She knew your dose and would add a little push to take you there to that next place.
She played nursemaid to a collection of us then. We lived down on the waterfront. Most of that year’s cohort was new, thought it was my second season. You can always spot the new people because they are the ones carrying pillows and blankets all around around. Not yet used to the concrete, they still held on to the comforts of the indoors. The stains on their linens were only at the fringes, but as the days passed that ate their way towards the middle.
By Christmas it had all changed. Soggy pillows, dirty throughout, were discarded, and my first holy vein was tapped out. Mary did her best to not make a big deal out of that shot vein and we just moved on to another. But the pristine nature of that fall was gone by winter, and most people began to step out on the co-op we had set up. The needles got dirty, the blood grew sick, and people started dropping.
“Woman injecting heroin – Warning not for everyone” image by Flickr user
urbansnaps – kennymc
Deep winter was nothing but buckets from the sky. Mary changed then; don’t know why. Her reason for the street was never the dope, but most people aren’t straight out for the dope to start. Most of us were out there escaping a trauma, some past fucking haunt, some babysitter who fucked with our shit, a stepdad, an abusive mother, the poor place we came from, those voices that only we could hear. But Mary started slipping away from that initial reason. Smoking a little became snorting a bit and then it was straight push and shit, she was ODing by February only to be saved a few times and then whoosh she was a ghost.
Most slept bare after Valentine’s Day and the hardcore drinkers were seen up and down the front sipping cooking sherry, sharing the remaining drops of cracked bottles. The junkers were all sick, cold, shaking, and starving for the next.
So I began to tap my own shit when Mary wasn’t anywhere to be found. Wasn’t that good at it. The scars and marks remind me now that I wasn’t good at it. Over that next spring and summer I vein hopped. Without Mary, people started fucking up, me included. Few ODs, couple of Narcan saves later, and on to a new vein was the pattern. Each new vein saw someone not so lucky. And so when my fucking sponsor tells me to not start this story with that golden age, I don’t agree. They started dropping one by one, as many dead as I have scars and broken veins. Not nearly as preventative without that beginning shit. The golden age makes what followed all the more.
By Valentine’s Day Mary was gone. Never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her; never heard of her passing, or as erased and on the street – when people flop you hear about it. She is not one of those scars but rather the first. Always wait for her to pop into some church basement sometime and tell the story of our co-op, our time when she played nurse, and about where she went after that. Waiting for that first tapped vein to pump into some location, that initial mark Mary, from the dry days before the rain.
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Phillip Rafferty lives in Portland. Oregon where he teaches English at Jefferson High School. His previous fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in Beatdom and Montage.