After you've begun to lose everything, you get a sense that things are just piled up around you. You realize that things exist just to be taken away. It's true of love and loved ones, of material possessions, and of course it's true about the pillars of your life. It wasn't long before Heather was out of jail. Her lawyer had shown in appeal that the chain of evidence had been disrupted and her conviction was overturned. This was a godsend, even better than parole because the offense is expunged from the record. She no longer had two strikes against her. But for those few bitter months while she was away, I stewed. I looked at the ruin of a life. My lover was in jail. My friends were potheads. My band had kicked me out for doing too many drugs. My best friend since childhood had ripped me off for a meager sum. The people I needed to save me weren't even talking to me. I didn't know where to turn. I was torn between all my worlds. There was the passionate artist that didn't create because of drug use. There was the son that had abandoned the family because I felt out of place and restricted within it. There was the pothead escapist waiting for a real fix. And then there was just me, somewhere between all these worlds realizing that I wasn't very happy with any of them.

My life had started to crumble and it all started with Heather's arrest and Hari's betrayal. I don't know which played the bigger role, but within weeks I had lost both of my closest friends. This was the beginning of the wasted years. I can't remember the timeline exactly, but it all became a morose contagion. I withdrew from things and brought Jeff into my world. I had told him about the heroin addiction after I was clean, but I don't think he believed me. I probably wouldn't have believed it myself. What I found in those early years was an unknown and amazing ability to camouflage my addiction. It's the physiology of H addiction, in a lot of ways. The only times people could really tell I was an addict was when:

a) I had just started using again and was getting very high off small doses

b) When I had taken an unusual amount that had really fucked me up

c) When I was going through withdrawal and getting sick

Outside of those instances, people had no idea that I was an addict. So in these months where Heather was removed, I think it was three months total, I got deep into pot and acid with Nick G. and Mike T. They were younger than me and considered themselves the punkest motherfuckers in the world. But of course they weren't, just as I wasn't. My good name in the scene had been ruined as soon as the band disbanded and reformed without me. I had been accepted at the clubs (Gee Coffee and the Daily Grind) where all the punks hung out merely because Ron would say, "This is our bass player". It was a necessary qualifier for acceptance because I dressed in kind of a grunge style. It was assumed that I was not a punk and did not belong at these performances. But I was more punk than those guys. I had dropped out of school and was plotting Monte Christo style revenge on the jockocracy.

But by this time everyone had stopped coming over to Nick's because all we did there was smoke pot. The circle broke apart and people fled, looking for a more pure environment where they could be stereotypical non-conformist hypocrites, as all teenagers generally are. And now Jeff was involved, though doing no drugs. He merely saw it as a fun place to hang out. If I was an outsider already, due to my dress and the music I listened to and my addiction to hard drugs, then Jeff had absolutely no place there at all. I remember Mike and Nick being apprehensive about Jeff being there, but they relented after I endorsed him. He was accepted because he can be a rather witty guy and was always sober so could always drive us wherever. I dove into pot smoking, just as I had when first expanding my drug use after dropping out of high school. It had been a nightly ritual at that time. I remember I would go over to someone's house and they would know a pot dealer and we'd drive to get them stuff, often hitting up to six dealers in a day to get a score. Then I'd get a portion of the pot for driving that person around and I'd go home and smoke it. Jeff was aware of this and equal parts amused and annoyed by it. I can't deny that Jeff's viewpoint on my drug use was bothering me. I believe he considered me to be trying to be something I was not, falling into some stereotype of the fucked up teenager. And it's very possible I was doing just that. But I believe there was a greater nihilistic intent in my actions.

You can only do so many drugs before reaching a point where you have to figure out what you're doing. AA members call this a moment of clarity. I had reached that point and could have walked away. I even made the proclomation that I was done after that bizarre acid trip. But there was something deeper there. Burroughs stated that the reason a junkie uses junk is to "be able to get out of bed in the morning and shave" and this is true to a large extent. That's one of the most horrifying aspects of addiction, that moment when you're no longer getting high and have to continue doing the drug just to hold off sickness. A junkie never quits because he wants to, he quits because he can't get any. Any attempt is a failure, some half-brained reduction cure. You do the calculations and you taper off by a few dollars each day and after a week you're free of the addiction. But this never actually works out. You end up finding reasons to give yourself a little more in each shot ("It's been twelve hours since I had any, I need an extra quarter grain in there to keep the level manageable" and other rationalizations) and you end up using it all in a matter of days. The real danger with trying to taper off is that you get a larger supply of junk, believing, wrongly, that you are done with your dealer(s) and don't want to make a call again. You take this larger supply and suddenly your habit is worse than it was when you started. Then you realize you've failed this seemingly easy task and you just start shooting again to forget everything.

Heather was released all at once, I didn't even know it was going to happen. The conviction was overturned at a routine appeal and Heather was released within a day or two of that. Suddenly she just called me and said she was having a party to celebrate. My veins started jumping a little, tingles running down my spine. She was back and H was back with her. I knew I was getting wasted that night. I can't say that I was naive and thought I could be strong, although I told myself that at the time. It was just the place I was in with my life. I was frustrated and disappointed. I was smoking pot and doing acid to obscure the reality. I had no job and my life existed for drugs. The pot was a stop gap solution. It eased the need but certainly didn't fulfill it. H was what I needed, as you just sometimes need that one thing in your life for it to run perfectly. But H doesn't fix things, it breaks things.

So that night I was at Heather's meeting her brother in person for the first time. I was meeting a lot of people, people that had disappeared. Heather was a changed girl. The prejudices of the past were gone and she had forgiven those that had caused problems. Even Nick was there, still proclaiming it wasn't one of the people he scored for that got Heather busted. We'll never know if that was true. It was a great night and we felt invincible. Our leader was there, free from prison, and so was her leader. Her brother was a mystery to everyone. A successful dealer that did not use. He warned Heather a million times not to use, offered to pay for a cure, pleaded and threatened. But ultimately he had to accept it. She was his best customer.

We snorted H and then shot it. It was a carnival atmosphere with each new person walking in getting a huge reception. The party began to wind down around two in the morning. Heather's brother offered the idea of renting a hotel room for the noisy drunkards and leaving those on the nod alone to enjoy their high. This was seconded by Heather and most of the people filed out. It turned out that the only ones staying were Heather's solid customers, most of the inner circle. We were all on the nod, half-lidded and mumbling nonsense to each other in Heather's basement room. We were celebrating. Heather had been freed and, in a lot of ways, that had freed all of us. It was an endorsement of the idea that we were all going to have a great run again. We were ready for it, shaking with excitement. There was a buzz in the air. Nothing bad could ever happen again, we were free. And when you feel that, you should know that nothing is going to be good anymore. It will all be bad.

It was about four in the morning when someone asked what Nick was doing in the bathroom. How long had he been in there? Time was elastic, it made no real sense. We could no more gauge time than we could change it. We decided we'd better check on Nick. We knocked on the door with no answer for a while and then Brian went around the outside and climbed in through the window. Heather had removed the screen and left the window unlocked so she could toss a stash out the window if she didn't have time to flush it. Brian climbed in and after a minute let us in. "He's dead," Brian told us. Nick had overdosed and died. I blamed the heroin. "He took too much, man, took too much, too much," I said and Tobey agreed with me. Heather blamed the whiskey. "You can't drink when you're on H," she explained for no reason. "It cuts your respiration right down and you end up just not breathing after a while." Brian agreed with her. There was only one thing to do. Well, there were two different one thing to do's to be done. The first was my own one thing to do. I ran. I headed home, although I knew that I might get caught high. The feeling at the time was that it didn't even matter. I just had to get home and away from this. The one thing for everyone else to do was protect Heather from going back to jail. She'd only been released that day and she didn't want to go back. They dumped the body in some field somewhere right before the sun came up.

Heather didn't get away with it fully. The police brought her in and tried to offer her a deal. Cop to supplying the dope and they'd give her material witness status. They believed she would give up her brother and testify against him, saying "Not me, I was just the middleman. He's the one that supplied the stuff." They knew that Nick was a regular and that there was a party at Heather's that night. They knew he died there but they couldn't prove it. Heather gave them nothing and was free. They never approached me as I was always seen as a bit of a peripheral character in the circle. My true role was never properly explained to them by informants (surely one or two of those people were informants) because my true role was kind of mysterious. They all knew that I used and that I slept with Heather. They knew that I maintained a 40 hour a week job with a $100 a day habit for a couple months. They knew Heather was in love with me and thought I felt the same for her. It's hard to fault them for their logic because Heather and I were like a married couple both in private and in public. We would bicker over meaningless things and then kiss and forget about it. We were often holding hands. Everyone pretty much described me as "Heather's boyfriend" when I was brought up at all.

After Nick's death, it all began going faster. New clients filtered in to replace him. Jane had always been another peripheral character, some girl that Heather held the power of life and death over. We all considered Heather our black angel. She gave us what we needed and we respected her for that. Jane was, like myself, accepted on a higher level by Heather. She wasn't just another customer. I remember one time Jane grabbed Heather's cat and held it up, looking into it's eyes. "You're cleaner than we'll ever be," she said mournfully. The cat was later killed when someone got the bright idea of shooting a shot into her tail. We never found out who did that.

With Nick dead and the old crew falling apart, I heard more talking than ever before. I remember those early days as golden, though danger-infused. There was the swirling of betrayal, the sense that it could all be taken away. But now it was something different. Now it felt different. Betrayal was no longer a possibility we worked against, it was an inevitability too sinister to acknowledge. Brian showed up one day in girl's clothes. "God damn!" he shouted on entering. "They took my clothes!" He had just been arrested and held for 72 hours, the maximum amount of detention before charges must be filed. He wasn't holding anything and they picked him up on suspicion. They threatened lie detectors and drug tests, hoping to break him into confessing and turning. But he sucked it up and did his time in the holding pen. "Those guys are animals," he told us. "I walked in and right away a guy was up to me 'Give me your jacket.' Then it was give a smoke and those shoes and by the end I was in my underwear. They gave me this dress and a volleyball t-shirt to wear home." He resolved to get clean after that. He was already three days into his withdrawal and said he could last another two easy. Then it would taper off. And by the way, could he have a shot on credit to get him through? Heather gave it to him.

Heather's brother was getting lower quality stuff now and Heather had to cut it more to make a profit. She had stopped serving just powder, a necessity to maintain business. She now had black tar heroin cut with coffee and sugar. The sugar cutting was so thick that there were large crystals in the tar. Heather told me to stay off the tar because it's like crack compared to cocaine. I stayed away from it and have never done it to this day. As for the powder, it was now grayish and cut with quinine. Quinine is ideal for cutting because it has a bitter taste, as heroin does. All those movies where a user tastes the heroin before buying, that's from back in the 70s and 80s when it was cut with milk sugar and you could tell how much it was cut by how sweet it was. With the quinine, you could never tell and were likely to overdose on the quinine. Before this time, Heather had been renowned for her cuts. She gave a good 13% heroin in each batch. Now it was down to about 5%.

Jane became Heather's close friend to turn to and I suspected some sort of lesbian moments between them. It's all speculation, of course, but you didn't see them together and you haven't slept with Heather. There's something about the way a lover interacts with other people, you get so you can tell what they've done with others. These signs led me to conclude that Jane and Heather had been sleeping together, but I never got a straight story on it. Jane was replacing me because by now I was coming over merely for the drugs. I had stopped confiding in Heather after Hari ripped me off. I was punishing her for someone else's action.

My habit was getting out of control. With no job or band to balance me, and all my remaining friends being strict drug addicts, I found myself without an anchor in the world. I remember during this period I would often get high in the late afternoon (snorting lines in my bedroom) and then go with Jeff to either Nick G.'s pot den or to Jemini's house. The introduction of Jemini had happened a ways before, while I was clean, but she had no impact on my life up to this point. I just remember going to her house with Jeff and collapsing on the bed for hours to just zone out while Jeff, Jemini, and her friend Courtney would talk. Jeff had a crush on Jemini and I was, understandably, kind of uninterested in sex due to my drug intake. I just watched the charade of unreciprocated attraction. After coming home from Jemini's, I'd sneak out the upstairs sliding door onto the deck and stealthily sneak down the stairs to make my way over to Heather's for a goodnight shot. My habit was getting large and I needed all the heroin I could get my hands on. The moment that stands out the most from this time is one night leaving Jemini's when we were in the car and Jeff said he didn't believe I was doing heroin. I rolled up my sleeve to show him needlemarks stretching from my wrist to my armpit.

As my habit grew and my unemployment continued, I began to seek money. I did the usual, stealing from my parents and so forth, eventually moving onto dealing small time to kids at the Ranchmart bowling alley. I was never moving much and never far ahead. There was no profit margin and I often burned the kids to keep the income flowing. It held me over a little bit as I managed to make about $30 a day off it outside of feeding my own habit. But within a week or so this money had dissolved into my arm and I was even deeper in the grip. "Can I get some from you?" the kids would ask when I showed up with Nick. I told Nick that they wanted Pez from me, my nonsensical cover story that I'm sure he didn't buy. I quit my little pushing gig after about three weeks because I just wasn't getting ahead anymore. I was cutting into my personal supply to keep the kids greased and I decided to quit before any of them got hooked. The only other option was to make a big score somehow and buy in bulk then cut down drastically. I had no big scores on the horizon and was always worried about being caught. I found that Heather was right in her assessment of dealing: Everyone hates you in the end and you end up in jail. I never got arrested for it, probably only because I quit so early.

New income was needed. Brian ran a profitable fencing operation that kept him in H so I had a connection if I wanted to start stealing. I was roped into being the driver for two of Heather's new customers, Mark and Ryan. Both had dropped out of school and worked part time at Ryan's father's junkyard. The rest of the time they pulled heists to keep in H. They were younger than me but knew how to break into houses so I decided to learn the ropes from them after that first getaway assignment. We worked in my own neighborhood at first because they knew the area. We would break into houses during the day and make off with televisions and stereos and computers. We would then fence to Brian and get enough cash to cover a day or two of use. It wasn't a bad system, it was just throughly dishonest and further from who I wanted to be. I've always believed that my purpose should be to strike back at corporations, not citizens. But this moral distinction is beyond you when you have a true junk habit. In fact, there are no allegiances or sympathies at all. If someone has money and you do not and you're going to be sick if you do not get high, then those people are standing in your way. In much the same way that a criminal will not think of shooting a police officer because they stand between freedom and imprisonment, a junkie will view anyone trying to stop them as an enemy to be dealt with. Junkies are naturally not bold and are more likely to pilfer items while their family or friends sleep. I've never heard of a junkie strong-arming a loved one for money, they prey on the loved one's trust to get all that they can. Junkies are generally not packed in after one betrayal, often as a result of the use of H. People often say, "It's just the drugs" and are often right in the sense that the junkie would not rip you off if they weren't using. But you must take action when you've been taken advantage of by a druggie. My parents played the tough love angle on me and, while it was initially defeatist in the short term because I sank deeper into drugs, it worked in the end because I didn't try stealing from them again.

Jane got kicked out of her house and began staying with Heather. She degenerated from that point on. She became a big addict and was just lucky that Heather made enough money to overlook her constant raiding of the drug inventory. Heather was being pulled in 16 directions at once, juggling a pending court date for possession, selling the two cars that she had bought so she could pay her lawyer to keep her out, maintaining contact with her brother (who was trying to distance himself from what was now clearly becoming a lost cause), dealing to her close friends, dealing to strangers that were likely to be setting her up for another peddling conviction, and dealing with her love for me. I've never seen anyone as scattered as she was at that time, but I've rarely been more attracted to someone before. There was something so sexy about the fact that she was maintaining despite everything against her. I had been deeply wounded by Hari and discovered, after all this time, that you really can't trust a druggie. I held it against everyone else, but Heather was winning me over again. I was beginning to feel that maybe I loved her too. After all this time I thought maybe we were in love with each other. Which may have been a result of the heroin. You come to love your dealer as you'd love a nurse. H can become a spiritual kick and you start to worship it and the supplier.

One day robbing houses, Ryan and I were inside while Mark was the look out. They had stumbled upon the great idea of dressing in those one-piece jump suits so we would appear to be a yard crew while doing the job. Mark or Ryan would often stand out front trimming hedges while the others were inside. It was a good cover and helped keep us under the radar of the suburban neighborhood. Their practice for which houses to hit was very simple. There had to be a shed in the yard on the opposite side of the fence. The reason for this is that we would boost the stereo, VCR, tv, whatever we got, and then pass it over the fence and hide it in the shed. This saved us from carrying out a tv in the middle of the day. We'd just return around midnight and watch for a while. Then we'd make our move. I never got caught with them. There must have been some protective aura around me because we never got caught on a job I was on. There was one time where we came close.

On that day, Ryan and I were inside while Mark was the look out. We had done our usual check (scanning through each window to find a light or person inside, check the garage (where we often broke in from the back) for cars, and then do a quiet scan of the rooms we would be in) and it looked cool. Ryan had a side view mirror he'd broken off a custom motorcycle, a thin mirror with a long metal arm. He would peer around corners like a SWAT team member before giving the go ahead to ransack the living room. That day we were walking out of the living room with a large tv between us when a man simply walked out of the bedroom. Apparently he had been sleeping and there was no car there to raise our alarms. His face registered a large shock but he didn't say anything in the half-second it lasted. Without knowing what I was doing, I heaved the tv at the man. We were out the door before it landed and we disappeared from that neighborhood.

I told Mark and Ryan that I was finished. I didn't need to go through that kind of scare again. They took a lot of good precautions but it was just too big a risk for me. "I understand," Ryan said. "It's not always like this. Some days you make out with a thousand dollars worth of stuff. You can't measure everything by how it's been today." I thanked him but stuck with my promise. I would not rob another house ever.

Next.