SoMa Literary Review - A Heroin Wave, 1997

A Heroin Wave, 1997

By John Smith

This story examines two egregiously trite subjects.

1. Death of a relative

2. Substance use/abuse among children of privilege

We're in Bill’s black Ford Explorer, parked on some street in North Beach . It's a random weeknight, maybe nine or so. On Bill’s cell phone my mother says "she[ dying grandmother] probably won't make it 'till morning," but they're going to leave. Bill, overhearing, offers a ride, "Wherever you need to go."

Here the narrator, nineteen years old, grappling with grief/loss, faces three main choices:

1. Sit beside her deathbed alone

2. Substance use/abuse

3. Mix and match for fun!

In that middle realm (option 2), the realm of riotous living, Bill is an eminently reliable abettor. During the four years we spent in the same homeroom, he— to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise— always had (and still has) an air of juvenile intrigue. To make other literary connections: the Bill character is more then a little reminiscent of the dissolute Tad Allagash in Jay McCinerary's Bright Lights, Big City: that cocaine-fueled "yuppie" chronicle of an aspiring writer's personal disintegration.

Now you're upstairs, in a dingy unadorned hotel room, red-lit with the tawdriest clichés. Bill’s “connection"/an independent narcotics retailer, is a heavy-set stock character. Straight from central casting in a baseball cap and black leather jacket. You are doing a line with Bill. He is wrapping up 60 dollars worth of white-jaundiced Bolivian marching powder in white-jaundiced paper You're sitting in some dive bar beside a fake fireplace, drinking a gin and tonic. Bill does a line off the dashboard. Let's go see Oscar, B says. Oscar is just another node on his vast social-network, whose core, like Oscar, are alumni of Town School for Boys, an institution which happened to have expelled Bill in the latter half of eight grade. (Still no stranger to expulsions, Bill, who often goes too far, is currently on compulsory leave from UC San Diego for alcohol-related infractions— no small achievement in a school of that size. ) You float in Bill’s Explorer hill-high-headily-numb park on a balustraded street in front of a foreboding mansion perched on a hill of many mansions.

Oscar Scaggs is living in the basement of his father's residence. (His father is the musician Boz Scaggs, former member of The Steve Miller Band and singer of "Lido Shuffle"). Do we enter through the garage door? In his dim room, Oscar's stereo is playing a conversation between pop-artist Andy Warhol and "LSD guru" Timothy Leary set to drifting music: and in fact, along the narrow, chiaroscuro, hallway hangs several Warhol Electric Chairs. Spectral, green, ominous the images reiterate our narrative's themes: doom and gloom, existential dread. Just above one of the narrow staircases is another work of art, a mixed media installation—a photograph of a woman above actual chicken wire cradling empty bullet casings.

Some friend of Oscar's from boarding school, a white guy with a huge afro, is milling around.

Leary's distant mutterings of psychedelic release haunt the dark adolescent tableau. The only light is from the hall.

Recalling this scene in turn evokes a series of elegiac, disillusioned sentiments, thoughts, and images related to family history, death and dying. She (the author's maternal grandmother) would sit by the neighbor's pool still, petite, withdrawn.

Now she lays vegetative—a hanging tan hand, a gaudy green-wall adorned only with a brown crucifix. The nurse traipses in and out distractedly and advises taking off her crown ring lest someone steal it. At Vassar (though she did not graduate) my grandmother had been close with Jane Perkins, daughter of Maxwell Perkins. Naturally, as an aspiring writer, tales of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe's editor* were of acute interest. She would sit by the neighbor's pool still, petite, withdrawn.

"What was dinner like at the Perkins?"

"Good food," she said. That was all she said.

Where do we find our own lost generation? There is talk of going to a club. Oscar's closet is bursting with bright orange shirts. Bill is picking out something to wear, getting really into it, turning it into one of his little projects, one of his little games as Oscar offers his critiques in between lines of yao (powder cocaine). The Mission is the best neighborhood for young people right now, Oscar says.

Bill’s friend Michelle arrives with her French boyfriend and an entourage of French-speaking persons who display limited aptitude for and/or little interest in the English language. They do not have a seat. They do not make themselves at home.

All of Oscar's guests…strangers to their host, except Michelle (a Eurasian waif) and Bill (who is still really into picking something to wear to the club from Oscar's closet)…appear as wary of one another as he of them.

We need to change if we're going to the club, Oscar says.

At one point, two of us are randomly climbing a staircase towards the main portion of the house, catching a glimpse—slant of hallway light on an otherwise dark, but clearly lavishly appointed room— before Oscar bounds up the stairs and quickly shuts the door. "What do you think this is? Spreckels?," Oscar asks sardonically.

("Spreckels" is a pointed reference to recently deceased "townie" † Nick Traina, romance novelist Danielle Steel's son, an active member of the local music scene, who had overdosed on heroin just a few weeks prior to this interaction on the stairwell. He was 19. They lived in the Spreckels †† mansion. Rumors had painted an intemperate picture of what went on there.)

We never make it to the club.

Bill is too inebriated to drive, so Michelle is giving several people a lift home. Oscar, up to this point skeptical of his visitors, asks if he can come along, just for the ride. This strikes me as being slightly odd. Within Bill’s over-privileged circle/milieu/set/group of friends, Oscar's request is irregular, as it suggests a naked, or at least partially disrobed, emotional need. Exposure of genuine feeling—happy, sad, angry— is something they take great pains to avoid; most of them, therefore, would abstain from making such a pointless journey (just "coming along for the ride") precisely because it does suggest a plain desire for company.

Oscar's request is not quite a faux-pas, but then again, it isn't typical. But then maybe you're reading into things too much. The thought passes.

We're in the backseat. Oscar is in front; just a chin and a fringe of blond hair framed against black—a windshield's rushing sky. Even at this late hour Oscar's dancing awkwardly in his seat, waving his arms to the music, while we sit sodden, immobile.

POSTSCRIPT

Just a little over a year later Oscar (What do you think this is? Spreckels? ) would himself die of a heroin overdose in a Mission hotel. Scaggs' son's last stand at Drab Hotel , reads one headline. Young, Rich and Strung Out: Heroin Emerging as Drug of Choice for Bay Area's well-off kids, screams another.

The plane had circled the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear day, beginning its descent into San Francisco . Coming home. The newspapers are spread across the kitchen table when you wake up.

* Editor of This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby , The Sun Also Rises, among others.

† Townie (slang) — an alumnus of Town School For Boys, a preparatory academy located in San Francisco , California .

† † A white limestone residence, erected in 1913 by sugar air Adolph Spreckels, it includes— among its 55 rooms— a Louis XVI ballroom. We are footnotes to footnotes.

John Smith, though born and raised in San Francisco, now resides outside Nashville, TN.