9:06 PM
naïve. I lived in San Francisco for three and a half years and heroin addicts were nothing more than an inconvenience to me. I could not understand their addiction, let alone why they went to such lengths to support it or thought I should help in that regard.

It’s all I can do to pay my basic bills, often not even those, so it’s beyond me that people would spend their whole day trying to get enough for a fix. Perhaps, as Ana says, better they get the money from me than have to turn tricks. I hadn’t thought of it that way, or of the dangers involved in turning to prostitution. I guess I just lumped it into the box with other problems I can’t solve or even understand.

So much for thinking of myself as compassionate.

I was up to my neck in my own problems and it was all I could do to just get by. I’m still in get by mode, I have only moments during which I go beyond that and thrive.

I was also really strung out myself, as John put it, on my ex-unboyfriend Eric. I’m sorry to say, nine years after we met, he’s still as close as I’ve been to love and it wasn’t that close at all. I think I just don’t understand that whole love thing, what it means, how it feels, what the point of it is, truly. I see all my friends paired off (then dating, now married) and I wonder what possesses them to do so, not to mention what makes them think it could possibly last.

Anyway, there I was in the heroin capital of the West Coast (I’m shocked to learn Seattle was #2) and when I saw the same scenes in person then that I saw in the film the other night, I didn’t quite comprehend what I was seeing. At the time, my flatmate told me I was in denial -- that I didn’t want to know. The truth was I just didn’t expect it, so I didn’t see it right in front of my face. If I saw a couple of people huddled together on the street, I thought they were keeping warm, not shooting each other up. Her boyfriend at the time was a recovering junkie and I got the impression she’d hung around enough crash pads to be exposed to the scene.

I was, however, fresh from the suburbs and had no clue of the signs. I’d heard of track marks and even seen them in the movies, but just about everyone in San Francisco wears long-sleeved thermal and flannel shirts with t-shirts over them because it’s damp and cold at least half the year. That was my uniform, too.

My first friend in San Francisco was a junkie. He was in the journalism class with me at [SF] State and was terribly bright. He had the same name as my little brother, so I guess I used that as an excuse to feel close to him. It wasn’t the only one, I just enjoyed hanging out with him.

My problem with men is that they don’t generally find me attractive and the ones that do want to treat my like crap, which I have no patience for. I’m always at an impasse.

This guy fit the pattern, though it wasn’t quite so set in stone at the time. He was short and blond and smoked, but none of that mattered because my heart is neither dissuaded nor won over by such shallow things. I don’t know why not, since it all ends up the same way in the end. He acted so put upon that I was attracted to him, like I did solely it to burden him. He was the first man I’d cared for since Eric.

Call me crazy for finding myself drawn to someone who was intelligent and made me laugh, who shared my passion for politics and journalism, who I felt comfortable with, who was a worthy partner in crime. I tend to get a reputation for being serious or depressed or angry, but the truth is, when I’m with the right kind of person, I have absurd amounts of fun and can be downright silly. So it was with him -- our adventures laden with literate slapstick.

One night he called me, sounding at once belligerent and drowsy. He unloaded completely. He told me about his problem, about his ex-girlfriend over whom he had never been able to recover and about the burden of realizing my feelings for him.

It was a lot to take in all at once. He rambled and his speech began to slur. I asked if he was OK, he didn’t sound well or maybe he was tired? Naïve to the end, me. “Yeah, I’m loaded now, so what?!” he growled. Even with the knowledge of his addiction, I didn’t know the symptoms, so I ascribed them to more common experiences. If someone has slurred speech and their thoughts trail off, in my experience it’s because they’re falling asleep. It’s what I do when I fall asleep talking with someone. Indeed, at those times, I’m even less lucid than my friend sounded.

I don’t know whatever happened to him. Shortly after his birthday that fall he left for the East Coast, Connecticut if memory serves. He planned to live with his off-again, on-again girlfriend at one point, then was desperate to stay clean and in love with another girl the next week. I actually listened and took the time to remember this stuff, as if a junkie’s word holds any meaning.

I can remember joking with friends and roomies about junkies, because they weren’t human to us, I suppose. Of course, in San Francisco it was hard to differentiate from hippies and junkies, with the former being the direct butt of jokes, especially when I lived in the Haight. You couldn’t walk 5 feet without stumbling over a hippie. Now I can’t help but wonder how many of them were strung out and how many of them are dead. They were everywhere, so many, I could not even begin to estimate the numbers of this underworld right before your eyes. It's overwhelming.

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