I LUV JUNKIES

I luv junkies. I have luved them all my life. Blame it on The Cross and the
Switchblade. I would sit in the backyard of our home in Brockville and read
the tattered paperback again and again. In this book, a tough-talking,
biker-jacket-wearing preacher roamed the streets of New York trying to
convince junkies to trade in their old needles for a shiny gold crucifix.

In this book, I noticed that all the intelligent people who asked
meaningful questions such as "Why is there no God?" seemed to be junkies.
The stupid character was the preacher who kept suggesting junkies drink
coffee and get a job. I remember thinking to myself, "Who the hell wants to
drink coffee and get a job? I want to feel the dirty New York rain falling
on my face as I teeter down a romantic looking alley in my high-heeled
shoes in search of a 'fix.' I want to wear a leather jacket and carry a
switchblade." However, the closest thing I could find to a switchblade in
Brockville was one of those novelty combs that flip out to reveal tiny
teeth for stroking your Brylcreemed hair.

I learned early that if you acted like a junkie, you could get attention.
In The Cross and the Switchblade there was one girl I particularly wanted
to be like. She was like The Mod Squad's Peggy Lipton but with, like, you
know, substance. Her eyes were ringed with attractive dark blue circles and
she was always trying to commit suicide with a switchblade, which I thought
was cool, seeing as she could've just OD'ed like everyone else in the book.
I wanted everyone worried every second that I might suddenly choose to die.
I dropped my ambitions to move to New York to star in A Chorus Line and
moved instead to Toronto, where I bought a biker jacket, ringed my eyes
with kohl and hung around the Cabana Room, Larry's Hideaway and the Edge
waiting to meet a real junkie -- a handsome poet junkie, like Jim Carroll
in The Basketball Diaries.

Of course, when I moved to Toronto all I met were other people pretending
to be cool junkies. We practised the fine art of walking around with
tombstones in our eyes. We had posters of Marianne Faithfull and Keith
Richards in our university residence rooms, and we would study to junkie
music like Lou Reed's "White Light, White Heat" and carry copies of Naked
Lunch around in our vintage patent leather purses. Friends of mine would
collapse in cafes, claiming they were OD'ing, but it would turn out that
they were just constipated from the food in the cafeteria. Once I thought I
saw a real junkie, leaning up against a doorway on Church Street, but it
turned out to be the clerk at the Shopper's Drug Mart suffering from
morning sickness.

Many friends of mine did go on to be real junkies. To this day, I can't
believe they fell for it. I wanted to shake them and say, "Aw, c'mon. I
thought we were just pretending!" Unlike the glamorous junkies you read
about, however, most of them seemed to always be working at some horrible
part-time job. On their days off, I would sit with them, waiting for some
insight, but they would just smile and say something like "Look at the
pretty lights." Their heads would nod and bob for hours, just like those
little toy doggies you see in the back of car windows. They would see
another junkie and they would clump together in a heap of leather and human
fur just like the muskrats in the song "Muskrat Love." Now that everyone in
town is a junkie or a former junkie, I have gotten so I can smell one
coming -- a kind of sweet, sickly smell of overwrought pancreatic processes
that reminds me of a mixture of honey and fresh bologna.

Now it's cool to be an ex-junkie, or at least pretend to be one. We no
longer think of junkies as furry vermin; we think of them as little John
the Baptists who have been pop-culturally sanctified by their little walk
in the desert. Everybody loves a survivor, even if all they have survived
is their first Oedipal trauma. Look at all the junkies we luv -- Courtney
Love, Steve Earle, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Jean Michel Basquiat, William
Burroughs
hey, where are the Canadians? Do you think Leonard Cohen was a
junkie or just pretending to be one? Why does Daniel Richler dress like
one? Look at all the junkie movies we luv -- Trainspotting, Dead Ringers,
Curtis' Charm, Naked Lunch. Oh, don't stop, baby, keep on printing those
pictures of Kate Moss and slathering on more of that special junkie luv.

It seems that being an ex-junkie endows you with cultural authority and
artistic powers. But is it really so special any more? The only thing
junkies seem to have been scoring are book deals, movie deals, government
grants and unconditional glory. Why are we finding so much substance in
substance abusers? It just seems so (yawn) mainstream. My special junkie
luv just doesn't seem to be so special any more.