Heroin Town: Part Two

DEATH AT HOTEL HOOKER

Residents say the hotel is cursed by decades of disease and overdoses.
Death has visited Room 52 more than once.

WILLIMANTIC -- Jessica Canwell wearily climbs three flights of dark, creaky
stairs to the top floor of the Hotel Hooker, where a needle waits for her
in a cluttered room smelling of stale food and urine.

Less than an hour earlier, her boyfriend had died at Windham Community
Memorial Hospital of a needle-borne infection. John Davis took his last
breath as Jessica, 22, went for a soda in the hospital's lounge. She came
back and leaned her head onto his chest, hoping to hear a heartbeat, to
talk to him one last time. He died a day before his 44th birthday.

Jessica's younger sister, Amy-Lee, 21, understands. She lost her boyfriend
to a heroin overdose six months earlier, and she prepares her sister's
"works," knowing she'll need a fix to cope with the grief.

Jessica injects the cola-colored mixture of tap water and heroin under a
scab that has formed over an infected abscess in the crook of her arm, into
the same vein she has used for three years. She pumps the syringe, drawing
up her own blood, and shoots the dark red mixture back into her arm.

The heroin does nothing to numb her pain. She collapses on the worn
mattress and weeps, haunted by memories of her boyfriend's dead eyes
staring at the hospital's white ceiling.

"I don't want him to be gone. I just want one more minute. Please,
somebody, let me have another minute," Jessica wails to Amy-Lee and some
friends who have gathered beside her on the bed. They gently brush
tear-matted hair from her face.

The friends bring sympathy bags of heroin instead of flowers or casseroles.
They sit next to Jessica and talk about John in soft, consoling voices
above the whir of a window fan. A small television blares a rerun of "Law
and Order."

Death is a familiar companion at the Hotel Hooker, a grim brick building
filled with junkies, the mentally ill and the hopelessly poor. It's a place
saturated in heroin, a place where people die.

Shortly before John Davis died on July 15, he told his friends there was a
man dressed in black, like the Grim Reaper, lingering in the corner of the
room he shared with Jessica. Death has visited many rooms at the hotel,
more than once in Room 52.

The previous tenant died of a heroin overdose, and was found lying in the
bathtub. Then a woman dropped dead of an overdose on the dirty gray and red
linoleum tile in the hallway just outside the door.

"This building is cursed," says Amy-Lee, who lives across the hall from her
sister.

"There's spirits in some of the rooms. I've seen them. So have others,"
says Wendi Clark, a recovering heroin addict who lived in the hotel from
1996 to 1999. "Some of the rooms have seen a lot of overdoses. I once saw
the face of a man reflected in the door of my microwave. Some of the
communal bathrooms - you go in and you feel someone else is there, even
though you're alone. It's creepy."

Amy-Lee awoke last January with her boyfriend lying on her chest, his body
already stiff with rigor mortis. Amy-Lee gave her sister the queen-size
mattress they shared, no longer able to sleep on the spot where he died.
Afterward, Amy-Lee took an overdose of sleeping pills and would have died
if Jessica hadn't found her and called an ambulance.

"You're in so much pain. You literally feel your heart breaking apart,"
Amy-Lee says now as she watches her sister grieve for John. Amy-Lee knows
how the hurt can linger; sometimes she thinks she sees the ghost of her
boyfriend walking up the stairs to the fourth floor.

Jessica lies in a fetal position on the same stained, sweat-soaked sheets
where John had lain a few days before. She has put on his green plaid
flannel shirt and tan moccasins despite the stifling July heat, and buries
her face in a pair of his khakis to remember how he smelled.

Soiled clothing, empty bags of junk food and stacks of dirty dishes are
strewn on the stained, pea-green carpet. The last bowl of uneaten chicken
noodle soup that Jessica fixed for John remains on a small table near the
refrigerator.

The room is oppressively hot and gloomy as a thunderstorm approaches. The
skies open and rain comes in through the fan in the window. Jessica slowly
lifts her large frame off the bed and walks, dazed, down the hall to the
fire escape. She steps outside, lifting her face into the driving rain
mixed with hail, oblivious to the lightning and crashing thunder.

"I'm so sorry, John, and I love you. I do. I love you a lot," she says on
the wobbly fourth-story fire escape.

Drenched and drained, Jessica wanders back to her room, her bulging blue
eyes pink from weeping and days of sleeplessness. A woman in the hall tells
her there is a Puerto Rican superstition that when someone dies and it
rains, it means the angels are crying.

"God takes everyone that's good, but never takes the evil people, ever,"
Jessica says angrily.

Dorcas Velazquez, a social worker who visited John in the hospital and
drove Jessica home after he died, thinks Jessica needs to pray. She takes
her to a Seventh-day Adventist church a few miles from the hotel, where
they sit on the red upholstered pews reading Psalms. Tears fall down
Dorcas' face as she talks gently to Jessica, whom she has tried to help for
years. She tells Jessica that dying is only a sleep until Jesus comes
again, and that she loved John, too, but that he had made some poor choices.

"God doesn't want us to suffer," she says softly. "But every time you put
that needle in your arm, you are dying."

Jessica gets back into Dorcas' car and leans her head against the passenger
window.

"I feel like I'm not even alive," she whispers.

Corridors Of Living Dead

When the Hotel Hooker was built in 1887, it was considered the finest hotel
between New York and Boston, an elegant rest stop for wealthy executives
who came to visit the thriving thread mills.

Seth Hooker, who had built other hotels in Colchester and Willimantic,
offered 100 rooms that were among the first in eastern Connecticut to have
electric lighting. The hotel offered a fine restaurant, billiards and a
barbershop, and it was host to meetings of the Venerable Club for gentlemen
over 70.

In 1938, Rose Riquier bought the hotel for $14,000 at a time when travelers
were gravitating to motels closer to major highways, and the hotel was
already beginning to decline. Her son and grandson now run the business,
which operates more like a rooming house.

Bob Riquier, Rose's son, says he knows what goes on in the rooms, but
insists he has no control over it. "I'm not a cop."

The cops do raid the place on occasion, but with little effect.

In fact, the police and fire complex abut the rear of the hotel where
dealers sell heroin day and night, an in-house convenience for the resident
junkies. The sales go down inside the rooms, away from the security cameras
placed in every hotel hallway and fire escape.

Tenants walk like the living dead along the dark, wood-paneled corridors.
Putrid hot air wafts from the open back door like an entrance to hell.

On hot summer days, swarms of gnats gather underneath the brass chandeliers
that hang from the high ceilings in the lobby, where yellowing photos of
Seth Hooker stare down from a picture frame. The wallpaper in the rooms is
peeling, the drop ceilings are bowed and the scurrying of rats is a
familiar sound.

The hallway floors are stained from cigarette butts and sticky with spilled
beer. The air stinks of cigarette smoke, fried food and urine from the
bathrooms on each floor.

A 17-year-old girl, eight months pregnant, lives on the second floor, her
sunken eyes weary and sad as she wanders through the hall. Doctors told her
that her baby is terribly underweight and will probably be sent to
intensive care when it's born.

Just two weeks before he died, John's welfare check and paycheck arrived
and he and Jessica celebrated. There was plenty of dope, and they shot up
so much they actually felt high.

That week, they romped in their shorts and T-shirts in the river during a
rare summer outing from the hotel. She playfully wrapped her white legs
around his thin, dark body as he spun her around in the water and kissed
her lips. Jessica talked to John in a cartoon voice and he laughed.

The sisters filled up two shopping carts at the supermarket and Jessica
cooked a feast of pork ribs, cheddar- and bacon-flavored mashed potatoes
and wax beans. Later that night, Jessica had a headache. John was still
high and went out on the fire escape to watch fireworks that someone was
lighting a few blocks away.

The next day, July Fourth, John, Jessica and Amy-Lee shot some heroin and
went downstairs for Willimantic's Boom Box Parade. They danced along Main
Street, laughing while a family standing along the parade route sprayed
John with squirt guns. Jessica caught so much candy from marchers that she
collected it in a plastic grocery bag as if it were Halloween.

John became ill a few days after the parade. Jessica assumed his high
temperature and pain came from AIDS.

"You didn't go to the doctors and you didn't take your medications. You
could have prolonged it," Jessica tells John, half scolding, half crying.
"You could have stopped it, but you didn't want to. Now I have to sit back
and watch you fade away and it's not fair."

The emergency room sent John home with a prescription for Motrin and a mild
muscle relaxant. There was no mention of the infection that would kill him
six days later. He limped back to the hotel, barely able to move. John lay
on the bed for several days with the lights off and the shades drawn,
shivering under two blankets even though the room felt like a furnace. He
dozed and watched TV, his head resting against a pillow on which Jessica
had written: "Lovin John 4 Life" and "Love hurts."

"I want to help you, John. Hear me?" Jessica said as she gently removed his
clothes and bathed him with a damp cloth. His back hurt so much he couldn't
change his own clothes. After the sponge bath, Jessica shot heroin into his
arm to ward off withdrawal and tried to feed him soup and sips of Pepsi.

She baked a chocolate cake in the rusty toaster oven in their room, frosted
it with vanilla icing, and used candy from the parade to spell "Get Well"
on the top.

"Look at your cake. Make me feel like I did something good for a change,"
Jessica urged John.

"It's good, Jess," he said, too sick to make a fuss.

"The way I see it, if she wants to take care of me, that's nice," John said
when Jessica left the room. "But the way I look at it is, I've been taking
care of her for as long as we've been together. She doesn't ever have to
consider going out there to sell her ass."

The next day, John grew sicker. His eyes were filled with fear.

"My wife died from AIDS. My brother died from AIDS, and I watched them.
They were on morphine and had machines. I don't want that. I want them to
put an IV in my arm and send me home," John said.

He said he needed to say goodbye to his children, his brothers and sister
and his mother. He looked as if he had aged 20 years, his ribs and
cheekbones pressing through his sweaty skin.

Jessica sat down beside him and gently stroked his long hair. He had given
her a fake gold wedding band a few months earlier, and Jessica began
referring to him as her husband.

"I swear I love you," she said, kissing his cheek. They stared at each
other for a moment. "I love you too," he said.

An ambulance took him to the hospital two days later, when his fever
increased and he began hallucinating. A needle-borne infection had poisoned
his blood. He died July 15 holding his teenage son's hand, a day after his
mother, siblings and children came to say goodbye.

Gift Bags Of Heroin

Three days after his death, John's body lies in a New London funeral home
in a cherry-wood casket lined with white satin and surrounded by red roses.
His hair is cut short and he is dressed up in a gray shirt and suit jacket.

Jessica has painted her nails a rosy pink and wears a long-sleeved black
and white shirt in the 90-degree heat to cover her track marks. Her sister
and friends from the hotel show up 10 minutes late for the funeral in a
light blue van driven by Dorcas. Jessica is waiting outside for them,
crying because she thinks no one is coming. Amy-Lee shows up in a long
black dress she borrowed from Jessica, just long enough to conceal the
beach sandals on her feet.

When the Rev. Benjamin Watts speaks, Jessica thinks he is lecturing her.

John, he says, made poor choices. John's death should be a wakeup call.

"He himself chose to hang out with some of the wrong people. His demons
have fought him so valiantly, they took his life," the minister says. "He
is in the hands of God. Do not follow everything he did. Learn from his
mistakes."

John's teenage children - two daughters and a son - pause at his casket and
weep for the man they knew best when they were small, a man who played ball
with them and dressed them for school. He is evident in their smiles and
tall, thin physiques.

Jessica hugs them for a long time, then returns alone to John's casket
after the funeral home has emptied. She leans over him, and cries softly,
her body shaking with grief. She caresses his chest covered with red rose
petals and whispers, "I'm sorry John. I'm so sorry." Then she gently kisses
his forehead and leaves.

She weeps when she arrives at John's mother's handsomely decorated home on
a middle-class cul-de-sac in Uncasville. His mother, a large woman in both
size and personality, has put on a spread of homemade chicken, pasta, rice,
salad and desserts. She tells stories about how sickly John was as a child,
how he'd go into the hospital for one ailment and contract another. John's
brother, Phil Davis, an engineer, says he went to the Hotel Hooker three
years ago intending to bring John home. He left realizing it was too late.

"His features were different. His cheeks were sunken, his frame smaller. He
was someone else by then," Phil says, tears filling his eyes. "When I saw
him I knew there was nothing I could do at that point, nothing I could do
to help him."

Within an hour of returning to the hotel, Jessica buys a bag of heroin and
mixes it with water from the bathroom tap. She squeezes the abscess in her
arm until a yellowish-white substance comes out, then jabs the needle into
her arm.

Later that night, there's a street fair outside and Jessica comes out of
the hotel onto Bank Street, still in her funeral clothes. She walks toward
a trailer where a disc jockey is encouraging people to sing through the
karaoke machine. She is holding the small hand of her friend's 9-year-old
niece. The girl is crying because she misses John. Jessica gently wipes the
tears away and holds the child to her chest.

Amy-Lee and a group of friends all put their arms around Jessica, and the
group sways gently to "Amazing Grace," sung by an older woman friend. It is
the song everyone sang at John's funeral.

Jessica gathers her strength and steps up onto the trailer. In a strong,
beautiful voice, she belts out Celine Dion's "Because You Love Me." She
weeps when she finishes.

Jessica returns to the hotel, where gift bags of heroin are coming in. She
shoots up and smokes marijuana with her friends. She says that when her
friends stop giving her drugs, maybe she'll enter a program and get
straight, maybe next week.

"I'm tired of waking up sick. I'm tired of going to bed sick. I'm 22 years
old and I'm so ... tired."

The Needle Of Mourning

A week later, after a memorial service for John at St. Mark's Chapel,
Jessica starts feeling sick. Another week goes by, and she has a high
temperature, a terrible cough and excruciating pain in her chest. She tells
Amy-Lee and her friends to leave her alone, to just let her die and be with
John.

She finally agrees to go to Windham Community Memorial Hospital, and
shivers under several blankets as nurses tend to her in the emergency room.
Doctors rule out AIDS and then place her in isolation for four days,
thinking she might have tuberculosis.

The TB test comes back negative. Jessica is told she has a stubborn staph
infection in her lung that will require at least 10 more days of
intravenous antibiotics. They tell her she would have died in a day or two
without treatment. It's the same type of infection that killed John,
possibly transmitted through needles.

After nearly a week on methadone at the hospital, Jessica is looking
better, her eyes are bright and she is thinking more clearly. But every
time she goes to the bathroom, dragging her IV with her, she imagines John
lying in the bed when she returns, his lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling.

She's missing her cigarettes, her sister and the hotel. When a nurse makes
a mistake and puts Jessica in isolation again, Jessica becomes unhinged.
She curses at the nurses, checks herself out of the hospital and calls a
friend for a ride back to the hotel. Her doctor telephones her at the hotel
and tells her she must come back for treatment or she might die.

The next day, Jessica agrees to return for more X-rays and to get a
prescription for antibiotics. She returns to the hotel. The infection
begins to improve and Jessica says the methadone has cured her of her
heroin habit.

"I don't do that no more," she says.

Jessica remains clean for a few days, until her dealer gives her a "bundle"
- - 10 bags of heroin - free until she can pay her debt.

"I wasn't strong enough to say no. They wanted me back into it," she says,
crying.

She has made a shrine to John in her room. His picture is pasted on every
wall, along with flowers she was sent after his death.

On a sticky August night, a month to the day after John died, Jessica
carefully arranges a clean needle and sterilized water on a chair next to
her bed. A social worker provides the water and some bleach in an effort to
prevent another infection.

Jessica shoots heroin into the crook of her arm, where the infection has
healed into bumpy red scar tissue. She fixes her hair, puts on a leopard
pattern shirt and a pair of black pants, and goes with some friends to the
American Legion hall for a night of karaoke.

Her strong, sweet voice fills the dark, smoky bar as she sings the words to
"Angel," a song widely believed to be about heroin, by Sarah McLachlan:

In the arms of the angel, fly away from here,

From this stark, cold hotel room

and the endlessness that you fear.

You are pulled from the wreckage

of your silent reverie,

You're in the arms of the angel

May you find some comfort there.

Within a week, Jessica and Amy-Lee are each shooting 15 bags of heroin a
day after finding work at the same chicken farm where John was employed.
They're doing triple the amount they used to, and Jessica has started
smoking crack.

"You know your limit when you're a heroin addict," Jessica says. She's so
high she is slurring her words and starting to nod off. "We feel good now.
We don't worry about tomorrow."

Jessica didn't turn to prostitution until nearly two months after John's
death. She entered a rehabilitation program in Norwich on Sept. 9 and is
now more than halfway through the 60-day program.