Swaddled in Rose Silk

Heike Mueller. Lady 3. 2018. Oil on canvas. 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy of ARTicles Art Gallery.

"Sometimes even good Homer nods off."

– Horace, Ars Poetica

A while ago I read a poem that said no one wants to talk about heroin anymore. Too déclassé, too many dead, too many who survived the ordeal now gone to seed. A bit of psychic shrapnel surfaced when that poem soaked in. A jagged shard that had lain embedded and suppressed in memory's equivalent of the inner wrist, that vulnerable site sad people slice when they hope to go away.

Heroin put my natal city of Seattle on the map. Its favorite psychedelic son, Jimi Hendrix, got busted for carrying it into Canada, before he killed himself at the age of twenty-seven with booze and barbs. Kurt Cobain emerged from a cocoon in the depressed mill town of Aberdeen, made it big on MTV and in Rolling Stone, then swirled clockwise down Seattle's deepest drains. A taste for junk likewise claimed Layne Staley, the singer for Alice in Chains. Multiple others from the haunts of rock and roll have perished from the powder, celebrities too numerous to name.

Even before my teenage introduction to the stuff, I saw its casualties stalk the streets, as Ginsberg phrased it in Howl. One friend on hands and knees heaved and swept a gutter with his hair. Another moaned from hepatitis C, liver inflamed, his life saved only by the ACA. Ginsberg was most interested in mental illness in his poem. Now a consensus is building that addiction is a disease, that we need to assist people to heal before they have a chance to become strung out.

In 1993 the Seattle Times reported, "The lead singer of Nirvana was on heroin when he shot himself in the head, renewing speculation that Seattle is a hotbed of heroin abuse, particularly among grunge musicians and fans." It's a white-bread habit, costly and select. And while Big Pharma and seedy physicians are fueling an epidemic of legal drugs, heroin remains a major player everywhere, in large part because synthetic opioids nurture penchants for its sweet sensation.

On the bright side, junkies, unlike the run-of-the-mill speed freak or drunk, rarely turn fierce, even if they do resort to property crimes to gather objects they can pawn. They hurt themselves, but rarely others. Several European nations are regulating heroin, effectively legalizing it, acknowledging addiction as a disease.

Seattle seems ready to follow their lead. In a single day in January of 2017, three people on Aurora Avenue died of heroin overdoses and a fourth had to be taken to a hospital. Public health officials found their lethal dope had been laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl. In March of 2016, Seattle police began to carry naloxone, a drug that reverses effects of any opioid overdose. Conceding to the counsel of erstwhile mayor Ed Murray, the city also now is establishing safe-consumption facilities where the chemically dependent can avoid arrest. Can fire-up crack, get sterile needles and syringes, inject themselves in relatively safe conditions.

________

Now again it is a white summer day on the city's south side. I've come back home to visit family and extract the psychic shrapnel in my wrist from long ago. It is a jagged shard that caused me pain. Lured to the surface by a now-forgotten poem, it itched within me as injuries tend to do when they begin to heal.

I escape the storming four lanes of First Avenue South; I motor down a quiet residential drive; I trace its half-circle past a dozen older homes. Here's the log home where I met Ken Magee. Outside the mossback driveway, I kill the ignition. I sit and breathe my enduring relief at having blasted through all that fast traffic.

The neighborhood looks much as it did in 1973. Pacific redcedar, Thuja plicata, shade the lawn. A tangle of foliage tumbles down a steep ravine. Miller Creek flows below, through thickets...