jazz

Dedicated to Mike Hagen. Mike Hagen had no friends or family anywhere. I guess I was the closest thing he had to a friend. Mike was in the methadone program, and hated it. So he decided to get out of it, with my help. Friends help friends.

His contribution was this: he was a trusted entity, meaning he’d been going to the clinic for years without failing a drug test. So they increased his dose, and gave him the pills, to dose himself at home. He would only take one of them, and save the other for the event horizon.

My contribution was this: I was an active heroin user, and he wanted to be sure of everything. So he gave me enough money to get two balloons and a spike. Which I did.

D_____ sold me a used needle, which made him angry. If he got hepatitis or AIDS, he would only be enjoying them for a minute or two, right? But still, it’s the principle of the thing.

I knew a bit about his life already, obviously. He worshiped Jeff Beck, and spent a lot of time figuring how Jeff did some of his tricks. He’d done a few for me, on a beautiful old white Strat. And about how he had gone to a PiL tryout, but instead of auditioning went with Lydon’s brother to cop. About his German parents and how they gave him to an uncle to bring here; he was a young child and he thought that that might have been the thing that fucked his life up. About his roommate, who was visiting his family–it was Christmas Eve–and how happy he was to have said roommate return to a rotting corpse stinking up the place.

I think we must have talked about the roommate that night.

Eventually he did the deed, and nodded out.

I sat with him for a while; it was only recently that I realized both that he’d most likely died while we sat there on the floor, and that the thought of taking his music stuff, worth a few thousand bucks, had never crossed my mind. I’m glad of that.

How do junkies hang onto guitars? They’re the only things we love more than the heroin, and they never turn on us.

Eventually, I got up, and went home. It wasn’t an easy drive that night.

The second best guitarist I ever knew was my best friend Billy, a punk turned bluesman. He was my best friend. He was also a junkie. Like attracts like.

I loved those days, and I’m glad they’re over, and I’m sad about how over they are for so many people. I’m the lucky one, I guess.