Running With Monsters: A Memoir by Bob Forrest Read Free Book Online Page B

ever passed up a drug when it appeared. “Hey, you want one of these pills?” someone would say as they pulled out a plastic sandwich baggie stuffed full of multicolored capsules.
    “Uh, what are those?”
    “I don’t know exactly. The red and yellow ones will slow you up and the brown and orange ones are some kind of speed.”
    “Well, pass ’em over, man. Pass ’em over! Got a beer to wash these down with?”
    There was a dividing line, though, and that was the needle. You’ll find, sometimes, that the most enthusiastic sniffer of medicinal powders will have a moment of horror and disgust when a party partner pulls out a rig.
    “Hey, man, what the fuck is that?”
    “It’s the best way to do it, dude.”
    “Maybe you’d better take that action somewhere else. It’s not cool.”
    But the thing is, it was cool. At least that’s how I saw it. When I encountered a junkie, I didn’t see some sad-sack, toothless loser with pallid skin and the inability to get through four hours without a fix. I saw a member of the Fraternal Order of Cool. The world heroin addicts occupied was closed off to me, and I was fascinated by it. There was a dividing line between drugs. Some users of cocaine and speed can get downright schoolmarmish when heroin enters the picture.
    “Want to try some of this?”
    “What is it?”
    “Heroin.”
    “Get the fuck out. Now.”
    Heroin, like needles, was cool. Or so I thought in those days. I sensed that dope might be the key that could unlock all the doors that the secrets of art, poetry, and music hid behind. Charlie Parker had blown mad, furious harmonies under its sway. Keith Richards, the ultimate rock-and-roll outlaw, churned out thick, massive riffs with its influence. William Burroughs took its directives and conjured up dark, nightmarish worlds that I wanted to explore. The whole of the night-framed hip world grooved to its beat and pulse and created fucking art. Smack was their muse. My heroes had known its allure, felt its embrace, and I wanted what they had.
    Despite my fascination and desire to explore the dark world of the poppy juice, I learned quickly that heroin wasn’t an easy score. The pill poppers, speed freaks, and drunks I knew just didn’t have access to junk. It wasn’t something they used and they didn’t have connections to that world. The junkies I knew all possessed some strange moralistic code that prevented them from introducing a novice to the habit.
    “Hey, man, let me try some of that,” I’d say as casually as I could.
    “You ever done this shit before?”
    “No. But I’ve done everything else.”
    “Sorry, kid. I’m not going to bust your cherry.”
    “But I can pay. I have cash.”
    “No.”
    It was frustrating and a major hassle, but if you look hard enough for anything, and if you’re persistent enough, you’ll find it. So there I sat in an apartment deep inside the Hollywood wasteland. It was a hot night and the avenues and boulevards were crawling and thick with hustlers and twilight life forms. The room was dark and cool, a refuge from the dusty streets. I was twenty thousand leagues beneath a neon sea. Across from me, sitting like Buddha at a low table littered with bent and blackened spoons, misshapen candles spitting out what little life was left in them, needles, glittering squares of tinfoil, bright scraps of rubber that had once been balloons, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and half-empty glasses sat a guy named Top Jimmy. He was one of the coolest dudes I knew, an underground legend. I had met him at the Cathay de Grande where his band, the Rhythm Pigs, played every Monday night. A snaggletoothed, porcine throwback to an earlier era’s great, hard-living white bluesmen, his given name was James Paul Koncek, but he derived his blues handle from a counterman’s gig he had once held at a gritty little Mexican takeout joint called Top Taco over on La Brea across the street from A&M Records, where he handed out free