From: (Monde Kontrolle) Subject: that time in Salt Lake City Date: 1996/11/12 newsgroups: alt.drugs.hard most of the stuff i've been posting here has been pretty negative -- and it's understandable, because heroin addiction is a pretty altogether negative experience. so just for a change i'll share one of the positive experiences i had on it. the only reason it stands out in memory as positive is that it happened to me rather early in the progression of the addiction. in fact, it had happened after one of the first few times i'd been really sick, which probably also has a lot to do with why i can look back on it and find the memory being so 'nice'. i was taking a cross country Greyhound trip from San Francisco to Chicago. i was 25, and had never seen the country...just California and Nevada -- and a tourist-oriented kind of trip to Europe when i was 16. i was all by myself, going to meet some folks from a record label in Chicago called WaxTrax! that handled most of the industrial music released in America at the time. i was working as a club promoter and had gotten to exchange letters and phone calls with the mail-order girl from WaxTrax! and she decided it would be fun if i came out there for a couple of weeks and met some people from the label and from the studio. the Chicago experience is a few stories in and of itself. i ended up shooting dope with members of the bands Ministry and Skinny Puppy...Al Jourgenson himself helped hit me up. last i heard, he's gotten clean. that was also my first experience with that east coast white heroin . but i want to write about what happened on the way to Chicago, when the bus stopped in Salt Lake City. by the time the bus crossed over the state line between Nevada and Utah, i was sick as the proverbial dog. i remember i had been amiably chatting with the girl in the seat next to me, who was a speedfreak and enjoyed making small talk. i had been getting less and less able to respond with any enthusiasm, and realised i was getting sick! here i was on my first cross country expedition and i felt like i was gonna puke and my head was gonna cave in. also the girl started tweaking herself, and that was pretty unpleasant. when we stopped in Salt Lake i realised there was no way i was gonna make it all the way to Chi-Town in this condition. i got off the bus, and managed to get myself checked into a motel for the night. in the morning, i began looking for a place to score some dope. now, mind you, we're talking about Salt Lake City here, not San Francisco or New York. i had no idea how lucky i got. i managed to find a street bum who referred me to a certain bar. i walked in there and just sat down. i was shivering. i felt like i was gonna toss my cookies any minute except i had no cookies to toss. there was a group of people sitting around a table on the other end of the bar. one of them approached me and asked me what was up. i said 'not me, that's for sure...' i guess they knew right away that i was needing a fix and that i was not a cop, but i definitely looked like i was from out of town! i told him i had $40 to spend. i kinda figured it was a gamble, that these were total strangers and i was probably going to get ripped off. but actually, they were very nice. there was the guy who came up to me, and his wife, who was wafer-thin, had stringy dishwater blonde hair and a gap-toothed smile, and this other guy who looked to me to be a dedicated alcoholic, kind of reminded me of Barney the drunk from the Simpsons. we all piled into the guy's station wagon, and drove to a pay phone. the woman ggot out and made a phone call. then we went off to another bar on the other side of town. she went inside. i was sweating like crazy but still felt shivery. . about five minutes later she came out and everyone knew she'd copped. we headed back to the old couple's house. the woman said 'it's time to get this far-from-home girl well!' and of course they were going to get some of the dope too as payment for getting it for me, so everyone in that car was acting totally giddy. the alcoholic guy was making these ambulance noises. and i was pretty bloody relieved, even though i hadn't seen the dope yet. i somehow knew it would be good because these people were too happy for there to be any question. we arrived at the couple's house. i think it was on the east side of town. when you look up the word 'dilapidated' in the dictionary you see a picture of this house. it was made of clapboard and chicken wire. you think i'm kidding or exaggerating? no, i'm serious. clapboard and chicken wire. the inside was a total mess but it definitely had this home-y, lived-in feel to it. inside there was another woman who looked about fifty years old, looking after a baby and an old 3-legged dog. there was a clothesline spread right through the living room with stuff hanging from it. we all gathered 'round the 'bed' which was just a pile of old mattresses and cooked up the dope in a spoon. the gap-toothed woman said ' i know womens veins best' and hit me up. then got out some fresh needles from a pack and gave the rest of the dope plus the cotton to the other two people. i remember how fast that shit spread from my arm to the rest of me. how the sickness fell off me like some sort of oily dropcloth that i had been choking in, just falling down around my ankles and vanishing into godknowswhere. i don't know how many times i thanked them. the three-legged dog seemed to take a liking to me, and i usually hate dogs...but i don't think i was hating anything at all that moment and the dog probably knew it. the drunk guy said 'i think we just gave that girl some religion' because i was spouting 'Jesus Christ, this is so good' over and over again. it never was that good again. i think maybe there's only one time that it ever is, and that was it. it was soon time for me to get back on the bus. my new Salt Lake City friends gave me their address on a scrap of notebook paper. in the chaos that my life became after my return from Chicago i managed to lose it. i sometimes wonder how they're all doing there in that little clapboard house. i wonder if they're still alive. i won't ever know. --