I had a friend, called Mitsos, the Sailor (because he used to be a sailor). I first met him after he had come out of jail- I don't know what he was in for and I never asked. He had this way about him that you see in people who have been in jail and have taken it as a harsh lesson. Once they 're out, you look at them and they may be a bit scruffy, a bit uncouth, a bit down and out (because jail never lets you move on) but they are straight like a rod, figuratively speaking. I don't mean sexually. I mean they watch their own behaviour like a hawk watches prey. The slightest misstep can lead to trouble, you see, and trouble can only end in one place.
So, Mitsos, he was trying to get his life back on track. He was homeless for a while. He slept at the benches in the park where we all hung out. At some point I noticed that when this girl -I don't remember her name but she was from Brazil- so when she was around, Mitsos was more smiley, more polite and even better groomed than usual. One day I saw him, out of the corner of my eye, hand her an actual boucquet of flowers, all wrapped up in crispy plastic sheet with a huge big smile on his face.
Eventually, Mitsos shacked up with this girl and they were happy together. Unfortunately, one of Mitsos friends was a junkie. But he was Mitsos' friend, so the Brazilian girl let him into her house.
It pains me to remember what happened after. One day the Brazilian girl came home and found her house empty- Mitsos' junkie friend had sold everything off. For junk money, it goes without saying. It goes without saying that Mitsos and the Brazilian girl had a huge row and Mitsos ended up on the streets again.
But he didn't stop there. I lost him, for a while, then one day I was in Athens' central square, Omonoia square. Omonoia is where you go to buy heroin and I saw Mitsos standing in a corner with another guy and trying to shoot up with what looked to me like a syringe with a broken needle. I went over and talked to him but he didn't want to talk. He wasn't drugged yet, he was still trying to shoot. He was angry and desperate and, I think, ashamed that I had seen him like that. I stood and watched him for a while trying to insert the needle in his vein and all I could think of was how grotty that syringe was. I worried he might get an infection.
Do you understand what he was doing? Mitsos wasn't a junkie. He had junkie friends but he was clean. At Omonoia he wasn't trying to get high. He was committing suicide. I only figured it out a couple of weeks later, when I heard they had found him dead.
I've thought often that maybe I could have helped him- given him a place to stay, even though my folks would never have agreed. Anyway, it happened as it happened. Mitsos took a last shot to nowhere a day when I was with my other friends at the park and we were all happy and laughing and having fun enjoying each other's company.
At least I got to say goodbye.
The first time someone tried to sell me heroin was when I was sixteen. I had gone for the first time to Exarchia Square, a place in Athens, Greece, were all the countercultural types gather. I had heard that all the punks and the anarchists gathered there and I wanted to meet some.
When I got there the place was empty so I sat on a bench and waited. At some point, this older dude came and sat next to me and started chatting me up. He started telling me about this thing called "paramytha" ("fairy-tale stuff") that people take to have a good time. He explained the name comes from the fact that it "makes you believe stuff" ("se paramythiazei"). I asked what this "paramytha" looked like and he described it as a powder, sometimes brown, sometimes yellow, sometimes grey, etc. So basically not only did he want to sell me heroin (I was 16, remember) he also wanted to sell me heroin cut with whatever dirty shit he had lying around (as normal).
Well, I wasn't buying. A while later an other older dude came and sat with me and told me to stay away from the other guy and the stuff he was trying to sell me. This dude, let's call him Dude B, told me that the "paramytha" was heroin, that it was a horrible disease that caused you to do the most degrading things to yourself and others. He told me that a grown man had once told him he gave someone a blowjob for money to get his "paramytha" (I'm guessing it was Dude B himself who did and that he did it many more times than one). I am not going to look down on a man (or woman) who gives blowjobs, or who gives blowjobs for money. But giving blowjobs to get money to spend on heroin that makes you give blowjobs for money is scraping the bottom of the lowest pit of degradation, in my book. Edit: but when you're addicted that's all par for the course.
So, no disdain. Sometimes pitty. Sometimes anger and frustration. Most of the time these days just a great big distance between myself and anyone who bears the marks.
I hope that is intersting to someone in this thread.