Heroin Chic

The house is one of those modern single-story Hollywood hills rectangles that just out from the hillside at an absurd angle, held in place by giant steel brackets. It belongs to the son of a well-known movie producer, but few of the hundred guests at the party seem to know their host. Music and laughter echo off the patio, which is crowded with young entertainment-industry types and more than a few recognizable musicians and TV stars. It's a mix of guys in Ben Davis hip-hop outfits and women in kinderwhore dresses.

But Jonathan (like other people profiled in this article, this is not his real name), a lanky, doe-eyed man in baggy chinos, isn't impressed. He's privy to a cooler vibe. At one A.M., he slips out.

Destination: Bonnie Brae Street. At this hour, the trip is a 15-minute shot. In a city famous for its endless sprawl, Bonnie Brae cuts through a densely populated neighborhood largely inhabited by immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Affluent Angelenos come here, too, and for them, Bonnie Brae is where they buy heroin.

As the car turns the final corner, a swarm of wildly gesticulating men materializes from between parked cars. Jonathan takes command. "OK, slow down," he tells the driver, and rolls down the window. He's the placid epicenter of a ferocious elbowing match. To the victor, a Hispanic teenager, goes $15. In return, the kid spits into Jonathan's hand a tiny, tied-up orange balloon from a stash he stores in his mouth. Inside the balloon and wrapped in a square of white plastic is a sticky, brown, pea-size ball.

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Jonathan has a weakness for heroin. But he's not curled up in an alley or stealing purses to support his habit. He's mostly in his darkroom or working on a video set. In a few days, he's off to New York, Europe and Japan (he'll hit the methadone clinic first) to attend gallery openings where his photographs are being exhibited. Only in his late 20s, he cashes in on his artistry with well-paying stints as a director of photography for rock videos.

Jonathan doesn't like smoking it and won't touch a needle. Weaned on New York powder, he fixes by melting tiny flecks of tar in a spoon with a drop of water--junkie style--and snorting the bitter, amber solution. The opiate courses slowly through his nervous system, bringing him to heroin's grand plateau in around 20 minutes. Heroin, especially for those who don't use needles, is not the sledgehammer of euphoria it's imagined to be. Aside from his pin-size pupils and some languid scratching, little about Jonathan's behavior betrays his drug use. "Heroin you function on," he explains as he fastidiously washes out the blackened spoon in the sink after scraping, boiling and huffing the evening's last dollop. "On crack you're really wired. You can't hold a conversation or read a book or watch TV."

Although he prefers fixing alone, he has plenty of company when he wants it. His partners-in-crime include a motion-picture art director, a pair of models and a well-known fashion stylist. "Most people I get high with have Ph.D.s," he boasts. "They're not street trash. They're more like corrupted intellectuals. Now there's a glamorous look to it. The glamorous people are doing it."

These days, heroin's shadow cuts across Los Angeles' entertainment industry--cyberpunks and screenwriters, club hoppers, cinematographers and, of course, rock musicians. Far from being anomalous, they are part of a new breed of talent that has recently infiltrated the culture factory. They are hip, motivated, educated--and on dope. They are the heroin achievers.

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When River Phoenix convulsed and died in front of Johnny Depp's Viper Room last year, he became a heroin poster boy. Phoenix OD'd on the same thing that had killed John Belushi several blocks away and 11 years earlier, a mix of cocaine and heroin called a speedball. Belushi, the goofy comic, is usually considered to be a cocaine casualty, while Phoenix is conceded to heroin. It's a telling shift in emphasis.

A decade ago, you had mergers, junk bonds, condos, conspicuous consumption and cocaine. Cocaine was a drug as relentlessly optimistic and upbeat as its era. Dynasty and Falcon Crest ruled the airwaves. As the Eighties crashed and burned into the Nineties, the coke-powered lifestyle went with it. TV began training its lens on the fucked up and downwardly mobile. The Simpsons, Married With Children, Beavis and Butthead. Loud and pissed-off, grunge and its sociological partner heroin roared down from Seattle. Alienation was now big business.

"Coke is as dead as dead. Heroin is coming back in a big fucking way," Eric Stolz tells John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction. Travolta, ever the cultural harbinger, discoed in Saturday Night Fever, got everyone wearing Tony Lamas with Urban Cowboy and gave the health craze a boost in Perfect. Now, in the most lusciously photographed sequence in Pulp Fiction, he mainlines a shot of heroin and goes for a long, blissful drive. (In contrast, on Beverly Hills 90210, Luke Perry only smokes it and cracks up his car.) Government findings support Tarantino and company as yesterday's coke crowd now shows up as a spike in heroin statistics. Crackheads in particular turn to heroin to come down. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, heroin use is at a high. "There is an increased supply from Southeast Asia, Mexico and Colombia," says DEA spokesman Ralph Lochridge, whose office handles greater Los Angeles. "The cartels are diversifying just like any multinational company. And they have diversified into heroin."

This means the dope on the street is purer and cheaper than ever. According to the DEA's National Narcotics Intelligence Consumer Committee, street heroin a decade ago had a nationwide average purity of seven percent. The price today is the same but the average purity now reaches as high as 35 percent. Because purity is shooting up, users don't have to. You can get high now without going the more dangerous IV route by smoking or snorting the drug. Until you get your habit up, there are no messy rigs, needle tracks, blood or threat of AIDS. All the pleasure and mystique of heroin ingestion, and less of the risk. A kind of Naked Lunch lite.

Adding to the cachet, filmmakers and recording artists rebelled against the Just Say No campaign and broke their Reagan-era radio silence on references to drugs. Perry Farrell, former lead singer for Jane's Addiction (now front man for Porno for Pyros), picked up the dormant threads of punk and junk and took them public. If the Los Angeles band's name and lyrics and the methadone bottle on the back of the 1990 album Ritual de lo Habitual didn't get the message across, Farrell gave the drug the thumbs-up in an interview following the album's release by saying, "I think it's great." He also injected it into his 1993 vanity project, Gift, a junkie vérité film starring him, his then-girlfriend Casey Niccoli and a whole lot of smack. Today, as mastermind of the Lollapalooza festivals, Farrell is an icon among heroin achievers.

Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love (of the band Hole) also were candid about the drug and their struggles with it--both in lyrics and in interviews. Then both Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff joined the permanent rehab wing of rock-and-roll heaven. Songs like Alice in Chains' Godsmack and band names like Morphine, Codeine and Cop Shoot Cop (think about it) further stamped the opiate high with the imprimatur of rock-and-roll cool. Heroin had the dysfunctional glamour that was right for the times, and Hollywood began to pick up on it.

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"Upon entering my vein, the drug would start a warm itch that would surge along until the brain consumed it in a gentle explosion that began in the back of the neck and rose rapidly until I felt such pleasure that the whole world sympathized and took on a soft and lofty appeal."

This endorsement of dilaudid (a synthetic opiate) came courtesy of Matt Dillon in the acclaimed 1989 Gus Van Sant film Drugstore Cowboy. Following Van Sant's lead, even more projects that depicted everything from casual to over-the-top heroin use--Naked Lunch, Rush, Killing Zoe, Fresh and Ed Wood--got the nod, culminating, of course, in Pulp Fiction's needle-in-the-chest adrenaline rush.

The fashion world, too, helped bring heroin into vogue. "Oh, heroin? It's beauty secret number one," says one Gaultier model. "Everyone in Paris and Milan smokes it--makeup people, photographers, designers." A young model, Kirsi Hegel, blabbed to a British tabloid that many of the new young talent were heavily into heroin, and confirmed that it helped them achieve that in-demand waif look. These models call themselves Gia's Girls, after Gia Carangi, a model and heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. Because of (continued on page 144)Heroin Chic(continued from page 68) rumors alleging drug use during New York's annual Bryant Park fashion show, fashion bigs placed narcs in the backstage changing tents. (Ironically, Bryant Park had just been renovated to chase away the street dealers.)

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"It's the new film noir mentality," says Rudolph (his full, real name), a 50-year-old nightclub impresario. The staccato of house music clatters at his Beverly Hills club, Tatou, while Shannen Doherty, director Rob Weiss and rich guys in suits dance away upstairs. "Basically they're trying to experience in real life what film noir is about--that certain bliss which will inevitably lead to doom."

That's why today's hipster heroes seem tarnished before their time. They have abandoned preppie clothes and tanning booths in favor of junkie pallor, weak beards, hats and baggy pants. "At the high end they wear Moschino and Stüssy," says Rudolph. "It's a matter of looking scruffy on a higher budget."

Recently, all the top young actors queued up for the lead in The Basketball Diaries (the protagonist trades shooting hoops for shooting dope) despite the film's low budget. Take a look at Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Ethan Hawke, Robert Downey Jr., Eric Stolz, Stephen Dorff, Christian Slater. To a casual observer, they could all be the same jaded, bored, strung-out person. Ditto with the women--Juliette Lewis, Winona Ryder, Patricia Arquette, etc. Their look is enough to fuel the rumors of dope use that swirl around some of them.

The line between real junkies and fashion junkies is indistinct. In fact, outing junkies has replaced outing homosexuals in the industry gossip mill.

"The young actors and musicians have the money to have parties in their own home or hotel suite, so they have a secure environment," says Rudolph. "I've witnessed all of this. Basically, everyone gets together and starts doing junk. You play music and you watch Drugstore Cowboy over and over. Sometimes some chick throws up and that's that."

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As MTV kicked into high gear, TV, advertising, music and film coalesced into one huge enterprise. Record companies spawned film divisions and movie studios formed record labels. Los Angeles' Viper Room mirrors that synthesis by being a place for actors who want to rock to mix with rockers who want to act. Heroin was always a rock-and-roll vice and Johnny Depp's dark club was a facsimile of a low-down rock dive, betrayed only by the cover price. After Phoenix' death, many of L.A.'s bars, clubs and restaurants along the Sunset Strip were fingered as the new opium dens.

"There are clubs that have rooms or areas to sit and smoke and be relatively undetected," says Dave Valentine, a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department's West Hollywood division. Many places, he adds, have their own house dealer, who could sell you a packet if you were with the right crowd. At one upscale joint, the dealer apparently owns the place.

"Heroin use is not something that people love to advertise," says Jim, a cherubic 21-year-old former heroin dealer. "On the other hand, in certain crowds--with people they know--you would be surprised how open they are."

"You go to school with a bunch of rich kids who have nothing better to do than do drugs," Jim says. "Before you know it, you owe a couple of guys a little money, and the easiest way out is to 'Sell this for me,' you know?"

If you have a big clientele and a small habit, you can leverage your efforts into a profitable enterprise. Pretty soon Jim was dealing to faces right out of People and Vogue, pocketing up to $20,000 a week. Jim tooled around in a fancy car, hitting clubs, parties and a drug-fueled sex orgy or two. Many girls, including a TV star who was once a household name, traded a blow job or more for what he had to offer.

Although Jim's presence here at the station suggests he's supplying Valentine with useful names and addresses, bringing the law down on privileged dopers is problematic. Shortages of manpower are exacerbated by the hassle of making cases stick against defendants who have high-priced lawyers. On the other hand, Valentine says that for well-heeled kids to "get handcuffs on and go to the station to get booked can be a traumatic experience."

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Most heroin achievers get high with five or six people and know of a few more. Jonathan, the Hollywood party boy, is part of one cluster. Another orbits around Kim and Trevor's loft in downtown Los Angeles.

Kim paints dark portraits that sell. And art is just her sideline. She makes her living as a cook and is on the verge of opening her own restaurant. Trevor, her live-in boyfriend, plays bass for a band that recently signed a major-label record deal. Both are in their mid-20s.

Kim was turned on to heroin three years ago by a fashion photographer she was dating. But she was clean when she moved in with Trevor last year--and so was he--though not for long. "How we got hooked on it together is, you know, I broke down that day," she says. "I went, we bought it. We bonded on it." Kim and Trevor buy their balloons from a nearby street dealer who, she says, "really takes care of us." He sells them a brown, gravelly heroin. They've tried China White but weren't impressed. They find the Bonnie Brae tar disgusting and their heroin goes for half the price. "The reason why it's so expensive on Bonnie Brae is that people from Hollywood are going there," Kim explains. Some of them have discovered her street. "These assholes don't understand being discreet about it--you worry about your dealer getting busted. It's just so obvious that these are little rich kids trying to score heroin, because it's so glamorized right now, you know?"

To her, heroin makes economic sense. "Even if you go out to drink, how much is a night at bars going to cost you? You know, a lot of money. In the beginning you can spend $7 or $14 and just hang out and have a beautiful night together."

By beautiful night, Kim and Trevor mean sex. Talking about sex makes a junkophile's eyes glaze. Their voices go soft, tinged with reverence.

"It's just so euphoric," Kim says. "Because there are no boundaries. All those things in your head you would love to do sexually with your partner that you think are perverted--it totally is just so intense." Many women report being able to relax into escalating peaks of multiple orgasms. Like accomplished tantric practitioners, men are gaga for the four-hour sexual marathons--and they don't even come. Even male IV users, who rarely get a hard-on when high, speak fondly of rolling around soft and naked with their partners.

Tonight, as they do about once a week, Kim and Trevor hold a soiree at their loft. There are respectable credentials all around: a film editor, a movie producer, a guy who just published a book. It's a select group; Kim's friends from cleaner days say they rarely see her anymore.

The room is lit by candles while sage and incense burn in an urn. The guests place their foil, lighters and personal straws near a votive candleholder that contains a razor blade and a clump of dope. Like most of today's smackheads, this crew chases the dragon: They heat a brown speck on a sheet of aluminum foil and, as the vaporizing junk uncoils off the foil, inhale the smoke through a straw. A dour Nick Cave CD plays on the stereo as a subtle odor--burnt, bitter, almondy--fills the room.

Watch enough heroin being consumed and eventually you'll see someone puke. This time it's Kim. She breaks off in midsentence and says, "Uh-oh." Then she's off to the bathroom. "See, you can lean over, puke and continue your sentence," she says when she returns. "It doesn't hurt. Um, it's horrible. I mean, it's pathetic."

The guests are chippers--occasional, weekend users. Because only Kim and Trevor know where to score, the others use only when they are visiting. "I like doing it this way," says Joseph, the producer, who's just back from working on a film in Europe. He says keeping it out of his house makes it easier to control. Like many people in the film business, Joseph says he was turned on to heroin because "basically, it was all around me. Everyone I knew was doing it."

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"People are just not taking it seriously," says Dr. Richard Sandor, a psychiatrist and addiction-treatment specialist at St. John's Hospital's chemical dependency program in Santa Monica. "They don't believe that it's as addictive as straight guys like me are saying. Heroin sets up a hunger in people that just doesn't go away," he continues. "When people try to stop using, they get--we have a wonderful word for it--dysphoric. It's not just unhappy. The receptor sites in the brain, for the internal chemistry that helps you feel good, have been reset. You don't have the substances around to feel pleasure. So you just feel god-awful. It's very difficult to resist the calling that the drug has."

Dr. Sandor's casebook contains tales of many chippers who advanced from smoking on the weekends to shooting it every day. Like many people in drug enforcement and rehab, he talks about the idea of "generational forgetting." This new group is too young to have any experience with the heroin casualties of the Sixties and Seventies. But according to Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, drug policy director at the Lindesmith Center in New York, that presents an opportunity for a more sensible view of heroin. "A lot of those horror stories were inaccurate. True, many people got hurt with heroin," he says. "But many never suffered real problems. For a long time heroin was the worst drug in the world. Then cocaine became the worst. Cocaine, in fact, is worse in certain respects, because it is more difficult to develop a maintenance relationship with it."

A maintenance relationship is key to the addicted achiever's lifestyle. Because heroin does not destroy body tissue, as long as you have access to a reasonably pure form of the drug you shouldn't have problems. In theory, anyway.

"Heroin is an extremely demanding mistress," Sandor says. "And you can't maintain the punishing schedules that these folks are engaged in and feed this jones. You just can't do it."

Addicts try to maintain themselves, their careers and their lifestyles despite the time, money and energy siphoned off by their habits. Often, they don't even get high. They fix so they won't go into withdrawal and get sick. However, even this status decays. It's what doctors call tolerance and what William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, calls "the algebra of need."

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Kim calls it the creep. She's weeping profusely. She's feeling, well, dysphoric. It's two weeks after her soiree and her sobs sound tinny over the phone.

In the beginning, as Kim describes the creep, you smoke or snort heroin, get a nice, cheap high and everything's great. "But even if you allot yourself like a half a balloon a day," she explains, "you get addicted to that half a day. You feel uncomfortable and you actually need to go a bit further to feel comfortable.

"I refuse to sacrifice my lifestyle," Kim says, a common refrain among achievers. "You're on the verge of maintaining, and to get high you do more. I'd rather get sick a little bit and get my amount down. Then I can creep up and get high a little bit, get sick. I'd rather control it at a small level than control it at a huge level where if I get sick, I'm deathly."

The heroin achiever leads a binge-and-kick lifestyle, a manic-depressive existence that swings from peaks of pleasure to pits of sickness, a cycle interspersed with long, muddy periods of maintenance. Kicking is a matter of scheduling. One achiever with a corporate, suit-and-tie job will take some sick days, check into a fancy hotel and sit in the whirlpool until the jones stops. Even with room service, it's cheaper than detox.

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Every day Vincent reads the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Hollywood Reporter. His desk is cluttered with clippings about new media, the Internet and artificial intelligence. From among the pencils and paper clips in the top desk drawer, he pulls out a sheet of foil, a metal straw, a lighter, a $50 chunk of heroin and a mat knife. He cuts off tiny pieces and begins to smoke.

Vincent is the personification of the L.A. service industry. Currently the manager of a trendy nightspot, he has promoted clubs and served as an arbiter of style for local magazines. He earns enough money to buy some dope and live in the shadow of the Hollywood sign. As the black burn spots (sometimes called tin art) accumulate on his foil, he says, "I don't feel like I'm hiding from changes, because I am interested in them. That's why I'm pursuing new media. Heroin creates an environment where you can go and work." He has a new Mac Quadra and a paying project to keep him busy. This is his second heroin wave. He picked it up in the late Eighties with the Jane's Addiction crowd, then got straight, got his shit together--only to find heroin again in the Nineties among his new, wealthier peers.

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At the podium, a 50-year-old, 30-year-sober lesbian alcoholic recites some kind of stream-of-consciousness poetry to 150 people gathered in a municipal rec center. The foam coffee cups and plastic chairs of the AA meeting are a far cry from the cool textures of a chase-the-dragon party.

During the break, Jennifer, a slender, raven-haired 22-year-old former party girl, steps outside for a smoke. The daughter of well-to-do parents, Jennifer was educated in private schools, got a new car on her 18th birthday--the whole bit. Jennifer began smoking heroin socially, going to trendy bars and clubs, then graduated to a full-blown, daily IV habit. Prostitution followed.

She had a brown-sugar daddy--a successful actor. She recounts tale after tale of sordid sex. When she gave him a blow job, he would take a hit of heroin or crack just before he came. She also fooled around with the owner of a record label. For a while, these arrangements assured her a steady supply of dope. She and the actor and a small group would gather at a dealer's house on Fridays for all-night heroin parties. "I've seen lots of people put needles in their arms," she says. "These people would do it out in the open at, this girl's house and I fucking thought I wasn't one of those people."

Jennifer's life disintegrated to the point where her oblivious parents took notice and forced her into detox at Exodus in Marina del Rey--the Betty Ford Center of the Nineties. Or, as she calls it, "rock-and-roll rehab." Alumni of Exodus include Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers and Kurt Cobain; Cobain's fate gives credence to the perception that detox outfits simply allow celebs to get into shape for a movie or tour.

"It was fucking brutal," Jennifer recalls. "Three days straight I didn't sleep. It was like frying on acid for three days. My bones ached. I had to sit on a chair in a shower so the hot water could hit me because I thought I was going to lose my mind and jump out the window."

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Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Junkie were written decades ago. Today's tunes about smack are relatively obscure compared with Heroin, Sister Morphine or Happiness Is a Warm Gun. They're just more reminders that today's twenty-year-olds have yet to crawl fully out of the shadow of the boomers. "It's like I'm watching a fucking bad version of my story over and over again," says Dallas Taylor, former drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Taylor made a million dollars by the time he was 21 and spent a lot of it getting high. Back then, they had their own heroin achievers. "Whenever anybody said, 'Oh man, come on, it's killing your career,'" he says, "my answer would be, 'What about Keith Richards?'"

Taylor ebbed and flowed through the Sixties and Seventies before sobering up after a failed suicide attempt. Then came a bout with liver disease. "Journalists love it when rock-and-roll drummers are dying," he says. "They wouldn't talk to me before, but now that I'm croaking, they'll talk to me."

Now 47, he is a consultant at Exodus and has chronicled his highs and lows for his autobiography, Prisoner of Woodstock. "What people don't realize is that it's the king," says the voice of experience. "It will fuck you up. I tried for 20 fucking years to control my heroin use. It just doesn't work. It didn't work in the Twenties or the Sixties and it ain't going to work in the bad old Nineties."

Hollywood, too, has had its casualties. Jerry Stahl is a 41-year-old former television writer, former scriptwriter, former playboy contributor and former junkie. He shot speedballs in an NBC bathroom before a story meeting for Alf. "If people sitting at the Viper Room smoking tinfoil can get away with it, great," he says. "But there are always going to be people who start there and just head due fucking south. And I was one of those people."

After the usual bottoming out (losing the wife and house, etc.), Stahl worked at menial jobs (moving furniture and flipping burgers, etc.). He, too, has staked space on the bookshelf and a chair on the talk show circuit with his just-published autobiography, Permanent Midnight. "Dope has always been cool in the movies and there have always been cool dope books," says Stahl. "It's such a great fucking legacy, it's hard not to buy into it. But the people who wrote about it are the ones who survived and got the fuck out."

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Two weeks after Kim's conversation about kicking, she finally opens her restaurant. Vincent's publishing venture seems to be receding, but he is maintaining. Kim and Trevor got a taste of the unreliability of contraband when their dealer got busted and they endured a few days of unplanned kicking. But the single biggest factor affecting the drug supply is not police, but the weather. "At some point or another in the Nineties," says Dr. Nadelmann, "there will be a heroin crop failure. The purity will drop, the price will increase and a lot of people who have been snorting or smoking are going to shift to injecting."

The more likely scenario is far less dramatic: The culture will OD on hollow eyes and sad beauty, and trendy people will no longer use heroin. Today's Smack Pack will either morph into the new look or be consigned to the retro bin. Perhaps crystal meth or GHB or drugs not yet synthesized will course through the scene. Or maybe it'll be fresh air. Hollywood can go cold turkey and not miss a beat.

Everyone intends to quit. Trevor is going on tour and says he won't score on the road -- especially overseas. Kim has to get clean, too--otherwise either their relationship or Trevor's recovery will unravel. Vincent talks vaguely about when he just won't do it anymore.

"I have to address what drives me toward it," Jonathan says. "Once you're aware that you're an addict, you're on the right path."

Perhaps, he says, he'll fall in love (he dates only drug-free girls) and never want to do dope again. But, like all the achievers, Jonathan says he's not worried. "At some point your career is the thing you're most concerned with," he says, slicing open a just-acquired balloon. "You don't want to throw it all away on fucking drugs."