On this day, Benton Wilson awakes in the cold gray of the early afternoon with a slightly sick feeling, a dull ache in his chest and legs that he can ease only with heroin.
From his closet, he pulls a shoe box of syringes, bottle caps, cotton balls, bleach and water. From an empty beer bottle on the windowsill, he pours out two packages wrapped in foil, each folded so tight they are no bigger than a fingernail.
While Elvis Presley’s greatest hits play and a stick of incense wedged into a space in the stereo burns, Wilson continues with this ritual he performs nearly every day.
He is sitting in a small Wicker Park apartment with flecking walls and windows covered with construction paper. Mattresses are on the floor. The wall next to the closet is spattered with blood. The radiator rattles. He ignores it; his eyes are fixed on his works.
He dumps the heroin from the foil into the bottle cap. Then, using a syringe he has uncapped with his teeth, he adds water to dissolve the heroin. He heats the mix with a match, leaving the top of the cap blackened. He ties off his left arm with a thin rag, then swabs a reddened sore in the crook of his elbow-the only point of entry to the only vein he uses.
He drops a bead of a cotton ball into the silty solution to soak up the heroin so he can get all of it into the needle, then he draws it into the cylinder of the syringe. Slowly, he pushes the needle into his arm. The cylinder fills with dark blood. Grimacing, Wilson pushes the plunger.
His eyes close. His head shakes, then it falls. He loosens the tourniquet, the syringe still sticking out of his arm, then finally he withdraws the needle. Blood runs down his arm.
“What’s it like?” Wilson says as he lazily rolls down his shirt sleeves, his voice slow and breathy. “It’s like somebody you love with their arms around you.”
If there is a center to Wilson’s life, it is heroin. Everything else may be careening pell mell toward some unknown disaster, as it often seems it is, but heroin is always there, a constant of sorts. Most days begin and end with it, revolve around buying it, focus on using it. Heroin obliterates everything else.
There are days when he does not use it, but they are rare. Even then, he thinks about using it, about how easy it is to buy-a telephone call and a short walk to a nearby apartment building-and how easy it is to use.
Maybe he is an addict. But he has stopped before. A few months ago, he boarded a train with one $10 dose of heroin, planning to use it as he traveled to visit his parents in New Jersey. Then he would quit and never start with it again.
It worked. He stayed in bed for a week, sick the entire time, eating nothing. He had cramps in his legs and arms. His stomach hurt. He shook in a cold sweat. But it worked. Two days after he returned to Chicago, though, he was using again.
“It’s just so easy to wake up every day and use it,” he said. “Not using it is terrible. It’s torture.”
At 21, Wilson is part of a resurgence in heroin use, one that drug experts say is of epidemic proportions. The signs are everywhere, from drug treatment centers to hospital emergency roons, from the jail to the morgue. The numbers of people in treatment, overdosing and in jail are all up.
Although heroin has gone in and out of fashion in the past, the current rise is different because it is being fueled by younger users like Wilson. They start by snorting the drug, determined not to become intravenous users. They do it to get high rather than to “get even,” that is, to get themselves to the point where they can simply function. They blanch at the notion that they are junkies. Indeed, they seem to view their use of heroin as daring, romantic even, far from the gritty, sorrowful addictions of others.
A slower addiction
Wilson, for instance, is enamored of William S. Burroughs and other writers who romanticized heroin. Burroughs’ book “Junkie,” in which he describes how his flirtation with heroin led to a habit, is a particular touchstone for Wilson, who cannot envision himself struggling on the street or in jail-as Burroughs was in his book. Other young people are captivated by the increased use of heroin by today’s young rock stars.
But drug experts across the country say the only difference between the new users and those of the past is that their addictions come on a little slower because they’re snorting instead of injecting. Once addiction takes hold, according to experts, it consumes them. Then they steal, or they prostitute-whatever it takes to make drug money.
“These kids, they don’t think anything is going to happen when they start up with the snorting,” said Max Pedraza, a recovering addict who now works as an outreach worker with the Chicago Recovery Alliance, which operates a syringe-exchange van at various sites across the city. “But it always does.”
Wilson is little different. His first experience was with friends in San Francisco three years ago. He thought it was the drug Ecstasy; he put it in water and drank it. But he didn’t get the excitable rush he had experienced before on Ecstasy.
Instead, he went into a nod, that dreamy state just short of sleep that, like a fog, envelops the user and slows everything down. His body warmed right up to heroin.
“It made me feel like everything was all right,” Wilson said. “It felt just like security. I really liked it and I knew I’d be doing it again. I just had to.”
Now heroin is at the center of his life. It pushes aside thoughts of food; use heroin and a meal is whatever can be had cheap and quick, like a candy bar. His tall, thin frame is evidence of that. He has no interest in sex, in relationships.
“I guess it’s pretty much everything,” he said, sitting in a Wicker Park bar one night. “I don’t do much of anything else. You could say it’s running my life these days.”
`It was like a quest’
Wilson was born in Evanston, the youngest of three children. He moved to New Jersey with his parents when he was a child, but he always hoped to come back to Chicago. It was a middle-class upbringing. His dad sells cars; his mother works in a bookstore.
His is a delicate face: pouty lips and brown eyes framed by close-cropped dark hair that he combs up. Sometimes he wears an earring. Sometimes he applies eye-liner because he wants his eyes to stand out, even though they already demand attention.
He dropped out of high school in his junior year and went to Boston to attend art school. He painted and played guitar in a band there, but left after a year for San Francisco. He was there for two weeks before returning home to New Jersey.
He came to Chicago about two years ago to attend Columbia College, but lasted less than a month there. He met a friend who was getting into heroin; he decided to go along. He snorted for about six months, before deciding to inject. The needle, he figured, would give him a better high.
“It was like a quest, something that I had to do,” he said, his face briefly animated. “I just wanted to know what everybody had been talking about. I mean, it sounded like it couldn’t hurt you, like it could help you and not hardly hurt you.”
But the needle hooked him. Soon, Wilson needed heroin to stay straight or to get even. No longer was it the experimental departure from marijuana or cocaine or even acid he thought it could provide. It was a staple of his daily existence.
His is a life of needle exchanges, pay phone calls to a dealer and afternoons and nights holed up in his room. There are broken promises by the dozen; every month, it seems, is the one in which he will quit using, or in which he will cut back, if that is possible. He toys with the notion of becoming a recreational user.
Heroin seems to dictate so much, like someone standing over him and telling him what to do. It wakes him up, breaking a sound sleep. It makes him cold and nauseated, with his nose runny and his body itchy. The initial warmth it delivers, the feeling that seems to make it worthwhile, quickly disappears.
He has hallucinated during his brief respites from heroin, seeing in his mind animals, oversized men in fedoras and other scary figures that leave him shaking.
“It makes it so you’ve got to go out and get it, no matter what time it is or anything,” he said, pulling hard on one cigarette in a chain of cigarettes. “The last thing you want to do is get out of bed, but you just have to. It seems like it’s just so important. Nothing else matters, really.”
Wilson does work. The economics of using heroin are such that any regular user must work-or steal. This new generation of users seems to have sworn off stealing-at least at the start. Wilson is a barback, the bar assistant who helps the bartender.
It does not pay him much, maybe a few hundred dollars a week, but so far it is enough to pay his bills and keep up his habit-although his telephone was just disconnected. Wilson spends $20 to $40 a day on heroin when he is using it once or twice a day, which he usually does. Then he spends a little more for some marijuana.
Addicts in suits and ties
Sit on the Chicago Recovery Alliance’s needle exchange van with Pedraza for an afternoon and you see the spectrum of heroin addiction: suit-and-tie lawyers and businessmen whose five- and six-figure salaries keep their habits going, and thieves whose days are spent stealing, fencing what they have stolen and buying and using heroin.
Wilson fits right in. All of these users skulk into the van with their sacks of spent syringes, chatting uneasily with the volunteers who staff the van and leaving with dozens of fresh needles, caps, bottles of water, bleach and, perhaps, condoms.
It is a curious phenomenon, as if the go-go 1980s, with its cocaine rushes and carelessness, have given way to a responsible yet opiated 1990s. Wilson trudges to the van every few weeks, usually on Fridays when it is parked on Wood Street near Division Street.
He exchanges a few dozen syringes and leaves with a few more than that. He uses his needles two or three times, but does not share them for fear of contracting AIDS.
It is his only concern, and then only a vague one. Overdosing does not scare him. He thinks he has some internal protection against that kind of fatal mistake.
So it is that he pushes to the end of his day with another injection of heroin, although this time half as much as his wakeup dose in the afternoon. He fishes a syringe out of the shoe box and pours one $10 foil out of the bottle.
There is a monotony to heroin addiction that is, in a stopped-time sort of way, arresting. Nothing happens on heroin. The days and nights pass as subtly as someone goes from user to addict, as quietly as heroin began to shape Wilson’s life.
“It just happens to you,” said Wilson. “You don’t have to strive for it. You start using and you think you’re going to be able to handle it. Then you wake up and you’re a junkie. But right now I don’t feel like a junkie. I can go a day without it, if I want to. Besides, I wouldn’t let myself get to that point. I have a conscience.”
