“On Addiction” by Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson’s moving essay on addiction for this month’s Plume combines both personal and disinterested (not to be confused with uninterested) insights on addiction that he’s gained from his own experiences with addicts, along with his extensive, close reading on the subject by such authors as Denis Johnson and Thomas De Quincey. In so doing, he witnesses, movingly, experiences with a drug-addicted loved one in language that crosses over from deeply private expression to the universal.

–Chard deNiord

“On Addiction” 

I thought I understood addiction. So many poets and novelists and artists I have known are alcoholics and/or addicts. Some recovered; some are still chasing the dragon; and still others died at home or on the street outside some crack house, which for some bizarre reason, the cops won’t shut down, probably because they want to assure us currently sober people that addicts will overdose on their own and periodically cleanse society of degenerates—this, under the false impression that only the scum of the earth can get addicted.

I’ve also known a lot of addicts from working with the homeless where anxiety and depression and schizophrenia often tag-team with all kinds of substances one can get on the street. But addiction becomes personal when you love someone and see them transformed by drugs, or when you get that 3 a.m. call to discover they’ve been found on the street and were lucky enough to have been successfully defibrillated for the second time in six months.

That’s when you become an official member of a club no one wants to join. The meetings take place during the wee hours of morning when you’re stumbling back to bed, half-asleep, after taking a piss, and you picture two padded paddles sending jolts to remind your loved one’s heart of its duties, and you think about all the times you and your loved one have spent doing something as simple as going to the zoo, and then you toss and turn for the rest of the night, suddenly imploring a God you barely, just barely, believe in to help you get through the night.

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The Jewish, Cubist poet Max Jacob, who died of pneumonia in a Nazi internment camp, knew how to thumb his nose at Death, even how to use language to poke of fun of Hitler’s instruments of Death, the Gestapo, whom he called “J’ai ta peau.” That is, “I’ve got your skin.” And later when he was being taken to an internment camp to await transport to Auschwitz, it is reported that he said, “I believe I am making a good impression on my landlady.”

Some addicts know this kind of gallows humor well. Last month when my son and I picked up a friend from rehab for one of his 5-hour breaks, we could not stop laughing as he related the stories of his fellow “inmates,” as he called them, their antics sometimes rising to the level of slapstick. But finally, as the laughter subsided and it was time to take him back, I could see sadness morph his face into a grotesque mask. My son and I were going home where we would laugh recounting the stories; my friend was going back to live those stories.

In Jesus’ Son Denis Johnson’s brilliant short story collection, he captures this slapstick humor as he follows the adventures of a junkie who’s called only “Fuckhead.”  At one point, Fuckhead and his friend Georgie, who are both high, get lost in a snowstorm while driving, and the narrator says:

We bumped softly down a hill to an open field that seemed to be a military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of identical markers over soldiers’ graves. I’d never before come across this cemetery. On the farther side of the field, just beyond the curtains of snow, the sky was torn away and the angels were descending out of a brilliant blue summer, their huge faces streaked with light and full of pity. The sight of them cut through my heart and down the knuckles of my spine, If there’d been anything in my bowels, I would have messed my pants from fear.

Georgie opened his arms and cried out, “It’s the drive-in, man.”

“The drive-in?” I wasn’t sure what these words meant.

“They’re showing movies in a fucking blizzard!” Georgie screamed.

“I see. I thought it was something else,” I said.

The humor here comes from the disconnect between Fuckhead’s beautiful drug-filled vision of mistaking drive-in car speakers for gravestones and the lights of the drive-in for angels (or are they the faces on the screen?)

And all of this is made more poignant because Johnson himself had his own battles with addiction, so that much of this scene was probably inspired by personal experience.

Perhaps the best example of this kind of humor can be seen in John Mulaney’s latest stand-up special, called “Baby J,” where he discusses his addiction and time in rehab. At the end, with a nod to the maxim that reality is often more absurd than make-believe, he simply reads an interview Esquire did with him, and how he answered every serious question with a bizarre answer that to him, because his brain was so muddled with drugs, seemed perfectly logical.

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A month ago, a young and creative young man I had recently spoke with was found dead outside a crack house in the ghetto. Someone’s son. Someone’s brother. All the people he had touched over his lifetime, all those people who accepted his love and energy and shared it elsewhere. If you listen closely, in the middle of the night when all is quiet and dark, you can hear the kind of animal moan that only this kind of senseless death can elicit. It enters the air of the universe we breathe every day. It’s part of us and so must be recognized and accepted, then somehow transformed into a celebration of a life cut short.

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This from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas De Quincey, wherein he contrasts the experience of taking opium while imbibing wine, praising the former.

But still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance, and beyond a certain point it is sure to volatilize and to disperse the intellectual energies: whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease or other remote effects of opium) feels that the divine part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and overall is the great light of the majestic intellect.

This romanticized view of opium made De Quincey’s book very popular in the 1960s, and there is much truth to what he says, but only if you want to ignore the underbelly of drugs use—something the parents and loved ones of dead addicts don’t have the luxury of doing.

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“Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.”

—William S. Burroughs

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“While the Undertaker Sleeps”

Neanderthals used rocks to fell their prey. Cro-Magnons made tools from the ivory and antlers. And me? A font of well-intentioned words frozen on the page with little chance of changing the world. Like on that hot summer day when ancient voices emanating from an abandoned well were discovered to be nothing more than a mischief of disgruntled rats. Which sounds like us, wouldn’t you say?—a well-meaning, befuddled species intent on doing as much good/bad/and everything-in-between—all during the wee hours of the morning while the Undertaker sleeps, and the Devils-Made-Flesh are stranded in duct-tape loaded minivans in a junkyard looking suspiciously like Hell.

I’m often surprised when the above prose poem from my While the Undertaker Sleeps, Collected and New Prose Poems, has been looked at as a sad commentary on the human condition, when, in fact, I meant it to be a call-to-arms. Nearing the end of my career, I have come to see that Death, (Addiction’s guru) whom I often personify, has been the driving force behind my writing. He’s always been present, looking over my shoulder or lurking in the recesses of my mind, waiting for his moment. For me, one defense against his insatiable appetite is to keep moving, keep creating, keep making people laugh at the unlaughable.

The Undertaker in the above poem is a stand-in for Death. We all have our own personal Undertakers who, as long as we are breathing, are forced into temporary slumbers. It’s only when Death wakes up that we’re fucked. Consequently, the point of the poem is that we should spend our time doing good deeds and treating each other decently and having fun, because we never know when Death, the Ultimate Asshole, will awaken.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear him rustling. Sometimes I smell his breath, knowing he’s ready, willing, and more than able to take someone close to me away.

Author: Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson has published seven books of prose poems, six novels, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on the prose poem, and three anthologies of prose poetry. His poetry and fiction have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and his second book of prose poems was awarded the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems. More information can be found at peterjohnsonauthor.com and on his Substack site at johnsonp.substack.com.

Plume: Plume Issue #158 October 2024