DYING IS EASY
LESSONS IN RECOVERY AND SURVIVAL FROM NYC'S UNDERBELLY
NOTE: This is an early draft of a piece I wrote for (I believe) The Fix. As was the case with most of my journalistic pieces, it started off pretty wild. My pieces for The Fix, Substance, and Filter were usually edited back into something resembling actual journalism by my very patient and long-suffering editor Will Godfrey, who would remind me of the need to include things like statistics and links to various studies, whereas I was always more interested in capturing pure slice-of-life street reportage. This piece developed into something slightly different, but stumbling across its original iteration, I think it really had something kind of raw and funny and true. So I wanted to share it here, where nobody is too concerned about me citing statistics.
My brief was to talk to people who had found recovery from drugs in their own ways, without necessarily doing the whole 12-Step / total abstinence thing. This was, after all, my story and one that I believed was not spoken of much in the culture, despite being arguably the most common story. I did these interviews in 2016-17, and of the three main interviews I conducted only know what happened to one of them. Jimmy, whom I met handing out needles on the Lower East Side, passed away during the first wave of COVID. His girlfriend put it down to his immune system being so compromised by the years of booze and heroin. “But,” she told me in an email, “He died sober. And for that, I know he was grateful.”
RIP Jimmy R.
Author photograph by Vanessa O’Neill
“You Wanna Hear Something Funny?”
I’m standing outside Buffas, a diner on the corner of Prince and Lafayette, sweating through my shirt thanks to the merciless humidity of a New York City August afternoon.
I’m talking to Jimmy R, a 49-year-old Boston-Irish scrapper with LOVE and HATE inked across his knuckles and a personal history soaked in heroin and cocaine. Jimmy has a definite way with words. He is currently sucking scalding coffee from a blue We Are Happy To Serve You! cup, the words tumbling out so fast I can barely catch them.
I first met Jimmy when he was handing out clean needles from a charity-run exchange. He had his Lower East Side regulars rolling in the aisles with his hilarious and profane recollections. There were tall tales of shooting dope, ripping off dealers, and dealing with crooked cops and psychotic meth casualties, all served up with the filtered water, rubber tourniquets, 28-gauge half-cc Terumo syringes, and packs of condoms (“Ya never know, kid. You might get lucky... it takes all sorts!”) Jimmy rattled off stories with the poetic ferocity of someone who’s been to hell and back, then back again, and wasn’t in much of a hurry to stick around for the encore.
“Started shooting dope at thirteen, fourteen, tops. By sixteen, I was a straight-up junkie,” Jimmy tells me, his eyes dark and distant.
“Grew up worshipping cats like Lenny Bruce, Lou Reed, and Keith Richards. The hipster junkie types, ya know? The ones who lived the dirt behind the glam. They became my patron saints, man. I worshipped ‘em. Living under the shadow of cats made me think I was immortal, until the needle disabused me of that notion.”
He drags on his Parliament (“Vapes are for pussies,” he tells me, apropos of nothing) and, for a moment, I can picture Jimmy back in the ‘90s, in the full pomp of his junkie splendor, a bulletproof knight in this endless, futile war on drugs, a cocaine monologue spewing from his lips like a faucet left open by a madman.
“But lemme tell ya when I hit rehab... I was sick as a dog, doped up outta my fuckin’ mind. I mean, they throw meds at you like—it’s an anesthetic for reality, man! Woke up one day and had to have a tête-à-tête with my counselor, right? Tell you something about that guy... ex-speed freak, teeth all fucked up, ya dig? Been clean seven or so years back then.
That first meeting, I ask him when he knew he had to stop, and he tells me, ‘One day I heard faucets whispering at me to kill myself.’ Imagine that? Pretty fucked, huh?”
I almost interrupt, but fuck it... this is Jimmy. He’ll circle back eventually.
“So here I am, up to my hips in the 12 Step shit. Admitting powerlessness. Blah blah... and I’m hearing all the same religious BS about turning my will over to God as you understand Him, shit which sounded awfully familiar ‘cause I was raised Irish Catholic, right? I’d had a gut full of God and guilt and all the bloody saints before drugs even touched me. I sat there, looking at this mess, like, whoa, hold up... this is my first time hearing this shit in rehab. I’m like, ‘You’re telling me THIS now?’ I finally am ready to give it up, and your solution is... fuckin’ PRAY?”
The confusion. The inherited doubt. I suppose it’s what locks so many of us in an endless loop of promises and relapses.
But as Jimmy tells me, that was a different world. These days, most people who wind up in rehab often walk in knowing what the 12-Steps are. Back then, it was a dark secret, a club you stumbled into blindfolded. These days, it’s part of the wider culture. You want to get clean, then get on your knees and pray. How simple. How easy. How perfectly, crassly American, right?
Yeah, the 12-Step faith isn’t just in the rooms; it’s seeped into the culture. AA’s become a neon-lit monolith in a country slammed by overdose crisis. Millions pledge their allegiance, from halls of sober seekers to the scripts of TV dramas recounting tales of downfall and salvation. Snake oil charlatans like Dr. Drew have made their fortune co-opting this leaderless, free-at-the-point-of-entry self-help system, and turning it into the cornerstone of a reality TV empire. The first person to ever bring me to a meeting, back in LA when I was hopelessly strung out on heroin, once said, “The cool thing about AA is that it’s the largest anarchist organization in the world.” What he meant by that was, AA has no leaders. No top-down management. Which makes Dr Drew’s commercialization of AA and NA all the more galling, I suppose.
Yet, the elephant in the room? The jury is out on whether or not this 12-Step stuff even works. The dogma? “Once an addict, always an addict.” It’s an approach to salvation that is inherently religious, exclusionary, and wrapped in Christo-mysticism, a cure that’s as much of a curse as anything else. But anarchist organization or no, one thing the 12-Step world does not like to do is give out figures. How many get clean with the steps? Well, they’ll tell you, 100% of those who follow the program get clean. And how do you follow the program? You don’t take drugs or drink. So if you can’t make it work, then you obviously weren’t following the program, and that’s that. What about the people who get clean without AA? Well, the program says, they weren’t real addicts. And how do they know that? Because real addicts need AA.
I mean, it’s circular logic that is so perfectly constructed, it’s hard not to admire it.
Personally speaking, I got clean without the 12-Steps. And I know plenty of others who did the same. And yet, we never hear these stories in the wider culture. So this piece is part of what I feel is my duty to correct this historic omission. Case in point, Jimmy, who spent this nuclear hot afternoon recalling how he bounced in and out of rehab like some narcotic-fueled yo-yo, until he was well into his forties. The months that he kept away from the needle, it was booze that kept him walking the razor’s edge of sanity. “Drank a pint of vodka for breakfast,” he told me. “Another for lunch. By the time it was 6 pm, I was passed out in a pool of my own piss.” It was the only way he could counter the overwhelming urge to relapse on heroin. After six months of drinking himself to hell, he’d finally give up and go back on the smack for a while.
“Truth be told, my girlfriend was fuckin’ relieved the day I went back on the needle,” Jimmy tells me. “I was way fuckin’ worse when I was drinking than when I was on the skag. I was a mean drunk. And I was fat. I mean, who the fuck wants to fuck a fat junkie, man?”
Then came the wake-up call. He woke up the day after his 46th birthday party puking blood, lying on the bathroom floor, “while the walls spun around me, and I just knew that Death was right outside the door just waiting for me, man. And that’s when I said to myself, If I make it through these next 48 hours... then I swear ta Christ, I’m getting clean.” Somehow, he survived, and the Baltic cold dawn of his 47th year was marked by that desperate, defiant promise to quit.
“No more swapping booze for smack. No more trying to pray the insanity out of me. I went back to Boston and made an appointment with my old family GP and told him if I didn’t quit today, I was gonna die. And thankfully, he had a solution for me.”
The doctor suggested Suboxone, a then-novel treatment for opiate addiction that has since supplanted methadone as the drug of choice for heroin addicts desperate to claw their lives back. Also known by its generic name, buprenorphine, Suboxone is prescribed in the form of an 8mg orange tab that dissolves under the tongue. Much like methadone, it floods the opiate receptors and keeps withdrawal at bay. Much longer acting than heroin, dissolving a strip under his tongue before breakfast, and another before bed, allowed Jimmy to live a relatively normal life. Plus, because buprenorphine binds to the opiate receptors, even if he tried to use heroin on top of it, the effects were negligible. Six months of suboxone maintenance allowed Jimmy to really take stock of his life and face his demons without the constant pressure of dope sickness and boozy obliteration. He remains on it, albeit on a much-reduced dose- today.
“The shit saved my life,” Jimmy says. “Helped me in a way that years of trying and failing with Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous just couldn’t.”
Jimmy’s story bucks the widely accepted narrative of sobriety-as-holy-mission. He’s a sanitation supervisor now, clocking in at a job far from the glory of lost days but steadily climbing, a rare light in the junkie wasteland. He’s reconciled, mostly, with the ghosts of his past, and even has made peace with the dude who raised his daughter after he burned out.
“He’s okay,” Jimmy tells me, with a dirty laugh. “For a straight, chino-wearing type of a motherfucker.” Volunteering with the needle exchange program is his way of giving back to a universe that could, and some might say should, have demanded his scalp.
“I lost so many friends,” Jimmy says, his voice dropping below 70 mph for a rare moment of self-reflection. “So fucking many. OD, suicide, murder... but no matter how it happened, it was all basically because of the dope. Why did I survive, and so many better people didn’t? Fuck knows. I don’t think about it too much these days. I just put one foot in front of the other and try to keep my side of the street clean.”
I recognize this as an AA phrase: keeping your side of the street clean. When I point this out, Jimmy shrugs and tells me that although AA didn’t work for him, he doesn’t believe it doesn’t have its place.
“I got plenty of buddies who got clean in the rooms,” he says. “And I still go along sometimes, just to be around people who know where I come from, you know? I learned plenty of helpful shit in there. It’s just... the God shit, man. I couldn’t get down with it. I just couldn’t.”
Jimmy knows the brutal truth: he’s no norm, won’t be mixing beers at the bar, never truly “normal.”
“We’re addicts,” he says plainly, prodding me in the chest with a finger that has a silver skull ring on it. “You and me both, man. We’ll never be able to enjoy a cold beer after work and leave it there. If we get a toothache, we aren’t able to take a Vicodin for the pain, and just leave it there. But that’s okay. If I gotta drink that fuckin’ O’Douls shit, or tough out my wisdom teeth extraction... It’s a small price to pay for, ya know, living, and shit.”
I swap Jimmy’s gutter-level poetry the following Wednesday for a meeting with Valerie S, 35, a publishing consultant chasing the dream in Manhattan.
“I was like everyone else in college,” she says. “I drank too much sometimes. Woke up next to some nasty-looking dude and thought, How the hell did I get here? There were plenty of typical teenage misadventures, but an addict? No way. That wasn’t in my DNA... or so I thought.”
It was an ex who introduced her to the joys of smoking cocaine.
“Not crack,” she says, almost offended at the notion. “Terrence was a broker, and brokers don’t smoke crack. This was freebase. Whole different story.”
I decide against instructing Valerie on the identical chemistry of freebase and crack cocaine. Instead I let her talk.
The cocaine habit she developed during that intense, six-month fling with Terrence lasted way longer than he did. I ask what happened to him. She tells me that his sexual appetite, high at the best of times, became problematic when he started smoking cocaine.
“Caught him in bed with some teenager he’d hired to help type up a book he was supposedly working on,” she says, with a laugh. “When I walked in, he literally looked up at me, slapped her bare ass, and said, ‘Oh, hey babe... you want a piece of this?’ I packed my shit and left.”
Soon she added prescription painkillers to her daily cocaine habit, and soon enough her habit had shackled her.
“When the hammer fell, it came down on me hard. I’m not ashamed to admit I was using sex work to feed my habit,” she says. Her voice is a mixture of shame and defiance when she tells me this. “Back when Craigslist was still the place to find clients. Did it for a few months, kidding myself that I was in control, until the time I got scared so bad, I had to quit.”
The story is a grim one. A ‘normal-looking’ client brought her to a motel and paid up front to tie Valerie up. She agreed against her better judgment, and spent the next 48-hours tied to a bed, while this psychopath smoked methamphetamine compulsively and raped her “multiple times.” Worst of all, he began telling her in skin-crawling detail how he planned to kill, dismember, and make her remains disappear forever.
“I was saved by a miracle,” Valerie tells me. “I truly believe that.”
Just as she was giving up hope of getting out of there with her life, her captor suddenly collapsed with chest pains. Valerie managed to convince the guy that he was having a heart attack and that she was trained in CPR. If he would untie her, she told him, she could save his life.
Amazingly, he did as she asked.
“What did you do?” I ask her.
With a sly smile, she recalls, “I broke a bottle of Grey Goose over the bastard’s head and ran screaming for my life in my underwear.”
She called the police, but by the time they showed up at the motel room, her kidnapper was long gone. “They never tried to find him,” she says. “They just treated me like some delusional, drug-addled whore. It was awful.”
This did act as a wake-up call, however.
“I knew I had to stop,” Valerie told me. “It was so clear to me. I made the call that same evening.”
Valerie underwent a private, in-patient medical detox at a clinic in New York City.
“And I just… stayed clean.”
Was it hard in the beginning?
“Yes and no,” she recalls. “I cut ties with a lot of negative people in my life, and that helped. The initial six months or so… when I was reinventing myself, finding a new circle of friends, discovering new interests… I suppose that was the most precarious time. But no, I never seriously considered using again. For me, it was just a matter of putting my focus elsewhere: my career, new relationships, new beginnings.”
Valerie still enjoys a glass of wine at the end of a long workday, despite keeping in touch with other women from her treatment center who practice total abstinence. I ask if she’s ever gotten the impression that those people don’t consider her to be properly ‘in recovery’?
She laughs: “I’ve never even had the conversation! Besides my husband, most people have no idea about what I used to do. Even when we’ve had a big heart-to-heart about their struggles, I’ve never felt the urge to tell them about my own personal history. Why should I? It’s really not a part of who I am anymore.”
Discarding an identity based on addiction and creating a new one is, some theorists argue, a key aspect of recovery.
“But I will say this with absolute certainty,” Valerie concludes. “I absolutely consider my sobriety to be as legitimate or real as anyone else’s. I really don’t see how anybody could seriously argue otherwise. Do you?”
It’s been a while since I’ve set foot in an AA meeting, so when Andre suggests I come to his regular Wednesday afternoon meeting in a community center in Jersey City, I’m a little wary at first. But I agree, and he seems delighted.
At first, I’m a little worried that he might try to evangelize to me (when he initially responded to my email, I told him that I was in recovery but did not attend any 12-step meetings).
I misjudged him, however. Andre just seems to genuinely appreciate that I’m willing to meet him on his own turf. Despite years away from the rooms of AA, the meeting unfolds with an almost comforting sense of familiarity. Later, after everyone stands up, holds hands, and says the Serenity Prayer, we break off for coffee at a nearby McDonald’s.
Andre is a disconcertingly young-looking 23 year old. Originally from Long Island, he’s a member of the generation infamous for bearing the brunt of the current opioid epidemic.
“The meetings gave me something I never thought I’d have again,” Andre says when I ask why the meetings he attends twice a week are important to him. “They give me hope.”
In what way?
“Just… looking around the room at these older dudes, you know? Some of ‘em were dope fiends, just like my friends and I were. I mean, where I came from, nobody ever seemed to get clean. I mean, they might get clean if they were sent to jail, or whatever, but usually when they got out…”
His smile falters.
“I lost a couple of friends that way. OD’ing, right after they got out. They’d wanna celebrate and take a hit, and boom. One guy I knew, the people he was with panicked and threw him in a bath of cold water—and he fucking drowned. How fucked up is that?”
It is fucked up, I agree. People who have been imprisoned and stop using drugs lose their tolerance, so they are particularly vulnerable just after release. Some programs exist to provide the anti-overdose drug naloxone to people leaving prison and train them in its use, but we need more of them.
Andre and I talk a little about people we’ve lost, and the sad, lonely, and even blackly comical ways that various souls in our orbit have passed on. It’s a common conversation at a time when tens of thousands a year are dying of overdose.
When I was addicted to heroin, it was a whole different world: pre-dark-net drug markets and pre-fentanyl. Heroin users mostly lived in big cities, and among my peers, I was unusually young at barely nineteen years old. These days, I’d be considered an old timer.
Andre grew up in a world where small, suburban Long Island towns like his all had at least four or five steady dealers catering to the high school population. He was introduced to OxyContin at a high school party when he was just 14 years old. “Swapped an 80 mg tablet for a joint,” he recalls. “As soon as I tried it, I was like, oh shit. This isn’t good… because I REALLY like this.”
Despite our age gap, Andre has seen more people die than I have. Four people from his high school graduating class were dead from overdoses before they hit 20.
AA showed him another way out. “Just seeing that people could come out the other side of it,” Andre enthuses, “And live, like, normal… happy lives. Help other people. Laugh, and shit. That was kinda inspiring, you know? I remember saying, I want some of that, and they told me, Keep coming back. So I did.”
Like many, Andre appreciates the routine and the community that a 12-step program has given him. He last used heroin just under a year ago.
His short-but-severe addiction twice nearly cost him his life. One time, he woke up on a gurney after receiving a lifesaving shot of naloxone.
“I was like, dude what’s that smell?” he recalls. “And I realized it was me. I’d shit my pants. So I’m lying there on the gurney, all covered in shit and feeling fucked, and all I can think is: I gotta get offa this fucking gurney and get a fucking hit, like right now! I mean, that was my first reaction. Not oh, I almost died. Just I gotta get high.”
Andre doesn’t live on Long Island anymore. He says he had to get away. He currently lives in Jersey City with his uncle, where he’s apprenticing as a plumber and is an aspiring DJ. He makes me feel old when I ask what he DJs and he tells me he’s really into “oldies.” When I press him on this, he says “Like, dance stuff… but from the ‘90s!”
Oldies, I think. Jesus Christ.
Moving to Jersey City from the suburbs to get away from drugs would, once upon a time, have seemed counterproductive.
“Shit,” Andre laughs, “Seems like there’s more dope in the suburbs than there is around here. You know how it is, even if you’re not looking for it you can kind of… sense it around you, you know? I know it’s around here if you wanted it. But…”
He drifts off. But what, I press him—does he really not want it any more? After eleven months in the Rooms, does he really feel like he’s turned a corner?
“Yeah…” Andre answers, sounding unsure. “I guess it’s always there, you know. It never really goes away. But having clean friends and meetings, and you know, structure, I guess… helps.”
“I know it might sound harsh,” he continues, “but I wanted to stay clean for my mom and my sisters—but at the same time it just felt like they couldn’t ever really understand it, you know?”
That doesn’t apply to the people at his meetings, or to his AA sponsor.
“It’s different with them. They know ‘cause they’ve been there. It’s kinda like… it would be worse to let them down, because they’ve managed to do it, so they know that I can do it, too.”
“Sometimes with my family, I just felt like they were kinda expecting me to fuck up because I’d lied to them so often, you know? But my people from the program are different. I can’t bullshit them, you know? ‘Cause they’ve been there.”
Andre shrugs. “Like my sponsor says: We keep each other honest.”
There’s no neat script here. No single road. Each personal battle burns with its own unique fires. Methadone, cold turkey, twelve steps, or silent grit in prison bunk beds—recovery is a mad, crude, and sometimes beautiful tapestry.
But here’s the one truth that is immovable. Judgment kills. And every user’s story matters. Every scar tells a story.
Something Jimmy told me when I asked him about his path to sobriety comes back to me now. “Dying is easy,” he said, slapping me on the back so hard I nearly swallowed my tongue. “Getting out of bed every morning and NOT sticking a needle in my arm? That shit takes guts. So every time I’m feeling a bit shitty, and giving it the whole ‘oh poor me’ bullshit? I try to remember that. ‘Cause going back to that junkie hellscape is NOT an option. And I’m too stubborn to die, man. Fuck that shit!”
“So is that the lesson?” I asked him.
“I don’t believe in lessons,” Jimmy says. “But if you want a fucking sentence on the shit? Try this...”
“You can’t get recovery wrong,” he said, with a knowing wink. “Not if you’re still fighting.”
That’s Jimmy. I may be the one making a living off of this stuff... but that boy really has a way with words.