Junkie Love

by Laramore Black:

I knew the author of this book mildly from his editorial position at Out of the Gutter Online and was a little skeptical when it came time to review this novel. Looking at it, I thought this would be just another tale from a reformed junkie. Some kind of beat-generation mimicry with the habit of romanticizing the drug addicts life. Needless to say, I was surprised when it wasn’t.

The opening chapter is all minor explanations and apologies for the later content within. The paragraph that changed the tone of the entire novel was in the following chapter:

“People who aren’t addicts will ask me later, after the crash, what it was I saw in Amy. They will not understand how I could’ve been so crazy about the girl. They will say she didn’t seem particularly bright or like she cared about me, and that aside from the way she looked, she didn’t have much going for her. And they will be right. But they don’t understand junkie love. When you’re as sick and addicted as we are, the rules to that game change. When you’ve just banged a speedball up your thigh and have finished going down on each other, and you lay collapsed, half naked, pants by your ankles, tourniquet still wrapped around, you can’t tell if it’s the orgasm or the rush of the narcotics that is making you feel so needed, so loved, so perfectly at peace with your disjointed world, because there is no division anymore, not from you, or from her, or from the drugs; it is one big tingling pleasure center, and it is viral and it is parasitic.

Amy will be my heroin.”

From that paragraph forward the story exploded. Many of the lines you can tell were reworked to near perfection the half-lived life it took to bring this story to life. I think people will see some similarities in Joe Clifford’s story and many junkie tales before, but his is one of more honesty without the glamour. This book is filthy and beautiful. Joe doesn’t pull any punches against himself and other people.

It is a shocking book, but the tone of the narration makes it obvious he isn’t trying for it to be. He casually says the most horrific lines in a casual way, not for a reaction, but because that was life. One line in specific is still haunting my mind:

“Oksana was boiling cat heads in a big pot on the stove when I got back to the apartment.”

That is a single line in this book. There isn’t much mention of it afterward, but after reading it, you really have to set the book down for a moment and think about it. This was a household thing. It happened on occasion or even constantly. He lived with this, without flinching. All humanity in my mind must have been drained from their souls.

They were the lowest of low lives and in stories like this, people don’t bounce back.

Another incredible coincidence of this story you won’t find in its text, is just how much he fooled himself with depictions of rock stars and literary giants at the time. The very ones who romanticized the image of drug-induced artists. One mentioned in specific is Jack Kerouac.

Joe Clifford is a man who spent half his life in Jack’s glamorized nightmare, but when Joe came out of it, he had the courage to speak the truth. Now in an unspoken manner, the two authors have been intertwined into history of time.

This is the house dubbed by Clifford as Hepatitis Heights in his book, which if examined closely by a viewer, can be found in the movie adaptation of Kerouac’s On The Road.

A coincidence, or an unknown shaking of hands in history? You decide.

I could go on telling you maybe fifty images that would stay with your imagination for the rest of your life from this story, like accidental feces injections and close-calls with blood born diseases, but the true nature of this book is an ode to the human spirit. Not only did Clifford leave the rather large statistic of heroin junkies who never recover, but he exceeded most people in becoming a successful writer. Now with a degree in hand and three published works, Clifford shows no signs of disappearing into the sidelines of history.

Stay tuned for a later exclusive interview with Joe Clifford in the coming weeks!

DarkMedia contributor Laramore Black is a dark fiction writer and poet of the American Midwest.  He is the editor-in-chief at Revolt Daily, contributor to the Imperial Youth Review and a staff member at Port Cities Review.  His recent publications include Out of the Gutter Online, Shotgun Honey, Literary Orphans, DarkMedia, The Shwibly, ThunderDome Magazine, Solarcide, and a few anthologies; like Long Distance Drunks, Nova Parade, and Salvation Black. You can stalk him on both Facebook and Twitter.