Writers write. They write about love triangles and stolen plots, murders committed by unlikely killers, and dysfunctional families. They write about writing, or writers bashing their heads into keyboards because they’re unable to write. They tell stories of slavery and human trafficking, about the political rise and fall of flawed and damaged politicians. About heroes battling against themselves or mountains or just life in general. And they write about addiction. Lots and lots of addiction: being addicted to people in codependent relationships, or being addicted alcohol or illicit or prescription drugs, or all three. Addiction is a big one. Today we’ll discuss opioids, alcohol, unhealthy relationships and more: the literature of humanity.
I’ve been submitting a book review for John Dufresne’s upcoming release of My Darling Boy, which deals with opioid addiction and the pain and trauma it causes not only the person with the substance abuse problem but their family and friends. Yesterday, I submitted the book review to Lithub (wish me luck). And then, a minute later, I saw, on Facebook, that one of my friends and previous colleagues had died, had succumbed to his various addictions. He was 33. This, for me, was too much of a coincidence. Not in that it was some random occurrence that matched up to another occurrence, but that substance abuse has become so prevalent in today’s society that even I have family members carrying Narcan, you know, just in case. This isn’t how life is supposed to be. Life is hard, but it shouldn’t be this. It’s never okay to be losing children and young adults to drugs and alcohol.
I’ve never done hard drugs. I’ve smoked pot, drank more than was probably healthy for me, maybe took a puff of hash while living in Spain. That’s about it. I grew up mostly in Miami in the ‘80s and ‘90s, right around the Cocaine Cowboy days, when Miami was the “Drug capital of the world.” I knew guys in junior high school who roared to school on their own on brand new Ninja motorcycles at the age of fifteen, when they weren’t being driven by their fathers in their new bubble butt Porsche 928s’s or their bright red Ferrari F40s. For context, the average house where my junior high school was located cost somewhere around a hundred and thirty grand. The F40 starting price back then was $400k. Shootings happened all the time. You always knew someone who knew someone who’d been murdered. But that’s what it was—distant, however close you were to the victim. It was like the early version of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon bullshit.
It's not that violent anymore in Miami, however violent Miami and South Florida continue to be. But the drugs are still there, and their potency has only gotten worse. Now it’s the drugs killing everyone, not so much the bullets. I’m 52. I didn’t start writing with purpose until I was about twenty-three. I had about two or three semesters of junior college by then, and I’d stopped attending, but one of those classes at Miami Dade Community College was about Beat Literature, and it changed me forever. I read Kerouac’s On the Road, sold all my shit, and jumped in a car to see the road like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise. I wanted to live life, to travel, to see what was out there in the U.S. and abroad like Kerouac’s heroes. Since then, I’ve had a bunch of short stories published, one novel published, and I have another nine novels I’ve been working on for years. I’m hoping once I finally put the editing pencils down that five of them will get published. I write literary fiction, and I’d like to see my works make as much impact as Kerouac’s works. We’ll see if that lofty goal ever happens. Or maybe someone else will—I’ll probably be dead by then if it does. But even with the nine novels I have under my belt (I actually think it’s eleven, but I think two of them vanished into some ex-girlfriend’s hands), there’s one novel that eludes me—the one I’ve been meaning to write for over twenty years, the one I call my “Miami” novel.
My Miami novel has taken as long as it has to get started for a number of reasons. The first reason is that a lot of the people who’d get mentioned would know it was them in the book. Yes, I’d change the names, maybe the genders, perhaps their ages. But they’d know. Back then, Miami was a small place. There was Coconut Grove. Kendall. South Beach. South Miami. That was pretty much it, at least where I ran around with my friends. I almost wrote “crew,” but that sounds a little more organized than what we were. We were a group of friends who slogged away in restaurants like Chili’s and Bennigan’s, Flanagan’s Loggerhead, Red Lobster and other chains around town as line cooks, as waiters (that’s what servers were called back then), and did other jobs where you could show up late to work with a hangover and cottonmouth and still not get fired. We slept with everyone, we fought outnumbered every week against other groups of “friends” (and some crews), and we lived for the night. Some of us did hard drugs. Some of us sold drugs—pot, mostly, but also acid, coke, pain killers, things like that. A lot of us got arrested, mostly for disorderly conduct, though a few of us did a little more time than an overnight stint if we (not me) were caught stealing something over a certain monetary amount (felony theft), caught with a certain amount of drugs (intent to distribute), or hurt someone a little too much (again, not me—I always said I’d hurt you, but I wouldn’t kill you; I liked my freedom too much; my two lines were always “I don’t start fights—I finish them,” and “the world is too small a place for me—there’s no way I’m going to prison”). I succeeded on both counts. Not everyone I knew was as lucky.
I will, however, write my Miami novel. Over the years, I’ve taken notes. I’ve done my research: listing out the popular songs of the day like the ones put out by 2 Live Crew, House of Pain, Alice in Chains, and Jane’s Addiction, events that were in the news and that stick out as memorable for some reason or another, fights I had in parking lots of nightclubs and bars and restaurants on U.S.1, on Ocean Drive (I got drunk one night and fist fought a cop in the middle of Collins Avenue, I’ve been told, but was so drunk the cop let me go in the care of a friend), and other places around the city where the machismo was thick and the patience slim. I’m of a different generation than those succumbing to the hard drugs these days. When I was growing up, I’d never heard of Fentanyl or Methamphetamine, or synthetic anything. We had schwag weed and kind bud. We had cocaine and ecstasy, and we knew crack and PCP and heroin were around, though not really in my group of friends. Now people carry around naloxone (Narcan) to reverse the opioid overdoses their friends might have during a night out so they don’t die.
John Dufresne’s My Darling Boy is another great novel about drug addiction, but it’s also sad that we, as fiction writers, continue to feel the need to express ourselves with regards to the issue. Not that we shouldn’t; we absolutely should, for it’s an epidemic affecting many if not most of us. But I wish this issue would up and go away just like the issue we’ve seen recently with health insurance after the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson. These things need fixing; unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about either. What I do know is that I will write about it because it is part of my history. I have seen drugs, and I have written novels that touch upon the devastating effects of those drugs. I’ve known drug addicts and people who’ve lost their lives to drugs at very young ages, including, as I mentioned, the friend and colleague that lost his life this month. As writers, we are chroniclers of the times we live in. We must write about the effects of the wrongs perpetuated on us by our politicians, by our neighbors, by our families. We must write about the issues that affect us and those around us in ways that clarify and expose the ills of the societies in which we live. We must write, yes, what we want to write, but we must write. We learn about the future by reading about the past. Technology changes, the planet changes, what we think about things and what we think about change, and they change constantly. It’s our job, in whatever fashion we think best, to communicate and document these things, because no one else is going to do that the way we do it. There will be other mediums that do similar things, but only we will write the books and short stories, the novellas and other fiction that, as Dufresne says, are the lies that tell a truth.
Cully Perlman is a novelist, short story writer, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
Thank you for this