In The Blood

After this interview I went and got the same tattoo as my biological dad. It’s the Zig Zag man.

My father liked heroin. A lot. He liked it so much that I guess one day he went out for a pack of smokes or something and never came back. I swore I would never get into heroin. Until I got into it. A lot.

I’m better now and I’m pretty sure he’s better too, but then again he lives in Yellville (I didn’t make that up), Arkansas and we’ve barely spoken in ten years. So I called him up.

VICE: Hi, it’s your son. Listen, I was wondering, who do you love more—me or heroin?

Well, I’ve got to be honest with you. A lot of the times the drugs took precedence. Let’s just say that at times I loved the drugs more.

How did you start using?

With marijuana, when my brother came back from Vietnam. Then, from the first time I got high, I was constantly smoking pot. I didn’t use heroin until I was 16, but I did a lot of LSD and diet pills. Dexedrine, double-scored X’s, Christmas trees, Apexes… you know.

Not really. I only ever heard of Dexedrine.

You’d really get a good high off of them. So I did them, and I did acid, and I smoked a lot of pot. But yeah, I started snorting heroin at 16, moved onto shooting, and before I knew it I had a $200 a day habit.

How did you support that?

Armed robberies. I got busted for robbing a dry cleaner. I had done other places, but that’s when I went to jail the first time. It was my dad’s gun. I broke into his gun cabinet—took the screws out of the hinges. I was doing stick ups like that. I was even sticking dealers up.

I did dope the first time totally by accident, thinking it was coke. Four years later I was holed up in a room with sheets over the windows, shooting up all day.

I had really nice reusable glass works for a long time. In a case and everything—real fancy.

That sounds great. Does it bum you out that I was getting high?

You know, I’m actually kind of glad that we have that common ground now.