Source: Eye magazine, Toronto, Ontario Contact: April 16, 1998 Author: Donna Lypchuk I LUV JUNKIES I luv junkies. I have luved them all my life. Blame it on The Cross and the Switchblade. I would sit in the backyard of our home in Brockville and read the tattered paperback again and again. In this book, a tough-talking, biker-jacket-wearing preacher roamed the streets of New York trying to convince junkies to trade in their old needles for a shiny gold crucifix. In this book, I noticed that all the intelligent people who asked meaningful questions such as "Why is there no God?" seemed to be junkies. The stupid character was the preacher who kept suggesting junkies drink coffee and get a job. I remember thinking to myself, "Who the hell wants to drink coffee and get a job? I want to feel the dirty New York rain falling on my face as I teeter down a romantic looking alley in my high-heeled shoes in search of a 'fix.' I want to wear a leather jacket and carry a switchblade." However, the closest thing I could find to a switchblade in Brockville was one of those novelty combs that flip out to reveal tiny teeth for stroking your Brylcreemed hair. I learned early that if you acted like a junkie, you could get attention. In The Cross and the Switchblade there was one girl I particularly wanted to be like. She was like The Mod Squad's Peggy Lipton but with, like, you know, substance. Her eyes were ringed with attractive dark blue circles and she was always trying to commit suicide with a switchblade, which I thought was cool, seeing as she could've just OD'ed like everyone else in the book. I wanted everyone worried every second that I might suddenly choose to die. I dropped my ambitions to move to New York to star in A Chorus Line and moved instead to Toronto, where I bought a biker jacket, ringed my eyes with kohl and hung around the Cabana Room, Larry's Hideaway and the Edge waiting to meet a real junkie -- a handsome poet junkie, like Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries. Of course, when I moved to Toronto all I met were other people pretending to be cool junkies. We practised the fine art of walking around with tombstones in our eyes. We had posters of Marianne Faithfull and Keith Richards in our university residence rooms, and we would study to junkie music like Lou Reed's "White Light, White Heat" and carry copies of Naked Lunch around in our vintage patent leather purses. Friends of mine would collapse in cafes, claiming they were OD'ing, but it would turn out that they were just constipated from the food in the cafeteria. Once I thought I saw a real junkie, leaning up against a doorway on Church Street, but it turned out to be the clerk at the Shopper's Drug Mart suffering from morning sickness. Many friends of mine did go on to be real junkies. To this day, I can't believe they fell for it. I wanted to shake them and say, "Aw, c'mon. I thought we were just pretending!" Unlike the glamorous junkies you read about, however, most of them seemed to always be working at some horrible part-time job. On their days off, I would sit with them, waiting for some insight, but they would just smile and say something like "Look at the pretty lights." Their heads would nod and bob for hours, just like those little toy doggies you see in the back of car windows. They would see another junkie and they would clump together in a heap of leather and human fur just like the muskrats in the song "Muskrat Love." Now that everyone in town is a junkie or a former junkie, I have gotten so I can smell one coming -- a kind of sweet, sickly smell of overwrought pancreatic processes that reminds me of a mixture of honey and fresh bologna. Now it's cool to be an ex-junkie, or at least pretend to be one. We no longer think of junkies as furry vermin; we think of them as little John the Baptists who have been pop-culturally sanctified by their little walk in the desert. Everybody loves a survivor, even if all they have survived is their first Oedipal trauma. Look at all the junkies we luv -- Courtney Love, Steve Earle, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Jean Michel Basquiat, William Burroughs hey, where are the Canadians? Do you think Leonard Cohen was a junkie or just pretending to be one? Why does Daniel Richler dress like one? Look at all the junkie movies we luv -- Trainspotting, Dead Ringers, Curtis' Charm, Naked Lunch. Oh, don't stop, baby, keep on printing those pictures of Kate Moss and slathering on more of that special junkie luv. It seems that being an ex-junkie endows you with cultural authority and artistic powers. But is it really so special any more? The only thing junkies seem to have been scoring are book deals, movie deals, government grants and unconditional glory. Why are we finding so much substance in substance abusers? It just seems so (yawn) mainstream. My special junkie luv just doesn't seem to be so special any more.