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Highlights from the first issue.

  * The Hatboro Blues SHAWN MCCREESH
  * Transgression, An Elegy LAURA KIPNIS
  * Steadying LEON WIESELTIER

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SHAWN McCREESH

The Hatboro Blues

To the memory of friends 

The first thing I remember thinking about what we now call "the
opioid crisis" is that it was making everything really boring. It was
2010, I was in eleventh grade and at a house party about which I had
been excited all week. I had with me a wingman in the form of my
buddy Curt, and a fresh pack of smokes, and -- please don't think less
of me -- 750 milliliters of Absolut blueberry vodka. In short, all
that was needed for a good night.

And yet the party was a bust. It seemed that every third kid was
"dipped out," as we called those in drug-induced comas, lit
cigarettes still dangling from their lips. Even the terrible rap
music wasn't enough to wake them. Nobody was fighting, nobody was
fornicating, nobody was doing much of anything. There was nothing
about this sorry shindig that set it apart from many others just like
it which were still to come, but it sticks in my mind now for a
melancholy reason: It was the point at which I realized that
something was very wrong.

What follows is not some hardcore Requiem for a Dream kind of yarn.
Different movies apply. My high school experience was plenty Dazed
and Confused, but with shades of Trainspotting and maybe a flash of
Drugstore Cowboy. It was like The Breakfast Club, if Claire had
carried Percocet in her purse and the dope in Bender's locker had
been white, not green. This is a story about how a kid who enters
high school as a Led Zeppelin-loving pothead can leave four years
later with a needle sticking out of his arm. (Or not leave at all).
It is a tale of a town and a generation held hostage by Purdue pharma
-- the story of every place on the edge of a big East Coast city
flushed with cheap heroin and prescription pills in the mid-to-late
aughts. Maybe you already know how it goes.

[insignia-break-300x127]

Fifteen miles north of Philadelphia's City Hall sits Hatboro. It is a
majority-white town with an average per capita income of $35,000 per
year. A set of train tracks dissecting the town can shoot you into
the city in a few minutes and for a couple of bucks. My elementary
school, Crooked Billet, was named after a Revolutionary-era battle
that took place on its grounds on May 1, 1778. Every year on that day
kids don tricorn hats and sing songs about America. The town is part
of a larger school district encompassing a neighboring township
called Horsham, which gets much wealthier as it creeps closer to
Philadelphia's Main Line. In high school, some kids lived in
McMansions and drove new cars, others took the bus. The public
schools were good.

I was raised, along with a younger brother and sister, by a single
mom who worked as a hairdresser and a waitress. I spent every other
weekend with my father, who lived in the next town over and founded a
tree and landscaping company and later worked in real estate. We
qualified for the free lunch program at school, and some years were
tougher than others, but we were not poor and always had everything
we needed. One week every summer was spent on vacation in Wildwood,
New Jersey. I began my career as a busboy in an Italian restaurant
when I was fourteen and kept the job all through high school. Later I
became the first person in my family to go to college.

It started off as your regular suburban experience, innocent enough.
I smoked my first cigarette on the same day as my first toke of pot,
in the last week of eighth grade. The cigarette was a Marlboro Red,
provided by a friend's older sister whom everyone thought was hot.
(Regrettably, I smoke them to this day). Weekends were spent with my
three best friends, guzzling Canadian whisky lifted ever-so-gently
from a parent's liquor cabinet and chain-smoking in various parking
lots. We were long-haired little gremlins who liked to venture into
the city for Warped Tour, Ozzfest, and Marilyn Manson. We loved
Cypress Hill and named my friend's $45 bong "King Zulu." We hated the
rich fucks (that was our term of art for them) who wouldn't shut up
about tie-dying their shirts for the next Dave Matthews concert.

Sandwiched between a scrap-metal yard and the Revolutionary-era
battleground turned elementary school were the aforementioned train
tracks and a pathetic patch of mud and trees we called "the woods."
It was to us what the country club was to that other Pennsylvanian,
John O'Hara: a place to get soused and settle scores. A few yards
down the tracks lived a homeless Vietnam veteran whom we'd christened
"the Bum." He would walk with us to a local bar to buy forty-ounce
bottles of beer -- usually Olde English or Steel Reserve -- in exchange
for a couple of bucks. (Bars in Pennsylvania sell beer-to-go, and
many of them still allow you to smoke inside.) My best friend at the
time was legendary for being able to down an entire forty in under
sixty seconds. We played a clever game called "Edward Fortyhands," in
homage to the Tim Burton movie, in which a forty-ounce bottle would
be duct-taped to each hand and use of both your mitts would not be
regained until the bottles were emptied. A guy named James at the
local Hess gas station would sell us cigarettes underage and one
woman who operated the McDonald's drive-thru traded Newports for
dollar-menu items. The world was our malt liquor-soaked oyster.

Another hangout was a place we called "Chronic Bay." (We were heavily
into Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" back then.) It was a pond-sized storm
drainage ditch located behind a sewage processing plant and an
abandoned Sam's Club that was shielded from view by a tree line. It
smelled, literally, like shit, but it was the perfect place to smoke
weed and drink fortys undetected. Our soundtrack at the time included
lots of Sublime, Biggie Smalls, and some tragically awful emo albums.
Most of my friends were skaters who loved to watch "Baker 3" on
repeat. Those were the carefree days when everything felt like a
party, the days before pregnancies and overdoses. Nobody was dying,
or making their mom sad, or falling asleep behind the wheel, or
stealing from their grandparents, or going to jail.

People used to talk a lot about pot as a "gateway drug," but I think
about what came next in terms of floodgate drugs: the floodgates of
an over-prescribed society opened, and suddenly drugs were
everywhere. Some people would learn where or how to draw the line,
but others could not see it; and crossing it became a death sentence.
After booze and weed we all started to play around with prescription
pills in a way that was always getting ratcheted up. It started
light, with Klonopin ("K-pins"), and then Xanax.

The first time I took Xanax was in a McDonald's parking lot. I took
both of the two milligram "bars" my friend Sam plopped in my hand,
felt pretty damn loose, and then my memory disappeared.

Most of my friends liked to eat pills, some more than others. In the
first month of eleventh grade, in 2009, a black comedy called
Jennifer's Body starring a salacious Megan Fox as a demonic succubus,
came out in theaters. A friend named Becky piled us into her Honda
Accord for a trip to the movies. Most kids sneak candy or soda into
the movie theater. Our clandestine appetites were different. We
popped Klonopin and smuggled into the theater a backpack stocked with
"Four Loko," the fruity malt liquor concoction that contained so much
caffeine that its manufacturer was later forced by the FDA to tweak
its recipe, because people were dropping dead after drinking it. Why
would anyone pay money to see a movie in this state? Most of us were
passed out before the credits rolled. But that's just how we rolled.
Everything seemed like an occasion to get "fucked up," even
standardized testing. Before the PSATS, Sam ate so many Xanax "bars"
that halfway through the test he dropped his sharpened number 2
pencil and told the proctor that if she didn't let him out of the
classroom he was going to vomit all over her. (She let him out.)

Sharon was a year older than me and lived in the neighbor-hood. The
year her mother was sent to jail, Sharon's house became our
free-for-all party pad and experimentation fort. Sharon's scratchy
baritone made for the perfect imitation mom-voice, so she could
supply an alibi to any anxious parent inquiring about their child's
whereabouts. It always worked, including on my own mother.  One night
at Sharon's we couldn't get our paws on any preferred substances, and
so Collin, our friend with the stickiest fingers, had a brainstorm:
He would go to the home of a girl he was seeing and raid her parent's
medicine cabinet. After he came back with a bottle of what we thought
was pharmaceutical-grade sleeping medication, we decided to divvy up
the bottle, pop all the pills at once, wash them down with fortys,
and have a contest to see who could stay awake the longest. Fingers
were crossed that we would be rewarded with hallucinations. But
things went awry and it was only later, after consulting our
handy-dandy Pillfinder ("Worried about some capsules found in your
teenager's room? Not sure about those leftover pills still in the
bathroom cabinet? There's a good chance that our Pill Identification
Wizard (Pill Finder) can help you match the imprint, size, shape, or
color and lead you to the detailed description in our drug database")
that we realized the Seroquel we had ingested was not knock-off
Ambien but an antipsychotic medication used to treat schizophrenia.
Oh well.

[insignia-break-300x127]

Meanwhile, all the regular stuff associated with teenage development
continued apace. I had some bad haircuts, kept decent grades, and
rarely missed a day of work at the restaurant. (There was that one
time, when Collin, Sam, and I each ate an eighth of magic mushrooms
at midnight, went out to play in a state-of-emergency blizzard, and I
missed a brunch shift the next morning. Otherwise I was a model
employee and my bosses loved me.) I was the same bookish kid I had
always been, devouring every Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings book
in the library. I shared a room with my little brother. I hung a Pulp
Fiction poster on my wall and bought CDs at the mall. I lost my
virginity. I got my permit and then my license. My father bought me a
1999 Nissan Maxima with 190,000 miles on it for $2,000 and taught me
how to drive a stick shift.

Wheels meant freedom and access -- to fine things, like trips to the
shore, but to trouble, too. Now that our group was mobile, all my
friends suddenly became two-bit drug dealers. Usually they had only
an ounce or less of pot to peddle, but sometimes more. I held a pound
of weed for the first time when a friend asked me to drive to nearby
Norristown to pick it up and stash it in the trunk of my car.
(Incentive: "I'll fill your gas tank and smoke you up on the way.")
Most days after school my Maxima was transformed into a roving
dispensary of marijuana and other delights. One night I decided to
vacuum the thing and install some new air fresheners. Miraculously,
the next day the school announced a surprise search of the grounds by
the police and their drug-sniffing dogs. Midway through science class
a principal knocked on the door and beckoned for me. The whole
classroom shifted to watch as I traipsed out, fate unknown. We walked
down the hall in silence and approached the exit to the parking lot,
where a sortie of my buddies -- who didn't know I had just wiped "the
whip," as we called the car -- had congregated with looks of abject
terror on their faces to watch the pooches encircle my lemony-scented
ride. Even though it had been cleaned, the dogs couldn't help but
stop on their adventure through the school's parking lot. You can
imagine the dismay of the principal and the officers upon finding
nothing harder than a pack of cigarettes and some "Rohto Arctic" eye
drops inside. As I say, a miracle.

One friend, high on something or other, crashed his car through a
storefront on the town's Main Street. Later, after a new facade was
constructed, we joked that he had merely given the place a free
facelift. (No one was seriously injured.) Another time I was cruising
around with my friend Ethan when a drug dealer named Pete got in
touch. For reasons that now seem inexplicable, we thought Pete was
cool and that his imprimatur meant something. At the time he was
dating Diana, a beautiful brunette and a real Calamity Jane who had
flitted in and out of our crew since the early days of eighth-grade
summer, when she would never turn up any place without a Gatorade
bottle full of vodka and a pack of Newport 100s. So when she dialed
me up to say that Pete had an $800 bag of cocaine from which a modest
profit could be made, and did I want to move it for him, I had to
take a minute to think about it. Ethan and I both looked at each
other and blithely shrugged, but my gut told me it was maybe a bad
idea to become a coke dealer. Besides, I had a job already, a real
one. I said I was honored but politely declined and hung up the
phone.

Then Ethan's cell started to ring -- it was Diana. He said yes,
dropped out of school the next week, and started selling the pile of
white powder, gram by gram. This posed two problems for the rest of
us: We liked coke and we had no self-control. By the time the weekend
rolled around, half the bag had disappeared up our little noses. Even
worse, Ethan's mother found the rest under his bed, freaked out and
flushed it. We dodged Pete for as long as possible, and then he
turned up on Ethan's front lawn with a couple goons and baseball
bats. Poor Ethan's parents were left with no choice but to call the
cops. Pete eventually backed off, but Ethan's credit around town was
pretty low afterward and there were more than a few parties to which
we couldn't bring him.

Drugs beget drugs and things begin to blur. The halcyon days of fat
blunts and warm beer in the woods were firmly in the rearview. Movie
shorthand again: if the ninth and tenth grades were Fast Times at
Ridgemont High, junior and senior year were more like Valley of the
Dolls, all the Spicolis turned to fiendish Neely O'Hara's. And it was
not just my raggedy clique that was gobbling pills like Pac Man. The
vicissitudes of the Lacrosse team and the Richie Rich kids from up
the way seemed to mirror our own. Next came Percocet, an opiate, and
therefore in the same drug family as heroin. "Perc 10s" and blueish
"Perc 30s" could be crushed up and snorted. Luckily for me, I
disliked the way Percocet made me feel. I didn't enjoy the stomach
pains, the itches, the bouts of narcolepsy -- or the feeling that I
was an actual drug user as opposed to a dumb kid having fun.

[insignia-break-300x127]

When you are a teenager, it is of course easy to make bad choices,
because you feel invincible. Maybe the worst decision one could make
in pilltown was to try OxyContin. You can have fun, as we all did,
with Klonopin, coke, Xanax, Percocet, Ecstasy, and tabs of acid, but
there is usually no coming back from OxyContin. A seventeen-year-old
doesn't stand a chance. Adults who are prescribed it for legitimate
reasons barely stand a chance. Oxycontin's not a drug that one can
"dabble" in. It is synthetic heroin in pill form manufactured by a
gigantic pharmaceutical corporation, and in Hatboro it wasn't hard to
find 40 milligram doses of it -- "OC 40s" for short, or the double
dosage "OC 80s." Ingested orally, Oxycontin is meant to mete out pain
relief over a number of hours, but the "extended release" could be
circumvented for an instantaneous high by crushing and then snorting
the pills.

In 2010, when I was in eleventh grade, Purdue Pharma tweaked its
production so that the pills could no longer be crushed. It was like
trying to plug a sinkhole with a wine cork. (Studies would later
argue that this tweak only pushed people more quickly to heroin.) By
then we all knew someone who was a full blown "jawn head," as we
called those addicted to OC's. Maybe it was the kid next to you in
homeroom who stopped showing up to school. Maybe it was a friend from
the grade above. Maybe it was an older sibling. There was a stupid
rap song called "OxyCotton" extolling the joys of OC's and it became
a kind of unofficial anthem of my high school, Hatboro-Horsham High
School, now nicknamed "Heroin High." The song was a menacing joint by
an otherwise obscure rapper named Lil Wyte. One verse, rapped by Lord
Infamous, went like this:

Scarecrow, scarecrow what's that you're popping

A powerful pill they call Oxycontin

But it's so tiny and it catch you dragging

Haven't you heard big things come in small packages

I prefer the oranges with the black OC

Take two and you cannot move up out your seat

Some people melt 'em down in a needle and shoot 'em up

But I pop 'em with Seroquel like glue, I am stuck

This was hardly just a street drug, though. With so many people's
parents being over-prescribed opiates, nabbing pills out of a
medicine cabinet became my generation's version of raiding the liquor
cabinet. In this way one of my earliest friends, Danny, got hooked.
He lived two streets over and was in the grade above me. We'd known
each other since we were in diapers. "In the beginning it was fun,
there's no two ways about it," he now recalls. "If it wasn't fun, we
wouldn't have done it. I don't know if that was the only way we knew
how to have fun or if we just took it to another level. Kids in
different parts of the country will drink and party and take it to a
certain level and there's nothing else readily available so it
fizzles out. Around here, it's like you partied and then you met
older kids and the older kids were doing this, and then, somehow --
peer pressure, wanting to fit in and be cool -- you somehow got into
that." The way he said it, "somehow" was another word for inevitably.

I never touched the stuff, not because I was smarter than anyone
else, I was just more of a wimp. I was already trepidatious owing to
some unpleasant experiences with Percocet, and OxyContin seemed
genuinely frightening. By now the kind of havoc that the drug could
unleash was everywhere apparent, and snuffing the fun out of house
parties was just the start. An older brother type with whom I had
worked at the restaurant since the day I was hired was no longer
funny, smart, or cool: He was a confirmed and abject jawn head, a
zombie. It was heartbreaking to watch someone's personality dim and
die before he was even old enough to vote. You had to look out for
your own, and my best buddies and I made a pact that, no matter how
far we pushed our partying, we would stay away from OC's. Still,
everything was being warped around us. Even our mood music morphed
from metal, grunge, and 90's hip hop into the real hood stuff coming
out of North Philly at the time, mix tapes about "trapping" and being
"on the block" and pushing drugs 365 24/7 rain or shine. I hate to
sound like Tipper Gore, but I believe that the music, if it did not
directly influence us, at least reflected the spiraling and trashy
subcul-ture of an ostensibly nice town littered with drug baggies.

Hatboro is just across the city line and a thirty-minute drive from
the open air drug markets of North Philly, known as "the badlands."
That is where all the heroin comes from once it is pulled from the
docks and flooded through the streets. OxyContin is expensive, but a
$10 "stamp bag" of heroin does the trick just as well. And so before
long, in a kind of irreversible entailment, all the jawn heads
devolved into dope heads, actual heroin addicts. Ground zero for dope
was -- and still is -- an intersection called "K & A," where Kensington
and Allegheny Avenues meet in the Kensington neighborhood. The
streets that spiderweb out from that junction are an addict's bazaar,
a warren of narrow blocks in which dealers sit on porches shouting
out their merchandise to passersby. You don't even have to know
someone to collect. When cops roll down the block, the dealers simply
retreat back inside. This is the hellish district in which suburban
mothers go looking for their heroin-addicted children, bringing them
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or a new coat if they can't coax
them to come home. Half the kids on those streets are from towns just
like mine.

I started hanging out in the city more when Becky -- she who had
driven us to the movies to see Jennifer's Body -- began dating Matt.
He was a year older, out of school, and living in a one-bedroom
apartment on Rising Sun Avenue, about a fifteen-minute drive from the
open air drug markets. Now drugs were more attainable than ever. A
new cast of shady characters floated into our orbit and the old ones
just got shadier. One night at Matt's I pawned some of the Xbox 360
games I had received for Christmas to purchase a bag of ecstasy pills
that turned out to be cut with methamphetamines. The red pills
emblazoned with stars and the green ones imprinted with palm trees
kept me, Sam, and Collin up all night -- Sam vomited every hour on the
hour and we pondered bringing him to the emergency room -- and sent us
into horrible withdrawal the next morning. It was the worst I had
ever felt in all my short life. The kid who sold us the dirty
E-pills, also named Matt, had his newborn baby with him that night. I
can still remember Matt fishing for a Newport in his pocket while
handing me his baby and saying "Here, you look like you're good with
kids." That Matt is dead now. When I bumped into the baby's mother at
a bar last year, we didn't even bother mentioning that fact. It was
the order of things. The other Matt became an addict and a father and
then, last I heard, got clean. Becky has two rugrats herself and just
sent out wedding invitations.

[insignia-break-300x127]

Until then, the city had always loomed large in our suburban
imaginations as the place where we would spend the best nights of our
lives. We used to head into the city to see our favorite bands at the
Electric Factory or the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street.
It was where the best cheesesteaks were, and the Italian market, and
the Flyers and Melrose Diner. It was the home of magic. But then
going to "the city" meant dipping into a dangerous neighborhood for
drugs -- a different kind of home for a different kind of magic. We
were slowly being blasted. It was on another night at Matt's when my
own sense of invincibility was finally shattered. After polishing off
a bottle of vodka we took a drive to K & A for some more provisions.
I parked the car while Matt walked up the block. He came back empty
handed, but with two cops in tow. They pulled up next to my Maxima,
yanked us out, slapped handcuffs on our wrists, and searched my car.
There was nothing to find, but one cop grabbed my red Verizon enV3
flip phone, turned to me and asked, "Who am I calling, Mom or Dad?" I
thought for a second and then gulped, "Dad."

The cop left a voicemail on my father's phone, gripped me up and
spat, "Now go back to the suburbs and stick to smoking your fucking
grass, white boy." When I got home, my father was nothing but rage.
He yelled so loud I can still remember the foundations of the house
shaking. I try to imagine what the voicemail said: "Hey, we've got
your loser son down here trying to buy narcotics in a neighborhood
where people are shot in broad daylight. Where did you think he was,
the mall?" When I reflect on that episode now, what is most shocking
to me is the blatant and incontrovertible white privilege. Here we
were, teenagers drinking and driving and looking for drugs, a menace
to ourselves and to anyone who might encounter us, and my interaction
with the police amounted not to a  rap sheet or a bullet but parental
concern and an actual slap on the wrist.

For me, the alarm had sounded. What on earth was I doing in North
Philly or with people like Matt? I really harbored no desire to
destroy myself. I really was hungry for life. Despair was never my
affliction, so why was I acting as if it was? And so I stopped going
to the city and cut out everything except pot and booze -- a
renunciation which, given the habits of most of my friends, was
practically monastic. The fact that I had been scared straightish did
not mean that anyone else was. The opposite was the case. Things were
getting worse. Rehab stints to the local clinic, court mandated or
otherwise, became a rite of passage for hard partiers. This meant
that Suboxone, a drug just as powerful as heroin that is used to wean
one off it, entered an already bleak picture. One day after school I
watched as Ethan and Curt split one tiny Suboxone pill, letting it
overpower them to the point that they could barely walk or keep from
vomiting. Hard drugs were no longer the realm of upperclassmen,
either. When Curt's parents went out of town, we threw a party at his
place and were deeply unsettled to discover a fifteen-year-old
freshman girl snorting lines of heroin in the upstairs bathroom. We
were the moralists! It was an odd sensation for us to be clutching
our pearls at the ripe old age of eighteen, but that episode shocked
even us.

My story is coming to its end. In the years after I graduated, the
bill for a class of kids hooked on heroin came due. One of the first
people with whom we ever smoked weed in eighth grade overdosed and
died. So did the kid who used to sell it to us. Two of the most
beloved girls in town, lifelong friends who grew up on the same block
as each other, both overdosed and died. Danny overdosed a number of
times, he was even found turning purple on the floor of a Rite Aid
bathroom once, and against all odds he is now sober. (To this day his
mother carries two forms of Narcan in her purse because you never
know.) Diana, who was dating the drug dealer Pete, descended further
into addiction, stole from friends, and fell off the map altogether.
One day last year I received a frantic Facebook message from her
mother, who was reaching out to Diana's old school friends for any
clues as to her whereabouts. She finally turned up a few months ago
newly sober, and posted a long status on Facebook about how, at her
lowest, she had picked up a meth addiction, weighed less than ninety
pounds, and was hearing voices. Her ex-boyfriend Pete lost his little
brother to dope. The list of the lost goes on. And not only of the
young. Some of the parents were just addicted as their children. My
mom's ex-boyfriend, who was like a stepfather to me during the years
when I was in middle school, became an addict and is now dead. The
man she dated when I was in eleventh grade ended up addicted to
opiates. As for any judgment about the quality of anyone's parenting:
I have come to believe that no level of awareness about the danger
could have prevented it. You can keep a close eye on your child, but
when drugs are ubiquitous, when they are a central feature of social
life, when the surrounding culture confers prestige upon them, the
best you can do is cross your fingers and pray.

A whole vocabulary has sprung up to convey the shared experience of
addiction, a vernacular of the carnage. When I go home and visit with
old friends, there is always a grim roll call conducted over beers.
"When was the last time anyone heard from her?" "Oh, I heard she's
still really bad." There is a lot of sorrowful shaking of heads.
Another one I've heard often and with nonchalance: "So, guess who's a
dopehead nowadays?" Social media has become a surreal forum for this
conversation, too. Facebook newsfeeds are so peppered with
remembrances and R.I.P posts that you might not even pause while
scrolling past one. Many of them include poorly cropped angel wings
or some variant of "Heaven just gained another angel," a phrase so
anodyne and overused I consider it Hatboro's version of a Hallmark
card. These were the cliches of social destruction. In the years
since I graduated, heroin has been largely edged out by fentanyl, a
synthetic opioid that is much easier to overdose on than your
garden-variety dope. Meth, which was never around in my picaresque
youth, has found a big market in the suburbs, too.

The crisis is in your face everywhere you go. It is the driver next
to you at a stoplight falling asleep at the wheel. It is the dopehead
in line in front of you at the 7-Eleven or the grieving mother of one
of your school chums standing behind you. Who should we turn to? God,
perhaps; but look at His record. The government, perhaps; but look at
its record.

To confront the addiction of the despairing produces its own variety
of despair. Along with some of my closest friends from back then, I
marvel that we made it out when so many of our comrades did not.
Melancholy permeates my town. And it is never really over. One of
those friends recently became a cause for concern among our circle
after he was fired for dipping out at work, just the way we did at
house parties in eleventh grade. He is not returning anyone's calls,
and word is that he has stopped paying some of his debts. It beggars
belief: opiates now, after everything we remember? But we are too
sober to delude ourselves about what is possible in our town, and in
other towns. We have seen this movie before.

Note: The names in this essay have been changed out of respect for
the privacy of its subjects.

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