Jerry Stahl Quotes

The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.

Jake La Botz is a creator of dark poetry and haunting song, the kind of music that gets in your bones and rides you for days, a sound and vision only those who've been to the bottom and clawed their way back up can generate. His midnight gifts evoke Hank Williams and Skip James as much as Tom Waits and Dylan. Not everybody will get this music - because not everybody is ready for the truth.

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.

Sometimes, it's like you know what people think: You know what they're thinking, and you know it's wrong. All you want to do if change their mind, but you can't.

You can't really compare hells. But I suppose the hell of being strung out on another person's addictive behavior is its own special thing.

I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.

I used to say, for me, writing was like walking a high wire, and heroin made me forget there was no net. Which is a fancy way of saying dope made me forget how shitty I felt for being on dope.

From diapers on, I felt like there was something not good about me, but it was invisible to everybody but my mother. And whenever she looked at me, she had to let me know that she knew. That was her mission in life.

I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental ... )

What we craved was drugs. What we had was each other.

Not until you finally try to put down the stuff do you realize, with stinging clarity, precisely why you picked it up in the first place. All life, in this freshly nerve-flayed state, boils down to a choice of hells. The hell of being fucked-up on drugs or the hell of being fucked-up without them.

I wasn't sad after my father kissed the streetcar. If anything, it was a relief. Much as I missed him, his dying gave me an excuse to feel the way I already felt. Which was the way I felt right now, under the laundry room fluorescents: hollow, pissed off, wanting to be wherever I wasn't. Until I got there. Then I wanted to be somewhere else.

At 17, all I wanted was to be a famous junky. Like all my heroes.

You need an entire drama to construct your life around to avoid living it.

Did I get my picture in the yearbook under "Most Likely to Commit Suicide"?

Just because I'd kicked junk, after all, did not mean I'd kicked being a junkie. And junkies lie. It's their primary addition.

In my family, misery didn't just love company, it wanted hostages.

Can you understand this? Shooting dope is all about getting warm and fuzzy. Dependably so. But the Daddy-rush... Forget about it! I've never felt anything so terrifying! It's so real, even the pleasure can break your heart. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is what separates shooting smack from loving your little girl. Heroin may kill you, but it'll never break your heart. Not like a child.

Pat Boone still didn't cover public cunt-licks in Tips for Teens, and there really wasn't anybody to ask.

All of us, at some point in life, choose our cliché.

I did not mean to sodomize Dick Cheney.

This is what I think: If you had the nerve to live what you lived, you should have the nerve to write it.

It's as if there's a landscape - we'll call it childhood - which exists in our mind. It's completely familiar. Unspeakably familiar. Until in the middle of the night, when the sky is blackest, lightning cracks through the firmament. And in that crush of sound, amid the madness and the blinding flash, you see your world: home, trees, rooftops, your own hand, in an entirely new way. Illumined by fire. Flashed for half a second and then gone. And it's that image, that savage, rip-through-the-curtain vision, that lingers. Not the reality you see every day. Not the world you walk around in. No, it's that spookhouse glimpse, the scorching peek through the blackness, that stays in the brain.

Still ... I would have hugged my mother if we were the kind of family who hugged. If touching her weren't impossible. If her subnightie waft was not so utterly, fatally repulsive. That's how much I loved her.

Sometimes I think life's nothin' but sittin' around watchin' pretty go bad.

I have to admit, I wasn't close to my old man when he was alive. He was hardly ever home. But now that he was gone, and I was back in Pittsburgh, I thought about him all the time. I felt closer to the guy since he'd been buried than I ever did when he was walking around above ground. I realized how much I loved him.

There were mornings I thought drugs made me insane and mornings I thought they kept me from going that way.

This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than exorcism.

A waft of sweet hash drifted by, and I wanted to float after it like Wimpy levitating at the scent of a hamburger.

The traditional dictionary definition of the difference is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet in a blackout, come to, and apologize for it. A junkie will steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But ultimately I think all addictions boil down to just not being able to be with yourself for any long degree of time.

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.

We weren't touching, but my skin could feel her skin buzzing.

Mom lived in 709. Five doors down from 714, the number they stamped on Quaaludes.

I think there's a phenomenon of people who want to be around something that seems "dangerous." It makes them feel more real.

My own theory is that people are just so desperate for somebody they can feel better than, in America. Now that everyone's going broke and working 17 jobs - if they have one at all - at least they can look at these guys behind bars and think, "At least I get to wear my own clothes to work."

I know it sounds lame, but I have to dig the way you think, and I have to feel you get me. My whole fucking life, I pretended I could relate to chicks so I could get into their pants. Then once I got in, all I wanted was out again.

Her skin felt smooth and firm. Her hair smelled faintly of motor oil. Her mouth tasted like coffee. She was absolutely real, and it was the sexiest combination on the planet.

All my life I'd gone for women who were a little off.

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.

...it's not what people do, it's what they don't tell you they do. That's what hurts. That's what you think about when the television signs off and you're still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

You may think you don't want to throw your life away for mere fleeting euphoria. But, once you get a taste, it doesn't feel so mere.
From then on the planet becomes a waiting room. The rest of your life devolves to no more than the time between highs.

Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job.

Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life.

The part of his mind that considered odds and consequences had shut down entirely, snuffed by the sheer adrenal rush of holding her, falling together into the Impala's sunken upholstery. He took her face in his hands as he kissed her, wanting to just get it right, to stamp the moment, to blunt the thunder of fear pounding in his skull as the rest of him succumbed to a sensation beyond pleasure, a kind of twisted relief that he'd macheted all his moorings, that whatever happened now would happen because he'd said 'Fuck It!' to everything that had rendered him, for more years than he could count, a soul-dead, heart-numbed misfit staggering from pill to pill just to get through the dull risk of his own existence.

Let me tell you something. Boring women get a bad rap. There's a lot to be said for boring women.

There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming.

It feels like I went right from pubescent to senior citizen. But what are you going to do? I'm lucky I caught myself. I might have ended up the only man in the rest home who still thought Jack Kerouac was cool.

I always tell myself, when I remember the non-stop self-generated hell party that used to be my life, I wouldn't be here if I didn't go there.

When in doubt, though, counter with your own cool.

The thing is, all my heroes were junkies. Lenny Bruce, Keith Richards, William Burroughs, Miles Davis, Hubert Selby, Jr ... These guys were cool. They were committed. They would not have been caught dead doing an ALF episode.

Sometimes what I did five minutes ago scared the fuck out of me five minutes later.

It's not like I was an alkie or anything. Alcohol is for cleaning needles

Not until I stopped doing drugs altogether did I feel like a man. Not until I walked out of that fire did I have any idea what the word even meant.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

Rumi will transform you, in ways you didn't know you needed transforming.

It's not like I ever wanted to wake up and just be a grossly overpaid, self-loathing, can't-look-in-the-mirror-without-gagging TV writer.

Society has always said: Make money. Artists have said: But there's something else. Cliché City. But in Hollwood there's the Big Lie that you can have both. A lie you want to believe.

I've always wanted to be a guy with a rec room.

My life - and this hit so hard I nearly toppled over - my life was Apollo 13! Launched with high expectations and pathetically crashed.

The point is, everything, bad or good, boils back to the decade on the needle, and the years before that imbibing everything from cocaine to Romilar, pot to percs, LSD to liquid meth and a pharmacy in between: a lifetime spent altering the single niggling fact that to be alive means being conscious. More or less.

Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you're in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a hell-tuned Bell & Howard. As the film goes in one end, at the other end it's immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire.

Junkies are liars. They have to be professionally.

It's different to miss somebody when they're still alive. When they die it's like, 'Okay, I'm sad.' You're supposed to be sad. When they just go away, when they disappear, that's a different thing.

The art and act of writing - speaking just for myself - involves getting your proverbial ass in the proverbial chair.

She knew the secret of my creepiness.

Not doing something crude right off is about as close as a guy like me ever gets to class.

I didn't really start publishing books until I was 40 because I was busy being a McDonald's employee. So there's always a sense of trying to make up for lost time.

If you're an asshole, you have an excuse for being an asshole because you're a junkie. But then once you give up the drugs, and you're still an asshole, that's problematic.

He hadn't expected anyone so pretty, and it threw him. Tina had the Faye Dunaway thing. Faye before the surgery, when her cheekbones were still as sharp as can openers and she looked like a feral gazelle.

There's two kinds of people, kid: the kind who pretend they are, and the kind who pretend they aren't. Take my advice and don't be neither.

That's the thing about people you loved. They disappeared on you. I didn't know much at the ripe old age of fifteen and a half. But, for better or worse, I knew that.

Happiness, to me, was no different than Mom's paprikalaced domino bars: something that looked sweet until you took a bite, and then made you want to vomit.

As far as I could tell, life was nothing but a forced march down a mined highway. Even if you did everything you were supposed to do, sooner of later if was your turn to step on a claymore.

If I closed my eyes, I could almost count those soft hairs on the back of her neck. One day I'd even leaned forward, pretending to drop my pencil, and inhaled her until the top of my head started to steam. A scent of butterscotch wafted off of her, and it was all I could do not to plunge my face into her shag.

Women in movies from Hollywood's golden era dressed the way my mother did now. My entire childhood, she'd shown up at PTA meeting in bust-hugging sequins, the sight of which gave my father complicated facial twitches. She was flamboyant, really, in no other way. There was nothing Auntie Mame about her. Unless Auntie Mame had a penchant for public collapse.

I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel ... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.

The Adderall Diaries is phenomenal. With jittery finesse and a reformed tweaker's eye for detail, Stephen Elliott captures the terrifying, hilarious, heart-strangling reality of a life whose scorched-earth physical and psycho-emotional dimensions no one could have invented - they absolutely had to be lived. By all rights, the author should either be dead or chewing his fingers in a bus station. Instead, he may well have written the memoir of an entire generation.

I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop ... this ... fucking ... feeling.

Mostly what I remember is the way things looked sometimes after I'd push down the plunger, sometimes when I got so high so fast I couldn't even take the needle out of my arm. I just sat back, head lolling on my shoulders like a balloon on a string, and everything, walls, carpet, couch cushion, my own hands, broke down to swirling molecules, reassembled as a million other things, and danced before my eyes before arranging themselves once more as reality. The endless cycle, that dance of molecules and their return to something solid, left me as drained as if I'd flown around the sun with veins for wings.

A tiny butter knife slices more skin off my heart every time I think about her.