In 1995, while standing in the center of an open-air drug supermarket in Lisbon’s Casal Ventoso shantytown, I decided it was time to sample some heroin.
It was not at all an interest in heroin that had brought me here, to the most notorious drug market in Portugal, the most drug addicted nation in Europe at the time. On the contrary—I’d dropped out of college and decided to take a European bicycle trip. But my bike, which had been lost in flight for two days (it went to Italy), was delivered to my tent in Lisbon’s urban campground, Monsanto, in a mangled condition. Instead of biking, I ended up camping in Monsanto for months, in a tent-village of undocumented laborers, addicts, and various others for whom things hadn’t gone exactly as planned. I became friends with a junkie dockworker, Bruno, and his goth girlfriend Ana, eventually moving into an apartment with them on the edge of Casal Ventoso.
Bruno usually went alone to score, but he decided one day that I’d gotten so good at passing for a junkie that I could now accompany him, so long as I heeded his solemn directive: “Never speak a fucking word.” Not because I shouldn’t tell anyone about what goes on (everybody knew) but because it would be a problem if my accent revealed me to be a sober American tourist.
We wended down the steep labyrinth of footpaths littered with prone, half-conscious people. Children darted about selling sheets of foil for a few escudos, nagging us to buy. Each switchback revealed a new grotesque scene: bodies slumped in positions that would have been painful to anyone not saturated with opiates. A man in a suit and fine shoes face down with a blanket over his head; a beautifully cheek-boned woman with a net of scars across her face clutching a stolen car radio. I didn’t speak a fucking word.
At the valley floor, we stopped in an open area lined with dealers’ shanties. The day was particularly gorgeous. Addicts silently queued up at their preferred shops. Bruno scored some castanha, the ubiquitous beige powder, and offered me a hit. I’d grown to like the smell and figured I’d ingested enough second-hand smoke already that a wee taste wouldn’t hurt. I said I’d try some back home.
Back in the apartment, Bruno put the Spacemen 3 on the stereo, tapped some powder on to a foil sheet, and lit a cigarette lighter underneath it. Ana muted the TV, and offered me an encouraging, missing-tooth smile. Outside the traffic thrummed and beeped. I took the straw and sipped a nip from a rising smoke tendril. Unlike the sweet smell, the taste was awful—metallic but also fleshy. I waited, but nothing happened. Nothing at all.
A little sip, it turns out, doesn’t do much. But from this point forward, I realized, if ever put to a lie detector test and asked if I’d done heroin, I’d fail if I said “No.”
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Art by Lara Schaberg
