The Wilderness Years - Requiem for Hippie Jack

It was purely dumb luck. His ex -girl who was half his age had worked with me for three days a year before in a bagel store and then just happened to be hanging out with him that afternoon when i walked into the bar... the rest as they say is history.

I was just a kid with a plan and nowhere to go, i needed to sling to pay off the mountain of student loan debt that would soon come avalanche like down upon me, at the same time i wanted to get down in the shit, my shady corner bar my new classroom. Hippie Jack needed some luck, a kid who could move stuff quick and easy, i needed a good connection, we were like fucking peanut butter and chocolate, we were gonna be great together we just didn't know it yet.. and for awhile we were...

Over the next two years or so we'd have some great times and some rough times but it was always interesting, one of the first times we hung out as his place we were discussing the merits of certain drugs, basically both professing a love of hallucinogens, he told me that day that the last known record of him was when he was released from a Texas state prison, a stretch for selling acid, he walked out and disappeared into thin air, moved north and east, he had no bank account or ID, he was a ghost for all intents and purposes, he didn't exist, yet he did, in his apartment on that main artery in the middle of no-man's land he hid in plain view, the only people that saw him were the ones that were looking for him, the margin walkers and derelicts and hippies, it was an existence off the grid at a time when the grid was becoming ever more hard to escape...

That fine day we sat at the beginning of the ride, he told me he'd never stick a needle in his arm, didn't understand why people did, didn't understand why his hero Jerry did?  We spent the early days getting high on grass and acid, my infamous light speed trip down the Bloomfield Bridge, riding my bicycle and tripping my brains out as the headlights raced past me, there were shrooms and nitrous oxide, he was out of debt and in good standing with the Mr. Big and i was fucking rookie of the year in the East End weed game, you could call it the honeymoon phase or you could call it good business between friends, we'd hang at the bar and laugh and drink, they were grand days they were...

And then shit went south, the arrival of our sweet girl Charlie Baltimore, the first of the powders soon to be rocked and smoked and the decline was swift, we were both losing the plot. It didn't take long for the sharks to circle as Hippie Jack went down the rabbit hole, Glimmer Twin Margo stealing 8-balls of blow and Cocaine Mike stealing everything else.  When Mr. Big washed his hands of him he was fucked, his weed connection gone he had to find other forms of revenue streams... what middle America doesn't understand it is the average dealer is holding shit together by a loose and fraying thread and when the thread snaps? no one hears the splash the well is so deep...

The mid 1990's was the first wave of good and cheap heroin, you didn't have to shoot it anymore you could snort it and still get the nods, i know cuz i dabbled in the black arts though i had the respect to know the Mother Superior was not one to be trifled with, i called it research, a lot of the kiddos that tried it ended up calling it a habit... Hippie Jack started hanging with those kiddos and soon he had one...

The first time Hippie Jack died he was brought back to life Mia Wallace style by an adrenaline shot to the heart, lucky he was hanging with some responsible junkies who just happened to keep one in the fridge. The second time he died he lay in his apartment for two days until his neighbors dog tipped off his owner that something was amiss, when they opened the door word had it he was face down on the floor looking like Veruca Salt after she ate the blueberry gum, this time there was no adrenaline shot, there was a brief rumor that Mr. Big had had some boys give him a hot shot, no one really knows, to most of the hood it was just another dead idiot... when Karen the bartender told me, in the very bar where i met him, i changed my drink to a Jack and Coke, she smiled, stepped out from behind the bar and gave me a hug, i took my drink and sat in the corner...

Hippie Jack was my friend. They held a wake at my favorite boozer one Sunday afternoon, a wake i didn't attend for fear of some undercover cop snapping pictures from his car, i was paranoid, they found more than just his body in his new run down apartment and i didn't want to chance it, at 6'4 and a rat's nest of dreads i was a pretty easy blue-eyed white boy to ID, he was a good guy, he'd share his gear and give you whatever he had even though he didn't have much, to this day i remember the look on his face when i gave him his bottle of Jack for Xmas, i realize now no one had given him anything in years, i used to enjoy sitting around and listening to his stories and when things went south i felt a bit shit, that somehow i let him down, he had even tried to go legit but without any form of ID it was tough to get a job, some people got him organized to help him get his ID so he could start a gig washing dishes, for a minute he got clean but it's hard for a lifer in the game to let it go, working a normal gig is for squares, it's easier to hustle, the tiger's stripes might fade but they never go away...

These days i wonder if anyone even remembers good old Hippie Jack, our old bar is a different place now, Karen the bartender and Mustache Mary and Shut the Fuck Up Lennie are all gone, moved on or passed on, Hippie Jack didn't make the age i am now, but he existed and for a time we were thick as thieves, laughing in the smoky neon light as CCR and Marvin Gaye and Barry White blared from the jukebox in a dive bar at the corner of Melwood and Centre... he was a good dude... tonight's tune is for him...