Justin One had been the first to bring heroin into El Rancho but he wasn’t trying to help anybody make a habit out of it. He had a basic understanding of how to drive to the West Side and cop and he gave Matt some crack he had lying around because he bought it on accident but only with a stern warning:
“That stuff will eat holes in your brain like Swiss Cheese!”
Justin Two was fundamentally different. He knew the corners, crews and housing projects of Chicago’s open air drug markets the way that most of us knew the bands and labels of its regional hard core scene.
I’m not sure exactly how or when Justin Two showed up but I somehow picture him as coming from the basement. The basement was always essentially lawless: anyone could spray paint on the walls, smash bottles and old televisions or play music for as loud and as long as they wanted. By the time we were getting evicted somebody was trying to plug up the drain and run the water until it had become an incredibly filthy version of a swimming pool.
Obviously it is physically impossible for Justin Two to have set a single foot within the basement without first passing through the upstairs living area and establishing some form of valid reason for being there but that is where the recklessness and lifestyle that he represented found purchase.
Justin Two worked construction jobs and drove a White Bronco like the famous OJ Simpson one. Or maybe someone who was there will tell me that it was a similar looking but different car, I’m kind of face-blind and car-blind. He seemed like he had a rough urban poverty style childhood: He would talk about how his father used to be an intravenous cocaine addict a lot.
Justin Two was and is a conventionally attractive, classically handsome man but for reasons I never saw the bottom of he was only capable of approaching sexual relations from a purely transactional viewpoint. I have never seen him even kissing another person without first negotiating some kind of exchange of drugs or money. When we shared a basement at the Red House he would bring home girls from parties and I would fall asleep listening to him tell them over and over that they would owe him sexual favors if they smoked his crack with him.
It could certainly be argued that he had some form of a healthy prostitution fetish but I can’t help but think that some level of deep self loathing was also at play. On a night like many others we had been driving around the South and West sides, visiting various drug spots and consuming hard drugs. After a hit of crack he seemed to find himself in the desperate throes of urgent libido the drug is known to trigger:
“Hey Ossian, if I bought you some more crack and some more heroin do you think it would be possible for you to fuck me in the ass?”
“No Justin, I think that that would probably be weird.”
“Why would it be weird?”, he whined in a tone that was bordering on incredulous.
“Mostly because I’d be prostituting myself to you for drugs.”
The statement left little room for continued argument and the matter was not broached again, at least not with me. We continued to buy our own drugs or I bought them for him in exchange for a ride or he bought them for me when he didn’t feel like getting high in the middle of the night by himself.
I can’t remember if this was back in 1998 or one of my post 9/11 visits to San Francisco but I remember looking through a street level window in The Tenderloin and seeing a clearly lettered sign above somebody’s bed that very much reminds me of Justin Two’s attitudes on this topic:
ATTENTION: IF YOU ARE FEMALE AND YOU SLEEP HERE THEN YOU SLEEP WITH ME AS IN HAVE SEX WITH ME
I have talked about The Beautiful Mutants show and the post-Confederate Flag Burning house meeting but I need to touch on another watershed moment in the evolving El Rancho timeline: Jamie’s overdose. Jamie was almost always drunk, had a Mohawk and usually wore a blanket so there were a lot of stupid jokes comparing him to a Native American. I don’t know how much experience he’d had with hard drugs before the Winter of 2000 but once it started going around he was getting in on it.
It was only a matter of time until somebody was going to do enough dope to stop breathing and that ended up being Jamie.
We didn’t know about how you’re supposed to say somebody is “not breathing” instead of spelling out that it’s an overdose on the 911 call. We hadn’t made contact with the Chicago Recovery Alliance yet and gotten prescriptions for the life saving drug Nalaxone. Somebody in the house must have had an early cell phone because we didn’t have a land line. I think Kiki or whoever it was that called was still on the phone with the dispatcher when the cops kicked our front door in.
They didn’t care about whether or not Jamie was still breathing, they just wanted to catch somebody with actual drugs and arrest them. It seemed like they had been watching us for a while and anticipating just such an occurrence. While the female cop in the trio was tasked with the “grunt work” of individual pat downs her two male colleagues made themselves busy kicking the walls of our rooms down and spilling anything that was on a shelf onto the floor.
I just tried to look up the meaning of the Chicago Police Department flag and ended up on a website where the word “HISTORY” is spelled wrong. It gets a little more esoteric than I was expecting. What I’m trying to get at is that if one of the points of one of the stars is supposed to represent clear communication with the community that duty was not neglected:
“We don’t like your kind of people around here!”
In large cities around the turn of the millennium it often felt like the only actual training the police had received was a steady diet of ‘80s cop and action movies where the punk rockers were always the bad guys. Andy Hyde had bright pink hair that wasn’t actually spiked but did stand up on the different sides of his head, a “SHUT UP BITCH!” T-Shirt and a pair of pants that lacked pockets and were held together by safety pins. All three of the cops had zeroed in on him as the obvious drug dealer in the room. They referred to him as “SHUT UP BITCH GUY” and took turns patting him down for drugs there is no plausible way he could have been holding unless they were in a body cavity.
Meanwhile Justin Two, clean cut and half Puerto Rican, was nervously pacing around in a black leather trench coat. I don’t think he was carrying drugs either but I was a bit surprised that they never even searched him.
An ambulance arrived and saved Jamie’s life. We never fixed the front door and it continued to flap open in heavy winds for the rest of the Winter. Most of the walls stayed knocked over and we slept in the lean-tos and open spaces that were left behind. Justin Two spent the rest of the night looking for a piece of crack on the basement floor that he had evidently dropped into the rubble at the moment of the raid, earning him the nickname hubba pigeon from an early internet list of hard drug related slang terms.
I want to say that this all happened before everybody went to California for Christmas but it just as easily could have been after the New Year’s Rave. I missed the Rave because I had stuck behind in California to go see Marilyn Manson in San Jose with Lil Four and Nick Feather. I was getting surprised before by how much had happened in a very short amount of time but now I’m having the opposite experience. I had thought that I had showed up on January 1st or 2nd of 2001 moments after the Rave but it turns out the Marilyn Manson concert was on January 10th.
I know that we broke a bunch of shit and got evicted some time after the Rave but it couldn’t have been in early January. I was underestimating how long we spent breaking and smashing every corner of the space until our landlord had no choice but to evict us. Now that I think about it we had to have been smashing shit for all of January and quite possibly into February.
I’ll get to it next time.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 