The Most Interesting Book the Old Man Had Ever Read

“You promised me he would not end like this.”

—Mernie, Bruce’s grandmother

On January 7, 1998—watching a movie and ingesting narcotics the way someone else might enjoy a bowl of popcorn—Bruce White yet again faced cinematic, near-certain death.

Soon to be forty years old, Bruce was in his room at his parents’ home in lily-white Lutherville, Baltimore County, Maryland. A convicted felon, he’d been using drugs every chance he had since elementary school.

At first, he felt extraordinary pain, lost consciousness, and embarked on an adventure worthy of Alice, except that White’s Wonderland was an especially odious subdivision of hell.

Bruce was the complete give-me-what-I-want-and-get-out-ofmy-way-or-I’ll-fuck-you-up dope fiend. He had seen and caused a lot of pain and ugliness to anyone unlucky enough to cross his path in a life devoted to drugs, kicks, fast machines, women, and violence. On the face of it, not a unique story.

But very few have experienced the sojourn Bruce took while minding his own business and watching a war movie at his father’s home on a winter’s night. Or at least come back to tell the tale.

Bruce awoke from a narcotic drowse with pain in his hand, having passed out in his bedroom with a cigarette between his fingers. He lit another and glanced at the TV to pick up the thread of Platoon.

“It was the part where Willem Dafoe is going into the tunnel. I always liked this part,” said Bruce, noting that at the time—thirtyeight years old and weary of the street game—he was “lost in my own tunnel of explosions.”

He kept a safe in the room and went to it for Dilaudid—an opioid painkiller—laughing because he couldn’t remember the last time he was able to watch a movie in one sitting. Kneeling to open the safe, he hoped there’d be some “good red pot” left to complement the Dilaudid. He found a needle and the pills but was out of reefer. Reaching into the pocket of a pair of pants, he found a dollar bill and folded into it eight tablets of the Dilaudid—“all that would fit into the syringe”—and looked around for something to crush the pills.

The amount, he said, “was maybe three times as much as anyone might use.”

Using a glass by the bed, he crushed the Dilaudid inside the dollar bill, shook the powder into a spoon, and tapped the rolled-up bill to get every last speck of dope. Putting a dab on his tongue he pronounced it bitter, familiar, and pleasant.

The ritual had begun. In the bathroom, he ran water in the glass, used it to fill a hypodermic needle, and then squeezed the water