The death of Junkie John . . .
Sunday 2/16
I found out today that Junkie John is dead. I guess that really shouldn’t be a surprise. But I still find it disturbing. John and Steve were our next door neighbors in Albuquerque. Each roamed the city with a conure on his shoulder. Steve’s was a Jenday/Sun cross that he called, appropriately enough, Sunday. John’s conure was a greencheek. The shrill screams of those birds announced John and Steve everywhere they went.
During the First Gulf War (I’m assuming the second is slouching toward reality),. John didn’t leave his television. He watched it with the same dedication that folks watch “Bachelor” and other so-called reality shows today. Despite his hard-core conservative rants (I was a “limousine liberal,” despite my tendency to drive around in a 1986 Ford Escort at the time), John had no qualms about living on the dole, be it Steve’s good will or the government’s food stamp program. He worked only briefly in the four years I knew him, and he was quickly fired for stealing from the unfortunate convenience store that hired him.
John could be very kind, intelligent, interesting, but more often than not he was a bore, trying to impose his beliefs on bystanders through sheer volume. In addition to his taste for heroin and methadone, John also was a drinker. And the more he mixed alcohol with narcotics, the more boorish he became. At one point, John finally crossed the line, offending Steve in some way that prompted Steve to toss him out of the small apartment Steve paid for. John moved in with his brother. The last I saw him, he was opaque. Light was still filtering through, but it was impossible to make out what it was illuminating. John was lamenting the death of one of his beloved birds, a footless Gouldian’s finch that had been devoured by one of his brother’s cats. John drifted into the past. Until today. Jose told me John was found dead in his apartment a few years ago. Apparently, his body went undiscovered for quite some time, slowly decomposing while new wars were conceived and new networks rose to cover them.
I don’t know what happened to that poor greencheck conure that used to ride around on John’s shoulder. I hope it somehow managed to fly away before John’s heroin wings burst into flame . . .
Posted by Bob Benz at February 20, 2003 12:02 AM