KENSINGTON BLUES

Month: July, 2012

Wilfredo

Wilfredo, Front Street, 2010.

Audio Transcription:

Wilfredo: I’ve been using since I was twelve, I’m 32. It’s rough. Black guys controls almost all the corners. They don’t like Puerto Rican guys. We fight almost, almost all the time.  I like to always like to take the trash out. I don’t like to ask for money. I don’t steal from nobody I just like, even that I’m sick I like to try to do something so I can win my money, that’s it. And I think that way you don’t have to be looking behind your shoulder every time that you get out from the house.

Once you touch your vain, you love it. You love it so much that in the morning if you are married, your woman want to have, make love and you are sick, you’ll say, ‘No. I gotta get my shit first, then I make you love.’ And that’s crazy because we, we are the man. The most, the most that we love is the woman. It’s sex. It’s love. But once you are in this, the love and the woman became second and third because this became first. This is like you are married to this beautiful woman that she got her legs tied to around you, it’s like a snake and she don’t let you go. And you can be clean for one, two, three years and just one day just fall and take you like seven or eight months to get you up again. And I got this hypothesis, that when you are wake up you are an addict, but when you are sleep you not an addict because once you open your eyes, your mind tell you, ‘I need a bag of dope’. And he starts sending you and your whole mind starts and starts sending you these symptoms that they recall a monkey on your back that, that means you are feeling this, all this pain in your back and you got your chills, you got your diarrhea, you got everything, all this vomiting, all this horrible pains and horrible symptoms and once you put that tiny um units with that shit, everything is gone. Every, every, every symptom of the sickness is gone. You are putting something in your body that is not fun anymore and is only, you gotta need it, you need it to eat, to sleep, to do everything because if you don’t have it, you cannot do it. You don’t function. To everything, to make love, to eat, to go out, to, to everything you gotta have it on your system. If you don’t have it, you are sick. That’s being a slave.

Wilfredo, shooting up in an abandoned lot on North American St, 2010.

I came here to take care of my father and I was doing okay in the methadone program. But I, I like fall in love with this Italian girl and I used to um, smoke crack behind her back and one time she told me ‘If you wanna get high don’t do it behind my back, you just tell me and we do it together.’ I crossed that line and, and then we became not a, not um a couple. We became club friends with privileges that we had sex when we was high. That was it. We used to spend three thousand dollars in two nights smoking all day and all night in the kitchen, shooting dope, shooting powder, smoking crack. Three days, three thousand dollars. It’s incredible. It’s incredible.

I started using cocaine, when I was twelve, snorting. And used to spend a lot of money, uh the cocaine is something that once you start, if you got one thousand dollars, they all gone. But, if you got something that stop that craving, that um, that, that get, that, that your body is asking for more and more and more like the dope, the heroin cut that and just make you calm down and make you don’t want no more coke. So I did it and I start snorting. Then I was snorting twelve, thirteen bags in a day and one guy told me, ‘You know what? You are spending a lot of money because you are snorting. If you shoot it, you only need twenty dollars and less than one hundred and ten. You wanna try it?’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’m gonna save more money.’ Once I give him my arm and he did it the first time, I see how it was the process and then I started doing it myself and that was it. I was married to the devil, the devil himself.

Ashley

Ashley, 2009.

Jamie

Jamie, 2010.

JS: I see that you are pregnant. How many months do you have?

Jamie: I’m 7 ½ half months.

JS: Do you know if it is a boy or a girl?

Jamie: It’s a boy.

JS: Why is it that you are out here on the street?

Jamie: Basically just to support my habit.

JS: You use Heroin?

Jamie: Heroin and Crack.

JS: How much Heroin and Crack do you use in a day?

Jamie: Anywhere from 6 to 13 bags a day, Heroin and um God knows how much Crack, you know as much as I can get basically.

JS: And you’ve been using for how long?

Jamie: Since I was eighteen. I’m twenty-eight.

JS: How did you get pregnant?

Jamie: By my baby’s father.

JS: Are you married?

Jamie: No, I’m not married. I have a daughter, she is 3, and now this one I’m carrying now.

JS: Does your baby’s father use?

Jamie: No, he’s clean… I just had three years clean. When I was um pregnant with my daughter I had, I had gotten clean. I was clean for 2 years and she was born on Methadone and she had no withdraw symptoms and I was on a Methadone program and then uh, I relapsed.

JS: Do you know what it was that caused you to relapse?

Jamie: Not really, uh well, I know that because I started taking some Xanax, I started taking some downers, I started taking pills and then that sorta caused me to relapse. You know, once I did that then I was like, I didn’t care about going to cop, you know and I don’t know, before then it was like you know I was not, not too proud, it was just like you know I didn’t want to and once I got high off the pills I was like fuck it, you know.

JS: Whats the best date you ever had? Whats the worst date you ever had?

Jamie: The best date is um, huh, you know getting someone that gives you loads of money and you don’t got to do nothing for it really. That’d be the best date. The worst date is um, you know I’ve been raped, and you know almost killed really. You know there’s all kinds of dates actually, scary and uncomfortable all types.

JS: And yet you’re still out here, do you feel like it makes you stronger?

Jamie: It has and it hasn’t, it has definitely made me stronger but I don’t want to be like this the rest of my life.

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