KENSINGTON BLUES

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.