One Follows Another
She brought up Peter, a friend of Jimmy's who had committed suicide (as had Jimmy's father), and the impact that may have had on his psyche.
She mentioned another high school friend of hers, Jack, who also had died of a heroin overdose. He wasn't an addict she said, he just used sporatically. I told her that I'd heard that myself, but that it seemed like the cause of Jack's death was kept quiet. Perhaps even more so than today, we agreed, no one wanted to talk about a drug problem — particularly if it was heroin, she said.
"All you used to hear was 'ON THE NEEDLE, OH MY GOD.' You could eat as many pills as you wanted and be in and out of emergency rooms, but if you were ON THE NEEDLE...."
She remembered Eddie, who stopped using drugs but then drank himself to death, and his sister Barbara, a beautiful woman whose home was a hangout for users before she suffered a fatal OD.
"Barbara's apartment was always a trip," Amber recalled. One day, [Mike W.] ODed. They put him in the elevator, pressed the lobby button, and said 'good luck.' " She laughed heartily. " 'Good luck,' that's all, but he was okay."
Then there was Greg.
"He was what in New England what they call 'clutchheads,' 'greasers.' He was more like that. But then he started hanging out with us because he didn't like the greasers, he liked the heads. But he'd sniff glue and other stuff that we didn't do."
Greg eventually died of a heroin overdose, too.
She remembered Celeste Crenshaw, a Hastings resident who in 1966 was found dead from a heroin overdose in the trunk of a car that belong to an Annenberg heir. Dick Schaap wrote a book about the case, Turned On, that holds up surprisingly well forty years later. The Schnibbies were friendly with Celeste's grandparents, who were her guardians.
"That's somebody who's family didn't recognize — and the school didn't help — that she was clinically depressed," Amber said. "No doubt about it."