My First Novel, Prince Junkie: Not A Glorification of Drugs

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Art by Kasey Hill

I’ve deleted the same shit paragraph about six times.

I wrote this to separate myself from the homeless experience.

The writing helped me put my brain back together.

You lose a lot of personality development if you fall that far down the spiral. It has taken me quite a while to stitch, stretch, and study my psyche and my body, which were both broken, beaten, cut, and otherwise abused by both myself and others while I was out there. Everything in my system rebelled against my subjecting its electric tentacles once more to any kind of square life. It rebelled hard. Regressions were a factor. My body’s weakness was a factor. All these things, and I with only a vague notion that they had to be fixed. I barely knew where to begin. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do work like that. Or anything square. So I forced my frail, scattered ass to write. And that evolved. My studies gave Ben an advantage over me while I was out there. He thinks a hell of a lot more than I did. Most of my time was spent either high under the bridge or high on the corner. If I’d have written about my exact experience, you would have gotten 500 pages of window washing and scoring from the faceless open-air drug market. Not very interesting.

Watch the pendulum…back and forth…this is a work of fiction…

It took a while to realize I’d destroyed my life’s structure, so I used this book to rebuild it.

The title is not a glorification of junk. It’s the title of a poem that Yale accepted. I think the title was what they liked best about the poem, but I’m probably wrong. No one has ever done that, I don’t think, kind of thrown it out that while in the throes of addiction, the addict, especially the homeless addict, is like a Prince. The man moves as if he’s been divinely entitled to give his life to drugs. People give him alms. People give him food. People give him clothes. If it wasn’t for the occasional fuck off, junkie, you’d damn near think he was a Prince. Also, there is The Prince by Machiavelli, and while erudite and political, the text is still, at root, all about how to be a more effective hustler…which Ben and his friends are.

But he isn’t a Prince. Or if he is, it’s the Prince of Trash, the Prince of Filth, of Concrete, of Junk. He wanders, moving through the various fiefdoms of the street, from the corner to the trap house, from the viaduct to the open-air market, seeming to have no care in the world. He is, of course, utterly fucked, but he doesn’t see that…not really. Especially not when he’s high. This is a thought that occurred to me and some others out there, that we were a bit like reverse royalty, so I thought that was the best title for the book. But I don’t glorify junk, and I don’t do it anymore, I have three and a half years clean from that crap, and I’m damn glad for it.

Read Prince Junkie to see how I came to that conclusion.

And thank you for reading anything I write when you do.