From the article andrew mentions...
..."When you start doing dope, there's a honeymoon period. At the time I started, when I was about twenty-four, I was with the woman who would become my first wife, Jannina. Heroin was definitely something that was on our radar. After I tried it for the first time—in New York, at the Royalton Hotel, the last stop of a tour STP coheadlined with the Butthole Surfers—we were excited about doing it together. It turned out her brother, Tony, was into it, too.
We started making trips to downtown L.A. to score. At that point I had this Toyota Landcruiser—the first significant purchase of my success. The whole thing was very ceremonial, like a ritual, like a religious event. The copping. The smoking. The need. I started referring to it as my medicine.
The four of us would just hang out—myself, Jannina, Tony, and his chick at the time. We were just smoking it, you know, chasing the dragon. It was all pretty innocent. We'd drive downtown, grab a few bags, smoke...and then we'd just kind of lie around and have that sort of dope sex where you can **** for eight hours. They call it a dope stick. You stay up forever but you have a hard time, you know, finishing. It's, like, tantric.
As time progressed, I was finding that there seemed to be a certain ceiling to the high when you were smoking heroin. And smoking is inefficient. Any junkie will tell you that: A lot of the dope goes to waste.
But not knowing anyone who fixed, I had to wait for my opportunity. It came on Thanksgiving 1993. We went over to Jannina's parents' house. Tony lived in a room in the garage. After dinner, he's like, "I got a couple rigs. You wanna fix?" So naturally I was like, "Sure." He tied me off and shot me up. And then he said, "Now you got your wings."
