To do or do nothing: How to care for loved ones who use drugs
What Sid & Nancy taught us about tough love in the '80s, and how it hurts us still.
This is an excerpt from my WHERE’S THE HARM (WTH) newsletter, which focusses on how portrayals of drugs and drug consumers on TV and in movies preserves myths about drug use, and is largely supportive of a war that wrongly targets drug users, people of colour and the poor.
There’s a funny scene in Alex Cox’s 1986 biopic, Sid & Nancy, where Nancy Spungen calls her mom from a London phonebooth to ask for money.
“We got married. Me and Sid,” says Nancy, the American girlfriend of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious (played gloriously by Chloe Webb) “Sid Vicious, you remember, from the Sex Pistols,” she explains.
“Anyway,” she continues, “why don’t you send us a present for our honeymoon.” After poo-pooing her mother’s offer to send them sheets, Nancy cuts to the chase: “Why don’t you send us some money?”
Then, after a muffled response from mom, Nancy says, “Why not?” The anxiety in her voice, snowballing into a familiar hostility — the pain of familial rejection.
For those who know, a parent’s rejection can feel agonizing in a primitive incomprehensible way. It seems to contradict all we’ve been taught about motherhood. Webb’s Nancy embodies this torment especially well as she screams into the phone: “I am SO married … I am! …. NO. […] Listen to me — if you don’t send us the money RIGHT NOW, we’re both gonna fucking DIE! […] YOU’D LIKE THAT, WOULDN’T YOU?!?”
“FUCK YOUUUUUUUUU.” A desperate, primordial rage takes her over completely. Smash, crash. She uses the receiver (and her palm) to shatter some phonebooth windows, then tumbles onto the street, with Gary Oldman’s (delightfully naive) Sid Vicious at her heels.
I thought it could be (at least morbidly) amusing to take the punchline of this phonebooth scene and imagine how Hillary Clinton and Barbara Walters might respond. All smiles, I bet.
Jokes aside, a scene like this requires a thorough understanding of what it’s like to be dopesick, broke and abandoned. We see this all the time in drug user advocacy — unless you know what it’s really like, you don’t know.
It’s easy to pick out writers, actors and movie makers who have no idea what it’s like to take hard drugs, to be enslaved by them (and we’ll talk about this in future posts, I promise). To reach inside and dredge up the terror of knowing their time (as healthy, able bodies) is about to expire — unless and until they find a fix.
If they don’t find it — and they aren’t on any type of opiate replacement drug, like methadone or Suboxone — it is almost certain that their minds and bodies will commence a journey so frightening, painful and isolating that aggressive bodily trauma is practically guaranteed.
By the time we meet them in the phonebooth scene, it’s likely that Nancy and Sid have already lost much of their comfort and safety. Why else would Nancy risk calling her mother, who, by this time, is a staunch believer in the perils of enabling (at least, according to Deborah Spungen’s memoir).
And yet, Nancy is apparently so weakened by her aggravated, vulnerable state, that she risks adding fuel to the flame. What other option is there?
Or maybe she hopes to accelerate her torment by pushing the only button that might just kill her. When the person who gave her life refuses to extend a life preserver; the moment we learn the gruesome limits of our mothers’ love — a pain to end all pains.