in my case a positive that came out of all this. Many of my friends from high school had already gone to fight in Vietnam, and a number of them had been killed in combat. When I was twenty I got the letter I had been dreading from Uncle Sam. It said ‘Greetings you have been selected to fight in the armed forces of America.’ ‘Great, now they’re going to make a man out of you,’ was how my Father greeted the news.
I went to the appointed place, at the appointed time, and sat in a room full of men all about my age. In came this US Army sergeant who began yelling at us.
‘Everybody, listen up! You’re in the army right now. You’re about to take an IQ test. If you fuck up this test you’re in the army anyway, but you’re going to spend the next four years of your life doing KP, that’s kitchen patrol, so you better not fuck up on this test, you better do your best. If you do your best you are going to get promoted quickly, you might even apply for private, you might be a private first class in six months.’
People pay thousands for motivational speakers like this these days! He was on a roll. ‘You’re going to have a blood test first and while it’s being analysed you’re going to take the IQ test, which is about two hours long.’
This confirmed what I had already decided to do the night before. I didn’t want to join the army and die in Vietnam. Like millions of Americans I saw this war as unnecessary and immoral. If we were under attack as a nation I would volunteer to defend my country, but I wasn’t having any of this. I wasn’t prepared to leave anything to chance. By this point in my life I was, strictly speaking, off heroin. However, I shot up with a friend the night before, I had heard that the army was rejecting addicts yet this was a big risk. I thought I could be reported to the police if things went wrong. After I had the blood test I took the IQ test and answered the questionnaire. I admitted to using drugs. I was standing in line in my underpants with about 500 other inductees, waiting for our physical examination when I heard, ‘Visconti, get dressed and follow me.’
I was ushered into an office where a man in a suit, sporting wire-rimmed glasses and a goatee, an aspiring Sigmund Freud who turned out to be a psychiatrist, turned to me and said in a thick German accent, ‘You have passed your IQ test.’
That was lucky I thought; maybe the blood test wasn’t foolproof? What was I doing here talking to Dr Freud?
‘You seem to have scored high, but on the questionnaire you indicated here that you have frequent and terrifying nightmares and you take drugs. Which drugs do you take?’
‘All of them.’ I said.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Which drugs?’
‘Well, everything, barbiturates, amphetamines, marijuana, heroin.’
‘Are you an addict?’
I hesitated; maybe it was a trick question. ‘Yes,’ I carefully admitted.
‘Would you like to not be an addict? Would you like to quit?’ he asked.
This was the $64,000 question. If I say yes, what is he going to do to me? Am I going to be arrested, or sent to some kind of institution? If I say no I might be arrested anyway, would he tell the police, because I didn’t cooperate? My brain was short-circuiting. But I thought I might as well play out this drama as planned.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, to what?’ he asked me.
‘Yes I’m an addict and yes I’d like to quit.’
The truth was, this was the truth. I had already tried using methadone, which I had to acquire illegally, but I continued to use heroin occasionally. The German psychiatrist started writing some stuff down and said, ‘Well since you are being so candid with me and you want to quit I will put down that you are rejected from the army because of neurological reasons.’
Even though there was a box for drug addiction he ticked the box that said ‘neurological’ and showed it to me. ‘It will go on your permanent army record that you are a 4F classification, which means you are unable to serve. You will never be allowed in the army!’ With this he concluded my session and sent me downstairs to meet a colleague.
‘There, they’ll make arrangements for your rehabilitation.’
This sent me into a flat spin, I had a gig that night, and there was no time for rehabilitation. Feeling trapped by my own actions, I trooped downstairs to see a very nice woman who had the demeanour of a loving mother. She was thin, with her hair piled on top of her head in a big bun and wore overlarge horn-rimmed glasses. She looked at me kindly and compassionately and said, ‘President Kennedy is appalled that fifty per cent of the men called up to serve are ineligible. The two main reasons for this are drug addiction and homosexuality and the United States government now had a programme that will cure young men of both, and then try to rehabilitate them.’ I understood being rehabilitated for drugs, but was baffled by curing homosexuality. The US Government still thought of it as a disease. She went on to ask me lots of questions about why I used drugs.
‘It’s an occupational hazard. Everywhere I turn in the music business I see drugs. If it’s not marijuana it’s amphetamines or heroin—I just got unlucky,’ I explained.
‘Do you think drugs make you play better?’ she asked.
‘Well, they made Charlie Parker play really good,’ was my quick retort.
‘Yes? But imagine how Charlie Parker would have sounded if he didn’t use drugs,’ she countered. She had a point. I still felt cautious about what I should or shouldn’t say. I wanted to debate further but I thought it best to get out of there unscathed. I was told I had automatically volunteered to attend group therapy sessions and I agreed. That was it; I walked through the door and out into the street.
These sessions were on Saturday mornings, in downtown Brooklyn, close to where I had grown up. The first thing they did was to give me a prescription for methadone. For the first time in my life I had a legal prescription, and I didn’t really need it; I was totally committed to not taking heroin anymore. The army induction episode scared me. More than that, I started to scare me. If I hadn’t made up my mind to quit, the experience I had to face up to would have done it for me. Everyone in the group were still hard-core addicts, most of the guys were thieves. They would interlace their stories of shooting up heroin with how they had broken into a car the night before or how they stole anything they could; I just sat there wide-eyed. The most appalling thing were the girls, who were my age and younger; they all entered the world of prostitution. I was sitting in the company of girls describing painful anal rape and guys bragging about stealing hubcaps—it was surreal.
When it came time for me to speak I repeated what I had told the psychoanalyst.
‘It’s an occupational hazard. I’m a musician. I don’t steal. I earn money by playing music, I just like to take drugs, that’s all.’
Without exception they looked at me with utter disgust, including the group leader. I hardly ever spoke again in the group. After six months in the programme I told the group leader that I truly felt I had been cured. During that time I never once touched heroin. He gave me a deep look and simply said, ‘OK.’ Three per cent of addicts never go back on heroin. I was one of the lucky—and determined—ones.
That’s the happy ending to a very dark and horrible period. I had been spending all my money, my entire salary, on the drug. I had even borrowed money from my grandmother on occasions. I never stole, but I had some very, very desperate, dark moments when I was a millimetre away from the bottom of the barrel. Using heroin is not clever, it’s not creative and rock ‘n’ roll has mythologized its use. Those therapy sessions exposed the reality of ‘heroin chic’ for me.
I would only tell this story to confidants over the years; I was very embarrassed about this period of my life, about using heroin and loads of other drugs. I was off heroin when I had to go up in front of the Draft board, but I was determined not to go to Vietnam, so this was a very drastic measure for a 20-year-old. Believe me, I was scared shitless on that day.
The group therapy was so God-awful it