This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
This post is part of a collaborative narrative series composed of my writing and Chris Arnade's photos exploring issues of addiction, poverty, prostitution and urban anthropology in Hunts Point, Bronx. For more on the series, look here.
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Jackie, Hunts Point. Courtesy of Chris Arnade.
Jackie died of an overdose, they say. Rumors can't wrap well around the simple act of injecting too much, but they try, spreading out in tendrils of a dozen wandering voices.
The sense of disbelief manifests in talking about it, in saying you do the same things that she did, buy from the same dealers, did drugs for the same span of time. You talk about it while looking for dates to buy your next hit. Overdose becomes diabetic shock becomes something involving lupus.
Most likely what happened involved heroin, but no one was there to take part in the act. No one to witness or to have purposefully inflicted harm. This isn't a snatched-on-the-track-cut-into-pieces death rumor.
Truer things are often quieter.
It happened inside a big apartment building, in a one-bedroom that operated as a crack house along the truck route. Someone went into the apartment and called 911, and that's it.
No one in Hunts Point is family. No one was real husband or wife. No one knows what happened medically or has access to such information. After all, they're not family; they're only those with which she's spent the last years.
No one has a cell phone and access to city numbers to call between 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, to tap numbers to be transferred between departments, to find someone in the medical examiner's office willing to buck the legal rules to help a dead woman's desperate friend. Can it be confirmed that she died? Can you say where her body is?
No one knows Jackie's last name. You know her last court date, whether or not she has a warrant, the abuse she's endured from men she's known, what she wanted to do in life: become a nurse, regain custody of her kids from the state. Who cares about such a trivial thing as a last name? You care about matters of immediacy, whether she was sick from withdrawal or if she found a new place to stay.
No one knows who or where her family is, whether someone will claim her body at the city morgue, or whether she's already been taken to potter's field on Hart Island.
To call the system is to be reminded that you're not real family, that you don't count, even if you don't know where those who do count are, if they exist at all. What are you trying to do, calling? What's your angle? The voices on the phone tell you those things.
What is family?
Jackie, Hunts Point. Courtesy of Chris Arnade.
In memory of Jackie, in honor of her family in Hunts Point: 9/16/91 - 8/8/14
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More Hunts Point Addiction Writing
Chris Arnade's Photos and his Facebook feed