“Give Them to Anyone Who Looks Like a Heroin Addict"
An exclusive extract from Jonathan Tepper's SHOOTING UP - out today!
We’re honored to share the first chapter of Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction, published today in the US by Infinite Books.
Described as “extraordinary” and “powerfully moving” by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, this is Jonathan’s story of growing up in the shadows of Madrid’s most notorious drug slum, where his missionary parents decided to plant a church among heroin addicts.
While other kids play soccer, Jonathan befriends bank robbers and former prostitutes. His heroes are guys like Raúl and Jambri, charismatic ex-addicts rebuilding their lives through the drug rehabilitation center Jonathan’s parents helped found.
Jonathan writes with unflinching honesty about the magnetic pull of the streets, the seductive danger of heroin, and the complicated love between broken people healing together. It’s raw, it’s hopeful, and it’s unlike anything we’ve read.
We think you’ll feel the same. Here’s chapter one.
CHUTANDO
Shooting Up
We were on the lookout for yonkis. My brothers and I shuffled our piles of pamphlets, hoping to get rid of them.
My father had been very clear. Before we headed out from our apartment, he called the family together in the living room, and we put our toy soldiers aside. Dad took a small mountain of religious tracts in his hands. He divided it into small piles, and we folded them neatly. It took forever, and we started aligning the edges one by one, but we soon learned to fold them ten by ten by pushing all our weight onto them. They covered our coffee table, and when we were done, the pile rose thicker than a phone book.
“Give them to anyone who looks like a heroin addict. Don’t come back empty handed,” he told us. “You will get an ice cream of whatever flavor you want if you do.”
I would definitely have a chocolate ice cream.
“Do you hear me, Jonathan?”
I nodded.
Dad prayed to bless our endeavor, and we headed out to find junkies.
One of the best places to find the addicts was by the Metro near Parque El Paraíso. Little Timothy, who was only two, played at my mother’s feet, as she stood by my father. David, Peter, and I moved through the sand and patches of green in El Paraíso, glancing from side to side for anyone who might look like a yonki. I had watched the junkies shoot up near our apartment, so it wouldn’t be hard to recognize them.
My older brother, David, took off, determined to give everyone a copy of the pamphlet. He sprinted in the distance and chased a frightened Spanish kid as he forced the tract into his hand. In his excitement, David forgot the pamphlets were only for junkies. My younger brother Peter stayed close to me.
The pamphlet said VEN, which means “Come” in Spanish. Our phone number appeared on the back, if they wanted to call us and get off drugs. It served as an unusual invitation to our home.
Under the headline, “I AM DRUGS,” a smiling skeleton reached out his claw-like fingers toward the reader as he introduced himself:
It’s me who in the beginning makes you live beyond the present world full of problems. But with time I am the very thing you cannot live without. After you have tried me, you’re mine for the rest of your life.
I am destroying your life in every area—physically, morally, and spiritually. It’s me who has destroyed your family. It’s me that caused you to go to prison.
I have you trapped.
You are in love with me. There is nothing in the world that can break our love affair.
The skeleton scared me a little; that was the point.
I gave my first pamphlet to a young man drinking a litrona of beer and eating sunflower seeds. He examined the paper and mouthed the words as he read them.
By the grass I spotted a man leaning against a park bench. His skull tilted to one side, his eyes staring into nowhere. His hair appeared oily and matted with dirt. I squatted and pushed the piece of paper into his hand, but he did not respond. I slid it into his shirt pocket.
“Keep it. It’s got a phone number. Dial it if you want to get off drugs,” I said, my small voice barely rising above a whisper.
He looked up, his eyelids moving as if time proceeded more slowly for him than for me. I stared at him, and he stared back at me.
“You’re a guiri. You look Swedish but sound Mexican.”
“I’m not Swedish. I’m American. My parents are missionaries.”
“If I were you, I’d lose that fucking accent.”
I was only seven, and I had spent almost all my life speaking Spanish the wrong way.
I nodded.
“You’ve got the pamphlet. Don’t lose it, OK?”
Having escaped that encounter, I walked further ahead and found two men lying on a patch of grass. They were smoking cigarettes, but their sunken cheeks and rotting teeth told me they were junkies.
One man used the hollow of the bottoms of Coke cans to cook heroin powder with lemon juice before he drew it into the syringe. He shot up and blood speckled the syringe, and then he passed on the needle. My heart thumped as I approached. When they finished, they lay back, their eyes drifting into a hollow stare before closing and shutting out the world around them.
But I persisted, tapping the first guy on the shoulder and offering him a pamphlet.
“Déjame en paz, chaval, o te rajo.”—Leave me alone, kid, or I’ll slit you.
I smiled nervously and backed away, relieved they did not get up to follow me.
Most of the addicts, though, took the pamphlets and put them in their pocket without saying a word. Others read the pamphlets as they drifted away. I hoped we would see them again.
As I walked up to yonkis, I studied them from a distance and learned to read their moods. Were they on edge and out to get money to buy drugs? Were they already high? My father said addicts might hurt each other, but they’d leave us alone. Bullies who bark are scared animals who almost never bite, he said.
David, Peter, and I obeyed with unquestioning enthusiasm. Perhaps it was my parents’ belief that God Himself would protect us that gave my brothers and me safe passage. Maybe it was the innocence of childhood. We were too small, too blond, and too odd to be a threat to anyone.
I stepped among the broken syringes, their needles glistening before me. They were everywhere in San Blas. I had seen them in the dump behind our apartment and by the buildings down the street. They blanketed the entrance to the Gypsy camp. The junkies scavenged for used syringes and rebuilt them, mixing a needle from one and the body of another if the blood inside had not dried. Then they shared them.
As the sun set, the distant orange glow of cigarette ends guided me like faint beacons. My pile was thinning out, and one by one I gave out the leaflets until none remained.
We returned home empty handed. No leaflets. But no addicts either. That was OK, though. My father told us we had planted seeds in men’s hearts. Soon the harvest time would come.
My father was happy. I was too as I licked the chocolate ice cream.
When we arrived in Madrid, my three brothers and I—all blond-haired, blue-eyed American boys—did not look at all like the Spaniards around us. We were the only foreigners I knew in the neighborhood.
We had gone from being Christian missionaries in Mexico to missionaries in Spain. I had lived almost all my life abroad, as we marched wherever God ordered. We were to be His shining witnesses, following His call to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth. Madrid wasn’t a jungle in Africa, but our neighborhood of San Blas might as well have been the edge of the world.
The umbilical cord back to our homeland was a microscopic black-and-white TV that we had to crowd around to watch. My parents thought television corrupted, not only morally, but intellectually. They relented and bought one for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Spain only had two TV channels, but they showed Carl Lewis win his gold medals in track and field, and Michael Jordan crush the Spaniards 96–65 in the basketball final.
When America won, we danced and chanted, “USA, USA, USA!”
“Keep your voices down!” my mother scolded. “Our neighbors won’t be happy tonight.”
It wasn’t only on the field and court that we beheld America’s might. We felt it too when the F-16s streaked across the sky toward the NATO airbase in Torrejón. We had never visited, but the rumor was you could buy A&W Root Beer and M&Ms at the commissary. And I connected with American culture when I coaxed the radio dial. The Armed Forces Network station played Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. But America remained far away: a place to which we only retreated on our missionary furlough every four years. Meanwhile, my mother’s beautiful, handwritten letters to America took weeks to arrive, and transatlantic phone calls were a rare, expensive treat. We were adrift, on our own.
Millions of Americans lived scattered abroad, and Dad said we could be proud Americans and at home anywhere in the world. American expats had a long tradition going back to Thomas Jefferson and President John Quincy Adams, who spoke eight languages. Great writers like Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot had lived in other countries. Some Americans served in the armed forces, while others went to distant lands with Coca-Cola or the Peace Corps, and some were even missionary kids like me. Americans spread out, sprinkled about like specks of light in the night sky, brightening the world.
Our walls at home were sparse, even monastic. Not monastic like we were Catholics, because we were Protestants, even though my parents said God loved Catholics too. My father said many only went to church for the photographs of the first communion. The only things that adorned the walls by our dinner table in San Blas were small plaques and two posters—nothing fancy and not even framed, because it was the message that counted.
In the entrance, a small plaque hung with a quote from C. T. Studd, the founder of our mission: “Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop, within a yard of hell.”
In the room, on one side hung Freedom from Want, a Norman Rockwell print of a perfect American family eating Thanksgiving dinner. America was a land we had left behind. The precision of the painting made it look like a photo. It reminded me of home, even though as a missionary kid, I never had a home—not that I particularly minded. In the picture the grandparents looked like my mom’s parents back in the US, just a little shorter and chubbier. Or I may have been confusing things; my ideas of the place came from faded family photos and Time magazine covers.
On the other wall was a poster of a shepherd clinging to the edge of a cliff, his arm outstretched toward his lost sheep. An eagle swooped in the distance to seize the sheep with its sharp, giant claws. The way it looked to me, the shepherd was about to fall into the ravine with his sheep. He was barely holding on. Dad said the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. I just hoped he made it back up.
The images overlooked our family meals.
Dad quoted the Bible, as usual, “Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it?”
He said that’s what missionaries do, leaving behind the flock in America in search for the lost sheep. “Pastor” meant “shepherd” in Latin, after all...
We didn’t have a church yet. In fact, we didn’t have any sheep. We would have to find them. That was our mission.
Dad even placed The Great Commission with our family photo above his desk. It said, “Elliott and Mary Tepper, missionaries to Spain,” and below that, Mark 16:15: “And He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’” He had copies printed so American churchgoers could hang it on their refrigerators and wouldn’t forget we existed as the years passed.
Dad explained to us in our usual morning devotional—our interminable daily Bible reading and prayer session—that God loves sinners, and we would bring them to Him. “I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.”
I thought Dad said that because he’d been a sinner and God saved him like the little sheep. Even though he grew up Jewish in Long Island, he found Jesus after doing LSD at Harvard Business School. Make money, not war, and avoid the draft, his friends said, but he yearned for something else. That was when he and the hippies used mescaline and listened to Dylan and Baez. Their words lit the steps on the path to truth. He lived on a commune, but not a seedy one, he said, more like one for people from Harvard and MIT. That was before he met God.
Dad’s arms grew hard from college wrestling, and he only spanked us with a reluctant resolve when we did not do exactly as he and Mom said. He was a clown who could walk up three flights of stairs doing handstands, do thirty one-handed push-ups, and wrestled my brothers and me on the carpet all at once until we were sweaty and stinky before dinner, which Mom did not like. But he was soft too. Words tugged at his soul, and he cried at the dinner table when he read stories to us.
“My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed.” That’s what Théoden said in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings before he died. And it made my father sad.
My father told us we needed to be wise and brave, but above all noble like Théoden: “True nobility is in our hearts.”
Dad had grand visions of rescuing the lost sheep. He said he saw things beyond the veil that others did not. He told us at morning devotionals that when he died, we must put the words of Genesis 37:19 on his tombstone: “Look, here comes the dreamer.”
We would find the sheep, he reassured us, even if I couldn’t see them yet.
My mother didn’t need to be rescued by God. She had known Him since she was a young girl in Sunday school. If she hadn’t been born a Southern Baptist in Wilmington, North Carolina, she would have been a grand dame with a portrait in a museum. She stood tall and serene and always looked at ease. She spoke with no Southern accent like her parents, and when she talked in Spanish, she did so without fault. Even though she had never been outside of the US before becoming a missionary, she had poise, never looked out of place, and always had the right thing to say.
My mother was the Sancho Panza to Dad’s quixotic dreams and the only one who could bend his plans and moderate his visions. Although she was tall and he was shorter, which was not like in my Don Quixote comic book. She was the one we went to if Dad wanted to spank us. She read my thoughts and looked after my brothers and me, yet not once did I wonder or ask how she felt about caring for four boys and a dreamer. She held little Timothy and smiled when we said goodbye to her parents in Wilmington, but she turned away to hide her tears and follow my father’s visions into the distant unknown.
My mother packed our bags neatly and tightly; she fitted everything into the smallest number of suitcases possible. She had labeled and ordered everything. My father may have been the ringleader of the Tepper circus, but my mother kept the show on the road.
My aunt said they married first and fell in love later. They had a shared mission when they married, but had to figure out how to live with each other.
Mom and Dad were on a mission. Everything else, they told us, pales in the light of eternity. We had to abandon it all for the sake of the call.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “Everything that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” That was why we had few earthly belongings.
Next to our dinner table sat a bookcase Dad had made by hand from cheap wood to house our World Book encyclopedias and National Geographic magazines. David was ten and had read them all. He remembered how many pages were in each volume, and he knew which numbers were primes and therefore more beautiful. But I didn’t see what he saw in numbers. I advanced more slowly as my curiosity flitted back and forth like a butterfly alighting on pages. I lingered at the letter S, lost somewhere between Somalia and Suriname.
The encyclopedias were my favorite things in the world, even more than my green World War II toy soldiers and Matchbox cars. I burned with desire to know everything, and in the National Geographics and encyclopedias, it was mine for the taking.
If your parents are engineers, plumbers, or lawyers, it doesn’t matter one bit to your life, but if your parents are missionaries, it changes everything. You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life. They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.
I couldn’t decide almost anything about my life, but with my books and encyclopedias, my mind was free to roam where it wanted. Books could fit in any backpack, yet they contained entire worlds. They were my magic carpet to change reality and take me wherever I wanted.
Books filled every corner of our small apartment. My parents had made a study with bookcases that lined the walls from the floor to the ceiling, as my father had when he was growing up. Books were stacked randomly in piles on the carpet like stalagmites. My parents said books had the power to transport and transform you.
David shared a room with Timmy, and I bunked with Peter, who was only one year, two months, and one day younger than me. But my parents’ books had a room all to themselves.
Theology, history, and poetry books were the only thing we brought with us to Spain. Forget Betty Crocker cake mixes, American candy, and other things that useless missionaries bring.
“They’ll never cut it on the mission field,” my father said of the weak missionaries who had heard God’s call but were not prepared to pay the price. “They’re chocolate soldiers who will melt when they face the heat.”
No. Real missionaries were like the Olympic gold medalist Eric Liddell. He was our hero, and when we ran, we held our heads high just as he did. Like me, Liddell grew up in a missionary family. The film Chariots of Fire ends with the words: “Eric Liddell, missionary, died in occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland mourned.” He taught classes to the children in the Japanese internment camp until his dying day.
My parents wanted to start a church among university students—the sort of people who liked books and learning as much as we did, the sort of people you could have conversations with and argue with at the dinner table late into the night.
That was how my father visited universities in Madrid in search of converts, but he returned home downcast and empty handed. He shut the front door, took off his tweed jacket, made a cup of tea, and retreated to his study to read the Bible and pray. The students did not want eternal salvation, even if it was free.
Every day he ventured out to the universities to speak to students about Jesus, and every day he returned alone. This continued for months, but their response was always the same. I felt sorry for him that his job was not easier.
“Their hearts are hard,” Dad said.
My father strained a smile and promised that soon God would send us sheep, but he retreated to the study where his cups of tea and small lithographs of Cambridge University consoled him. They reminded him of the year he spent studying economics at Selwyn College and how he stepped into its chapel and heard the voice of God when the choir sang. But like the university students in Madrid, he did not heed the call the first time God came to him. That only happened later after Harvard Business School when he had a vision of heaven and hell, and God told him to give his life to Him. My father obeyed and threw himself through a storefront window close to Harvard Yard.
The doctors who sewed him up thought it was LSD. My father said it was God.
His story sounded weird even to me. “Why did God make you jump through a window?” I asked.
“Milton and Dante had visions of heaven and hell. The Apostle Paul’s vision on the way to Damascus was strange, but Paul changed the world. Sometimes you’ve got to be a little strange to change the world.”
Dad stared off into the distance, enraptured in thought. He played Joan Baez’s “Forever Young” again. I pulled at his arm and twirled the hair on his forearms into curls to get his attention, but he put his finger to his lips. The music, he told me, was from a time when righteousness, truth, and beauty mattered. Today, no one cared. But we would bring light to the lost.
Lovely