Everybody Used to Be Something , by Marc Dion

When Philip Seymour Hoffman, light of the American theater, died, apparently of a heroin overdose, I had to ask somebody who he was. I don't go to the movies much.

But, on my short drive to work that morning, talk radio provided me with an ignorantly "serious" discussion of his death. I started counting and I think I got to 14 before some caller said, "He had it all and he threw it all away on drugs."

You betcha.

He used to be something. Like a girl I knew who died from a heroin overdose 15 years ago. She used to work in a 7-Eleven. She was a 7-Eleven clerk and she threw it all away, the $9-an-hour-paycheck, the two kids by two guys, the food stamps, all of it. It was a damn tragic waste, since the world needs people to tell you the small coffee is $1.06, thank you.

And another guy I knew, died of an overdose, found, as they must be if the story's any good, with the needle still hanging out of his arm. He was a high school graduate, a fairly rare thing in his family. He worked in an auto parts store for a while but he started stealing the parts and selling them half price on the street, so he got fired. They found him in a city park, if I remember.

And I wrote a newspaper story about a woman who threw away her career as a hair dresser for heroin, did a jolt in rehab, did fine for six weeks, relapsed, bought something she though was heroin. It wasn't heroin. It killed her. I interviewed her daughter.

They are a people unto themselves, the junkies, living day-to-day. They're so happy when they buy, so happy when they're high. So happy at the moment of collision, so mumblingly, smilingly, sleepily happy as it takes hold.

I've seen them on the streets blocks from my house, standing, high, bent forward from the waist, hair touching the sidewalk, doubled over. No sober man can stand up that way. But for the junkie, it's an easy thing, done with the grace of a swan's neck bending.

They're a nation, serving at the same Mass, scuffling and lying and prostituting for the same God.

Philip Seymour Hoffman. The name's a junkie joke. What junkie can afford three names, can even remember three names? Better follow what we do in my urban area instead — snatch the first name and add "the junkie." You know, "Phil the junkie," as distinguished from the Phil you know who drives a truck.

"Naah", I say to a friend. "Not Phil the truck driver, Phil the junkie."

"Oh, yeah," the guy says. "I know Phil. Freakin' junkie."

Everybody used to be something, back before. But before is a long way back, if you know what I mean.

"Good thing about junkies is they die young," a cop once said to me. "Bad thing is, we never run out of 'em."

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Marc Munroe Dion's books, "Between Wealth and Welfare" and "Mill River Smoke" are available for Nook and Kindle and are now on amazon.com .