cover image Tales from the Geronimo: My Seduction by Junk and Desert Dreams

Tales from the Geronimo: My Seduction by Junk and Desert Dreams

Scott Frank. Grove/Atlantic, $20 (255pp) ISBN 978-0-8021-1572-0

``Why suffer?'' asks Scott Frank, a Tucson writer and musician, unrepentantly recalling how his 1974 slide into heroin addiction helped salve his youthful pain over his mother's suicide. If his self-analysis seems sketchy, as is his self-righteous attack on drug policies, this meditative, ironic memoir summons up potent images from the shadow world of drug addiction. After moving into the once-romantic, low-rent Geronimo Hotel in his native Tucson, Frank linked up with fellow dabblers and junkies who introduced him to a subculture of dealers, users and thieves-an increasingly constricted circle of outlaw paranoia. With calm precision, Frank reconstructs the junkie's rituals of search, fix and bliss, even the moment when he felt addiction grip his body chemistry. He suffered his own corporeal horrors and managed a cross-border smuggling deal, but not until a botched burglary left him bloodied did he swallow his pride and ask his well-connected dad to get him into rehab. The Geronimo has now been yuppified; Frank retains a stubborn pride in its ghost stories. (June)