DOS & DON'TS

You wouldn't believe the kind of crazy shit we've been getting into every night since we became friends with Robbie. We're just worried someone's going to hit him in the head again and set everything back to normal. Comments/Enlarge | See all

Suicide gets better with age (the band). Comments/Enlarge | See all

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IN THE MAGAZINE


After this interview I went and got the same tattoo as my biological dad. It's the Zig Zag man.

IN THE BLOOD

Dealing With Dad's Junk

My father liked heroin. A lot. He liked it so much that I guess one day he went out for a pack of smokes or something and never came back. I swore I would never get into heroin. Until I got into it. A lot.

I’m better now and I’m pretty sure he’s better too, but then again he lives in Yellville (I didn’t make that up), Arkansas and we’ve barely spoken in ten years. So I called him up.

VICE: Hi, it’s your son. Listen, I was wondering, who do you love more—me or heroin?

Well, I’ve got to be honest with you. A lot of the times the drugs took precedence. Let’s just say that at times I loved the drugs more.

How did you start using?

With marijuana, when my brother came back from Vietnam. Then, from the first time I got high, I was constantly smoking pot. I didn’t use heroin until I was 16, but I did a lot of LSD and diet pills. Dexedrine, double-scored X’s, Christmas trees, Apexes... you know.

Not really. I only ever heard of Dexedrine.

You’d really get a good high off of them. So I did them, and I did acid, and I smoked a lot of pot. But yeah, I started snorting heroin at 16, moved onto shooting, and before I knew it I had a $200 a day habit.

How did you support that?

Armed robberies. I got busted for robbing a dry cleaner. I had done other places, but that’s when I went to jail the first time. It was my dad’s gun. I broke into his gun cabinet—took the screws out of the hinges. I was doing stick ups like that. I was even sticking dealers up.

I did dope the first time totally by accident, thinking it was coke. Four years later I was holed up in a room with sheets over the windows, shooting up all day.

I had really nice reusable glass works for a long time. In a case and everything—real fancy.

That sounds great. Does it bum you out that I was getting high?

You know, I’m actually kind of glad that we have that common ground now.

JESSE PEARSON

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IN THE BLOOD

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