Junkies are families, even when heroin is their only love.

Former junkies are passionate replacing their drug of choice with their first love.

As the case with Joe Clifford, writer, editor, rock musician, killer singer and good looks. When I'd go to Amazon to check on my novel DAZED (The Story of a Grunge Rocker), Clifford's book Junkie Love kept popping up so I decided to order. Then I read, and then I messaged him so I could friend him on FB. He wrote back we'd been friends for a year. He and Tom Pitts (Piggyback, Hustle) were reading at Eric Beetner's Noir at the Bar in Venice and so I dragged 1960's model and former Whiskey A-gogo dancer Wendy to a mostly industrial building. We made it inside in time to catch Clifford's and Pitts' readings and knew I had tapped into a vat of talent.

We all had something in common.

The streets, heroin, music and writing, junkies are families.

"Seems like I spent most my life working on the book: the first half screwing everything up and the next half writing it all down," Clifford says about Junkie Love.

San Francisco had what oenophiles call terroir; the theory that the place where grapes that make a great wine are grown should be evident with every swallow. Clifford shows the city long past the Haight Joplin/ Airplane days of willful and self-absorbed young adults making beautiful music together changed into a heroin wasteland. Epochs end, and San Francisco had been forced to rejoin the real world. Jack Kerouac inspired Clifford to head west but the destination became far less important than the journey, sealing Clifford as an impressive diarist of modern times.

"Rock'n'roll is all attitude and sneer. Nothing beats being onstage, cigarette burning, beer warming, set list scrawled on the back of a cocktail napkin, tubes crackling with overdrive. Yet it isn't the shows I miss… No, what I miss are the shows no one ever saw, the songs no one ever heard, those three-day-long, middle-of-the-night drug-fueled cluster fucks, where nothing mattered but the music…I miss the what ifs, the what could have beens and the nights that will never be. The stories that will never be told again," Clifford says in Junkie Love. His San Francisco band is The Wandering Jews. "We just released All The Pretty Things with new drummer Micheal Urbano. We are talking about playing a one-off live show release party. I hate playing live."

After multiple attempts at rehab, scurrying around Hep C and flesh-eating diseases, abscesses and collapsed veins, kicking heroin in jail, Clifford told the counselor, "I used to feel cool, playing in rock'n'roll bands, getting fucked up, being bad, the girls, the city. Being a junkie was being part of a rich tradition. Dee Dee Ramone, Lenny Bruce, Jim Carroll. A Johnny-Cash-middle-finger-fuck-you to the world. I was cocksure and twenty then. I am thirty-one years old now. I feel stupid. Embarrassed, humiliated and stupid." And when asked by a fellow patient in Clifford's final rehab, "Which judge ordered you here?" Clifford answered, "I wasn't ordered. I came in on my own."

So Clifford writes. The one-time philosophy of "You cannot fail if you do not try" doesn't exist now. Nor does the "who knows how tomorrow will turn out or whose bed he'll end up in tonight…"

Blame Kerouac or not, Clifford now has direction.

Clifford chose life. Was it the luck of the draw? Clifford says, "Well, that's the million-dollar question, ain't it?" Survival? "I just knew I had more to say."

"I've always been drawn to the hard-luck case, the down and out, the downtrodden. There is something beautiful in the gutter. Why are we drawn to anything we're drawn to? I'm sure part of it goes back to my childhood. My folks had me when they were very young, and as a result, I ended up spending a lot of time with my grandmother, an alcoholic married to another alcoholic. She was the most loving person I've ever met. But these early memories shaped my being. I remember when the horses came in, it was a good night. And when the rent was late, it wasn't so hot. But good or bad, it's what I saw. Sorta ‘Fairy Tale of New York, y'know?' "

And that's where the noir flare entered Clifford's work and living like a rat in dumps with communal bathrooms and "who wanted to walk down the hall to take a piss? So I pissed in the sinks."

"I try to gather up everything I know, everything that I have learned since I began plugging into God's colorful celebration. I think I might be onto something here… Then it's gone. And I feel myself slipping off the curb, into the cracks."

But survival won out, like it did with Ginger Coyote, holding on to her anchor Punk Globe Magazine. Feeling instinctively she like Clifford was in the middle of a vast good fortune, even if it didn't pay shit. Sometimes, even when the money's bad, it's good.

"My old writing prof John Dufresne used to say, ‘If writing was easy, everyone would do it." Not that it's as hard as say, working in a goddamn paper mill. He meant precisely the opposite. Compared to the grunt of manual labor, or run-of-the-mill soul-sucking factory job," Clifford says, "I mean who wouldn't want to be a writer? But that's the hard part. Because there is no job to apply for: you can't go to craigslist and click ‘Novelist Wanted'. It's a crooked road, and it takes a long, long time to break in. We have bills to pay. Can't just sit around ‘writing'. That's the survival part of being an artist: taking the shit the world dishes out while still moving forward with creating something new."

So why bother when the odds are stacked against you? I was told what a lot of writers are told, maybe not in these words, "If you're competing with Stephen King, you lose."

But Clifford writes he has no other choice. "I know that sounds melodramatic. But it's true. Why else would he/she? For real, you've graduated from writing for you to writing for everyone else; otherwise you're saying I don't give a shit about getting published. Writing for you is about feelings." Locking yourself in a bedroom playing guitar or painting what you'll likely pitch in a dumpster, that's the same thing. "Real writing means worrying about audience…it's not about how YOU feel; it's about connecting to another living, breathing human being. And if it isn't connecting, then you need to do another job." Tough to handle.

Joey Ramone wasn't the singer Aretha Franklin is, but he pulled you in because he connected with each syllable, each phrase, and each wavering note. He made you feel. Van Gogh's brush strokes left more behind than paint. Reservoir Dogs remained in your gut long after the lights came on as does Clifford's writing.

"Maybe I'll go back to San Francisco. Maybe I'll become a real hobo and live out my dream of hopping freighters and eating black swan stew. Maybe the earth is really flat, and I will drive off the edge…I exchange my ticket for one to Albany. I have money left over and time to kill, so I score dope around the corner and shoot up in a pizza shop. I don't feel it."

But Clifford made it back to San Francisco.

And writing and editing.

Clifford says, "David Barber who now runs Thrillers, Killers ‘n' Chaos was the old editor for Flash Fiction Offensive, which is under the Gutter Books umbrella. (My former junkie running partner turned novelist) Tom Pitts and I had been talking about starting a crime ezine of our own. And then fate stepped in and David asked me to help with the ever-mounting slush pile, then decided to take his talents elsewhere. Within like a week of asking me to be assistant editor, I was in charge of the ship.

Once I took over FFO, the first thing I did was bring Tom aboard. It can hit me pretty hard sometimes, Tom and my relationship. I mean, we used to literally be criminals, scum-of-the-earth types, and now we work side by side reading subs, publishing novels, talking marketing and plotting technique. Life is some trippy shit."

Clifford's future reads well.

Editing for Gutter Books brings a very eclectic mix, with topics ranging from PIs and masturbation to FBI procedurals, to mob and chess, and the true story of the world's first terrorist rock band. Oceanview Publishing brings Clifford's Lamentation this October which Publisher's Weekly describes as "set against the backdrop of a bitter New Hampshire winter, where one brother's loyal determination to clear the other of murder uncovers a well-kept, small-town secret that costs him the very person he's trying to save."

Trouble in the Heartland are crime stories inspired by the song titles of Bruce Springsteen (and signed off by The Boss himself). Authors who contributed are Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), James Grady (Six Days of The Condor), James R. Tuck, Lynne Barrett, Todd Robinson and many more. From Gutter Books, partial proceeds go to aid veterans with the Bob Woodruff Foundation.

Agent Liz Kracht is shopping Clifford's hybrid thriller and (ten cent grad school word coming up) bildungsroman, Skunk Train. It's the story of two teens on the run with stolen pot down the coast of CA. Think True Romance meets, well, Nick Sparks. "It's the closest thing I've written to Junkie Love."

Which brings Clifford full circle, back to the embryo of living, but shit happens.

Like Clifford says in Junkie Love, the book that put him on track, "You are not William Burroughs, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if Kurt Cobain was slumped over in an alleyway in Seattle the day Bleach came out. There is no junkie chic. This is not SoHo, and you are not Sid Vicious. You are not a drugstore cowboy, and you are not spotting trains. You are not part of anything—no underground sect, no counter-culture movement, no music scene, nothing. You have just been released from jail and are walking down Mission Street, alternating between taking a hit off a cigarette and puking, looking for coins on the ground so you can catch a bus as you shit yourself."

Sometimes, writing is the only way out of a mess.

http://www.joeclifford.com/