Jack Black’s Doctor Judas: Opium
Jack Black was a hophead but it wasn’t for kicks that he took up the opium pipe, though when he was perfectly honest with himself, and that was plenty of the time, he would freely admit that he was predisposed.
After a long night of concentration soft stepping the second story of a sleeping citizen Jack said the only thing that helped him come all the way back down after the tortured silence of the job was the deep breath and pleasant dreams proffered by a draw upon a pill of opium.
Years later, in the long dark of the San Francisco jail, first on Broadway and then, after the 1906 earthquake wrecked it, in the Ingleside city jail, Black was known as the king of hop and as convict commerce he dealt in it and fairly ruled his barred roost, keeping himself supplied as well (eating a pill instead of smoking).
Jack Black wrote later that he never regretted a thing, not jail, not the life of an addict. He put it all down to learning something new, what he had to know to go on purposefully surviving. Even so, by the close of the year 1911, after more than half a dozen lost years in jail, he was tired and sick as well. He thought he would die anyway but he wanted to die on the outside, not behind bars once and for all. He planned an escape.
Very early in January of 1912, with the help of a trusted confederate on the outside (whose name Jack never, ever gave up, in life or in print; he is the third, unnamed, dedicatee listed in You Can’t Win), Jack beat the jail. He was so weak by then that the friend had to lift him bodily through a sawn barred window and half carry him to an “owl car” (night service) that took them over to Oakland.
Because Black was something of a known figure in the city jail, an uproar immediately ensued upon the discovery of his escape. Jack wrote later that the newspapers reported a statewide search was on for him, and including a big reward, and his Bertillon card—identifying specific measurements of Black’s precise physical frame (this was in the days before fingerprinting intimately ID’d a man)—made its way all over the country.
His friend gave him what money he could and a big gun. Jack had his opium, of course, but before he took off the friend warned him off it, and for good; “it’ll make a bum of you in the end,” he said. Jack admitted the truth of it but it made no difference. He held on to his stuff. The hop was “companion and friend and rest and peace to me.” He’d been using it regular for nigh on ten years. With his habit intact he soon lit out for Vancouver, Canada, his old stomping grounds, knowing he had to escape the United States if he had any chance at all.
He found a room and from that moment Jack began to cure himself of the hop habit. He decided finally it had to be done. Dr. Judas Opium, he called it, “the drug that kisses and betrays.” The worst hold of the hop was the mental hold. Before a cure can begin to take, a man must desire to be cured. Jack believed he could cure himself because he wanted to be cured, it was as simple as that for him. He made it that way. He wanted to be cured because he had no other choice if he wanted to remain on the outside. He had made up his mind.
It took him six months to get his daily dose down to nothing. In that time he climbed a lot of walls. He drank wine and whiskey and absinthe. He lost a lot of sleep and spent the nights walking till it tired him out and he could fall down for a couple of hours.
The while he was still the fugitive, a hunted man. What’s as painfully nerve-racking as being a dope-kicking con on the run? Finally, letting up on the iron will a mite, and out of a wish for some kind of human connection, now and then he allowed himself into the light of day. Dodging the law was second nature to him but he was wary just the same. No one, not a copper, not a friend, saw him because he always saw them first. Finally he found a little city park and permitted himself to relax in the sunshine for a short time each day. He needed the rest, the mental relaxation, and he felt himself get a little stronger every day. He began to notice the grass was green again.
He met a woman named Anna who kept a room where she’d frequently invite some of the local yeggs to relax and have a big meal, some conversation. He was fond of Anna, she was a resourceful hooker and thief, but she also kept a man, an old lover, who was the worst sort and after Jack returned her a favor (he always returned a favor) he left them alone because he didnt trust the man. He admired the heck out of Anna, though; “she was pure grit all the way through,” he said. When he felt strong enough to make it again on his own he left Vancouver and headed east for Winnipeg over the Canadian Pacific Railway. He relaxed his attitude of hate and revenge that had kept him going for so long but, even so, he recognized he was a criminal lifer and that eventually he’d likely meet a violent end either on the road or in a shoot-out with laws; he vowed never to let a copper take him alive.
He doubled back west toward Edmonton. In the town of Strathcona (presently a part of the metropolis of Edmonton) he stopped over for a rest up. He found a boardinghouse and it was here by some strange chance he saw Salt Chunk Mary, an old friend and confidante of the road and the mother of the Johnson Family, for the last time. He greeted her with genuine cheer but she only gave him a look. That careful, level stare. “You are mistaken; you dont know me.” Jack understood immediately. He allowed her to pass on by. He admired above all others her strength of character and I wonder if right then she entered Black’s sturdy mythic past, a past he would not only immortalize in You Can’t Win but embellish in, remarkably enough, a stage musical based on her life. That was a long, improbable future from now.
It was summertime, and even way up north the light was grand, and he was nearing the end of his kicking opium. He wanted to lie low and decide what to do next. One morning while loafing at a hotel bar he saw four plainclothes eyeballing him. “There he is now.” When they approached him with evil intent he pulled his pistol intending to shoot or be shot. They pounced on his good hand before he could fire, then knocked him cold. When he awoke in jail next morn he discovered to his resigned surprise that they were not cops but railroad bulls and, furthermore, that they had mistaken him for someone else. He shook his head at his luck as he knew too well this thing was far from over. These people in this jurisdiction did not know who he was but yet he had some explaining to do in any case. That damned big pistol.
Jack Black’s power of speech was one of his most remarkable talents. A disguised lifetime on the road and underground perforce had set his mind to the act of acting, sometimes rehearsed, oftentimes on the spot. In his day in court on the pistol charge he had come up with a story to tell, and he told it but good. “Judge,” he says, “I never got into trouble like this before.” He proceeded to tell a tall tale of woe—his family would be disgraced, his sister’s suitor would abandon her, his Chicago firm would surely fire him, and his health was none too good, just look at me—as soft soap to the court. “For God’s sake let me go. I’ll get on a train and go back to my people and never drink another drop as long as I live.” The judge finally says stop, stop. A court reporter was in tears. He was fined five dollars, the gun was confiscated, and he was let go.
Well sir he did get a train, back east once more, just to get out of town as he’d made so well known. He had grown a beard by way of disguise—it was gray, he said, though he was just forty—but not long after returning to the Winnipeg area he was obliged to shave it off fearing a man he’d had some little trouble with had gotten too good a look at him. Thus he was clean shaven and in fair health, much as he had been when he left jail two seasons ago, when he was arrested once more, back yet again in Alberta, in the town of Lethbridge, for unstated reasons (why the 800-mile trip there and then back so frequently? Jack doesn’t say…), this time with a group of men accused of pickpocketing fairgoers. And this time he said his name was Harry Kline.
Jack didnt try to escape, he was pistol-less anyhow, and he knew he wasn’t the man the police wanted then. But while he was in lockup, in the Royal Mounties’ barracks, to be precise, expecting to be released, an enterprising Mountie, after only eight days (Jack said flatly that the RMP couldnt hold a candle to the Texas Rangers, in his experience), discovered that the prisoner here now looked a good deal like this here photograph of the man Black hanging on the barracks wall. The beans were spilled. Here was Jack Black, a wanted man.
Jack still believed he had nothing to fear. Here he was in Canada, he was Canadian by birth, and he understood that he could not legally be extradited to America with no untried charges against him in Canada. He made this clear to his jailers in the event. On the record. He knew the authorities at the Alberta Provincial jail where he was now being held understood but they kept him under strict lock and key all the same. Nothing whatever was said to him but he began to wonder if the state of California was on its way to him at last.
The warden at the Alberta Provincial was a progressive sort. He allowed the prisoners to work out of doors. They dug potatoes in the fine soil. They had three meals a day, clean clothes, linen on the beds. One thing that was missing, though, was tobacco, not allowed. Jack said he “suffered for a smoke as much as I ever suffered for a jolt of hop.” He needed it like medicine and one day he noticed some crumbs of tobacco at the back of his cell left by a previous inmate who’d scored a sack of Bull Durham. He spent a morning gathering flakes of the stuff with a pin, took a leaf from a magazine, and rolled a thin cig about the size of a match. Brother, it was heaven on earth. “I never expect to get hold of anything better than those two or three whiffs of tobacco smoke.”
Jack Black held off succumbing to the plaintive call of opium but he could not escape the long, long arm of California law for in this he was right as Canadian cold rain: his American jailer was on the way to Alberta sounding his name again.
***
Cocteau said, “Opium knows how to wait.” Jack rarely if ever spoke of his opium life in public after writing his storied kick (first for the newspapers then in his book) but we’ll never know what it meant to him down the years and through all his late success in the straight world. Having known the life of the poppy it never leaves one, it is said. An archetypal loner Jack was well known to friends as a man who refused to be a burden to anyone and when he became sick again in early 1932 who would blame him for turning one more time to the relief he’d understood so well once upon a time in poppyland.
By 1930 or so, although it had been decades since the U.S. laws had come down hard on opiate users, still it would not have been difficult to procure opium, certainly not by an old hand like Black, who was a longtime schooled habitue of many a city’s Chinatown, and welcome. Perhaps the temporary strength gained from it then lent him the melancholy courage to quietly leave New York, this time for good, after the unsuccessful close of his Broadway play and all the frequently weary toil and effort he put into its production, with a plan to find a solitary place in which to end his days without bother and fuss, out of the spotlight again at last, alone and unknown, which was his nature after all.
by Donald Kennison