Hey Mr. DJ

Frontdesk by David Waggoner

For more than twenty-five years, HIV has spread across the globe, taking with it close to thirty million lives and creating twelve million orphans in Africa alone. Now a second, no longer invisible, scourge is destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who use a drug known by various monikers: Debbie, Tina, Chrissy, and other names that you wouldn’t find in any baby-naming book—such as space food, crank, laundry detergent, coffee, cookies, or killer. Going by nicknames specific to certain geographic areas of North America, crystal meth is called 222 (Chicago), Batu (Hawaii), CR (California’s Central Valley), Horse Mumpy (Tampa), Lost Weekend (San Francisco), Redneck Heroin (Atlanta), Sprung (Mississippi), and so on. What makes this not-so-new drug so terrible (and perhaps for some so desirable) is how it changes—sometimes forever—an individual’s ability to think, create, love and do anything close to having safe and protected sex.

In this month’s cover story, Paul E. Pratt interviews one of the world’s greatest music impresarios and über-DJs—Junior Vasquez, who became so involved in his crystal meth-addiction, that in his own bone-chilling words about his parents’ deaths, “I don’t even remember burying them.” The drug took away so much from his life. It stunted his creative abilities; it made him “unattached to everything, and my music reflected that.”

In order for one’s life to be so distorted and destroyed, it seems that the DJ wasn’t listening to even his own friends and colleagues in the music business. He was spinning out of control. For someone who was the spin-meister for some of the biggest club hits of the nineties and beyond (Madonna, Beyoncé, and Mariah to name just a few superstars he’s worked with), Vasquez’s music may have been the sound heard at hundreds of AIDS benefits and thousands of high-profile clubs around the world, but he wasn’t capable of recognizing his own crystal meth dilemma. Until he had a seizure due to the use of crystal. That’s when he heard a wake-up call to seek sobriety.

In the case of Junior Vasquez his use of the drug was motivated by nonstop work (rather than nonstop sex). When combined with sex, however, HIV infection is bound to happen to someone inviting the out-of-bounds partying associated with the use of meth. Cheap, widely available, and often glorified for its use (as Junior Vasquez attests), methamphetamine threatens to unravel years of safer sex education, AIDS prevention, and condom use, while refueling an epidemic already having made a comeback among this country’s young gay men. First there was barebacking, and now there is meth. Together they can only spell trouble for those who ignore the latest trend in escalating infection rates.

Now in recovery, Junior Vasquez is not afraid to share with A&U his story about his process of getting back on track. He recognizes how difficult it is for today’s youth to feel when so much of contemporary life seems unfocused, unfeeling, and filled with easy ways to escape reality. Tweaking is living life without feeling. It’s like reading a poem or short story and sensing only the shapes of the words on the page but not the shapes of the emotions within. Junior Vasquez’s story, like the ones that make up our annual Summer Reading feature, is much needed in the fight against AIDS because it is about “rediscovering” the simple things in life—relationships, music, and especially feelings. What better way to start the summer than to recover those feelings, and all they can teach us, in a world that seems intent on teaching us not to care.

July 2006