ABANDON ALL HOPE: ON GROWING UP IN A HEROIN SUPERMARKET (GUEST POST BY JONATHAN, AUTHOR OF SHOOTING UP: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LOSS, AND ADDICTION)
When people speak about their favorite teenage hangouts, they tend to mention places scented with adolescence rather than danger: a football pitch washed in orange dusk, a shopping center where time dissolved between escalators, a friend’s bedroom with posters peeling from the walls and music playing low enough to invite confidences.
Mine was a bar called Torre del Campo in San Blas, on the outskirts of Madrid, a neighborhood that functioned, during the height of Spain’s heroin epidemic, as the largest open-air drug supermarket in Europe.
The bar itself would have seemed unremarkable had it not been for its clientele. It had black wrought-iron doors, a striped awning that kept the entrance in permanent shadow, and an interior so dim that from the street it was impossible to tell where the sunlight ended and the darkness began. Music drifted out—Michael Jackson, sometimes the Rolling Stones—and mingled with the smell of stale beer, tobacco, sweat, and something sweeter and more chemical that I later understood but did not then have words for. Dealers leaned in close to whisper. Addicts hovered, restless, waiting for the exchange that would allow their bodies to settle.
This was where my brothers and I spent our Friday nights.
My parents had come to Spain to plant a church among university students. When that dream failed to materialize, they believed God had redirected them toward the yonkis—the heroin addicts who shuffled daily through San Blas in uneven lines toward the Gypsy camp known as Los Focos. And so our family life reorganized itself around the rhythms of addiction. Instead of youth groups or Little League, we handed out tracts beneath streetlamps and invited junkies back to our small apartment for lemonade, cookies, and Bible study.
If you are writing about setting, especially for young readers, you must resist the temptation to treat place as backdrop. Setting is not scenery. It is atmosphere and pressure and theology all at once. It shapes the moral weather in which characters breathe.
San Blas was bordered by open fields, yet it felt claustrophobic. Red-brick apartment blocks pressed close together. Dirt lots collected rubbish and burnt-out cars. Behind our building, syringes lay scattered in the dump, their needles catching the light like small, treacherous stars. Beyond that stood the Gypsy camp—huts patched together from scrap wood and plastic sheeting held down by tyres, prefabricated houses stripped of copper wiring, children peering through glassless windows like watchful eyes.
Spray-painted at the entrance was a line from Dante: Abandon all hope, you who enter.
As a boy, I did not yet know Dante, but I understood warning. Thousands of addicts streamed through that gate each day—men and women whose cheeks had hollowed and whose arms bore the scabs of collapsed veins. They came in the summer heat when the horizon shimmered, and in winter when frost hardened the dirt. They arrived desperate. They left altered.
That was our parish.
What I remember most vividly is the proximity of opposites. Inside our apartment, floor-to-ceiling books lined the walls: theology, poetry, encyclopedias, National Geographic magazines. My father quoted Scripture beneath a print of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, as if Thanksgiving in small-town America hovered protectively over our dinner table. Outside, dealers cut heroin with strychnine. Mothers wept in immaculate living rooms whose lace doilies gleamed with defiance.
Light and darkness were not metaphors in San Blas; they shared a staircase.
As a teenager, I lingered at thresholds. Outside Torre del Campo, I waited while my father stepped into the gloom to speak with men known by names like Veneno and Majara. I learned to read posture, to detect agitation in the twitch of a jaw or the set of shoulders. I watched knives flash in the half-light, heard threats delivered in tones so casual they were almost tender.
Once, a man pressed a gun into my father’s face and said, “You must be brave… or very stupid.”
The sentence hung there, suspended between admiration and contempt. I did not yet know which it was.
A favourite hangout is the place where you absorb the unspoken rules of the world. Mine taught me that despair can look theatrical, even charismatic, and that kindness, when offered without calculation, can appear either holy or naïve depending on the observer’s mood.
In our living room—nicknamed “Hotel Tepper” by my mother and “Grand Central” by a fellow missionary—addicts detoxed on the same sofa where my brothers and I had wrestled hours before. The room smelled one week of sweat and withdrawal, the next of furniture polish and sugar cookies. Men with burn marks on their fingers from cigarettes they had dropped while high now knelt awkwardly in prayer. Some relapsed within days. Others lingered. A few changed.
If you are writing about place, you must allow it to hold contradiction without resolving it too quickly. San Blas was dangerous; it was also intimate. I knew which bar played which song, which addict might joke and which might lash out, which mothers would press coins into my palm when my parents were not looking. Spanish housewives kept apartments so spotless that you could almost forget a son was shooting up in the bedroom down the hall. Cleanliness became an act of resistance.
The neighborhood mothers fascinated me. They gathered around our kitchen table, their voices weaving together stories of sons in prison, daughters walking the streets, children lost to overdoses. Their grief was detailed, patient, repetitive. They recounted football matches from childhood, first communions, the way a boy once laughed before heroin hollowed him out. Setting, I began to understand, is also memory—the accumulation of ordinary moments that gain unbearable weight only in retrospect.
Growing up there meant I never mistook addiction for abstraction. It had a smell, a voice, a nickname, a history. It sometimes sat on my bed and flipped through my Matchbox cars. It sometimes threatened my father. It sometimes wept in our kitchen.
And yet San Blas was also where hope, improbably, improvised itself. A storefront church with folding chairs. A donated guitar. A furniture shop launched by former addicts who sanded and varnished discarded tables until they shone. My father quoted the book of Acts about believers sharing everything in common, and for a moment—just a moment—it seemed plausible that such a thing could happen on Calle Butrón.
I did not choose this hangout. My parents did, convinced that eternity outweighed safety. But the place imprinted itself upon me. It sharpened my curiosity and my caution. It made me attuned to moral tension, to the fragile distance between ruin and redemption.
When I write about San Blas now, I try to render it as it felt then: vast and perilous, yes, but also strangely formative. It was the edge of the city and, in many ways, the edge of childhood. The graffiti at the camp’s entrance warned against hope. My parents insisted hope was the only story worth telling.
Between those two claims, I grew up.
That world—the bar in shadow, the dump glittering with needles, the mothers in spotless apartments, the addicts on our sofa—is the landscape of Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction. It is the story of what happens when a family decides to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell, and their children mistake it, at least for a while, for normal life.
I grew up in San Blas, Madrid in the 1980s, and my parents were Christian missionaries who started a drug rehab among heroin addicts. Almost all had shared needles and were HIV+. They became my older brothers and sisters, and most died of AIDS. Despite my improbable background, I sought solace in books and ended up becoming a Rhodes scholar and going to Oxford. Shooting Up is a story of love and loss, but it is also a love letter to friends, family, and even learning.
San Blas was my teenage hangout. And it was anything but ordinary.
Amazon
"[An] extraordinary coming-of-age story"Spectator"A terrific story . . . You want an evocative account of the missionary experience? Here it is. A bracing social history of Aids in Spain? It does that too. But if it's misery you're after, look elsewhere. This is a memoir full of hope."The Times"Shooting Up is an extraordinary memoir of a unique childhood among heroin addicts during the AIDS epidemic, but it is a universal story of love and loss that is powerfully moving."-- George Stephanopoulos, political commentator and Good Morning America and ABC Sunday News anchor
"Shooting Up is an astonishing work that opens your eyes—and your heart—to a whole new world, one that is as beautiful and inspiring as it is gritty and harrowing. Jonathan Tepper is an extraordinarily gifted writer who has somehow managed to write a memoir that is at once heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and joyous."--Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Golden Gate
“Tepper’s story about addiction, AIDS and his parents’ work with addicts in Spain in the 1990s is a one-off insanely entertaining and wild account. In fact it’s the most riveting memoir I’ve ever read."— Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God
“Jonathan Tepper’s gut-wrenching, inspiring memoir Shooting Up immerses you so deeply in its characters that you feel as if you’re living—and suffering—alongside them. Set amid the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Madrid, this gorgeously crafted coming-of-age story is both luminous and profoundly humane. An unforgettable read that’s impossible to put down.”— Joseph Luzzi, author of My Two Italies and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
“Shooting Up is a powerful testament to the redemptive power of faith, friendship, and love. I couldn’t recommend it more highly; I cried, I laughed, I was changed.”– Thomas Webber, author of Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy
"A remarkable, true-life story about an American family offering salvation in Spain’s slums." "an unadorned coming-of-age memoir rooted in faith and humble acts of service." Our Verdict GET IT-- Kirkus
"Riveting memoir exploring missionary work, addiction, and human kindness... This rousing memoir chronicles Tepper’s upbringing with his missionary parents"-- Booklife
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