Blueschild Baby

Well, that's what I remember as the author's name, to this novel of heroin addiction. I read it in the early '70's and have been looking for a copy for nearly that long. I remember the cover of a dog-earred paperback with the picture of a young man with a star-spangled bandana tied around his head. A first person account of a young African-American's dive into the murky sump of living the junkie life. Unlike the more current vogue of wealthy screenwriters or models and musicians succumbing to the wiles of the trendy, but evil dragon, this is the tale of a good kid from the ghetto who simply is sucked into an environmental hazard. Even after seeing family and friends die, if all your peers are doing it, are you different enough to resist? Georgie wasn't. Then he tried. Nearly thirty years later the book was good enough to make me wonder if he succeeded then and is still.

Know how the good ol' days are only good because these days have gotten so bad? Crack cocaine, car jacking and drive-by shooting all make marijuana, stolen hub caps (remember hub caps they went the way of vinyl and the eight track) and knife fights look like a spirited day with the Quakers. Blueschild Baby brings you back to the good ol' on-the-block neighborhood days when the local winos (todays homeless) were your good friends who would encourage you to do something with your life so you wouldn't end up like them, and you respected them and listened to them because of their obvious example. Remember the bad kids on the block who didn't beat you up because they knew you were not one of them, and they too, with a distant glance, encouraged you to get out of the neighborhood and not become a familiar fixture like an old graffitied lamp post that never went anywhere? Remember how mysterious that life seemed and how you always wondered what would have happened to you if you had travelled down that road? Well Blueschild Baby takes you down that life road without the tell-tale tracks on your arms or the lost decade of life in a unique gripping style that will have you going right from the last page back to the first page like a ride that you just have to try again. If you don't like reading you'll read this book and not feel like you are reading but living. If you are an accomplished reader you'll enjoy the weaved web of Georgie Cane's sad vision of life. How does it end, at the beginning.