Under the smiles, though, was trouble, and Coltrane was at the center of it. He and Jimmy Heath had both been using heroin for a couple of years—snorting it, though Lewis Porter maintains that Coltrane may have started injecting it back in Philadelphia. (Charlie Parker had told Heath, “When you put it in your nose, you’re still a gentleman; when you put it in your arm, you’re a bum, exposed to all the world.”)
Musicians mostly snorted it—unbeknownst to Gillespie, six of the players in his big band had been doing so—and those who put it in their nose rather than in their arm were better able to stop when they wanted. But while the septet played Dayton, Ohio, that fall, Coltrane and Heath, sick and nervous from the diluted heroin they’d had to purchase in the hinterlands, got relief when “Specs Wright brought in a girl named Dee Dee . . . who came in with a set of ‘works’ (needles and supplies), and she helped them all with shooting up, mainlining. That way they all got high instantly.”
It was the beginning of a hellish seven-year addiction for Jimmy Heath. Coltrane’s relationship with self-soothing substances was more complicated. He gobbled sweets, which led to problems with his weight and his teeth. He treated his frequent dental woes with heavy drinking. He also drank when he couldn’t get heroin or was trying to stop. In October 1950, while he was in Los Angeles with the Gillespie group, he passed out in his hotel room after shooting up; Heath found him and revived him.
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