A missionary family raises four boys in one of Madrid’s most drug-ravaged neighbourhoods. Jonathan Tepper’s memoir traces an extraordinary journey.
Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up is much more than the account of four brothers in a missionary family growing up in Spain in the 1980s. Part of the book’s secret is how it compassionately describes broken people facing an inevitable AIDS death with endurance, faith and love. The story is not told cynically or indulgently, but with sympathetic attention to human frailty and bravery. The characters will haunt the reader as they have haunted the author. The book traces the growth of the four brothers, starting with the voice and outlook of one of them as the author, as they grow up in the San Blas neighbourhood of Madrid, filled at the time with heroin addicts. The book succeeds so well that the attentive reader sees the world as if he is one of the brothers himself.
Yes, there are bad people in bad neighbourhoods. Many of the early stories of the characters the reader meets turn to crime to get the money they need to buy drugs. The addicts are essentially weak, tend never to have finished school, will probably never marry, and nearly all will die young as a result of shared needles. They are all damaged. But Tepper successfully shows how they are real people with the same longings for normality and acceptance that we all have. The reward for this gruelling account comes in the form of the reader’s increasing compassion and understanding of their plight.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
When they are young, children inevitably accept their parents’ authority. As they grow, they learn more about themselves and the world around them, and learn to think for themselves. This is Shooting Up’s triumph as Tepper captures these subtle changes. By the end, the author manages to show that his family’s setbacks – and they have a big one – have still permitted the author great success. What is unique is that Tepper maps the tension between the universality of the human condition – we are all born, suffer and will die – with the particular, his and his extended family’s lives. Tepper doesn’t blow his own horn. He quotes C.S. Lewis: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as much like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t any Narnia.” The book is a spectacular achievement. It provides a hopeful and optimistic path, and is an uplifting story of victory in the face of adversity.
What initially seem to be every-day events slowly reveal themselves to be the foundation stones for the rules for life. The boys – being boys – ignore the syringes on the ground and live for the daily soccer game. The writing is alive: you know these are real boys. They are interested in fútbol, nothing more, nothing less. This ability to focus so obsessively helps the author later in life to win scholarships…the virtue of striving: training the mind to achieve worthwhile goals. At the same time, children have an uncanny ability to save themselves, too. When they have had enough of their father’s Devotionals after dinner, they pretend to have fallen asleep. These practised skills come in handy. They show respect to dad, as they should, but also reveal that they can decide for themselves when enough is enough. Clearly, the boys have unique parents. Kids may not need money, but they do need to know right from wrong. We see that the kids may think that their parents are nuts sometimes, but they see what kindness, love, loyalty and respect will achieve.
This is not a hagiography of the father and mother. They know they have a life-long obligation to help where they can. And the cost to one of them is too much. We see they are not perfect. But they try – and continue to try. The parents remain inspirational. Yet there is no proselytizing here. We see just the facts. There is no hiding of the truth of crime to support drug habits, no hiding of back-sliding when wannabe addicts fail again and again in their attempts to break the habit. In a sense, it is a modern Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius describes how Fortune treats some better than others; that life’s gifts are often random, and to some, non-existent. You gotta take what you get – and accept it. Also, like Boethius, there is no rage against injustice. The author shows how self-analysis helps, how striving for – and demonstrating – internal excellence leads to spiritual growth. It all comes from self-choice. The book is an archetype of a self-help book but does not deserve to be read as merely a self-help handbook.
The kids meet the drug addicts. The addicts don’t want to be addicts. They want to protect the kids. They are good to the kids. The brothers pay back the trust and loyalty they witness. Meeting the addicts is the key part of the story. The addicts become alter-parents. You see the challenges facing the addicts. They try. It is this bravery that comes to the fore when the AIDS epidemic hits. It is convincing. You believe you are at the hospital beds with them; you may find yourself in tears. You can’t put the book down.
Tepper has an innate ability to show flawed characters rebuilding themselves. We see this process through the eyes of Jonathan growing up, the small reforming steps of addicts become bigger steps. The steps grow larger for them, just as they do for Jonathan growing up beside them. We see selfless acts to help others. Addicts trying to ‘make good.’ But we see warts and all. The rehab centre must repair furniture to pay its way. Tepper brilliantly illustrates how – while he is carrying a repaired sofa up the stairs to a customer, he sees that if you look carefully, the newly-prepared surface only masks the rot and woodworm beneath. The furniture is like the reformed drug addicts – they are still scarred individuals. We see that reality has nuances – we even understand why the police ignore this area of Madrid, why normal people, in fear, pull their children away from the HIV+ addicts. It is just convincing; it is real. It is, you feel, just as Jonathan Tepper saw it at the time.
Perhaps the most convincing part occurs when the author returns to America for university. Having been away so long, he doesn’t know if he is Spanish or American, as all the age-old dichotomies compound together at once – is he an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’? He was not a disadvantaged adult drug addict, but a young, privileged, and educated observer back in Spain. Now he is older than his age would indicate, surrounded by the one-dimensional wealthy Chapel Hill kids away from home for the first time. There is a great scene where a well-meaning – but unworldly– young girl tries to warn the first-year undergraduate youth about the dangers of AIDS – and gives out little red bows. Our author, having seen the prolonged miseries ending in the death of so many of his dear friends from the ravages of this horrible disease, gets up to leave, and she comes up to him to say it is mandatory for him to learn about what it means to be HIV+…this is priceless!
I love autobiographies, and I have read many. And I can safely say that this is the best memoir I have read so far. It has a compelling story, a perspective and a point of view that changes as the character grows, the depiction of the suffering is real and believable – you are THERE at the scene as it happens and, the book allows an individual’s life to become a universal grand epic reflecting the nobility of effort to succeed against all odds.
In the end, through a life of unstinting hard work, he justly wins his long-held goal for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. Aptly, he says, achieving what he always wanted to achieve, finally gives him that ‘high’ from real achievement – rather than heroin – that he always was too frightened to admit he wanted to try. His achievement brings a smile to your face.
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Contributed by
Nigel Scotchmer
