Word: hopheads
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other than Pasternak's Communist critics, have noted his unfeigned and unwavering sympathies for the educated middle class in which he was reared. In this section, Pasternak takes pains to make his protagonist's loyalties unmistakable. The partisan commander is a cocaine-sniffing hophead whom Dr. Zhivago loathes, as much for his boring platitudes as for his cruelty. By contrast, when a band of teen-age White soldiers storms the Red positions, the doctor admires their gallantry. He feels that he must shoot in self-defense, but he cannot bring himself to aim at the boys who "were...
...hophead dream of an ending, Nick goes away for a cure, comes back, presumably to marry Holloway's daughter and settle down to a career as an artist. As the book jacket puts it solemnly: "Nobility and love may flower wherever the seeds are sown." What the book has to offer is the authenticity of setting and speech that recalls Nelson Algren's excursion into the same territory. Unfortunately, Author Motley has not written another Man With the Golden Arm-but only a sort of Man With the Wire-Recorder...
...addicts learn and change hophead jargon. They call a needle and a syringe a "spike & dripper." A sniff of heroin is a "snort of horse," and an injection under the skin a "joy pop." Many teen-agers quickly become "mainliners" -because it is cheaper and quicker if they inject the drug directly into a vein, most often with a safety pin and an eyedropper...