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Actor in Boston, Massachusetts, United States

CHECK OUT THE FEATURE THE WEEKLY DIG BOSTON DID ON ME AND OXY-MORONS......... News & OpinionsHome News + Opinons Oxy Morons Send to a Friend Subscribe to Featured Stories RSS Feed Print This PageOxy Morons After getting hooked, jailed and thrown off an 80-foot cliff, Charlestown’s Johnny Hickey looks to break into the filmmaking business by Chris Faraone Issue 8.50 Wed, December 13, 2006 Once upon a time, Charlestown had traditions. Residents didn’t shit where they lived: If someon... Moree planned a bank heist, it went down across the bridge. There was the infamous code of silence: If your neighbor walked into a bar and blew somebody’s skull onto the cigarette machine, you assumed that it was justified and you kept your mouth shut. And lastly, young men had to look sharp. “If you didn’t wear nice clothes, you would get tortured,” reminisces Johnny Hickey, a 28-year-old Townie. “That’s the way it was. If you came out wearing a pair of British Knights, you were getting hemmed up in a hallway.” And then came OxyContin. “The culture we grew up with is gone,” says Steven Murphy, 35. “People are wearing hand-me-down clothes with big bushy hair and beards. There’s no more hockey, no more football games, no more family functions. It’s all out the window. They’re all inside getting high. The parents are doing drugs with their fucking kids. People are stealing in their own backyard. Kids are snitching on each other just so they don’t have to wake up locked up and strung out. I’ve never seen it so bad.” Walking through the Bunker Hill Projects is like visiting a graveyard. Most people remember their old neighborhoods as places where friends lived; Hickey sees a place where people died. “My cousin Kelly Hickey, my stepfather Frank Pachico, my best friends Butchy Landenberg and Mikey Kato, and my little cousin Katie Lane all died from overdoses in here,” he says. “And that was all before 2004.” Mike Jones, his cousin, adds, “I probably know at least a dozen people who OD’d in every one of these courtyards.” Stories such as Hickey’s are often told through statistics, and during sweeps week, when reporters sound alarms about the shadow that Oxy addiction is casting over America. The figures are depressing: Nationally, 5.5 percent of high school seniors report having abused the drug in the past year (even more alarming is how when the $80-a-pop high gets too pricey, many of them graduate to heroin, which, at $5 a bag, is OxyContin’s more-affordable fraternal twin). In Massachusetts, the drug is mostly responsible for a 600 percent increase in prescription-medication-related deaths over the past decade. And in the square mile that separates downtown Boston from the North Shore, Partners HealthCare reports that “the rate of substance-abuse-related hospitalizations among Charlestown residents is more than twice the rate of Boston overall,” and that “the number of drug-related deaths among Charlestown residents was nearly 50 percent higher than the rest of the City of Boston as a whole between 1999 and 2002.” During those years, Hickey was himself an addict. After being tied to several pharmacy robberies around Greater Boston, he was sentenced to two and a half years in the Essex County Correctional Facility at age 22. Unlike the athletes and school principals whose drug habits make for ironic headlines, Hickey was a hardened criminal, schooled in the projects by Irish mobsters, crooks and thieves. “I made so many enemies, sticking up drug dealers and doing whatever,” he says, his semi-refined Charlestown gruff still intact. “My life was always on the edge. People were after me all the time, trying to shoot me, stab me or jump me for something. I’ve always been a bullshitter and a go-getter, but I used it for the wrong things. Until now.” Today, Hickey is in the projects scouting locations for Oxy Morons, a feature-length screenplay that he wrote as a communications student at Bunker Hill Community College after his release in 2003. Filming a documentary on Charlestown’s dope plague wasn’t an option: The characters whose stories Hickey wants to tell are mostly dead and buried. While Hickey hopes to attract financial backers, he’s not willing to surrender authenticity. (“If someone wants to turn this into some Hollywood bullshit like The Departed, they can suck my dick,” he says.) Among the very non-Tinseltown backdrops that Hickey and his crew are considering: project rooftops where they hid from cops, Orange Line trains that they rode to robberies and “The Oily’s”—a Charlestown hangout under the Tobin Bridge where Hickey first got high on angel dust as a teenager. “Drugs happen everywhere, but this is where I watched it happen,” he says. “This is where I watched heroin and Oxies take control of a whole neighborhood.” The way that Hickey paints Bunker Hill is dead-on. At 4pm on a school day, the streets are empty, as are the handball courts, baseball fields, park benches and pizza shops. Walk deep into the projects, and the few people you do see are noticeably “jammed”—local slang for the fiendish scratching and pinned eyes brought on by Oxy abuse. Parking spaces are empty. Window shades are pulled. “When I was a kid, people got shot for selling dope in this neighborhood,” says Murphy, a former addict who Hickey tapped to play a jailed drug abuser in his movie. “I know—my mother OD’d on heroin in 1988. Now you have dealers who have raped girls walking around untouched, just because people need to get high. Back then, there was a lot of weed, coke and dust, but heroin was an absolute no-no. The mob wouldn’t allow it.” Though it takes place between 2001 and 2002, Oxy Morons illustrates the gradual decay of Hickey’s neighborhood from the late-’90s through today. The lead characters are incarcerated at the onset of the epidemic, only to be released later for a Slaughterhouse-Five-esque culture shock. Instead of Charlestown, the screenplay takes place in “Charlesville” (which makes the characters “Villains” instead of “Townies”); and for creative purposes, “Bunker Hill” was changed to “Breed’s Hill” (where the Battle of Bunker Hill actually took place). But besides those details and a few names, Hickey’s script is pure autobiography. “In the first scene, the main character just got thrown off a cliff,” Hickey says. “After I wrapped up my last bid, I came back to the street, and I was back to my old ways. Then, in a drug deal gone bad, I got thrown from an 80-foot cliff in Quincy. I dislocated my hip, separated my pelvic bone, tore my urethra, and my bladder exploded. I woke up seven days later in the hospital, and they were giving me morphine. At that point in my life, I realized that I was done. I went cold turkey in the hospital. I pulled all of that shit out of my arm. The doctors thought I was fucking crazy. I knew if they gave me that shit I’d walk out of there with a habit and end up back in the can. That was the last time I ever did drugs. I hate to say it, but getting thrown off that cliff was the best thing that ever happened to me.” Since his recovery, Hickey’s stayed clean—even after the state discovered that clerical errors freed him early and he was forced to serve four more months, despite being confined to a walker. For the past two years, Hickey’s worked at the Comedy Connection, where he’s gone from bouncer to booking agent, and where he frequently networks with screenwriters, comedians and actors such as Sopranos regular Frank Santorelli. It was a hellish detour, but Hickey’s back on course. “I was a smart kid. I won science fairs,” he says. “I was always the one who they said would never end up like I did. But once you hit that adolescent age around here, it gets the best of you. I always wanted to be an actor, but the things I did deterred me from ever living that life. I guess eventually, for whatever reason, things fell into place.” In addition to his own movie, Hickey’s acted in a score of indie films around Boston. A natural-born hustler, he’s used the opportunities to pitch co-stars, including Lenny Clarke and Law & Order’s John Fiore, both of whom have expressed interest in his movie. But with Oxy Morons, Hickey hopes to do more than just advance his own career. While he stresses how unrealistic it is to curb drug trends through art, he hopes that his portrait of a neighborhood on junk scares away some would-be fiends; and that the film reaches the Oxy nation beyond Bunker Hill, which, at this point, is unsalvageable. “It used to be just the scummy project kids who were druggies,” Hickey says. “But kids from the suburbs look up to kids from tough neighborhoods like Charlestown and Southie. That’s just the way it’s always been. So these kids in Melrose and Malden are seeing in the newspaper that kids like me are robbing pharmacies, and they think it’s a cool thing. Everyone’s fucked: cheerleaders, athletes, smart kids, whatever. “I had a buddy who was a football player at UMass,” Hickey continues. “He was hooked on the shit, and his parents tried relocating him to California. Two weeks after he got there, he found Oxies and he died. He was a buddy of ours, but he wasn’t a criminal. We come from the projects and that bad background; he came from a condo in Southbridge with two parents. He had a big heart. I have his picture hanging on my wall above my TV as another reminder about what a sick and twisted drug this really is.” Cris Farone. Less