Reviewed by Rod McLary
The subtitle to this book is A Memoir of Love, Loss and Addiction and is Jonathan Tepper’s story of his childhood and his family. The story is an unusual one by any measure and the epigraph really says it all: How natural it all seemed then; how remote and improbable now! [George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia].
The author is the second son of American missionaries Elliott and Mary Tepper who were first missionaries in Mexico and then in Spain. Jonathan and his brothers David and Peter, and later Timothy, had lived most of their lives abroad as [they] marched wherever God ordered [5]. Now they are in San Blas near Madrid and reputedly the heroin capital of Europe. As the author says, the family ‘lived in a household where God talked back’ [13]. And God told Mary and Elliott to start a church for the yonkis [heroin addicts] in San Blas. And thus begins the story which seems almost improbable reading it from a distance.
From an early age, the brothers went out with their parents to invite the yonkis back to their home – they went to bars, the addicts’ camp, the park with their mother who was carrying their youngest brother Timothy in her arms. Jonathan handed out tracts to the yonkis and felt ‘a quiver of excitement’ [17] whenever they met the addicts. Over time, Jonathan befriended many of the yonkis and was not reticent in asking pertinent questions such as ‘does the needle hurt?’. In turn he and his brothers were treated with respect due in no small way to the boys’ easy acceptance of the yonkis and their lifestyle – no doubt a level of acceptance they rarely experienced elsewhere.
And then in the 1990s, the lives of the yonkis were upended by the invisible plague AIDS. Drug users were particularly susceptible through their sharing of needles and many died – including some of those with whom Jonathan had forged friendships. The author very movingly writes of the reality of grief and the overwhelming sense of helplessness in the face of so much pain. It also taught him that life itself is fleeting.
However, adolescence intruded as it is wont to do and Jonathan began to question his faith and why his parents had become missionaries and how his father’s vision now embarrassed him. ‘Was it medically possible to die of shame’ [100] Jonathan asked himself and cogently said the kids were always dragged along by the riptide of their parents’ lives [107].
But to counterbalance this rather over-exposure to the harsh realities of life, there was much love and learning within the family group. Elliott not only quoted extensively from the Bible but from other great literature from Dante to C.S. Lewis to J.R.R. Tolkien so the boys grew up with a keen desire to know things and to understand the world. At eighteen, Jonathan returned to the States where he attended to University of North Carolina – not Harvard where his older brother David had gone a couple of years previously but close. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford.
Jonathan Tepper has crafted a moving and inspiring memoir which resounds with the love shared between his parents and their four sons and their deep commitment to caring for those to whom society had turned its collective back. While an unconventional childhood by any standard, it was also a childhood filled with love, learning and a deep faith which inspired them to devote many years to the yonkis of San Blas and to develop close friendships with them. Shooting Up is a joy to read.
Shooting Up
[2026]
by Jonathan Tepper
Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 978 1 4087 2496 1
$34.99; 304pp