“Like Shooting Jesus”

“Like Shooting Jesus” is Brian’s description of his first intravenous heroin high and the title of the book’s sixth chapter. Its force lies in the collision of sacred imagery with the bodily act of injecting: a phrase for an overwhelming rush that, in the account around it, also marks the beginning of a pursuit that cannot reproduce its own first moment.

The Phrase and Its Scene

Brian, a Hidden Valley High School student and the son of a doctor, was dependent on pills by seventeen. At twenty, a co-worker introduced him to heroin. He first snorted it from small waxed-paper bags marked with names including colombian coffee and blue magic, wrappers small enough to hide inside his phone case. The phrase belongs to a later step in that progression, when another friend taught him to inject himself.

The practical details are starkly ordinary beside the ecstatic language. Brian bought needles at a local drugstore and told the pharmacist he needed them for insulin. Then he described the first injection: “It was like shooting Jesus up in your arm,” followed by the sensation of “this white explosion of light in your head” and floating “on a cloud.” The account makes the expression more than a striking comparison: it is attached to a particular first experience, reached through a learned technique and needles obtained under a false explanation.

Ecstasy and the First High

The sentence’s compression gives it its shock. “Shooting” evokes both injecting a drug and an act of force; “Jesus” supplies an image of sacredness. The comparison does not establish a religious belief or a literal vision. Rather, it gives Brian language for an intensity he describes as a sudden explosion of light and a feeling of elevation. The sacred reference enlarges the rush beyond ordinary pleasure, while the physical action in the same phrase keeps that elevation bound to injection.

Brian’s description immediately complicates its own exhilaration. He recalls that a user does not yet know “that the first time is the best.” The opening rush is thus presented retrospectively: what felt like a peak in the moment becomes, in memory, the high against which later experiences are measured. His account turns from floating to pursuit—“After that, you’re just chasing that first high.” The word “chasing” changes the phrase’s emotional direction. The first injection may be recalled as release and radiance, but the sentence that follows makes clear that the experience cannot simply be repeated on its original terms.

From Pills to Injection

The phrase also sits within a movement from prescription pills to heroin. Brian had snorted crushed OxyContin before inhaling heroin powder; he recalls that heroin was cheaper, more intense, and increasingly present wherever he went. The first injection therefore did not arrive in isolation. It followed pill dependence, exposure to heroin through a co-worker, and an earlier route of use that made inhaling the powder easy. The language of a sudden white explosion condenses that escalation into one remembered threshold without erasing the steps that led to it.

The chapter’s account also places the high beside loss and narrowing attention. Brian was deeply troubled by Scott Roth’s death, yet the narrative says that little else but drugs mattered to him anymore. That contrast does not make the phrase a complete explanation of his experience; it shows the limited and consuming world in which the remembered rush took on its power. The drug’s intensity and availability belong to the same account as grief, concealment, and the practical work of finding and using it.

Repetition and Meaning

As a chapter title, “Like Shooting Jesus” makes Brian’s language carry beyond the instant it describes. The phrase first offers a compact image of the initial injection; the surrounding account then supplies its reversal, as the remembered ecstasy becomes something pursued rather than recovered. The title preserves the seduction of the first high without treating it as an uncomplicated triumph.

The book’s notes identify the expression with Brian’s interviews and record that counselor and Suboxone support-group facilitator Ron Salzbach also confirmed it. That corroboration anchors the phrase as reported language, while the chapter places it in a wider account of Brian’s progression and consequences. Its significance rests in that double movement: the image conveys why the first high could feel almost transcendent, and the words that follow expose the cycle of chasing an experience that has already passed.