by Tony O'Neill
“There the bastards are!” they’d yell. “Trying to skip the country!”
They’d hold us down and read the litany of crimes: my being in the country illegally for over a year. Possession and use of controlled substances. Thousands of dollars in bounced checks, ripped bank accounts, unpaid rent. The $15,000 stolen from Susan’s old job. Maybe they’d even show up with every heroin and crack dealer we still owed money to in LA, for a bit of summary street justice. That bill alone had to amount to tens of thousands of dollars—double, triple the amount worth killing us for. Holy fuck, the sweat was running off me as I handed my passport over. Dripping from my nose. Soaking through my shirt and onto the crumpled suit I wore in an attempt to look inconspicuous. Only the suit was red sharkskin and had dark bloodspots on the trousers from shooting up. I don’t think it had ever been cleaned since I bought it, high on crack, a year ago. I was the most conspicuous person in the airport, almost comically noticeable.
“You have nothing on you,” I told myself. “Calm the fuck down.”
“But wait,” my paranoia piped up. “You packed in a hurry. What if you left something in your clothes by mistake? A balloon? A rock? An old syringe? And do you really trust that junkie bitch? What if she slipped something in YOUR luggage? She’s done dumber things! They have sniffer dogs…X-rays…. They’ll bust you before you can get out. You’ll never leave this fucking city. It WANTS you. In a crack house or in a prison cell; doesn’t matter: it’ll HAVE you.”
I bought a book waiting for our flight to be called. Why the fuck didn’t we score some smack before we left? One balloon to make the flight bearable? Bullshit bravado, that’s all it was. We were terminal fools. The book was a trashy paperback about—what else?—a couple who sinks into heroin addiction. I figured it would pass the eleven hours until I hit London.
We made it onto the plane. Right up until takeoff I expected the pigs to rush onto the plane and bundle us off. The pilot to announce: “Ladies and gentlemen…do not panic. We have fugitives on board and they are about to be removed…. Do not interfere with the apprehension of the suspects.”
When the plane picked up speed on the runway I had the sense of the Devil itself chasing the jet, snarling and slobbering and snapping in frustration as we climbed just out of reach. The sky, though, provided no sanctuary from my toxic thoughts.
The fat American businessman next to me took up half of my seat as well as his own. Susan was anxiously looking out the window. Even with her hair washed and clean clothes on, she looked like a junkie whore. Aw Jesus, I had to tell my parents that I was married again. This time to a fucking junkie! The crash from the cocaine was dwindling to a throbbing sleep-deprived headache and the relentless hum of post-heroin-withdrawal anguish was returning, as I knew it would.
Jesus, it was hot.
Aren’t planes supposed to be air-conditioned? I tried to get comfortable but either hit Susan’s bony elbow if I moved too far left or the businessman’s hammy arm if I slithered too far to the right. My squirming and jostling for position was obviously irritating him. He stared at me, round and pink and disgusted for a moment, before returning his attention to some banal magazine aimed at men. Cars. Gadgets. Women with big tits and white smiles. A world as alien to me as that of ecosystems at the bottom of the ocean. I smelled. I smelled like a man who had been shitting and vomiting and sweating out the heroin for a week and cleaned himself quickly in the sink of a motel with a ratty-looking washcloth before he left for the airport. I smelled like a man whose last act before leaving that dark cave was to take one final hit from the pipe and watch his face carefully in the mirror as he exhaled plumes of white smoke, while a cab honked outside in the parking lot. A man who had vaguely considered just staying there and trying to rustle up more credit for crack, just stay in that room and just be. To simply wait until the cops or death came and put an end to the whole sorry mess.
He cleared his throat, irritated. The fat pig was irritated by my presence. This tub of fucking lard that was taking up half of my Goddamned seat with his flab—flab no doubt put on over expensive business lunches and good brandy—was irritated by me! Self-righteous anger bubbled up inside of me.
Who was the real monster? M or this self-important cocksucker? This businessman? This evil corporate dick-sucking bastard? WHO WAS THE REAL MONSTER?
Calm down. Breathe. You’re crazy right now—you’re sick. Keep it together. Order a drink and shut the fuck up for the next eleven hours. You need to make it home without getting arrested.
Suspended somewhere in the sky I sat in the tiny toilet and looked at myself. I looked as if I hadn’t slept in years. I jerked off quickly and brutally—it was over in seconds, one of the odder effects of heroin withdrawal. The climax sent a small rush of serotonin to my brain, giving me relief for a few seconds at least. I knew in a few hours I was going to arrive at Manchester airport to see my parents for the first time in over a year. Then I was going to return to London in an attempt to somehow insinuate myself back into the music industry. Beyond that, I had planned nothing. Especially here, absurdly suspended in a toilet thousands of feet in the air, I knew the idea was ridiculous. I wondered vaguely how long it would be before I fucked up again.
Someone rapped on the door, agitated.
“How long you gonna be in there?”
I stood up and washed my hands.
“Not long,” I replied.
5
JANUARY
We hit London with two thousand pounds and a bank account with an overdraft limit of a thousand. We had spent a few weeks in Blackburn with my parents trying to get ourselves oriented. The town was much as I remembered it when I left and never looked back at seventeen years old—small, dull, and entirely without charm. It was just another one of the increasingly ghettoized towns on the outskirts of Manchester that stagnated without any effective rail links to the big city to sustain any kind of cultural exchange. Life in Blackburn was insular and suspicious. The only entertainment on offer was a crumbling cinema in the center of town with four screens and sticky brown carpets from the mid-seventies and the endless succession of pubs and clubs in which the townsfolk drank and drank until they collapsed, vomiting, into the gutters.
The money came from my parents, who desperately wanted me to get on my feet. The first two days at my childhood house we were too sick and too depressed to talk to them. The shock of my sudden return, coupled with the appearance of a new wife, must have nearly killed them. They had a vague idea that I was using drugs, but when I staggered off the plane, still sick and unsteady and with a thirty-two-year-old wife—who looked at least ten years older—in tow, all of their worst fears must have been confirmed with interest. Susan at least made the effort to cover her track marks with makeup, but succeeded only in making herself look like a burn victim. I had to remind her to wear trousers or jeans at all times, because her legs were such a fucking mess. We both looked like the ideal “Just Say No” poster children.
Feigning jetlag, I slept the days away with the curtains drawn, emerging only to eat, stare at the television, and return to my room. Awake at three in the morning in the silent house, I fretted that I would never have the strength to emerge and talk to them. I stood at their door and listened to their frenzied whispers and my mother’s stifled sobs. I also knew that I would eventually have to, in order to get back to London, where at least I would be granted the anonymity I so desperately needed right now. I crept down the stairs and into the darkened kitchen to get some water. I still felt like shit. I wondered vaguely if I could find some heroin in Blackburn. I had looked at the local paper, the Lancashire Telegraph, for stories on drugs and found mention of a few arrests of heroin dealers. I knew then that it was around. But I also knew that in a town as parochial and shut off as this one I would have a hard time scoring from people I didn’t know. Nobody just shows up in a place like Blackburn from out of town and tries to connect for drugs—they grow up here, stay here, work the same dead-end jobs for years here, and
buy drugs from the same small-town, small-time drug dealers.
Rifling through the drawers in the kitchen I found one drawer full of various medicines. I had, of course, already made the medicine cabinet in the bathroom for drugs, but found nothing. Here too it looked like I would be similarly disappointed: nothing but a lot of over-the-counter remedies for everything from sleeplessness to upset stomachs. The few prescription bottles in there were mostly blood pressure related. Then I came across a plain white box with a green-and-white prescription label affixed dead center.
“Dihydrocodeine Tartrate,” the label read, “30 mg. Take one to two tablets for moderate to severe pain.”
They were meant for my father’s arthritis. He had a phobia of doctors and medication though, and obviously had never even so much as opened the box. The label dated the pills to July 2000. All one hundred tablets where still encased in their foil blister packs.
“Thank you,” I whispered to the God who watches over junkies and fuckups.
I slept that night with the box under my pillow, feeling like a child with its favorite teddy bear. For once my sleep was relatively peaceful. The dreams still persisted, of course, how could they not? But when I jerked awake, I slid my hand under the pillow and felt the comforting smoothness of the box of tablets and was asleep again, almost instantly. I wondered about keeping the box a secret from Susan, but I knew that she would sniff out the fact that I was high immediately. Unfortunately I would have to split the drugs with her.
The next morning I was all business. I went downstairs and took my first three tablets with a cup of coffee. I was long enough off heroin that even 90 mg of dihydrocodeine—something that would previously not have even stopped my nose from running—now gave me a pleasant, woozy kind of high. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and showered for the first time since I had arrived in Blackburn. Then I set about the careful business of convincing my parents—and myself—that everything was all right, and that Susan and I needed to get to London to kick-start my ailing career. Of course, for the move I would need some kind of capital, a loan maybe, and then I could start getting it together and finally make them proud of me.
I could see it in their eyes: He seems so happy. He seems at peace. He seems to have a plan.
Our flame-out in Los Angeles became the subject that dare not speak its name. I ran errands with my mother, had drinks with my father at the barfly joint he hung out at every night at the end of their street, my jangling nerves coated with opiates. It was there I realized why I could never be anything but a junkie anymore. It’s only when I’m on opiates, I reasoned, that I know how to act like a normal human being. Like a normal son.
“Why don’t you stay here for a while?” my father asked over his pint of bitter in the Stop and Rest, while around us the old drinkers coughed phlegmy coughs and smoked and laughed.
“There’s nothing for me here, Dad,” I told him as gently as possible, “You know that.”
“I know,” he said sadly, “Sure there’s nothing here for anybody….”
That was true. Looking around the pub, the smell of decay was palpable: the yellow-stained ceiling and walls, the faded and ruined 1960s carpeting, the single, lonely fruit machine, the air thick with smoke from cheap cigarettes. There was no attempt to create a pleasant atmosphere to drink in. This was a working-class drinker’s pub, nothing here but alcohol and a smattering of other boozers. It was hard to say how a pub so small still managed to look so empty and so sad, but this place managed both of those things. It reminded me in atmosphere of the crack houses dotted around MacArthur Park that I once frequented—the same lonely, furtive atmosphere—the same sense that this was a place for achieving oblivion, nothing more.
The clientele was almost entirely male (apart from the pudgy, big-permed barmaid) and mostly made up of cirrhotic old men. Even the young people who sometimes came in looked prematurely old—they looked worn out, ashen, and used up: ground down into premature agedness by lifetimes of boredom, booze, and drudgery. The smell of Sunday afternoons, gray skies, stifling hours dragging by in dusty sitting rooms and parlors. The place was a museum of soul-death by inertia.
Once I had secured the loan from my parents, I went to the bank to get an account. I figured that having been out of the country for so long and having no real credit history I’d be lucky to get a checkbook. However, when I was taken into the room to fill out the paperwork I lucked out and ended up with a young, hyperactive closet queen as my advisor. When he asked about my lack of a work history and I told him I had just returned from LA his eyes lit up.
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve always wanted to visit America. What were you doing over there?”
“Writing music videos.”
“Really?” he gasped, “How glamorous. Why on earth did you come back here?”
“Well,” I told him, “I wanted to get back into playing music. My old band was pretty big here but no one had heard of us in the States. So I decided to come back to where people remembered us. You remember the Catsuits?”
“Oh yeah—I have a few singles of theirs!”
“Well, that was my band.”
And that was all it took. I played the big music star returning from Los Angeles, and this idiot lapped it all up. It was that easy. Every time the computer flashed up LOAN RISK!!! in big flashing red letters he just muttered, “Okay, we can bypass this…” and clicked a button. In thirty minutes I had a checkbook and a bank card with an overdraft. I made up stories of seeing celebrities at fictitious restaurants in Beverly Hills and the poor sap bought it all. When I was done and the guy approved me, I walked over to the train station and bought a ticket for London Euston: it was that simple. I had a sense that once I hit the capital, everything would be all right. I popped some more painkillers and stopped at one of the dozens of bars dotted around the station to get a drink. Things were finally coming together.
6
RJ
Upon hitting London, we checked into a cheap, damp, shabbily furnished room in a Russell Square hotel. We simply arrived in Euston with our cases and checked into the cheapest rooming house we could find. The place was populated by backpacking students and drunken Australians who lounged around in the communal areas drinking cans of Foster’s and Tennent’s, smoking joints, and watching daytime television.
The only contact with other human beings we had was in twelve-step meetings around the city, where we sat in silence and listened to other people’s stories. We did not go in an attempt to stay clean. More than anything, I wanted to score drugs. I convinced Susan it would be a smart idea to attend. I was so out of touch with the London scene that I got ripped off the first few times I attempted to buy from the street. One afternoon I found myself chased down Euston Road by a braying pack of Rastafarian crack dealers who took my money and sold me a piece of gum wrapped in a baggie. After I confronted them they pulled their gums back from their yellow teeth and actually howled and yelped like fucking wolves, before giving chase. I ran, gasping for air, knocked over an old hooker, and lost them by the McDonald’s near the train station. Similar scenes repeated themselves a dozen times or more. Susan sat around the room, chain-smoking and depressed, and I would set out every morning—like a man attempting to look for gainful employment—in an attempt to make a connection for heroin.
Having never scored heroin in London, I assumed that the street-dealing scene would be identical to that of Los Angeles. That I would be able to walk up to any dealer, hand over my money, and walk away with drugs. Not so. If you wanted pills or hash or grass then it was readily available from the kids who loitered on Camden High Street after dark. But the heroin- and crack-dealing scenes where much more underground. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were relegated to the “frontlines,” open dealing spots dotted sparsely around the city. But if you were an outsider, you were an easy target for rip-off artists. When I walked up to these kids and asked for smack I was inevitably sold a wrap containing nothing. When I returned to complain, the dealer was gone, c
arried away on the scent of fat cooking on kebab skewers, piss, and the smoke from cheap blocks of hash.
I thought that Narcotics Anonymous meetings would be a good spot to get more information about where the real heroin and crack scene was centered. Only it was tough to walk right up to people who were in recovery and try and get that kind of information. So we just sat and listened, waiting for clues. I had patience. I had nothing but time. I was an invisible man, blended completely into the chaos of the capital. After the meetings we returned to the rooming house and sat with the blinds drawn, the dark enveloping us, and we waited. I imagined that if I concentrated hard enough I could disappear completely.
Sometimes some well-meaning sort would offer to buy us a coffee after the meeting. As with all junkies in recovery, the talk was inevitably concentrated around drugs. The serenity and the clean-living bullshit that everybody bandied about in the meetings soon vanished into unrestrained drug talk. Like men with no dicks talking about all the pussy they used to get.
“…and then I fixed the morphine drip in the hospital, so I could get enough out of it to stay high on…”
“…when they closed down the needle exchanges in Glasgow I’d just fish the used needle bins out of the Dumpsters at the hospital, get the old spikes out, file ’em down, bleach ’em, and use ’em…only sometimes there was no time for filing and bleaching…”
