by Tony O'Neill
“…yeah the skag was so much better then. Little tablets we used to get…‘jacks’ they called ’em…just cook ’em right down and shoot them…”
“…and there I was, sick as shit on the cell floor, shitting my pants…screaming, and the guards wouldn’t even call the fucking doctor…”
“…when my cousin OD’d on that stuff we went and found his connection and bought as much of it as we could. You see, we knew it had to be good shit then….”
“…high as a cunt, I just picked up a two-thousand-quid rug from Harrods and walked straight out of the front door. I think they figured I was a delivery guy or something. I walked it straight to my fence and got two hundred quid for it. That was back when you could buy Diconal and Ritalin cheap in the West End…. Ever shoot Diconal? It’s a better rush than heroin…hits you like a speedball….”
“…you see this leg? Right here, below the knee, where it goes purple? It’s a deep vein thrombosis. I got it shooting Palfium. They don’t like to prescribe it anymore. Pink palfs…they were the best. Better than skag. You got to crush ’em up good and cold shake it in the syringe. But if you don’t shake it well enough you fuck up your veins. Once I got this I was able to hit up doctors for pain pills better than ever. File a lost-and-found slip at the train station saying you left a bag containing pain meds on the train. Then call an emergency doctor at night and show ’em the slip and tell ’em you’re in pain. Once the fuckers took a look at my leg they were always good for more pills until the doctor’s office opened. Do it on a Friday and you could get enough to get loaded with for the whole weekend….”
I had come back to a city I no longer belonged to. Junkie and fuckup stuck out all over me like a warning sign to potential employers, friends, or lovers. I found myself unable to even relate to my old friends. I called up Emma from the Catsuits and found myself invited up to her place in Crouch End for a party. She lived with our old guitar player Marie, so this would be a reunion of sorts. I knew there would be a lot of old faces from my music days. Susan stayed alone in the hotel. I arrived early and nervously downed pints in an Irish theme pub across the road. I felt like an imposter, uncomfortably lurking in a sharkskin suit. I stood in the bathroom staring in the mirror trying to perfect looking normal, nonchalant. “Hey, how’s it going?” I practiced saying.
At the party, the usual round of So-what-have-you-been-up-to?’s. Everybody looked pretty much the same, apart from me. Intensely aware of the lines under my eyes, the puffiness of my face, the track marks still healing on the backs of my hands. I drank too much, said too much. Got into an argument over politics with an earnest young NME journalist in the kitchen, secretly pissed that he was hogging the whiskey, and hating the fact he was wearing an ‘ironic’ Kylie Minogue T-shirt. I told him he was a know-nothing college-boy asshole. He was talking about Tony Blair, picking sides, the same old arguments I always heard at home.
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him, drunkenly leaning in too close. “We’re all dying…. Why do you care what variety of shit you have to eat in the meantime?”
I drunkenly showed my track marks to Dante Thomas, an old friend from the music days. His band had been the most successful unsuccessful band in history. He looked identical to the last time I had seen him, staring at my plate with a head full of Ecstasy in the Stock Pot, Soho, 1998.
“My, my” he said. “Aren’t you the reckless one….”
All that Emma and Marie wanted to talk about was the old days, the carefree days of my drinking and fooling around as if the crash wouldn’t happen. Too much “remember when…?” for my stomach. I could sense I was disappointing them. I felt old and tired and sad that I hadn’t stayed here instead of leaving. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been so worn out, so beat down by circumstance.
Eventually, I drank all of the red wine and whiskey in the place and left to try and score with a sallow-looking guy who said he used smack once in a while and knew where to get it, even at one in the morning.
“You just got to look for prostitutes,” he told me. “Wherever the prostitutes are there will be dealers….”
Tried to get money but I was so drunk I forgot my PIN number. The guy got nervous that I was trying to hustle him out of money and split, leaving me stranded in north London. I tried to kick the screen on the ATM in, and fell over on the pavement with the piss and the rain and the mud.
After two unsuccessful weeks in the hostel we found a flat share advertised in a free paper. It was a two-bedroom council flat in a high-rise in Hammersmith. The place had the improbable address of 109 Batman Close, and cost one hundred pounds per week. It was close enough to the BBC’s White City studios that when the Real IRA exploded a car bomb outside of there the day after we moved in, the windows of our room shook, and I thought that the walls were caving in around us literally as well as figuratively. Our flat mates were a couple, he a monstrous English beer belly constantly sucking on a joint, drinking lager, glued to The Weakest Link or Bargain Hunt. She was South African, tall with a butch buzz cut, piercings dangling from her face. We heard them fuck noisily and constantly through the walls of our bedroom, and I listened to the creaking and his grunting and her oh-oh-there-yeah-there-don’t-stop’s and watched the wet patch on the ceiling, with Susan sleeping beside me or threatening suicide and chain-smoking again. I listened to the Queens Park Rangers crowd roaring from the stadium across the road, daytime television dancing across my face. I knew that soon I would be insane or a suicide myself.
I really needed to score.
Then I came across RJ. I met him outside of the needle exchange on Fortress Road, Shepherds Bush. I had stumbled across the store-front needle exchange a week after arriving in Hammersmith, while wandering the area’s backstreets. I went there under the cover of getting needles but with the real intention of talking to some local junkies. The place was deserted though, apart from the guys who worked there—a couple of older black ex-dopers. One guy took care of me while the other hung out watching TV, asked me to fill out a form, and I gave a false surname and address. He was polite, respectful. He noticed the trace of an accent I had picked up in LA and in true dope-fiend fashion asked me what the heroin was like on the West Coast.
I told him that since my return to London I had been smoking heroin but now I wanted to inject again. He filled me in on the need to cook down UK heroin in citric acid. He gave me a pack of forty insulin needles, packets of citric acid, cookers, filters, sterile water, alcohol swabs, and a bin for disposing old needles in. As I was finishing the paperwork I noticed a tall, gaunt figure ring the bell and get buzzed in. He moved quickly, with a junky’s determination, dropping off his old needles and following the guy into the back room to pick up more. I thanked my guy and walked out, loitering by the front entrance to talk to the new arrival as he left.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked as he walked out the door. He looked a little startled but stopped to answer me.
“Not bad, mate.”
I got a closer look at him, yet could not get a read of his face. It was as if he was petrified in wax, his features out of focus and indistinct. He wore a cream winter sports jacket and baseball cap, but beyond these features I could not pinpoint anything distinct about him. If he changed his outfit he would have become completely unrecognizable to me.
“Listen man…I just moved here and I need to score, badly. I ain’t a cop or anything…. Can you help me out?”
“Well,” he told me, “I figure they ain’t got Yanks workin’ for the drug squad now…. Wass yer name, mate?”
We exchanged pleasantries and he told me his name was RJ.
“I can’t do anyfing right now, but I can sort you out after six if yer like. You got a pen?”
And that was how it started again. We split with each other’s mobile numbers and my lethargy and depression melted away with each successive step. I had three hours to kill. I sat in the McDonald’s on Shepherds Bush Green nursing a Coke and watching council estate mums with their hair pul
led back in severe ponytails pushing red-faced screaming children, flabby white arses peeking out of the tops of tracksuit bottoms….
…An old homeless guy with shit stains on his filthy wool suit walking the gray streets and rummaging through a garbage can looking for food…quick-talking black kids with impenetrable West London–Jamaican accents hanging on a fence, slapping palms, wolf-whistling at the young snatch as it walked by…
I returned to the flat beaming with pride. The hunter who had returned with enough provisions for the family. Susan even attempted a stilted, awkward hug, and we sat and waited for six o’clock to roll around.
That evening I established what was to become my routine over the next few months. My mobile phone buzzed to life and I answered it breathlessly after the first ring.
“It’s RJ. I’m walkin’ up on your place now. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I slipped my shoes on, put on my leather jacket, and crept out the front door. I exited the Stalinist-gray block of flats and leaned by the door watching for RJ to appear from the background static of the city. Kids played in the concrete and the broken glass, one suspiciously poking at a dead cat with a stick.
Cars dragged past the estate, their souped-up sound systems causing the windows in the flats and houses to vibrate in unison. The sky was a murky gray, already dark outside at six, dirty yellow streetlights bathing the moist fog in an eerie glow. Then RJ would appear, sometimes on time, sometimes late, but always with that lurching, determined walk, winking at me—“All right, mate?”—as we both slipped into the block of flats.
We always did business in the piss-filled elevator, both of us red-cheeked and wet-nosed from the London winter. I had the money counted out, and he spat the wrap out and handed it to me. When we reached the third floor I got out, said goodbye, and RJ headed back down to the street and more deliveries.
We saw RJ through London winters and London summers. Through dry spells when we were all scrabbling and sick, not enough dope to keep everybody well, and through times of plenty. Good cheap heroin and plenty of it—wars and surplus—small white bags, spat from his mouth into his palm, and into my palm and into my mouth, the Kings Mall, Hammersmith, the piss and bleach of the stairs and the cold that penetrated the concrete façade, and home: Baggies untied, ripped open, tan powder dumped into spoons and the sickly sweet smell of cooking junk and peace…. Endless, terrible, beautiful peace. Sometimes he would show with his brother Mike, a tall skinhead with a mean look but who was actually one of the most harmless, sweet guys you could hope to meet. They were both addicts. I had the sense that RJ looked after Mike and made sure that he got by day to day.
Back in my room I locked the door and threw my coat on the bed. Susan looked up expectantly as I walked in and whispered, “Got it!”
With shaking cold hands I unwrapped the white plastic package and poured out its contents onto a CD case. I felt a familiar excitement rising in my chest. There it was, heroin, the first heroin I had had since Los Angeles. It was a light tan-colored powder and after being off for so long it seemed like a surprisingly large amount. I briefly considered the possibility that getting high might not be such a smart idea, but the thought was ludicrous and abstract now that the heroin was here in front of me. Up until this moment I had constantly been searching for it, and always in the back of my mind thinking that if it didn’t present itself to me then that was it—it was meant to be, I was to remain clean. But if it fell into my lap, then it was meant to be also. I should use again. This Zen attitude toward using heroin was negated somewhat by the fact that I had spent nearly every day since arriving in London trying to score heroin. I had sought it out, and when a junkie puts out the distress signal that he needs junk in a big city, somebody somewhere will respond. It was no accident that I found myself in a locked bedroom with a bag of disposable needles and twenty pounds of heroin—it was the only possible conclusion to my repeated attempts at scoring. However, the idea that fate had presented me with this opportunity to get high made me feel slightly better about myself as I prepared my first shot, slid the fresh needle into my buttock, and injected into the fat and muscle there. After all, you don’t want to fuck with fate, right?
When we were done I tidied my equipment away and walked out into the main room, leaving Susan alone with her high on the bed. My roommate was sitting there, drinking a can of Stella and watching some obnoxious TV show at a brutal volume.
“All right?” he said. “Didn’t hear you come in.”
I sat in silence for a while and watched the program. The concept seemed to be that two teams of nerdy young men each build a robot. The robots are then placed into an arena where they attempt to destroy each other in front of a braying crowd of spotty teenage boys and Star Trek obsessives. All of this hosted by a smirking washed-up TV actor from an eighties sitcom set on a spaceship. One rickety-looking creation halfheartedly rammed the other with a pointy stick. The crowd went wild.
Outside the light had faded completely. I could feel the initial rush of the heroin starting. I knew it was happening because I found myself getting caught up in the TV show despite myself. I started admiring the skill and patience it would require to build such a robot. I began to wonder whatever happened to that sitcom from the eighties set on a spaceship. Did it get canceled? Surely not! Little eruptions of pleasure started in my spine, my chest, and my head.
I found myself wondering if everyone else was on heroin, secretly. Is this why they found TV like this so fascinating? Or was I defective, a faulty robot?
A robot was eventually declared the victor.
“Well, that was great,” I heard myself saying.
“Yeah.” My roommate sighed, taking a sip from his lager. “Robots are brilliant.”
I excused myself, flopped on the bed, and stretched out. Susan roused from her nod a little and muttered, “I feel so fucking good right now….”
It did not seem possible to feel any better than I felt at this moment. Outside I could hear sirens, dogs barking, the comforting sounds of a metropolitan city. I was home at last.
7
MUSIC
I answered an ad in the Melody Maker:
GLAMOROUS ELECTRO-POP BAND seeks KEYBOARDIST. Influences Duran Duran, XTC, Japan, Chicks on Speed. Call Elektra.
The girl on the other end of the phone seemed vaguely Eastern European. We arranged to meet in a Camden bar. Having resumed my use of heroin I had initially intended to stop my attendance of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. However, one guy who was a regular at the Camden meeting, a grinning wide-boy ex–heroin addict turned ticket tout named Michael had mentioned that he had a council flat lying empty that he wanted to sublet. He offered it to Susan and me on the cheap. The temporary arrangement in Batman Close was coming to an end, so I felt obligated to keep up the charade of twelve-step meetings in an attempt to secure the offer of the new place.
Also, now that I was attending meetings high on heroin, I found them a lot more bearable. Enjoyable even. I could take an active interest in other people’s stories and sometimes even empathize with the poor fuckers. There was an initial twinge of embarrassment when I stood up to a roomful of applause, collecting a keychain celebrating ninety days sober while ripped to the gills on strong Afghan gear, but it soon subsided.
I started to get over my feelings of ridiculousness about “sharing” in group meetings. Loaded, I was expert at saying the right things: expressing the officially proscribed doubts and fears using the correct, crypto-therapeutic language. I learned not to roll my eyes or snigger when someone used an NA cliché around me. I was astounded by people’s ability to use a cliché I had heard in recovery one million times before, as if they were expressing a truly original thought. Like this:
“You know what I realized I was doing?”
“What’s that?”
“I was changing seats on The Titanic. You see?”
Or this:
“Listen. What you are feeling is fear. You know what fear means?”
“What?”
“Fuck Everything And Run. F.E.A.R. You see what I’m saying, mate?”
I met with Elektra and Paris from the band Liquid Sky in a little pub called the Good Mixer in Camden, right after my NA meeting in a nearby church hall. Right after the coffees and amens I slipped into the bar and hammered back a couple of vodka tonics in quick succession. When I still played with the Catsuits, this bar had been the center of the indie rock scene in London. One could see some of the biggest faces in the Britpop scene rubbing shoulders with upstarts like us on a Friday night. Now it was populated by drunk Goth kids and tourists who showed up five years too late for the party. Somebody was playing Pulp’s Different Class in its entirety. It was oddly like stepping back into 1997.
Two girls dressed like new-wave prostitutes staggered in on improbable heels. One of them wore a LIQUID SKY T-shirt strategically slashed across the tits and belly. This barely earned a sideways glance from the bar’s jaded clientele. I looked up from my glass and waved over to them. They approached and the smaller of the two, a dark-haired girl with electric-blue eye shadow, offered her hand.
