by Tony O'Neill
“Brian is out for a bit. I was bored.” She smiled, perching on the desk.
“Oh yeah? There’s nothing much happening in here.”
“You’re on stuff too, right?”
I eyed her suspiciously. “Stuff?”
“It’s cool,” she insisted. “I saw you at the chemist taking your dose. You didn’t see me. I was buying tampons.”
“Well,” I said, at a loss for the right words. “That’s nice.”
“My boyfriend uses too. I mean, he’s on a script too. He don’t do the gear anymore. I made him stop. It was killing him.”
Her name was Amy, it turned out. She seemed okay, a little slow, but okay. Two kids, a boyfriend out of work and on a script, and both of them hitting the crack pipe. She was working illegally—cash in hand—for Stoker to supplement their benefits. I didn’t ask if the blow jobs were a part of the deal. I figured it would be best to keep my mouth shut.
Once she started talking it was hard to get her to stop. She had a crackhead’s machine-gun mouth all right. She talked to me about anything, everything. That first day I stared off into space as she riffed on her kids, on her boyfriend, on reality television, on how bad Stoker smelled. I tried to listen to the World Service over her monologue, but found it was impossible to focus on anything else—her voice had a nightmarish quality about it, whiny and grating, and it seemed to reverberate from within your own head. Maybe that’s why Stoker insisted that she put his penis in her mouth once a day.
I garnered all kinds of useless information about this woman. Where she lived (around the corner, across the road from the video store), what medication she and her boyfriend took regularly (Lustral—an antidepressant—and a blood-thinning medication for the boyfriend’s deep vein thrombosis in his leg), her kids behavior (“Steve…come to think of it Steve and Jackie…They’re both little shits”), and, her favorite topic, the fact that she had to drive to Kings Cross every night after work to score rocks.
“Why aren’t there any decent crack dealers around here?” she would moan, repeatedly. “I hate having to drive all the way to the Cross to buy. I’ve never found a source for decent stuff around here. Why is that?”
“It’s a mystery, I suppose,” I would tell her.
The visits became more and more regular. I’m sure Stoker had the good sense to ignore her, but ever since Amy had discovered my “secret” I suppose she now thought of us as friends, and I became her unwilling confidant. She continually found excuses to come into the garage and bore me stupid with the minutiae of her life. After a week of this I started giving serious consideration to leaving the job.
I lasted another month. The job was easy, and the money was useful. But the main reason I had for liking the job—not having to deal with other people—was now irreconcilably ruined. One day after drinking my methadone in the chemist’s I walked out onto the street and turned right instead of left. I went to McDonald’s instead of Stoker’s house and bought breakfast. Once I was half an hour late for work I left the restaurant and called RJ and set up a meet to buy some coke and heroin.
My time of being an employed citizen was, for now at least, over.
The kicker was that a month or so later I was watching the local news. The police raided the video shop right across from where Amy lived with her idiot boyfriend and her little shit children, after a tip off that people were selling crack cocaine out of there. What they found was a sophisticated operation where crack was on sale for bulk purchases. The bundles where stashed away in VHS copies of the latest movies. In the back room they were producing the rocks from powder cocaine in a mini production line. I laughed to myself, wondering if Amy had seen this yet.
Poor, dumb Amy.
14
NA
Jack was an eighteen-year-old kid with a shaved head that I thought at first was because of an affiliation to skinhead culture, but which I later discovered was because he was deeply ashamed of his natural, bright ginger locks. The first time I heard him speak was quite typical: it was during the Tuesday-night Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Camden. It took place in a filthy, cold room above a community center that everybody referred to as “the crack house.” He shared a long, meandering story in which he came across as a rather buffoonish, comical character. In this story, some friends set him up on a blind date. As he was “sober” he had assumed his friends would be decent enough to set him up with a similarly sober girl. I remember at this point wondering if there was such a thing as a sober eighteen-year-old in London. It seemed entirely possible that Jack was the only one—a kind of twelve-step Omega Man.
Anyway, the story continued. Of course the girl, Louise, was not sober. In fact, she showed up piss drunk to meet Jack. When he told her that he didn’t drink or do drugs, she just smiled and said, “That’s okay mate—all the more for me!”
I smiled. Nobody else did. What was it with fucking NA meetings? Nobody had a sense of humor.
The story continued and at one point featured a stone-cold sober Jack holding the girl’s hair as she vomited twelve Bacardi Breezers and a döner kebab into the piss-stinking toilets of the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. The tale culminated on a night bus at two in the morning, with the obliterated Louise throwing strawberries (I can’t remember where the strawberries came from) at the assorted drunks, psychos, hard men, and yardies riding the N87 to Wandsworth that night.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jack whined, trying to grab her wrists before somebody beat the living shit out of him.
“I’m sharing the strawberries, dickhead!” came the reply.
I laughed. Everybody looked at me, Jack included. I held up my hands in a kind of I’m sorry but it was funny! way. He seemed genuinely aggrieved. I talked to him afterward, and that was when I realized that Jack wasn’t even an addict. He was attending NA meetings because he thought he smoked too much weed. I shook my head sadly at him.
“You’re eighteen,” I said as gently as possible. “You’re meant to smoke too much weed!”
I had offended Jack for the second time that night. He frowned and shot me an expression that only overly serious eighteen-year-olds can give.
“My addiction,” he said, completely seriously, “Deserves as much respect as yours!”
So I filed Jack away mentally as just another asshole kid who needed to define himself through his problems—real or perceived. I thought it was cynical how the NA meetings embraced him, despite how obvious it was that he didn’t have a problem. Now Jack was interacting with real-life addicts—crackheads, prostitutes, junkies—people he would never have had any contact with in the real world. For someone as guileless and naive as he seemed, this probably wouldn’t be a good thing. Little did I know that in a matter of weeks I would be living with Jack, and everything would fall apart.
The meetings were now superfluous to my needs. I didn’t have any friends in the program. But I did have some people I thought I could use to my advantage, and that kept me coming back.
Michael, the guy I knew from the Narcotics Anonymous meeting that I attended on Tuesday nights, still had the illegal sublet available on his old council flat in White Hart Lane. I asked around because I was informed that the lease was coming up on the flat share in Batman Close and we would all have to be out at the end of the month. The beer belly and the South African were going to take the opportunity to go backpacking. Susan and I were too high to make any adequate provisions for this event, so I decided it would be prudent to keep attending NA meetings to secure Michael’s sublet. Susan stopped showing up with me, content instead to sit around the flat shooting heroin, watching daytime television, and smoking cigarettes.
But, of course, secrets do not last long in NA meetings and suddenly Jack was sniffing around Michael, wanting to get in on the action. One day Michael took Susan and I out to see his place. We took the tube to Seven Sisters, and then an aboveground train out to White Hart Lane. The area was run-down, nothing but high-rise council flats, shabby-looking semi-detached h
ouses, low-end supermarkets, and corner shops. All they had out there was the football ground. To Michael, this was a selling point of Herculean proportions.
“You’re just dahn the road from the ground, mate. It’s fuckin’ ace. You can hear ’em cheer whenever Tottenham score! Blinding!”
Michael obviously fancied himself as a wide boy. He looked like he would be handy with his fists. He was always in a Fila tracksuit and pristine trainers. He made his money as a ticket tout, now that he was out of the drug game.
“Fackin’ Madonna’s coming to play London soon! I ’ave five of us gonna get in the line for tickets. They’ll ’ave a limit, but these fuckers are gonna go for a couple hundred each, mate! Nice little profit, yer know?”
The flat was on the seventeenth floor of a piss-stinking council rabbit warren. The elevator was literally sopping with urine and garbage. Susan made a disgusted face at me, but I just shrugged and told her to get in. Michael seemed entirely oblivious to it. He just seemed happily surprised that it was working. Inside, the place was a shambles. Dirty clothes lay all over the floor, and the air was stale. It had two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The main bedroom was at the back and had balconies where you could walk out and enjoy the view of the gray skies and the countless other high-rises. It was one of the most singularly depressing panoramas I have ever seen.
“I’ve not been back since I quit the brown, you know? I had to get out of here to get clean. Too many memories. Too hard to stay clean here, you know? I’ve been in this flat ten years, using for all of them. You see down there?”
Michael pointed to a muddy patch of grass, seventeen floors down.
“Yeah.”
“A mate of mine jumped out my window and landed there. Broke both of his legs and his hips too. ’E’s in a fuckin’ chair now, the fuckin’ cabbage.”
“Why did he jump?”
“We was smoking rocks. I dunno. I s’pose he thought he heard something, you know what I mean?”
The deal was that the flat would be free in two weeks, and Susan and I could move in. The flat in Hammersmith had to be vacated in a week and a half. I asked Michael if there was any way he could clean out sooner than two weeks. He just shrugged and didn’t answer.
“There’s something else,” he said. “I promised the other room to Jack. Do you mind?”
Michael saw the look on my face.
“’E’s all right. He’s just young is all. He won’t be any trouble!”
Susan was livid, and we had an argument on the way home. She was already complaining about having to share the flat with Jack.
“You got a better idea, Susan? Maybe we should put a fucking down payment on our own place? I hear Chelsea’s nice!”
“Fuck off. You should have told Michael no when he brought up Jack’s name.”
“You were there. Why didn’t you tell him?”
“You’re the man!”
“Yeah. That’s why I’ve been out twice a fucking week praying with these cunts, picking up fucking key rings for making it nine months clean and fucking serene and having to listen to their fucking bullshit, and everybody asking me ‘Oh, why don’t you have a sponsor?’ and all the rest of it! I’ve done my part. If this place ain’t good enough, go get a fucking paper and start looking for another place yourself.”
“Fuck that. Let’s just call RJ.”
“All right. That’s more like it.”
15
JOBS (TWO)
The regime under Dr. Stein was pretty good. I was back at my old pharmacy and once a day we went to Shepherds Bush Green to pick up our eighty-milliliter bottles of methadone. The methadone itself was luminous green and sickly sweet. Once the methadone kicked in I would be filled with good-natured cheer and get an insatiable appetite for sweets. At a bakery nearby, I would eat cream buns and custard tarts. I existed on a diet of methadone, Coca-Cola, chocolate bars, and pastries.
Over the next few months Susan and I met with Dr. Stein weekly. He would ask how we were doing. We would tell him that we were fine. Once in a while he would send one or both of us to the bathroom with a plastic bottle to take a urine test. While not actually curing the mental yearning to shoot heroin, the high doses of methadone we were being prescribed took away the physical need to do it. Without the relentless pressure of withdrawal gnawing at us we actually stopped doing heroin for a few months. However, once things were relatively stable for a while, I started to get bored. A junkie friend of mine used to remark how he would inject water whenever he didn’t have heroin, and somehow it would make him feel better. Methadone did nothing for either the Pavlovian craving for the needle or for my need not to feel. Life was as ugly and as meaningless on methadone as on heroin, except now I didn’t have my routine of scoring drugs and fixing to look forward to. I knew that there had to be a way to get around the urine tests, so I went to an Internet café and did a search on heroin’s half-life in the bloodstream. It revealed that heroin tends to leave the system quite quickly, and you could give a clean urine test seventy-two hours after your last dose. So I resumed, regulating my use of heroin to the beginning of the week and weekends.
Once a week I attended the job center. Susan was ineligible for the dole, and I was eligible for only fifty-seven pounds a week. I was using at least a hundred pounds a week in heroin alone, so as unsavory as the prospect was I knew that I needed to find some kind of work again. After the experience with Traditional Country Music Monthly, I had vowed to stay away from regular employment. But, of course, cold hard reality intruded. In the job center, I sat across from an old woman with a pursed mouth who seemed to really resent her job. I told her of my work history: keyboardist in the Catsuits, then music video writing. It seemed so small and unimpressive when I tried to explain it to the woman.
“So…,” she monotoned, “would you be interested in doing something with music again?”
“Oh yeah. Do you have something?”
She tapped into her computer for a moment. She said, “Here we go,” and half-turned the monitor toward me. On screen it said: “VIRGIN MEGASTORE, OXFORD STREET. SALES ASSISTANTS RQD (IMMEDIATE).”
“I’ll set you up an interview, then, shall I?”
Well, Jesus. I was desperate. The night before I had flicked on the television and saw none other than my old band mate, Laura, presenting a TV show on Channel 5. She looked exactly the same. I sat watching her, with a snoring junkie wife on the bed next to me. I had less than a hundred pounds in the bank and was shooting up into my legs. I didn’t look exactly the same. I looked like the portrait in the fucking attic. Part of me wanted to stand up and tell the old whore to fuck off, that I’d eat dog shit before I’d work in a Virgin Megastore, but I fought the urge. I needed something straight away, or there’d be no more drugs.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Set up the interview.”
My first day on the job I wandered around the shop floor in an ill-fitting T-shirt, trying to avoid talking to people until my lunch break. I was working five days a week, my schedule changing every week. Once a month I’d have a weekend off. I was paid seven pounds an hour to restock the shelves and work the tills. It was mind-numbingly boring work, made worse by the giant video screens that looked down upon us everywhere we went, blaring out terrible songs every fifteen minutes. That was the gimmick—every fifteen minutes there would be a great sound like the whole shop was about to take off. And then these huge video screens would flicker into life and a song would come on. The second or third time this happened I realized that it was the same fucking song. The same video. I found myself inadvertently singing along. Oh Jesus, I thought.
I walked over to the supervisor, a large Jamaican girl who seemed ruthlessly efficient and far too dedicated to a job that was the non-food equivalent to working in a McDonald’s. Her name was Jenna.
“Jenna,” I yelled over the music, “are they gonna play the same song all day long?”
“Huh?”
“On the big screen. They’ve played the same song
three times already!”
“Oh yeah. The record company buys the screen for a block of time. Usually a month or so.”
“A month! I’m gonna be hearing this shit for a month?”
“Oh, don’t worry. After a while you stop noticing it. I didn’t even realize it was on.”
After two weeks I was ready to lose my mind. On my early shifts I’d be in there at 8:30 A.M. to endure a start-of-day pep talk from one of the managers. Usually some meaningless nonsense about how well the store was doing, what a great guy Richard Branson was, and how to watch out for shoplifters. Then, even before the store was open to the public, I’d hear the sound.
WHUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRGHHHHHHH.
That was the sound of the screens fading into life. The song started with a drum intro that turned my blood cold. I couldn’t block it out. I tried everything. I brought drugs to work and got high in the bathroom. I even walked around with earplugs in, but when I walked right past Jenna, ears plugged and oblivious one day as she called for me, I got busted, receiving an official reprimand. So no more earplugs. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night with that same fucking drumbeat playing in my head. I felt like I was being subjected to some intricate form of psychological terrorization.
