by Tony O'Neill
And the customers. Jesus. If you made the mistake of making eye contact with any of them then you’d be stuck for an hour.
“Excuse me, where would I find Mariah Carey’s new album?”
“Excuse me, do you have a bossa nova section?”
“Excuse me, are things filed by first name or surname?”
I learned to perfect the art of walking purposefully with a bunch of random CDs in my hand. If anybody stopped me to ask anything I’d tell them, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m assisting another customer at the moment. Somebody else will be happy to help you” before cutting out. The building was so big that I could pass entire days going from one floor to the next, picking up a CD from the storeroom, carrying it to the next floor, taking a break, walking through the jazz section flicking through CDs. Anything but doing actual work. And, of course, stealing.
Everybody stole. But nobody stole as ruthlessly and efficiently as I did. The process was simple. Staff got searched when leaving for the day, but not on lunch breaks. Wandering around the West End on a break, I stumbled upon a Japanese language college. I entered and located an empty locker on the third floor. Sensing an opportunity, I bought a padlock and fitted it. Then on lunch breaks I would make the journey with my jeans stuffed full of stolen CDs and store them in the locker for collection at the end of the day. I wasn’t the only one stealing, but I was the only one with such a well-thought-out system. I took home approximately twenty to twenty-five CDs a day. Sometimes RJ would take CDs in exchange for heroin, and I started stealing to order. For the three months that I worked there, up until the time they let me go rather than renew my contract, I had all of the heroin I wanted. I was a king, I suppose. But unbeknownst to me, this rare moment of serenity would be fleeting. Life was about to take another turn.
16
THE FUCKUP
The living arrangement with Jack was the beginning of the end in many ways. The first problem was the fact that I moved out of Dr. Stein’s catchment area. A catchment area is the area immediately surrounding a doctor’s surgery. Dr. Stein had drilled into both Susan and I the importance of telling him if we moved, as he could legally prescribe methadone to us only so long as we remained in his area. Of course, the move from White City all the way north to Tottenham was bound to cause us big problems. So we simply never mentioned it. After all, what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right?
The hammer started to fall three weeks after moving in with Jack. Susan and I slept on mattresses in the large bedroom at the back. Despite taking two weeks to prepare the flat, all that Michael had managed to do was put his clothes into messy piles and stick them in the corner of the room. Jack was ensconced in the smaller bedroom down the hall.
Now keeping our methadone prescriptions under wraps from the others in NA was even harder. Jack suddenly decided that we should all be friends since we were living in the same place, and he kept inviting us out to pubs and clubs with him. I went once. I thought that when Jack invited me to a club, that surely all bets must have been off in regards to his supposed sobriety. After all, what on earth would one do in a nightclub in Brixton without even a few beers?
The answer came soon enough. One would stand around, sipping tonic water or Coca-Cola, watching everybody else have a good time, listening to jungle music, stone-cold sober. Jack was immediately on the floor dancing, leaving me to watch him in increasing disbelief. I started to wonder if in fact Jack was not some kind of mental subnormal.
The day that everything fell apart started off like any other. Susan and I had our weekly meeting with Dr. Stein at the surgery in Shepherds Bush. I was already wondering about the possibility of finding somewhere else to live. Living with a genuine NA’er was tiring, especially as Susan and I were now both expected to attend meetings with Jack. We would have to come up with continuous cover stories to avoid getting roped into attending three meetings per week. I could sense that Jack was getting suspicious. When I gave in and went to a meeting with him one day, he told me as much. We were hanging around in a nearby McDonald’s waiting for the meeting to start and he said, “I’m worried about you.”
“Why?” I laughed, trying to sound casual but knowing what was coming.
“You barely attend meetings anymore. You never share when you do. You’ve been coming around for ages and you still don’t have a sponsor. I know that you two are clean, but, you know, my sponsor, David, says that sobriety isn’t enough!”
“Oh yeah? It’s enough for me. What else am I supposed to do? Do a fuckin’ song and dance?”
“He says that people like you are…what did he say now? Yeah—dry drunks. You’re not drinking, but you’re still exhibiting all the symptoms of being sick.”
“Jack,” I said patiently, “for one, I’m not a fucking drunk. I never have been. Two, I don’t know David and David doesn’t know me—or Susan—so really his opinion is of no interest to me. If coming to meetings as often as I feel I need to and staying off drugs isn’t enough, then, you know, fuck it. Maybe I shouldn’t come. Why don’t you go to meetings with David, since you find him so utterly fucking fascinating?”
Jack backed off, startled a little by my outburst.
“Wait! Look, of course staying clean is what’s important. It’s just…I don’t want to see you…go back on it, right?”
“You don’t know nothing about it,” I snapped. “You’ve never done gear. You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t fucking judge me! Anyway, it’s time for our precious fucking meeting, okay?”
“Shit. Okay, man. Chill the fuck out.”
So I knew that this situation couldn’t carry on indefinitely. I was pondering this as the nurse called Susan and me into Dr. Stein’s office. Walking in and closing the door behind us, I noticed that Stein looked even more glum-faced than usual.
“Sit down.”
We did.
Saying nothing, Stein took out the pink prescription pads that they use for narcotics and scribbled down our weekly prescription. This was unusual. He usually asked a bunch of questions, asked for a piss test, something. But today there was nothing, just Stein writing, stonily silent, pressing down so hard that I thought his pen might tear a whole through the paper.
“There you go,” he said, tossing the prescriptions at us, “your final prescriptions. Now don’t come back, either of you.”
Susan and I just sat there in silence. Stein glared at us. I started racking my brain. I knew that I couldn’t have given dirty urine the last time. I hadn’t used heroin in a while. Since getting the heave-ho from Virgin, heroin was temporarily a luxury item.
“I don’t understand,” Susan began.
“Where do you live?”
“One-oh-nine Batman Close—” I began.
“Bullshit! I sent you a standard letter, because your last urine test proved inconclusive. It wasn’t positive, probably some over-the-counter medication you have been taking, but it was enough to render the test inconclusive. I sent you a standard letter to inform you of this, as the rules dictate. The letter was returned to me with the notice that you no longer live at that address.”
“Look, Dr. Stein,” I stammered, in full damage control mode, “I was going to tell you! The lease came up on the flat and we had to vacate. We’re somewhere temporary—only for a few weeks, and we’re looking for a new place right in the area. That’s why we didn’t tell you!”
“Oh yes, I’m sure. You people are always so fucking innocent! You probably have four or five doctors prescribing to you, right? You don’t give a shit whether I lose my license! I’ve been nothing but good to the pair of you!”
I was stunned. Dr. Stein was genuinely hurt by our deception. Although, I must admit, when he mentioned his suspicion that we had more than one doctor prescribing methadone to us, my first thought was: That’s possible? I gotta try that.
Susan chimed in. “Dr. Stein, it’s true! We didn’t want to fuck up our prescriptions, that’s all! We’re only out of White City for a month, tops, until we c
an find a local flat again! We’re sleeping on a friend’s floor at the moment. Please…please, don’t kick us out. Things have been going really well recently! We’re getting it together…. Oh Jesus…please don’t kick us out…. It’s not fair!”
Susan was about to go into her crying and wailing routine again. Stein cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“It’s too late. The wheels have been set in motion. You must give me your new address, and another doctor has to take over your care. It’s expressly prohibited for me to prescribe to patients outside of my catchment area. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you anymore.”
We returned to Tottenham in silence. We drank our methadone from the bottles on the train ride home. Everything was wrong. Ascending in the pissy elevator to the seventeenth floor of our block of flats, the situation was about to deteriorate further. There were people in the flat. Usually Jack would fuck off during the daytime, but he was here and so was Michael. The cunts were both sitting around in our bedroom.
I opened the door and saw them, huddled in conversation.
“Oi!” I yelled at the pair of them, “What you doing on our room?”
Michael looked up. He just said: “Can you come in here a minute?”
Susan and I walked in silence toward them. Michael and Jack were sitting on the only two chairs in the room. Michael pointed toward the mattresses and said, “Sit down.” We did. Michael and even dumb, eighteen-year-old Jack were now towering over us. I started to feel anger rise in my chest. Susan kept her mouth shut and looked at the floor.
“Fucking problem?” I asked.
“I think so,” said Michael, “Jack here…and me too actually…we’re worried that you aren’t really a part of the program anymore. I mean, I know that you sometimes show up to the odd meeting, but…well, it’s been a long time you’ve been coming around. A long time. Neither of you have a sponsor, which to me…well, I just don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?” I demanded. “I don’t want a sponsor. When I bump into someone at one of these meetings who I think will have the first clue about where I’m coming from, then sure, then I’ll have a sponsor. Until then, I’ll do it myself.”
“That’s not the way the program works!” Jack laughed.
“Don’t tell me about the fucking program, Jack. I went to my first meeting five years ago in LA, remember? You were thirteen fucking years old Jack. I’m not listening to any fucking lectures from you, mate. I show up. That’s where I’m at right now.”
“Anyway,” Susan interjected, “how is any of this your business? What, you sublet a flat to us and suddenly you’re monitoring our recovery? Where do you get off, Michael?”
“Look, love,” Michael shot back, “for all intents and purposes, I’m your fucking landlord, okay? And there’s some shit I can’t tolerate in my flat these days.”
“Oh, so we can’t live here unless we start showing up to more meetings and being good little patients? So you’re the king of recovery now? What? If I don’t get a sponsor are you going to revoke my ex-junkie license?”
He ignored me. He looked at his hands for a long time. Then he looked up.
Michael said: “You’re still using. The pair of you.”
“Bullshit,” I hissed. “I might not buy into all of this fucking twelve-step stuff, but you can’t just accuse us of…”
Jack had his moment of triumph. He reached down to the floor and picked up the evidence. One of my empty, brown medicine bottles labeled “Methadone linctus. 80 mls.”
“You wanna tell me just what the fuck you were doing snooping around in my fucking room, cunt?” I spat.
“Fuck off! I was looking for that book you borrowed off me!”
Ah, the book. About a week before Jack had been telling me about a book he had just read, A Sense of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle. Apparently he was Scotland’s most dangerous prisoner, and then he became a sculptor. It sounded quite mindless, but I had made the mistake of feigning interest. Jack had insisted that I borrow it. I declined. “But I’m done with it! You can hang on to it for as long as you’d like.” For a quiet life I had taken the tattered paperback, put it on the desk in my room, and promptly forgotten all about it.
I sat there, quiet for a moment. I didn’t like sitting in front of the pair of them like a naughty schoolboy anymore. I stood up, so I was now looking down on them.
“Look. I relapsed. I’m a junkie. Michael, you know what I’m talking about…”
Jack went to chip in, but I dismissed him with my hand.
“Listen, between you and me, Michael, the boy wonder here doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. You know this. He’s a moron! You know. How many times did you fuck up before you got clean this time? And how long has it been, huh? Less than a year, right? So you don’t know what’s around the corner any more than I did. I fucked up! I got a habit again. I got on a methadone program. Are you seriously telling me that you are shocked that a fucking heroin addict relapsed? Is this news to you?”
“You lied to me. You lied to the fellowship. You stood up there and took key chains for being clean for thirty days, sixty days, six months—”
“Who did I hurt, Michael?”
“You led us on! You lied.”
“And you’ve never lied when you’ve been using?”
“But he isn’t using now!” Jack piped up.
“Shut up, cunt!” I screamed at him. He kept his ass on the chair. I looked back to Michael.
“So what are you saying?”
“I want you both out of here.”
“You fucking serious?”
“Yeah.”
I ran my fingers through my hair. I looked down at Susan. We had separately, and together, been evicted so many times, from apartments, from motel rooms, from other people’s homes, that she just shrugged and looked at me as if to say “c’est la vie.”
“Fine. We’ll be out by the end of the week.”
“I want you out tonight.”
“No way.”
Now it was Michael’s turn to stand. He had a few inches on me, and meat on his bones.
“I want you both out tonight.”
“I just paid you rent for the week.”
“You’ll get it back.”
“Now?”
“Not now. When I have it. Now fuck off. If you don’t wanna leave, I’ll come back with some mates and I’ll chuck you out. You know that I ain’t fucking around, right?”
I knew. I looked down at Susan. “Pack our shit up,” I told her. “I’m gonna go find us a place.” I left her there with Michael and Jack. I didn’t want her coming with me. I didn’t need to hear her fucking voice on top of the chatter in my own head. I cursed and punched the elevator doors as it brought me down to the ground floor. Outside the rain was pissing down. The gutters were filling up with filthy water, and I was racking my brain about where to go. I remembered the hooker motels around Kings Cross and decided to hit there. Any motels that rent rooms by the hour had to be cheap.
On my way out of the flat, Michael had the audacity to yell after me: “Don’t give up on sobriety, mate. When you’re ready to come back, the meetings will be there for you.”
I paused by the door, and gave him my considered response.
“You can suck my dick, Michael, you fucking faggot.”
I slammed the door, made my way down to the rain-blasted streets. I felt strangely liberated. This is when I functioned at my best, with my back completely up against the wall. I knew that the situation at the bank wasn’t good. We had maybe a hundred pounds to our name. The rain kept coming down on me, oblivious to my situation.
17
DOWN AND OUT ON MURDER MILE
We stayed in Kings Cross for two sleepless nights. The first night that we were there I woke up in the early hours, covered in bites from the bugs that lived in the mattress. The motel was a run-down shithole off Caledonian Road, and the room was in the basement floor and didn’t even provide sunlight. I called Dr. Stein’s of
fice and informed them that we were now homeless and looking for a place to live. His nurse warned me that unless we found something by our next scheduled visit, our prescriptions would be canceled. I hit the papers looking for a place.
Susan got on the phone to her father in LA and pleaded for money. Over the years she had burned both of her parents down for money, but surprisingly the old man came through for her this time, wiring two thousand dollars by Western Union. When I expressed surprise she just laughed.
