by Tony O'Neill
“They’re just happy that I’m not in LA anymore. That has to be worth a couple of thousand, right?”
I looked at her and silently wondered just who had gotten the best out of that deal.
I found a flat that lay above a shoe repair place on “Murder Mile”—Upper Clapton Road. We saw the place at ten in the morning and took it straight away. It was a pit, but we couldn’t afford to waste money in the motel any longer. The landlady’s son showed us around, and something about him gave me the impression that after we said we wanted the flat that he might try and sell us a stolen cell phone or some bootleg DVDs. I figured the uglier and more fucked-up the flat was, the less chance that they would be interested in what went on behind closed doors. Total anonymity was my goal, and I got it.
The first night that we were there, I turned on the TV and a local news reporter was standing outside of our front door.
“They call it Murder Mile,” he said, looking straight at the camera, “a section of East London that has more shootings per capita than anywhere else in the UK. Today, Homerton Hospital announced that they were hiring doctors from South Africa—doctors more adept at treating gunshot wounds—to deal with the spiraling consequences of Murder Mile’s crack-fueled explosion of violence….”
The landlady was an ancient Indian matriarch who asked no questions as long as the rent was paid roughly on time. She sat behind the counter of the shop downstairs like a wooden statue—unblinking and unmoving—with the smell of leather, shoe polish, and glue heavy in the air like a kind of incense. She said nothing when I slipped the three hundred pounds cash over the counter to her, just gave a slight nod of the head. She was draped in yellow-gold jewelry and her entire being seemed to shimmer in the dull light.
The steel door next to the shop led to a concrete hallway with a blinking yellow light illuminating it. Then up the brown-carpeted twisting staircase to the third floor. The room itself was shabby, cold, and small. The carpet was dark brown and threadbare. Our tiny, portable black-and-white television sat upon a rickety chest of drawers in front of the dirty, collapsing bed. There was a small, unused kitchen and a dark, bloody bathroom.
Sometimes you could hear mice in the walls, in the quiet hours before dawn. We started using heroin in earnest again. I watched Susan shrink and age here, dramatically—she lay on the bed mostly whining about dope sickness and fixing drugs and stinking the place up with the stench of the living dead, but sometimes, when I was too sick to move, she would relent and make the convoluted journey from Murder Mile to Hammersmith to pick up our drugs from RJ. But I soon realized that waiting for her to come back was worse in a way than making the journey myself. The terrible sense of stasis, of time standing still, slipping backward even, while bad daytime television crackled out of the set and the demons and the sickness flayed me alive in the bed was more unbearable than making the journey myself—sweating and shaking in packed commuter trains and watching the stations grinding by.
At least then the countdown—Latimer Road…Shepherds Bush…Goldhawk Road—gave the sense of a building climax. And then in the toilet of the Kings Mall, a depressing Stalinist concrete façade, holed up in the filthy dark cubicle with one foot wedged against the lockless door listening to the homeless guy in the next stall take a spluttering liquid shit, the smell filling the whole place, I’d cook up my shot and thread the needle into my gooseflesh, probing for a vein…thick black blood dripping down my forearm, spotting my jeans, forming in dark pools on the piss-wet tiles.
Once the shot was in my bloodstream the homeless guy’s shit started to smell like a home-cooked meal and I would feel pure pleasure in my guts instead of fear and hunger, and the long ride home became a reverie—relaxed and languid—handsome and perfect on the Hammersmith and City Line to Kings Cross, nodding in time to the train’s slow-motion lurches.
Susan’s face was a constant reminder of my condition. I looked at her with the same terrified fascination with which a drowning man might look upon a sack of bricks that had suddenly appeared chained around his neck. Without even a cunt that I wanted to penetrate she was an obsolete commodity, ossified into clichés by her constant self-pitying.
Once we moved into the flat on Murder Mile, Dr. Stein was able to palm us off onto another methadone clinic—Homerton Drug Dependency Unit, where we found ourselves under the care of Dr. Ira. Stein handed us our last prescriptions and a sealed letter with our case histories to give to our new jailer.
In Dr. Stein’s clinic I had little to no interaction with other addicts. The waiting room was full of people with common or garden ailments—old ladies with varicose veins, pregnant women, ugly runny-nosed children. The junkies tended to recognize one another, but they rarely interacted. Walking into the doors of Homerton for the first time, I realized things would be very different. Junkies were everywhere. As I was walking in one was arguing with a sour-faced, gray-haired old lady behind the reception desk about something or other. He looked cadaverous and vengeful; he spat curses at the old woman, who looked at him like he was a hideously animated piece of feces.
“If you don’t sit down and stop talking,” the old lady said, “I’m going to call security.”
“Call ’em ya fucking cunt! I dare yer!”
She picked up the phone. She dialed a number and said, “Security?”
The guy punched the desk. “Fuck you!” he screamed at her. “I’m fucking going. Tell that Jew-fuck Ira to stick his fucking mefadone up his arse! Fuck this shit! I ain’t coming back! Twats!”
He stormed out of the glass doors and into the parking lot. There were four or five others sitting around in the waiting room, silent in their misery. I walked over to the old woman behind the desk, gave her my name, and was told to wait. After a few minutes, Susan and I were called into an office to meet Dr. Ira.
He gestured for us to sit down on the two plastic chairs by his desk. I handed over the envelope and Ira studied the paperwork on us both. He left us sitting there like that for a good five minutes. I could hear him breathing in the quiet little office. I could hear Susan’s bones creaking as she shifted position on her seat. Eventually I began: “Dr. Ira, if you have any questions about—”
He shook his head and carried on reading. He was taking an extraordinarily long time to read a single sheet of paper. Eventually he put the paper down and peered over at us.
“The first order of business,” he said, “is to come up with a treatment plan for the two of you. A time frame, if you will.”
“Okay,” I said. “A time frame for what though?”
“For detoxification.”
I let this information sink in. Then, remembering something Dr. Stein had said to me during one of our sessions, I said: “But our last doctor recommended that we stay on methadone for the foreseeable future. He said that the longer someone is on methadone, the better the chances of them staying off heroin when they do detox.”
“Poppycock!” Dr. Ira laughed. “Dr. Stein sounds like a typical softly-softly man. That kind of attitude never helped anybody to get off drugs! It’s best not to pussyfoot around with these things, get it over with as soon as possible. Rather like ripping off a plaster, yes?”
Dr. Ira started writing in his file.
“Excuse me.”
He stopped, sighed, and closed his file. He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes dejectedly, replaced the glasses, and looked at me in exasperation. “Yes?”
“Well, I don’t think that I want to detox. I’d like to remain on methadone for a while. This is the best my life has been in…five years at least. I don’t think I’m ready.”
“Well.” He smiled. “You’d better be. Because we do have a problem here on two fronts. One is that I—and my hospital—do not believe in long-term methadone maintenance. We see it as counterproductive. In layman’s terms, our position on providing opiates to opiate addicts is that it is rather like providing cars to joyriders. You are not solving the problem, but rather rewarding the negative behavior. But the
other problem is one that is much more pressing, for both of you.”
“What is that?” Susan asked.
“Well, I see here that Dr. Stein was something of a liberal prescriber. Eighty milliliters of methadone daily, hmm? I’m afraid that that just won’t do. The most you will get here is fifty milliliters, so in a way you will be starting a detox of a kind…right now.”
“But—” I started.
“This is not something I can discuss with you. We have a cap here of fifty milliliters. Eighty milliliters is absolutely out of the question.”
“Then I want to be treated somewhere else.”
“Do you have the money to see a private doctor?”
“No.”
“Well, unless you’re willing to move into another catchment area, I am afraid I am all that you’ve got. Don’t worry, we’ll make you nice and comfortable.”
Susan and I just looked at each other in shocked silence. Dr. Ira scribbled a note on a piece of paper and handed it to us. It wasn’t the regular pink prescription slip we had been receiving from Dr. Stein.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s a prescription notice for seventy milliliters of linctus that will be reduced by ten milliliters a week until you are at an acceptable dose of fifty milliliters. You go into the back office and you will be given a card. Each day you present yourself to this clinic, your card will be stamped, and methadone will be dispensed.”
“To take home?”
“Of course not. You drink the methadone on-site.”
Immediately I felt myself tensing up. The first week or so that I had been on methadone, I had taken my dose first thing in the morning. I found that by six or seven in the evening I was in a mild state of withdrawal. After a few restless nights’ sleep I worked out that it helped to take forty millitliters first thing in the morning and forty milliliters at night before bed. Not only was the bastard forcing me to reduce my dose, now he was telling me how to take it. I explained to the doctor about my routine for taking the medication. He just smiled at me, the patient look of a man trying to explain—again—that the rules had changed and that I had no say in what happened next.
“You take your dose on-site. Take-home doses are a privilege to be earned. If you don’t like how my hospital is treating you, the door is not locked. You are free to leave treatment at any time.”
After drinking our allotted dose in a windowless back room overseen by an officious woman wearing glasses, we split, cursing the place.
Walking out into the hospital parking lot, Susan and I were approached by a tall figure with a mop of unruly black hair and skin pressed tight against prominent cheekbones. Susan was lighting up a cigarette and the figure said, “Spare a fag?”
Susan nodded, handed him one, and lit it for him.
“You two under Dr. Ira?”
I nodded, “You?”
“Nah. Fuck that. I don’t do that shit. Once those fucking methadone clinics get their claws into you”—he motioned to his wrist as if locking the key on a set of handcuffs—“especially that cunt. My ex-missus used to see him. She used to come home in tears every fuckin’ Wednesday. A right bastard.”
“Yeah, he’s reducing us already. He wants us down to fifty in a fortnight.”
“Yeah. Says he won’t prescribe over fifty, right? I know. Heard it all. You know that there’s no limit to what they can prescribe legally? Mate of mine is on two hundred milliliters a day. Has been for years. That fifty milliliters rule is just something Ira thought up. But look, if you ever need extra…”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of glass ampoules.
“What are they?” I asked. Susan leered at the ampoules.
“Methadone amps. Mate of mine gets ’em from a private doctor in the city. Trades ’em to me. You can shoot these and it won’t dirty up your urine test.”
We had started walking back toward the street together.
“I’m Steve Cook, by the way.”
We shook hands.
“Do they feel good?” asked Susan. “The methadone amps?”
“Yeah! They’re good. Not as good as the real thing but as least you get a hit from it, unlike the fucking juice. Stick some Ritalin in there and it feels like a speedball, though.”
“You got any Ritalin?”
“That’s where I’m going now. Kid I know has ADD. But ’e doesn’t react well to the Ritalin. His mum sells ’em to me.”
Steve gestured to a block of council flats overlooking the hospital.
“How much?”
“Three quid each.”
“D’you mind if we come up?”
Steve laughed, “More the merrier, mate. Eh—you ain’t old bill are you?”
We had a laugh about that as we went up to score the pills.
Steve rapped on the door, and a heavy, tired-looking woman answered it. She was sucking on a cigarette. “A’right Steve,” she said, beckoning him inside. Susan and I stood about on the balcony, looking at the rows of identical front doors.
“You think he’s on the level?” Susan asked.
I shrugged. I hoped so. It had been a long time since I had done anything approximating a speedball. I hadn’t injected coke since leaving LA, for fear of getting into the kind of mess that I had back in the States with a coke habit. But after today, after listening to that red-nosed bastard doctor lay down the law about how much methadone I should take a day, and where I would be taking my methadone, I was in the right headspace to get good and fucked up.
18
JULY
I am scoring crack in Kings Cross. It is my twenty-fourth birthday. I am playing a show tonight with Liquid Sky in Tufnell Park and I am nervous. Louis, the incompetent bastard, promised to score some cocaine for me, and of course it fell through at the last minute. He seemed utterly bemused by how pissed off I was. We have two hours following sound check before we play the show. I decide to go to the Cross and risk the street dealers in the hope of getting some rocks.
Wandering the street making eye contact with the various dodgy-looking people loitering by the station, I find a runner who immediately tries to bully me into buying from him. “My guy is in the motel there,” he says, nodding to one of the many horror motels that dot this neighborhood, “Gimmie the cash and I’ll come back with the stuff.”
“I’m not a fucking tourist. I’m not buying unless I can try some first.”
“Nah, too many cops.”
He smiles at me, his gold teeth glinting with a vague kind of threat.
“Just gimmie the cash,” he says as if talking to a remedial student, “an’ I’ll be right back.”
“Forget it.”
As I’m walking off, he calls me back. Brings me over to his car. We get in and drive off, circling around the backstreets of the Cross. He pulls up next to a tired-looking whore lurking outside a McDonald’s and she jumps in the backseat. I start to get worried that they are going to rob me. He tells her to get a pipe out, which she does, one of those little numbers fashioned out of a miniature Martell cognac bottle. He pulls over, produces a rock from his mouth, and hands it to me along with the pipe. I unwrap it and place a piece on the gauze, running the flame lightly over it to melt it into place. I take a hit, handing the pipe over as I exhale. It is, at least, real crack. As I blow the crack smoke out the dealer hisses “shit” and I look in the rearview mirror. Police are driving slowly up the street behind us. We are double-parked and the car is literally full of white smoke. He shunts the car into life and starts to drive off as casually as possible while I wrestle with the busted handle to try and wind the window down and let the smoke out.
Somehow, when we turn left toward Euston Road again, the cops lose interest and carry on down the street. But now I am nervous as hell and want to get out of the car as fast as possible.
I buy the rock we have been smoking off him and another, bundled up in plastic wrap. In my shaken state I don’t take the time to check the merchandise. They drop me
off at an amusement arcade on the Caledonian Road. I go into the bathroom and check the second rock. Motherfucker! I realize immediately that I have been burned. A piece of old chewing gum is all that is at the center of the bundle of plastic wrap. I am forty pounds down and I have about ten pounds’ worth of crack to show for it.
Stepping out of the bathroom I see someone familiar through the glass front of the arcade, lurking about on the street. With a start, I realize it is Michael. I have not seen him since he threw me out of the place on White Hart Lane. He looks like shit, nervously standing on the corner, waiting for his connection to show up. I have a knife on my belt buckle, and high on that blast of crack I briefly consider sidling up to him and sticking it between his fucking ribs. But fuck it: he already got his. He’s back to this tedious fucking routine, just like I am. It seems there is no escape for any of us, whether we have God and the twelve-steps on our side or not.
