by Tony O'Neill
Does Dr. Ira believe I have been off heroin for a year? No. Does he believe any of his patients have? No. Does he care, as long as he doesn’t have to explain the dirty urine samples to his higher-ups?
No, no, and no.
Walking out of the clinic with my prescription I feel like a lottery winner. The bastards are off my back for another seven days. Back to Murder Mile, Susan, and my cold-water flat. Back to the old gray-haired pharmacist and the old black cleaner Leroy, who walks around the shop floor dazed, broom in hand. There are more shootings per capita on Murder Mile than anywhere else in Great Britain. The drug trade is to blame, mostly the Yardies who control the crack trade. Scoring crack around Upper Clapton can be a risky business. Junkies can get caught in the cross fire of turf wars and displays of machismo. DC, a young kid I bought from on occasion, was found dead in the back of an abandoned Vauxhall Astra last month. One day his mobile was turned off and then a day later I saw it on the news: another dead kid on Murder Mile. Turns out he was fourteen. I remember absently thinking that kids are looking older these days. I suppose a gun and a bag of rocks can make anyone look like a man in poor light.
21
JANUARY, AGAIN
I am watching Susan sleep.
I am wondering, If I killed her now, would I get away with it? Susan looks dead already. When she sleeps, she looks like a corpse. She smells like a corpse too. Maybe she would thank me for it.
I realize that if I could make Susan just…disappear…no questions asked, I would do it in an instant.
Or would I?
It always comes back to drugs. As a woman, Susan is useful for certain things. I know that she is able to wheedle credit out of RJ in a way that I would never be able to. Because she can make herself seem pathetic, wounded, and in need of help. That’s Susan’s whole deal, the only card she has to play. But it still works on people. There have been times when there has been no more money for dope, no way of getting dope, and Susan has come through for us. They are rare occurrences, but they have happened nonetheless.
But what am I going to do with Susan in the long term? I cannot remember the last time we fucked. The idea fills me with an uneasy revulsion. Susan was no beauty when I met her, and in the intervening few years she has bankrupted herself completely. She looks ancient, worn-out, a shell of who she used to be. I look at myself in the mirror and can still see traces of the old me. I wonder if Susan sees that when she looks at herself. I think that she must. Someone as insecure as Susan, if she saw what I saw, maybe she would take her own life. Heroin is cruel to women, I think, crueler than it is to men. Male junkies take on a certain look, a certain starved appearance around the cheeks and the jawline, but on women it has the effect of making them look uglier, haggard, mean. In the long run, there are no beautiful female junkies. Even Nico, poor beautiful Nico, wore her face out toward the end. And she was starting from a position of breathtaking gorgeousness. For Susan there was no chance.
I am a coward. I do not have the nerve to kill Susan. I am just indulging in fanciful thoughts because she is passed out and I am awake. Shit, if I didn’t have the nerve to leave her, where would I find the nerve to kill her? Sometimes she says things like: “If I hadn’t found heroin, I think I would have killed myself.”
Other times she says: “If you weren’t around, I think I’d do it. I’d get it over with.”
How am I supposed to respond to that? Susan is twelve years older than me. She must know that I will not be around forever. I just mumble shit like “Don’t talk like that.”
I have seen Susan high on Xanax, back in LA, holding a loaded handgun under her chin. Her eyes wet. We had reached the end of the line again when we were staying in her mother’s house in Venice. Her stepfather kept a gun underneath his bookshelf. She knew, and one night when we were alone there she took it out and placed the gun under her chin. I watched her, frozen.
“Is that thing loaded?” I asked her eventually.
“Yes. What use is an unloaded gun?”
I nodded. There were no more drugs. We couldn’t stay clean.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“Me too. I’m tired too.”
“I can’t do it,” she said eventually. She handed the gun to me. It felt heavy. She said: “Put it in my mouth.”
She opened her mouth. I put the gun in her mouth. She closed her eyes like she was in prayer. I held it there for a few moments, and then, defeated, I withdrew the gun from her mouth. I knew what she wanted me to do, but I couldn’t do it. I handed the gun back to her and told her that I was sorry.
She placed the gun back under her chin.
“I want to do it. I’m fucking serious this time. I really want to do it. Would you do it if I did it first?”
“Put the gun down,” I told her. “Don’t be so fucking stupid. There’s always more drugs. More time. This isn’t the way.”
The next day she left for rehab on her father’s insurance, and I wound up in a sober-living house. But I never forgot that incident.
It hung over me, an implied threat that if I ever left, I would be pulling the trigger that I chickened out of pulling that night.
Susan was still asleep. There was nothing to be done. I sat by the window and waited for dawn.
22
ST. STEVEN
I occasionally returned to the Virgin Megastore to shoplift after being let go from my job there all those months ago. I knew the positioning of the security cameras and that the security staff were lazy, fat, ignorant, and complacent. It was simply a matter of learning how to remove the security cases quickly and discreetly. I learned the technique from Steve Cook. Steve had an almost Zen approach to stealing. He had a lizardlike calm and an economy of movement that I have never seen equaled before or since. He could locate the weak spots in the square plastic security boxes and crack them open with an almost undetectable application of pressure with the thumbs. The case would fall away like an old chrysalis and the CD would slide into his pocket as if it had never been there. Of all the times that Steve had been in prison, it had never once been for shoplifting.
But, like so many others in my life, one day he simply wasn’t there anymore. His phone was cut off; there was no one at his house, the curtains were drawn, and the place was shrouded in darkness. Gone. I realized that I did not know his family, or anyone outside of the circle of people we scored or used drugs with, and none of them had a clue. Maybe back inside Wormwood Scrubs for a spell. Maybe dead from bad drugs or an unpaid debt. Steve was a father; his two children lived with their mother. I sometimes smiled and thought about how wonderful it would be to have a father as knowledgeable and cunning as Steve.
The image of Steve that I would take with me was in Steve’s kitchen in his council flat in Dagenham. We had just returned there from seeing his connection at a working man’s club hidden away in a council estate, talking football and politics with the cab driver, who obviously knew that we were buying drugs but didn’t care, and then stumbling dizzily back into the flat, blinds drawn and music on—Deserter’s Songs by Mercury Rev—and Steve said, “This bastard’s voice is a bit fruity but he has something,” and I wondered if that album could be summed up any better by anyone.
And the sickness fell away from us as we cooked the junk and prepared the pipes. The first order of business was to get well and Steve had a knack for finding veins in the most abused and calcified of areas and offered to help me shoot. He found blood with a surgeon’s precision—sheen of clear perspiration on his forehead—and, saintlike, he rolled up his sleeve and took his own shot second.
And in the kitchen with the smack taking me, I looked at Steve—his skinny arms and rib cage poking out like the angles of a Schiele self-portrait—and the spike threaded into his arm and he tap-tap-tapped the syringe like he was checking the wall for hollow spots, and with an almost audible pop the needle burst through the vein and dark red blood lazily flowed into the syringe, turning the heroin black.
And this was it—
this was beauty—no sickness, no worries, no nothing, except friends and the safety of heroin and the crack we were about to smoke and a whole day to waste—nothing but days and days and weeks to waste—no matter, life could not intrude into this sacred space.
I feel an understanding of God that I have never felt before, I thought as Steve pushed the hit into his vein in much the same way that Jesus might have, and we connected with something larger and more ancient and more vast than either of us could truly conceive of before the drugs.
Adios, Steve. Life had become a series of revolving faces, careering from medical emergency to drug spin out, from arrests to rehab, from relapse to sudden death or disappearance.
In my run-down flat in Murder Mile I said a prayer to Steve. I lay still on the collapsing bed and laid my arms out in a cruciform. On the CD player Ornate Coleman played—the sacred and the profane—while I waited, looking out the window to the overcast East London sky, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
23
JOBS (PORNO)
Money was low. I had taken all of my checks to various backstreet check-cashing joints all over the city. They often had to be sought out. Fabric stores, shoe shops, and vendors of cheap, imported tourist trinkets were always a good bet. “Payday Advance” was the most commonly used euphemism.
Soon after receiving my last illicit ninety-three pounds from one of these transactions, I decided to see if my card would bear the cost of one more travel card for the underground. As soon as I slipped the useless strip of plastic into the machine, the screen blinked up RETAINED—RETAINED—CONTACT YOUR BANK OR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION. I hopped the turnstile with my last forty quid in my pocket and vowed to find another source of income.
WANTED. SALESPERSON. ADULT ENTERTAINMENT / BOOKSTORE. OVER 18 ONLY. NO CRIMINAL RECORDS. 15 P.H. CALL MICK.
Well, shit. There was money to be made in porno. Back in LA I had gotten paid $50 when I really needed money for dope to be an extra in a porno flick called Snatch Adams. The shoot had taken place in an abandoned hospital in a run-down neighborhood called Boyle Heights. I went along with a guy I knew from the methadone clinic called Speedball Eddie, who did this kind of shit as a profession of sorts. He would fill in as an audience member for any and all of the crap that was filmed in LA: Judge Judy, The People’s Court, Rosie O’Donnell, whatever. He’d make his dope money by just sitting there, clapping maniacally whenever the “APPLAUSE” light went on. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of him on my little portable TV, with his lopsided, self-administered Beatles haircut and his wide, brown, burn-out eyes, clapping like a seal for his fifty dollars, while more mundane human dramas than his own played out on-screen.
I thought the shoot might be kind of fun, but it wasn’t. It was odd and creepy. I was skagged out of my mind and so nothing really turned me on anymore. The hospital itself was like something out of some cheesy “after the apocalypse” kind of movie. The place was in total disarray: glass cabinets hung open as if people had looted the place and fled, gang graffiti covered a lot of the walls. Wandering the halls, Eddie and I came across room after room, each more forlorn and desolate than the last…overturned institutional tables…metal stretchers with frayed and worn leather restraints…trays of rusted, unusable, obscure medical instruments…it was possibly the coldest, least inviting place on the planet.
Our scene lasted less than a few moments. They filmed it at 11:30 in the morning. On a dirty-looking hospital bed, a blond, plastic-looking girl in a nurse’s uniform was being fucked by two guys. The director kept stopping and repositioning them, and then they’d carry on as if nothing had happened.
“Yeah…take it you fucking bitch!”
“Oh…Right there…. Faster…”
On cue, Speedball Eddie and I walked past the scene in white doctor’s coats. We paused, looked over at the action on the bed, and, unfazed by the sight of the woman getting screwed from behind as she sucked the other guy’s oddly oversized cock, we nodded to each other, made notes on our clipboards, and walked on. We were so close to them, you could smell the sex. And we had earned our fifty bucks, just like that. They actually offered Eddie an extra seventy-five if he would take part in a gangbang, but it would involve hanging around till 6:00 P.M., and Eddie had people to see. Despite the fact I would have turned down the money also, I was privately a little offended that they didn’t ask me as well.
So there was no embarrassment in my showing up for the interview for the porno store. When I called, Mick grilled me over the phone, mostly about whether I had a criminal record. When I insisted for the third time that I didn’t have one of any kind, he relented and told me to stop by the shop for an interview.
The store was on Wardour Street, the heart of the Soho porn trade. For a while it was the only place in the whole of the UK where you could buy hardcore porn legally. When the Internet rendered such laws obsolete, hardcore finally arrived in the provinces, but the porno trade is still one of the most thriving businesses in Soho, alongside prostitution, drugs, and trendy wine bars. I showed up five minutes early. Mick was still with the interviewee before me. The store was being watched by two kids, who looked like typical council estate boys—white trainers, chunky gold jewelry, cropped hair gelled tightly to their heads, bulldog tattoos and tracksuits.
“I’m here for the interview.”
“All right mate. ’E’s in the back right now. ’Ave a browse and ’e’ll be out in a bit.”
It was pretty typical fare. Dildos of varying shapes and sizes lined one wall. Magazines, with names like Color Climax, Euro Sluts, and Backdoor Beauties filled the center aisles. The other wall was covered in DVDs. In England, there is still a furtive feel to porno shops. It is how I imagine a liquor store in Utah would feel. There is a sense that what people here are doing is legal, but still beyond the pale and rather degenerate. A few embarrassed-looking customers shuffled in while I was browsing, men who refused to make eye contact with each other and who bristled with discomfort when the kids in the tracksuits threw out a casual “All right mate?” in their directions. A door against the back wall opened, and a big guy with a beard walked out, followed by the other guy there for the interview. He was wearing a dirty-looking T-shirt and jeans. I had at least made the effort to wear a shirt. Well shit, this asshole probably didn’t need the job as badly as I did. I nodded at the fat bastard with a beard and he introduced himself as Mick.
“Step into my office.”
The office turned out to be a stockroom, and a small one at that. It was stuffed with magazines and DVDs. Everywhere you looked there were spread cunts, asses, tits, and more erect cocks than I had probably seen in my entire life. The room was crammed and airless. Oh Christ, what if I got the job? I couldn’t turn it down, I needed the cash badly. But the reality of working in this store started to cut through even the insulation of the methadone I had injected before showing up and I started to feel claustrophobic and sick.
“Nice guy,” Mick said, by way of introduction. “I would have given ’im the job too. He’s done this kind of thing before. But he had a criminal record. Can’t hire someone with a criminal record. Do you have a criminal record?”
“No,” I told him, again.
“I mean, it’s not that I give a shit what anyone’s done in the past, right? It’s the fucking council. They’re all over this trade. They’d close us down if they could. They control it from the fucking ground up! Basically, if you take this job, you’re working for Westminster Council. That’s why I have to ask. Fill this in, will you? I’ll be right back.”
He handed me a blurry, photocopied form. It had only a handful of questions: name, date of birth, national insurance number, address, and, finally, “Do you have a criminal record—y/n?” and he left me alone. I filled out the form and waited for Mick to return. On the shelf above me, a huge pink dildo poked out over my head like the sword of Damocles.
Dave came back in and gave my application form a cursory glance, before placing it on his desk.
> “You done this kind of work before?”
“Well, shop work, yeah. I know how to work a till. But it’s been off-licenses and music shops. Not porn.”
“That’s all right. Here, I want you to take a look at something.”
He pulled a magazine from a pile on his desk. It was called Anal Cream Pies. I looked at the cover, which showed a close-up of a red-looking anus with a huge drip of semen hanging from it. Next to the ass was a blond girl with an extended tongue. She was winking at the camera as the cum leaked from the ass onto her tongue. It wasn’t quite embarrassment that I felt. It was an oddly disassociated feeling. It was the oddness of the situation that was the worst—pawing through a hardcore porn mag, in a tiny stockroom, with a big sweaty bearded guy called Mick all but sitting on my knee. By my standards, I’ll admit, it was pretty tame. In LA I had injected enough meth and smoked enough crack that I had found myself in plenty more bizarre situations than this. Still, it wasn’t Sunday school.
