Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  My cock in her hands, her mouth, her pussy, her asshole, and it feels as if I am undergoing a religious conversion of sorts, with my mouth on her clit, crushed against her lips. I have a sense of God that I have never felt in my whole time on this earth.

  Oh Christ I am in love I am in love, and it is flowing from me, I cannot stop it, and when we are lying naked, listening to music, play fighting, laughing, I never want to leave this room. This is real. Oh God help me, this is real.

  28

  CHORUS

  After weeks of seeing Vanessa, I know that tonight I am coming as close to ruining everything as is possible. I have decided to leave Susan. I am trying to do it the best way I can. I have been spending all of my free time with Vanessa. When she is not around I am sad and withdrawn, and the only way I can cope with that is to get high. And getting high is the only hold that Susan has on me anymore.

  Tonight an old Scottish junkie called Jimmy who works with Susan at the needle exchange dropped over to Murder Mile with a large quantity of pharmaceutical grade cocaine. I cannot even begin to fathom how these ampoules of liquid cocaine found their way onto the black market, but of course I cannot resist having just one shot of coke, and before I even realized where I was, it was four hours later and all of the coke was gone, and my arms were raw and bloody from at least fifty separate injections. Crashing hard from the coke, I tried to wash the blood off my arms, but my flesh looked like raw hamburger meat, so I threw on a leather jacket and split, leaving Susan and Jimmy to carry on with whatever else he had brought over with him.

  By the time I arrived at Vanessa’s flat, I was almost in tears from the mind-bending effects of the coke crash, and suddenly I was completely aware of the hopelessness of my situation. When I arrived, Vanessa seemed shocked at my appearance, and when I took my jacket off and she saw what I had done to my arms she was almost in tears as well. We just sat there on her bed, I rested my head on her, and she cradled me like a child until I started trying to talk to her, but everything came out as a sob. All I could say was “I’m sorry…” over and over, because I knew that there was no conceivable reason that she should have to listen to this or to put up with this from me. The beauty of what went on when we were together, the innocence of it, the carefree and joyous nature of it, was suddenly destroyed when I walked in that night. I had brought with me all of the destruction and negative energy that shaped my life, and I think that it scared her badly because for the first time she saw me as ugly, and as worn down, and as scared as I have ever been.

  She kept asking me: “Do you want to go?”

  And I kept saying “no” because I felt that if I went tonight, that I might never be allowed to return.

  Vanessa has never told me that I need to stop using. It is something that has endeared her to me more than anything. Usually people find it impossible not to talk in clichés when they are around an addict, and the biggest cliché of the lot is the faux concern and the assurances that “you really need to get help.” No, Vanessa in the whole time I have known her has never said any of that to me. In New York’s music scene she had seen enough of addicts to understand that no one could make me quit. And sitting here on her bed, with her gently cradling my head, I realized that I had been taking advantage of her good grace and her consideration of my feelings.

  How dare I walk in here with the blood not yet dried on my arms, weeping and paranoid and suicidal?

  It is now that I realize that I am running out of time, and I need to make a decision. If I leave here tonight without making a decision, I may never get the opportunity to come back. So I amaze myself by being the one who first broaches the subject.

  “I think I need to quit,” I say. “I think that this is it. I really need to stop doing this.”

  Vanessa doesn’t say anything for a while. Then she says: “I think you’re right.”

  We sit there. I can feel some of the horror receding a little. I have done this many times. I know the stages of the cocaine crash. It will be a while before I feel anything close to normal, and as the cocaine wears off I start to feel the pain in my arms and hands from the repeated, frenzied injecting I had been doing earlier in the night. “I don’t want to go back there,” I say eventually.

  “Where?”

  “The flat. I have to tell Susan. I have to do it now.”

  We lapse back into silence for a while.

  “Would you like to stay here?” Vanessa asks, eventually.

  “Yes. Are you inviting me to move in with you?”

  “Yes. But were you serious about stopping doing this?”

  “Yes.”

  There is of course a huge fear about leaving Susan and moving in with Vanessa. In fact, Susan and Vanessa are almost side players to the real drama that was unfolding in my head. If I move in with Vanessa, one of two things will have to happen: either I would have to get clean or Vanessa would have to start using heroin. The situation could not resolve any other way. So my choice is not between Susan and Vanessa, which would really be no choice at all. My choice is between the status quo of my existence as it is or an attempt to live another kind of life.

  29

  COMING IN TO LAND

  Walking from Murder Mile with a bag of my clothes in a holdall, I stop to call Vanessa from a pay phone.

  “It’s me,” I tell her. “Is it cool to come over?”

  “Sure. What’s going on?”

  “I left Susan. It’s done.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe later, but not now.”

  It is curious, because the relationship that I have had with Susan would be unfathomable to Vanessa—indeed, sometimes it is unfathomable to even me—and I feel like I am talking in riddles when I try to explain it. I have been through breakups before. Some extremely messy, some protracted, but none as oddly noneventful as this one.

  I started the conversation by telling Susan that Vanessa and I had been sleeping together. I had spent most nights over at her place since that first time. I expected that she already had assumed this, and Susan seemed entirely nonplussed by the information. She said something along the lines of “Well, if that’s what you need to do.”

  “It is what I need to do.”

  “Well, fine. What are you telling me for? Is this supposed to turn me on?”

  We lapsed into silence again. I had waited until Susan was high on dope, because I had seen her completely break down about the smallest thing—from a phone call from her father to a charity appeal on television—if she wasn’t sufficiently insulated from reality with drugs. But so far, so good.

  “I am telling you, because I am going to move in with her. I think we have a future together, and I don’t think that you and I have a future together.”

  Susan lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking. I was struck again by how much like a little old lady she was beginning to look. Her eyes betrayed fear, despite the opiates in her. She sucked in a lungful of smoke.

  “What about my paperwork? I’m illegal here. You’re abandoning me and now I will never be legal here.”

  “You won’t be legal even if I stay. We didn’t even begin to file your papers in the whole time that we’ve been here.”

  “But what am I going to do?”

  I could hear that old hysterical note creeping into her voice. This was it. I had to do it now. “I can’t help you anymore. My life doesn’t lie here. You knew this wouldn’t last. We never got married thinking that we would grow old together. I’ve found something else I want.”

  There was silence again.

  “Then go,” she said, quietly. “Just go.”

  And that was it. No tears, no screaming, no begging to stay. I packed my things and walked out. What do you do, when you make a suicide pact but both of you survive? Was I a coward for not trying again?

  As I walked toward the train station, I realized for the first time in years I was walking with purpose. I walked Murder Mile, past the Jamaican
patty stand, and the fried chicken and halal kebab signs, past the junk shops and the kids lurking by the pay phones hawking crack and stolen mobile phones. I felt my chest loosening, as if I were really breathing for the first time in years. I walked into the sodium glow and train rumble of Clapton station and I realized that for the first time in recent memory I was not afraid.

  30

  THE GOOD TIMES

  We are in a warehouse party in Hackney. An old band mate from Los Angeles was in town doing the lighting for a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show with the Libertines headlining. He called me out of the blue to tell me he was in town.

  Vanessa and I walk in there around midnight on the tail end of a forty-eight-hour cocaine, Ecstasy, and sex bender that has taken us to a variety of bars, clubs, flats, and houses all over the city. As we stagger into the place, all eyes turn to us. We are on fire, radiating an aura of invincibility that everybody is picking up on. A man walks up to us and asks, “Can I take your photo?” and we say yes, so he does, temporarily blinding us with the flash. He hands us his card and says, “E-mail me and I will send you the picture!” and we walk away as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  The DJ is spinning Primal Scream at a thunderous volume, and we dance and kiss to “Swastika Eyes” furiously. Love and empathy is radiating out from us in great telepathic waves. I am swimming in Vanessa’s eyes, lost in them for a moment.

  Somebody bumps into me, and it is the guy from the Libertines, Pete Doherty, and he looks as if he is about to collapse onto the floor. His skin is ashen, and he is barely standing really, his eyes fuzzy and unfocussed.

  “Sorry mate,” he slurs, rocking on unsteady heels.

  “No problem.”

  And then he staggers away, careening into someone else.

  “He’s gonna play tonight?” Vanessa laughs. “He looks like he won’t make it.”

  A guy comes onstage and is joined by a DJ, who starts to blast abrasive metallic noise. The singer, a tall, spastic-looking skinhead, obviously half-deranged on Ecstasy, starts to rap over the top of the music in lunatic yelps. The place is suddenly packed, shoulder to shoulder, and we are drawn toward the front of the stage by the swell of people and the heat is brutal and the noise is almost terrifying and it feels like we are at the end of the world and my eyes catch Vanessa’s and I never want this to stop, never never want it to stop.

  Spilling out into the night air. The Ecstasy has come on so strong we both looked at each other at the same time as Black Rebel Motorcycle played and we decided—without speaking—“Home. Bed,” because we could no longer be contained by clothes.

  And in the taxi home I rest my head on her lap and look up at her face as the streetlights bounce from her cheeks and I say: “My God. The scene is so incredible right now…. It feels as if there is fucking revolution in the air…. When did London wake up all of a sudden?”

  And Vanessa laughs, telling me: “London wasn’t asleep. You were.”

  She is right, of course. And we laugh, as the taxi speeds us home so we can fuck frenziedly until the sun rises again.

  Shoreditch. The weekend of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and all of London it seems is staggering from one party to another, blissfully drunk and wasted. Wherever you go, carefree hedonism is the order of the day. The days are endless, warm, and infused with the surreal logic of dreams. We are drinking beers and people-watching from a sun-drunk table outside of the Barley Mow, enjoying the bustle of Curtain Road. It seems as if the whole population of the city is emerging into the light for the first time, blinking molelike into the mid-morning sun.

  “Do you know something?” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “It’s been three months since we met.”

  She laughs.

  “I have something for you.” She smiles and looks over. I reach into my pocket and take out one of my old AA sobriety chips. It is red, and on one side is inscribed “90 DAYS” and on the other “ONE DAY AT A TIME.” She looks at it and smiles. I smile too.

  “This is so cool,” she says. “Thank you!”

  She places it on her key ring, and we pick up our beers, clanking them together.

  “One day at a time,” we toast, as we drink. Vanessa is so beautiful today. She makes the sun on my face feel warmer. She makes the beer I am drinking seem colder. We are free.

  31

  THE BAD TIMES

  After moving into Vanessa’s bedroom in Cheshire Street for a month or so, we decided to get our own place. She shared her old place with a few girls who seemed slightly annoyed by an uninvited lodger showing up and holding up the line to the communal shower. We found a decrepit artist loft above a fried chicken joint on Kingsland Road, so I changed my pickup to a new pharmacy, ten minutes down the road. The pharmacy sat on a nondescript row of shops, surrounded by a video store and a Greek bakery. The old woman behind the counter regarded me sourly but did not treat me too badly.

  The loft in Dalston was an unmitigated disaster. Upon moving in we had discovered that it was infested with mice and cockroaches. Also, the electricity did not work properly and most nights the place felt like a walk-in refrigerator. When we complained to the landlord he claimed that since the place was technically a commercial property and not a residential one, he did not have to do a thing about it.

  To compound the problem, a month after we moved in, Vanessa discovered that she was pregnant. We had stopped using protection after we moved in together. Our connection was so immediate and so profound that I thought nothing of doing this. One week her period was late, so she bought a home test from the pharmacy and the results came back positive. My first reaction was complete terror. I assumed that Vanessa’s would be the same. But when she saw my face turn white she seemed hurt.

  “Is this really such a bad thing?” she asked. “I mean, if this was such a bad thing why didn’t we take precautions?”

  I thought about it. Was it a bad thing? I had never even entertained the thought of children before. But I had never entertained the thought of quitting dope before either. I looked at Vanessa and realized that maybe we did have a chance to make it in this world. Maybe it was time to take risks and think the unthinkable. “No.” I said finally, “Not such a bad thing at all.”

  The band’s activity following the TV show in Wales ground to a halt. The release date on the album was put back. The single from the album was decided upon and changed at least a dozen times. Throughout all of this, Alex proved himself to be possibly the most ineffectual manager of all time.

  The check from the Garbage tour bounced, and I took a job working in a music shop in the West End to supplement my income. I was on the phone to Alex begging him and then demanding that he pay me my money so often that he started screening my calls. What kept me going was the idea that soon the call would come to announce that our album was being released and that we could go back on the road. Only the call never came. Other calls came. The news that a DJ had been paid fifteen thousand pounds to remix the single, and soon after that the song had been dropped from the album altogether. The news that the A&R guy representing the band had been fired and replaced by someone who thought that our album sounded “outdated.” The news that our European label was suing our UK label over the lack of activity. The final straw came over an argument about underarm hair.

  A new single was decided upon, and a video was shot with Kelly to promote it. The song stank. The label demanded that Kelly record a poppier-sounding single to launch the album with and she did, without the band knowing. The first I heard of it was when a CD of the song landed in my mailbox. It sounded insipid, desperate. Of course, the label loved it. Despite not finding their way to pay me the money they still owed me for rehearsals, and for the Garbage tour that had happened almost a year previously, they suddenly found fifty thousand pounds to shoot a new promotional video.

  All was apparently going well. Until the day when I spoke to Kelly over the phone to find out the state of play, and she told me the lat
est piece of shitty luck to befall the project.

  “The single isn’t being released,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, when the label saw the finished product they freaked because in two of the shots I raised my arms and they could see underarm hair.”

  I sat down.

  “The exact word they used was disgusting. Can you believe that?”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “They wanted to reshoot the video, but I said no. There’ve been too many delays already.”

  “Right.”

  “And I told them Patti Smith had underarm hair. It didn’t ruin her career!”