Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O'Neill

  “So, how have you been feeling?”

  “Insane.”

  “Hmmm.” Cash flicked through his file with long, delicate fingers. “And you’ve been opiate-free for two weeks now, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you sleeping?”

  “Shitty.”

  “Well, getting sleep is important. Does the Valium help?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, we’ll up your dose a little. And what else? You said ‘insane.’ Depressed?”

  “Depressed. Angry. Ready to kill.”

  “Well, an adjustment phase is to be expected….” The detox had taken a month to fully complete. My methadone was reduced until I was taking only twenty milliliters daily. Then I stopped taking methadone for twenty-four hours. After that I switched to a drug called Subutex, which came in the form of white tablets that dissolved under the tongue. Of course, I tried to crush them up and snort them, but the rush was weak, and snorting crushed Subutex felt like snorting a large pile of flour. The Subutex was reduced until I was taking only 0.1 milligrams per day and then I stopped altogether, switching to Valium and marijuana. The physical withdrawal was something I could deal with. But the mental effects were destroying me.

  “I dunno, Dr. Cash. I’ve been here before…. Hoped it might be different this time…. I’m starting to think that I can’t cope with life. You know…life without smack.”

  “Well…certain scientific journals have suggested that the damage from long-term opiate use is—in some cases—irreversible.”

  “I can’t face a lifetime on methadone anymore, Dr. Cash. It’s wearing me down. I’m tired.”

  “It doesn’t have to be methadone. I mean, I can’t write you a prescription for heroin without a license…and since the black wind of prohibition blew over from the other side of the Atlantic those licenses are not realistically obtainable anymore…most of the doctors who have them are old, dying off, and not in the market for taking on new patients. But I have known you for a while now, and I can see that you’re on the level. A morphine maintenance program would certainly not be out of the question.”

  “It isn’t the methadone itself, doctor—it’s the clinics. Anyway, I can’t afford a private maintenance program. This detox has nearly wiped me out.”

  I didn’t look to Cash for any kind of sympathetic response because I knew instinctively that there would be none. Private doctors aren’t there to take on charity cases any more than heroin dealers are. Their universe is quantitative and the prices are fixed.

  “I mean if they’d just put a fucking tap outside the clinic where we could just fucking line up and get the shit dispensed every day I’d stay on methadone until I dropped dead. It’s the rest of the bullshit that comes with treatment—the amateur-hour pop psychology, the constant supervision, and the encroachment on your time. The real problem is that keeping up a methadone habit is just as much work as keeping up a heroin habit. When I started doing this I never imagined I would find myself pissing in bottles every week and stuck with compulsory meetings with failed shrinks for the rest of my life. There’s just no joy in this anymore.”

  I walked out of there carrying the handwritten prescription like I was holding a one-hundred-pound note. Nothing to do but keep on going. Dr. Cash faded out as I hit the gray streets and the evening-time cold shocked me out of the dreamy state his warm office had lulled me into.

  34

  CLEAN

  The next day I opened my eyes.

  Fuck.

  The fear was on me already, sitting heavy and dark on my sallow chest. My throat felt swollen, painful. This was a new symptom. The beginnings of a cold or maybe the flu. I thought absently of the cocksucker who sneezed on me the day before on the northern line and cursed silently.

  Vanessa was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to work. She had been a rock to me throughout this. We did not have an easy time in the weeks since I quit Subutex. When she returned from work I would usually be perched on the sofa, smoking a joint, on the verge of or in tears. I kept promising her that this would be over soon. Every morning I woke up with a dread feeling in my soul.

  She stood there, impossibly beautiful in the bedroom doorway. She was smiling. I managed a weak smile back at her.

  “Will you be okay today?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, baby. I’ll be okay.”

  “Well, I got to go. I’m late again. I’ll call you, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I looked at the clock: 8:30 A.M. The day stretched out in front of me, daunting and infinite. How to fill the time before I could retreat back into our bed, swallow Valium, and be unconscious again? My muscles ached and my sinuses hurt. Motherfucker. My first cold in years.

  Heroin somehow prevents the body from contracting colds and the flu. You’ll never see a junkie with a cold, unless of course he is in withdrawal. Once the heroin is removed, though, the weakened immune system is particularly susceptible to colds and other viruses. I coughed and sat up. I realized that I had two options: score some heroin or get out of the flat and pass the next twelve hours any way I could.

  Later, I was wandering the Warren Street tube station with my hand buried in my jacket pocket, clutching a small knife. The blade was retracted, and I was scanning the blank crowd for the correct face. The bastard must be around here: he was rushing to meet the train yesterday afternoon. He must work close by. Maybe I’ve already missed him. I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that what I was doing was patently ridiculous. But I carried on, grimly determined.

  I did not aim to kill or even seriously injure him. Just slash the germ-spreading bastard a little. The leg, the buttock, somewhere painful but not dangerous. I pictured the scene as I stalked the platform: there the bastard would be, rushing, late for the office…. I’d shadow him off the platform and as he stepped onto the escalator I’d quickly sink the blade into his soft, fat, useless ass cheek, vanishing before the pain even hit…before the red started to soak through the seat of his pants.

  But the faces that surrounded me—beaten down, rushing, furrowed in concentration, laughing, frowning—simply exhausted me. I could feel the heat rising off my body. My legs felt weak and shaky.

  “This is ludicrous,” a voice told me. “You are out of your fucking mind.”

  Finally I sat on the platform and rested my head in my hands. My mind was screaming like some endless horror movie jump cut. It is at this point in the withdrawal process—when the smack is almost all out of your system—that the brain makes its final all-out attempt to get drugs. It wants junk. It needs it. It pleads and begs and cajoles. And sitting alone on a train platform having just spent an hour trying to find a man who sneezed on me yesterday so I could take revenge by stabbing him in the ass, I began to concede. Why was I even bothering to go through with this charade? I could be at Kings Cross in fifteen minutes and high within thirty.

  On the next bench sat two drunken Australians drinking lager and eating like pigs from a greasy Burger King bag. The smell of the food and their whining accents was making me feel sicker than I already was. They noticed me bristle in discomfort.

  “Oi mate,” one yelled over to me. “Cheer up—it might never happen! Argh! Ha ha ha!”

  The guy who yelled—a red-faced inbred in a U2 T-shirt—cracked up at his own witticism. I did not dignify him with a response. The train was due to arrive in four minutes, and I would soon be on my way to some heroin, which—even though it will be of mediocre quality at best—would still transform my day from the wreck it was right now.

  “He don’t wanna talk to you, mate,” his friend chimed in, a pig-fucking retard with a grimy, sweaty-looking beard. “Strong silent type, eh?”

  I gripped the knife in my pocket, blood-red murderous rage building in my chest. They had no idea how close they were to dying. I kept looking at my feet, focusing my thoughts on getting on the next train and getting the fuck out of there. No distractions.

  Then the platform’s PA sy
stem buzzed into life to announce that “due to a person under a train at Kings Cross,” trains would no longer be stopping at this station. All around me people cursed, sighed in frustration, and stomped away to alternate platforms. Consumed by hopelessness, I finally relented. Submitting, I let my head fall into my hands, and I began to sob quietly.

  35

  JUNKYARD ZEN

  Saturday. Vanessa was at work, and I was sitting in the house contemplating suicide. It sounds dramatic, but there it is. Vanessa’s belly was showing a nice little bump now, and I was trying to be normal. Trying and failing. I woke up and I smoked weed, hoping that somewhere in that unpleasant, disorienting high I would at least get relief from the screaming in my head. Nothing. I was going to be a father soon. I sat in the chair and stared out the window. A father. Me?

  The phone rang. It was Vanessa. She had taken to calling me every few hours to see if I was okay. She was the pregnant one, yet she felt she had to check on me to make sure I was all right. Some father I was going to be. Her sympathy had a curious dual effect on me: my heart skipped to hear her voice and to know that for now she still loved me and was tolerating me through my withdrawal. But when I put the phone down, like the crash from smoking crack, the depression kicked in worse than ever.

  You’re meant to be the strong one. She’s fucking pregnant! Where are your fucking balls?

  I tried to cry but there was nothing. I almost considered going through my pockets again, to try and find a bag of heroin or some methadone tablets I may have forgotten about and missed the last time I searched my pockets. It was nothing more than a trick to distract myself for the twenty minutes or so it would take to do it. But I didn’t have the energy. I thought about cutting my wrists, but my muscles ached so much I could not even imagine walking over to the kitchen counter to pick up a knife. And then, Jesus, if I am going to cut my wrists, why not just score heroin instead?

  My mind circled itself in this maddening dance of despair every moment of the day.

  I fled the house and rode the train to the West End, wandering the streets of Soho, eventually finding myself walking along junk lines and in the shadow of the Centre Point building. There I see Imtiaz Ali, an old twisted-up Pakistani junkie I recognized from the methadone clinic. He wore a skullcap and a filthy-looking patch over his left eye, and was huddled over in the mid-morning chill; when he met my gaze, he smiled and beckoned me over.

  “I don’t see you anymore!” He laughed. “Did you move?”

  “No…. I quit.”

  “Quit?”

  Imtiaz laughed, and his laugh turned into a coughing fit that racked his entire body. He spat out a mouthful of phlegm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “You quit! That’s very good, my friend. I wish you the best with it.”

  I had once heard through Steve Cook, who knew the story of every junkie in East London it seemed, that Imtiaz had lost his eye up in Bradford when crack dealers had beat him to within an inch of his life over some failed rip-off or other. Ever resourceful, Imtiaz used the missing eye as a prop to hustle money at mosques the length and breadth of London. Going through his routine of the fellow Muslim who had fallen on hard times, he would spin fictitious tales of his life spent in the service of Islam, and resisting Western infidels at every turn. Then, for the coup de grace, he would lean in to his victim and hiss, “You see…this eye…?” before dramatically flipping up the dirty eye patch, revealing the grisly void underneath. “Gouged out by a Russian bayonet while resisting the Godless communists in Afghanistan!”

  Of course, the nearest Imtiaz had gotten to Afghanistan was the Afghan heroin he injected daily…and right on schedule, he was waiting for his connection to show. He saw the hesitation and hunger in my eyes when he told me this.

  “I think I’d better go,” I said, with little conviction. I looked toward the underground station but remained rooted to the spot. Imtiaz eyed me with junkie indifference. Then he shot me a grin and said: “He’s had great rock recently. Good brown, too. It’s up to you, mate…but, well…one hit never put anyone back on, did it?”

  I sat on the toilet in the Burger King on Tottenham Court Road and measured out some of the heroin into a bottle cap. Then I added a packet of citric acid. Placing the cap on the sink, I snapped off a healthy chunk of the rock and dropped it into the spoon, added a little water, and started to cook the solution down. The water fizzled, turned a murky brown color. The smell of the cocaine and the heroin filled the bathroom. I swirled the solution to check for residue. Hardly any. I dropped a tiny ball of toilet paper into the liquid and filtered the shot into an orange-top insulin needle bought from Imtiaz for a pound.

  “I am a man of weak will,” I told myself, as I slid the needle into my wrist. Painful, but those veins were the ones that had always come through for me. Typically I was quite careless with the needle, sticking it through the skin and then probing violently underneath until I found a vein. Push all the way to the hilt—nothing. Retract slightly, change the angle—push.

  All the way to the hilt—nothing. Retract, change the angle, push all the way—

  SHIT!

  Jangling pain as the needle jabs a nerve ending, sending a jolt of electricity up my left arm and one of my fingers starts tingling violently with pins and needles. FUCK!

  Nothing. Retract slightly. Change the angle.

  Push.

  And then something. I felt it before I saw it, that junkie sixth sense. I knew I was close and then—

  Pop!

  The needle was in the vein and my blood was flowing, siphoned into the barrel of the syringe. Got you, you fucking bastard! I loosened the tourniquet and emptied the barrel into my aching wrist.

  The whole bathroom pulsated with the intensity of the cocaine I’d injected. My head spun momentarily. My mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with wads of cotton. I could hear voices reverberating from the next room through the tiled walls. Everything sounded fuzzy and indistinct.

  Everything tightened up, fell back into place. I felt alive again. I had to pack up my equipment and get out of the bathroom. Too confined. Too much bad energy. I wondered how many junkies had shot up on this toilet seat.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Head is ringing.

  Too confined, but where to go? Not the street. The noises! The people—the shapes—the movement—too much! I am acutely oversensitive right now. Fuck, I wish I were at home. I hate doing coke in public. Fuck! I shouldn’t have done this. I was surely almost over the worst of the withdrawal by now. Will this put me back? I have to tell Vanessa. Will Vanessa leave me? Will she understand?

  I staggered out the door. Out onto the streets. Sensory overload. Cut across Tottenham Court Road heading for the underground. A car horn comes on like a shotgun blast.

  BLAM

  Jump cut—

  The hood of the car inches away from me—black guy behind the wheel screaming obscenities silently through the windshield.

  “Fuck! Sorry!” he is saying.

  No wait—

  “Fuck sorry,” I am saying, staggering across the road and onto the pavement. Cold. My breath hangs suspended in the air momentarily, then it’s gone into the cosmos. I start to think about something Vanessa told me once about these things called fractals. But it’s too much—too crazy right now!

  I feel like a monster, something that should be living deep, deep underground rather than up here in the unforgiving glare of the winter sun. The chatter of the crowd and the rumble of traffic sound distorted, ominous. My footsteps echo around in front—behind—beside me. Just keep walking in time to the blood in my ears.

  “I want to see you bleeding,” a woman tells me, stopping in front of me.

  “Huh?” I say, looking up, and obviously something about my general demeanor scares the shit out of her, because she suddenly becomes very pale and she stutters out again…

  “I think you’re bleeding.”

  …signaling by pointing to her upper
lip and breaking eye contact, walking around me and away quickly. I touch my lip.

  Red.

  Fuck.

  I cut myself shaving this morning, must have opened it up again. I wipe it with the back of my hand, smearing the blood around my upper lip, and carry on—half-running—to the station.

  And the train pulls out with the agonized roar of a thousand children wailing in unison. My heart is slowing down somewhat. I can feel the heroin more now. Misjudged the shot, maybe. Too much coke. For once that old fucker Imtiaz was not lying about the quality of his guy’s crack.

  And on the train a crazy black guy sat singing a kind of spiritual in time with the train’s clack-clacks.

  Because I give it up to Jee-sus!

  And people were looking round at one another, smirking, slightly embarrassed by this public display of both insanity and religion—two very taboo subjects in modern British society. He carried on in his West London–Jamaican patois: