by Howard Marks
A few days later I got the telephone call from Mal. It was unusual because it was 8.30 in the morning, and I’d never known Mal get out of bed before lunchtime. What’s more, he was extremely cryptic.
‘Come on round to Billy’s mother’s house now,’ he said. ‘It will be to your advantage.’
I didn’t have to be told twice. There was only one thing that excited Mal, and given how understated he was, he was obviously very excited.
It was only a ten-minute walk to Billy’s house in Orrell Park. Past my old school and across the rec. Up Hornby Road to Walton Prison, and then along the path beside the old Liverpool-to-Preston railway line, which brought you out just around the corner from his mum’s. Nevertheless, I was breathless by the time I arrived.
I knocked on the front window. Billy quickly came to the door, grinning, and ushered me into his mother’s front parlour. In the centre of the room there were four big cardboard boxes.
Mal was the first to speak.
‘We were wondering if you could try and put a price on that?’ he asked, nodding his head towards the cartons. I looked into the first, which seemed to be full of big brown bottles. The first I pulled out was titled ‘Tincture of Opium’ and measured two and a half litres. It was about three-quarters full. I pulled another out that was roughly the same size. Diamorphine hydrochloride, according to the label. Heroin linctus. There was even more in that one.
Then Billy spoke.
‘I think that one’s the box with all the shite. Take a look at the stuff in the others.’
He pushed a box over to me with his foot. When I opened it, my stomach turned over with excitement. The box was about eighteen inches wide and two feet long, and inside were scores, maybe hundreds, of little bottles and jars. Some were made of glass, some brown, some blue, some green. Others were plastic. I recognised the grey plastic cartons of Smith, Kline and French with their logo on the top. There were cardboard boxes and other bottles in the red-and-blue livery of Wellcome & Burroughs. I swear I was so excited my dick got hard.
I started pulling them out and examining the labels. Pethidine, 100 tablets. Palfium, 100 tablets. Dexedrine. Drinamyl. Valium. Nembutal. Seconal. Morphine. Heroin. My hands began to shake. There was something I needed to do before I went any further.
‘Would you mind if I had a hit?’ I asked.
Mal smiled, a look of total satisfaction on his face. Billy threw me a bag of works. Of course, they were all used. This was ten years before anyone had even heard of AIDS. I fished the cleanest out of the bag and went back to digging in the box until I got what I wanted.
The first bottle contained pink tablets. The second, a white, fluffy powder. My two favourite drugs. Diconal and pharmaceutical cocaine. Combined, they made the notorious ‘pink speedball’. This the most dangerous, yet most intensely euphoric hit known to man or beast: just a few weeks before, I’d woken up next to a croaked Chrissy Booth, who just couldn’t manage to be cautious enough with the old pink proportions. But did that bother me, or even phase me for a second? Not at all. We’d simply called the police and abandoned the apartment and went back to pounding ourselves into oblivion.
I crushed a couple of pills on a piece of cardboard using the bowl of a spoon, and when the powder was as fine as I could get it, I formed a ‘V’ in the card, and slid it all into the back end of a syringe, followed by a smallish pinch of coke.
I didn’t want to take too much. Given the quantities available, I thought it best to do what I could to pace myself. And even though the shot was on the moderate end of the scale, it was still profoundly satisfying. The truth is, I never knew pinkies to be anything else. Until you were ready for your next, of course, and then it was as compulsive as crack.
But even though I’d been moderate in my consumption, I lost my focus, as Mal and Billy did another. Then we all did another round.
We spent the morning in a state of blissful nod, and it wasn’t until the mid-afternoon that I tried to turn my attention back to the boxes.
I’d pull out a few bottles, and check them out, spend a little time in awe at both the quality and the quantity of the haul that I had before me.
There were four bottles of heroin powder in total, the largest being a blue, one-ounce bottle that was labelled 1933. As far as I could tell, there was no sign of any degradation – that heroin was as good as it had been on the day it had been manufactured. A drug fit for war heroes.
Now at that time, the price of heroin was twenty pounds a gram when you could get it. So, twenty-eight grams at twenty pounds a pop. That was over five hundred quid for that bottle alone. And there were at least three more bottles that held another five grams apiece. Not to mention the dozens of ampoules, and pills, and linctuses.
And then there was morphine. Morphine sulphate. Morphine hydrochloride. Was that heroin or not? Morphine tartrate. And every type came as several bottles of powder, as pills and as ampoules. Why the fuck had this guy kept so much stock, much of it dating back from the Second World War and before? It had only been a small corner chemist shop, but it had been in Bootle, close to the docks. Perhaps he’d stocked up in an attempt to deal with the consequences of the Blitz?
I never really made much progress in evaluating the retail and wholesale value of the stock that day. After a while, we gave up all pretence of trying to be businesslike and just settled down to a good, old-fashioned binge. At five o’clock, Billy’s mum came home from work and Mal went back to his house for his tea.
Me? I was going nowhere. Not with a stash like that about. The only way that I’d leave is if I was forced to do so at gunpoint.
Billy’s mother was the breadwinner of the family, a clerical officer with the tax office, and a devout Catholic. His father had some sort of serious heart condition and couldn’t get about much. He could just about make it to the Windsor Castle for his lunchtime pint, and that was it. The rest of the day, he spent in the armchair in front of the TV.
Whenever we came around, the family tended to leave us alone in the front parlour, possibly believing that the pictures of the Sacred Heart and the statues of Our Lady would do an adequate job of maintaining the necessary scrutiny. Nevertheless, we pushed the boxes behind the settee, just in case she decided she needed to come in for something.
We spent that evening doing the wildest things imaginable, mixing combinations of three and four different drugs. Speedballs that involved the use of a syringeful of coke in one arm, and a syringeful of heroin in the other, with two people shooting them in simultaneously. Billy and I matched each other shot for shot, the regular hits of coke keeping the pair of us from passing out completely.
We were just about to put together another shot when we noticed that the bottle of water we’d been using was empty. Billy didn’t want to go back out into the kitchen to fill it up for fear of waking his parents, so he pondered for a moment, deciding what we should do.
Then, a smile spread across his face and he went across the room and opened a china cabinet, bringing from it a small bottle. Without saying anything, he poured enough heroin and cocaine for two more speedballs into a couple of spoons, and then opened the bottle.
‘Are you up for this then?’ he asked.
‘Up for what? What’s in the bottle?’
He didn’t answer at first, just continued grinning at me.
‘It’s some kind of holy water, isn’t it? You want to shoot up with some kind of holy water?’
‘This isn’t just any old holy water. This isn’t your common or garden, priest-blessed tap water. This is the real deal. This stuff comes from Lourdes. This is the stuff that miracles are made of.’
Although I hadn’t been brought up as a Catholic myself, I was familiar with the stories, of the stream where the Virgin Mary had appeared to a young girl and since that time, after being immersed in the waters, the lame had been healed and the blind had regained their sight. Now, it was a place where hundreds of thousands of pilgrims flocked every year in the hope that the water would
work its magic on them.
‘Miracle juice, huh? In that case, you’d better make mine a big one, because I’m surely in need of a miracle.’
The preparation of a fix is always a ritual in the early part of one’s drug-taking career, but Billy put these two shots together with a degree of pomp and ceremony quite unlike any shot that i’ve done before or since. Indeed, when he presented the two filled syringes to me, so that I could choose which one I wanted to do, he looked less like a junkie offering me my gun, and every bit like a priest dispensing the sacrament to a devout member of his congregation.
Rising to the occasion, I incanted a half-remembered fragment of the Catholic Mass that I’d heard once at a wedding or a funeral.
‘Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world. Have mercy on me.’
I drove the plunger back home and waited. For what? I don’t know, some sort of sign, perhaps? A bolt from the blue? To have my hit supernaturally or spiritually enhanced, somehow? Or maybe be struck down dead by a phenomenal overdose? Maybe he’d do the loaves and fishes trick with the dope.
I think what I really expected was another appearance of the Virgin who had appeared at Lourdes, declaring: ‘I am the Immaculate Injection. This is what you must do with your lives.’
Instead, I got nothing. Just a normal fix in every way. I turned to Billy, who had also finished his shot, and had a beatific smile on his face. Well, he’d been brought up a Catholic. Perhaps it did work for him.
‘What was it like?’ I asked. ‘Did anything happen?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘Just before I pushed the plunger home, I said a little prayer to the Virgin. I told her that I was going to close my eyes, and make a wish. And when I’d finished shooting the dope, I opened my eyes and my wish had come true.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ I snorted. ‘I don’t believe you. What did you wish for?’
He smiled slyly, and then he told me.
‘I wished that when I opened my eyes, I’d find myself in a room full of drugs. And praise be to God, take a look behind the couch and see what the Mother of Christ has gone and left for us . . .’
‘The Immaculate Injection’, 2001
Zoe Lund
Cul de Sac
THE SKY WENT red. Slow rivulets defined themselves, mapping the insides of her eyelids. There was a change of light.
She rubbed her eyes and looked around. Fluorescent and ugly, the place was awake. It was 4 a.m. and one could no longer sell liquor. So the people had to leave.
As her pupils adjusted, contracting even more, above her head was something she had seen before.
The mobile des mobiles.
Round and round they spun, all the whys and wherefores. The good reasons and the real, balanced but never content. Bobbing now, her motives were marionettes with an invisible master. She couldn’t see him for there were no mirrors in the place. Subjects of torque, they twirled each on edge, off a roving axis. Prey to entropy and atrophy, empathy and apathy, they were hanged and hung as one, above her.
And faded away as the emptying club came up.
Nightclubs always look hideous at their middle-of-the-night morn. The floor was awash with alcohol, mud, drug cut and a jigger of vomit. Her footprints left brown-outlined imprints that soon would ebb away.
Like all patrons, she left quick, hand over eyes. Outside, it was night again.
She did not want to take a cab. But walk – where to?
Aha! The northwest Wind! An old joke, ever blowing her southeast. But she didn’t need to cop just now. Not quite yet. Something else was driving her downtown.
At the causeway of Astor Place she stopped, questioning her direction. But thoughts were no deterrent. These streets were, as she had remembered earlier that night, vertical not merely horizontal. So she wasn’t only travelling in length but also in depth. And though she could follow the map of those terrains, she had never been able to surface the guide at will. So where was she, really? She could only find out by arriving at her destination and then counting back. St. Mark’s was its usual carnival and she walked swiftly, collar up, eager to slip into the anonymity of the easterly blocks where her sole identity was that of someone vaguely recognizable as another one who might know what’s up.
Midway in longitude and midway in latitude, at the heart of it all, there is a dead end. In the cul-de-sac they once sold kick-ass bags, but now, as gentry forces draw lines to Avenue C, the escape route through a murky swampish backyard, complete with a sort of muddy stream, is a barren flatland. Dry and mowed into plain view, it is no cloak for your dagger. Many a time, just-copped, she had scattered herself through that mystery marshland, works poking into her thigh as she forded the sewer-brook and ran, not looking back till she was gone from the four-meter wilderness.
That land of Atlantis trees was now a nascent parking lot. The parking lot was a condo on the way.
Just a block away on Fourth Street, flat red-brick buildings had been put up, all in a row like those in down-heeled suburbia. She hadn’t been here in months.
The last time her need had been clear. It was 4 a.m. and she had come to cop. The police had been busy and the heat had taken its toll. All the spots had closed down early. Long overdue for a fix, she was crying with the sickness. If she hadn’t been so crazy-ill, she would never have allowed Mark, a freelance dopespot steerer whom she had never trusted, to show her where to go.
Back then, the red-brick buildings were still under construction, and to access the cul-de-sac she had to cut through the building site, passing by the silhouettes of worker-guards who gave not a shit for a passing copper. ‘They won’t care unless we start breaking the new windows they just installed,’ said her guide. Mark was smiling too much and she didn’t like it. By the occasional worker’s flashlight beam, his long black face glistened in the dark. Except where his beard was. She didn’t like most beards. It takes a very honest man to wear a beard for pure aesthetics. She hadn’t thought anyone sold dope anymore in the cul-de-sac, but Mark had convinced her otherwise. He led her into a hallway in one of the buildings at the very dead end. A white girl of twelve or so gave her dope for good money. And she gave Mark the obligatory tip. That meant that she would have to walk home even though she could hardly stand up.
Just before the exchange she had started to cry again. ‘I’m so sick, Mark,’ she’d said. ‘This is good, right? It’s good. Right? I don’t have a penny more after this. It’s good, right?’
‘Yeah, sure. Hey. Of course it’s good,’ said Mark.
Walking home with the stuff in her pants, she’d felt it burn against her belly. She tried to measure the degree of heat that the bags gave off against her skin. To perform alchemical analysis as she walked. Arriving home, she knew.
It was flour. ‘Beat.’
Now she was back. Alone and with no motive. She had a scratchy, nude feeling at the nape of her neck. Like she had an unknown cunt there that she had never noticed. And autonomous, it had made a rendezvous the day that she was born. For now. To be deflowered. But her terrible lover was unknown.
To her right was the rubble-strewn plateau that had been the woodsy exit. All was now in evidence. No more dealers stood at the mouth of the forest, no more junkies scurried into the brush. It was a stage without a curtain. Naked and obscene, she felt her neck getting wet. It was then that she first heard voices. Men speaking. One was engagingly familiar, the other she recognized but it made her want to run. She understood when she heard a third voice. The squawk of a walkie-talkie.
She was clean, so she looked for the voices’ dark source.
On an overlooking roof, two figures were gesticulating. She could observe their shadow-play while remaining, herself, in darkness. One, complete with regulation fat ass, was in blue. The other, diminutive and agile, was a friend. A Hispanic of considerable and evident life-competence, Joey had remained a street-life recidivist. He was certainly aware that he could ‘cross over,’ but she gathered he would rather die. Her friend pleaded his case w
hile the cop registered his find in the walkie-talkie.
She moved closer to the building but remained out of sight. Knee-deep in rubble, she wondered how to help.
By the time she could climb a fire escape, the incident would be long over. If she shouted, she’d be taken for a loon. She caught words as they fell off the roof.
‘This time you’re out of luck cause I’m clean. But I know what you do. Every day you stake out this roof. When you see people copping, you radio their descriptions to your guys on the corner and they pick them up and take them to jail. Why do you do it, man? Yeah, you. Personally you. Why? So you can tell your wife that you put seventeen junkies in jail for buying a powder that eases their pain and hurts no one else? Do you realize that a junkie’s body doesn’t let him not cop? And in jail we go through cold turkey – cruel and unusual punishment for an utterly victimless act that we can’t not commit. If you busted a non-junkie mass murderer and somehow put him through the symptoms of heroin withdrawal while he was awaiting arraignment, his lawyer would have an easy time throwing out the case and hanging a rap on you for torture!’
The cop had been silent through all this and did not speak even now. It was Joey whom she heard speak up again.
‘What the fuck is this? I did not come uphere to shoot up! The proof is that I have no works on me. You know that. You just searched me. Why are you doing this?’
‘Come on, asshole,’ said the cop.
‘I came up here to look at the fucking sky, man. Is that a crime now too?’
The silhouettes merged for an instant, then separated again.
‘Hey!’ shouted the cop. ‘Don’t touch the evidence. That’ll be another count.’
‘Evidence my ass!’ It was Joey. ‘You just planted that shit on me! You know it and I know it!’
‘And no one else,’ said the cop.
She was about to yell ‘I know, I know!’ when the cop burst out, ‘Cut it out, motherfucker, or I’ll get you for assault!’ Somehow she knew her friend had spat in his face. It came back to her like an instant replay. It was then that things took a wicked turn.
