by J.W. Carey
Solpadol
J.W. Carey
Copyright 2016 J.W. Carey
Cover by J.W. Carey
Solpadol
J.W. Carey
Content:
Solpadol
- Me
- Henry Miller
- Ernest Hemmingway
- Billy Pettinger
- Grace Petrie
- Allen Ginsberg
- George Orwell
- St. George
Honesty
Contact
Solpadol
A Broken Polemic III
By J.W. Carey
Maybe it’s time we talked about depression.
Maybe it’s time to cut away the metaphors, the narcissism, the intellectual realism exchanged for fact. To throw away the dreams of literature like yellow smoke between fingertips, take the ideology of consciousness and exchange its memory for the ghost of Guinness and imported sugar and painkillers for my dad’s back. Maybe it’s time we admitted to loving our suffering for the hope that it makes us wise, that it makes us strong – like regret and heartbreak and misery exercised our hearts until they became healthy.
Maybe it’s time I was honest about the full medication I hide and throw away, about the calcium supplements, the needles, the potential of health that I lock beneath my bed and wheeze out the black thirst of sugar and drink in the night. To admit the tightness around my eyes, the sudden shear of sensation that these things bring.
Maybe it’s time I said I wasn’t addicted, to anything, and that all choices for self-destruction are my own. Time I was honest and whispered the words instead of miming them. Maybe it’s time I told my heart that she doesn’t make me happy. That she doesn’t leave me satisfied. That our hour trysts are nothing compared to a pint and a pill and dry-heaving in the middle of a packed bar with an inch-high stage. That I feel all the colder because she is warm. That I have ran across the city of Manchester with her face in my hands, pulling on, driving me on, whipping me into the fear of the last train. That I have followed her ghost through the streets of Liverpool; through the three floors of the Krazyhouse and back to a top-floor flat that made my thighs pant. That I have sat beside the Salford river, beneath the sun and the pink leaves, and never wanted to see her again. That I have smoked with the statue of a black-iron miner overlooking Wigan Pier, and asked him what he thought of Orwell’s corpse across the water. That I have stood, in Hale, and been happy in the shadow of a lighthouse that shines no light. That I have fallen asleep, and woken beneath the Christmas lights of Southport. That I have sat in every bar in Wigan, every nightclub; that I have stared out of the window on Great George Street and seen the sky break apart into primary colours and tertiary and fall through the sieve of the monotone into the hip flash filled to the brim with poetry and Kraken. Maybe I need to learn how to use a backspace.
Maybe it’s time to picture her and feel nothing. To see her and hold her hand and know nothing. To not care how she feels and waste my life not hurting her. Maybe it’s time to recede into the honesty of abuse, the abuse of the body, the abuse of the blood cells that move like drunks in my veins, the abuse of the cracking retinas, the abuse of the nerve endings wrapped in damp towels, the abuse of the extensor indicis, the abuse of the shadow canine, the abuse of a rotten liver and a ghost pancreas.
Maybe. so many maybes. maybe nothing. maybe everything. maybe Solpadol.
‘I found my soul spinning at the bottom of a glass, drunk on oxygen, reeling with painkillers and smiling up at me like the grimace of the damned.’
Me
Beneath the shadow of the stage, I could barely tell what he was saying. He’d been talking for a long time, pulling on my sleeve when he wanted my attention, but I wasn’t paying attention. I felt nauseous, no vomit but all gas, all rotten smoke in my stomach. It was the product of too much booze – too many hours waiting, too many hours talking with bohemian drunks in my hometown; too many hours lying to old friends and telling them that they looked happy, happier with their girlfriends than ever before. I spent my free days like that – suspended between the sickly mornings, the liquid afternoons and the painkiller nights. Too many hours drinking and fighting the good fight.
He stunk of artificial smoke, puffed from a battered eCig that blinked at me with its blue eyes. The crowd jostled occasionally, but not much. There was a woman just to the left of us that wouldn’t stop dancing like she was at her daughter’s wedding, throwing her arms back in comic embarrassment and tossing her head from side to side. I could see the musician glance down at her occasionally, with a crooked eye like he was trying to stop himself from laughing.
He was good; he played the guitar well, knew how to work the crowd and broke off between songs to tell a couple of jokes from the road. He played a few songs I hadn’t heard before, and he stopped to ask us to cheer for his merch guy, who stepped onto the bar and waved his arms enthusiastically, forgetting that he was holding a plastic cup of beer in either hand. He spilled the booze down his shirt, across the bar and into the hair of a few people stood around him.
I was drinking with my pills, tossing the painkillers back with Jack and coke and, occasionally, I’d follow the steps down into the clogged bathroom and try to make myself throw up. My gag reflex was dead, and it could take minutes for my fingers to hit a nerve point, hanging in the middle of my throat like a hologram. They’d hit the trigger and I’d retch, dry-heave into the space above someone else’s shit and torn toilet paper and shredded love notes carved into the wooden wall.
I bought the singer a drink afterwards and told him that I loved a book he once wrote. He hugged me and I spent the rest of the night smiling, like it was carved into my face. I smiled as I threw up the noxious beer; smiled as we lounged in uncomfortable chairs off Lime Street and drank whiskey named after Irish punk bands; smiled as I followed the people I knew back to their top floor apartment; smiled as I lay on their coach and fell into a deep sleep.
The seagulls cry like a backspace. Their laughter, jubilant and maddening, clicks like black plastic and could’ve wiped a year, two years, a thousand years, away. The relentless hammering of their keys drag me into a sudden wakefulness.
Liverpool. drunk – still. The motions of sleeping men and women are a cocoon, and the air is warm with their shared breath. I know their names; all of them. My phone tells me it’s 6:27 and, outside, the darkness hangs heavy. I slept on a couch too small for me, and my left foot managed to hold me in place all night. An open skylight grimaces at me, and I can see the trailing fingertips of artificial light brush against the edges of the glass. Wisps; lost souls dazed, confused, caught beneath the prison of imported lightbulbs.
It’s like an act, something I’ve rehearsed a hundred times before. I move through the old motions like an automaton – removing the sleep from my eyes, clearing my mouth with wash or whiskey, shaking my hair into place with cramped fingers, blinking blearily at myself in the bathroom mirror. I do my best to straighten my clothes; I slept in them, if you can call it sleeping. I used my coat as my pillow and, for the first time, I noticed how cracked and torn the leather was – I am getting old.
I take two Solpadol from the half-empty packet in my wallet, and wash them down with a glass of something; someone else’s something left on the sideboard. It is dark and hollow at the edges and doesn’t really taste of anything, but I empty the glass anyway. The room is empty of consciousness, and after one final look around, I decide to leave. Just as my hand touches the door handle I am struck with the idea that I might never see any of those sleeping figures again. I am tempted to stay, for a few moments, and watch them all wake and hide their self-loathing, their pride and their sickness behind a veneer of happiness.
There is no beauty here.
The bricks speak in their weather-beaten tongue and cry out an impossible joy, so loud that I am amazed anyone can sleep. With every step, the heart of the city reverberates in my stomach; the motion of the earth and the waves slapping against the distant docks all twisting up through the nerves of my ankles and coming to rest in the pit of my stomach. I feel nauseous, but I love this city; this city that moves and cheers – this city that isn’t afraid to express its mad love in the street. This city that isn’t owned by its past, but wears it like a fading tattoo, proudly, sternly, severely. I think of all the old men I’ve met in these bars, the failed revolutionaries and the alcoholics, the singers who break off their sets and undulate Sammy Davis Jr. in the bathroom stalls. This city has a life still to be lived, with heartbeats and flashing moments of love that trail all the way to Edinburgh and Norwich and all the other cities I dream of in my fever.
I don’t think much of it when my phone vibrates in my pocket, and I turn my feet in the direction of Beatles’ Street. I like walking down that old road in the morning, before most people have stumbled from their beds with bleary eyes and half-shrivelled limbs.
The haze of Solpadol suits this city – suits all cities that twist and wind through our lives. It numbs the thirst for colour, the potential for colour, and cuts away the ragged limbs of desire. With Solpadol in my system, I could walk for hours across the same cobblestones and love the distance that pushes me back, drives me from the full wakefulness of the living.
It pushes me on, past the Cavern club; I remember my dad telling me that it wasn’t the real Cavern. He used to hang out there when the Beatles were starting out. I remember him telling me that they were crap until they cut their hair and bought suits and spent some time in Germany. I remember him singing along with Gerry and the Pacemakers as we tore along the East Lancs Road. I see the old statue of John Lennon, black iron, with scratches across its cheeks like someone had hacked away at the metal until it shone; they are like glittering stars beneath silver stubble. An old man scowled at me from the step to the Quarry, his eyes narrowed against the early morning cold.
There is a young man, holding onto the corner of the street and curled around the brick. He convulses and shudders and I can hear his retching, and the vomit splatter onto the corner. It’s like looking into a reflecting pool. I can hear his blood crying out for an end, making promises that the body will never be able to keep – no more drink, my deity me, no more drink or drugs and nothing that could be yellow smoke in the morning.
* * *
I can’t write – I try and I try but there’s nothing there besides this old familiar emptiness – this blatant, mocking exhaustion. I try to think of love and Johanna and Woody Guthrie, but there is nothing but the hollow shapes of them all behind my eyes; half-illusion, half-stolen meaning. I clench my fists and my eyes and pull the hair at my temples to dream of the revolution of ideals – but I am left with nothing but thoughts of Syrian blood in the streets and the idea that I could lie in bed and dream until death came for me.
Even this – even this – feels like practice; like I’m flexing my muscles in the mirror. Written in moments, on my phone, on receipts, on payslips that speak a tale of £6.66 an hour. Paragraphs growing, spreading, coiling out from a single word or phrase – a single memory; the sight of a not-forgotten love in a pub window as I walk by; a broken bottle that I’m sure I remember throwing against a brick wall at four in the morning two years ago; a nightclub’s sign that I remember pissing on one solitary day in 2014.
I want to write; I think – for a career. I want to wake up late and rinse my mouth out with rotgut whiskey and take my notepad to the pub and combat the trackies and the strong jawlines with grammar and sentence structure and a shuddering, noble kind of weak admittance. I want to be loved for my faults, that I can expose them and live them and ascend to this sub-human kind of living. I think I want to be a brand, and sell that brand, and not a person at all.
Last night I went and drank until this whole thing seemed like a good idea.
***
‘Free to meet tonight?’
I didn’t even have to think – I was always free. Even after all this time, she only had to think about me and I’d come running. She was the last semblance of passion; the last sight the set my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my throat. Since her, it was all violence and violent words and nothing and alcohol and painkillers to keep it all at bay, to render any and all desire mute. I’d tried, so many times, to forget about her; about the hold even her memory had over me. I felt my eyes twist into the windows of the bar she worked at when I last knew her; desperate for a sight of her beneath the yellow light reflected from the varnished wood. I never saw her; I didn’t even know if she worked there anymore.
No; I was never free. All along, she’d been there; hovering over me like a dream.
‘No,’ I should have replied; ‘no; I’ve never been free. I don’t need to meet you because I close my eyes and you’re there – somewhere. It’s like there’s a crowd, and occasionally I’ll catch glimpses of you between the heads but I won’t go looking for you. You’re there; you’re nearby, and that’s always been enough for me. You snap your fingers and I will bend for you, silhouette of a woman; I will bend beyond the breaking point and hide the shattered bones beneath the veil of Solpadol.’
‘Sure.’ I sent back. ‘When and where?’
I should have told her that I didn’t need to see her, that she was always in my dreams; told her that even now she hung over me and her every word was like a brand, seared onto the bones around my heart. I should have listed the letters I hadn’t started, the kind that always ended after a comma because there was no hesitation, no pause in what I once felt. I should have told her that I was busy; that I was living my life and she, she, irrevocable she, had no power anymore. I should have told her that the boy I once was, was no more; gone; dead; ash; faded like I picture the tattoos on her back.
She told me when; she told me where. She ended her text with a cross, and I knew I’d been carrying her last one on my back for five years, or more, or less. I didn’t know. I said I’d be there.
When my train pulled into the station, I stepped inside and settled near the window. It was a desolate view, I knew; I’d lost count of the times that same landscape had blurred for me – it felt honest, naked. I knew that nature and man were harlots, intertwined with the bed sheets until they were one, but it still felt like I was the only one seeing them, seeing dawn fall over them like candlelight.
The entire train was empty when it moved away, but for me and a young couple that took a seat a few feet from me. She was clearly hungover, in a dress that reached her thighs and tired rings around her eyes. He’d given her his jacket, but she wore it open, like she could tear it off at any moment. He glowed with health, in comparison; his hair slicked backwards and his eyes bright and alert. Even the way her turned his head was more animated than her movements, which moved through the air like icebreakers – slow and sluggish. She turned her head away from him and h
eld it in her hand. With the grey light breaking through the glass, and the earnest boyfriend turning, holding his hands out to her in supplication, she couldn’t have looked more beautiful. Had I been an artist, I would have demanded that they freeze there forever, that the train be stopped and the entire train line be closed off. I would starve Liverpool and Manchester and every stop between to capture the two of them, together.
Henry Miller
I’ve been lying to myself a lot recently. About who I am. About what I’m capable of. About the things I’ve achieved. No one. Mediocrity. Nothing. I’ve been lying awake at night, feeling a beating heart, and fantasising that it would just stop. Just like that. It’d stop beating and I’d wake up in the morning and go to work and sit there for 8 hours with a helpful smile on my face and not feel guilty about it when I left the door.
I’m not making any progress here, not anymore. I think it’s the Solpadol. I think my head’s changed; I think the neurons have stopped firing and my arteries are leaking fluid into my eyes and I can’t sleep sometimes. I worry that I’ll be dead by 25 – I worry that I’ll still be alive at 30. I worry that I can’t write anymore; I really can’t, and every decision is make is like seeing, again, blood ballooning out of my veins and onto the hospital bed and flustered NHS nurses looking down on me apologetically and making me sleep in my own shit and bloodstains.
I keep hearing an old man say ‘nurse; nurse; give me some water; nurse, nurse, I’m dying’ and there is such a large part of me that wants to stand up and tear needles and wires from my arms and my chest and tell him to hurry up and die. I think I’m not the same person that I used to be.
I didn’t want to wake up this morning. Open my eyes from the black hole of sleep; from the black hole of me; from the black hole of depression. Depression is a black hole; a hole inside you. It’s something you’re born with, and it’s impossible to fix; impossible to fill.
