Down and Out on Murder Mile (4 page)

Upon hitting London,
we checked into a cheap, damp, shabbily furnished room in a Russell Square hotel. We simply arrived in Euston with our cases and checked into the cheapest rooming house we could find. The place was populated by backpacking students and drunken Australians who lounged around in the communal areas drinking cans of Foster's and Tennent's, smoking joints, and watching daytime television.

 

The only contact with other human beings we had was in twelve-step meetings around the city, where we sat in silence and listened to other people's stories. We did not go in an attempt to stay clean. More than anything, I wanted to score drugs. I convinced Susan it would be a smart idea to attend. I was so out of touch with the London scene that I got ripped off the first few times I
attempted to buy from the street. One afternoon I found myself chased down Euston Road by a braying pack of Rastafarian crack dealers who took my money and sold me a piece of gum wrapped in a baggie. After I confronted them they pulled their gums back from their yellow teeth and actually howled and yelped like fucking wolves, before giving chase. I ran, gasping for air, knocked over an old hooker, and lost them by the McDonald's near the train station. Similar scenes repeated themselves a dozen times or more. Susan sat around the room, chain-smoking and depressed, and I would set out every morning—like a man attempting to look for gainful employment—in an attempt to make a connection for heroin.

 

Having never scored heroin in London, I assumed that the street-dealing scene would be identical to that of Los Angeles. That I would be able to walk up to any dealer, hand over my money, and walk away with drugs. Not so. If you wanted pills or hash or grass then it was readily available from the kids who loitered on Camden High Street after dark. But the heroin- and crack-dealing scenes where much more underground. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they were relegated to the “frontlines,” open dealing spots dotted sparsely around the city. But if you were an outsider, you were an easy target for rip-off artists. When I walked up to these kids and asked for smack I was inevitably sold a wrap containing nothing. When I returned to complain, the dealer was gone, carried away on the scent of fat cooking on kebab skewers, piss, and the smoke from cheap blocks of hash.

 

I thought that Narcotics Anonymous meetings would be a good spot to get more information about where the real heroin and crack scene was centered. Only it was tough to walk right up to people who were in recovery and try and get that kind of information. So we just sat and listened, waiting for clues. I had patience. I had nothing but time. I was an invisible man, blended completely into the chaos of the capital. After the meetings we returned to the rooming house and sat with the blinds drawn, the dark enveloping us, and we waited. I imagined that if I concentrated hard enough I could disappear completely.

 

Sometimes some well-meaning sort would offer to buy us a coffee after the meeting. As with all junkies in recovery, the talk was inevitably concentrated around drugs. The serenity and the clean-living bullshit that everybody bandied about in the meetings soon vanished into unrestrained drug talk. Like men with no dicks talking about all the pussy they used to get.

 

“…and then I fixed the morphine drip in the hospital, so I could get enough out of it to stay high on…”

 

“…when they closed down the needle exchanges in Glasgow I'd just fish the used needle bins out of the Dumpsters at the hospital, get the old spikes out, file 'em down, bleach 'em, and use 'em…only sometimes there was no time for filing and bleaching…”

 

“…yeah the skag was so much better then. Little tablets we used to get…‘jacks' they called 'em…just cook 'em right down and shoot them…”

 

“…and there I was, sick as shit on the cell floor, shitting my pants…screaming, and the guards wouldn't even call the fucking doctor…”

 

“…when my cousin OD'd on that stuff we went and found his connection and bought as much of it as we could. You see, we knew it had to be good shit then….”

 

“…high as a cunt, I just picked up a two-thousand-quid rug from Harrods and walked straight out of the front door. I think they figured I was a delivery guy or something. I walked it straight to my fence and got two hundred quid for it. That was back when you could buy Diconal and Ritalin cheap in the West End…. Ever shoot Diconal? It's a better rush than heroin…hits you like a speedball….”

 

“…you see this leg? Right here, below the knee, where it goes purple? It's a deep vein thrombosis. I got it shooting Palfium. They don't like to prescribe it anymore. Pink palfs…they were the best. Better than skag. You got to crush 'em up good and cold shake it in the syringe. But if you don't shake it well enough you fuck up your veins. Once I got this I was able to hit up doctors for pain pills better than ever. File a lost-and-found slip at the train station saying you left a bag containing pain meds on the train. Then call an emergency doctor at night and show 'em the slip and tell 'em you're in pain. Once the fuckers took a look at my
leg they were always good for more pills until the doctor's office opened. Do it on a Friday and you could get enough to get loaded with for the whole weekend….”

 

I had come back to a city I no longer belonged to. Junkie and fuckup stuck out all over me like a warning sign to potential employers, friends, or lovers. I found myself unable to even relate to my old friends. I called up Emma from the Catsuits and found myself invited up to her place in Crouch End for a party. She lived with our old guitar player Marie, so this would be a reunion of sorts. I knew there would be a lot of old faces from my music days. Susan stayed alone in the hotel. I arrived early and nervously downed pints in an Irish theme pub across the road. I felt like an imposter, uncomfortably lurking in a sharkskin suit. I stood in the bathroom staring in the mirror trying to perfect looking normal, nonchalant. “Hey, how's it going?” I practiced saying.

 

At the party, the usual round of So-what-have-you-been-up-to?'s. Everybody looked pretty much the same, apart from me. Intensely aware of the lines under my eyes, the puffiness of my face, the track marks still healing on the backs of my hands. I drank too much, said too much. Got into an argument over politics with an earnest young
NME
journalist in the kitchen, secretly pissed that he was hogging the whiskey, and hating the fact he was wearing an ‘ironic' Kylie Minogue T-shirt. I told him he was a know-nothing college-boy asshole. He was talking about
Tony Blair, picking sides, the same old arguments I always heard at home.

 

“It doesn't matter,” I told him, drunkenly leaning in too close. “We're all dying…. Why do you
care
what variety of shit you have to eat in the meantime?”

 

I drunkenly showed my track marks to Dante Thomas, an old friend from the music days. His band had been the most successful unsuccessful band in history. He looked identical to the last time I had seen him, staring at my plate with a head full of Ecstasy in the Stock Pot, Soho, 1998.

“My, my” he said. “Aren't you the reckless one….”

 

All that Emma and Marie wanted to talk about was the old days, the carefree days of my drinking and fooling around as if the crash wouldn't happen. Too much “remember when…?” for my stomach. I could sense I was disappointing them. I felt old and tired and sad that I hadn't stayed here instead of leaving. Maybe then I wouldn't have been so worn out, so beat down by circumstance.

 

Eventually, I drank all of the red wine and whiskey in the place and left to try and score with a sallow-looking guy who said he used smack once in a while and knew where to get it, even at one in the morning.

 

“You just got to look for prostitutes,” he told me. “Wherever the prostitutes are there will be dealers….”

 

Tried to get money but I was so drunk I forgot my PIN number. The guy got nervous that I was trying to hustle him out of money and split, leaving me stranded in north London. I tried to kick the screen on the ATM in, and fell over on the pavement with the piss and the rain and the mud.

 

After two unsuccessful weeks in the hostel we found a flat share advertised in a free paper. It was a two-bedroom council flat in a high-rise in Hammersmith. The place had the improbable address of 109 Batman Close, and cost one hundred pounds per week. It was close enough to the BBC's White City studios that when the Real IRA exploded a car bomb outside of there the day after we moved in, the windows of our room shook, and I thought that the walls were caving in around us literally as well as figuratively. Our flat mates were a couple, he a monstrous English beer belly constantly sucking on a joint, drinking lager, glued to
The Weakest Link
or
Bargain Hunt
. She was South African, tall with a butch buzz cut, piercings dangling from her face. We heard them fuck noisily and constantly through the walls of our bedroom, and I listened to the creaking and his grunting and her oh-oh-there-yeah-there-don't-stop's and watched the wet patch on the ceiling, with Susan sleeping beside me or threatening suicide and chain-smoking again. I listened to the Queens Park Rangers crowd roaring from the stadium across the road, daytime television dancing across my face. I knew that soon I would be insane or a suicide myself.

 

I really needed to score.

 

Then I came across RJ. I met him outside of the needle exchange on Fortress Road, Shepherds Bush. I had stumbled across the store-front needle exchange a week after arriving in Hammersmith, while wandering the area's backstreets. I went there under the cover of getting needles but with the real intention of talking to some local junkies. The place was deserted though, apart from the guys who worked there—a couple of older black ex-dopers. One guy took care of me while the other hung out watching TV, asked me to fill out a form, and I gave a false surname and address. He was polite, respectful. He noticed the trace of an accent I had picked up in LA and in true dope-fiend fashion asked me what the heroin was like on the West Coast.

 

I told him that since my return to London I had been smoking heroin but now I wanted to inject again. He filled me in on the need to cook down UK heroin in citric acid. He gave me a pack of forty insulin needles, packets of citric acid, cookers, filters, sterile water, alcohol swabs, and a bin for disposing old needles in. As I was finishing the paperwork I noticed a tall, gaunt figure ring the bell and get buzzed in. He moved quickly, with a junky's determination, dropping off his old needles and following the guy into the back room to pick up more. I thanked my guy and walked out, loitering by the front entrance to talk to the new arrival as he left.

 

“Hey, how's it going?” I asked as he walked out the door. He looked a little startled but stopped to answer me.

 

“Not bad, mate.”

 

I got a closer look at him, yet could not get a read of his face. It was as if he was petrified in wax, his features out of focus and indistinct. He wore a cream winter sports jacket and baseball cap, but beyond these features I could not pinpoint anything distinct about him. If he changed his outfit he would have become completely unrecognizable to me.

 

“Listen man…I just moved here and I need to score, badly. I ain't a cop or anything…. Can you help me out?”

 

“Well,” he told me, “I figure they ain't got Yanks workin' for the drug squad now…. Wass yer name, mate?”

 

We exchanged pleasantries and he told me his name was RJ.

 

“I can't do anyfing right now, but I can sort you out after six if yer like. You got a pen?”

 

And that was how it started again. We split with each other's mobile numbers and my lethargy and depression melted away with each successive step. I had three hours to kill. I sat in the McDonald's on Shepherds Bush Green nursing a Coke and watching council estate mums with
their hair pulled back in severe ponytails pushing red-faced screaming children, flabby white arses peeking out of the tops of tracksuit bottoms….

 

…An old homeless guy with shit stains on his filthy wool suit walking the gray streets and rummaging through a garbage can looking for food…quick-talking black kids with impenetrable West London–Jamaican accents hanging on a fence, slapping palms, wolf-whistling at the young snatch as it walked by…

 

I returned to the flat beaming with pride. The hunter who had returned with enough provisions for the family. Susan even attempted a stilted, awkward hug, and we sat and waited for six o'clock to roll around.

 

That evening I established what was to become my routine over the next few months. My mobile phone buzzed to life and I answered it breathlessly after the first ring.

 

“It's RJ. I'm walkin' up on your place now. I'll be there in a few minutes.”

 

I slipped my shoes on, put on my leather jacket, and crept out the front door. I exited the Stalinist-gray block of flats and leaned by the door watching for RJ to appear from the background static of the city. Kids played in the concrete and the broken glass, one suspiciously poking at a dead cat with a stick.

 

Cars dragged past the estate, their souped-up sound systems causing the windows in the flats and houses to vibrate in unison. The sky was a murky gray, already dark outside at six, dirty yellow streetlights bathing the moist fog in an eerie glow. Then RJ would appear, sometimes on time, sometimes late, but always with that lurching, determined walk, winking at me—“All right, mate?”—as we both slipped into the block of flats.