Down and Out on Murder Mile (5 page)

We always did business in the piss-filled elevator, both of us red-cheeked and wet-nosed from the London winter. I had the money counted out, and he spat the wrap out and handed it to me. When we reached the third floor I got out, said goodbye, and RJ headed back down to the street and more deliveries.

 

We saw RJ through London winters and London summers. Through dry spells when we were all scrabbling and sick, not enough dope to keep everybody well, and through times of plenty. Good cheap heroin and plenty of it—wars and surplus—small white bags, spat from his mouth into his palm, and into my palm and into my mouth, the Kings Mall, Hammersmith, the piss and bleach of the stairs and the cold that penetrated the concrete façade, and home: Baggies untied, ripped open, tan powder dumped into spoons and the sickly sweet smell of cooking junk and peace…. Endless, terrible, beautiful peace. Sometimes he would show with his brother Mike, a tall skinhead with a mean look but who was actually one of the most harmless,
sweet guys you could hope to meet. They were both addicts. I had the sense that RJ looked after Mike and made sure that he got by day to day.

 

Back in my room I locked the door and threw my coat on the bed. Susan looked up expectantly as I walked in and whispered, “Got it!”

 

With shaking cold hands I unwrapped the white plastic package and poured out its contents onto a CD case. I felt a familiar excitement rising in my chest. There it was, heroin, the first heroin I had had since Los Angeles. It was a light tan-colored powder and after being off for so long it seemed like a surprisingly large amount. I briefly considered the possibility that getting high might not be such a smart idea, but the thought was ludicrous and abstract now that the heroin was here in front of me. Up until this moment I had constantly been searching for it, and always in the back of my mind thinking that if it didn't present itself to me then that was it—it was meant to be, I was to remain clean. But if it fell into my lap, then it was meant to be also. I should use again. This Zen attitude toward using heroin was negated somewhat by the fact that I had spent nearly every day since arriving in London trying to score heroin. I had sought it out, and when a junkie puts out the distress signal that he needs junk in a big city, somebody somewhere will respond. It was no accident that I found myself in a locked bedroom with a bag of disposable needles and twenty pounds of heroin—it was the only possible conclusion to my repeated attempts at scoring. However, the idea that fate had presented me with this opportunity
to get high made me feel slightly better about myself as I prepared my first shot, slid the fresh needle into my buttock, and injected into the fat and muscle there. After all, you don't want to fuck with fate, right?

 

When we were done I tidied my equipment away and walked out into the main room, leaving Susan alone with her high on the bed. My roommate was sitting there, drinking a can of Stella and watching some obnoxious TV show at a brutal volume.

 

“All right?” he said. “Didn't hear you come in.”

 

I sat in silence for a while and watched the program. The concept seemed to be that two teams of nerdy young men each build a robot. The robots are then placed into an arena where they attempt to destroy each other in front of a braying crowd of spotty teenage boys and
Star Trek
obsessives. All of this hosted by a smirking washed-up TV actor from an eighties sitcom set on a spaceship. One rickety-looking creation halfheartedly rammed the other with a pointy stick. The crowd went wild.

 

Outside the light had faded completely. I could feel the initial rush of the heroin starting. I knew it was happening because I found myself getting caught up in the TV show despite myself. I started admiring the skill and patience it would require to build such a robot. I began to wonder whatever happened to that sitcom from the eighties set
on a spaceship. Did it get canceled? Surely not! Little eruptions of pleasure started in my spine, my chest, and my head.

 

I found myself wondering if everyone else was on heroin, secretly. Is this why they found TV like this so fascinating? Or was I defective, a faulty robot?

 

A robot was eventually declared the victor.

 

“Well, that was great,” I heard myself saying.

“Yeah.” My roommate sighed, taking a sip from his lager. “Robots are brilliant.”

 

I excused myself, flopped on the bed, and stretched out. Susan roused from her nod a little and muttered, “I feel so fucking good right now….”

 

It did not seem possible to feel any better than I felt at this moment. Outside I could hear sirens, dogs barking, the comforting sounds of a metropolitan city. I was home at last.

I answered an
ad in the
Melody Maker:

 

GLAMOROUS ELECTRO-POP BAND
seeks
KEYBOARDIST
. Influences Duran Duran, XTC, Japan, Chicks on Speed. Call Elektra.

 

The girl on the other end of the phone seemed vaguely Eastern European. We arranged to meet in a Camden bar. Having resumed my use of heroin I had initially intended to stop my attendance of Narcotics Anonymous meetings. However, one guy who was a regular at the Camden meeting, a grinning wide-boy ex–heroin addict turned ticket tout named Michael had mentioned that he had a council flat lying empty that he wanted to sublet. He offered it to Susan and me on the cheap. The temporary arrangement in Batman
Close was coming to an end, so I felt obligated to keep up the charade of twelve-step meetings in an attempt to secure the offer of the new place.

 

Also, now that I was attending meetings high on heroin, I found them a lot more bearable. Enjoyable even. I could take an active interest in other people's stories and sometimes even empathize with the poor fuckers. There was an initial twinge of embarrassment when I stood up to a roomful of applause, collecting a keychain celebrating ninety days sober while ripped to the gills on strong Afghan gear, but it soon subsided.

 

I started to get over my feelings of ridiculousness about “sharing” in group meetings. Loaded, I was expert at saying the right things: expressing the officially proscribed doubts and fears using the correct, crypto-therapeutic language. I learned not to roll my eyes or snigger when someone used an NA cliché around me. I was astounded by people's ability to use a cliché I had heard in recovery one million times before, as if they were expressing a truly original thought. Like this:

 

“You know what I realized I was doing?”

“What's that?”

“I was changing seats on
The Titanic
. You see?”

 

Or this:

“Listen. What you are feeling is fear. You know what
fear
means?”

“What?”

“Fuck Everything And Run. F.E.A.R. You see what I'm saying, mate?”

 

I met with Elektra and Paris from the band Liquid Sky in a little pub called the Good Mixer in Camden, right after my NA meeting in a nearby church hall. Right after the coffees and
amen
s I slipped into the bar and hammered back a couple of vodka tonics in quick succession. When I still played with the Catsuits, this bar had been the center of the indie rock scene in London. One could see some of the biggest faces in the Britpop scene rubbing shoulders with upstarts like us on a Friday night. Now it was populated by drunk Goth kids and tourists who showed up five years too late for the party. Somebody was playing Pulp's
Different Class
in its entirety. It was oddly like stepping back into 1997.

 

Two girls dressed like new-wave prostitutes staggered in on improbable heels. One of them wore a
LIQUID SKY
T-shirt strategically slashed across the tits and belly. This barely earned a sideways glance from the bar's jaded clientele. I looked up from my glass and waved over to them. They approached and the smaller of the two, a dark-haired girl with electric-blue eye shadow, offered her hand.

“Hi…I'm Elektra.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

 

The band was a three-piece: the diminutive Elektra on vocals, Paris on guitar, and a bass player who called himself Louis XIV. He was absent because he had to appear in court, having drunkenly crashed his Ford Cortina into a fence in Croydon. We talked and drank. My initial awkwardness
faded away as the booze went down. Soon I was talking about the old days with the Catsuits and arguing over the merits of Suicide's later albums with them. They weren't nearly as pretentious as their personas and demeanors initially suggested. Elektra, the supposed renegade Russian heiress, was actually an Israeli girl with the less memorable birth name of Sue. Paris was actually a rather shy Dutch girl whose real name sounded like someone clearing their throat. We got on immediately. They remembered the Catsuits and there was a tense moment when they asked me what I'd been up to since the band split up. I shrugged.

 

“Oh, you know. This and that. Traveling…”

 

“Well, do you want the gig? If you're up for trying it out we're ready to start. You're the best person we've seen by miles.”

 

This flattered my ego just enough.

 

“Cool. What were the others like?”

 

Elektra laughed. “A forty-year-old creep who kept telling me how sexy he thought Russian girls were, a butch lesbian who was really into Ani DiFranco, and a guy with a ponytail.”

 

Rehearsals began immediately. They had written three songs that they gave me on a CD. On the back of their crude demo, the band had secured a prestigious slot doing a session for John Peel's show on Radio 1. The recording session was in a month and a half, and without a live keyboardist
they could not perform any of the songs. I felt a familiar twinge of excitement. One of the first big things the Catsuits did was a session for Radio 1. Maybe somehow I could fluke my way back into the industry. I had the sense that somehow, I had stumbled upon a way out of the wilderness.

 

When I got back to Batman Close, Susan was nodded out in front of the little black-and-white TV, a cigarette burned down to her knuckles. I looked at her and closed the door behind me. I still had two problems: Susan and heroin. Susan roused from her stupor. In one movement I had my shirt off and was unlooping the belt from my jeans. I perched on the end of the bed, dumped some citric acid and heroin into the spoon, and began to cook up a hit.

 

“How did it go?” Susan slurred.

 

“Great. I'm in a band. We're called Liquid Sky.”

 

“Thass…great.”

 

“Yeah…”

 

I looked back at Susan, her slack jaw slumped onto her chest. Jesus, she looked bad. She was really giving up. I'd had a sense that maybe some of the spark would come back into her when she removed herself from the chaos of Los Angeles and found herself in a new city. But since we'd moved here, she barely ventured outdoors. I was the one who went out and found RJ, found the apartment, scored the heroin. Money was
dwindling, one of us would soon need to get a job, and already Susan was whining about having no papers and how I'd have to be the breadwinner for the time being. She said it as if there was no one working without papers in London. The old girl seemed as if she were waiting around for death, but there was still something inside of me that wanted to hang around and find out what happened next.

 

Susan would have to go, right after I quit heroin again. I noted the irony of this thought, as I slid the needle into my flesh to hunt for a vein. But there was time. First and foremost, I had to do a good job with Liquid Sky and nail the John Peel session.

 

Then,
I thought determinedly, feeding the shot into my arm,
then I can quit.

I am terrified.
Vomiting. RJ has not answered his phone in days. I have been calling every ten minutes. Susan lies on the bed, twisting and turning in the duvet and cursing. I have taken to lying in the bathtub, fully clothed. Thank God our roommates are away for the weekend. It feels good to rest my head against the cool of the plastic tub and the tiles. At least for a moment. There is not enough money to risk going to Kings Cross to score. One rip-off and we would be fucked. “Why the fuck do we have to rely on RJ!” Susan screams, on the verge of tears again. “You couldn't have found a fucking backup for emergencies?”

 

“Why the fuck is it always on me to do this shit?” I yell back, and that makes me cough and then the dry heaves start again.

 

“This is your fucking city! Your responsibility!”

 

“If you make me get out of this tub,” I warn her, “I'm gonna throw you out the fucking window, do you hear me, cunt? I'll put you out of your fucking misery once and for ALL!”

 

She shuts up after that.

It was depressing
to realize that despite all of the promises to myself I had gotten a heroin habit again. I had not intended to get a habit. I mustn't have. But I had done the same fucking thing again: I had promised myself that I would use heroin only every other day to stop my body from building up a tolerance. But there was always an excuse for an exception to the rule. The weather was shite, there was nothing to do but sit around the place and get high. The weather was good, so why not have a little hit to celebrate? I was depressed, needed a shot to cheer me up. I was happy, needed a shot to enhance my happiness. The same old shit I had been pulling on myself since day one.

 

Every morning that I didn't wake up sick I'd think,
Well, I got a reprieve. No smack today, and I'm back on track.
In fact, being not sick and back on track
would turn out to be a perfect excuse for a little hit. I'd think:

 

Did William Burroughs sit around, worrying about taking dope? Or did he just do it and then write immortal books?

 

Did Chet Baker worry like this? Or did he just get high and sing those beautiful songs?

 

Was Johnny Thunders a big crybaby pussy, skipping shots and worrying about getting a habit? Or did he just get on with it, and play his guitar like Jesus?

 

For Christ's sake, I'd tell myself, don't be such a fucking crybaby. And cook up a fucking shot already.

 

So, inevitably, the morning came that I woke up sick for the first time. My first thought was, Am I dope sick, or just sick? I couldn't tell. But I was wet. Soaked. I had sweat so much in the night that my side of the mattress was cold and soggy. And my stomach was feeling ominous. But the worst part was the beginning of the symptom that I knew meant withdrawal: the chills. Like my blood had been replaced by ice water.
Bollocks,
I thought,
you're dope sick. You fucking idiot.
My next thought was:
Well, you'd better get straight and figure out what's next.

 

Susan woke up to find me perched on the end of the bed trying to shoot up. It was amazing that, having been off dope for almost three months,
none of my veins seemed to have healed up. I'd imagined that I would be completely regenerated after three months of no needles, but it seemed like within days of starting to shoot up again my arms were mostly no-go areas. I was shooting into a vein in my foot, which hurt like a motherfucker. She blinked a few times and then muttered: “I feel sick. Fix me a shot.”

 

“Fix your own fucking shot,” I hissed. “I'm busy, you lazy bitch.”

 

I had a rehearsal lined up for 4:00
P.M.
I had to get hold of RJ and get enough heroin for the day. This was all happening at a very inconvenient time. Money was getting low, and we needed income. I made a vow to start looking for a job as soon as I copped some drugs. Miracle of miracles, RJ picked up first time. We agreed to meet in an hour.

 

I was waiting on a bench outside the tower block when he showed up, an hour late. I had been watching a bunch of young kids lurking outside a newsagent, grabbing smaller kids as they left and taking their loose change. I was feeling sick again. I handed him eighty quid and took four bags, hiding two of them in my pocket from Susan's probing eyes.

 

“You don't look well, mate,” RJ said. “You all right?”

 

“Just a little sick. I should have saved a little for this morning, we've been bang at it recently.”

 

“You got a doctor? I mean for juice or whatever?”

 

“Juice?”

 

“Methadone. It's handy to have a prescription for days like this. There's a surgery in Shepherds Bush, I hear he's okay. You should get yourself on. It don't cost anything if you're out of work you know.”

 

“I'm not ready to quit, RJ. I tried that once.”

 

“Who says you have to quit? Doesn't do you any harm to have a little extra shit in case of emergencies….”

 

After my experiences in the methadone clinics of LA, I was doubtful. But it was free. I thanked RJ and went upstairs to get Susan and myself well. Then I told her we were signing up for a doctor.

 

The surgery was deceptively normal, after my experience at the clinic on Hollywood Boulevard. No crackheads asking for change. No heroin-addicted transvestites staggering around in hooker boots. Just a bunch of kids with runny noses and old folks with diabetes. We each filled out the required forms and waited around for an hour. Then we were called in together. Dr. Stein watched us impassively as we walked in and closed the door. He was a tall, cadaverous man whose hands and face seemed to be too large for the rest of his body. His expression was stony,
and the room was silent except for the hum of the fluorescent lights. I felt like I was slipping into a confessional booth.

 

“How can I help you?” he asked eventually, after studying us for a while.

 

“Well…we wanted to ask about getting onto a methadone program.”

 

“Hmm.” Dr Stein started tapping at his computer, half-turned away from us.

“And you are both using?”

 

“Yes,” we answered in unison.

 

“How much? Approximately.”

 

“About a gram a day,” I answered.

 

“Each?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“That's a lot.”

 

“Is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

 

We weren't quite up to a gram a day yet, but it always helps to massage the figures. Dr. Stein tapped on the computer for a while and we both sat in silence. I glanced over at Susan, and she pulled a face. I mouthed
Asshole
to her. She nodded.

 

There were more questions. History of drug use, history of treatment attempts. It took a while. When you went through it all, piece by piece, I realized that I had been doing this longer than I had been playing music. I got a break at eighteen and played music professionally for two years. But I had been using heroin for the past four years solidly. It was a depressing statistic.

 

“Well,” Dr. Stein said after collating all of the evidence, “I'm sorry to tell you that I can't help you right now. There simply aren't the places on the program at the moment. The best I can do is put you on a waiting list and get back to you.”

 

Susan went into her crying, begging routine. She was really good at it. I had seen her do it to get drugs, money, and now she was using it to get on a methadone program. She started pleading and hot tears began to flood down her cheeks. He voice got higher, more insistent and demanding; she started to sob and her words became jagged and almost indecipherable.

 

“But…the money…we can't…and we're sick…and I'm starting a job…soon…and I'll lose it…if I can't show up…want to change…honest to God…”

 

It even took me by surprise. I put a stiff hand on her back and awkwardly said, “Hey, calm down…. We can manage, I suppose….”

 

“HOW? HOW CAN WE FUCKING MANAGE? WHERE'S THE MONEY COMING
FROM? I CAN'T WORK SICK! WE'RE FUCKED!!!!!!”

 

Somehow, she prompted Dr. Stein onto the phone. He had a whispered conversation as Susan tried to control her breathing and stop sobbing. I knew it was going our way. I could pick out words here and there over Susan's sniffles and gasps for air: “very desperate…work lined up…I know he had one space available. Yes, they're married….”

 

Dr. Stein hung up the phone.

 

“Okay, I managed to get you two on. Bear in mind that this is
highly
irregular. You're lucky that someone happened to drop out of the program this morning and I'm taking you both on as one case. You will have to take urine tests when you see me, and I don't tolerate any funny business. One dirty urine, and you're out of my program. And that counts for cocaine, too. Understood?”

 

“Yes, Dr. Stein,” Susan sniffled. “And thank you.”

 

We left the clinic with two prescriptions, written on special pink prescription pads. That means they were for narcotics. We each were given eighty milliliters of methadone linctus a day. Walking away from the clinic Susan laughed a little.

 

“I thought he was gonna crap his pants when I started bawling.”

 

“Fuck, I thought
I
was too. That was pretty good.”

 

“Yeah, well,” she said somewhat bitterly, “I got a lot to cry about in my life. I just have to think about it for a while.”

 

I looked at the prescription. “Free fucking drugs,” I laughed, “you can't get better than that. Maybe we could really get off dope using this.”

 

“Oh yeah,” Susan sneered, “You gonna join NA for real? Maybe we can practice our steps later.”

 

“Fuck off.”

 

“Then stop talking like a pussy. Quit dope! Jesus, sometimes I think you're going soft in the head.”