BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 13

Well hello, here, as a special treat, is episode 13 of Blind Man On Crack.  You might also like to read How To Become A Crack Addict, which is the first 22 posts of this blog (Jan to April 2013), or you can buy it for a tiny fee on amazon, if you do that kind of thing.  Meanwhile, here is episode 13, just for you...

Walkabout

 

For the next few months, I relied on Westbourne Park to fuel my iniquity, and Layla and I became if not friends, acquaintances, if not acquaintances, associates.  But when the drugs had gone, she’d get surly and start mumbling insults.  I’d just sit there, regretting, occasionally trying to fashion a roll-up from the charred remnants of six other joints, which in turn were the remnants of thirty-six previous ones, and she’d condemn my ashen fumblings as unseemly.  But a Rubicon had been if not crossed, waded into.  Crack with a heroin chaser was now the order of the day.  Ah, those comforting heroin-spliffs, that allowed me to smoke crack with seeming impunity.  I was like an acrobat using a bed of nails as a safety-net, but then I had no plans to let go of the trapeze.

 

If I called on Layla to find her out, I’d fall back on the nearly-always-in Mr Bingo, who’d faithfully summon up Sandra for me, for the usual fee of fags and fiver.  But Sandra wouldn’t let me score heroin.  She didn’t do that shit, and because she was the middleman between me and the dealer, there was no point asking.  Besides, the promise of ‘crack soon’ overrode the possibility of ‘heroin later’.  Once I was thrusting those scrunched-up notes into her waiting mitt, I was in the business of making sure she came back just as soon as possible.  If that was with just white, so be it…I wouldn’t care about brown once I’d got that first bit of crack down my neck…well, not until it was gone.  No, the white was Sandra’s thing, and she’d sneer at those who even touched the other.  Heroin, even if just smoked in a spliff, or on foil, was the preserve of scumbags.  As for people who injected, they were dropouts.  She’d do the Lady of the Manor turning-up-of-the-nose at those losers, leer down like a mangy Margot Ledbetter at the needle-crew.

 

Some nights I’d get a cab to Westbourne Park, arriving outside the 24-hour shop where a loose collection of brethren would already be clustered in its light, hoping for a break in the context of ongoing despair.  Some of them seemed so shady that even I, in my gullible rapacity, found myself not engaging and wandering away, trying to look to poor to mug.  They were usually male, but sometimes a female would fall among them, and they’d gather about like dung-beetles under a jackal, a strange cross between scavenger and serenader, asking who’s she with, where’s she going, does she want to ‘come for a smoke’, but most offers were hollow, and the lady would shake ‘em awf like dandruff, flouncing into the night, leaving the beetles twitching their feelers in dismay at the thought of her smoking with someone further up the food-chain. 

 

One night, alone in my cubicle, as I lay there lamenting the slope on my mattress, formed by only ever having one person on it, I was on the brink of booking my passage to Westbourne Park.  It was two in the morning, and money had just gone into my account.  Then it occurred to me it might be worth trying to score closer to home.  My encounter with the reptilian pimp, only a few months before, was proof that drugs existed in Shepherd’s Bush as well as Westbourne Park, and the Bronx.  It was now my mission to find them.  All I had to do was wander down the right street, let myself be spotted by the right person.  I might not be able to see them, but they may spot, then assail, me.  ‘Shepherd’s Bush has 24-hour shops too,’ I mused, and felt myself becoming more London-savvy with every thought.  Like a pig foraging for truffles, this time I’d root out the desired delicacy, even if it meant snuffling in the undergrowth half the night.  So I got up, dressed, discreetly excited, discreetly exited, and made my way down to the Green, which lives up to its name inasmuch as parts of it are green.

 

It’s odd being a partially sighted spy.  You go out in search of your quarry, knowing that contact won’t depend on you spotting it, but it spotting you.  It’s more a putting-yourself-out-there exercise, a blurred reconnaissance, a fact-finding mission, but one where the facts find you.

 

Ten minutes later, I was trawling the broad pavements outside the Walkabout pub, the haunt of sexually active Australians, just by the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where I’d seen Suzanne Vega, Cowboy Junkies, Richard Thompson, Divine Comedy, and a range of luminaries (during my crack sabbatical).  Like most trawlers, my net went wide and deep.  I pity the dolphins, those ever-smiling intellectuals in brine, getting all tangled up in dredge-nets, because Josh the geography student can’t think of anything but tuna to put in his bap.  Even though I was the one doing the trawling, I felt like I’d been caught myself, some four years before, by Sandra, the professional fishwife.  Her net was so holey you’d think even krill would get through.  But if you’re looking to get hooked, it’s possible to become enmeshed in a threadbare net that’s barely there.  I was fish turned fisherman.

 

I spied activity, portside.  A drifting silhouette put out a mild distress call.  It wanted a cigarette.  Her sail was surely battered, and her hull well-punctured.  But even though I couldn’t get a clear look at the spook, my cracked and fuzzy telescope told me this was contact.  I dropped anchor, and she hailed me.  'What are you doing out this time of night?' she asked, probably prompted by the white cane I was hanging out like a fishing-rod before me.  Less cagey in my old age, I replied, 'I was just looking to get something.'  She leapt at this.  'What is it you want?'  You could almost hear her adrenal gland kick in.  ‘I was thinking of getting a smoke.’  'What, white?'  The strange game of reveal was over, and she'd declared first.  Now we were on the same wavelength, talking the same language.  No fear among plague-ships.

 

There was a cashpoint nearby, although it was the kind I couldn’t read so well, pale, with spindly blue lettering.  But for the addict, delay-intolerant, a cashpoint, whether it be embedded in the wall of a bank, a shopping-mall, or jammed in a nook of a Budgens, is a thing of hope, a facilitator of dreams.  When those notes are poured into that little metal tray, it’s as if the establishment itself wants you to get wrecked.  ‘Yes,’ gleams the oracle, ‘you go and score, seize the day, or night...mind you, if you incur any charges while you’re at it, we’ll punish you, of course.’

 

So there we stood, at the oracle.  We would have knelt, but for the gum and spit on the ground.  My co-worshipper read aloud with reverence the sacred text, the blessèd buttons pressed at my behest.  We petitioned it for eighty pounds, which it granted.  This was the conduit, the tunnel to a new universe that we would never actually arrive in, but we didn’t care, for transfigurèd we were, sore fucking transfigurèd.

 

I stuffed the notes in my pocket and turned to my new associate.  'Who shall we try?' I asked, wanting her to think I knew a few dealers, which I thought might dilute her compulsion to fleece me.  ‘This way,’ she said, and led me round the corner onto Uxbridge Road.  Having established that neither of us had a mobile, she said she’d use a callbox.  I’d just given her some change, when a skinny figure came scuttling across the road towards us, and Martha, my associate, called out to it.  ‘Is Billy around?’ she asked.  ‘Ring Colonel,’ the stranger delicately crowed, ‘he’s just on Loftus.’  Martha made the call.  The phantom, now standing before me, introduced herself as Faith, and warned me to be careful of Martha (or Mel, as she knew her).  She was bad news.  But the world of crack is a backbiting one – when someone tells you someone’s a thief, they’re usually thinking about robbing you themselves.  See, I told you I was London-savvy.  Martha emerged with urgent instructions for us to get to the corner of Loftus.  Mid-flight, I transplanted the notes into Faith’s waiting grasp, who’d by now convinced me that she was the one I could trust, and we could go back to hers just as soon as the crack was ours.  Discovering I’d entrusted Faith with the money put Martha’s nose out of joint, or back in, I couldn’t tell.  But, by now, all we could both do was hope that Faith, having disappeared down Loftus Road, would return with the relevant drugs.

 

As we stood there on the corner, me feeling like we were sure to get arrested, another of Martha's nocturnal playmates turned up, a girl called Belinda whose tits were on obvious show, for obvious reasons.  Suddenly they were all coming out of the woodwork.  I'd no idea I was living in such a hotbed.  When Faith returned, all four of us went back to her place.  She had the ground-floor flat of a house no more than a few minutes away.  It couldn’t have been easier.

 

The living-room, for want of a better name, was dingy and cluttered, and felt like years of dust and grease had caked into every surface, apart from, of course, the shiny bathroom tile onto which Faith spat the saliva-clad parcels, just acquired from the elusive Colonel.  Opening a tiny cling-film package that's covered in phlegm is a pretty slippery business, but I eventually managed to do it, and off we went again.  It was all becoming dangerously easy, and dangerously close to home.

 

Martha seemed to have a lighter-fuel habit.  She had a canister lodged in the inside-pocket of her crabby denim-jacket.  Every so often, she’d bite down on the nozzle, releasing a blast of butane into her mouth, which she'd suck down into eager, perhaps bleeding lungs.

 

Belinda just sat there, wafting a really tangy BO.  It smelt like someone had lifted the lid of a saucepan with three-day-old stew in it.  She didn’t say much, but whenever someone put crack on a pipe she’d be sitting there drooling.  After a while, though, she began to get paranoid, and started accusing Faith of hiding drugs in parts of the room she hadn’t even been, under the bed, on the windowsill, on top of the curtain-rail.  Faith didn’t like this, and started getting nasty, threatening to take a knife to her if she carried on.  When Belinda gave as good as she got, Faith called out for backup.  ‘Gerald,’ she bellowed.  Moments later, a bearded mental guy lumbered in.  He didn’t look like he could follow even the simplest instruction, but she ordered him about like a dog, all the same.  ‘Get that out,’ she sneered, as if pointing at a ready-meal gone mouldy.  Belinda, though, jittery by now, and clearly not quite the ticket, was already making tracks.  Gerald swivelled slowly as if to grab, but he was too late, and she was out the door before his pincer-like arms met.  Belinda gone, Faith was satisfied, and she sent Gerald back into his lair.  It wasn’t long before Martha left, too.  Don’t know why…maybe Faith convinced her the drugs had all gone, threatened her with Gerald, or perhaps she ran out of butane, went to the shop and got serenaded by a local dung-beetle.

 

It allowed Faith and I to have a little get-to-know-each-other session, to bond in the dinginess.  To me, she didn’t seem like a typical crack-smoker.  She was about fifty-five, and spoke like an old-fashioned school-ma’am, clipped and oversure.  She had a take on everyone and everything, and none of her opinions was good, like so many scalding school-reports from an establishment where corporal punishment was not a last resort, but a relished ritual.  There was something sadistic about her, and it wasn’t long before stories of childhood maltreatment came up.  She played the ‘it never did me any harm’ card to the hilt.  Apparently she was grateful that her mother, a dissolute of sorts, had locked her in the cupboard under the stairs for hours on end.  She was equally thankful that one of her mother’s fleeting boyfriends had taken a far keener interest in her, aged nine, than he ever seemed to take in her mother.  These things had made her stronger, taught her about the foibles of human interaction, how to get ahead of the game, and on it, as soon as she left home, when fourteen.

 

Then, when it was light, and the white, along with all my money, had gone, it was time to resort to that arch-comforter, the brown.  We’d been out a few times during the night, but I’d been bashful of asking for heroin, for fear of Sandra-style admonishments, but Faith had broached the subject early on, declaring herself to be a keen injector of both, with many a sunken vein and abscess to show for it.

 

We’d been talking about my sight-condition when it was time for her to cook up (i.e. prepare the heroin for injection).  I gave her the usual spiel about getting ill when I was nine, that affecting my sight, but one adapts, especially when one’s a child, how things had been up and down over the years, but quite stable for about the last ten.  It was a story I’d grown tired of telling, and mostly lazy spin and omissions, anyway.  But Faith, having gained an impression of what I could and couldn’t see, found it useful, and decided it would be alright to inject in front of me.  ‘I usually go into the bathroom to do this,’ she explained, ‘but if you can’t see me anyway, well, what’s the point?’  I didn’t really care what she did.  ‘Fine,’ I replied, with my usual passivity.

 

I tried not to fixate on the ritual unfolding before me, even though my curiosity was growing.  Although I couldn’t see exactly what cooking up involved, this was maybe no bad thing.  There was a spoon with a bit of liquid in it, then a flame under the spoon.  Then you’d draw the stuff up from the spoon into the barrel of the syringe.  But it was like watching an alchemist turn lead into gold through frosted glass.  I got the gist, but not the know-how.

 

I’d forgotten to buy tobacco and papers to make those, by now, very necessary post-crack heroin-spliffs.  Faith, having drawn the elixir into the syringe, placed it down for a moment to help me in my hour of need, suggesting I tried snorting the heroin instead.  She endorsed this method because it meant I wasn’t wasting any, whereas putting it in a spliff meant that most of it went, quite literally, up in smoke.  ‘Drugs are expensive,’ she pointed out.  ‘You’ve got to make the most of them when you’ve got them.  You can’t let people fuck you around, like that Belinda bitch.  People will take the piss if you let them.’  It was a moving motivational speech, and left me in no doubt that I was in the presence of an old, and somewhat withered, hand.  She was kind enough to chop me out a little brown line, then fashion a tube for me to snort it through, from a leaflet that fell from a nearby TV guide.  Positioning myself above the platter, being careful not to exhale and so blow it in every direction, I sucked up the bitter powder into a nostril, sniffing with gusto a few times more to knock it back into the recesses of my sinuses.

 

Then, it was Faith’s go.  Picking her way through clutter, she settled on a big square cushion in the corner, as if a cat preparing to give birth.  I could still see her, but not in detail.  Down went her jeans, revealing skinny limbs.  Her lamentations regarding the state of her legs brought to mind claylike flesh, flecked with scars and scratches, scabs and cysts, and the odd ripe boil on a rank, necrotic stretch of shin, all testimony to her decades-long dalliance with decay.  She then began telling me how her legs were in such a bad way that she’d thought of offering herself up to schools to give talks to the children about the perils of drugs, using her legs as a visual prop to drive the point home…an ambition that seemed both worthy and macabre.

 

A fleeting question entered my mind as to what I might do if she had an overdose.  I knew virtually no first aid, and wasn’t even sure if it applied in this setting.  I felt like a toddler thrown in the deep end, except I hadn’t been thrown, I’d leapt in of my own accord.  Then I realised that I didn’t even know what an overdose looked like.  It was just a word I’d heard.  Did the patient keel over and flop into a kind of coma?  Did they quiver on their back, their limbs all fidgety like a dying fly?  Would I call an ambulance?  What would I tell them?  ‘Oh, we were just having some crack, then she injected some heroin, and now she won’t say anything.’  What would my fate be in such an entanglement?  Would the police be involved?  Would I, the semi-innocent bystander, be drawn into the fray?  Was I doomed to be grilled by the local Jessica Fletcher?

 

By the light of a precariously positioned lamp, and a few shreds of daylight seeping in from the street, Faith braced for revelation.  Legs awkwardly akimbo, she twisted the snake-neck of the anglepoise to illuminate the relevant crater, to be located in the region of the groin.  ‘I suppose you get a different kind of rush doing it that way,’ I surmised, hoping my interest would prompt her to do one for me.  But instead she said, peering at my forearms, ‘You haven’t got the veins for it.’  I wondered was this her way of teasing my curiosity, provoking me to find a vein she could inspect, inject, and then say, ‘Ah well, if you insist,’ to exonerate herself from any accusations of enticement.  Or maybe this scenario was being played out solely within the confines of my own needy, and possibly seedy mind.

 

She shushed me.  The Eagle had landed.  A sigh passed her lips, the kind you’d maybe get from pressing a freshly dead corpse in the ribcage.  I was still in the business of trying to seduce her into seducing me into having a hit, but she just wouldn’t be coaxed.  Half of me was glad of this, but the crack-addled half, still striving for a yet higher high, was resentful, and quietly vowed to make it happen, somehow, at some point.  But, for now, all I could do was watch her swoon, a dirty kind of envy swilling in my gut.

 

Jeans up, she picked her way back to the sofa, sinking into the upholstery as if pulled by a sense of relief as irresistible as gravity.  ‘Nice?’ I asked, colluding with the confidence-trick being played on us both.  ‘Like a nun kissing God,’ she replied.  Ghoulish though the interlude had been, my monkish aspirations to attain the serenity she had found, remained untarnished.

And that, friends, is that, apart from a little song for you, as ever:  All I Want For Christmas Is A Personality Disorder

See you after Christmas I hope.

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 12

Hello, and happy Christmas, if you do that kind of thing.  Below is episode 12 of the grinding saga known as 'Blind Man On Crack'.  I hope you enjoy it.  See you after Christmas.

Opium Is The Religion Of The Massive

 

I now felt, perhaps with a degree of trepidation, but also excitement, that I was back in the game.  So, bank-account recovered, courtesy of the ever-giving nipple of state, I was ready for another go.  It was always exciting finding, then refinding a new hideaway, and it couldn't have been more than a week before I was sniffing around Westbourne Park again, like a dog, looking for where it last pissed.  I popped into the 24-hour shop to get some fags for Mr Bingo, then over the road to the cash-machine.  I was never a scout, but crack had taught me to always be well prepared.  Reversing the map in my mind, to affect a speedy return to that pillar-box red door, I soon found the right turnoff, and within moments was pressing the buzzer for my wheezing, antique go-between.  Would he be in?  Yes he would.  'Ah Ben, how are you?' came his tinny tones over the intercom.

 

Up in the gloom of his hallway, we shook hands like old friends.  I handed him twenty B&H and a fiver, which he received with thanks.  I asked him if he could call Sandra for me.  He obligingly tried, but to no avail.  'It's gone straight to her answer-phone,' he told me.  'Can I try one of my other friends for you?'  He cited another member of his little coterie as a potential introduction, crooning, 'I can ring Layla.  She is a nice girl.  Likes a smoke.'  He flicked through a ragged book of contacts.  'Would you like to meet her?'  Ask a silly question.  Call over, he told me she wouldn't be long, and we went into the living-room to wait.  He sat there smoking and watching Channel 4 Racing, whilst I sat wondering what Layla would be like, what new avenues of pleasure this meeting might open.

 

It wasn't long before the buzzer went.  Moments later, Layla was standing in a long red coat in the half-light.  We chatted for a while, then Layla asked me if I wanted to go back to hers.  She lived opposite the 24-hour shop.  So off we went, me revving myself up for another dopamine-drenched stroll around the shrubbery of sensory delight.

 

Layla was quiet and quite reserved.  She seemed more normal than Sandra, less likely to fly off the handle, be sneaky, or chastise me quite as freely.  She rang the dealer from a callbox, and we hung around by a cemetery until some kid on a chopper showed up across the churchyard.  He picked a sinuous path through the headstones to get to us.  Skirting the skeletons could have put another half a minute on our wait, and that's a long time when you're virtually shitting yourself with desire.  God rest their souls.

 

She lived in a tall, mostly empty townhouse, tucked away in a block of buildings that someone had optimistically called a mews.  It was mostly empty because she had two kids who'd moved out, leaving her in an echoing shell.  We made our way up the rickety and ramshackle staircase, which spiralled up three floors, where a skylight threw down light onto unvarnished banisters and bare wooden floorboards.  This is where she spent most of her time, like a shorthaired Rapunzel.

 

We sat in the bedroom, perched at the top of the house, and hurriedly unwrapped our little white parcels.  She'd also got some heroin, or 'brown' if you want to be really street.  This came in blue plastic as opposed to white, for punter-convenience.  Having cajoled one open with the aid of sharpened fingernails and a razorblade, she sprinkled what looked like brick-dust into a roll-up she'd prepared earlier.  I feigned a purely intellectual interest, asking something like, 'What does that actually do for you?'  'It helps with the comedown,’ she replied.  Richard Branson couldn’t have pitched it better.  If there was one thing I wanted a cure for in the field of crack, it was the comedown.  The product seemed both enticing, and deeply worrying.  I ignored the deeply worrying part.  'Do you wanna drag?' she asked, half-passing me the long, glowing spliff, which was giving off a thick, sickly smoke.  'You won't get hooked.’  I think she meant it wouldn’t grab me almost instantly like crack had.  Admittedly, her language could have done with some clarification regarding my long-term chances, but then she’d just had some crack, which doesn't exactly lend itself to measured, considered speaking.  Anyway, I knew, as everyone surely knows, that 'heroin' is one of those words like murder, cancer, or rom-com…best avoided.

 

Whilst it's true to say that crack and heroin are both 'addictive', it's also desperately inadequate.  Addiction's just another word for liking stuff.  Crack's more like an infatuation.  You try it.  You like it.  The attraction is instant.  You can spend ages hating the fact you want it so much, but you keep running back into that beguiling, betraying embrace.  Heroin, however, is more like a long-term relationship.  You might be unsure at first, but then, after a few weeks, months even, you find you miss it when you don't have it.  Other relationships still seem appealing, but disentwining from this one seems pretty tricky.  You're as good as married.  And divorce can be a messy and protracted business.

 

So there I was, on the brink of yet another choice that could mark a further dip in my fortunes.  I could hear the cast of Grange Hill screaming in my ear the title of their early 80s hit, 'Just Say No’.  The ghost of Zammo hovered before me, in his hand a shred of foil, his haggard chops bulldog-like and baleful, a warning in his sallow eyes.  'Friend, don't do it.  Look what happened to me.'  As far as I could recall, he keeled over in a toilet-cubicle, but was ok in the end, having come to realise that drugs betray, and leave you looking drawn in your teens.  But the memory was foggy.  The cast of Grange Hill had done what they could.  None of my real-world schools had done anything regarding warning me against the perils of drugs.  Further back, when I was about eight, discussing John Lennon with my mum, I was informed that heroin was a bad thing.  I think the gist was that using it could kill you, and so could coming off it.  So, twenty-two years later, I delved into this extensive archive, weighed up the pros and cons, and accepted the spliff.  My initial drag on it was cautious, by way of a nod to Zammo’s plight, and the wisdom of my mum.

 

But I noticed very little.  It just seemed like a sickly-sweet roll-up.  I handed it back and we carried on chatting, having the odd pipe, and probably thinking we were both quite lucky…me, by having found a new way of getting crack…her, by having found a new way of getting crack.  It was the perfect reciprocal arrangement.  We sat there in the twilight of her bedroom as rain splashed down on the skylight in the hall.  She'd not taken the plastic covering off the mattress, which I found slightly odd, because it made the bed creak like a crisp-packet whenever you moved about.  In fact, it was as if everything had to remain as pristine as possible.  Whenever she had a pipe, a ten or twenty minute bout of domesticity would ensue.  One minute she’d be pulling stuff out of the wardrobe, laying it on the floor, putting different clothes on different hangers, then shoving it all back on the rail.  Next she’d be filling a bucket with water and mopping the bathroom-floor.  At one point, a pair of rubber-gloves were donned and various cluttered surfaces cleared and polished.  I just sat there, rustling on the bed, feeling unsettled by all the commotion.

 

But in the midst of this madness, something new was happening.  Having been handed the spliff a handful of times, it occurred to me that I wasn't gagging for crack in quite the usual way.  Normally, especially in new or unsettling company, I'd be doing one every ten minutes or so.  Now a new ingredient had been thrown into the mix, that was softening the comedown I’d come to loathe.

 

A little while later, the room by now a fog of Mr Sheen and bucket-steam, Layla took a break from her duties, rolled us both a spliff, and switched the telly on.  Apparently it was time for ‘Murder, She Wrote’.  Coked-up, I’d look for sex in anything.  I sat there on the edge of her crinkly bed gawking at the screen, waiting for a woman worth lusting over to appear, but suitable candidates were thin on the ground.  I even began imagining myself in various scenarios with senior sleuth Jessica Fletcher herself.  Yes, crack can take you to some dark places.

 

But even though I was in a state of never-dissipated lust, there was a new glassy tranquillity about things, and I sat there quietly mesmerised by this faux realm of high-falutin’ felony.  You don’t need me to tell you, anything that makes ‘Murder, She Wrote’ seem tolerable is an arch-deceiver.  But all that mattered to me was how I felt, not why I felt it.  In the desert of my affairs, I wasn’t one for trudging about looking under stones.  Who could tell which one was hiding a scorpion, waiting to spring, and, if necessary, sting?

 

Crack’s swift elevation was like jumping from a cliff wearing a jetpack with low batteries.  You’d shoot up twenty feet, hover for a moment, then go plummeting into the ravine below.  Heroin seemed to offer a safe descent, kick in like an emergency parachute.  It didn’t land you in the river that ran through the gorge, or even on its dusty bank.  There was a bouncy castle down there, and heroin placed you gently upon it, as a caring parent might a child.

 

It was a world within a world.  If it could protect me from the ravages of crack, it could shield me from anything.  It was like being sat before a gladdening fire on a rainy afternoon, with a cup of tea and blackberry jam on toast.  No prospect of trouble from anyone or anything…mellow music, joss-stick on the windowsill, probably sandalwood, and problems, still real, seemed distant, copeable with, putoffable.  This was a goldfish-bowl I was content to dream and drift in.  The world outside went on in its usual, concave way.  Let it, I could now say.  Anything that took the edge of coming down from crack was worth looking into.

 

I’ve since learned that a lot of people get a heroin habit off the back of their crack use.  Like me, they began with the crack, couldn’t take the comedown, so turned to a comforter.  Like me, they’d probably been at least paying lip-service to the idea of quitting crack, when they suddenly discovered that heroin could help put off that decision for months, years, a lifetime even.  The brown, so often sold from the very same pocket as the white, always seemed to be around, and was usually half the price of its flighty white cousin, so why not?  The successful drug-user knows which drugs to combine for best effect.  Still not comfortable?  Take a Valium, some alcohol, whatever you can find.  Any beta-blockers?  Sling ‘em in.  Yes, the successful drug-user is a veritable amateur apothecary, knowing not only what to administer, but how, how much, and when.  This also describes the unsuccessful drug-user.

 

It wasn’t long before our languishings were curtailed by the sound of a slamming door.  Layla began tidying again, but this time it was all the paraphernalia that had to go, not clothes or bottles of lotion.  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, worried there might be some unfriendly male on the prowl.  ‘My son,’ she said, half-closing the bedroom-door.  The crack, and a few other bits and pieces, were lying on an open TV guide, which she folded shut and shoved in a drawer.  The pipes, made in the traditional way, plastic bottles with broken biros jutting out, were too bulky to follow, so were placed in the now perfectly ordered wardrobe.  Spliffs remained in ashtrays - these could parade as normal roll-ups if required.  She called out, and her son, about sixteen, replied as he climbed the lighthouse-like staircase.  Eventually he arrived on the landing, but didn’t come in, making a beeline for the bathroom.  It felt kind of odd, being a grown-up hiding drugs from a child.  I thought it was meant to be the other way round.  But at least he had a clean toilet to use.

And here is today's Christmas song, just for you:  I Control The Snow

See you soon.

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 11

Hello, thanks for parachuting in.  Here is the eleventh cliffhanger in the tawdry saga of the 'Blind Man On Crack'.  In this episode, he sits at dawn in a stranger's flat, coming down from crack, with Ceefax on the telly...

Bingo

 

As the days passed, and my spirits slowly rallied, I was on my way to visit a friend over in my old stomping-ground of Westbourne Park when another chance encounter occurred.  It was a risky place to be, admittedly, considering my history there, and this time the throw of the dice went against me.  I'd just crossed Harrow Road when I was spotted.  'Hi,' came a gravelly female voice from behind me.  'It can't be,' I thought, 'Debbie died.'  I turned around, but the figure was surrounded by the glare of a low sun, and I still couldn't make them out.  'Do you remember me?' she asked.  'It's Sandra.'  Since my attempt to rekindle things with Debbie, I'd visited Westbourne Park a few times.  It's a tricky business, walking the streets you used to use on, especially when you're desire to stay away from things is, at best, sporadic.  And, as the phrase goes, if you keep going to the barber's, you're eventually going to get a haircut.  And I was about to get the short-back-and-sides of a lifetime.  'How are you?' she asked, indulging in a little preliminary small-talk, that we both knew would last a maximum of a minute.  'Oh, not so bad,' I replied.  I knew what was coming.  'Do you still smoke?' she asked, a little more coyly.  'Oh yeah,' I said, casual as you like, phoenix-eye gleaming.

 

Minutes later, we were in this ancient Jamaican guy's flat, Mr Bingo, a keen chainsmoker and wrinkled as a fig.  Sandra said he wouldn't mind us smoking there, as long as I made a suitable contribution, a tenner or the equivalent in fags.  I gave him a note, and he disappeared into the bedroom with twenty B&H and an ashtray.  Sandra and I went into the living-room and made ourselves at home.  She rummaged in her bag for her pipe, rummaged somewhere else for the stone, and within a matter of seconds was solemnly sucking on the carcass of a broken Bic biro, jammed into the side of a small plastic baths-salts bottle.  I knelt in silence beside her, leaning forward, transparently keen, like a hungry child waiting for cake.  There was something sadly seminal about my relationship with Sandra.  It was the relationship that the impatient invalid had been waiting for.  A woman offering herself was really something to someone who thought he was worthy of no one, and drugs too.  It was like the perfect cocktail of nurse and narcotic.  I'd tried in my early teens to get hooked on something, so as I'd always have something to lean on.  Tipex, drink, cigarettes, had all been auditioned.  Then sex, masturbation, pornography, prostitutes, strange midnight walks to places where I thought I might meet ‘someone’, someone who'd either never been part of the mainstream, or who'd been thrown out of it like wot I had, a partner in exile, a bird, similarly feathered, albeit caked in ash.

 

Nursey gave me a pipe, and I exhaled the smoke like an angry Ivor the Engine, bracing myself for a one-track journey through the peaks and troughs of an increasingly polluted landscape, first stop Cashpoint Central, of course.  Can't say either of us had changed much in the three-odd years since our last encounter.  The afternoon turned into evening, with the usual vague sexual shenanigans, the moaning and squabbling, the trips to the cash-machine, or to the shop for fags.  Once or twice, one of Mr Bingo's other transient tenants would drop by, have a smoke, then go back out to grind another tenner out of humanity.  One guy turned up with a pile of change and wanted to buy a pipe's worth from Sandra.  She wouldn't have it.  She gave him the usual blather about, 'I'd give you one, but I only have a pipe or two left.  Honestly, I would if I could.  If you'd come earlier…'  It was all lies.  She had plenty on her.  She was concealing stuff from me, let alone from this hapless traveller.  'No, I understand,' he said, no doubt smouldering with resentment.  Moments later, he started trying to butter me up.  'Mate, I don't suppose there's any chance of a pipe.  I don't like to ask, but…'  So I took a leaf out of Sandra's book.  'Honestly,' I began (always good to get the lie out the way first), ‘what I have is my last, I would if I could, but…'  Instead of acquiescing there, and resigning himself to the fact that he just wasn’t going to get a pipe, he then offered me his phone, proposing, 'I mean, what if I give you this for a couple of pipes.  It's not flashy, but it's got a fiver's credit.'  But there was no way he was going to prize a pipe out of me, and I clung to my little chunk of bliss like a feral dog a bone.  You can't smoke a phone.

 

Crack is not a noble drug.  It's not like cannabis can be.  There's no passing the peace-pipe in this wigwam.  His plight meant nothing to me.  Whether he was after his first pipe of the day, or had just come from a smoke and was now gagging for a pick-me-up, I didn't care.  But now I knew he had his peepers on my stuff, I took extra care to keep an eye on things.  That's crack for you.  You might be quite a generous person under normal circumstances, but get a pipe down your neck and you'll be the slyest, greediest, and most manipulative creature under the sun.  I certainly was, and more often than not so were the people I hung out with.  But I’ve been in his shoes many times, and my god they chafe.  But today, I was the big chief.  Today, I could lord it over allcomers…give, deny, toy with…I was, at least for the time, a miniature crack-baron, weighing up the petitions of the less well-off, and deciding, by using entirely selfish criteria, whether or not I would be gracious and give out.

 

It's an ugly game.  If it had been a girl asking, I'd most likely have given her something.  The invalid within was a sucker for a lady's lament.  The seedy, coked-up fiend would probably have revelled in the power of it all.  Even though crack could fuel all sorts of lechery in me, it nearly always remained mental, and when things did become sexual, it was always fairly vague and noncommittal, and trumped within minutes by the need for a pick-me-up.  There was a part of me that wanted to go further, wanted to know that control, to tease her with drugs 'til she did my bidding.  But a nagging morality, that couldn't be shaken, wouldn't have it.  Many's the time I've been smoking, felt like getting sexual, but then, after another foray down that very predictable cul-de-sac, thought, 'Mmm, this is all very well, but drugs are my muse now.’

 

It wasn't until about three in the morning that I ran out of money.  Sandra had sent me out to get more cash, with an additional order for a can of Fanta and a microwaved pie, to be obtained from the 24-hour shop on Harrow Road.  That place was like the Broadmoor tuck-shop.  Even buying a Mars bar there felt somehow illicit.  There were always at least two pairs of eyes on you, whether you were standing at the counter or skulking in the back trying to stuff a pastie down your trousers.  Proprietor-customer trust levels were low.  At any given time, especially in the depths of the night, there would always be about six people seeming to work there, two behind the counter, two flanking the counter, and two on general duty, like floating sentries, keeping an eye on the constant flow of weirdoes who wandered through, wanting out-of-hours drink, ten cheap fags, or a can of Fanta and a microwaved pie.  You had to ask if you wanted something microwaved.  You couldn't just go and shove it in yourself.  And the privilege of using it put an extra ten pence on the bill.  Everything got a minute, from a sausage-roll to a ready-meal.  You could end up with a samosa hotter than the sun, or a chicken tikka as tepid as baby-sick.  Things might be different now, but at the time I think it was still working towards its first Michelin star.

 

The cashpoint was just across the road, and not a safe place to have your back turned on the world.  The stubbly bevy who loitered in the doorway had a good view of anyone foolhardy enough to get money out.  So there I stood, hunched and anxious, only to have my card spat out and the words 'cash available to withdraw = nil' flash up on the screen in green.  It may as well have read 'game over’.  I knew then that I was in for a truly miserable few hours.  This was the bust after the boom, the casino doorman turfing you out when you've run out of chips, the end of the 80s.

 

So I went back to the flat and 'fessed up.  Sandra was in the bathroom, doing her usual smoking in private routine.  I then realised, probably a little late, that she'd only sent me out so she could have the place to herself.  I went into the living-room, feeling desolate and dreading the comedown.  Once again, I had to reluctantly and resentfully acknowledge it was over.  And I knew that anything Sandra might have hidden away wouldn't be going towards my party funds.

 

She came through into the living-room and I told her the bad news.  'Oh Ben, why do you always do this?' she complained.  I thought the choice of the word 'always' was unusual, considering the last time we'd met was about three years ago.  She started getting her things together.  The coalition was over.  But then there's about as much honour in a crack-alliance as there was between Hitler and Stalin when they divvied up Poland.  She began jemmying herself into her jacket.  I dared to ask where she was going.  Much as I found her company traumatic, the thought of being left alone, with just cravings for company, had no appeal.  'Where do you think I'm going?' she spat.  I didn't answer.  She lit a cigarette and shoved it in her mouth.  It jigged around as she scalded me some more.  I didn't dare ask for one, even though I'd bought them.  'I'm going to suck a fucking punter's dick, aren't I?' she said.  'How else do you think I'm going to get money?'  Short of flagging up welfare-to-work initiatives, a viable answer evaded me.  So I just sat there feeling wretched and mournful, ruing the well into which I'd, once again, hurled myself headlong.  She swept out the room in a slow kind of tantrum.  'I'll be back in an hour,' she said.  She wasn't.

 

I sat there, head in hands.  Probably prompted by the commotion, it wasn't long before Mr Bingo shuffled in.  He sat himself down in front of the electric fire, put the telly on, and stared at pages from Ceefax, all the while dragging and wheezing himself into the grave he'd managed, so far, not to fall in.  He really chainsmoked.  He'd light the next before the last was out.  When he dragged, he really dragged.  There seemed to be a love verging on desperation in every pull he took on those poisonous packeted fags.  Then, having expelled a slow cone of thick, grey tumescence, a croak of satisfaction would emanate from that dry-as-straw throat.  I pictured a wicker larynx inside that wizened neck, drowning in treacle, gurgling into action whenever words were called for, which wasn’t often.  So there we sat, at dawn, me feeling dismal, waiting for the trains to start, and Mr Bingo, gleefully guzzling on his beloved B&H's, occasionally saying something I couldn't make out, to which I'd respond with vague politeness.

 

So, a couple of hours later, I said goodbye, he croaked a response, and I left.  Outside, I observed the colour of the door, pillar-box red, and logged the fact the place was fronted by a low white fence.  I couldn't make out the number of the house because it was small, and high on the door.  But I had all I needed.  It's amazing how the disabled adapt in a world not tailored to their needs.  As I walked down the street, I noted my exact location, pre-satnav.  I would be coming back here, so I had to be absolutely certain I had the place circled in my mental A to Z.  Sandra and I had parted without exchanging numbers, and I hadn't thought to ask Mr Bingo for it.  Often, when I'd crawl out from under the stone, I'd be vowing never to make the same mistake again.  By not asking for the number, I was playacting at having learned my lesson, making out that a future of serene abstinence lay ahead.  But I knew I’d be back.  How torn the mind of the soul that's hooked.  You could almost see the fracture-line.

And here is the song that was playing on Ceefax:  Run Out Of Drugs Again

Tomorrow?

DUEL

Hello, and thank you for tuning in.  The next episode of the 'story' will be posted up soon.  Meanwhile, here is a little story of 100 words, which you may or may not like...

DUEL

Back to back, we parted.  Only on the judge’s word should we turn, and fire.  But with each step, the silent chasm behind me grew.  Where was the call?

Over field, mountain, even across oceans I forged as straight a path as I could, leaving many horizons behind, saw whales rising from heaving seas, children begging on beaches, derelict cities, as Earth curved beneath me.

Then, after years of walking, I saw a figure on the skyline, approaching, my once adversary.  Now, on the other side of the world, differences forgotten, we met as friends, face to face.



Well, apart from this song, Shooting Stardust, that's it for today...

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Missing Episode

 There was a missing episode from the parchments of 'Blind Man On Crack', which we show below.  It's believed Suggs, from Madness, and Donald Trump, from America, saw this episode unfold from the sidewalk...

  Donald Trump called round on Suggs, the singer from 80s band Madness, and as they sat there, with smokes and chocolate, Donald said to Suggs, 'I like your net-curtains, are they voile?'  'No,' said Suggs, 'muslin.'
  Donald didn't call again.
  Suggs, sucking on a humbug (British mint), thought 'I wonder why they did call him Snow Queen at Business Camp...'
  Then this song was heard in the air, in the local neighbourhood:  Snow Queen

That was the missing episode.

Tomorrow?

REHAB STORY

Hi, and thank you for stumbling on the roadside debris that is 'How To Become A Crack Addict'.  You can read my book of that title in the first 22 posts of this blog, if you want, or you can even buy it on amazon, if your morals allow it.  If you do, please leave a comment, or review.  Anyway, today's story is a dream I had in rehab, in the coastal town they forgot to close down.  I hope you kinda like it:

HOTEL OF INJURY

In a twilight land, there’s a hotel where broken children are sent. 

One day, the boy who was nothing more than a head came searching for his sweetheart, manoeuvring around in an adapted shopping-trolley, orally steered.  He was on the mezzanine, overlooking reception, with the boy who turned to stone when anxious.  They both had a crush on the receptionist, but neither knew of their unstated rivalry.  Normally, she’d sit behind the desk, filing her nails, making calls, receiving broken children from parents, guardians, teachers and priests.  But this afternoon, she was nowhere to be seen, and the boy who was just a head felt he’d wasted his effort, coming all the way down in the lift, along the corridor, to the brink of the mezzanine, to miss out on her willowy, feline outline.  Stoneboy, too, was disappointed, sensing fingers and toes threatening to petrify.

Kat, the object of their love, was in the kitchen, helping prepare the evening meal (although even lunch was an evening meal in this dim domain).  She was cherry-pretty, but had a condition whereby tears would forge gorges in her cheeks, to the point that she’d still be called gorgeous, but for all the wrong reasons.  She managed her moods accordingly, never allowing herself to love, in case it didn’t last, and brine came flowing disastrously down those rose-white cheeks.

Prawns cocktailed, melons balled, and dinner ready, she reappeared at reception with lithe efficiency.  Trolleyboy spied her first, through the bars of his vehicle, and ventured a shy hello.  She looked up with catlike neutrality, but Stoneboy thought she was looking at him, got tongue-tied and flustered, and felt his limbs seizing up.  Trolleyboy could contain himself no longer, but his desire was deadly and, with overeager mouth, he steered himself to mezzanine’s edge, and over, clattering and cartwheeling down the stairs into the foyer, until, wheels still spinning, his pasty cheek was pierced by mangled metal.

Kat hurtled to his side, stooping down, revealing knee.  'Oh, what's become of him?' she wailed, calling up to Stoneboy for succour, but though he wanted to at least feign help, and win her that way, he found he was almost rigid, a granite child, statuesque in trauma, moving like one wading through setting concrete, until, two steps down, he froze entirely.  Kat, bewildered, and desperate to see such destruction, bit her lip, began to whimper, tried to rein things in, but her will was wilting, and sour droplets came rolling down from glacé eyes, trickling like acid with ravaging intent.  Within moments, her face was a mass of gashes, visible veins, and torn, sore tissue.

Gazing up, by way of a mute farewell, Trolleyboy mused, ‘Well, at least she chose me.’

A porter cleared up, although Stoneboy was left on his step, as a warning to future guests not to stray too far into love’s fatal minefield.

Dinner was quiet that night, and, out of respect, many guests forwent dessert.

Well, there we are, a story about a hotel in a twilight realm.  Maybe tomorrow?  Oh, and as ever, here is one of my songs:  Over You

For your ears only...

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 10

Hi, thanks for dropping in.  Below is the tenth instalment of the ludicrous history that is Blind Man On Crack.

Hepatitis Court

 

So began eighteen months of grinding emptiness, without the help of crack.  It was September, 1999.  I had a notion I would write a collection of breathtaking songs before Christmas, send them out to a record label or two, be signed, and get famous, or at least make a living making music.  I did write some songs, partly spurred on by a few new bits of equipment.  There I’d sit, cross-legged on the floor, playing my keyboard, also on the floor, with a microphone jutting from the edge of the bed.  Christmas approached, and I’d written quite a little collection, all whilst stoned, naturally, but I was quite pleased with some of them.  I even got round to sending a few out to record labels, but gave up pretty quickly once it was clear a contract was not about to drop on my doormat.  Didn’t they know who I was?  Or maybe they knew I didn’t have a doormat.

 

So, not yet a pop-star, I spent Christmas at my parents, and this was probably 'ok'.  But, because I couldn't stand being there for too long, I contrived to leave as soon after Boxing Day as trains allowed, saying a friend had invited me to bring in the new millennium with them.  If they had, I didn’t go, but at least it meant my parents wouldn’t be concerned I had nothing to do on such an allegedly momentous day.

 

Then, on New Year’s Eve night, as the dread hour loomed, it seemed the best thing to do was seek solace under the duvet, which I did around half-past ten.  There was nothing good on the telly – even Newsnight had gone mad.  I was hoping to be sleeping deeply by midnight, and to wake up on a fresh, clear, New Year's Day, transfigured of course – but a steady intensification of fireworks crackling in a festive sky put pay to that.  I couldn’t help recoiling in cultural disgust at the hype attached to all this enforced jollity.  Desperately tuning the radio from station to station, it was hard to avoid tracks like Millennium by Robbie Williams (torture on any day of the year) and phrases like ‘tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999’.  I wondered why no one had ever written a song called ‘Tonight I’m Gonna Bed Early, So Please Keep The Fireworks To A Minimum’.  Outside, it was all bang bang, cheer cheer, pretend pretend.  In a state of living rigger mortis, I gawped at the ceiling…another flurry of aerial explosions, more whoops and cheers…and the year 2000 was born – one more blank canvas to scrawl on.

 

No doubt I was one of many to troop off to their GP in early January asking for antidepressants.  There I sat in the surgery, for the third time in so many years, requesting something to lift the spirits.  My lovely doctor said he’d try me on a new medication psychiatrists were using.  ‘Well, if psychiatrists use it, it must be good,’ I vaguely thought, picturing Frasier, and a few of the Hampstead set I’d met at the psychotherapy council.  So home I went, clutching my prescription like a child with a bag of Randoms.

 

I took my first capsule at lunchtime.  By about four, I can remember feeling slightly edgy, then, by about eight, having to tell myself, ‘Don’t worry, don’t panic, you’ll be ok,’ although I wasn’t sure why I was having to do this.  Come midnight, I thought I’d go to bed.  I listened to the radio, as usual, then slowly drifted off, yet somehow I wasn’t feeling right.  Just as I was about to fall asleep, I suddenly sat up, in a state of utter panic.  My heart was racing, and I could barely catch my breath.  All I could think of to do was make myself sick.  I tried to get to the loo, but my knees buckled in the hallway.  I thought I was going to die.  My vision was glassy, and my limbs felt feeble, like a rained-on rag-doll.  I decided it might be a good time to pray, seeing I was already on my knees anyway.  I did one of those prayers when you say, ‘Dear God, please, keep me alive just this once, and we’ll settle up later?’  I struggled to the loo and shoved my fingers down my throat, kept retching, but nothing would come.  I crawled back into the living-room and phoned an ambulance.  I explained what was happening as best I could and awaited the arrival of my saviours.

 

Minutes later, my buzzer went, and I made my way outside, hoping the house-manager wasn’t peering out of her window, which overlooked the main entrance.  The friendly paramedics took me into the ambulance, checked my pulse, noted it was speeding, but also that it was beginning to slow.  It didn’t feel like that to me, but I trusted their judgment.  Then I was given some oxygen to help me get my breath back.  They thought I was having quite a bad panic-attack, as opposed to actually dying, but they said they'd take me to the hospital if I really wanted.  I really wanted.  So off we went to A&E.

 

A little later, I was being asked to take a seat in the dazzlingly depressing waiting area.  There were a few other customers in place.  One sitting in crumpled silence, another twitching in the corner, occasionally grunting, and a third that just plain stank.  I found myself a few seats along from him, but didn’t move away in case I hurt his feelings.  I was asked through to see the nurse.  She asked me what was up, and I told her about my run-in with an antidepressant.  In the name of honesty, I let her know I'd also smoked a couple of joints.  I think this information prompted her to tick a box marked 'stoned, put to back of queue'.  I spent the next three hours back in the waiting room, being ignored, just me and my fragrant friend, who I think was just there to get out of the cold.  So, come about four, after several enquiries as to the likelihood of getting seen, all to no avail, I asked the woman at the desk to order me a taxi, and half an hour later I was being driven home by a pleasant man who seemed much more interested in my welfare than anyone in the hospital had.  I felt a little better by now, and when I got home I went to bed and drifted into an unquiet sleep.

 

I woke up at lunchtime, still feeling edgy.  There was no way I was going to take another of those satanic capsules, so I went back to the doctor and told him what had happened.  He listened sympathetically, probably hoping I wasn’t going to sue him, then wrote me out a prescription for something new.  A few days later, I experienced a panic attack that came close to the intensity of the first.  I imagine this was because the original medicine was still festering in my system.  Luckily, this one passed.  By now, I’d been constipated for several days, and remained so for over a week.  ‘Oh, you poor man,’ said the chemist, with what sounded like sympathy born of experience, and gave me some little caplets.  Within about eight hours, the floodgates opened, and all was well.  The moral of this tawdry parable?  Beware drugs, licensed or otherwise.

 

My life still resembled how things had been on the coast, except now I had the churning of traffic to accompany my thoughts…rise at noon, roll a joint, watch House Invaders, think about that day’s creative venture, not do it, see if there was anyone on a shopping channel with nice tits, roll a joint, stare at Countdown, then at six, watch the Simpsons, ruined again.  The evening would inevitably involve raiding the fridge, getting more stoned, maybe writing some music, porn, Newsnight, and bed.  Did I mention I was stoned?

 

I saw no one for most of the next year.  Empty day followed empty day, stoned week followed stoned week, drunk month followed drunk month.  I’d see the odd friend from time to time, but other than that it was solitary confinement, in which I was both prisoner and warder.  Outside, the seasons did their thing, but my poetic link with them had died years ago – now they were just a taunt.

 

I, concealed behind greying net-curtains, fixated on porn, acquired from various outlets in the King’s Cross area.  Not having access to crack, I resorted to my original addiction, sex.  This I'd accompany with whatever drugs I had to hand - red wine, dope, poppers, over-the-counter painkillers, whatever numbed the soul.  I even found myself taking Nytol recreationally.  One night, having just acquired some porn from a bloke in a toupee in a King’s Cross alcove, I bought what I thought was a gram of coke from a guy that shuffled up to me as I left.  Naturally, when I got home, it wasn't coke, but a scrunched-up Iceland receipt wrapped in cling-film.  So many nights I'd sit there in my room, squinting at porn on my scrawny little portable.  I'm surprised I didn't kill myself on poppers.  There I was, inhaling the chemical fumes from a little bottle with a name like 'Crazy Horse' or 'Jungle Jive’, as some erotic vignette would come to its denouement before me.  Poppers make the heart pound and push the blood to the extremities of the body, so you can see why people use them sexually, and why they give you a pounding headache.  Unlike crack, they make it happen, as opposed to stop it happening, but it's a pretty desperate game whichever way you look at it.  Then, emission accomplished, a bottle of red wine emptied, four or five joint-butts in the ashtray, and lid back on the poppers, I'd eject the video, shove it in a drawer where the cleaner wasn't likely to look…joint, Newsnight, yada yada yada.

 

Another spring sprung, and little crocus-heads poked from friable, frost-clad soil, which I'd heartlessly trample as I made my way to see a prostitute, picked out from the classified pages of the Hammersmith Gazette.  Many an afternoon was punctuated this way…pop to the post-office for milk and local paper, then dash home to see what ‘personal services’ were on offer that week.  There they'd be, tucked away between 'paving' and 'pet supplies'.  The anatomy of addiction seems to be the same whatever the drug, or activity.  First, that midbrain spark, igniting the notion that it's time for action, to set off on a pilgrimage to that healing well whose waters are always too deep to reach.  But these diversions were no substitute for a life.  The more I stayed in my flat, the more it felt like a dungeon, and the more I felt like a prisoner within it.  But the prospect of doing anything new, like starting a course, getting a job, performing comedy, forming that band, or finding a relationship, seemed out of reach.  Aspirations, never turning into anything real, end up turning on you, wagging their fingers and chiding you.  'Why haven't you honoured us, made us real?'  They're like children, conceived, but held in the womb so long they actually grow up in there.  After a while, you're so pregnant, you can barely move.

 

I went back to my GP and asked if I could see a counsellor.  He put me in touch with a local centre, and I was asked in for an assessment.  A few weeks later, I was sitting before another well-meaning trainee in a windowless room with a box of tissues on a table between us.  But we developed a good rapport and, after a few sessions, I managed to decide to perform some comedy again, even though it would inevitably be at the bottom of the light-entertainment ladder, again.

 

I rang the place in Islington I’d performed in a year or two before, and booked myself in for a spot on open-mic night.  I felt it was important for me to go on my own, deliver the wares, and try to be something resembling professional about it all.  If I felt that comedy was something I could do well, I should get used to turning up alone, performing, and going home alone, without always seeing it as some kind of dare to which friends should be invited.  Butchers sell meat.  They get up in the morning, pop to the abattoir, take a few carcasses back to the shop, don an apron, hang a few choice cadavers in the window, and the working day's begun.  They don't get their mates round to sprinkle the floor with sawdust, squirt bone-meal in sausage-casings, or stick rosettes on shoulders of beef.  I needed to take a leaf out of the manual of good butchery, to be self-contained, self-confident, and begin to develop a professional self.

 

I worked on some new material until, script internalised, I was in the bath on the day of the performance, a joss-stick in the basin wafting sandalwood, and the radio on in the kitchen.  There I was, simmering in too-hot water, both apprehensive and underwhelmed at the prospect of performing again, when the woman on the radio said, 'We've just received a report that a plane has crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York,' to which I thought, 'Oh shit.'  I can remember hoping some disaffected redneck was to blame, like Timothy McVee, who blew up that building in Oklahoma.  The idea of it being an angry Arab, or similar George Bush bogeyman, was a frightening prospect, because that would lead, as it did, to him and his friends unleashing their unique brand of muscular Christianity on places they probably couldn’t even point to on a map.  Moments later, another plane’s hurtling into the second tower.  It all seemed like too much of a coincidence.  Wrapped in a towel, I dripped into the living-room and put the telly on.  It certainly made for compelling viewing, like Thunderbirds, but without the puppets.  I can remember thinking, 'Blimey, this is Biblical,' or something profound like that.  Then I thought, 'I wonder if they'll cancel the comedy.’  A little later, I rang to find out.  'Yes, tonight is comedy,’ said the girl who answered, although I’m not sure she’d heard the news.

 

I arrived about eight, and the place was, unsurprisingly, pretty quiet.  There was Percy, the compere, eyes circled with a weariness born of overexposure to bad comedy.  He recognised me and asked how I was.  I felt ashamed for not having moved up the comedy ladder since our previous encounters, and gave him some blather about having been working out of London, then turned the questions on him.  I was the first to arrive, as was my practice, which meant I could choose where I'd come in the running order.  As ever, I picked first up in the second half, then went and propped myself up on a stool by the bar and waited for the revels to begin.  After about half an hour, the place began to fill up a bit, peaking at about twenty people, half of whom were acts.

 

Once the entertainment got underway, it was clear the Twin Towers were fair game for the amateurish stylings of most of the acts.  But no one had anything incisive or clever to say, and the whole place had the ambience of a mortuary.  But when Paddy tried to resuscitate the audience after the interval, I went up and did my bit, making no reference at all to the main event of the day, although avoiding felt more contrived than mentioning it.  And however pleased I'd been with my new material that morning, the backdrop of three thousand people lying dead under rubble seemed to put a dampener on things.  So, job done, I returned to my pint of unpalatable cider, as the rest of the evening withered away into nothingness.  I had a bit of nice interaction with the Polish girl who worked behind the bar, chatted to one or two of the other acts, then went home.  I had at least done what I said I would do.

 

Things were threatening to get marginally better.  I probably wouldn’t have got back to comedy without the encouragement of my counsellor.  I'd also bought a new little drum'n'bass box, into which I could program rhythm-tracks and bass-lines for new songs, of which I wrote quite a number at this time.  I also discovered that I could play the guitar a bit, having for years thought, because I wasn't a virtuoso, that I should leave it languishing in the corner, daily reminding me that I was an underachieving misfit – but it's amazing what you can get away with when you've got a bit of imagination and a guitar-effects box.

 

I began turning up at other comedy venues, and sitting at the back like a Time Out critic or a talent-scout.  I wanted to check out the acts, but was mainly there to see if I could do a quick five minutes some time.  One such place was in the basement-bar of a local hotel.  I sat there in the shadows and saw a few acts come and go, and then, during the interval, collared the compere and cajoled him into giving me a slot the following week.  Perhaps he admired my get-up-and-go attitude, and seemed fairly happy to give me a chance, which did my confidence no harm at all.

 

Come the night, I met up with a friend of a friend, who lived just round the corner from the hotel.  I  wasn't at all nervous before going on, which I think meant that I was in a strangely de-energised state when I got up on the stage.  I was feeling pretty out of sorts, with quite a lot of eye-pain going on, which was something of a distraction, only adding to my feelings of self-consciousness.  It was obvious to the audience that I was not comfortable, and so neither were they.  I opened badly, and couldn't redeem things.  I got increasingly panicky, and started talking too fast.  This meant the audience had no spaces in which to laugh.  And so, with no laughter, I panicked even more.  Then I stopped even looking at them, choosing instead to gaze off to the left and right.  When I realised I'd blown it, I wrapped up, got off, and went and sat back with my friend, which gave me no pleasure at all.  Within moments, one of the other acts came over and said, 'Don't worry mate, you've got some good material there, but you didn't really get it across.'  I felt that was fair, and appreciated his kindness.  But I still felt humiliated.  Then the compere came over, saying that he liked one particular line very much.  It was like waking up in the gutter with paramedics above me.  You're only as funny as your last gig, or gag.  I couldn't sit there assuring everyone that I had been funny the previous week.  So I just put it behind me.  It didn't really haunt me that badly, because everyone dies at least once in their life.  Jack Dee said that one rule of comedy is 'never embarrass the audience'.  Embarrassment spread through the bar that night like Legionnaire's Disease through air-conditioning, and I was patient zero.  Come the end of the evening, I said goodbye to my friend, still wanting to assure her that I was capable of being funny, and we went our separate ways.

 

Then, on Goldhawk Road, about ten minutes from home, some bloke accosted me from the entrance to a block of flats.  'Are you looking for anything, bruvva?' he asked.  I sensed illicitness, and my shadow-self kicked in.  'What have you got?' I enquired, not wishing to jump to any conclusions.  He didn't beat around the bush.  'White,' he replied.  Well, having only been abstinent by default, I was in there like a shot.  He must have thought he'd hit the jackpot.  Maybe he could spot a user, even if they'd not actually used for two years, as I hadn’t.  He gestured I should follow him, which I did like a dog on the promise of a bone.  As he led me round the back of the block, it struck me I might have misjudged things.  'I'm not looking for any trouble,' I said.  He sensed my nervousness and sought to reassure me.  'It's ok mate, my girl's upstairs.'  That was good enough for me.  We reached the bottom of the steps and began to climb, firm friends by the time we reached our first stairwell.  In better light, I got a clearer view of him - gaunt as a broom, with spiv-like moustache, tired, malnourished skin, mauve lips, and dagger-like teeth, all topped off with a baseball-cap at a controversial angle.

 

Next, we're sitting on the stairs a couple of storeys up, smoking crack with 'his girl'.  I think he was a bit of an amateur pimp.  There was something reptilian about him, nasty and sinuous like a tentacle.  She was quiet, although her eyes had a look of slow exasperation about them, and she acquiesced skilfully to whatever he said.  He nudged me as she was on the pipe, saying something vague about me having her for the night.  'She's mine, bruv, she knows what's good for her, do you know what I mean?'  I pictured him beating her in a basement, cajoling her into doing his mate a favour in the bathroom.  It would be great to say that I found his offer repugnant and rose above the moral swamp in which he clearly writhed.  But to me, love's guttersnipe, it all seemed like an excellent adventure, with a bit of crack in my system, doubly so.  Pre-crack, my demeanour around 'ladies of a certain profession' had always been passive and polite.  Post-crack, the thoughts and fantasies I found myself entertaining were, to be honest, not nice.  Crack's a pretty satanic catalyst.  It digs into your deepest insecurities and turns them inside-out.  Suddenly the shy are strident, the inept, consummate, celibate, sexual.  Fleetingly, the victim becomes the vanquisher, the virgin, the vampire.

 

I accepted his seedy proposition, at which point he said something to the girl, like, 'Yeah, you and him?'  She blew out the smoke, and vaguely nodded.  Well you would.  Until you know who's going to be funding the next few hours, it’s wise to keep your options open.  Only when you know where the power lies can you decide where any favours should be directed.

 

It was decided we should make a move.  After all, there's only so long you can sit in a stairwell before you start feeling self-conscious.  We took the lift back to the ground, made our way to the nearest cab-office, via the cashpoint, and before long we were climbing another stone staircase in another anonymous-looking tower-block, down by the river in Hammersmith.

 

I don't know who his friends were, but their flat was the usual barren shell, the only vestige of orthodoxy being a portable telly on a chair in the corner, probably cos it was too heavy to drag to Cash Converters.  I slumped down into what I realised on closer inspection was a car-seat, amid crumpled TV guides and shards of porn.  The coffee-table before me was a mess of ashtrays, foil, and ripped-up cans – but it’s not the place you’re in, it’s the people in it, innit?

 

We stayed a couple of hours, until it was time to replenish.  We got a cab back to the cashpoint, drove around the corner and parked up near a bus-stop.  Tentacles asked me for the money, then told me to get out of the cab, saying the guy he was going to see was a bit paranoid, and didn't like him turning up with strangers.  Obviously, this was so much bullshit, and so full of holes to be even half-convincing, but there was me, chump of the moment, waiting on the pavement.  'You will be back, yeah?' I almost pleaded.  'Five minutes bruv,' he assured me, 'I'm just going round the corner.’  The cab pulled away.  Needless to say, that was the last I saw of them.

 

Problem was, though, I didn't really know where I’d been dumped.  I was at a bus-stop, in the rain, at four in the morning, which is where crack always leaves you, if not literally, metaphorically.  But luckily the glow of an all-night shop caught my eye.  I went in to see if I could get my bearings, without seeming like an escapee from a local psychiatric unit.  Turned out I was on the salubrious Shepherd's Bush stretch of the Uxbridge Road, closer to home than I thought, which made my walk through the rain a little more bearable.

 

Back in the flat, the only light being thrown on the subject was dawn's infringement.  'What the hell was that about?' I wondered, languishing in the arms of my long-lost friend, that nagging outstayer of welcomes, the comedown.  Were the fates conspiring against me?  More likely I was conspiring against them.  Only I could carry the can for stopping off when assailed by a stranger at midnight.  Nothing had changed.  The aftermath was still the same tense, angst-ridden nightmare I'd come to know.  But I consoled myself with the fact that his dumping me at the bus-stop had at least brought things to an early close, stopped them getting really out of hand.  But I was still pining for a pipe to lift me, however briefly, out of this pit of spitting vipers.  I kept reminding myself that I'd get through it, and eventually, after much clenching and gnashing of teeth, I managed to sleep.

 

I woke at lunchtime, depressed to reflect on the night’s dark antics.  Yes, the hangover was just the same.  I searched my head for a grain of cheer, but found none.  All dopamine, and other agents of happiness, had vanished.  My head felt like a cold and burnt-out fireplace, with no obvious sign of getting a fresh blaze going.  Then the plaintive strains of an antique acquaintance piped up from the blackness of the chimneystack.  'Please, no more, no more,' came a sorrowful, soot-muffled cry.  Momentarily, a wave of pity passed through me.  Obviously, some waif was wedged up there.  'Don't forget me, sir, please, don't forget me.'  But I had other things on my mind.  Top-hatted and cloaked, I was out the door like Jack the Ripper on arsenic.  The waif would have to wait.  He'd come unstuck eventually, when he’d got skinny enough to come loose and drop into the hearth.

 

And there I was, suddenly on the hunt again.  I made my way down Goldhawk Road, back to the foot of the block where the reptile had caught me on his prickly tongue.  But there was a madness in my method.  I half-thought he might be back there, ensnaring passers-by with whispers of white, or, if he wasn't, maybe someone new could be found.  My goal was to hook up with someone, anyone that could facilitate a repeat of last night, but there was no sign of him or the girl.  I walked up a few floors, just in case it was a regular haunt.  But there was no one around.

 

The building felt designed to cultivate suicidal thoughts, a way of sifting out the socially weak without anyone really noticing.  Built with only cost in mind, this was a block that chose you, not the other way round.  Named after someone laudable on the national curriculum, it was known by those in the know as Hepatitis Court.  There was usually a puddle in the lift.  All the doors were fire-doors, and thick as a fist.  This is where the destroyed middle-classes mingle with the feral.  If you can't hack it in your own clan, hack your way into another, move down a rung or two, and hang out with a crowd who don't care what job you do, or did, how big your house is, or was.  There's no pressure to impress here - see it as a kind of high-rise haven, concrete retreat.

 

But there was nothing there for this hapless afternoon-hunter, no new friendships to forge, nor old ones to fake.  What could he do now?  All the old feelings were back.  One go at the old game and I wanted to gamble everything.  Dice felt like the cure for debt.  I returned to my flat, crestfallen, disconsolate.

 

From the barely settled ashes of abstinence, so chancily put down, an ugly phoenix was threatening to lumber.  Too long he’d languished in grey.  Now his hunger for hunger was heightened.  He rose, yawned, and stretched, like a darkside Yaffle, shook dust from stiffened wings, glass eye gleaming, piercing, inscrutable, voracious.

 

Well, there it is.  I hope you'll tune into the next instalment.  Meanwhile, here is a song you might like to hear:  Jimmy, Where Did You Go?