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.
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