Down and Out on Murder Mile (11 page)

Tuesdays—I meet with
Dr. Ira in Hackney, East London, to ensure that the flow of methadone remains uninterrupted. Methadone gives and methadone takes away—rather like God, in a way. If methadone is God then Dr. Ira is His gin-soaked St. Peter, sitting at the gates, checking boxes, deciding if I have been naughty or nice in the week since he last passed judgment on me.

 

Sterile, airless atmosphere in the waiting room. Smell of detergent and junk sickness wafting out from aching muscles and creaking bones. Old woman behind the reception desk with a white, starched, severe face eyes me with obvious condescension. The good doctor owns me, for all intents and purposes. I am sure the pursed-lipped old receptionists and nurses are in love with Dr. Ira's twisted pipe-tobacco-stained old bones in their own dried-up, pent-up way.

 

Dr. Ira is a repulsive old specimen.

 

Stink of professional arrogance and brandy all over his sweating, leering, ruptured old face. After thirty years in the service, junkies are his life now. He has the same love-hate ambivalence toward us as we have toward the drugs that constitute our lives.

 

“Fuck Hannah,” a male voice says from behind me.

 

“Martin,” says a shrill East End harpy, “she's pregnant. We can't leave her wivout nothing.”

 

“That fucking cunt will take all of our fucking gear and leave us sick. She's a fucking liberty taker. Fuck her and that fucking fetus she's dragging around.”

 

“Martin—she's all right—you've got her all wrong.”

 

“No I fucking don't! Tell her she can't fucking crash with us. Who knocked her up, anyway?”

 

“Denzil.”

 

“That paki cunt? Tell her to stay with that fucking bastard then!”

 

“He fucking raped her. She can't stay wiv him.”

 

“Raped her, my arse. She fucked him for rock. She'd fuck anyone for rock.”

 

“I know she would. But that sick cunt raped her.”

 

“Did he give her a pipe?”

 

“Well, yeah, but—”

 

“Then she fucked him for rock. End of.”

 

The East End harpy has her blond hair, black at the roots, tied back in a severe bun. It is pulled back so tight that it accentuates the harsh contours of her skull. She has a black eye that has faded to the color of autumn leaves. Her boyfriend is a skeletal old jailbird, bathed in sticky coagulating withdrawal sweat. He nervously clenches and unclenches his inked fists and stares at the polished tile floor.

 

Last night I had a dream that Dr. Ira told me to suck my methadone out of a rubber phallus protruding from the fly of his dandruff-sprinkled brown slacks. It was part of my treatment plan, he told me, laughing.

 

In the dream, I did it.

 

Wouldn't you?

 

“Now,” Dr. Ira is saying to me, rustling his papers up and down and coughing phlegm into his palm, “take those
child molesters,
hum? They say that they can't help it. Chemical castration doesn't help. It's a medical condition that they have. There aren't many reformed child molesters out there.”

 

The child molester speech. I hate the way his lips seem to grow wetter and thicker, redder and mushier, when he talks about child molestation.

 

“There is evidence to suggest their claim that they
can't
stop what they are doing. But your claims that you can't stop…well, frankly my boy…they are contraindicated.”

 

“And how is that, Dr. Ira?”

 

“Well, because there are
innumerable
ex-addicts out there. They are legion.”

 

“You mean the God-botherers.”

 

Dr. Ira smiles his practiced old predator's smile.

 

“Well, yes, the Narcotics Anonymous people, of course. But others also.”

 

“And how long do they stay clean?” I ask. “I mean, when do you consider them clean? After a year? Two years? Five?”

 

“Any time away from drugs would be considered a period of clean time.”

 

“But
how long
do they stay clean for?”

 

It is the old chicken-and-egg scenario that we always get into. This is the game. Dr. Ira wants me to reduce my methadone. Even if I were to reduce it by just five milliliters, he would be happy. In
reality, if I reduced by five milliliters a day I would not feel the deficit. But once I reduce, there will be no way—bar buying the methadone off the black market—for me to ever get my dose put back up. It will never happen. The inflexible authority of the clinic can never be overexaggerated.

 

If I remain at Homerton Drug Dependency Unit for twenty years on a methadone program, never again use street drugs, hold down a job, buy a house, start a family—all of that kind of happy shite—I will still be considered a failure for Dr. Ira. For me to qualify as a success to his superiors, I must reduce my dose over a period of time until I am opiate-free, allowing me to leave the program. If I do that, but then return to using street drugs and eventually kill some old bastard for his pension money so I can score, I will still be considered a roaring success by the hospital's standards. There is no follow-up treatment. As soon as I walk out the door—clean, for however short a period—I am judged a success.

 

So we carry on this dance, week after week. Dr. Ira gives me his little speeches. I listen, respectfully decline his offers of dose reduction, and walk out with a prescription for one week's supply of methadone. And then it starts all over again.

 

My daily routine has evolved over the past year. Today I receive my prescription once a week, take it to a chemist, and then return every morning to the same chemist to pick up a bottle of sticky, sickly sweet methadone linctus. I can take the bottle home and use it whenever I need it. I can save
it up and use heroin instead. I have approximately two thousand milliliters, stored in medicine bottles around my flat. It makes me feel secure. The King of Purgatory, with all of his adornments.

 

After six months at Homerton I underwent my review. No dirty urines. This was quite simple to achieve. For that whole period I was piss tested regularly, observed by a nurse. So I injected black-market methadone, the kind that comes in ampoules specifically for that purpose. It is impossible to get by prescription unless you have a private doctor. The only way most junkies can afford a private doctor is to play up their habit and sell the excess ampoules. It was a shitty high, but better than nothing. After three months I was allowed to piss alone. Then I used other people's piss.

 

Most opiates are out of the bloodstream in three days. At the clinic people would take turns using heroin or staying off. After three days off, they were pissing good, clean urine again. Then they filled up a bottle and distributed it to everyone else they were friendly with. Everybody involved could use heroin most of the time and pass the urine test all of the time. After the first six months, the piss tests became less regular, so as long as I was careful I could do as I pleased. It is all about working the angles at the methadone clinics.

 

Does Dr. Ira believe I have been off heroin for a year? No. Does he believe any of his patients have? No. Does he care, as long as he doesn't have to explain the dirty urine samples to
his
higher-ups?

 

No, no, and no.

 

Walking out of the clinic with my prescription I feel like a lottery winner. The bastards are off my back for another seven days. Back to Murder Mile, Susan, and my cold-water flat. Back to the old gray-haired pharmacist and the old black cleaner Leroy, who walks around the shop floor dazed, broom in hand. There are more shootings per capita on Murder Mile than anywhere else in Great Britain. The drug trade is to blame, mostly the Yardies who control the crack trade. Scoring crack around Upper Clapton can be a risky business. Junkies can get caught in the cross fire of turf wars and displays of machismo. DC, a young kid I bought from on occasion, was found dead in the back of an abandoned Vauxhall Astra last month. One day his mobile was turned off and then a day later I saw it on the news: another dead kid on Murder Mile. Turns out he was fourteen. I remember absently thinking that kids are looking older these days. I suppose a gun and a bag of rocks can make anyone look like a man in poor light.

I am watching
Susan sleep.

 

I am wondering, If I killed her now, would I get away with it? Susan looks dead already. When she sleeps, she looks like a corpse. She smells like a corpse too. Maybe she would thank me for it.

 

I realize that if I could make Susan just…disappear…no questions asked, I would do it in an instant.

 

Or would I?

 

It always comes back to drugs. As a woman, Susan is useful for certain things. I know that she is able to wheedle credit out of RJ in a way that I would never be able to. Because she can make herself seem pathetic, wounded, and in need of help.
That's Susan's whole deal, the only card she has to play. But it still works on people. There have been times when there has been no more money for dope, no way of getting dope, and Susan has come through for us. They are rare occurrences, but they have happened nonetheless.

 

But what am I going to do with Susan in the long term? I cannot remember the last time we fucked. The idea fills me with an uneasy revulsion. Susan was no beauty when I met her, and in the intervening few years she has bankrupted herself completely. She looks ancient, worn-out, a shell of who she used to be. I look at myself in the mirror and can still see traces of the old me. I wonder if Susan sees that when she looks at herself. I think that she must. Someone as insecure as Susan, if she saw what I saw, maybe she would take her own life. Heroin is cruel to women, I think, crueler than it is to men. Male junkies take on a certain look, a certain starved appearance around the cheeks and the jawline, but on women it has the effect of making them look uglier, haggard, mean. In the long run, there are no beautiful female junkies. Even Nico, poor beautiful Nico, wore her face out toward the end. And she was starting from a position of breathtaking gorgeousness. For Susan there was no chance.

 

I am a coward. I do not have the nerve to kill Susan. I am just indulging in fanciful thoughts because she is passed out and I am awake. Shit, if I didn't have the nerve to leave her, where would I find the nerve to kill her? Sometimes she says
things like: “If I hadn't found heroin, I think I would have killed myself.”

 

Other times she says: “If you weren't around, I think I'd do it. I'd get it over with.”

 

How am I supposed to respond to that? Susan is twelve years older than me. She must know that I will not be around forever. I just mumble shit like “Don't talk like that.”

 

I have seen Susan high on Xanax, back in LA, holding a loaded handgun under her chin. Her eyes wet. We had reached the end of the line again when we were staying in her mother's house in Venice. Her stepfather kept a gun underneath his bookshelf. She knew, and one night when we were alone there she took it out and placed the gun under her chin. I watched her, frozen.

 

“Is that thing loaded?” I asked her eventually.

 

“Yes. What use is an unloaded gun?”

 

I nodded. There were no more drugs. We couldn't stay clean.

 

“I'm tired,” she said.

 

“Me too. I'm tired too.”

 

“I can't do it,” she said eventually. She handed the gun to me. It felt heavy. She said: “Put it in my mouth.”

 

She opened her mouth. I put the gun in her mouth. She closed her eyes like she was in prayer. I held it there for a few moments, and then, defeated, I withdrew the gun from her mouth. I knew what she wanted me to do, but I couldn't do it. I handed the gun back to her and told her that I was sorry.

 

She placed the gun back under her chin.

 

“I want to do it. I'm fucking serious this time. I really want to do it. Would you do it if I did it first?”

 

“Put the gun down,” I told her. “Don't be so fucking stupid. There's always more drugs. More time. This isn't the way.”

 

The next day she left for rehab on her father's insurance, and I wound up in a sober-living house. But I never forgot that incident.

 

It hung over me, an implied threat that if I ever left, I would be pulling the trigger that I chickened out of pulling that night.

 

Susan was still asleep. There was nothing to be done. I sat by the window and waited for dawn.

I occasionally returned
to the Virgin Megastore to shoplift after being let go from my job there all those months ago. I knew the positioning of the security cameras and that the security staff were lazy, fat, ignorant, and complacent. It was simply a matter of learning how to remove the security cases quickly and discreetly. I learned the technique from Steve Cook. Steve had an almost Zen approach to stealing. He had a lizardlike calm and an economy of movement that I have never seen equaled before or since. He could locate the weak spots in the square plastic security boxes and crack them open with an almost undetectable application of pressure with the thumbs. The case would fall away like an old chrysalis and the CD would slide into his pocket as if it had never been there. Of all the times that Steve had been in prison, it had never once been for shoplifting.

 

But, like so many others in my life, one day he simply wasn't there anymore. His phone was cut off; there was no one at his house, the curtains were drawn, and the place was shrouded in darkness. Gone. I realized that I did not know his family, or anyone outside of the circle of people we scored or used drugs with, and none of them had a clue. Maybe back inside Wormwood Scrubs for a spell. Maybe dead from bad drugs or an unpaid debt. Steve was a father; his two children lived with their mother. I sometimes smiled and thought about how wonderful it would be to have a father as knowledgeable and cunning as Steve.

 

The image of Steve that I would take with me was in Steve's kitchen in his council flat in Dagenham. We had just returned there from seeing his connection at a working man's club hidden away in a council estate, talking football and politics with the cab driver, who obviously knew that we were buying drugs but didn't care, and then stumbling dizzily back into the flat, blinds drawn and music on—
Deserter's Songs
by Mercury Rev—and Steve said, “This bastard's voice is a bit fruity but he has
something,
” and I wondered if that album could be summed up any better by anyone.

 

And the sickness fell away from us as we cooked the junk and prepared the pipes. The first order of business was to get well and Steve had a knack for finding veins in the most abused and calcified of areas and offered to help me shoot. He
found blood with a surgeon's precision—sheen of clear perspiration on his forehead—and, saintlike, he rolled up his sleeve and took his own shot second.

 

And in the kitchen with the smack taking me, I looked at Steve—his skinny arms and rib cage poking out like the angles of a Schiele self-portrait—and the spike threaded into his arm and he
tap-tap-tapped
the syringe like he was checking the wall for hollow spots, and with an almost audible
pop
the needle burst through the vein and dark red blood lazily flowed into the syringe, turning the heroin black.

 

And this was it—this was beauty—no sickness, no worries, no nothing, except friends and the safety of heroin and the crack we were about to smoke and a whole day to waste—nothing but days and days and weeks to waste—no matter, life could not intrude into this sacred space.

 

I feel an understanding of God that I have never felt before, I thought as Steve pushed the hit into his vein in much the same way that Jesus might have, and we connected with something larger and more ancient and more vast than either of us could truly conceive of before the drugs.

 

Adios,
Steve. Life had become a series of revolving faces, careering from medical emergency to drug spin out, from arrests to rehab, from relapse to sudden death or disappearance.

 

In my run-down flat in Murder Mile I said a prayer to Steve. I lay still on the collapsing bed and laid my arms out in a cruciform. On the CD player Ornate Coleman played—the sacred and the profane—while I waited, looking out the window to the overcast East London sky, waiting for something, anything, to happen.