Down and Out on Murder Mile (12 page)

Money was low.
I had taken all of my checks to various backstreet check-cashing joints all over the city. They often had to be sought out. Fabric stores, shoe shops, and vendors of cheap, imported tourist trinkets were always a good bet. “Payday Advance” was the most commonly used euphemism.

 

Soon after receiving my last illicit ninety-three pounds from one of these transactions, I decided to see if my card would bear the cost of one more travel card for the underground. As soon as I slipped the useless strip of plastic into the machine, the screen blinked up RETAINED—RETAINED—CONTACT YOUR BANK OR FINANCIAL INSTITUTION. I hopped the turnstile with my last forty quid in my pocket and vowed to find another source of income.

 

WANTED. SALESPERSON. ADULT ENTERTAINMENT / BOOKSTORE. OVER 18 ONLY. NO CRIMINAL RECORDS. 15 P.H. CALL MICK.

 

Well, shit. There was money to be made in porno. Back in LA I had gotten paid $50 when I really needed money for dope to be an extra in a porno flick called
Snatch Adams
. The shoot had taken place in an abandoned hospital in a run-down neighborhood called Boyle Heights. I went along with a guy I knew from the methadone clinic called Speedball Eddie, who did this kind of shit as a profession of sorts. He would fill in as an audience member for any and all of the crap that was filmed in LA:
Judge Judy, The People's Court
,
Rosie O'Donnell
, whatever. He'd make his dope money by just sitting there, clapping maniacally whenever the “
APPLAUSE
” light went on. Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of him on my little portable TV, with his lopsided, self-administered Beatles haircut and his wide, brown, burn-out eyes, clapping like a seal for his fifty dollars, while more mundane human dramas than his own played out on-screen.

 

I thought the shoot might be kind of fun, but it wasn't. It was odd and creepy. I was skagged out of my mind and so nothing really turned me on anymore. The hospital itself was like something out of some cheesy “after the apocalypse” kind of movie. The place was in total disarray: glass cabinets hung open as if people had looted the place and fled, gang graffiti covered a lot of the walls. Wandering the halls, Eddie and I came across
room after room, each more forlorn and desolate than the last…overturned institutional tables…metal stretchers with frayed and worn leather restraints…trays of rusted, unusable, obscure medical instruments…it was possibly the coldest, least inviting place on the planet.

 

Our scene lasted less than a few moments. They filmed it at 11:30 in the morning. On a dirty-looking hospital bed, a blond, plastic-looking girl in a nurse's uniform was being fucked by two guys. The director kept stopping and repositioning them, and then they'd carry on as if nothing had happened.

 

“Yeah…take it you fucking bitch!”

 

“Oh…Right there…. Faster…”

 

On cue, Speedball Eddie and I walked past the scene in white doctor's coats. We paused, looked over at the action on the bed, and, unfazed by the sight of the woman getting screwed from behind as she sucked the other guy's oddly oversized cock, we nodded to each other, made notes on our clipboards, and walked on. We were so close to them, you could smell the sex. And we had earned our fifty bucks, just like that. They actually offered Eddie an extra seventy-five if he would take part in a gangbang, but it would involve hanging around till 6:00
P.M.
, and Eddie had people to see. Despite the fact I would have turned down the money also, I was privately a little offended that they didn't ask me as well.

 

So there was no embarrassment in my showing up for the interview for the porno store. When I called, Mick grilled me over the phone, mostly about whether I had a criminal record. When I insisted for the third time that I didn't have one of any kind, he relented and told me to stop by the shop for an interview.

 

The store was on Wardour Street, the heart of the Soho porn trade. For a while it was the only place in the whole of the UK where you could buy hardcore porn legally. When the Internet rendered such laws obsolete, hardcore finally arrived in the provinces, but the porno trade is still one of the most thriving businesses in Soho, alongside prostitution, drugs, and trendy wine bars. I showed up five minutes early. Mick was still with the interviewee before me. The store was being watched by two kids, who looked like typical council estate boys—white trainers, chunky gold jewelry, cropped hair gelled tightly to their heads, bulldog tattoos and tracksuits.

 

“I'm here for the interview.”

 

“All right mate. 'E's in the back right now. 'Ave a browse and 'e'll be out in a bit.”

 

It was pretty typical fare. Dildos of varying shapes and sizes lined one wall. Magazines, with names like
Color Climax, Euro Sluts,
and
Backdoor Beauties
filled the center aisles. The other wall was covered in DVDs. In England, there is still a furtive feel to porno shops. It is how I imagine a liquor store in Utah would feel. There is a
sense that what people here are doing
is
legal, but still beyond the pale and rather degenerate. A few embarrassed-looking customers shuffled in while I was browsing, men who refused to make eye contact with each other and who bristled with discomfort when the kids in the tracksuits threw out a casual “All right mate?” in their directions. A door against the back wall opened, and a big guy with a beard walked out, followed by the other guy there for the interview. He was wearing a dirty-looking T-shirt and jeans. I had at least made the effort to wear a shirt. Well shit, this asshole probably didn't need the job as badly as I did. I nodded at the fat bastard with a beard and he introduced himself as Mick.

 

“Step into my office.”

 

The office turned out to be a stockroom, and a small one at that. It was stuffed with magazines and DVDs. Everywhere you looked there were spread cunts, asses, tits, and more erect cocks than I had probably seen in my entire life. The room was crammed and airless. Oh Christ, what if I got the job? I couldn't turn it down, I needed the cash badly. But the reality of working in this store started to cut through even the insulation of the methadone I had injected before showing up and I started to feel claustrophobic and sick.

 

“Nice guy,” Mick said, by way of introduction. “I would have given 'im the job too. He's done this kind of thing before. But he had a criminal record. Can't hire someone with a criminal record. Do you have a criminal record?”

 

“No,” I told him, again.

 

“I mean, it's not that I give a shit what anyone's done in the past, right? It's the fucking council. They're all over this trade. They'd close us down if they could. They control it from the fucking ground up! Basically, if you take this job, you're working for Westminster Council. That's why I have to ask. Fill this in, will you? I'll be right back.”

 

He handed me a blurry, photocopied form. It had only a handful of questions: name, date of birth, national insurance number, address, and, finally, “Do you have a criminal record—y/n?” and he left me alone. I filled out the form and waited for Mick to return. On the shelf above me, a huge pink dildo poked out over my head like the sword of Damocles.

 

Dave came back in and gave my application form a cursory glance, before placing it on his desk.

“You done this kind of work before?”

 

“Well, shop work, yeah. I know how to work a till. But it's been off-licenses and music shops. Not porn.”

 

“That's all right. Here, I want you to take a look at something.”

 

He pulled a magazine from a pile on his desk. It was called
Anal Cream Pies
. I looked at the cover, which showed a close-up of a red-looking
anus with a huge drip of semen hanging from it. Next to the ass was a blond girl with an extended tongue. She was winking at the camera as the cum leaked from the ass onto her tongue. It wasn't quite embarrassment that I felt. It was an oddly disassociated feeling. It was the oddness of the situation that was the worst—pawing through a hardcore porn mag, in a tiny stockroom, with a big sweaty bearded guy called Mick all but sitting on my knee. By my standards, I'll admit, it was pretty tame. In LA I had injected enough meth and smoked enough crack that I had found myself in plenty more bizarre situations than this. Still, it wasn't Sunday school.

 

“Take a look inside,” Mick instructed.

 

I did. The front cover had pretty much said it all, to be honest. The magazine consisted of photosets, all telling the story of how a young woman—or a pair of young women—end up getting an anus full of semen. Each picture had a caption in German, Spanish, French, and oddly translated English:
“Pretty Anna is surprised by presences of her boss Duke, in the after hours of the office. ‘Oh' says Anna ‘I thought you had left, Duke!'…‘Not yet. You and your sweet little ass are burning the midnight oils I can see,' Duke sneers, loosening his belt.”

 

“Does it offend you? The magazine? Cos it's exactly the kind of thing we sell here.”

 

“Well, the grammar's a little offensive. But apart from that…no.”

 

“The grammar? How'd you mean?”

 

“The little bits of story they have under here. Does anybody actually read that?”

 

“I've never given it much thought.”

 

I handed the magazine back to Mick. He looked at me with a sardonic grin. I started to worry that he thought I was trying to be a smart arse. I needed the job. Fuck. If I didn't get it, no rent, no drugs. Rent I could deal with, except without a fixed address I stood to lose my methadone script, which didn't bear thinking about. I decided to shut the fuck up and speak when spoken to.

 

“Okay. Lets role play,” Dave said, leaning forward.

 

“Sure.”

 

“A geezer comes in, right? And he wants a contact mag. D'you know what a contact mag is? It's a mag that carries adverts for people who want to meet up for sex. Men looking for women. Women for men. Men for men. Women for women. Men for sheep. You get the idea, right?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“And he needs one for, say, West London. He's looking for a dominatrix in West London. Right?”

 

“Right.”

 

“But we only have a mag that deals with piss drinkers in South London.”

 

“Erm…yes…”

 

“Do you tell him to come back when the mag is in stock next week? Or do you just sell him the piss drinker contact mag for South London regardless?”

 

I knew where this was going. This was just another “fuck the mooch over for money” gig. This I could deal with. This interview I could nail.

 

“I'd sell him what we have in stock,” I tell Mick. “Don't let 'em walk out without buying something.”

 

“Good!”

 

Fuck it was hot in there. And small. I could hear the bastard breathing in and out.

 

“Okay, here's another one. Let me show you this….”

He rummaged though the junk on his desk again, this time coming up with a small bottle of clear liquid.

 

“Spanish fly,” he informed me with a leer, handing the little bottle over for me to look at. It reminded me of those little bottles of amyl nitrate I used to sniff to get high when I was younger. “You know what Spanish fly is?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“This is the original, mate. Before all of that Viagra rubbish. Spanish fly keeps you hard for hours and drives the women mental. Thirty quid a bottle, that goes for. It's the pheromones, you see?”

 

I looked the unassuming bottle over again. It seemed inconceivable that grown men could fall for shit like this.

 

“Would you still sell this,” Mick continued, “if I told you that there was nothing more potent than ginger ale in that bottle?”

 

“Sure. Why not?”

 

“Right answer!”

 

Mick leaned over and shook my hand. “I have one more geezer to see today, so I'll give you a call in the afternoon. Thanks for your time.”

 

“No problem.”

 

“Hey, before you go…could I interest you in some Spanish fly? Drives the women crazy!” He cackled his dirty smoker's laugh again, and I told him, “I think I'll pass, thanks.” Walking out of the shop and into a Soho afternoon, I felt gripped by the complete patheticness of my situation. In six years I had gone from someone who had just gotten signed to a major record label,
embarked on a world tour, and been on the verge of truly great things to a penniless junkie, banking on getting a job in a Soho porn shop so I could earn enough to feed my habit. I started to laugh a little, but it was a sad kind of laugh so I stopped again. It sounded stilted, forced, and ugly as it bounced off the bricks of Walker's Court.

April Fools' Day.
Suddenly and gloriously, I found myself in a band again. I answered an ad in the
New Musical Express
for a signed band looking for a keyboardist, left a message, and was called back a week later and told to show up to a studio by Old Street station for a tryout. I had also received a call back about the porno store. They wanted me to start the following week, and I wasn't in a position to turn the job down. My hours would be twelve noon to twelve midnight, four days a week. I imagined looking at all of those dildos and latex vaginas and inflatable sex dolls for twelve hours a day and realized that I might go insane, and this focused my energy even more on scoring this gig. I turned up to the tryout glowing with methadone and focused. This gig was important because the band in question was signed to an actual record label. The artist was Kelly Leyton, the one-time
vocalist with a hugely successful trip-hop group called the Trainer Whores now embarking on a solo career. The album was in the can and about to be released, with “much fanfare” as her manager promised on the phone. There was a tour in support of a successful rock act called Garbage already booked to begin in two weeks, so I went to the rehearsal in the mood to take no prisoners.

 

I was introduced to the rest of the band, and then we ran through the songs I had learned from the CD I had received in the post the previous week. I had practiced diligently and brought all of myself into the room this time. No stashed syringes of methadone or heroin. No cocaine, no crack. Just me, and whatever I hadn't lost in the intervening years.

 

After the rehearsal I was immediately offered the slot. I had felt it in my gut. The chemistry was there. The music I produced meshed with what the band was doing. I actually enjoyed myself for the first time in years. Kelly claimed to have psychic abilities and she placed her hand on me for a second and then smiled. It seemed that the vibes were right. I also met the manager, Alex. He was a chubby, boyish man with a bowl haircut and red cheeks. He seemed like a pussycat compared to other managers I had been involved with in the past.

 

“It's great to have you onboard!” he said, shaking my hand furiously.

 

“It's great to be onboard!”

 

“This is just the beginning. I'm in the process of booking more dates to support the album's release. We'll be quite busy. The Garbage tour is just the beginning!”

 

Walking home from the rehearsal, I allowed myself to gloat a little. It was actually happening again. I was signed to a record label. I could go back to doing what I did best, before I ruined it all with the drugs. I started to think that if I could just bank on this one thing working out okay, it could be a comeback that Lazarus would be envious of.

 

It took me a week of negotiations back and forth with the clinic before I realized that there was no way that they would let me pick up a week's worth of methadone. Dr. Ira seemed to relish delivering the deathblow.

 

“I understand, that this…tour…constitutes some kind of opportunity for you. But I simply cannot let you walk out of here with a prescription for that much methadone. Any other answer, I'm afraid, would be…unprofessional.”

 

So I had to buy my medication on the black market. Forty pounds got me enough methadone linctus for the week, which I measured out into the correct doses and took with me in a mouthwash bottle. For all of the efforts of doctors like Ira, black-market methadone was readily available all over the city. On the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, between certain
times and on certain days, if you had the right kind of face, you could score methadone juice or ampoules from the old junkies who congregated outside the underground station. I often found myself ghosting around Soho scoring Physeptone tablets from the relics of the West End's old junk-dealing scene, survivors of the golden days when you could buy Chinese heroin from the old pushers who lurked by the restaurants and Laundromats of Chinatown, then on to Lady Frankau's for a prescription for pure coke and morphine. They lurked around the corners, in the alleyways and shop doorways, huddling in their jackets and eyeing the passersby with cold, hungry eyes.

 

The band met up at the rehearsal room one last time before we were to start the tour. This was when we met our tour manager for the first time. He was a handsome, boyish-looking man with tousled hair who staggered in fifteen minutes late, obviously severely hungover and a little befuddled.

 

“All right loves!” he yelled. “Sorry I'm late. Had a bit of trouble with my phone.”

 

“You got it fixed?” Alex asked, in an attempt at sounding managerial.

 

“Well, not quite. It's at the bottom of a canal. But no worries, it's all under control!”

 

He was called Dan. And over the next few weeks I came to consider him a real friend.

 

As I left London, Susan, the methadone clinics, and Murder Mile behind, all of it fading away as we tore up the M1, barreling on to new cities, new landscapes, new people, I felt myself expanding to fit the air that was suddenly all around me, and the remembrance of who I once was came flooding to my mind.

 

The idea of me at eighteen years old, with friends who would soon be torn from me by circumstance and time, but who at this moment were my entire world…the idea of me being someone at the beginning of a journey, rather than limping toward it's conclusion defeated…the idea of my having ambitions beyond simply getting enough money to pay rent this week and getting some heroin into my blood started to become something other than an abstract notion…. It became something almost tangible for the first time in years.

 

And as the bus lurched toward the first stop on the tour, I felt a surge of almost forgotten, but still familiar, emotions filling my brain, as if I were a waking coma victim. I looked to my travel bag stuffed under my seat, knowing that it contained a Listerine bottle filled with enough methadone to kill every man and woman on this bus, and I wondered if I were to toss it out the window onto the asphalt that zoomed past underneath us, would I—this newly awakened I—even feel the sickness anymore?

 

The shows flew by in a dizzying sugar rush. In every city we landed from Bristol to Edinburgh,
Dan had a connection for cocaine, and the tour bus was in a blizzard of it; and, as is usual on tour, it was the lighting guys, the guitar techs, and the guys who operated the mixing desk who partied harder than the band. Having stopped drinking totally since starting using heroin, I suddenly began consuming great oceans of booze. The guitar tech was an old speed freak called Pat, who started selling me Dexedrine tablets, which I swallowed before every show. For the duration of the tour, I was indestructible. Superhuman. Before the shows I would vanish with Dan into the underbelly of whatever city we were in to score cocaine. We bought from shady men with faded blue prison tattoos and gold jewelry in high-rise council blocks, from Arabs who moved the stuff from under the counters of their side-street kebab shops, and from one guy in Newcastle who had a nice middle-class home, a wife, and two young children running about the place. All of them were on first-name terms with our tour manager. I started to feel an affinity toward Dan that I hadn't felt for another human being in a long time.

 

One night, following a drunken show in Edinburgh, I slipped his mobile phone from his jacket pocket and started drunkenly calling numbers stored within it. He walked in on me, huddled in the back of the tour bus, talking dirty to a girl called Vanessa I had chosen at random from his address book. Instead of hanging up, she had encouraged it, and the whole thing went on for at least fifteen minutes. Dan walked in, saw me on his phone talking to one of his friends about
eating her pussy, and snatched the phone from my hand.

 

“No…no,” he said to her, “that's just one of the alcoholics we have in the band. I know, love. He's incorrigible.”

 

The next morning I woke up, staggered from the bunk of the tour bus, and ran to the exit. I threw open the door just in time to vomit violently onto the concrete below. Looking up, I saw all of Garbage and most of their crew, who happened to be walking past at the exact moment that the puke erupted from me. They stopped and half-smiled. Shirley Manson looked impossibly small next to the crew of ex-Marines the band had carting their equipment around for them. I grinned at her and said as cheerfully as I could, “Lovely morning!” giving a friendly wave. They carried on walking.