Time passes like this. Gazebo-life. Some people come, some go. I’m vaguely aware of the themes of the conversations. It’s mainly about cigarette supplies, the wankers running the centre and phone time.
Phone time is a privilege granted after enduring a week here. You get one hour between 6 and 7pm. No internet access, just phone calls or texts. the network is monitored. By who, I don’t know. Probably the fucking psychopath. Sounds like the kind of thing he would enjoy.
Cigarettes is a biggie. They visit the shop once a week on a Thursday and then and only then can you buy cigarettes. What the fuck!!! They don't tell you this on their shitty fucking glossy website. That’s clever. What dickhead thought that was a good idea. Stick a bunch of people struggling with addiction in a centre to help them get their lives back together and deny them fucking cigarettes. So far I haven't met one person who doesn't smoke. Scratch that, there is one, Ethel. One fucking person in 20 who doesn’t smoke.
“So what happens if you run out?”
I’m motivated to speak up. This is important. Even through the fog and despite the effort it takes to get the sentence formed, I need to know.
Kim is sat next to me. She pulls me close to her and whispers
“We help each other out”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because were not allowed to share fags. If they catch us we get a strike”
“A strike?”
“Yes three strikes and you get kicked out”
What the fuck!!!! This is insane. I bet this is the work of the fucking psychopath. Wanker. When I get out of here I will track that cunt down and kill him. No I won’t. I’ll drug him. Take him to a fucking shed somewhere in quiet place and torture him. What a nasty fucking horrible sack of shit. It takes a sick fucking mind to come up with that one.
Better still, I will cut off his arms of and force whisky and smack into him for a month or so, then get him to detox the old skool way. That will teach him a lesson. Fucking prick.
“That’s fucked-up”, I say
“I know. And the shop is just down the road. A two minute walk”.
I want to know what else constitutes a strike but I don’t have the ability to form such a complex sentence. Bollocks. I look at Kim. She’s looking at me. She can see the struggle and gives me a little smile and touches my arm. She knows where I’m at and it’s a gesture of compassion. Thank God for her.
I sit back and try to do a mental stock take of the cigarettes I bought with me. Not many. I smoke a lot. What day is it? No idea. Haven’t a clue. Midweek? Yes it’s midweek. Shit. If i run out of fags that’s it. I’m over the wall. Fuck them and their stupid fucking rules. I can guarantee they have some smart-arsed rationale behind this. I can see the grinning idiot sitting confidently behind his desk, arms folded behind his head, legs stretched out confidently as he explains to the families of the incarcerated why it has to be like this
“Well you see its all about structure. You see the addict is trapped in a world of chaos and uncertainty. All his life he has done exactly what he wants when he wants. There are no rules or structures in his life. This might seem harsh to you, but it’s in their best interests. Imposes a sense of discipline and introduces them to concepts they won’t be familiar with such as planning and budgeting. But crucially, you see, its all about consequences and boundaries” yada, yada fucking yada…. Deluded, murdering bastard. They probably teach them this shit in University. Introduced by some asexual frigid fucking 70 year old Oxford Don who’s lived his life cocooned in his ivory fucking tower avoiding human contact for decades. Well congratulations. I wonder how many people have done a runner as a direct result of this. How many they have murdered through their inhumane fucking stupidity.
Everyone gets up suddenly and heads to the main building. I panic, what’s happening. Kim looks back. “It’s chore time, don’t worry you don't have to do anything for the first few days till you get straightened out”. Phew good.
The gazebo is empty again. Just me and Lisa. I look at her.
“Cunts” she exclaims.
I nod.
She heard about the cigarette policy I’m guessing. Or it’s a brief summary of her feelings towards our recently departed fellow fuck-ups. Or it could just be a general statement to the universe. I grunt in acknowledgement and twitch violently. This twitching and shaking is getting fucking irritating.
We sit like this for a while. Silent. It’s not an uncomfortable silence. Underneath the twitching and sucking of cigarettes, beneath the fog of smoke and the blanket of librium, the first faltering steps of self appraisal are beginning. Two heads, busy in their solitude. Chewing over the gristle. Inwardly focused. Self induldgenet. Selfish and self obsessed.
I think about what’s led me to this place. This seat in this gazebo in this garden at this place and time. Sat here unable to string a sentence together. Shaking violently. Rendered dumb by a heroic dose of benzos. Bitterly angry at everyone and everything but knowing deep down this is all me. All my doing. I’m the mastermind of my own destruction. I’m like Don Quixote brandishing his lance furiously at the stoic impassive windmills. Insane. Chronically depressed. Suicidal. What’s different now than this time last week? The drug for one. Last week -whisky, this week librium. Is some higher power at force? Fate getting sick of my sniveling and whining and depositing me into this place as some last ditch effort to fix me up. Christ, as if I’m important enough for the universe to give a flying fuck about me. Maybe I was destined for greatness before I managed to irreversibly fuck my life up. Had I swerved some great fate that was pre-ordained for me and was God now taking a hand in ensuring I get my shit together. Annoyed at my wilful refusal to play ball. Perhaps I was supposed to discover a cure for cancer. I could have created an app that reads peoples thoughts or discovered the source of unbridled and eternal happiness. But no, instead I kept my foot on the accelerator. Pressing hard until the car had well and truly veered off track, spun out of control and flipped on its roof and smashed in a crumpled tangle of debris against the brick wall of my own stupidity.
I look back over my life. It plays out like a Ken Loach film; bleak, somber, awkward. Shambling along to its inevitable unhappy ending. I can afford the luxury of playing back this autobiographical inner critique now that I have chemical assistance. There’s a nice big opaque glass screen between me and my feelings. Same as with the drink. Same as with any drug. When I’m fully fucked-up, I can look at things dispassionately and without any feelings. Examine it objectively. Analyse it. Draw conclusions from the key datapoints along the timeline. Plot a trend line across the clustered lowlights and odd highlight. Dissect it dispassionately as if it’s not me. It’s some other poor cunt’s biopic.
It’s roughly midweek, I think. Tuesday or Wednesday. Time has no meaning in here. Either in this centre for the rehabilitation of fuck-ups or in my head. It’s a luxury for sane people. If it wasn't for the cigarette question, I wouldn't care what time it is, what day it is. It’s a continuation of the endless unfolding misery that is my existence. A rolling, open script that goes on and on and fucking on despite all my best efforts to bring it to an end. I’m fucking indestructible. Kevlar coated. How I am still alive baffles me. There’s been suicide attempts, direct and indirect. I’ve spent the GDP of a small European principality on drink and drugs. Drugs of all types, the full spectrum. From party to prescription, soft to hard, uppers-downers, solvents, sex aids, psychedelics, the full monty. I was thorough in my research methods. Left no stone unturned. I’ve checked every box on the Avon-calling drugs catalogue. Full house for me. I could easily hold my own in a drinking contest with McGowan, Best, Stone, Floyd. The heavyweights of alcoholism. I’ve done the lot and yet still, here I am. I’m out of options. Unless they get busy and start inventing a new class of drugs to get fucked-up on, I have no other angle. Nowhere else to go.
I’ve been here before. Not here in the literal sense, sat on this chair in this Gazebo, but here metaphorically. On my arse, in this God-awful self-pitying hell hole at the end of all the the worlds, tucked away in the scrapyard at the back end of the galaxy
Yes welcome back to the howling empty loneliness and despair of another fucking rock bottom.
And each time I think that’s it. This is THE one. It cannot get any worse. I cant take any more pain. It’s not humanely possible to take any more pain. And then crash….bang….thud…a trapdoor opens revealing another fucking helter skelter ride and wooosh…down we go….
Always downwards, never upwards not even sidewards. Faster, never slower. More misery, more shit. And then crash…thud…wallop - a harder, stonier, more painful rock bottom. More bones broken, less cushioning and each time it’s harder to stagger and straighten up and try and get a firm foothold
And just as you’re getting a bit of stability, just when your racing head has managed to slow down a touch and start to catch its breath, the floor opens up and down we go again. Not quite finished are we sir? Not quite fucked-up enough yet are we? Fear not! We have really pushed the boat out this time sir. This next rocky bottom really is as messed-up a place as we could conjure. I think you will settle in just fine. Oh and here’s your tab from the last level. Out of funds? No problem, sir, we’ll add it to your tab. Quite an impressive tab if you don't mind me saying sir.
The last time it was heroin, methadone. Codeine, dihydrocodeine, diamorphine. Opiates of all descriptions. I was a lot younger and it was the end of the 90’s. The decade had started off so well. Thatcher was fucked. Her stranglehold on the country was waning and the writing was on the wall for that deranged harridan. Years of Tory avarice and rampant consumerism were finally coming to an end. The “cash is King” rhetoric of the yuppies was crashing down around their ears.
The rave scene exploded into my conscious. Into my world, our world. I was in the right place and at the right time for the first time ever. Liverpool, Manchester, the North West – the place I grew up in and hated. The grimy forgotten industrial North despised by the Tories and their ilk. The place I longed to escape from. It was like someone had thrown a hand grenade into the midst of this derelict wasteland and it exploded with music and ecstasy and joy. And I was a part of it. Almost everyone I knew fell under the spell. There were different groups at the arse end of the 80’s for teenagers back then. All loosely based around music or football. Casuals, Goths, Punks, Trendies, Greebo’s. Little tribes and we hated each other. Our music was better than yours. Our fashion was better than yours. Then two things happened. Acid House and MDMA. The perfect storm.
It only took one pill, one night and bang it was on.
Fat Dan was the first to go. He was a year older than the rest of my group and went to university first. We had a leaving do for him in our hangout, our bat cave. A dingy shithole above a cab firm in Station Road in Southport. I loved that place. It was grotty and damp and smelt. But it had sofa’s and a bar and it was exclusively ours. The goths. No one else bothered us here. Fat Dan was, unsurprisingly a fat bastard. We waved him out the door of our club. Big fat guy with dyed straight black hair, a black trilby, black skinny jeans, winkle pickers and a long purple tie-dyed shirt.
6 months later we were still there, drinking and smoking and arguing about music. It was a Wednesday night - our night. A stranger walked in. He must be lost otherwise he wouldn’t be here. A medium built guy with baggy jeans, a purple hoodie with a big fuck-off purple Om emblazoned across the front. Hair in curtains and a big beanie hat with a yellow acid face on it. What the fuck was he doing here.. When he spoke everyone’s, mouths dropped. It was fat Dan. He was back and he wasn’t fat.
He told us what happened. Ecstasy. He described it in beautiful detail. Everyone was on it. Everyone was united. All our old enemies from school were all mates now. Partners in E.
We weren’t convinced but slowly one-by-one, everyone turned. It was impossible to fight it. The tide was strong.
I took my first pill and suddenly it all made sense. That awful techno drum machine we had derided previously, suddenly came alive and stirred something deep within me The weird artificial blips and bleeps started talking a language I couldn’t’ understand before. And the translator was ecstasy. It was a spiritual revelation. It blew my mind. This was it. This was what I’d been searching for all my young years. It wasn’t just the music. It was political. Everything became obvious. The state had divided us. North/South, city against city. Culture against culture. Black against white. Rich against poor. Them against us. It was all bollocks. All we needed was MDMA. Everything started to make sense. I was reborn. Society would change. A better life was on the horizon. The old ways were dead. This was it.
Except it wasn't. Like with anything in life, like in the 60’s with the hippy dream of free love and brotherhood, business took over. The business men in this scene were drug dealers and gangsters. The drugs were diluted. The music got darker. Fast forward 8 years and I was fucked. A husk. A lot had happened. Our mates, our crews were dispersing. The government had saw what was happening and went to war with us. The criminal justice bill was introduced. New age travelers were hounded in the press and the streets. They don’t like what they don’t understand but if they really understood they wouldn’t have bothered. We were imploding from the inside anyway. The dream was over.
I was in my familiar place - fucked. Years of LCD, MDMA, PCP, speed, coke, crack, ketamine, weed took a toll. I couldn’t carry on I. I thought I was on my knees then. I needed something else. And as if by magic, it came to me.
It was ‘97 and I was at one of my early rock bottoms. I was still getting over the death of my beautiful sister. She got sick and died within weeks. I couldn’t get over it. It came out of nowhere and broke my heart. Turned my world upside down and smashed me into a million pieces.I was in bits. I was living in a house at the time with my girlfriend and ‘best mate’. Things went from bad to worse. My best mate and my missus decided it was an opportune time to start shagging each other without having the kindness to inform me first. Nice! Peoples capacity to be cuntish has long since ceased to amaze me but back then I was broken. They asked me to leave. Cunts. I did, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. I met a mate I did some casual work with. He was a nice guy, long standing problem with heroin but a decent bloke. He had a room going spare in his flat so I moved in.
It started off good. He was on a methadone program with the NHS but also had a private script with some dodgy doctor in Harley Street, we we’re living in Hackney in London at the time. Graham Road. Before it was cool and the hipsters took over. He got methadone ampules, dexedrine and valium on a private prescription for a hundred quid a week. It was a fucking good deal. He stashed the green stuff and sold this to junkies who couldn’t score to make the money for the private script.
I was still going out but not raving anymore. Me and my partner-in-crime, Sarah would go out drinking and cane ‘base’, pure base amphetamine. You could go for days on a gram of that shit. It was cheap, dirty and did the trick. But the downside was the amount you cold drink on it. A phenomenal amount. And the come-down was brutal. Three days without sleep, speeding your tits off and drinking Stella like water. It had a price. And that price was 3 days of pure misery. Suicidal thoughts, racing heart, palpitations and soon enough, anxiety attacks. Full on, full blown, terrifying panic attacks.
One day I was sat in my room rattling and shaking. Scott my mate came in. “You look fucked”. This coming from a junkie with a 500ml a day methadone habit carried some weight. “Try some of this”. He gives me a tablet. What is it? Valium. OK.
30 minutes later and I’m fucking A-OK! Magic. This stuff is phenomenal. I’ve found a solution.
Over the next year, I introduced methadone to the mix. First the syrup. The green sickly shit. I loved it. For the first time in my life I found a balance. A Ying and a Yang. It was the first drug I took where I could function. I wasn’t up, I wasn’t down I wasn’t off my nuts. I was just OK. Calm, still. My head wasn’t yapping like a fucking Jack Russell on crack and I could get on with life. This is what I had been looking for.
There was some nagging doubt in my head though. I was brought up in the 80’s and had the fear of God put into me about heroin. Zammo the Scouse smack head who OD’d on Grange Hill. The ‘Just Say No’ campaign that came on the back of that. We had ex-junkies coming to school telling us of the horrors of heroin. Not once did any of them say how fucking good it was. It was great. They lied…again.
Then his wife moved in and their young kid and it all turned to shit. She was a fucking hoover when it came to gear. She had a voracious appetite for drugs and sex. She was and still is to this day, the vilest, most twisted, depraved piece of shit that I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting in the flesh. Sick in many ways but never clucking. A devious scheming whore in the truest sense of the word. Scott was out every day, dealing, robbing, scoring, making enough for them both to have enough. Whilst he was gouched-out in the bedroom with their son, she would busy herself offering blow-jobs or sex to anyone who happened to pop in. I hated her. She would often wink at me whilst she was sucking some random junkies cock as I went to make a coffee in the small living/room kitchen we shared. Often in order to secure more drugs, but just as often, for the sheer thrill of it. We called her Miss Mimms after the book nurses used to identify drugs. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of drugs and their effects on the human body. I learnt a lot from her as after infidelity, this was her specialist subject. Why didn’t I ever tell Scott what his wayward wife was up to? I could say it was because I didn’t want him to hurt any more than he already was and there was some truth in this. But that wouldn’t be entirely true. The real truth was that she bought my silence with more drugs that she’d received in kind for her extra-curricular services. And yes, that made me feel like a worse piece of shit than her. But that’s addiction for you. Try maintaining a hundred and fifty quid a day smack habit and a stringent moral code. Its not possible. Pragmatism always wins out. Every time.
I started down this path looking for a solution to the problem of chronic speed come-downs. It worked perfectly. Did exactly what it said on the tin. But as I got more and more into it, I crossed a line I said I never would and started injecting it. I developed a morbid fascination with the process of sticking a needle into me. The whole process of it gave me a perverse and deep sense of pleasure. It focused my chaotic mind. I became hyper-present in the moment. Conscious of the two extremes of existence. The gnawing sickness from withdrawal starting to pulsate through my body, the almost transparent needles with a miniscule drip from the ampule poised on the end, the almost macroscopic view of my skin with each pore perfectly visible, the knowledge that the sickness would in a matter of seconds be transformed into pure oneness with the universe. Chiaroscuro! The dark and the light. Things got dark very quickly.
This was the first time I’d consciously crossed a deeply-held core moral boundary of my own definition. The other drugs were acceptable. I never questioned them. But sticking a needle full of chemicals in your arm is a different ballpark. I still had enough inside me back then to recoil at what I was doing. I was still sane enough to see it for what it was and I knew I had to get the fuck away from it at any cost. So I did a geographical. Not a huge one and not my first. I was still in London but I had to sort myself out. I couldn't get enough gear and I wasn’t cut out to be a junkie. I’d bumbled along for a few years but it was getting harder and my habit was getting worse. It was too much work. It’s a tough gig being a full-time smack head. Its easy for people to sneer and look down their nose but walk a few miles in these shoes – I dare you. I needed to clean myself up. So I did what I do best. I fucked off. I left Scott in the shit. Owing him money and drugs but I didn’t care. I needed to sort myself out first. I would make it up to him later.
I got to my new flat, a basement studio. It was dark and dingy. Perfect. I had to have somewhere quiet to do what I was about to do. I’d stolen some amitriptyline from my poor mum who was taking it to get over the death of her daughter Jacky, my sister. That sums me up perfectly. Sums up everything about me. Stealing from my own grieving mum. Robbing her of her peace of mind for my needs. That’s it in a nutshell. A selfish, horrible fucking parasite. That’s me. I’’d also procured some largactil from an associate. I had no idea what it was other than it was a drug and I liked drugs.
But it made no odds. I had massively underestimated my opponent. I hadn’t done my research. I was complacent and arrogant. I thought I knew everything. I quickly learnt, I know fuck-all. My first mistake was assuming Methadone wouldn’t be as bad as gear. The second was assuming that any other drug would mitigate the effects of opiate withdrawal. Both proved quickly to be incorrect.
Largactil, I later came to find out is called the liquid-cosh.
With good fucking reason. It renders you physically immobile but it doesn’t dumb down any of your mental capacity I pulled a typical junkie trick, assuming more is better and took the largactil and necked a load of amitryptaline. This would stop the withdrawal from the methadone. Wouldn’t it?
No. It fucked me up good and proper though. I ‘d been in the flat one night and I came around. I was on the floor in a pool of blood. Shit! What’s happened. I tried to stand up I couldn’t. My legs stopped working. Fuck! Blood was coming out my head where I had fallen and hit the radiator. I was clucking like fuck, The methadone had worn off, the largactil had immobilized me and the amitriptyline was doing strange things to my head. It was the worst of both worlds. I lay there crying and shivering and feeling like my fucking soul had been ripped out my arse. It was, at the time, the worst night of my life, and there followed one of the worst months of my life.
Methadone is a bastard drug. It’s worse than smack and the withdrawal is hell. I suffered deeply and thought I’d learnt a valuable lesson. That was another rock bottom. And it took fucking months to get over the depression. I had relocated, severed contact with everyone I knew and was alone and fucked. I never felt so alone, so unloved, so empty. Depression whether chemically induced or ‘natural’ is horrific. For those that have never suffered its bitter clutches you are lucky. Depression -it sounds like a bit of a dip doesn’t it. A bump in the road, low-mood. It’s not. It’s the most inappropriately named condition in medical history. It’s an absolute lack of all hope, joy or warmth. It’s a feeling of complete isolation. Total disconnection from the world and other people. It’s like being trapped in a slow-motion black and white silent movie whilst the rest of the world is skipping along in glorious technicolor with Dolby Atmos sound and special effects. I called NA, The Samaritans, the local drug and alcohol dependency hotline, I prayed to the God I didn’t believe in.I prayed for death.I tried and failed to enact it…again. I procrastinated and slid and stumbled through the mental fog.
For most people that would have been enough. I got clean and after the depression subsided I thought I was OK. I wasn’t.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It gives you a wonderful backwards vista of the pitfalls and mistakes we have made. It shines a bright light onto each one and provides a little narrative explaining how they were traps. But at the time, they are as clear as mud. I thought I had got clean. And in a way I had. I was off the gear finally and relieved as fuck to be off it. But a side effect of this was anxiety – debilitating anxiety. But I quickly found a solution for that – alcohol. Oh lovely, salt-of-the-earth alcohol. My friend from early teen days. A safe pair of hands to gently caress the rough edges off of this shit show that is life.
I started drinking. It wasn’t even a conscious thought. It just happened. And it wasn’t a little glass of wine here or there, it was straight on the 9% lagers. Skol Super, Tennants Extra, Special Brew and Kestrel Super were the order of the day. They had a nice full-bodied, richness to them that seemed lacking in weaker stuff. It just felt so right... And it just helped give my head that little tap it needed to start seeing the world from a less bleak perspective.