Junkie Love (3 page)

That morning over breakfast she told me about prison and the people she’d met there, the strategies she’d been forced to develop in order to survive. At their sentencing, she had received three years and Dougie seven, her lawyer having made much of the fact that she was the erstwhile innocent led astray; and, taking into account remission for good conduct, this had meant that she would be released in a little over two years. Despite getting a much lighter sentence than Dougie, though, for her it was a far greater trauma, never having been on the wrong side of the law before beyond a few trifling and cautionary experiences. For Dougie, it was all part of the criminal life: when things were going well you made a lot of money in a short time, enjoyed yourself and invested the money wisely. When things got fucked up — a scenario that was bound to happen sooner or later, if only because of the law of averages — then you accepted your fate: you kept your mouth shut, served your allotted time without complaint and made sure that in all
events, and no matter at what cost, you held onto your self-respect. It was not the first time he had been inside, and though it was a much heavier sentence than any he had received before, he knew how to handle himself and was confident that he would survive.

For Cissy, however, privileged and spoilt as she was, the whole thing was slightly more of an unmitigated disaster. She was about to cross the threshold into a wondrous and unknown world, one which contained all kinds of obstacles and unseen dangers; and, as she was taken from the court and driven away in a police van to begin her sentence, all the loneliness and isolation of her eighteen years on God’s earth crashed around her in a cataclysm of self-pity, fear and anguish. Engulfed in these cold and darkening waters, she adopted the only course of action that seemed appropriate in the circumstances: she broke down, wept and blubbered, like the lost and fucked-up child she really was.

The first few months in the Scottish prison were the worst. No-one spoke to her and she suffered several attacks, both verbal and physical, from other women who were angered by her pretty looks, or by the fact that she kept herself apart as if she were somehow better than they were, or at least believed herself to be so. She didn’t make one friend during the whole of her time there, and she told me it was the most frightening, bewildering and lonely period of her life. There were strange codes of behaviour and rituals to observe; frequently, in her ignorance, she would step across some invisible line, or would fail to respond in the appropriate manner to some request or insult. Her fellow inmates were tough, older women, in prison for a variety of infringements ranging from drugs and prostitution to crimes of larceny, fraud and violence, and they didn’t take kindly to some rich kid, so obviously naïve and out of her depth as Cissy was. She, herself, was terrified the whole time, understanding little of the hard Glaswegian street dialect the
women used, in spite of her time with Dougie. She tried, as much as possible, to make herself invisible and adopted a mouse-like demeanour in her attempts to stay out of trouble at all costs.

She did learn a few useful tricks, though. And when, after six months, she was transferred to Holloway Prison in North London, she knew far more about what to expect, viewing the move as a chance to make a positive new beginning. This period saw the birth of her street-urchin persona, as she determinedly wiped out all traces of her former privileged identity, replacing them with the voluble and chirpy manner of an East-End barrow boy, like I said, straight out of Dickens. She learned how to ingratiate herself with others, how to kowtow to, and flatter, those further up the prison hierarchy; she cut her shoulder-length blond hair and adopted a look that could either be seen as asexual or Punk; she learned how to develop friendships and loyalties, and how to exploit them to her advantage during difficult or dangerous moments. Most of all, she began to regain her confidence as she found her place in the prison system, attracting her own circle of admirers and devotees in what was almost a mirror image of her social aspirations before the bust. If it was not exactly a time of great joy for her then at least it was bearable, and by the end of her sentence she had so thoroughly obliterated all traces of her former self that it could be quite reasonably argued this former self no longer existed. Her mother, at any rate, certainly agreed with this point of view, totally disowning Cissy when she tried to make contact with her.

• • •

After this night of caresses and fond reminiscences, I didn’t see Cissy again for a couple of years — at least not beyond the occasional chance meeting in the street, or in a club. I had my own problems to deal with, such as where to find the enormous
amounts of money I needed each day just in order to feel normal, and the heroin simply wasn’t working like it used to in the old days. My marriage had broken up, largely because of my endearing inability to think about the future in any terms other than where the next fix was coming from, and I had lost most of my friends, either through neglect or out-and-out sleazy, unreliable, low-life behaviour.

When my wife left, my initial reaction was to go into a tailspin of self-destructive, almost masochistic proportions, a drugs and sex binge that had the desired effect of largely obliterating all sense and feeling. All, that is, except for the spiral of barely controlled panic I’d experience on waking alone in a stranger’s bed, dopesick and broke, seeing clearly the entire stomach-turning hopelessness of my situation spread out before me in the vivid, garish colours of a nightmare. At such times, the cruel reality of my predicament was almost too much to bear, and I would lie there as if paralysed, breaking out in a cold, clammy sweat as I suffered an anxiety attack of epic proportions. I could see no future, no escape from this cycle of obsession and dependency; while thinking about the past, and what I had lost, only increased the fear, adding a sprinkling of self-pity and disgust to an already potent brew of sickness and black despair. The only thing that could motivate me at such times, and stir me from this malaise of physical and mental paralysis, was the onset of real sickness with the concomitant knowledge that if I didn’t get my arse in gear soon, then very quickly I’d be incapacitated and more or less incapable of hustling for the next fix.

Long-term addicts develop an acute sensitivity to minute changes in the body’s metabolism: it’s a survival mechanism, I suppose, like a clock or a timer ticking away in your veins. As the level of artificially-induced endorphins begins to fall, all the alarm bells in your body go off at once and you begin to plot and scheme, to think of ways of obtaining more of this precious
and elusive drug. If your search is not successful, and real withdrawal begins, you will start to experience a most unpleasant feeling in the pit of your stomach, more accurately the bowels: first, of body-doubling cramps, then a sensation as if your insides are coming apart, as if everything in there has turned to mush and jelly. And this is pretty much the way it is. After days, weeks or, in some unhappy cases, months of constipation (this being a well-noted side effect of regular opiate consumption), nature finally has her way, and you are forced to endure a period of sustained and prolonged diarrhoea that strongly discourages you from straying from the close vicinity of a toilet for more than five minutes at a time. It’s as if the wondrous, golden liquid that you injected into one part of your body has corrupted everything within, not just physical but spiritual as well, turning all of it rotten, degenerate — as if the foul-smelling, brown liquid that comes chundering out of the other end is, in some sense, a metaphor for the state of body and mind you have gotten yourself into.

In addition to this indignity, you will also be subject to regular hot and cold flushes of particularly pungent sweat, extremely offensive to the olfactory senses of anyone in the vicinity. The traces of this seem to permeate all clothing and bed-linen (usually soiled and unchanged for weeks at a time, in any case), and to float about your person in a miasmic, foul-smelling cloud of bodily and spiritual putrescence. You will also ache in every muscle and joint of your body, and will find it impossible to attain comfort in any one position that you happen to arrange your limbs into — a fact that will necessitate constant changes of posture, while inducing involuntary and spasmodic twitching motions of the arms and legs, as you try in vain to escape from an inescapable, all-encompassing sensation of non-localised pain. Almost as unpleasant will be the constant running of the nose and eyes, the over-stimulation of the mucus-producing glands, and the hacking, consumptive
cough that most users develop during withdrawal. For as the cough mechanism of the diaphragm is given free rein — after being suppressed for so long by the daily intake of opiates — the immune system will fall prey to all kinds of bacteria and minor infections that the heroin had previously kept at bay. Of course, symptoms vary slightly from person to person, and one or more of them may be more, or less, pronounced depending on individual metabolism and physical characteristics. But whatever the case, most addicts would find it easy to agree that withdrawal is an extremely unpleasant experience, and one which is to be avoided at all costs, if at all possible.

My own strategies for avoiding this state were many and varied. They ranged from the pawning or selling of all superfluous and not strictly necessary possessions — most, that is, of what in any normal household would be considered essential: furniture, pots and pans, records, books, clothes, musical instruments, wedding rings, electrical appliances, television and radio sets, stereo systems, works of sculpture and decorative art — through running and small-time dealing, up to street crime and petty theft. I needed about fifty pounds each day to keep high, more if possible, though twenty pounds would get me straight and ward off withdrawal symptoms for ten to twelve hours. Any less, though, and I was in trouble, and three months after the split the stress of finding these amounts of money each day was beginning to tell: I had sold just about everything that my wife and I had bought together, was rapidly running out of friends and acquaintances that I could scrounge off, and my metabolism seemed to be undergoing some kind of miraculous transformation, absorbing the drugs I fed into it like a sponge, demanding yet another shot, first eight, then six, then four, then three hours later. It was a case of diminishing returns, and destitution beckoned.

I was also running out of girlfriends who would help to look after me. According to the accepted wisdom, prolonged use of
heroin is supposed to lower, and eventually kill, the male sex drive, but in my particular case this unfortunately didn’t happen: I was still chasing after girls in almost as compulsive a fashion as I was looking for drugs. Cocaine, which is supposed to be something of an aphrodisiac, always failed to do anything at all for me in that department, and I always regarded it as an expensive waste of money, particularly if sniffed via the nose. I used to like the rush it gave when mixed together with heroin and injected as a speedball, but apart from this method of ingestion I always thought it was a big let-down; plus, after the initial euphoria had worn off, I was always left feeling nervous, dissatisfied and paranoid. I much preferred speed as a stimulant, both for everyday use and for extended all-night fucking sessions. I also loved having sex on heroin — it took away the desire to have an orgasm, but not to fuck, and you could keep going for hours in a deliciously sensuous dream state that eventually led to some kind of Nirvana when you did finally come. The endorphins would be coursing through your system by then, not only from the smack, but from the sex too, and the after-effects were akin to floating amongst pink, fluffy clouds high up in a Himalayan sky of purest blue — total euphoria, in other words.

I must say, though, that the search for heroin took precedence over the girl-chasing, as the penalty for failing to connect and score was much more acute, and happened much more rapidly, than if I failed to get lucky with a girl. I could easily go without sex for three or four days, longer if necessary, but thirty six hours without a hit and I’d be throwing up and shitting all over the place. And so, in this distorted economy of pleasure and pain, the search for heroin was always predominant, taking precedence over every other area of existence whether it be food, drink, sex, friendship — even, sadly, love.

Maybe my girlfriends picked up on this; maybe they sensed I was a man without a future; maybe it was the fact that my
clothes stank and my personal habits of hygiene had atrophied to an almost non-existent state. Whatever the case, the impression I got all around was of possibilities receding, avenues of opportunity being closed, future possible means of support being withdrawn, and a general shrinking in the overall sphere of my miserable existence.

I was also heartily sick of the whole rigmarole of copping each day: first the search for money, then the telephone calls, then the tramping around the streets, followed by the endless waiting in some obscure room filled with other chain-smoking, sweating, desperate people, who had nothing at all in common other than their need for a fix. My five years as an addict in New York had at least provided some sense of challenge and excitement. I was always getting knives and guns pulled on me as I entered or left the burned-out tenement buildings in the Lower East Side, South Bronx and Harlem that the dealers used to sell out of, and there was a constant aura of danger around the whole business that was somehow attractive to a fucked-up and perverse romantic such as myself. I enjoyed the hustling and the large, freely-available sums of money that came my way from the rich Uptown addicts I would score for — living, as I did, in the midst of this drug chaos, and being intimately familiar with every street, den and shooting gallery, and the quality of smack being sold there on any particular day. I enjoyed walking the streets, picking up news on the grapevine and trying to get to the good stuff first, running the gauntlet of muggers and psychos who hung around in doorways waiting for people like me. If I was lucky, I’d make it back to the safety of our room, and the friends who were waiting there for me, with a nice bundle of little wax-paper packets filled with the invigorating white dust that everyone was desperate for. It gave a sense of purpose to my life: I knew what I had to do each day, and I was almost as addicted to the adrenaline rush as I was to the heroin and cocaine cocktails that were my speciality. It was
also a good way to meet interesting people from other walks of life that I normally would not have come into contact with: Puerto Rican and Black street-dealers; petty thieves; New York City policemen; pimps and prostitutes; rich Uptown socialites and models; muggers and psychotics; Wall Street businessmen; heirs and heiresses to fabulous fortunes; murderers; musicians; hit-men; and normal everyday junkies, winos and drifters.